Reader Comments: GOP Congress Members & White House Plotted Jan. 6 Insurrection; Military Spending Higher than Ever; Kyrsten Sinema; Secret Conservative Group Pushed Trump Tax Cuts; Critical Race Theory; Larry Itliong; New film - Cuba in Africa;
Whenever there’s a high-profile event involving calamity and destruction conspiracy theorists will invariably bring up the specter of “An Inside Job.” They posit that a secret cabal of deep state government operatives is responsible for everything from the tragedy of 9/11 to injecting the public with 5G microchips that force your central nervous system to run on Windows 11. Turns out in the case of the Jan. 6 insurrection, they may be right.
7 plus trillion for this sort of madness, not a peep out of Manchin, 6 or even 3 plus trillion for old people, young people, in between people, an earth able to sustain future people - unacceptable. How sick this is
Well, Toyota has ensured I'll never buy another of their vehicles. Not sure how the other companies intrude on my life, but I'll try to avoid their services and products as much as I can.
This report by AFSCME District Council 37 is like a bikini, (very old joke) What it reveals is interesting; what it conceals is vital. NYC has contracted out city services to politically wired non-profits for decades. Not profit workers were poorly paid and the “non profit” operators made our like bandits. If non-profit workers are to be paid at rates identical to public employees, why contract out at all? Will non profit operators still stuff their pockets. Will this legislation will bring fairness to “non profit” workers? It does show the political juice of DC 37. Until just now workers at non profits were represented by a different part of the union. DC 1707 has been merged into DC 37 (also omitted here).
The term, "populist," is misleading and blurs reality. We see this re history, and also today when applied to "the Trump phenomenon." Wealthy elites have long manipulated and lied to get regular people frantically to act against their own interests, divided from people who should be their (our) allies, enhancing the power of the wealthy to abuse. As this article reports, Trump exemplifies this phenomenon.
Gratitude to journalists and publications like The Guardian https://www.facebook.com/theguardian/ for this kind of reporting, and xxxxxx https://xxxxxx.org/2021-10-26/how-secretive-conservative-group-influe… for passing it on.
When we consider the shortages created by shipping flaws we must also consider the "Just in time" plans almost all large realtors were using when we entered the pandemic. Big business was reducing it's costs (and expanding its profit) by ordering things as they were needed. That way they didn't need to 'warehouse' their supply and avoid those costs. So once again, we are made victim for those who place profit over the service they promise us.
That xxxxxx has chosen to reproduce the "If the People Stand, the Game is Over -- meme" that reeks of "the socialism of fools" without commenting on its Antisemitic nature is something that requires at least a clear apology.
Nick Wright, in an article for the Morning Star, wrote that while, of the six figures depicted only two were Jewish, the piece "clearly exaggerates the distinctive features of all six men" and that "exaggerated depictions of Jews are created, disseminated and understood in a historically defined context that includes a powerful, even dominant, discourse that draws upon the long traditions of anti-semitism embedded in the dominant ideology and expressed, over the centuries, in the dominant visual culture". Further he states "the subterranean narratives around notions of the Illuminati, Freemasonry and bourgeois conspiracies cannot, in much popular imagination, be disentangled from deeply suspect discourses in which alien, semitic and covert elites are the controlling forces in our lives", and concludes "This is bad art and worse politics
The "ambivalence" to John Brown of Douglass is greatly overstated ,and not even supported by the essay to which we are referred.What is true is that Douglass did not approve of the PARTICULARPLAN of Brown's and did not participate. But he definitely agreed with Brown's overall view on the use of force.
WHEN MY FATHER called recently and asked me to explain critical race theory (CRT) to him, I initially balked. He voted for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020, a choice that caused a rift between us. I’ve since tried hard to reconcile Dad’s politics with what I know of him as a person.
He is a loving man and always supported my intellectual pursuits. He also knew that I’d studied race and racism in graduate school and that the issues were foundational to my dissertation and teaching at the college level. Finally, he knows that I make no apologies about my anti-racist and social justice-oriented identity, something he seems to simultaneously admire and abhor. Still, I couldn’t tell whether Dad was making an honest effort to learn about CRT, a field of study that I knew he’d never heard of until it became politicized. Was Dad truly on a path to learn, or was he just antagonizing me?
“Is this question in good faith?” I asked him. He’d said yes and explained that he wanted to help teach the concepts to a friend of his—someone I didn’t know and who, according to Dad, held extreme and unyielding views about race.
Dad next asked me to educate his friend about CRT, an invitation I politely declined in the name of self-preservation. “I’m going to have to pass on this opportunity,” I’d told him, “but your friend is free to locate the many resources that exist on the topic.” I forwarded him an article I’d written on CRT and told him to start there if he was serious about understanding my perspective.
Dad respected my decision to bow out of the discussion, but I still felt unsettled. As a white person, I firmly believe it is my responsibility to engage other white people in these discussions—especially when their politics diverge from mine. After this exchange, I began a quest for resources in the spirit of working through a dilemma that I believe a lot of allies, activists, and teachers can relate to: wanting to protect ourselves from engaging in those circular and fruitless discussions with bad-faith questions about why CRT and anti-racist goals matter, but also feeling a responsibility to guide people toward useful tools in the event that they are genuinely interested in learning about causes that have been weaponized and distorted in political discourse.
In considering my own education, I found it useful to start from the ground up.
The COVID recession overwhelming hurt low-wage workers and their families—making an already bad situation worse.
Indeed, the pandemic spread rapidly in the fissures that previously existed because of racism, poverty, and profound inequality—and our refusal to acknowledge the full extent of these injustices in our public discourse or public policies.
In a collaboration with the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, EPI researchers evaluate the public policies that shaped the preexisting conditions of the pandemic—policies that were by no means accidental or morally neutral—and lay out the policies that we need to counter and reverse the status quo. Read the article
Larry Itliong was a Filipino-American union organizer who played a vital role in organizing Filipino farm workers from the 1930s into the 1970s.
Larry worked with a number of unions, most prominently the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee which organized the Delano Grape Strike. In 1966 the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee would merge with the Cesar Chavez led National Farm Workers Association to form the United Farm Workers (UFW).
After the merger of the unions, Larry served as an assistant director and national boycott coordinator for the UFW. Later in life he would focus on supporting retired Filipino farm workers.
Ambassador Lianys Torres Rivera, Cuba’s Ambassador to the United States
Isaac Saney, public spokesperson, Canadian Network on Cuba; Professor, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada; Author of forthcoming Africa’s Africa's Children Return! Cuba, Africa and Apartheid's End
Piero Gleijeses, Professor of American Foreign Policy, Johns Hopkins University; Author, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington and Africa, 1959–1976 (winner, 2002 Robert Ferrell Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations); Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991.
Negash Abdurahman, Ethiopian-American filmmaker and educational technology consultant. Founder of RI Systems Inc. His acclaimed, award-winning film Cuba in Africa was years in the making, overcoming many obstacles, to tell the truth (mostly untold in the US) of Cuba’s revolutionary internationalist mission from 1976-1991 that was decisive in winning the sovereignty of Angola, the independence of Namibia, and securing the unraveling and defeat of apartheid South Africa.
The conference will provide theoretical debates, case studies based on examples of struggle and resistance, as well as a plenary seccion on the Thirteen Theses of Marxism-Feminism with Frigga Haug and other Marxist feminists. Join us!
The idea of an international Marxist feminist conference was originally brought into being, and was since then continuously organised, by the feminist section of the Berliner Institut of Critical Theory (InkriT) around the German sociologist and philosopher Frigga Haug. It was held in Berlin (Germany) for the first time in 2015, followed by an increasingly international second conference in Vienna in 2016, and the third one in Lund (Sweden) in 2018.
The 4th International Marxist-Feminist Conference is organised by transform! europe and the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), along with Iratzar Foundation, Bilbo-Barcelona Critical Theory Group (BIBA CT), Berliner Institut für Kritische Theorie (InkriT), Roxa-Luxemburg-Foundation and ParteHartuz.
11-13 November 2021
via Zoom
the link will be provided here
There are two categories of conference sessions:
Key-speakers, world-renowned and historical feminists, will present and debate specific aspects of their works such as the analysis of value, work, social reproduction, racialisation, sexualisation and the state. Moreover, they will also delve into certain dominant theses and practices in the traditional Feminist and Marxist fields, guided by a decolonial, materialist, and ecosocialist feminism.
The collective panels, whose participants and topics will include the spokespersons of the proposals, the organisations and the theories of the Global South, as well as the nations without state of the Global North.
Main themes of the panels:
> Theoretical debates around intersectionality or overlap in various fields, such as value, state, law, subject, care, production and social reproduction; proposed around new organisations and repertoires of struggle and protest.
> Specific case studies, based on examples of struggle, resistance, and organisation. Apart from the various feminist strikes in the global north and south, there will also be time to delve into local and specific resistances – in companies, on the internet, in universities and in the public arena. The new trade unions of women workers in feminised spheres will also be discussed, as well as feminist unionism in the first sector, industrial sector and service sector, including analysis of the current digital and financialised capitalism
> A plenary on the Thirteen Theses of Marxist Feminism with Frigga Haug and other Marxist Feminists, delving into the various Theses developed at the previous Marxist Feminism Congresses in Austria, Germany, and Sweden.
The conference will be broadcasted via the platform ZOOM. The link will be provided here and on the conference website. Morning panels will be issued in original version and evening plenary sessions will have simultaneous translation.
The Marxist Feminist Conference was initiated by Frigga Haug and is organised by transform! europe, Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU), Iratzar Fundazioa, Critical Theory Bilbo-Barcelona (BIBA CT), Berliner Institut für Kritische Theorie (InkriT), Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and Parte Hartuz.
All information regarding the conference is available on the website www.marxfemconference.com and on social networks.
Join us for a book talk with authors Robert Cohen and Sonia Murrow, and a reading by NYU students.
November 11 (5:00 PM ET)
No introductory work of American history has had more influence over the past forty years than Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, which since its publication in 1980 has sold more than three million copies. Zinn's iconoclastic critique of American militarism, racism, and capitalism has drawn bitter criticism from the Right, most recently from President Donald Trump, who at his White House Conference on American History in 2020 denounced Zinn as a Left propagandist and accused teachers aligned with Zinn of indoctrinating students to hate America and be ashamed of its history.
Rethinking America's Past is the first work to use archival and classroom evidence to assess the impact that Zinn's classic work has had on historical teaching and learning and on American culture. This evidence refutes Trump's charges, showing that rather than indoctrinating students, Zinn's book has been used by teachers to have students debate and rethink conventional versions of American history. Rethinking America's Past also explores the ways Zinn's work fostered deeper, more critical renderings of the American past in movies and on stage and television and traces the origins and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of A People's History in light of more recent historical scholarship.
About the Authors
ROBERT COHEN is a professor of history and social studies at New York University and is the author of Howard Zinn's Southern Diary: Sit-ins, Civil Rights, and Black Women's Student Activism. He lives in New York City.
SONIA E. MURROW is an associate professor of the social foundations of education and adolescence education in the School of Education at Brooklyn College. Her research interests include the history, policy, and practice of urban education and the teaching of history to adolescents. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
This event is presented in zoom. Live closed captioning will be available.
The CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies is recruiting for a “Distinguished Lecturer” in Labor Studies. This is a full-time, non-tenure-track position, initially for one year, but potentially renewable for up to seven years. Candidates are typically practitioners with an interest in teaching labor studies.
SLU is CUNY’s twenty-fifth and newest school. It is dedicated to public service and social justice and provides unique and exceptional programs for working adults and traditional-age college students who seek to address the challenges confronting poor and working-class populations. Its faculty includes some of the most innovative and distinguished scholars in the social sciences, as well as expert practitioners in the fields of government, labor, and public service.
To maximize these opportunities, SLU 's Labor Studies department is recruiting for with a one-year Distinguished Lecturer position designed to bring students into contact with well-respected practitioners in the labor field, exposing students to individuals with a wide range of experiences and skills, both intellectual and practical. The position will begin at the start of the Spring 2022 or Fall 2022 semester.
