Most of all, it's urgent that you defend voter rights, plan for 2014 races now, oppose austerity, support the 'Moral Mondays' in North Carolina (photo above), the Congressional Progressive Caucus' 'Back to Work Budget' and end the wars! We're doing more than ever, and have big plans. So pay your dues, make a donation and become a sustainer. Do it Now! Check the link at the bottom...

July 25, 2013 - The United States finds itself at a crossroad, with a choice of moving toward a multicultural future behind a more activist federal government or veering down a well-worn path that has marked various tragic moments of American history when white racists have teamed up with "small government" extremists.

Despite losing Election 2012 - both in the presidential vote (by five million) and the overall tally for Congress (by one million) - the Republicans are determined to use their gerrymandered House "majority" and their filibuster-happy Senate minority to slash programs that are viewed as giving "stuff" (in Mitt Romney's word) to poorer Americans and especially minorities.

Republicans are gearing up to force a series of fiscal crises this fall, threatening to shut down the federal government and even default on the national debt, if they don't get their way. Besides sabotaging President Barack Obama's health reform law, the Republicans want to devastate funding for food stamps, environmental advancements, transportation, education assistance and other domestic programs.

"These are tough bills," Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Kentucky, who heads the House Appropriations Committee, told the New York Times. "His priorities are going nowhere."

A key point is to slash help to what the Right sees as "undeserving" Americans, especially people of color. The ugly side of this crypto-racist behavior also surfaced in the gloating by right-wing pundits over the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the murder of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. Fox News pundits, in particular, have mocked the outrage over the verdict from America's black community and Obama's personal expression of sympathy.

It is now clear that Obama's election in 2008 was not the harbinger of a "post-racial" America, but rather the signal for white right-wingers to rally their forces to "take back America." The fact that the modern Republican Party has become almost exclusively white and the nation's minorities have turned more and more to the Democratic Party has untethered the GOP from any sense of racial tolerance.

There is now a white-supremacist nihilism emerging in the Republican strategy, a visceral contempt for even the idea of a multi-racial democracy that favors a more vigorous federal government. Some of these extremists seem to prefer sinking the world's economy via a U.S. debt default than compromising with President Obama on his economic and social agenda.

Though the mainstream media avoids the white supremacist framing for the political story - preferring to discuss the upcoming clash as a philosophical dispute over big versus small government, - the reality is that the United States is lurching into a nasty struggle over the preservation of white political dominance. The size-of-government narrative is just a euphemistic way of avoiding the underlying issue of race, a dodge that is as old as the Republic.

The Jeffersonian Myth

Even many liberals have fallen for the myth of the dashing Thomas Jefferson as the great defender of America's Founding Principles - when he was really a great hypocrite who served mostly as the pleasing political front man for the South's chief industry, human slavery....(Click title for more)

New Insurgency: From the Deep South to the Midwest, a New Generation Demands Justice

On Saturday, July 13, George Zimmerman was found not guilty. This was the moment Florida showed the world that it does not care about its youth, especially young black and brown people. If neighborhood watch vigilantes are given the license to kill, what instructions are given to black and brown youth such as me? How do I stand my ground when I feel threatened? Am I not allowed to defend myself? Dream Defenders have been joined by community members and students from Jacksonville, Gainesville, Orlando, Miami, FAMU, FSU, UF, FAU and UCF, as well as the Advancement Project, Power U and USSA. We are occupying the state capitol until Governor Rick Scott meets our demand to convene a special session of the legislature. During this session, we want a new Trayvon Martin Civil Rights Act to be passed. It will focus on the Stand Your Ground law, racial profiling and the war on youth. This is deeper than just the Zimmerman murder case. This is a movement to unravel the system that allowed Trayvon to be criminalized, profiled and killed in the first place. We will stay in the capitol until the governor meets our demands. We have gotten support from across the country and around the world. This is what the student movement looks like.

Black Youth Project 100 is a group of 100 young black activists from across the country convened by the Black Youth Project to mobilize communities of color beyond electoral politics. As we convened for our first Beyond November Movement gathering, we collectively mourned over the Zimmerman trial verdict and produced this video response to affirm the humanity of black life. We are committed to connecting the tragic loss of Travyon Martin and this recent miscarriage of justice in Florida to countless other examples of American systemic racism and injustice. Moving forward, we will be mobilizing a black youth contingency to attend the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington and offering civic engagement training to young people. We are organizing local chapters to build political power nationwide while simultaneously supporting the efforts of other youth-led organizations such as Dream Defenders. As stated in our video, we see the hopelessness of a generation that has been broken trying to find its place in this world, and we understand that we need to turn anger into action and pain into power.

In response to North Carolina's extreme right agenda that disproportionately harms people of color and the poor, the state NAACP has led twelve "Moral Mondays," resulting in 900 arrests. The unjust acquittal of George Zimmerman is symptomatic of systems of white supremacy that are enacted both nationally and locally. While people in North Carolina mobilized for Trayvon Martin and against racial profiling on Sunday and Monday, we know that this is only one part of the resistance. Governor Pat McCrory recently repealed the state's racial justice act, and youth of color across the state are being racially profiled and pushed into the school-to-prison-pipeline. The NC-Student Power Union and NC HEAT will continue massing on "Moral Monday" and "Witness Wednesday"-but also around issue-based campaigns, including a Moratorium on Out-of-School Suspensions and a people's budget.

As congressional immigration debates simmer, the Immigrant Youth Justice League and Undocumented Illinois, a state-wide undocumented youth collective, have been staging direct actions targeting the president's deportation policies at fundraisers and detention centers. Just as black men are consistently and unfairly singled out in the American criminal justice system, a system of intense police surveillance threatens more of our families for the price of misconstrued congressional priorities. IJYL has met with the individuals in deportation proceedings and their families; held press conferences in front of ICE offices and rallies and vigils in their name; and rallied alongside other organizations to fight against immigration officials and local police who have strategically profiled day laborers and flea-market merchants. IYJL will continue to devote vocal, physical and soulful efforts to fight any gross mischaracterization of equity and justice, from DC to Sanford to Chicago. We will step up our efforts to stop the trend of deportations, like that of Octavio.

...(Click title for more)

July 22, 2013 - Wall Street held itself a big fat profit party last week. The nation's six largest banks reported $23 billion in profits. That's for one quarter -- three months. Pop the Champagne. Buy another Lamborghini.

Well, if you're a Wall Street banker, that is. Not if you're a college student looking for a loan. 'Cause bankers and Congress don't intend to give you a break today.

Not if you're one of the tens of thousands of workers furloughed because of the sequester. 'Cause Congress has no intention of charging highflying banks a financial transaction tax, the revenues from which could prevent many of those cuts.

Not if you're one of those middle class Americans who bailed out the banks and now fears renewed recklessness on Wall Street will require another rescue. 'Cause Wall Street has persuaded Congress that it really, really should not closely regulate banks.

But, hey, they're partying on Wall Street, right? The thing is, people are supposed to rule. Not Wall Street, not banks, not money. People rule in a democracy. This is something apparently forgotten by some in Congress. Banks are corporations, which are legal entities established under rules written by people. Their existence should advance America and Americans. Not the other way around. Many in Congress need to be reminded of that.

Start with the U.S. House of Representatives. Just last month, the House passed measures to reverse regulations in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Financial Protection Act and to deregulate derivatives, those high-risk financial instruments at the heart of the 2008 market collapse.

Members of the House lost sight of who they work for, who rules. Here's a hint: It's not banks.

Over in the Senate, by contrast, several lawmakers have made it clear they know people rule. Two groups of Senators are working to strengthen financial regulation.

A Democrat and a Republican, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, introduced legislation requiring big banks to increase the capital they must hold to cover losses. That would diminish risk of another taxpayer bailout. It would also encourage the nation's largest banks to break into smaller financial institutions with reduced capital requirements....(Click title for more)

Could the Xi Jinping era see a dramatic improvement in China's environment? The answer must certainly be yes. Technically and administratively, China has the know-how and the government machinery that would let it make meaningful progress to clean up the environment over the next decade. The question is whether its leaders have the political will.

The "crazy bad" air pollution in Beijing paradoxically provides room for hope. The outpouring of anger - and the role played by social media such as Sina Weibo - means that this is an issue the government ignores at its peril.

The air pollution crisis is a health emergency. A 2007 World Health Organization study estimated that air pollution killed about 656,000 Chinese each year. That is equivalent to almost ten times the number of people who were killed by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Imagine. Almost ten Hiroshimas a year from China's air pollution.

Many countries have cleaned up pollution only after a dramatic event. Sixty years ago, in December 1952, a deadly smog in London prompted by coal burning killed as many as 12,000 people in days. The world's first clean air act was passed in its wake and relegated London's famed "pea-soupers" to history books. A June 1969 fire on Ohio's Cuyahoga River ("a river that oozes rather than flows," Time magazine said at the time) jump-started the environmental movement in the United States. The first Earth Day was held the following year and the Environmental Protection Administration was set up 18 months after the Cuyahoga blaze.

Like the United States, post-war Japan saw its headline-grabbing pollution disasters, notably mercury poisoning in Minamata and choking air pollution in Yokkaichi, both of which had the dubious distinction of having diseases named after them (Minamata disease and Yokkaichi asthma). Today, Japan has one of the highest degrees of environmental protection (both legally and in spirit) in the world, but also some of the world's most sweeping energy-conservation measures.

Pressure from a richer and more assertive population is quickening the pace of Asia's environmental clean-up. The most recent Greendex survey of 17,000 citizens in 17 countries conducted by the National Geographic Society and research house Globescan in spring 2012, found that Indians and Chinese scored highest in an international survey of environmental attitudes and behaviour.

Chinese worry about food safety was almost off the charts in the survey, with 91 percent reporting that it was a serious concern, underscoring serious popular discontent following a wave of food poisoning incidents, most notoriously melamine-laced baby milk powder. This fear about food outstripped any other concern expressed in any of the 17 countries.

According to Greendex, the Chinese were more concerned about air pollution than citizens of any other country. Significantly, Chinese and Indians were the most confident that their governments and companies were working hard to ensure a clean environment. In short, the environment is seen as an issue of personal safety and well-being in developing countries like China and India. Governments ignore this at their peril. ...(Click title for more)

July 24, 2013 - The fabled City Lights bookstore in San Francisco is sixty years old this year. They're having a lot of celebratory events to mark the birthday. Even without the past decade's steady and precipitous decline in the fortunes of independent bookstores, City Lights' survival and thriving is literally extraordinary.

Started as a paperback bookshop by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and partners, it expanded to sell all manner of reading material and became a locus of the fledgling Beat literary movement and much more. Ferlinghetti, having earned a doctorate from the Sorbonne in post-WWII Paris before returning to the United States, was no literary lightweight, and from the start stocked his inventory with works of deep political, philosophical and cultural significance.

But the Beats brought City Lights into the international limelight after Ferlinghetti heard a young Allen Ginsberg read his new poem "Howl" in San Francisco in 1955, convinced Ginsberg to let him publish the poem in the then-new City Lights publishing imprint, and was soon the center of a landmark censorship case after United States customs agents seized copies of the little book and local police arrested Ferlinghetti and another City Lights staffer for selling the "obscene" work. The Howl trial made headline news and put one more nail into the coffin of censorship, after the ACLU and renowned San Francisco attorney Jake Ehrlich successfully defended the book (while Ginsberg was already confessing to Ferlinghetti "To tell you the truth I am already embarrassed by half of it"). Fifty years later, Ferlinghetti wrote of Ginsberg "his insurgent voice is needed more than ever, in this time of rampant materialism, militarism, nationalism, and omnivorous corporate monoculture eating up the world."

But what of Ferlinghetti's own "insurgent voice"? He has published many books of poetry himself, and much more, over the past six decades, has been official poet laureate of San Francisco, received numerous awards both literary and civic, had his paintings widely exhibited and printed and, over 90 years of age, is about as famous as a poet can be in these times. A few years ago, he published via City Lights press, of course -- a little pocket hardcover work titled, in fact, Poetry as Insurgent Art. It's featured on the front counter at City Lights bookstore during this 60th birthday year as a sort of talisman of the shop's existence. The book is his relatively succinct answer to the question, Can Poetry Matter?

More than 50 years ago, renowned American poet William Carlos Williams wrote famously that "It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack of what is found there." Like Ferlinghetti, Williams was no slacking beatnik. A practical man who was not only a poet but also a practicing physician, Williams' lines are usually read to imply that poetry -- good poetry, at least -- is essential to one's inner life and spirit. In the cultural doldrums of the early 1950s, that rang true for many people.

"Poetry can save the world by transforming consciousness," Ferlinghetti argues in "Poetry as Insurgent Art." He wrote this book for anybody who might listen, it seems, but especially for those who might be poets. "I am signaling you through the flames. The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it." Poetry, in this vision, must be a political statement, arrows slung for freedom of expression, thought and resistance. "Write living newspapers," he counsels. "Your poems must be more than want ads for broken hearts" -- in other words, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, to write mere "love poetry" in such times is "almost a crime." So "challenge capitalism masquerading as democracy"; "Liberate have-nots and enrage despots"; "Don't cater to the Middle Mind of America nor to consumer society." And so on, in variations of his admonition to "be committed to something outside yourself."

To be sure, this is a tall order for poetry -- or any form of writing. But the six or seven (mostly) one-liners on each of the 30 pages of the section giving his book its name are testament to Ferlinghetti's enduring vision and commitment. Some of these lines read as if they could have been penned in the Beat heyday, over half a century ago: "Stand up for the stupid and crazy"; "Dig folksingers who are the true singing poets of yesterday and today." Political economy, down-home mysticisms, and occasional cringe-worthy silliness ("Make permanent waves, and not just on the heads of stylish women") all blend into his own version of Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet." Thus, poets should "see eternity in the eyes of animals," but not "be too arcane for the man in the street." Ferlinghetti can be self-deprecating: "Don't lecture like this. Don't say don't." But he is also dead serious: "Don't let them tell you poetry is bullshit" and, especially, "Don't ever believe poetry is irrelevant in dark times." Indeed, as Williams would probably agree, in dark times and in this vision, poetry becomes even more essential.

The second major section of the book, "What Is Poetry?," was started by Ferlinghetti in the late 1950s; here he provides backup for his argument for the importance of poetry, and that "life lived with poetry in mind is itself an art." Here, the "political" reverts -- somewhat -- to the personal, as "poetry is the shortest distance between two humans," is "the anarchy of the senses making sense"; and "it is a pulsing fragment of the inner life, an untethered music" which "restores wonder and innocence."

Again, a lofty charge, but many have believed it, and some, such as Ferlinghetti, have lived it -- even though, as he acidly quips (echoing Ginsberg's famed opening lines to "Howl") in "The Populist Manifesto" appended here, "We have seen the best minds of our generation/destroyed by boredom at poetry readings." Many would-be appreciators of poetry can probably relate. To paraphrase Mother Goose, When poetry is good, it can be very very good; when it's not, it can be horrid.

City Lights still hosts lots of author readings, not only of poetry but of every kind of new work, as long at it is not fluff. It remains an incredible resource, carrying works from around the world that are hard to find in other stores. The entire upstairs room is devoted to, yes, poetry; the two floors below are stuffed with a world of everything else in or out of print. There is still a little mail drop where people can write each other care of the shop or leave messages, a real anachronism in this digital age (but the store does have the following wonderful sign on display: "Stash your sell phone and be here now"). The store is a must-see stop on many San Francisco tourist itineraries and there are very good eateries nearby in North Beach and Chinatown -- the little "Jack Kerouac alley" next to the store is a semi-official gateway between the two neighborhoods -- and even better bars even closer. If you are lucky you might see Ferlinghetti himself ambling about.

Hopefully, many such tourists and other visitors will succumb to the impulse to buy Ferlinghetti's impassioned, compact and concise little book from the shop's counter, and actually read it. He's even signed some of the copies. As for the man himself, long may he add to his poetic warning therein: "Wake up, the world's on fire!" ...(Click title for more)

Online University of the Left via Daily KOS

July 15, 2013 - Actually, the book's REAL title is American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard (Penguin Books, 2011).This review demonstrates that I've been doing most of my writing for Top Comments recently, since it was motivated by a comment thread started by cuphalffull's recommendation of the book in DrJohnB's diary on the roots of the polarization we see in today's politics.

No, I'm nowhere in the thread, because I remembered that I had read the book and there was something I found hinky about it, but I figured that the people recommending the book meant that maybe I should reconsider it. I've reread it, and it IS an interesting read, but it's more solid in some parts than it is in others, and it sort of loses its way between the Revolution and today, although the conclusion is provocative. The problem is akin to the Greek myth about Procrustes' bed.

So what this is is a case study of how a professional historian looks at a history book written by a, well, journalist. It's the stuff you have to look out for when you're reading material by the Walter Isaacsons and the John Mechems of the world.

The premise of the book is that the roots of partisanship in American politics - in fact, the origins of American political culture - lie in the patterns of settlement of North America in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and the movement west by the descendents of the original settlers and by immigrants during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It's a good premise and Woodard provides it with a good explanatory matrix. The sociologists who study immigration have observed that people tend to move west along latitudinal lines, thus migrants west from Massachusetts would end up in Michigan and Wisconsin while migrants from Georgia would end up in Arkansas or Texas. Here are the eleven regions in order of settlement:

1. First Nations (now the Canadian province of Nunavut)

2. El Norte (the Spanish settlement of Northern Mexico and what's now New Mexico starting in the 1560s)

3. New France (the watershed of the St. Lawrence River, 1612)

4. Tidewater (Jamestown, 1607)

5. Yankeedom (Plymouth, 1620)

6. New Netherland (1626)

7. The Deep South (The Carolinas, colonies of the sugar planters of Barbados, c 1670)

8. The Midlands (William Penn, 1681)

9. Greater Appalachia (starting in 1718)

10. The Left Coast (starting in the 1830s, accelerating after 1848)

11. The Far West (after the Civil War)

Here they are mapped out: (See Above) ...(Click title for more)

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The time is long past for 'Lone Rangers'. Being a socialist by your self is no fun and doesn't help much. Join CCDS today--$36 regular, $48 household and $18 youth.

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Solidarity, Carl Davidson, CCDS