Jan 27, 2023

NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie recounts the contributions of A. P. Randolph, over many decades, to align the civil rights struggle with the struggle for economic justice – starting in a 1919 Socialist Party magazine, The Messenger.

Seattle’s Kshama Sawant, Socialist Alternative member of Seattle’s city council, has said she won’t seek re-election next year. A Seattle Times columnist, generally unsympathetic, opines: “Her strongest legacies are that she upset Seattle’s comfortable liberalism, and called out the rich barons. She was so absolutist though that she ended up alienating even her allies.” There are links in the column to some more sympathetic accounts of Sawant’s time on the council.

“The decades-long decline of unionized labor, as the EPI’s analysis concludes, has thus not occurred because workers don’t want to join unions, but rather because the design of current labor law is prohibitive to forming them even when the appetite for doing so is strong.” Luke Savage’s piece in Jacobin fingers the dozens of apparently minor barriers that add up to big frustrations for the millions of workers who favor a union. Tipped by our comrade Dave R via Portside.

Atlanta police killed Manuel Esteban Paez Terán last week, one of many “forest defenders” protesting the construction of a $90 million “cop city” in Atlanta which would destroy large swaths of the Atlanta forest – a crucial buffer against climate change. The Guardian reports: “Officials say Manuel shot first at a state trooper ‘without warning’ and an officer or officers returned fire, but they have produced no evidence for the claim. … Police raids on the forest intensified until 14 December, when a half-dozen ‘forest defenders’ were arrested and charged with ‘domestic terrorism’ under state law – another unprecedented development in US environmental activism, said Lauren Regan, founder of the Civil Liberties Defense Center.” More details on the increasingly nefarious tactics employed by the state against activists and community members – tactics which we can surely expect to spread across the US – are detailed in the article.

This WaPo article on the Biden administration’s major-ish move on housing costs cedes the administration too many excuses for dodging the demands of housing advocates, including the letter from Sen. Warren and Rep. Bowman. But it does frame out the scope of the housing problem well. The Homes Guarantee Campaign pushed by People’s Action is outlined in this account from Common Dreams’ Progressive Newswire. And here’s that Warren-Bowman letter.

Victor Navasky, the longtime editor and then publisher of The Nation, has died at 90. This NYT obit observes that he “introduced a droll sensibility that leavened the magazine’s sometimes too-earnest prose.”