Reader Comments: How to Treat Your Neighbor; After No Kings-Can Nonviolent Struggles Defeat Dictators; Migrants Have Always Been Welcome; Study Shows Workforce Needs Migrants; Nuclear Weapons Testing Happening Again; 100 Years of Black Labor Activism
Tidbits - Reader Comments, Resources, Announcements AND cartoons - Oct 30, 2025, xxxxxx
Re: Can Nonviolent Struggle Defeat a Dictator? This Database Emphatically Says Yes
Correction: The Berlin Wall came down on November 9 1989 anniversary if Kristallnacht not 1988.
Jessica Benjamin
Re: After No Kings, It’s Time To Escalate
General strike is the next logical step. The GOP and their Oligarchy masters don't really care if you assemble and wave signs. What will make them notice is workers of all types grinding the economy to a hault, even for a day. The losses of even one day from EVERYONE not working would scare them.
Re: Gaza ‘Scholasticide’: We Mourn Our Universities as One Mourns an Old Friend
My friend Shahd, who remained in Gaza City before the ceasefire and the return of displaced people from the south, told me what became of the university after Israeli forces withdrew.
"The library became a place for cooking over open fires," she said. "Books and doctoral dissertations were scattered on the ground, used by the displaced as kindling."
In times of hunger and war, knowledge itself loses its value. Books and dissertations, once symbols of Gaza's intellect and promise, became fuel for survival.
Trump is trying to extort $230 million from the government (during a shutdown) while the people who voted for him are still waiting for him to lower prices and hoping they can afford health care.
Re: We Can’t Rebuild the Labor Movement Without Taking On Big Targets
(posting on xxxxxx Labor)Absolutely right. Let's also re- establish our own Party to be the vanguard of our struggle to transform the outlook of the trade union movement as well as politics and ideology, from pro-Capitalist to pro-Worker in thought, in words and in deeds. Long live the genuine union! Long live the Worker's Party! Long live the Working Masses of USA.
Allan Baluyot
Let Them Eat Cake... -- Cartoon and Commentary by Benjamin Slyngstad
Sure people are about to lose food assistance but Trump Antoinette wants a ballroom.
I never thought this would happen -- again -- Nuclear tests
I was ten years old. I would go, with my mother to the weekly vigils of Women Strike for Peace in downtown Chicago, in protest against nuclear tests being carried out by the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union.
We were citizens of the United States we could pressure our government, and we did. We were able to build a movement that forced the end of nuclear testing; We were part of an international peace movement that was able to force all countries and all governments to halt all above-ground testing of nuclear weapons and later was powerful enough that led to the signing of treaties that banned their use.
Now the wannabe fascist dictator of the United States has declared that he is ordering the soc-called Department of War to resume the testing of nuclear weapons. It is time to do what my mother and thousands of other mothers did, to protect our children and grandchildren, to take to the streets, to defend our immigrant neighbors, to defend our children and grandchildren, to defend our babies, to put an end to this monstrous disaster.
Going to those peace marches more than sixty years ago, I returned to my fourth grade classroom and wrote this poem (which hung outside the principal’s office, and was published in among other places, The International Teamster (my father was a milkman), Liberation Magazine,The Freheit, Jewish Currents, and The Worker.)
The Bomb and Tom
If I had a plane,I'd fly it down a green lane.I'd see the presidents,At their residence.I'd talk to them about the bombThat might save the life of Tom.
It would be nice for children to grow up,Not BLOW UP!And try to read books, try!And sigh when the tests begin, Just wonder why? And save little Tom, just save TomFrom the mighty atom bomb.
Jay Schaffner
What We Need Is a Popular Front Against Fascism (J. Patrick Patterson / In These Times)
As fascism’s grip only grows tighter, the popular fronts of yesterday can become blueprints for solidarity today.
1. a broad political alliance united against fascism or authoritarian rule
2. a big, messy group of people affiliated through common cause
Has this ever worked?
Kind of famously, yes — at least for a while. In the 1930s, as fascist movements stomped across Europe, popular fronts emerged to block the spread. In France and Spain, leftists, centrists and anti-fascist liberals joined forces to beat back the far right, sometimes literally.
In the United States, the Communist Party helped bring broad, anti-fascist politics into public life, forming coalitions among Black writers, labor organizers and progressive cultural workers. As historian Bill Mullen writes in Popular Fronts, the period saw “an extraordinary rapprochement” between Black and white members of the U.S. Left — not just in protest, but in culture, art and publishing. In Chicago, a “companion front” developed through a radical Black cultural infrastructure with institutions like the Chicago Defender and the South Side Community Art Center.
To Mullen, this front was “mutually constitutive,” meaning the cultural and political fed each other. You couldn’t separate the protest from the poetry.
"We share a common interest, survival, and it cannot be pursued in isolation from others simply because their differences make us uncomfortable." — Audre Lorde
What’s this got to do with now?
A lot. Democracy is being hollowed out in real time — through voter suppression, surveillance, the criminalization of protest, the scapegoating of migrants, anti-LGBTQ laws, book bans. The far right is openly organizing to take permanent power, not just win elections.
A popular front today wouldn’t mean everyone is suddenly best friends. It means movements stop playing defense in isolation and start fighting together, as if something bigger is at stake. Because it is.
What would a modern popular front look like?
It’s the Movement for Black Lives linking arms with climate activists and unions, knowing their fights are connected. It’s the People’s Climate Movement bringing together frontline communities and labor to take on big polluters. It’s housing coalitions in Seattle, Chicago and LA organizing with immigrant rights activists and elected officials for social housing.
It looks like survival. The other side already has a front, known as the Heritage Foundation.
Isn’t this just “lesser evilism”?
Not if done right. A popular front isn’t about diluting politics, but sharpening priorities. We don’t need to agree on everything, but we do need to agree that authoritarianism, white nationalism and rule-by-billionaire are worth fighting — and we can’t fight alone.
[This is part of “The Big Idea,” a series offering brief introductions to progressive theories, policies, tools and strategies that can help us envision a world beyond capitalism.]
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The U.S.-Born labor force will shrink over the next decade (Josh Bivens / Economic Policy Institute)Achieving historically ‘normal’ GDP growth rates will be impossible, unless immigration flows are sustained
By Josh Bivens
October 7, 2025Economic Policy Institute
It is often underrecognized how much population aging is currently reducing the growth rate of the U.S. labor force and will continue to pull it down in coming decades. The share of the population that is over the age of 65 (when labor force participation tends to take a steep fall on average) is rising rapidly. This share was 12.4% in 2007, 17.9% in 2024, and will hit 21.2% by 2035 (CBO 2025b). A recent EPI report (Gould et al. 2025) assessed trends in U.S. labor force participation and reviewed the research literature about their drivers and the potential effects of policy changes on these trends. One upshot of this research literature is that even the most ambitious policies to boost the labor force participation rate of the current U.S. workforce would not materially change these trends.
Any decline in labor force growth necessarily leads to a decline in the rate of growth of gross domestic product (GDP). GDP is the product of the number of hours worked in an economy multiplied by productivity (the average amount of output generated in an hour of work). If the number of work hours falls because the labor force shrinks, this essentially translates one-for-one into slower aggregate growth. Policymakers who do not want to see the pace of GDP growth shrink relative to the past history of U.S. growth really only have one option: allowing larger flows of immigration. Absent this, other policies to boost the U.S. labor force—while they might be wise along many margins—will not restore overall GDP growth to anywhere near its historic pace. In the rest of this policy brief, we lay out some of the larger trends in U.S. labor force growth and the implications of population aging for the future path of the labor force and economic growth.
U.S. labor force growth has slowed a lot in recent decades, and U.S.-Born labor force growth has slowed even more
Figure A shows the average annual growth rate of the overall labor force for a number of historical periods. We pick endpoints for these periods that correspond with business cycle peaks to make sure that sharp cyclical differences are not driving these trends. For two recent periods (2007–2019 and 2019–2024), we also show the average annual growth of just the U.S.-born labor force.
Between 1948 and 1979, labor force growth averaged 1.8% annually. From 1979 to 2007, this pace slowed, but only slightly, averaging 1.4% annually. However, in the two business cycles since 2007, labor force growth averaged just 0.5%–0.6% annual growth. For the two most recent business cycles, we have data on growth in the U.S.-born labor force, and this growth is just 0.3% on average.
Forum - Lessons from 100 Years of Black Labor Activism: Fighting Racial Authoritarianism and Building Cross-Movement Solidarity - New York - November 7 (CUNY School of Labor & Urban Studies)
The achievements of Black union activists in the U.S. labor movement over the last 100 years offer powerful lessons for anyone seeking to build a multiracial, democratic working-class movement today. Black labor leaders consistently challenged both white supremacy within unions and economic injustice and racial authoritarianism from employers and the government. Since the 1920s and the early organizing of A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Black labor activists have insisted that racial justice is core to class struggle. That Black leadership in the labor movement was deeply rooted both in working-class communities and other freedom struggles—most notably the Black Freedom / Civil Rights movement—played no small part in the gains made by working-class African Americans and Black-led unions.
Join us to learn from a panel discussion with Cedric de Leon, Professor of Sociology and Labor Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; author and activist Bill Fletcher Jr.; Tamara Lee, Associate Professor, Labor Studies and Employment Relations, Rutgers University; and moderated by Cameron Black, Assistant Professor, Labor Studies CUNY SLU. The speakers will discuss what today’s labor movement can learn from this history to strengthen its organizing tactics and build solidarity for a multiracial working-class democracy and how historically tensions between or within movements have helped to build a movement’s power and how we might imagine using tensions today to strengthen our movements.
Book Talk - Aaron Leonard's Menace of Our Time on American Communism - New York - November 13 (Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives)
Thursday, November 13 · 5:30 - 6:30pm EST
Bobst Library70 Washington Square South 2nd Floor -- Room 251New York, NY 10012
From Rutgers University Press: "Beginning at the turn of the century, and ending only with communism’s collapse, the US government and major elements in the wider society undertook an unrelenting effort to suppress and criminalize domestic communism. This book tracks those efforts; from the state laws of the twenties that imprisoned the fledgling communist leadership, the efforts by police and local authorities against communists as they fought for unions, racial equality, and the unemployed, the trials and imprisonment of communist leaders mid-century, the extra-legal efforts of the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) in the sixties, and the ongoing, relentless attention by the FBI afterward. This is a long-overdue book about the most extensive, repressive effort ever undertaken by US authorities against a political organization that, however problematic, was largely operating within the scope of constitutionally mandated freedoms."
[Aaron J. Leonard is an author and historian. Among his books are Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists, The Folk Singers & the Bureau, and Meltdown Expected: Crisis, Disorder and Upheaval at the End of the 1970s (Rutgers University Press, 2024).]
