Most of all, it's urgent that you oppose war on Iran, defend voter rights, plan for 2014 races now, oppose austerity, support the 'Moral Mondays' in North Carolina, the Congressional Progressive Caucus' 'Back to Work Budget'! 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...

April 14, 2014 - Cecily McMillan has had trouble concentrating on the master's thesis she is supposed to be writing this spring under my direction at the New School in New York City, a study of the political beliefs and career of the late, great socialist, pacifist, and civil rights campaigner Bayard Rustin.

It's not that Cecily has writer's block and has been avoiding the library (if only it were that). Rather, she is spending far too much of her time in the defendant's seat in a courtroom in New York City Criminal Court in Lower Manhattan. There she is facing charges of felony assault on a police officer in Zuccotti Park, birthplace of Occupy Wall Street, on March 17, 2012.

On that day a demonstration took place in the park to mark the six-month anniversary of the original occupation. When the police moved in to clear the park, making scores of arrests, Cecily was caught in the melee. Her trial, billed as the last Occupy trial, began this past week, on Monday, April 7, and has drawn national and international media attention. On Friday, the newly seated jury heard opening arguments from the prosecution and from Cecily's lawyers. The case is expected to last another two weeks. If convicted, she could be sentenced to seven years in prison.

I have known Cecily for nearly three years. I met her when I was invited to speak at a Democratic Socialists of America youth section gathering in the Catskills in the summer of 2011. Cecily, then twenty-two years old, was a recent college graduate (Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin) and a veteran of the previous winter's Madison, Wisconsin protests against Governor Scott Walker's anti-labor policies. She was obviously in her element in a political gathering-self-confident, vocal, and, in that much abused term, charismatic. A leader. And also (and this doesn't always go with the territory) generous and empathetic. My seventeen-year-old son, a high school student, was attending his first socialist meeting, over-awed by the older, worldly college students surrounding him, and I was deeply grateful when Cecily took him under her wing. So, a leader-but with a pronounced maternal instinct.

Cecily went off to New York that August to begin her graduate studies at the New School. And I was not terribly surprised when, in October, I came across her name in a New York Times story about Occupy Wall Street, on its one-month anniversary. I learned that she had been involved with Occupy from the earliest planning sessions in August. And I was pleased to see that she was in the faction that thought Occupy should put forward concrete demands, if it was going to be taken seriously and broaden its support. As the Times reported:

    [P]olitically active members like Cecily McMillan and David Haack, who first proposed formulating demands in a pre-campout planning meeting in August, said they were ready to take action. Mr. Haack, who in 2009 tried to run for the White Plains City Council, admitted feeling disillusioned after the group struck down their proposal in August, but now he feels inspired by the movement's "true democratic process," even if it means slower progress going forward.

    "Let's give ourselves two weeks," Ms. McMillan said about presenting provisions to the General Assembly. Ms. McMillan, 23, a New School graduate student, feels such dedication to the cause that she has contemplated taking a sabbatical from her studies - but she has begun to worry that the movement could become "a joke" without specific goals. Still, with the right demands, she said, more union members and diverse contingencies could join.

In other words, within the spectrum of political tendencies represented in Occupy, Cecily represented the Michael Harrington/democratic socialist "left wing of the possible" perspective, which never turned out quite as influential as the anarchist/utopian wing (alas)....(Click title for more)

Written by a Group of His Friends, via Portside.org

Carl Bloice, a brilliant journalist, political theorist, and teacher who inspired and mentored generations of activists in the U.S. and around the world for more than five decades, died in San Francisco April 12 after a long battle with cancer. He was 75.

From a courageous stint as what is believed to be the first Northern reporter to cover the 1960s Civil Rights movement in the South to editing the West Coast People's World newspaper to his years as the People's Daily World Moscow correspondent during the turbulent final five years of the Soviet Union to stinging commentary as a prominent blogger for left and African American publications, Bloice paved one groundbreaking path after another.

"Carl taught me to be a journalist, that journalism mattered, and that it was the thing that saved us from the humiliation of silence in the face of injustice. His absence creates a vacuum in our world--and my world-- that simply cannot be filled," said longtime University of California Santa Cruz journalism professor Conn Hallinan, who was with Bloice first in the San Francisco civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam war movement at the University of California, Berkeley, and later at the People's World.

"Brother Carl was a fighter for working people and his writing could be described as advocacy journalism with barbs," said Peter Gamble, publisher of BlackCommentator.com on whose editorial board Bloice served.  "He was a loyal friend to those who had the fortune to know him. We will miss Carl very much, but his soul will live on in our hearts and provide some of the energy needed to continue the struggle."

Longtime San Francisco peace, labor and community activist Giuliana Milanese, one of Bloice's oldest and closest friends, recalled him as "a reflective comrade, unfailing in his commitment to justice, and his steadfast vision, not based on leaders who come and go but on ideas that create change. Carl never gave up the fight for a better world."

Bloice was born January 28, 1939 in Riverside, Ca. As a teenager, living in South Central Los Angeles, he began his own political activism early in civil rights activities as a member of the Liberal Religious Youth, the Unitarian Universalists' youth organization, in Los Angeles.

For a time, Bloice planned a life in the ministry of the Unitarian Church. But his activism and work with others in the burgeoning civil rights movement led him in another direction.

By the age of 20, Bloice had joined the U.S. Communist Party. This was a time, noted the late Franklin Alexander, one of Bloice's early friends, and fellow young African American CP recruit, that it was hard to get in the door with many leaving in the wake of the Red Scare, anti-Communist repression in the U.S., and the post-Stalin revelations in the Soviet Union.

By the early 1960s, Bloice, then a poet and prose writer, moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. There he joined the staff of the People's World, beginning a three-decade association that would establish him firmly as a rare journalist who influenced readers and activists around the world.

"I remember going to meetings in L.A. where there was an FBI car parked outside, and agents taking down the license number of every car in the block," Bloice would later tell the San Francisco Chronicle. "Members were kept under surveillance, and people victimized just because they bought this newspaper."

Though affiliated with the CP, the People's World had achieved a broad renown as a voice of the progressive and working class left from its early days as the Western Worker, when it was a leading chronicler of the 1934 San Francisco General Strike, the struggles of West Coast longshore workers and other unions, and the infamous Zoot Suit attacks on Latino youth by off-duty while sailors and Marines in Los Angeles in 1943.

Under Bloice, first as a staff writer, then editorial board member, then editor, that tradition continued. By the 1980s, Bloice would happily display a plaque, the Toronto Globe and Mail would note, from the City of Berkeley in his then Berkeley office at the old Finn Hall recognizing his achievements in "profoundly partisan journalism."

In 1962, Bloice with others founded the first chapter of the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs, a multi-racial, national youth organization, named for the legendary NAACP co-founder, journalist, author and educator. In San Francisco, the DuBois Clubs gained quick notice for leading desegregation fights targeting drive-in restaurant chains, the San Francisco hotel industry and automobile sales rooms that systematically discriminated against African-Americans in hiring. Bloice was also the group's publications editor.

During that time, the Los Angeles Times cited Bloice as a leader of the University of California Berkeley's Free Student Union and Vietnam Day Committee, successors to the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement, along with other prominent free speech and anti-Vietnam war activists, including later Yippee prankster Jerry Rubin, Conn Hallinan, Robert Scheer, who went on to become a well known journalist, and many others....(Click title for more)

Meet the Preacher Behind Moral Mondays

 

An Armed Standoff in Nevada Is Only the Beginning for America's Right-Wing Militias

Common Dreams   

April 17, 2014 - Seattle's corporations were blindsided, it all happened so fast. Socialist candidate Kshama Sawant's successful City Council campaign tore through Seattle politics like a tornado, leaving the 1% devastated, unable to cope with a storm they didn't see coming.

The Seattle elite had no way to counter her arguments, silence her supporters, or keep her from gathering a tidal wave of support for the $15 campaign. The establishment was paralyzed, powerless. (Image: 15now.org)

But Sawant's election victory was just the beginning of the humiliation for Seattle's super wealthy. After singlehandedly transforming city politics, Sawant used her newly elected bully pulpit to torment the mayor and City Council and harangue Seattle's corporations, while simultaneously mobilizing thousands in the streets to bulldoze through her progressive agenda. The 1% had absolutely no idea what to do - they'd never experienced anything like it. They conceded defeat and agreed to a $15 minimum wage - in words.

Sawant didn't buy it, refusing to declare victory until it was in her hands. After the mayor and the City Council created a committee to implement the $15 minimum wage, Sawant was busy sounding the alarm bells, correctly predicting that such a radical change would never be accepted without a fight by Seattle's 1%, who would eventually recover from their shell shock and re-group to attack.

That attack is now beginning. But a direct assault isn't yet possible.  Sawant's position is fortified by her broad-based support, the result of her devastatingly effective campaign. Thus, the 1% are playing a long game, using a combination of tried and true tactics, where they'll "agree" to Sawant's demands on one hand, while slandering her as an "extremist" on the other, all the while proposing a plan for $15 with just enough loopholes to render it meaningless. For example, the corporations want a $15 that includes "total compensation," meaning that any benefit - like health insurance costs - could be counted as part of a worker's wage, thus changing the definition of minimum wage. 

These are some of the tactics being employed by the newly-formed Seattle corporate front group "One Seattle," whose members include some of the largest corporations in the world, and who collectively despise Sawant nearly as much as she hates them. The "middle ground' in this conflict doesn't exist. 

Which leads to another tactic of One Seattle: creating the illusion of a middle ground - the super wealthy plan to use middle class small business owners as proxies in this war, since "mom and pop" are more lovable than Starbucks' multimillionaire CEO.

This corporate tactic to win the hearts and minds of the public by putting forward the friendly face of small business owners was recently exposed by Seattle's weekly newspaper "The Stranger," who revealed a leaked memo from 'One Seattle' which detailed the "small business strategy," as well as other above-mentioned tactics that Seattle's biggest corporations were going to use to undermine Sawant and the $15 Now campaign....(Click title for more)

Solidarity, Carl Davidson, CCDS