|
7 Unions & over 100 Black Clergy Call for General Strike if Trump Steals the Election
Dayne Goodwin
Mike Elk, Payday Report, November 2 Last month, Payday broke the story of the 70,000-member Rochester AFL-CIO becoming the first local AFL-CIO to call for a general strike if Trump attempted to steal the election. Now, other unions and civil rights groups across the nation have joined them. Today a group of sevens unions, both national and local, have called for a general strike in the case that Trump discredits the election results. The unions represent hundreds of thousands of members throughout the Midwest. They include the 35,000-member United Electrical Workers (UE), the 91,000-member SEIU Healthcare Illinois Indiana Missouri and Kansas, the 29,000-member SEIU Local 73, the 25,000-member Chicago Teachers Union, the 5,000-member Cook County College Teachers Union Local 1600, the 430-member AFGE Local 704, and the Warehouse Workers Organizing Committee, a non-traditional labor group. Together they follow in the footsteps of the 200,000-member Seattle AFL-CIO and the 60,000-member Western Massachusetts Area Labor Federation that also issued calls for a general strike earlier last month. “We believe that the labor movement has an essential role in demanding and defending democracy,” read the unions’ press release obtained by Payday Report. “We believe in the power of the people — the multi-racial, working-class majority — and we are ready to defend our right to a free and fair election and a peaceful transition of power.” Along with the unions, a group of more than 100 Black clergy members, including the former President of the NAACP, Reverend Cornell William Brooks, have signed an online pledge that calls for a general strike if Trump “attempts a coup or refuses to respect the legitimate result of the election.” “We will need many different tactics — protests, occupations of state capitals, strikes — but fundamentally it will all require unity, courage, preparation, and discipline,” wrote the faith leaders in their pledge. As reported in the Guardian last week, Sara Nelson, president of the 50,000-member Association of Flight Attendants, also called for a general strike. “We will have to do the one thing that takes all power and control from the government or anyone with corporate interests in keeping this person in office,” she said. “And that is withholding our labor.” So far, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has resisted efforts to call
for a General Strike. However, with growing support for a General
Strike effort endorsed by unions representing over 600,000 members, it
would be difficult for Trumka to resist the growing momentum coming from
the rank-and-file within organized labor.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Re: How the Strike for Equality Relaunched the Struggle for Women’s Liberation in the US
Dayne Goodwin
be sure to read this one
On Mon, Nov 2, 2020 at 12:49 PM Louis Proyect <lnp3@...> wrote: > > Interview with Ruthann Miller, ex-SWP, about her role in the The Women’s > Strike for Equality in August 1970 > > https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/womens-strike-equality-liberation-betty-friedan >
|
||
|
|
||
|
From Stonewall to Black Lives Matter – Spectre Journal
Louis Proyect
The Stonewall Riots gave birth to the modern LGBTQ movement as we know it. On its 51st anniversary, we are witnessing the most significant rebellion against racism and police violence in more than half a century. Today’s uprising is unfolding in a context where public policy and mainstream opinion is shifting decisively in favor of LGBTQ equality. We see this in the legalization of gay marriage, the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity in workplace non-discrimination laws, and increased trans and queer visibility and representation in popular culture, among other places. On the other hand, the Trump administration has spent its first term in office inciting racist bigotry and fueling its right-wing base. Above all, it has provoked attacks against LGBTQ communities that threaten to turn back the clock and undermine the gains won through decades of struggle. Given this contradictory landscape, it is necessary to evaluate the state of LGBTQ life and politics under Trump; to analyze the significance of the ongoing anti-racist rebellion and its implications for the trans and queer movement; and to excavate the radical legacy of the Stonewall Rebellion and the Gay Liberation Movement. In doing so, I will recover the lessons it holds for the struggle for trans and queer liberation today, considering the intersection of this struggle with the fight for Black lives. https://spectrejournal.com/from-stonewall-to-black-lives-matter/
|
||
|
|
||
|
Mexico Seeks Apology for Catholic Church’s Role in the Spanish Conquest
Dennis Brasky
|
||
|
|
||
|
"Questioning the Old Progressive Dogma": An Interview With Jean-Claude Michea
Curtis P
“Admittedly, to be able to place the idea of common decency in the heart of the socialist project, it was necessary first of all to free it from all its historical limits (limits which held, moreover, less to the fact communitarian itself than to its various forms of hierarchical organization). Nevertheless, this critical universalization movement of common decency necessarily finds its anchor in these elementary structures of reciprocity, which have always founded the very possibility of a collective life.”
|
||
|
|
||
|
France: “Our Republic”? Social-Chauvinism and Capitulation to Islamophobia by the Left
John Obrien
Anything you want to share in the The Terrorist
Attack in Innere Stadt, Vienna, Austria today?
From: marxmail@groups.io <marxmail@groups.io> on behalf of RKOB <aktiv@...>
Sent: Monday, November 2, 2020 4:00 PM To: marxmail@groups.io <marxmail@groups.io> Subject: [marxmail] France: “Our Republic”? Social-Chauvinism and Capitulation to Islamophobia by the Left France: “Our Republic”? Social-Chauvinism and Capitulation to Islamophobia by the Left By Michael Pröbsting, 2 November 2020
Your Subscription | Contact Group Owner | Unsubscribe [causecollector@...] _._,_._,_
|
||
|
|
||
|
Re: France: “Our Republic”? Social-Chauvinism and Capitulation to Islamophobia by the Left
Sābrīn M
If not wanting members of the working class to be beheaded by far right terrorists for drawing cartoons is Islamophobic, count me in.
On Mon, Nov 2, 2020 at 6:00 PM RKOB <aktiv@...> wrote:
|
||
|
|
||
|
France: “Our Republic”? Social-Chauvinism and Capitulation to Islamophobia by the Left
RKOB
France: “Our Republic”? Social-Chauvinism and Capitulation to Islamophobia by the Left By Michael Pröbsting, 2 November 2020
-- Revolutionär-Kommunistische Organisation BEFREIUNG (Österreichische Sektion der RCIT, www.thecommunists.net) www.rkob.net aktiv@... Tel./SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram: +43-650-4068314
|
||
|
|
||
|
Zoom Is Now Worth More Than ExxonMobil—And Founder Eric Yuan’s Net Worth Has Nearly Doubled In Three Months
Louis Proyect
|
||
|
|
||
|
Re: Why I voted for Howie Hawkins
Richard Modiano
Concerning Angela Walker, she was the late Mimi Soltisyk's running mate on the Socialist Party of America's ticket in 2016 and is a bus driver for the Milwaukee County Transit System. She also served as an officer in the Amalgamated Transit Union local.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Dr. Jared Ball of Morgan State Univ: Why I voted Green
Andrew Stewart
Dr. Ball previously ran for the GPUS presidential nomination in 2008
|
||
|
|
||
|
Corporate America is breaking with Donald Trump
Louis Proyect
Financial Times, OCTOBER 28 2020
Corporate America is breaking with Donald Trump Executives are now more worried about democracy than their tax bills or the president’s tweets by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson To put it in terms a Twitter-happy US president would understand, it has been more subtweet than tweetstorm. In recent days, leading US industry associations, chief executives, investors and business school professors have issued oblique rebukes of Donald Trump’s suggestions that he may not abide by the results of next week’s election if he does not like them. Most have been carefully worded but, as with any artfully indirect social media post, their meaning has been unmistakable. Most notably, several of the US’s biggest industry groups joined forces on Tuesday on a statement as striking as it was anodyne. “We urge all Americans to support the process set out in our federal and state laws,” they wrote. That such traditionally cautious groups felt the need to say this speaks volumes. As anyone who has ever haggled over the phrasing of a statement with so many authors will tell you, its lowest-common-denominator wording was also as close as the business community will come to sending a shot across the president’s bows. Faith-based investors had urged business A-listers who were keeping quiet to champion a peaceful transfer of power or risk being seen as “complicit in the chaos”. JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon is one of the few to do so, though Expensify’s CEO went as far as to implore the 10m users of its expenses software to vote for Joe Biden because “not many expense reports get filed during a civil war.” Whether hesitant or hyperbolic, these statements all carry the same message: there is a growing consensus in corporate America that Mr Trump is no longer good for business. That represents a sharp change since the start of the president’s term, but also an understandable consequence of what has happened since. Back in 2017, “business leaders held their nose and engaged in dialogue with this president because they saw some immediate financial opportunities and decided to look past what some wanted to believe were just stylistic peculiarities”, recalls Aron Cramer, CEO of BSR, a group which helps multinationals navigate their social responsibilities. Those opportunities were quickly realised, in the form of deregulation and a historic cut to corporate tax rates. But even early on they also came with sharp disagreements over tariffs, immigration, racist violence and environmental policy. Once tax cuts were in the bag, “the business relationship went from the good, the bad and the ugly, to just the bad and the ugly”, remarks Bennett Freeman, an adviser to companies on labour and human rights issues. Share prices rose, but CEOs found themselves having to manage trade wars, growing divides among staff and customers, and threats to the status of employees who held visas or were brought to the US illegally as children. And as big companies embraced “stakeholder” causes, from inclusion to environmentalism, Mr Trump espoused a dated caricature of capitalism: his focus on stock markets as the yardstick of economic progress made him look like one of the last devotees of Milton Friedman’s shareholder primacy doctrine. His inattention to issues such as economic inequality, racial injustice and climate change also forced reluctant CEOs to fill the void by speaking out on politically charged topics they would rather avoid. Corporate America is no political monolith. In industries such as healthcare and energy, many executives still believe Mr Trump would be better for their bottom lines. Yet fear of Mr Biden’s agenda is ebbing. As a recent PwC survey shows, executives worry Democrats would raise taxes but believe Mr Trump would be worse on US-China relations, immigration and foreign policy. Markets’ relative stability as Mr Biden has led the polls supports this view. Polls also explain executives’ willingness to turn their backs on Mr Trump as the risk of speaking out has fallen with his re-election chances. Most executives entered 2020 determined to avoid getting sucked into a bitterly contested election. Their belief that the Trump administration handled the pandemic and the racial justice protests that have defined this year less capably than their companies changed the equation. But it is only recently that executives have come off the fence, as Mr Trump’s musings about not accepting a peaceful transfer of power tested companies’ vaunted conversion to social responsibility, notes Deepak Malhotra. The Harvard Business School professor wrote a letter signed by more than 650 academics, which urged executives to speak out against the threat they argue the president poses to the republic. “The pendulum often swings left to right but here’s something that might rip the pendulum off the clock,” he argues. In private conversation, business leaders have run through the worst-case scenarios. If a peaceful transfer of power looks doubtful, BSR’s Mr Cramer says, top executives would quickly make their alarm public, not least to congressional Republicans, who understand the risk of alienating donors. Whether or not the subtweets become a tweetstorm, CEOs who once dreaded @realDonaldTrump tweets have lost their fear of the man behind them. They got the tax cuts they wanted and see little to lose in breaking with him now. andrew.edgecliffe-johnson@...
|
||
|
|
||
|
Portland
jenorem
When the political divide turned deadly in PortlandThe
moment Jay Danielson and Michael Reinoehl collided was a random
encounter between two armed men with extreme political beliefs. It was
also a dangerous harbinger of what the election could bring.Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Colin Reed: 4 signs Trump and the Republican Party are in big trouble this Election Day | Fox News
Louis Proyect
|
||
|
|
||
|
Eric Blanc, Leo Panitch, and the Popular Front | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
Louis Proyect
Toward the end of the stellar Cosmonaut interview with August Nimtz on Lenin’s views on electoral politics, the principals try to relate it to the current day. They concur that there’s more than a whiff of Popular Front nostalgia in the air with support for Biden symbolizing the kind of class-collaborationism that Lenin spent his entire career opposing. Just a day after listening to the podcast, I read an interview that probably would have had Lenin spinning in his tomb fast enough to supply electricity in Moscow for a year if a transformer had been attached to his toe. Eric Blanc, today’s leading exponent of neo-Kautskyism, interviewed Leo Panitch, a Canadian professor emeritus who has co-edited the prestigious Socialist Register journal since 1985. Titled “How Can Socialists Help Stop Trump?”, the interview was Blanc’s attempt to get benediction from Panitch for supporting a vote for Biden. I have no idea what Blanc’s religious background is but Panitch is a Jew like me and in the world of Marxism amounting to something like a powerful rabbi. For orthodox Jews, there are always knotty problems on how to interpret Talmudic law. Can you push a baby stroller on the Sabbath, a young couple might ask the rabbi. Stroking his long white beard, he’d reply “Only within the eruv.” (The eruv is a rope strung around an orthodox Jewish neighborhood, where exceptions to strict Talmudic law are permitted.) full: https://louisproyect.org/2020/11/02/eric-blanc-leo-panitch-and-the-popular-front/
|
||
|
|
||
|
Re: It’s Good That DSA Didn’t Endorse Joe Biden – The Call
hari kumar
Dear Michael: You wrote:
"By the way -- Chomsky is NOT a Marxist.." By coincidence, I have just finished Chris Knight 'Decoding Chomsky'. I knew already that "Chomsky is NOT a Marxist". What I did not know was the extent to which his linguistic theories are the perfect form of 'Idealism', and how often he had wriggled to extricate himself from one linguistic mess into yet another. All for stoutly refusing to accept that language is 'social'. This might seem a bizarre statement for any intelligent person to make even once. But he built his theories on this notion. Oh, and he does not accept language is subject to evolution. Several other things are pretty laughable. Anyway. It is a very enlightening book in my view. Hari Kumar
|
||
|
|
||
|
Re: A Liberal “Moral Reckoning” Can’t Solve the Problems That Plague Black Americans
Louis Proyect
On 11/2/20 12:58 PM, Viejo Oso Gruñon via groups.io wrote:
At least you’re posting a link to the article & not insulting him him in such puerile ways as you do with Chomsky and Monthly Review.I'm not going to repeat all the criticisms I have of Adolph Reed Jr.and company but for those wanting to read them, go to: https://louisproyect.org/category/adolph-reed-jr/ As for the specific quote above, my sympathies are not with Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo--let alone Hillary Clinton. They are with Cedric Robinson, CLR James, David Roediger, and much of the analysis produced by the SWP in the 1960s, particularly by George Breitman. Long before I began paying attention to Adolph Reed Jr., who spent a couple of months in the SWP's youth group long ago, I had this to say about "identity politics": https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/02/deepening-contradictions-identity-politics-and-steelworkers/ My problem with Sanders was less about his class-reductionism than it was with running as a Democrat. Odd that an orthodox Marxist like Adolph Reed Jr. never understood the contradiction between prioritizing class and endorsing a candidate who ran as a Democrat, the party that upheld slavery in the 1800s, Jim Crow in the early 1900s, and in its most progressive phase during the New Deal refused to confront and eliminate lynching.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Re: A note on US democracy
Tristan Sloughter
An odd claim when less than half of the population votes in the presidential election. And I think it is in the 60's for percent of "eligible voters" who vote in these elections.
|
||
|
|
||
|
How the Strike for Equality Relaunched the Struggle for Women’s Liberation in the US
Louis Proyect
Interview with Ruthann Miller, ex-SWP, about her role in the The Women’s Strike for Equality in August 1970
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/womens-strike-equality-liberation-betty-friedan
|
||
|
|
||
|
Re: Why I voted for Howie Hawkins
fkalosar101@...
I agree with much of what John Reimann says and admire Oakland Socialist.. It's certainly true that Trump will leave office, unless he dies, only if Biden (or conceivably the equivalent, Pelosi) replaces him. I hope that happens, but am not hopeful about the outcome, for reasons similar to those Mark Lause has outlined elsewhere.
I disagree at least with the following:
|
||
|
|
