January 21, 2022

From our MoCo comrade Ingrid G: Where do we go from here? “On the one-year anniversary of the January 6th assault on the Congress, we in the US face the threat of an authoritarian movement seizing state power, dismantling our democratic institutions, and launching repressive attacks on progressive organizations.” In a January 1 statement, DSA’s North Star Caucus proposes explicit steps DSA can take in building multi-racial unity on the left — and enriching and diversifying DSA’s culture and strategy — to confront the rise of neo-fascism and to defend democracy.  

Grappling with what is, after all, the bottom line: Class Struggle and the Fight for Democracy: 8 Propositions — from The Platypus via Portside.

An excellent summary of another way Maryland District 18 Senator Jeff Waldstreicher failed to turn up for progressive voters in Montgomery County. 

More than 8,000 workers at around 80 King Soopers grocery stores (owned by Kroger) are on strike, protesting low pay and rising healthcare costs — despite Kroger’s 2020 profits reaching nearly $3 billion, with CEO Rodney McMullen receiving a $6.4 million raise — among other things. In The Nation, Kim Kelly writes: “Two-thirds of the 10,000 Kroger workers … surveyed said that they do not earn enough money to cover their basic expenses every month, with 44 percent of them reporting that they cannot pay rent and 39 percent saying they can’t afford groceries.” 

A review of a new book on US labor is tagged by our comrade Jules B; it is making the rounds of longtime labor commentators and raises questions about where unions can get their support. “… labor leaders have too often mistaken the survival of their own unions ‘with the survival of the union movement itself.’” But unions’ fundamental problem, the book’s author, William Scheuerman, argues, is that, given the corporate-government assault upon them, their “organizational structure no longer serves the mission of the labor movement.”

The union movement is still constrained by outmoded labor law and high, easily exploitable barriers to organizing, we hear from our comrades at the Economic Policy Institute: “One of the most important things that could be done to generate a more equitable economy is to dismantle the barriers to union organizing and collective bargaining … New data on unionization from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS 2022), coupled with evidence on the value of unions and on workers’ desire to be unionized, reinforce the importance of this goal and the urgent need for policy reforms.” 

Earlier this week, Microsoft purchased game studio Activision Blizzard for over $70 billion, making it one of the largest corporate media consolidations in history — for context, Disney’s purchase of Fox media assets a few years back was valued at just over $71 billion. Kotaku explains why this consolidation was inevitable, and what it might mean for the media industry going forward. (Last December, Activision Blizzard employees took their first steps towards unionizing the media company following a deluge of scandals and mismanagement emanating from executive leadership … bold steps in an industry known for its exploitation and lack of organized labor). FTC chair Lina Khan suggests in this NYT interview that the acquisition/merger might get close scrutiny.