Tidbits -- January 30, 2013

Portside Readers' Comments and Announcements

Portside Readers
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Just keep making the point! There has been a huge shift in power and wealth to the super rich in the last 30 years. As they have benefited they need to support a social infrastructure that helps most other people. And those who got rich through Walmart should step up to the plate. They made their money by exploiting virtually everyone connected to their stores from employees to global suppliers. It is payback time! I have to say how disappointed I was when Phil Mickelson who is #22 on the PGA golf rankings and who made millions of dollars last year, started complaining about how he would have to pay more taxes and even threatened to move. This is just self-indulgent, self-centred nonsense. I was not unhappy that he had a bad game yesterday.
Laurel MacDowell
Technology makes it possible to produce all the goods and services, including food, needed by the world with an ever shrinking work force.  In this context reduced working hour to provide more jobs would be beneficial.  However capitalist mentality resists reduced working hour except to classify workers as temporary to avoid health benefits, pension and unemployment insurance and unionizing.  In this context universal single payer health care and strengthening Social Security become a priority in reducing poverty and hunger
John Talbutt
Bill Fletcher's claim that President Obama's inaugural address was a call to action is wishful thinking. 
Even in terms of identifying the constituent pieces of a potential bloc, Fletcher does not claim that it included labor, because he cannot, whether one means by that the trade union organizations, their rank & file members, or workers more broadly. 
Any progressive effort to create such a bloc thus certainly must go well beyond the president's name checks.  
When Franklin Roosevelt told labor leaders to "make him do it," he also worked actively to change laws and enact programs that facilitated organizing. Despite the limits imposed by the racism of the Jim Crow era Democratic party, Roosevelt worked to create organized capacity among his constituents to bring the organized pressure needed, both through legal reforms relating to union organizing, and through expansion of the social wage. 
Barack Obama has done nothing similar. In fact he decided against fighting for the right to organize in his first term, despite having run on that platform. 
Nothing in the inaugural speech suggests a change of course to help create stronger possibilities for organizing. Nothing suggests that the president will give up his agenda of cutting Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, i.e. actually cutting the social wage, if he can use that to get a "grand fiscal bargain." 
Obama's agenda of willingness to entertain such cuts forces progressives not just to try to make him do progressive things, but actually to oppose him. We must fight to prevent him doing regressive things. Disguising this reality does progressives no service. He may speak of the haves and have-nots. He sides with the haves in elevating the phony debt/deficit issue, and in generally siding with his Big Finance donors in economic policy when their interests conflict with those of workers or the people at large.  
And the idea that President Obama wants to end permanent war frankly is laughable. His policy is to extend "the war on terror" without limit.
In that area, he in fact acts exactly like a Roman emperor. The English word "emperor" derives from the Latin "imperator," meaning "commander." President Obama has completely failed to reverse the rival by ex-Nixonians and George W. Bush of Nixon's imperial presidential claims, based on misreadings of powers derived from being "commander-in-chief." Not just that, though. He has expanded those claims still further, to include the power of assassination, and the right to hold U.S. citizens and others indefinitely without trial. 
In these mad power claims, Obama acts exactly as an emperor. Time to reread Tacitus on the use of republican forms in developing imperial politics and powers.  
Had Romney been elected, he would have done all that and worse. But the fact that Obama was not the most regressive candidate does not mean that he is a closet progressive waiting for us. He is not.  
There is no "call to action" in the speech. A call to action calls for action. It is not hidden. 
And there is not even a more hidden invitation to action, despite what Bill Fletcher would have us believe. 
We need to build our organizing and our strategies around a clear strategic understanding that we face a president who is right wing on war powers and civil liberties, center-right in economics, and moderately liberal on civil rights for various demographic groups or categories. He in turn faces a divided Congress, which opens up temptations for him to engage in regressive bargaining, sometimes including bargaining against himself -- but always against us.  
Whatever brief increment of motivation we might gain by accepting an illusion that Obama is a progressive-in-waiting will be more than offset when we encounter again the facts of what he really is. Fletcher does progressivism no service by fostering that illusion.
Chris Lowe
Portland, Oregon
the new format is terrific - love it and this article with it's gorgeous photos of those gorgeous pieces of artwork is a delight and raised my spirits
great work
Cher Green
John Nichols of The Nation moderates a panel of progressive labor leaders including Karen Higgins of National Nurses United (NNU), George Kohl of the Communication Workers of America (CWA), Lindsay McLaughlin of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and Bill Fletcher, PDA board member, American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), at PDA's, "Progressive Central III, The People's Inauguration", University of the District of Columbia Law School, January 19th, 2013.
There will be a memorial for Jon Fromer on Saturday, February 16.  The event will take place at the Unitarian Church in San Francisco at 1187 Franklin, at Geary St. There will be videos and visiting from 12:00 to 2:00 and the program and celebration from 2:30 to 4:00.
A fund has been set up to fund this memorial.  Additional funds will be used to promote and circulate Jon's work (CD's, videos and his yet-to-be-published novel and, subject to available funding, to support causes he was involved in.  You can donate via PayPal (go here to donate) or send a check payable to "Mary Fromer" to P.O. Box 1912, Mill Valley, CA 94942.  Donations, while greatly appreciated, are not tax-deductible.
Steve Willett 
Encircle the State Department Office at One Market Plaza
Demand That The Department Reject Keystone XL Permit
Make History! Invite Friends!
All the details HERE
March in Solidarity with the LARGEST climate demonstration in Washington D.C. yet!
On September 24, 2011, over 1,500 people came to San Francisco for Moving Planet "A Day to Move Beyond Fossil Fuels."
Let's make it clear to Obama that climate's time is now. The first step he can take is to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, then we'll know he means what he says about protecting our climate.
Over 100 people have already signed up to come to the Bay Area Forward on Climate Rally. How fast can we get to 200? When will we break 1,500?
Please forward this message to at least 10 friends today and invite them to join you in San Francisco, February 17.