Lewis Lapham and the Fate of the Book

Tomgram: Lewis Lapham, Machine-Made News

Posted by Lewis Lapham at 6:08pm, April 22, 2012.

[Tom Engelhardt writes, an an introduction to Lewis Lapham's article. . .] A decade ago, I wrote a novel, The Last Days of Publishing, about the world I had worked in for a quarter-century.  I already had at least some sense, then, of what was bearing down on the book.  Keep in mind that this was a couple of years before Facebook was launched and years before the Kindle, the Nook, or the iPad saw the light of day.  Still, back then, for my novel’s characters — mostly authors and book editors like me — I imagined an electronic book-in-the-making, which I dubbed the “Q.”  It was the “Q-print,” officially, with that initial standing for “quasar”– for, that is, a primordial force in the universe.

When one of my younger characters, an editorial assistant, unveils it — still in prototype form — it’s described as “a sleek, steno-pad sized object… a flickering jewel of light and color.”  And he imagines its future this way: “Someday it’ll hold a universal library and you’ll be able to talk with an author, catch scenes from the movie, access any newspaper on earth, plan your trip to Tibet, or check out a friend on screen, and that probably won’t be the half of it.”

An older publishing type, on the other hand, describes its possibilities in this fashion: “In a future Middlemarch, the church will offer public service ads when Casaubon appears, the drug companies will support Lydgate, and architectural firms can pitch their wares while Dorothea reorganizes the housing of the poor.”  A decade later, that may still be a little ahead of the game, but not by so much.  The inexpensive version of the Kindle is awash in ads by now and, books and all, the iPad, of course, is a riot of activity.

Don’t think of me, though, as the Nostradamus of online publishing . . . (click here for the rest of this article).

Chris Drew: The First Amendment And The Right To Survive

[Occupy Rogers Park had no question about how it wanted to highlight the beginning of its "Chicago Spring" campaign: we decided to honor Chris Drew, Rogers Park resident and courageous artist, who has uncompromisingly fought for free speech rights for artists.  The unusual thing about Chris Drew is that he identified the right of the artist to survive (by his/her art) and the right of free speech, and thus began to challenge the restrictive peddler's licensing procedure that limits artists' abilities to pursue their craft and hence their speech.  He recorded his own arrest for violating this ordinance, and when the police discovered this they dropped that charge and instead charged him with felony eavesdropping.   The ACLU took up his case and in March, 2012 the trial judge threw the case out on constitutional grounds.  The Illinois eavesdropping law may be on its way out. 

What many may not know is that for the last year Chris has been fighting this case and fighting his own serious health issues at the same time. His indomitable will and his connection with and belief in those marginalized artists with whom he has worked for so many years sustained him.  But as his health is failing (for the past year he has been fighting lung cancer),  he was determined  to accept the award and to make his remarks, which appear below unedited.  In addition you will see the remarks I made to introduce Chris;  having worked with him since my arrival in Chicago has been a distinct honor;  and in making these remarks I wanted to add something that perhaps no one else was in a position to do.  When Chris and I had a few moments after we had dropped him off at home, we talked for a moment about how overwhelmed he was by the honors accorded him, and about the difference between the movements we had both seen as young people and the movement of today.  We talked about the slogan, often repeated on Occupy posters, "It Isn't One Thing,  It's Everything!"  Our experience is so tied up with this demand or that issue.  This piece of the pie or that piece.  But this is about the whole pie.  The whole thing.  And Chris responded: "What most people see is small and unconnectedness. But it is connected.  It’s about the whole thing, and art is the key.  It’s all connected it is the key to our freedom.  We use the art patch to illustrate how to fight for freedom, demonstrate that [artists] have tools to fight for that freedom.”    –  Lew Rosenbaum] (The April 7th program, including Chris Drew’s remarks can be seen here).

_________________________________________________________________________

The Art Patch Project: The First Amendment And The Right To Survive – Chris Drew

This expanded lecture needs to be repeated at graduate gatherings of the Arts Teaching Institutes in Chicago.

Community Arts Concept

Art for change vs. art for art’s sake:  Art is always both, because the act of art is self-expression, which is the act of expressing the self in flux – in change.

The economic system that developed around art – art for collectors, for curators and art as an investment separated itself from art for change when desirable.  “Change art” being feared by the moneyed classes had to be discouraged during its dangerous lifetime. This is done at the institutional level.

Community art keeps rearing its beautiful head, generation after generation, by different names, movements and artists. In the 60’s and 70’s tradition I am from, it was known as “Community Art,” and resulted in opening up institutions to minority artists as well as a call for the ambitious artist to establish small institutions in community locations, securing the self-esteem needs of community segments.

Our initial Art of the T-shirt and its presently evolved Art Patch Project is the fruition of this in our 25 year long arts activity.

Stolen Rights –the Right to Survive by Art

We are talking about the real First Amendment right to survive by selling our art in public spaces that is required for change art to exist and build a public audience. This is the right above all that should be defended by our lives. In Chicago and too many other locations it has been abandoned as useless, a move that has marginalized artists and dwarfed our art scenes in public.

I have written on the legal basis and significance of this on my blog (http://www.c-drew.com/blog/) and in e-mails available on

Chris Drew asks “WHO WILL WORK?”

line.  Here I hope to describe a vision shortly and hook a few dedicated individuals.  Every movement is only as great as the art that informs it.  We need a core of workers to re-awaken the Art Patch Project to change Chicago – to create survival opportunities as an arts change base for Chicago.  WHO WILL WORK?

Art Patch Project

Please use the Art Patch Project to make Chicago Change.  Bluntly put, I am dying and the Art Patch Project needs new energy.  I pray some of you are that new energy.

Why the Art Patch Project?

We must teach citizens of Chicago to stand up for their rights and demonstrate the central role art has in this process.  We must employ win-win strategies to do so.  Using art we have changed the eavesdropping law.  Let’s extend this to artists’ rights and set an example of using art to fight for First Amendment Rights.

The Art Patch Project is a win-win concept.  Artists submit designs and are encouraged to promote their art on line on the art patch.  The Art Patch Project promotes artists’ rights on line on the patch.  Volunteers print and give away the many flavored art patches over time educating the public to the variety of artists missing in public.  The movement regenerates an art movement to sustain its needs in public. Activities take place in low-tech one or two day a week activities sustainable by a core of dedicated artists at costs affordable to a volunteer movement that takes place in public.

In 2006 Chris Drew set up “shop” on Michigan Ave., ironically in front of the Chicago Tribune Freedom Museum

This concept is already underway, demonstrable today. You may have an art patch in your hand right now.  These patches are sewn on clothes, pinned up in a creative variety of ways. They have a life that goes on promoting your voice.  This is a solution.

Artists have been using the Art Patch Project to protect our stolen rights with growing awareness, establishing a foundation to build on.  The fact is we have less right to survive by our art in Chicago in public than most places of the world.

The fact is we have less right to survive by our art in Chicago in public than most places of the world. And we have a first amendment guarantee in this right.  And we are not fighting for it.  We have given it up. We have given up our most basic right.  It is your duty to change this.

__________________________________________________________________

Sue Ying, an advocate of the Harold Washington Cultural plan, founder of Artists Against Homelessness, a strong woman and revolutionary artist for fifty years, introduced me to Chris Drew shortly after I arrived in Chicago in 1987.  Chris had come to Chicago’s uptown as a homeless expatriate from Minnesota.  He’d set up a gallery on Clark Street and began a career devoted to advocating for and with artists, recognizing that suppression of the artists’ voices is key to suppressing any revolutionary discontent in society.  

She told me he was someone I needed to know, to work with, and to learn from. What he was doing was important and powerful and it went to the heart of understanding what it meant to be a revolutionary and to have clarity about the content of our time. 

He was opening the Uptown Multi-Cultural Art Center, which is still housed in the American Indian Center. Recognizing that Chris’s work was important to the youth in Uptown, especially the American Indian youth, the American Indian Center gave Chris a space, rent-free, to run the workshops that were open to anyone– ANYONE — who wanted to take them. Chris started a free screen print workshop, which pulled young taggers and graffiti writers in to learn how to put their drawings onto t-shirts.  He taught them the process and then engaged them to help teach others.  He never charged for what he taught and he always encouraged people of all ages to honor their creativity. Even if they could not sell to a gallery or get published, they could make art, they could make t-shirts for themselves; for their friends; to sell at pow-wows and to display and sell at the Art of the T-shirt exhibits that Chris arranged in libraries, at the Cultural Center one year, and at Daley Center another year.  But more than anything, Chris adhered what his mentor Carlos Cortez used to teach us: “Do not expect to become an artist to make a living; become an artist to make a life.”

For 20 years, Chris has run UMCAC on a shoestring — he always said he operated very low to the ground.  And while it is true that famous artists such as Carlos Cortez have worked closely with Chris, the thousands of other artists he has touched and helped to show that they have a voice are at least as important.  Chris’ gift to the community is translated into his vision that everyone is an artist, a vision that he shared with that other mentor, Sue Ying.  That there can be no revolution without a revolutionary culture.

As times changed, Chris added more weapons to his artistic arsenal: art shows, computer skills workshops, an artists’ co-op, a web campaign to revive the Harold Washington Cultural Plan that had been abandoned, the annual Art of the Tee Shirt Harvest Festival and the web based ART-ACT or Anti Racist T-Shirt-Artist Contest Tour.  From the ashes of the Washington Cultural Plan, Chris began the project that evolved as Free SAM or Free Speech Artists Movement.  

Chris passionately wanted artists to be able to display, and sell, their artwork in the parks and on the lakefront. That led to questioning the peddler’s license process. and that then led to his art patch project and to the Artists’ Free Speech Movement.  He was arrested in 2009, initially for selling his art patches for $1, but that charge was dropped and he was instead indicted for felony eavesdropping because he had audio recorded his arrest for selling the patches.  

This only scratches the surface, but I have to stop now.  I have to stop now by thanking Mayor Richard M. Daley.  I thought I would never thank Richard Daley, but I am doing it now.  Because King Richard and his minions thought they would pick a fight with a defenseless artist who would go quickly into oblivion.  Instead they picked on a tiger, who seized the opportunity and whose merit is that he wants us to continue to seize the opportunity, not to give up the fight for freedom until we are all free. 

Now, Occupy is not in the habit of petitioning the Mayor for actions.  In various parts of the city, organizations petition the mayor through their alderman for an street to be named in honor of one of the neighborhood’s distinguished citizens.  Instead of begging the Mayor of the 1%, we decided to confer that honor on one of Rogers Parks most distinguished citizens.  And so  Morse Ave. will be re-christened Honorary Chris Drew Way. And we are presenting this commemorative proclamation recognizing why the street will bear his name.  It’s especially appropriate for Occupy Rogers Park to be give this proclamation to Chris, because it is precisely the question of defending the “99%” to which Chris has devoted himself.  That is the content of our time: “Everything or nothing all of us or none. ” (Bertolt Brecht)

Chris Drew prints and gives away art patches at the Glenwood Ave. Arts Festival, August 2010

So now, I want to ask you, as Chris begins to talk, remember the felony charge that Chris has been fighting and take out your video cameras, your cell phones, any recording devices you have for video and audio, and record what you are about to hear, to post it far and wide on FB or any other medium you have at your disposal, to celebrate the fight for which Chris has dedicated the majority of his life, the battle which is for your freedom and the freedom of us all.  Pull those phones out and please help me welcome Diana Berek, a long time cohort of Chris Drew to present our Occupy Rogers Park award !!! — introductory remarks by Lew Rosenbaum]

The Longer School Day and Education Reform: What’s Really Going On?

Fighting the Longer School Day in Chicago Schools — reprinted from April, 2012 People’s Tribune Students, parents, and teachers march to Chicago Mayor’s home to protest school closures. The government must be held responsible for providing education. Education must be taken out of corporate hands. PHOTO/SARAH JANE RHEE By Lew RosenbaumOn August 23, 2011, Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizzard announced a plan to extend the school day from 6 hours to 7.5 hours. After refusing to go along with the contractually agreed-upon salary increase for teachers, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) then turned around and slapped the teachers with a longer school day. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) responded that more work time should be accompanied by an increase in pay. They also opposed the change since CPS had no plan for how the extra time would be used.This battle has gone back and forth since August. The current CTU contract expires at the end of this school year, and what the new school day will look like has become the subject of contentious negotiations for the new agreement. What is the battle around the longer school day all about? CPS says that keeping kids in school longer will improve their test scores. Some parents, grasping at any straw offered, see some possibility of salvation. Others fear releasing their children to the streets. But as Karen Lewis, CTU president, maintained on a Chicago Tonight (WTTV) interview, there is no research that indicates that a longer school day in itself improves education. More time in school does not equal better learning. Just as important, test scores do not really measure learning anyway. There is no plan in place to introduce funding for art and music teachers, or for more staff to cover recess periods—elements that have been removed as cost-cutting maneuvers. The battle is really not about effective education. At first the effort was part of a campaign to vilify teachers. CPS launched its attack on teachers with the refusal to grant the pay increase already agreed upon, and then accused the CTU for being greedy. The school day battle followed the same script: The CPS announced it’s plan, the CTU objected, and the CPS characterized the teachers as only interested in money, not in children. Reality check: CPS public education policy is being decided in the interests of a certain group of wealthy adults, the Commercial Club of Chicago, and that plan has starved public schools of needed resources for almost two decades. It has created a two-tiered public education system, with high performing magnet schools at one end and a mass of so-called failing schools at the other. Whitney Young and Northside Prep, two of the highest performing magnet schools, have circulated a petition to opt out of the longer school day. They know they don’t need that extra time. The city’s scheme to privatize “failing schools” into charter schools has not improved the children’s learning. A longer school day that could mean increased class size and even more test preparation will not improve it either. CPS does not take into account that 80% of the children in public schools qualify for free lunches. The poverty rate, along with class size and prevalence of high stakes testing, limits instructional quality and makes the US rank 24th among 29 industrial countries in educational achievement. Public education cannot be quick-fixed by increasing the instructional day. The framework of our educational apparatus is stacked against us. The Commercial Club of Chicago has no need to educate most children for the fewer jobs available, even for college graduates. Necessities of life are abundant, but produced without people having jobs. People are being replaced by “smart” electronic technology. All children in all neighborhoods need an education that will prepare them to understand and act on the fundamental changes our society is undergoing. We must take education out of corporate hands and hold the government responsible for providing these resources. Discussion of a longer day cannot take place outside this context.

Capitalism, a New Poem by Matt Sedillo

 

Matt Sedillo

Capitalism

by Matt Sedillo

Edgar
One of seven
Third born
Parents poor
Seen two younger die
Bed ridden
Mother crying
Father’s time
Fleeting
Man has
Something to say
Has an opinion
About everything
By sick child’s bed side
Pain reads in his eyes
Yet says next to nothing
Father rendered silent
London
Is full of dying children
Sheets carry
The stench
Father’s coat
Smells of factory smoke
Of the ash
That fell upon it
Mother sings sweetly
But the truth rings in her eyes
Edgar is going to die
And they both know it
Jenny

Jenny Marx, Karl Marx' wife

Pawn shoes
Pawn rings
Pawns linen
Has already lost
Two children
To the squalor
Of the east end
Does her shopping
Stepping over
Beggars lying in sewage
Lying in shit and piss
And third child
Her only son
Her precious boy
Her sweet angel
Edgar
Is dying
Victorian England
The world’s most
Powerful nation
Is full of dying children
Streets run flooded
With the tears
Of the women
Forced to bury them
Husband

Karl Marx

Some kind of genius
Beloved
Celebrated
Studied
The toast of a town
That will do nothing
To help feed his children
Edgar is going to die
And the whole family knows it
Karl
Spends more time
In the library
Than he does
With family
There are questions
To be answered
Momentum
To be conquered
There is talk
In intellectual circles
That his
Is the most brilliant mind
In all of London
His ideas are spreading
As his child lays dying
Walks the streets
That lead
To hallowed
Halls of knowledge
That lead to ladies in parlors
That lead to lords in parliament
On the same stretch of sidewalk
Of whores and beggers
Karl immerses his mind
In political economy
Some say his ideas
Will be the ones
That will shape history
He says the point is not to simply
Interpret the world
But to change it
Because he knows
Knowledge is not power
Only power is power
And kings queens
Clergy
Industrialists
And moneyed interests
See to it their critics
Are not rewarded
For their efforts
And Karl knows
That a man with ideas alone
Right as they may be
Cannot salvage a single

Edgar Marx, son of Jenny & Karl Marx, died in 1855. "Der arme Musch ist nicht mehr. Er entschlief (im wörtlichen Sinne) in meinen Armen"(Jenny Marx)

Solitary child
Not even
His own
The industrial revolution
Is full of dying children
Edgar
One of seven
Third born
Parents poor
Seen two younger die
Will not survive
The night
And there is nothing
The boy’s father
The most brilliant political mind
In all of Germany
France or Great Britain
The specter that haunts Europe
The writer
The philosopher
The journalist
The political economist
The revolutionary
The boy’s father
History’s most famous communist
No there was not a damn thing
Karl Marx
Poor as he was
Could have done about it

In memory of Edgar Marx and all the child victims of the industrial revolution

<mailto:mattsedillo1981@gmail.com>mattsedillo1981@gmail.com

RRC Extra No. 28: Dave Marsh Writes About Austin Hopes and Dreams

RRC Extra No. 28: Austin Hopes and Dreams

Please feel free to forward or post this RRC Extra widely. We only ask that you include the information that anyone can subscribe free of charge by sending their email address to <mailto:rockrap@aol.com>rockrap@aol.com. If you ever wish to unsubscribe, just send an email with “unsubscribe” in the subject line to <mailto:rockrap@aol.com>rockrap@aol.com.

The massive South by Southwest music festival (SXSW) has been held in Austin, Texas in the spring of every year since 1987. Dave Marsh reports on this year’s shindig.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

I know something about SXSW keynote addresses. Little Richard and Smokey Robinson both did theirs as, in part, dialogues with me—sitting live in front of several hundred people, Richard being Richard, Smokey being serious, sincere, smart, and as handsome as seventy will allow.

To a certain extent, it’s a setup: All the attendees who don’t care find other things to do and most of the rest come to have expectations affirmed. But it’s not that simple either. I had the best fun of the last twenty years just asking four questions, sitting and watching Little Richard rave for (I timed it) 17 and a half minutes without pausing for breath. Then he turned to me, clearly winded, and said breathlessly, “Ohhh, Dave! You’re still here. I bet you want to ask me some more questions.”

But it’s not that simple either. The best moments can also be absolutely pedagogical: Smokey ended with a seven minute spiel telling people how to find and deal with stardom, beginning with an admonition (“Thicken your skin”) and ending with a parable about the invention of show business. Since 2010 that last part’s gotten almost half a million hits on YouTube. Richard, who appeared in ’08, seemed to just rant but in reality he was preaching a sermon on the same theme as Smokey, offering all kinds of nuggets but coming back to the main point over and over again: “Sign your own checks!…Sign your own checks!” Afterwards, a young woman came up to me, eyes a brimful of tears, and said, “Thank you, thank you, that was everything I came here to learn.”

Steve Earle began by lecturing his audience: “Let me make something extremely clear. Kiss is not cool, Kiss was never cool, Kiss will never be cool.”

But Bruce Springsteen, this year, was something else again. He offered career advice wrapped in biography, history complete with instructive examples of where he’d swiped a couple of his classics: the doo-wop crooning that led to “Backstreets,” the way the Animals’ “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” provided the core of “Badlands,” and how and why “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” is “every song I’ve ever written including the new ones.” Rocker he may be, but not rockist: “The elements you’re using don’t matter. Purity of human expression and experience is not confined to guitars, to tubes, to turntables, to microchips. There is no right way, no pure way, of doing it. There’s just doing it.” Bruce wrestled with Lester Bangs and Woody Guthrie, post-authenticity, the transformative self, Roy Orbison’s paranoia, Phil Spector’s musical violence, the cover of Meet the Beatles as “the silent gods of Olympus,” the barely comprehensible existence of Nintendo-core, black death metal, and the yearning needs of soul. It was as if someone had managed to translate “A wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom tutti frutti” into a comprehensive treatise on the development and meaning (or lack thereof) of the past sixty years of Anglo-American popular music.

He avoided the hard political realities at the core of his new album, Wrecking Ball, in favor of talking eye to eye with an audience he assumed (correctly) consisted of people who either knew these things or needed to find them out. It was a practical speech, aimed at a specific group of people. He didn’t even know it was being broadcast live or, as far as I can tell, imagine that it would wind up all over the Internet, words stuck in the heads of millions of listeners. (The full audio’s at <http://npr.org>npr.org. It’s also worth looking at the segments posted on YouTube, particularly the stuff about the Animals.)

Raves arrived immediately, but I don’t think anyone’s used the term that best describes it for me: Generosity. The speech gave far more than it took and it held back on self-promotion (granted that the entire speech was wrapped in Bruce’s persona, but I’ve already quoted the only reference to his new album.)

Springsteen never has opening acts. That day he had five. Before the SXSW speech, Jimmy LaFave, Eliza Gilkyson, and Juanes sang Woody Guthrie songs (plus one original by Juanes). It was beautiful and loving, and all the things that a tribute to a great artist on his centenary ought to be. The highlight for me wasn’t Juanes singing a verse from “This Land Is Your Land,” which he told me later was the first time he’d ever sung in English onstage, but Juanes stepping up to challenge the audience when it didn’t sing along heartily enough. LaFave sang wonderfully as he always does, his Oklahoma roots deliberately on display, and his commentary on Woody’s music and life more trenchant than ever. And Eliza, firebrand that she is, kept the music contemporary, insisting on its relevance—or rather, insisting on her listeners paying attention to its continuing relation to the world descended from the one Guthrie described. Eliza has been the best female singer-songwriter for several years now, LaFave has been the best interpreter of Guthrie, Dylan and Springsteen for longer than that, and maybe this performance will help the news spread from Austin. Juanes, of course, is a rock star of Springsteen’s magnitude throughout Latin America and much of Europe; imagine John Lennon in Spanish.

That evening at the Moody Theater Springsteen had two openers–Low Anthem and Alejandro Escovedo with his full band each did about 45 minutes. (Springsteen had done a couple of numbers with Alejandro the night before at the Austin Music Awards show.)

The Austin show was only Springsteen’s second since the release of Wrecking Ball and, like its predecessor—an Apollo Theater benefit in honor of SiriusXM’s tenth anniversary—it contained some beautiful one-off wrinkles. Instead of invoking Curtis Mayfield, Wilson Pickett and Smokey Robinson (and James Brown by way of a lunatic climb into the rigging), this time Woody Guthrie framed the action. Bruce opened with his now-17 member E Street Band doing “I Ain’t Got No Home” a cappella and closed with “This Land is Your Land” with Escovedo, Low Anthem, Joe Ely, and a couple members of Arcade Fire helping out.

Is there another performer in our culture who operates in both the folk-rock and soul-gospel traditions? It’s as fashionable lately to evoke Springsteen as a literary figure as it once was to display him as an articulate pseudo-gas station attendant. But what’s most remarkable is the ability to move smoothly among soul and gospel music and the folk and country tradition in the way that Springsteen does. He has reached the point now that on Wrecking Ball’s “Land of Hope and Dreams” he does both in the same song. Generally, one is lurking in the background of the other in any of his songs, especially live. (Which can’t be discerned if all your attention is on the lyrics which is where, I suppose, the shade of the Great American Poem lurks in the minds of the critics who think it’s mostly about the words.) Yet in pulling these sounds together, Springsteen is capable of convincing more than a few that the beloved community truly could be in our future.

The Wrecking Ball songs (at the Moody he played eight of the eleven) have the strongest connecting thread of any Springsteen album since The River–from the furious social questions of “We Take Care of Our Own,” through the economic despair and determination of “Jack of All Trades” and “Death to My Hometown” to the glorious anthem of hope “Rocky Ground”—with its invocation of God, who does not answer—to the final, unambiguous call to action, “We Are Alive.”

I don’t suppose Bruce Springsteen has a much clearer vision of where, exactly, that action must lead to prevent the “hard times come and hard times go” cycle that he pounds away at six consecutive times in the song “Wrecking Ball.” But you can glimpse what it might feel like in any great musical performance, not just one of his. And, from my perspective, that is the real purpose of SXSW. Truth is, there hasn’t been a commercially important act that broke out of the conference since Hanson, fifteen years ago. But so what? It’s still the biggest, best music school in the United States, maybe the world.

And while Bruce’s show couldn’t offer the kind of community that he evokes in songs like “Land of Hope and Dreams,” it did evoke a sense of musician solidarity that’s essential to what happens with SXSW at its best. It’s a glimpse, but even a full-on Bruce and the E Street Band show is just a glimpse of what it would be like to live with equality and justice every day.

SXSW is as imperfect as any other human project. The sheer size of it has outstripped Austin’s transportation infrastructure and its deficit is ever-widening. The business panels are just the record industry trying to talk itself into believing it still exists. Hip-hop, dance, and ethnic music never get an equal shot in the press coverage and Austin’s local Mexican/Chicano community is invisible.

But.

What SXSW offers is a chance to attend that music school not only as student but as teacher. Not to study music but to observe and participate in the stewing mess of it. I have gone to Austin for this peculiar rite of March madness for the past, I think, nineteen years. I went to speak, I went back to listen. I keep going back not because I think I’m going to find any next big thing, but because I might run into musical glory.

This year, I got it in half a dozen ways—from Bruce, of course, but also from Eric Burdon, whose surprise (even to him and Springsteen) appearance to sing “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” at the Moody was a fiery proof of every accolade heaped upon the Animals’ frontman earlier that day. Where else could I interview, in the space of forty-eight hours both Juanes and Eric Burdon? Where else could I see old Austin friends like LaFave, Gilkyson, Michael Ramos, Michael Fracasso, Joe Ely and the Krayolas? Where else could I spend an afternoon and evening at a taqueria with Alejandro, Jesse Malin, Lenny Kaye, Rosie Flores, and new favorites like Maren Parusel?

Where else could I (with massive help from David Alvarez at KUT-FM and my producer Jim Rotolo) put on a live Sunday radio show, from nine to eleven AM, with seven musical guests? None of them played a record or sang a song I’d ever heard before. And all of them were flat-out great. None of them got paid—at SXSW no artist at an official gig ever gets paid, and very few get paid at any of the others, either. It is, most of the time, music for the love of music.

I go to SXSW to recharge, to remember why I love music, why we’ve still got a chance. And this year, like that young woman said, I got everything I came to learn.—D.M.

Please forward this RRC Extra to five friends. To subscribe to Rock & Rap Confidential, just email <mailto:rockrap@aol.com>rockrap@aol.com. Subscriptions are free.

[Graphics added by editor of this blog]

Chris Mahin Writes On The Anniversary Of The Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King

[Chris Mahin, whose writing appears on this blog often, contributes the following on the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King.]

April 4 is the anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Below you will find the text of an article I wrote in 2006 about the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968 during the Memphis sanitation workers strike. It was written for the regional website of the union I worked for at the time. It describes what happened in the sanitation workers’ strike, the role played by AFSCME, and the attempts of the FBI to slander and isolate Dr. King. I thought it might be useful background material for anyone involved in events commemorating the anniversary of the assassination.
Thanks,
Chris
——————————————————————————————-

April 1968:
Dr. King Is Killed Defending Labor’s Rights

Murder in Memphis: Life Magazine Cover

April 4 is one of the saddest days of the year. On that day in 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. While many events are held each year to honor Dr. King’s memory, too often people forget – or have never learned — why he was in Memphis that spring. Dr. King went to Memphis to help striking sanitation workers – and paid for his stand with his life. That makes April 4 an important anniversary not only in African American history (and in U.S. history in general), but in the history of the labor movement as well.

On February 12, 1968, hundreds of Memphis sanitation workers went on strike. At the time, they were making less than $1 an hour and were eligible for welfare. They decided that they had had enough of poor wages, terrible working conditions, and a viciously anti-union mayor.

The workers were members of Local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The strike was the culmination of years of mistreatment. The workers worked 12 hours a day carrying garbage with busted, leaking pails. Some of the pails were infested with flies and maggots, and the workers had no place to wash up in the yard when they had to leave the trucks. Some of the workers had no running water when they returned home after work. The workers had no real benefits of any kind.

This dire situation came to a crisis point on Feb. 1, 1968, when the accidental activation of a packer blade in the back of a garbage truck fatally crushed workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker.

"I Am a Man" became emblematic of the strike

Almost 1,400 sanitation workers joined the strike. They shut the city down.

The workers and their supporters marched daily to pressure the mayor and the city council to recognize the sanitation unit under AFSCME Local 1733. The men wore signs which read “I AM a Man,” a slogan that was eventually recognized around the world.

Tension grew in the city as Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb called the strike illegal and threatened to hire new workers unless the strikers returned to work. On February 14, the mayor issued a back-to-work ultimatum for 7 a.m. on Feb. 15. The police escorted the few garbage trucks in operation. Negotiations broke off. The newspapers began to report that more than 10,000 tons of garbage was piling up.

It was in that tense environment that AFSCME organizers appealed to Dr. King to come to Memphis to speak to the workers. Initially, King was reluctant. He was immersed in work preparing for the Poor People’s Campaign. This was a huge undertaking, an effort to bring poor people of all ethnicities to Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1968 to protest poverty. But when AFSCME organizer Jesse Epps pointed out that the fight of the sanitation workers in Memphis was part of the same struggle as the Poor People’s Campaign, King agreed.

Once in Memphis, King immediately grasped the importance of what was unfolding there. On his first visit to the city, March 18, he spoke to a crowd of 17,000 people, and called for a citywide march.

On Thursday, March 28, King led a march from the Clayborn Temple, the strike’s headquarters. The march was interrupted by window breaking at the back of the demonstration. The police moved into the crowd, using nightsticks, Mace, tear gas – and guns. A 16-year-old, Larry Payne, was shot dead. The police arrested 280 people, and reported about 60 injuries. The state legislature authorized a 7 p.m. curfew and 4,000 National Guardsmen moved in.

On Friday, March 29, some 300 sanitation workers and ministers marched peacefully and silently from Clayborn Temple to City Hall – escorted by five armored personnel carriers, five jeeps, three huge military trucks, and dozens of National Guardsmen with their bayonets fixed.

In the last days of March, King cancelled a planned trip to Africa and made preparations to lead a peaceful march in Memphis. Organizers working on preparations for the Poor People’s Campaign in other cities were directed to leave those cities and come to Memphis, for it was clear that the Poor People’s Campaign could not be won without winning the fight in Memphis.

On April 3, 1968, Dr. King returned to Memphis. That evening, he gave an extraordinary speech to hundreds of people at Mason Temple. The speech has gone down in history as the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. Anyone who reads it today will notice that it is an eloquent statement of support for the sanitation workers. (That night, King called them “thirteen hundred of God’s children here suffering.”) But it is also a farewell speech, the oration of a man who knew he might not have long to live, and who was searching his soul to make sense of his life, and his place in history.

In the speech, King emphatically rejected the calls not to march again because of an injunction:

“[S]omewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right!”

At the end of his remarks he referred indirectly to the underhanded attempts by racists, the FBI, and other forces to sabotage his leadership and destroy the movement, declaring:

“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like everybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

Murder at the Lorraine Motel

Less than 24 hours after uttering those words, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead while standing on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Urban rebellions broke out in more than 60 cities. In response to pressure from all over the country, the federal government sent Labor Department officials to Memphis to mediate a settlement to the strike.

On Tuesday, April 16, AFSCME leaders announced that an agreement had been reached.  The agreement included union recognition, better pay, and benefits. The strikers voted to accept the agreement.

It was a bittersweet end to a long battle. The strike ended in victory, but at a terrible cost, the death of one of the foremost symbols of the fight for justice in that (or any) era. AFSCME’s victory in Memphis inspired other workers in Memphis to join unions, and other employees throughout the South to join AFSCME. The Poor People’s Campaign which Dr. King had been
working on when he went to Memphis did take place later in the tumultuous year 1968. As King had hoped, it brought together poor people of all ethnicities to demonstrate in Washington, D.C. – African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and whites.

Given Dr. King’s role in the Memphis sanitation strike and the tremendous community support that the strikers received, perhaps

Carrying on Dr. King's Legacy

the month of April ought to be a time to remember that not all labor leaders have an official position with a union — and that labor comes in all colors, and includes both employed and unemployed people. If we hold on to those lessons, we will honor what was won with such great sacrifice in Memphis in April 1968.

# # #

John Nichols: Adrienne Rich’s Touch Was Political — in The Nation

Blogs » John Nichols » Adrienne Rich’s Touch Was Political

John Nichols

Adrienne Rich’s Touch Was Political

John Nichols on March 28, 2012 – 10:43 PM ET

Adrienne Rich addresses dinner guests after receiving the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 2006 National Book Awards sponsored by The National Book Foundation in New York, Nov. 15, 2006. (AP Photo/Stuart Ramson, file)

Adrienne Rich was an exquisitely politically poet—and a politically exquisite poet.

Radical in word and deed, Rich did not play games with politics or poetry. She treated each seriously, displaying a genius first recognized by W.H. Auden in the early days of the McCarthy Era that so horrified them both—and that new generations of readers would recognize across the decades during which she became as definitional as the elder poet who had selected the 22-year-old Rich for the 1951 “Yale Series of Younger Poets Award.”

Dead now, at age 82, Rich will speak on—well and wisely—through her poetry and through the myriad interviews she gave about writing and radicalism. Intensely committed to the causes of civil rights, socialism, feminism, lesbian and gay rights, anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, she wrote poems about being an observer, but she was an eternal participant. And that participation was transformational.

“We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed,” she would write, “yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.”

Committed to trade unionism, she served on the board of the National Writers Union, as arguably the most honored of its author members. Yet there were some honors she would note accept. In 1997, she famously refused a National Medal of Arts as a protest not merely against right-wing attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts but against the economic, social and political compromises of the Clinton administration. ”I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration,” Rich explained. “[Art] means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage”

A huge fan of “Democracy Now,” and a frequent contributor to The Nation and other journals of the left, she made political media more lyrical. But she also made literary journals more political. Asked in a very fine interview a year ago with Paris Review Daily about the “overtly political” character of her 2011, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve—with its anguished reflections on “Guantánamo, waterboarding, official U.S. denials of torture, the ‘renditioning’ of presumed terrorists to countries where they would inevitably be tortured”—Rich replied:

I’m not quite sure why you see Tonight No Poetry Will Serve as more overtly political than my other books. The split in our language between “political” and “personal” has, I think, been a trap. When I was younger I was undoubtedly caught in that trap—like many women, many poets—as a mode of conceiving experience.

In 1969 I wrote, “The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political” (“The Blue Ghazals,” in The Will to Change [1971]). Writing that line was a moment of discovering what I’d already begun doing. Much of my earlier poetry had been moving in that direction, though I couldn’t see it or say it so directly.

“The Blue Ghazals,” published as an homage to Mizra Ghalib—the 19th-century master of Urdu ghazals who penned a poetry that was free and beautiful in a time of oppressive and cruel British colonialism—spoke of the common ground between love and solidarity as well as any poetry of our time.

What Rich explained in “The Blue Ghazals” she practiced across more than sixty years as as poet who maintained an exceptional level of engagement with the good fights of her times.

Rich was passionate about that engagement. And her poetry challenged others to share the passion.

After the end of the Reagan presidency, she published “In Those Years,”  which always seemed to me to be a fitting extension of Auden’s “September 1, 1939.”

Rich’s poem read:

In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and, yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through rages of fog
where we stood, saying I

John Nichols’s new book on protests and politics is Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street, just out from Nation Books. Follow John Nichols on Twitter @NicholsUprising.

Copyright © 2012 The Nation

Racism and the War Against the Poor

[On December 17,  1951 William Patterson, National Executive Secretary of the Civil Rights Congress, delivered copies of an historic petition to the United Nations delegation in Paris. Meanwhile, renowned musician and activist  Paul Robeson presented the same petition, which documented the legacy of slavery in America, to a U.N. official in New York.  That document was entitled "We Charge Genocide."  Quoting the U.N. definition of what constitutes genocide (" Any intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, or religious group is genocide.") the Civil Rights Congress called on the U.N.  " for Relief From a Crime of The United States Government Against the Negro People."  They concluded that "the oppressed Negro citizens of the United States, segregated, discriminated against, and long the target of violence, suffer from genocide as the result of the consistent, conscious, unified policies of every branch of government. If the General Assembly acts as the conscience of mankind and therefore acts favorably on our petition, it will have served the cause of peace."

Ruben Stacy lynched in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, 1935

After the Civil War’s military phase was over, the Reconstruction period established the rule of Wall Street over the South,  followed by the rapid and thorough establishment of sharecropping and peonage in the South.  The lynch law became the leading terroristic weapon to keep these social relations in place.  Thousands of documented cases of lynchings took place from the end of Reconstruction to the end of the second World War. This source notes that in the century after the end of the fighting in the Civil War more than 2,400 African-Americans were lynched, a number that considerably underestimates the deaths.  And while the preponderance of people lynched were African-American, more than a thousand non-African-Americans (“white,” Mexican, Asian) were lynched in the same period.

Ida B. Wells,born in Alabama and teaching in Memphis in 1892, had been writing articles in a Memphis paper pointing out the rising tide of lynching and the other practices which

Ida B. Wells

characterized the oppression of Black people. In 1884 she was ordered to give up her train seat and move to another (crowded) car so that her seat could be taken by a white.  She refused, was forcibly removed, and she sued to recover damages (the Supreme Court had, in 1883, struck down an 1875 Civil Rights Law banning discrimination in public accommodations).  A lower court ruled in her favor, but the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled against her and ordered that she pay court costs.  She continued to write about inequities and, while away in Philadelphia, her newspaper was burned down.  She left Memphis, lecturing around the world about the condition of Blacks in America, arriving in Chicago at the time of the World’s Fair.  Here she and Frederick Douglass campaigned to boycott the World’s Fair (1893) because Chicago had failed to work with the Black community in putting together its representation of African-American life.  20,000 copies of a pamphlet they wrote were distributed.  Wells decided to stay in Chicago and continued her campaign for an anti-lynch law, a campaign which she brought to the President of US (without significant effect).

In 1924 the young Vietnamese expatriate Ho Chi Minh, studying in France,  visited the United States and wrote an article on lynching for the French press (he also made some reports to the international Communist movement on the “national and colonial question”).  This source identifies 2,600 victims of lynching in just the 20 years from 1899 to 1919, and connects lynching to an economic question as well as a racial one.

In the last year, the issue of mass discrimination has entered public consciousness through the publication of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.  Her arguments on how the proportion of Blacks incarcerated has mushroomed fits neatly into the UN definition of genocide.  Note her comments here on Democracy Now, which among other things shows that the election of a Black president has not mitigated the growing assault on “poor communities of color.”

The March/April issue of Rally Comrades has a different perspective on race and class.  While focusing on the history of the US, as indicated above, the article “New Form of Racism Emerging” locates a nodal point in the creation of a new class of poor, with Blacks at the center of this class.]

New Form of Racism Emerging

We are entering a vast social revolution. Every aspect of American life is being torn apart and something new is being created. America is not going to be recognizable in another 20 years.
Change in social motion is difficult to grasp because the content begins to change before the form. What revolutionaries must grasp is that a new form of racism is developing, directed against an emerging new class that includes the “ghetto blacks,” the “illegal immigrant” and the white, so-called “trailer trash.” In other words, the class and cultural differences with the ruling class, not color, is emerging as the ideological basis for the savage economic assault against the poor.

Everything changes as economy changes

An economy cannot stand alone. There must be a political structure that protects it, including laws, ideas and institutions.  The struggles that are taking place today are over how to guarantee that the economy can continue to develop. All kinds of ideas are created, reshaped or thrown out according to whether they politically facilitate the development of the economy.
The concept of race, like any other political concept, has always served the needs of the economy. It changes with every change in the economy, because the economy demands that change if it is to move forward.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, two or three Blacks were lynched each week in the South. Lynching was seldom applied to Blacks until after the Civil War. Up to that time, almost all those who were lynched were white. There were changes in the economy and the Blacks had to be driven back into some kind of semi-slavery in order to maintain the profitability of the southern economy, which was absolutely indispensable to the northern textile industry and the U.S. economy overall.

Racism in America has been directed against the Irish, the Native Americans, the Latin Americans, and the Asians among others. Most of all it has centered on the African Americans because it is a political question. Politics is the art of the class struggle. Nothing could be more artful than to use a myth to convince literally millions of people to do harm to themselves in the interests of the people they are struggling against. Yet this is precisely what has happened in our history. It happened because the American people became convinced that they were dealing with a biological rather than a political question. We emphasize this point because the great economic and political changes taking place are having a profound effect on the politics of race and color.

There was a time when a person’s race depended on where they were born, not the color of their skin. Race became a color question when the African slave trade enslaved all kinds of different nationalities whose common characteristic was their color. This linking of color and race for capitalist exploitation was further consolidated and spread through the worldwide expansion of imperialism.
We also must never forget that the brutality of racism was not always directed solely by color differences. The racist nationalism of the fascist Japanese government against the peoples of Asia, or the slaughter and enslavement of the Slavic peoples by fascist Germany are only recent examples. In history we see racism in a religious garb as well. The thing that is clear is that racism, no matter its veneer, facilitates exploitation and is an integral part of capitalism. Therefore, as the needs of capitalism change, the forms of racism will change to accommodate it.

Not an underclass but a new class

A new social group is forming. They have been driven outside the  capitalist economy, but as human beings they must eat — they must consume. This new class is growing daily through the process of technological innovation. Like anything else, today’s new class developed over a period of time.

Robotics entered industry at the lowest and simplest level. Its first victims were the unskilled and semiskilled workers. Part of the legacy of slavery was that after emancipation a huge section of the African American work force remained tied to the land. Tractored off the land after the development of the cotton-picking machine, they were the last section of the rural population to join the industrial work force. They were concentrated in that sector — the unskilled and semiskilled sector — that was first attacked by the robot.

The Black poor were hit first and hardest. The Black bourgeoisie fled their traditional sections of the city as soon as the ink was dry on the laws allowing them to do so. Holding stable jobs, a section of the African American workers also moved from the inner city into much more stable neighborhoods.

With the factories shutting down, the land around these factories quickly lost their value. Taxes fell, maintenance dwindled and the combination of the American form of apartheid, plus the liquidation of jobs, created a new type of slum: the black, permanently destitute, rotting inner core of the formerly central working-class area of the city.

The economists, their social vision distorted by racist ideology, were unable to understand the difference between the reserve army of unemployed created by industrial capitalism and the structural, permanent joblessness created by robotics. They only saw a growing mass of African Americans outside the labor market. They eagerly embraced the term “underclass.”
Those who coined the term “underclass” perhaps thought here again was a group unable to keep up, and once falling behind and supported by welfare, consciously accepted an existence outside the capitalist relations of worker and employer. They were presented as a subclass of Blacks, reliant on welfare, who had lost the work ethic. Worse, they were creating a subculture of immorality and criminality in the midst of a great national expansion of wealth and productivity.

A more concrete look showed something different. The new productive equipment has polarized wealth and poverty as never before. Absolute wealth in the form of 145 billionaires and absolute poverty in the form of some eight million homeless and absolutely destitute were new to our country. The increase in production was accompanied by an increase in unemployment and joblessness.
Since that phrase “underclass” was coined, the process of social destruction has continued. We can see now that this new group of permanently unemployed is not the result of the welfare system or of some “racial inferiority”, but of the new means of production and the destruction of jobs.

The effects of robotics on the white unskilled and semiskilled workers were not so easily seen scattered as they were, and still are, throughout the general white population, especially in the rural areas and in the suburbs. The African Americans were highly visible, being concentrated in a relatively small urban area. Also, the percentage of Black laborers among the African American population was higher than white laborers among the white population.

Racism against Blacks provided the form, but the content was the beginnings of a social revolution. The first expression of that revolution was the wrecking of the economy of working-class Black America. That revolution is now wreaking its havoc against the formerly secure sections of the blue-collar, white-collar and lower management levels of the white workers.
Today, almost nine in ten Black youth ages 16 to 19 are unemployed. There is a steady increase in Black teens murdered. Black families on average hold one-tenth the wealth of white families. HIV, a disease of poverty, disproportionately affects Blacks. There is a disproportionate number of Blacks in prisons.

This dangerous situation facing the African American poor is not happening in a vacuum. It is part of a process that is pulling millions of all colors and nationalities into poverty. Today, the economy is losing millions of jobs. Nearly 50.7 million Americans, or one in six, are without healthcare. An estimated 50 million people struggled to put food on the table last year. The demand at food banks is up. One in four children is hungry. Growing numbers of Americans are going without other necessities such as water and heat in their homes.

But it is not simply the growth of poverty that is significant today. And the results of the process are broader than the social problems caused by racism. It is acknowledged now that, in fact, the so-called white underclass is larger and growing faster than the Black. What we are dealing with is not an “underclass,” but a new class. Today, this new class has already formed a new economic section of the working class and it is in the process of creating a new social and political entity.

Class-cultural division

The concept of race based on color has to go out the window, just like the concept of race based on geographic locale had to go out the window.  It is not possible to have a Black president and sustain the idea of color-based racism.

But we do have racism. But it’s more and more being shifted into economic status. More and more if you are part of the America where your parents didn’t have a job, you don’t have a job, you went to a school where you can barely read and write – you might have the same skin color, but you are not the same as others who are not in that situation.
The cultural divisions within Black society have been developing for some time and are almost complete. There has been a selective “cultural integration” taking place. If an African American will think, talk, act and have the same motivations as the members of the ruling class, the doors are open to them. The scores of Black generals, admirals and CEOs of big corporations, the Black politicians and government bureaucrats all testify to this. Today, there are literally hundreds of Black millionaires. Below them is a growing layer of Black professionals who have practically no connection to the strivings and aspirations of the mass of African Americans.

The tendencies of cultural division within white society, although always underground, are now becoming visible. Increasingly, lower-class whites have more in common with the lower-class Black cultural forms than they do with the white upper-class. Today, this history is being grafted on to the new class and the cultural divisions that are arising from the vast polarization of wealth and poverty.

Race, racism and the new class

The ruling class uses the particular weapons of history against the different sections of the new class, but the ruling class is aiming its fire at anyone — regardless of color — who presents a threat to the existing order. They are attempting to stigmatize and isolate the new class as a class.

We can see the outlines of this attack in Charles Murray’s new book Coming Apart. He warns that the all-class white unity that once characterized America is “coming apart at the seams, not along seams of race or ethnicity, but of class.” The divergence of cultural behaviors and values between the classes he describes is so great, he writes, that they have so little in common that one can “barely recognize their underlying American kinship.”

Murray considers the “new lower-class” of “poor whites” he describes as depraved and ignorant as the poor Blacks he described in his infamous book The Bell Curve. For Murray, poor whites are lazy, prone to crime, addicted to government programs, irreligious, full of excuses, and morally bankrupt. They are inferior to, beneath, not anything like, the whites (and the wealthy of all colors) in the new upper class he lauds so highly.

This kind of racism against the white poor is nothing new, of course. Poor whites have always been considered naturally inferior, their poverty attributed to some deficiency in intellectual or physical capacity. Especially after the Civil War and all the way up to WWII the southern white was looked down upon by the northern white as being not really American. In the 1950s, a series of Chicago Tribune editorials, for example, viciously attacked Appalachian “migrants” for turning the streets of Chicago into “a lawless free-for-all with their primitive jungle tactics … [with] the lowest standard of living and moral code [if any] of all… No other group is so completely devoid of self-pride and responsibility… even worse than Negroes.”  The 1972 movie Deliverance made this point clearly to the American public – that these people were animals, that these were the kind of people that lived in Appalachia.

While Murray focuses on poor whites, he includes poverty stricken Latinos and Blacks in this new lower class. Regardless of color, the new class poses a threat to the very fabric of American society. “Individually, they are not much of a problem,” he writes. “Collectively, they can destroy the kind of civil society that America requires.”

Looking ahead

Two contradictory processes are developing simultaneously in America today. Under the pressure of economic privation there always will be a tendency for any oppressed or defenseless person to shift the blame to someone else, rather than attack the overwhelming power that is hurting him or her. We are going to see different sections of this new class fighting each other.
At the same time, the commonality of their economic situation is going to compel them to unite, if only at first on specific issues. As the foundation for color-racism is being destroyed there is a growing economic attack against the new class — on their education, their housing standards, their job benefits, an attack on the very infrastructure of their lives. There is no way for them to resist this kind of pressure unless they seek out and find a political expression for the objective reality of their changing lives.

We are dealing with a political question. The new class is already forming along the line of a unity based on what is practical and real and possible.  But ultimately, it cannot carry out its historic mission unless it becomes conscious of that mission, unless it understands itself as a class, unless it sees its common interests as a class. This is the revolutionaries’ role, to illuminate the meaning of the current struggles in order to develop the consciousness, the thinking, the sense of self the class must have to carry out its mission.  Strategy, direction, vision and the diverse ways in which the revolutionaries disseminate and share this message all turn on an accurate assessment of the race question as it is today in America..

March.2012.Vol22.Ed2
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
P.O. Box 477113 Chicago, IL 60647 rally@lrna.org
Free to reproduce unless otherwise marked.
Please include this message with any reproduction.

Can We Educate Ourselves Out of Recession? Alexander Cockburn and Jack Metzgar Don’t Think So. . .

[Education, Jobs and Wages, the article by Jack Metzgar referred to in the article below, can be found here , on the WCSA blog.]

from Counterpunch

Weekend Edition March 23-25, 2012

Only 25 Per Cent of All Americans Go to College and Only 16 Per Cent of These Actually Try to Learn Anything. Welcome a Nation of Helots.

The Myth of the “Knowledge Economy”

by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

“In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program around is a first-class education,”  President Obama famously declared in his 2010 State of the Union Address, just as millions of high schoolers across the nation were embarking on the annual ritual of picking their preferred colleges and preparing the grand tour of the prospects, with parents in tow, gazing ashen faced at the prospective fees.

The image is of the toiling students springing from lecture room to well-paying jobs demanding advanced skills in all the arts that can make America great again – outthinking, outknowing  the Chinese, Japanese, Indians, South Koreans and Germans in the cutting edge, cut-throat high tech economies of tomorrow.

Start with the raw material in this epic knowledge battle. As a dose of cold water over all this high-minded talk it’s worth looking at Josipa Roksa and Richard Arum’s recently published  “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.” The two profs  followed more than 2,300 undergraduates at 29 universities, selected to represent the range of America’s 2000-plus four-year college institutions. As resumed by Steven Kent in Daily Finance:

Among the authors’ findings: 32 per cent of the students whom they followed in an average semester did not take any courses that assigned more than 40 pages of reading per week. Half did not take any courses in which more than 20 pages of writing were assigned throughout the entire term. Furthermore, 35 per cent of the students sampled spent five hours or less a week studying alone.

Typical students spent about 16 per cent of their time on academic pursuits, and were “academically engaged,” write  the authors, less than 30 hours a week. After two years in college, 45 per cent of students showed no significant gains in learning; after four years, 36 per cent showed little change. And the students who did show improvement only logged very modest gains. Students spent 50 per cent  less time studying compared with students a few decades ago.

Students who majored in traditional liberal arts fields like philosophy, history and English showed ‘significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study.’” But of course these are the courses and instructors being ruthlessly pruned back.

One of the study’s authors , Richard Arum, says college governing boards, shoveling out colossal sums to their presidents,  athletic coaches and senior administrative staff, demand that the focus be  “student retention,” also known as trying very hard not to kick anyone out for not doing any measurable work. As Arun put it to Money College, ”Students are much more likely to drop out of school when they are not socially engaged, and colleges and universities increasingly view students as consumers and clients. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that all students want to be exposed to a rigorous academic program.”

Rick Santorum briefly struck out at ingrained snobbery about going to college: “President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob.” Amid howls from Republican governors, this was a piece of derision it didn’t take him long to retract. Actually, it turns out only about 30 per cent  of Americans over the age of 25 have bachelor’s degrees.  Jack Metzgar, emeritus professor of humanities at Roosevelt University in Chicago, had a very useful piece in Working Class Perspectives, the blog of the Center for Working Class Studies Site, with this and other useful facts and reflections.

The US government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that in 2010 only 20 per cent of jobs required a bachelor’s degree, whereas 26 per cent of jobs did not even require a high school diploma, and another 43 per cent required only a high school diploma or equivalent.

Please note that the latter 69 per cent were therefore free of the one debt  in America that’s even more certain than taxes – a students loan. At least, if you’re provably broke the IRS will countenance an “offer in compromise.” In fact they recently made the process  slightly easier. No such luck with student loans. The banks are in your pocket till the last dime of loan plus interest has been extorted.

Now for the next dose of cold water. The BLS reckons that by 2020 the overwhelming majority of jobs will still require only a high school diploma or less and that  nearly 3/4ths of “job openings due to growth and replacement needs” over the next 10 years will pay a median wage of less than $35,000 a year, with nearly 30 per cent paying a median of about $20,000 a year (in 2010 dollars

As Metzgar correctly remarks, “Put these two sets of numbers together, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Americans are over educated for the jobs that we have and are going to have.  It’s hard to imagine why anybody would call us ‘a knowledge economy.’” In other words millions of Americans are over-educated, servicing endless debt to the banks and boosting the bottom lines of Red Bull and the breweries.

The snobbery, as Metzgar  points out,  stems from the fact that America’s endless, mostly arid debates about education are conducted by the roughly one third who are college-educated and have okay jobs and a decent income.

The  ”knowledge economy” in the U.S., now needs more than 6 million people with master’s or doctoral degrees now, with another 1.3 million needed by 2020.  But this will still be less than  5 per cent of the overall economy.

Even if we expand the definition to include jobs requiring any education beyond high school, the ”knowledge economy” – now and a decade from now -will still represent less than one-third of all available jobs.

This is a lot of jobs, about 44 million now, and if you work and live in this one-third, especially in its upper reaches, more education can seem like the answer to everything.

Indeed, according to the BLS, having a bachelor’s degree should yield a person nearly $30,000 a year more in wages than a high school graduate. But most of the American economy is not like this.

The BLS’s three largest occupational categories by themselves accounted for more than one-third of the workforce in 2010 (49 million jobs), and they will make an outsized contribution to the new jobs projected for 2020.They are: Office and administrative support occupations (median wage of $30,710);- Sales and related occupations ($24,370); Food preparation and serving occupations($18,770). Other occupations projected to provide the largest number of new jobs in the next decade include child care workers ($19,300), personal care aides ($19,640), home health aides ($20,560), janitors and cleaners ($22,210), teacher assistants ($23,220), non-construction laborers ($23,460), security guards ($23,920), and construction laborers ($29,280).

As Metzgar writes, “As an individual, get a bachelor’s Degree or you are doomed to work hard for a wage that will not provide a decent standard of living for a family.  You may not get such a wage even with a bachelor’s degree, but without it your chances are slim and getting slimmer.” Here’s his kicker: But as a society, “the best anti-poverty program around” cannot possibly be “a first-class education” when more than 2/3rds of our jobs require nothing like that…we need to stop fostering illusions that good educations can ever substitute for the organized collective action - in politics, in the workplace, and in the streets – that will be required to reverse the increasingly miserable  future.”

So what is the best anti-poverty program? Higher wages for the jobs that are out there, currently yielding impossibly low annual incomes. The current American minimum wage ranges between $7.25 and $8.67 per hour. From time to time senior executives of Wal-Mart call  for a rise in the minimum wage since, in the words of one former CEO, Lee Scott, “our customers simply don’t have the money to buy basic necessities between pay checks.” The minimum wage in Ontario, Canada, is currently well over $10 per hour, while in France it now stands at nearly $13. Australia recently raised its minimum wage to over $16 per hour, and nonetheless has an unemployment rate of just 5 percent.

Any Republican candidate seriously pledging to raise the minimum wage to $12 would gallop into the White House, unless – a solid chance  – he wasn’t shot dead by the Commentariat, or maybe by a Delta team acting on Obama’s determination relayed to him by the bankers, that this constituted a terrorist assault on America. As Ron Unz, publisher of  The American Conservative – who favors a big hike in the minimum wage, recently wrote:

“The minimum wage represents one of those political issues whose vast appeal to ordinary voters is matched by little if any interest among establishment political elites. As an example, in 1996, following years of unsuccessful attempts to attract the support of California politicians, disgruntled union activists led by State Sen. Hilda Solis, now serving as President Obama’s secretary of labor, scraped together the funds to place a huge 35 percent minimum wage increase on the state ballot. Once Republican pollsters began testing the issue, they discovered voter support was so immensely broad and deep that the ballot initiative could not possibly be defeated, and they advised their business clients to avoid any attempt to do so, thus allowing the measure to pass in a landslide against almost no organized opposition. Afterward, the free-market naysayers who had predicted economic disaster were proven entirely wrong, and instead the state economy boomed.”

Occupy Wall Street and The American Revolution — by Chris Mahin

[The essay below was the basis of Part One of a two part presentation on the Constitution and its history for  Occupy Rogers Park.  Part One was presented February 19, 2012.  Part Two is on this blog as well, and is titled "When Corporations are People: A Grim Fairy Tale,"  and was presented February 26, 2012.]

Thursday, March 08, 2012

“Occupy Wall Street” and the American Revolution, posted in the New Worker (England)

Thomas Paine

by Chris Mahin

AS THE “Occupy Wall Street” movement continues, it may be helpful to look at history to see how those fighting for change have mobilised in earlier times. One such example is the American Revolution of the 1770s.The American Revolution of the 1700s shows the tremendous importance of introducing new ideas into the fight against the powerful.

In 1763 Britain took control of Canada after defeating France in the French and Indian War. The Parliament in London soon began taking steps that pushed the residents of Britain’s 13 American colonies toward rebellion.First the British government barred the colonists from settling west of the Appalachian Mountains (this was the Proclamation Line of 1763).

Then the Parliament passed laws requiring the colonists to pay for the French and Indian War (the Stamp Act, Tea Tax, and other measures were designed to raise money to defray the cost of that war).

These steps enraged many colonists. No longer in need of British military protection against the French in Canada, they were much less willing to tolerate interference by the British government in their affairs. The colonists refused to pay the Stamp Tax and Tea Tax because their colonial legislatures had not been consulted before those measures became law. They cited a principle which the English Parliament had forced the English king to agree to in 1628 – “No taxation without representation”. However, at first, most colonists did not favor independence. The colonists considered themselves loyal subjects of the British king, George III, who they believed was being misled by his ministers. The colonists simply wanted to change their relationship with Britain’s central government personified by the Parliament in London.

Between 1765 and the end of 1775 many protests erupted in America against different aspects of British rule. These protests included instances of bitter street fighting (the Boston Massacre of 1770) and wholesale destruction of property (the Boston Tea Party of 1773). They culminated in full-scale, bloody battles in which hundreds died (Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill).

But despite all the militancy and violence of those 10 years of protest, as long as the colonists believed only that the British government’s policy was wrong while accepting the “right” of a king to rule them, they could not break with Britain. They didn’t even try.

This was a classic case of a revolution not being able to move forward because the fighters in the revolution, while militant, were being held back by their old ideas. The situation would not change until something happened to shake up the thinking of the American people. Fortunately, something did.

On 10^th January 1776, Thomas Paine, an English radical who had lived in America for only 14 months, published a pamphlet called Common Sense.

In simple, readable language, Paine tore apart all the arguments in favor of American loyalty to the British Crown. He insisted that one honest man is worth more than all the kings who ever lived. He painted an inspiring picture of what the world would be like with an independent America to serve as an example to everyone fighting for freedom in every part of the world.

Common Sense challenged some of the basic assumptions that people in the 13 colonies had lived by for their entire lives.

Paine gave the colonists a cause – independence for America and opposition to kings and aristocrats everywhere. “The cause of America is the cause of all mankind,” he declared. Because Paine’s ideas were, for his time, qualitatively new, they sparked great debate. His small pamphlet was circulated widely. Some 120,000 copies of Common Sense were sold in its first three months and 500,000 copies were sold in the first year after its publication.

As Common Sense was distributed throughout the 13 colonies, public opinion began to change. One by one the state delegations to the Second Continental Congress began to support the idea of proclaiming the independence of the 13 colonies from Britain. Finally in July 1776 the Second Continental Congress voted for the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. This vote was a direct result of the publication and widespread distribution of Common Sense.

Perhaps those involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement can learn lessons from the American Revolution of the 1770s.

Like the revolutionaries of 1776, we live at a time when people have been hard hit by the status quo, but don’t fully understand what it is that has hit them. This means that we have to act like Thomas Paine; we have to change people’s thinking. We have to convince the American people to give up their old ideas and accept some new ideas so they can win the fight that they are waging against hunger and misery in this country.

The fundamental idea that we have to get across to people can be stated fairly simply: We do not have to live like this. Today, no human being in the world “has” to be hungry. Today, the human race possesses the productive forces (computers and robots) and the scientific knowledge to guarantee that everyone could live a healthy and cultured existence. The only thing preventing that from happening is the strangle-hold that 445 billionaires have over the world’s economy and politics. Today, it is possible to unite our efforts against the billionaires and millionaires, end their control over society, and create a new society.

Like the people who made sure that copies of Common Sense reached every corner of the 13 colonies, we have to transmit our message far and wide. We have to ensure that there is as wide a debate as possible about the role of the corporations.

If we do that, we can begin to change the thinking of the American people – and help change history.