Florida: The Biggest Bully on the Electoral Playground
My fair state has done it again. We are officially the biggest bully when it comes to voter intimidation and use of force, by any means necessary. Where else but in Florida do we get to have voting disrupted on the last day of early voting because two suspicious packages were found with wires hanging out of them next to the Winter Park Library?
My brother, who lives in Winter Park, which is located in the heart of the I-4 Corridor, the swingiest part of our swingy state, walked within 10 feet of the suspicious packages, which were detonated by police hours after police dogs determined that the packages contained “bomb-related” materials.
Coincidence or yet another chapter in Florida’s long history of voter disruption and intimidation? Maybe I’m overly sensitive, but the last year has added more fuel to the disenfranchisement fire that has been burning in the Jim Crow South for the last millennia. Take a walk with me through “Disenfranchisement World”, and find out the latest news at this figurative Florida Theme Park.
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Lenin is young again
At the end of October we once again commemorate the October Revolution, when the Russian Bolsheviks overthrew their capitalist government and created the world’s first socialist state.
This clip from Sergei Eisenstein’s movie October, filmed on the actual location where the revolution began just ten years later, shows the fateful first moments when the uprising was launched.
(The soundtrack is I Lenin Takoi Molodoi or Lenin Is Young Again.)
You can read John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World — the only firsthand account of the October Revolution written in English — online for free here. And in case you missed it before, Ask A Socialist has posted an introduction to Lenin here.
Memphis Students and Workers Fight for Union Rights and a Living Wage
This report comes to us from the USAS Campus Worker Justice Tour, a series of visits to campuses around the country where students and workers are fighting back against corporate outsourcing and the exploitation of campus workers.
Where We’ve Been
Workers at the University in Memphis, like many public workers in the south, have no collective bargaining rights and face “right to work” labor law. Much of this state law can be traced straight back to Jim Crow policy, often quite literally (in North Carolina, the law that explicitly bars public workers from collective bargaining was passed by the last Jim Crow legislature in session). At the University of Memphis, where for the first 48 years in operation Black workers kept the school running but only white students could attend, poverty wages have long been the status quo.
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Remembering Jerry Tucker, Labor Leader and Educator
My friend and colleague of more than 25 years died today from pancreatic cancer. If you never had the privilege of meeting and working with Jerry Tucker, it is truly a shame. Rarely do we cross paths with someone who makes such a difference in our lives. Jerry was such a man. I first heard of Jerry in the mid-1980s. I was part of a progressive/reform caucus in UAW 422, the GM autoplant in Framingham, MA. Our caucus, the STANDUP, had, against all odds, elected a delegate to the UAW Constitutional Convention. On the first night of the convention we got a very excited phone call: “You all won’t believe it. There is an entire region here running on a exactly the same platform as ours! The leader is the Assistant Regional Director, Jerry Tucker.” We knew we needed to find out more.
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Chavez does it again!
This article was originally published on BlackCommentator.com.
Let me start by being clear that I am in favor of term limits. I am not in favor of people running forever. That said, the victory of President Chavez is a tremendous one, and not just for him as an individual.
There are those who are committed to turning the clock backwards and they are not simply in operation at election time. The US ruling elite was thoroughly convinced that they could not only unseat the Chavez administration but that they could begin the reversal of the process of social transformation underway in Venezuela. Through instruments, such as the Washington Post, the ruling elite has been hounding the Chavez administration accusing them of being everything but children of God.
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Decolonize your diet!
Editor’s note: This is the first piece in a new series on revolutionary health and nutrition. In this series, we hope to include interviews with alternative healthcare providers such as acupuncturists, midwives, herbalists, and other healers. The goal is to develop a discussion on the role of health in revolutionary transformation, both at a personal level and at a social level.
Dr. Luz Calvo is a professor of Ethnic Studies, a gardener, cook, and political activist in Oakland, CA. Describing their newest project, Calvo and her co-author, Dr. Catriona R. Esquibel, write: “We have a passion for Mexican food. We have a passion for gardens, for healthy food, for food justice, and for people of color reclaiming our histories. All of this has led us to our current project, Decolonize Your Diet. This is a project to reclaim the heritage foods of greater Mexico and Central America as a way improving the physical, emotional, and spiritual health of US Latinos/as.”
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Principles to assess/guide projects to build an eco-just economy
The FRSO/OSCL Ecology Work Team has developed these principles to help us
assess the wide range of on-the-ground projects that are being done to
advance eco-justice work and/or to build “sustainable” or “regenerative”
economies. These principles were first identified at a December 2011 retreat
and were revised to reflect issues raised at the summer 2012 regional
meetings. We hope that this outline will help clarify the kinds of projects
our organization wants to help build and in that way reflects our emerging
line on ecology, economy and the national question.
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Richard Aoki and Lessons for the Movement
The recent releases of information about Richard Aoki have generated quite a stir. For those who haven’t been following and aren’t familiar, Aoki was a well-known Japanese-American radical starting in the 1960s and ’70s who played a key role in the Black Panther Party in the San Francisco Bay Area and who died in 2009. Unexpectedly, on August 20th the journalist Seth Rosenfeld with the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) announced, in conjunction with a book that he was about to publish on the FBI’s historical attacks on student radicals, that FBI documents identify Richard Aoki as an FBI informant.
Richard Aoki
The allegations raised a furor on the Left. At the center of the debate was the question of whether the evidence presented by Rosenfeld could be trusted or whether it was misinterpreted and/or manufactured. This debate was fired by the fragmentary nature of the evidence released at that point. Based on that initial evidence, it was broadly felt in the movement that Rosenfeld hadn’t proved his claims.
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Liberate Everything: The Story of Oakland’s People’s Library (So Far)
for its contents. This is a safe-cache copy of the original web site.