Where Kansas Reps Stand on Bush's Escalation

Think Progress has compiled where almost all of the House and Senate stand on Bush's escalation.

THE CURRENT TALLY

(Last update: 11 AM, 1/19/07)

	Dems	Reps	Ind	Total
Oppose	213	31	1	245
Lenn Oppoose	24	19	0	43
Lean Support	0	24	0	24
Support	2	106	1	109
Refuse to Answer	4	32	0	36
Unknown	39	39	0	78
Total	282	251	2	535

Here's the Kansas delegation. Who'd have thunk that Sam Brownback has the most forthright position against the escalation. Will he follow it up by opposing attempts to filibuster an anti-escalation resolution? Will he join Chuck Hagel in supporting the anti-escalation resolution?

Rep. Jerry Moran (R, Ks-1) Lean Oppose

Moran says it doesn't make sense to send more troops if the Iraqi people aren't willing to set aside sectarian differences and commit to rebuilding their country.

Rep. Nancy Boyda (D, KS-2) Declined to answer

Democrat Nancy Boyda also declines to take a definitive position; she says she has –quote — “deep concerns'’ about the plan.

Rep. Dennis Moore (D, KS-3)Declined to answer

Democrat Dennis Moore isn’t taking a formal position on the plan, but he says any decision will be carefully scrutinized by the Democratic-controlled Congress.

Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R, KS-4)Support

“President Bush outlined a way forward in Iraq with Iraqi troops meeting the challenges and taking the lead. American forces will assist Iraqi troops as they stand up and take responsibility.”

Sen. Sam Brownback (R, KS) Oppose

“‘I do not believe that sending more troops to Iraq is the answer,’ Brownback said while traveling in Iraq. ‘Iraq requires a political rather than a military solution.’”

Sen. Pat Roberts (R, KS) Support

Roberts said his support for Bush’s plan is conditioned upon Iraqi forces stepping up efforts to end the sectarian violence and achieve stability. “At this point, I believe it is the only realistic choice given the regional instability and danger we face,” Roberts said. “But this support is not without limits if, as this mobilization takes effect, we do not see measurable progress.”

You can reach the Capitol switchboard toll-free at 800-614-2803. Just provide your zip code or ask for your members of Congress by name. It looks like Boyda and Moore need to hear from their constituents.

Brain Drain

According to a report on one of Thursday's NPR programs:

There are more Ethiopian doctors in Washington, D.C. than in the entire country of Ethiopia,a country of 70 million.

Kudos to Boyda and House Freshmen on Trade

I criticized newly elected Kansas Congresswoman Nancy Boyda for her poorly stated and, in my opinion, wrong position saying she would vote to fund Bush's escalation in Iraq, even though she apparently does not agree with it. Today, I want to applaud Boyda for joining with 38 other House freshmen in sending a letter to Ways and Mean chair Charles Rangel demanding an end to sell-out free-trade policies.

David Sirota has more

The letter restates what Public Citizen already has reported: that Democrats achieved their majority specifically because candidates ran against our current “free” trade policies, backed by both Republicans and the Wall Street/Rubin wing of the Democratic Party. There have been furious efforts by some Democrats to try to pretend that’s not the case, but this letter makes pretty clear what the reality is. Here’s a key excerpt:

“As you may know, in each of our campaigns the issue of trade and the impact of the Administration’s trade policy on working families, the environment, independent farmers and businesses in our districts were critically important. Vital to our electoral successes was our ability to take a vocal stand against the Administration’s misguided trade agenda, and offer our voters real, meaningful alternatives to the job-killing agreements, such as CAFTA, that the majority of our opponents supported.”

As you can see, this letter was signed by even the freshman that the media has tried to tout as “conservative” faux “centrists” - but what we see is that this new class of lawmakers is really a group of economic populists. See the full letter here - and get ready for the upcoming fights as the White House presses for more “free” trade pacts and ultimately reauthorization of “fast track” authority which guarantees a continuation of a trade policy that includes no labor/wage/environmental/human rights standards.

Guatemala: Brutal Murder of Docker's Union Leader

Brussels, 17 January 2007 (ITUC OnLine): The ITUC has condemned the brutal killing on 15 January of Dockworkers' Union leader Pedro Zamora in an attack by a number of armed assassins. Zamora, General Secretary of the STPEQ Union, had been leading efforts to stop the privatization of the country's major port of Quetzal and he and fellow unionists had been subjected to a campaign of harassment and intimidation. The union is proposing a programme of upgrading and modernisation as an alternative to placing the port facilities in private hands.

After picking up his children from a hospital appointment, Zamora's car was followed and then rammed by a white pick-up truck, and then sprayed by gunfire from both sides of the vehicle. Of the more than 100 bullets which hit the car, around 20 hit Zamora. One of the killers then walked up to his vehicle and shot him in the face, a method reminiscent of that used by paramilitary forces during the country's civil war. Despite Zamora's efforts to protect his children during the attack, his 3-year-old son was injured but his condition is believed to be stable.

The ITUC and the International Transport Workers Federation are taking this latest case of anti-union repression in Guatemala to the International Labour Organisation, and calling on the Guatemalan government to ensure that a full investigation take place, to identify the culprits and bring them to justice. Suspicions that the management of the Port was involved should constitute one focus of the investigation.

"This gruesome killing recalls the darkest days of Guatemala's decades of civil conflict, and the country's reputation will continue to suffer unless action is taken to root out and punish those who commission and perpetrate intimidation and murder", said ITUC General Secretary Guy Ryder, adding "this murder was planned and premeditated, and appears designed to send a message to those who dare to stand up for fundamental rights".

The ITUC and ITF will be coordinating worldwide action to put pressure on the Guatemalan authorities to guarantee full respect for the rule of law and fundamental workers' rights, to ensure that all those involved in the killing are punished and that the continuing culture of impunity is brought to an end.

Marc Cooper : the unholy trinity

It would be hard to say it better than Marc Cooper

reading today's news reports of the menage-a-trois taking place among Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad....

I would think that any liberal, any progressive, and certainly any radical would have to be sickened to watch Hugo Chavez embrace and celebrate a right-wing fundamentalist, a holocaust-denying obscurantist like Ahmadinejad. Does Venezuela have the right to build an economic alliance with Iran? Certainly. But Chavez calling the President of Iran a "brother" and a "revolutionary" ought to turn one's stomach.

There are, indeed, few regimes on earth more hostile to leftists, socialists, gays, atheists, liberals, and, um, women and, let's say, Jews, than that of Iran. We rightfully worry over violation of civil liberties by what goes on Guanatanamo. But that prison camp looks like Club Med compared to the Iranian judicial system that hangs gays and imprisons young people for holding hands in public.

Ahmadinejad was also friskly patted on the tummy by the rather pathetic Daniel Ortega, who just re-assumed the presidency of Nicaragua (after being voted out in 1990). Is calling Ortega "pathetic" a smear? That's a thought-crime I have been accused of at times from out in the left-field bleachers. Hardly. in Ortega's case, it's going light on him. He will be remembered, eventually, as the grave-digger of the Sandinista movement which he helped lead to power in 1979. Every single Nicaraguan intellectual who joined up with the Sandis back then has since quit. They have been appalled by Ortega's steam-rolling of all internal debate, by the Sandinistas' rampant corruption and grotesque self-enrichment. And by Ortega's, well, pathetic political opportunism which has given him a reptation roughly equivalent to a local boss of the Mexican PRI.

I read that Ortega took the Iranian president on a tour yesterday of the slums and shantytowns around Managua. Perhaps they had time during that ride to explore just how much they might, in fact, have in common in spite of apparent and rather superficial ideological disagreements. Reaching a new cyncial depth, Ortega and his wife (both long-time Marxists) campaigned this time around as no less than Bible-thumping Christians defending family values (this in spite of Ortega hiding behind parliamentary immunity to avoid prosecution on charges of incest from his step-daughter). On the eve of the recent presidential election, Ortega led his parliamentary delegation to vote for a seal-proof ban on abortion -- with no exception for rape, here we go again, incest. That's certainly a measure that Brother Ahmadinejad greets with approval. Some might say that chiding Ortega plays into the hands of the "enemy." But it was Ortega, not me, who ran with a vice-presidential candidate who was a former, and unrepentant, leader of the CIA-backed contras.

In today's news accounts, I see that the miserable folks who live in the Managua slums (among the worst in the hemisphere -- I also toured them with Ortega) were given (by Ortega's ruling party) thousands of portraits of Ahmadinejad to be waved as he rolled through with Ortega. Can you imagine that inidgnity?

I won't go on. I only wonder how hard it must be today to be an 18 or 19 year old college kid who, jolted into consciousness by the war in Iraq, or by the images from Abu Ghraib, to find those sort of psychic links that my generation did. Can you be inspired by the anti-semetic front man for the Mullahs? By the blustering Venezuelan demagogue who now seeks to rule by decree? By the aged Nicaraguan comandante running on the backs of unwed Managua teenagers?

Sometimes, like these times, it's really good to be old.

[For the younger readers, the title of Cooper's blog post "Sunday Morning Sidewalk" is a reference to the Kris Kristofferson song "Sunday Morning Coming Down." which was a big hit for Johnny Cash.]

Top Ten Under-reported Humanitarian Stories

The staggering human toll taken by tuberculosis and malnutrition as well as the devastation caused by wars in Somalia, Central African Republic (CAR), Sri Lanka, and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), are among the Top Ten Most Underreported Humanitarian Stories of 2006, according to the year-end list released by the international humanitarian medical aid organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

Analyzing the Bush speech

Several valuable analysis I've seen:

• Anthony Cordesman senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington in the New York Times. This is an interactive analysis. Scroll through Bush's speech, click on the highlighted sections, and read Cordesman's comments.
• Martin Thomas of the UK's left-wing Alliance for Worker's Liberty "Bush Blunders Towards More Bloodshed in Iraq"
  

George W Bush's "new policy" in Iraq is a recipe for more bloodshed on the lines of the assault on Fallujah in November 2004 - but also, so it seems more and more, a botched compromise which makes no sense from any angle at all.

Bush's basic line - a "surge" of 20,000 more US troops into Iraq, raising the numbers there to the highest level since 2003 - comes from right-wing wonks Jack Keane and Fred Kagan, the sort of people who believe that the USA could have won the Vietnam war with "one more push".

But Keane and Kagan have written: "Bringing security to Baghdad - the essential precondition for political compromise, national reconciliation and economic development - is possible only with a surge of at least 30,000 combat troops lasting 18 months or so. Any other option is likely to fail..." - in fact, in their view, to make things worse. (Washington Post, 27 December 2006).

What Keane and Kagan see as needing at least 30,000 more combat troops - a nearly 50% increase on the 70,000 combat troops (140,000 total) currently in Iraq - is much more limited than Bush's stated objectives with his smaller "surge".

...using US withdrawal as a threat to make Maliki shape up is stupid, and not only because Bush obviously has no intention of carrying out the threat. The collapse of the Maliki government would trouble the government ministers much less than it would trouble the USA. The government ministers would mostly flee back to London, or some other city of exile, or retreat to an area of Iraq securely under their (Shia or Kurdish) control. The USA would be left with one of the world's most pivotal regions, the oil-rich Gulf, convulsed in all-out war and chaos.

And the workers and the peoples of Iraq? They lose out either way. Their only hope is the emergence of a secular and democratic pole within Iraqi politics, led by the labour movement, which can fight both the US/UK and the sectarian militias. Our duty is solidarity with the much-harassed Iraqi labour movement trying to do that.

• Paul Starr, "The Power Party vs. the Peace Party"

Far from making the United States stronger, Bush’s policies have dissipated American power. In his speech, the president suggested that if the United States failed in Iraq, Iran would be emboldened. But Iran has obviously already been emboldened because its leaders believe that an America mired in Iraq can make only empty threats.

To use power ineffectually is to destroy it.

• Paul Rogers (Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University and is openDemocracy’s International Security Editor)
  

the continuing presence of 140,000 US troops (and now, after Bush's speech of 10 January, quite probably 20,000-30,000 more) for years to come is an unbelievable "gift" to the al-Qaida movement, presenting the far enemy to them on what is, to a large extent, home territory (see Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, "The dividends of asymmetry: al-Qaida's evolving strategy", 18 December 2006).

Iraq is already providing a first-rate jihadi combat training-zone and, from an al-Qaida perspective, this is without any risk of changing. They (and many western analysts) simply do not believe that the United States can win in Iraq. Therefore, the longer it loses the better. In light of the fact that al-Qaida deals in decades, it has the prospect of decades of training for jihadi cohorts.

• John Robb of the Glogal Guerillas blog
  

The latest US "strategy" for Iraq, a small increase in manpower focused on controlling sections of Baghdad, has generated substantial debate/commentary in the US. The reason for this has vastly more to do with domestic political issues than anything substantive in the military sphere. To wit, almost nothing in the current plan -- from troops to tactics -- has changed in any meaningful way. Further, the general situation of country-wide chaos will not change due to any efforts to pacify select Baghdad neighborhoods ...

Of course, the failure of these periodic efforts may be due to an inability to revisit a key assumption upon which the present US effort is based: that strong states tend to form naturally if provided the right minimalist conditions. I believe the opposite is true: that states, once broken, tend to remain hollow and in perpetual failure. The reason is that in the current environment minimalist conditions yield social disintegration.

The Power and Interest News Report

With U.S. President George W. Bush's new Iraq strategy unveiled, it is clear that the administration is running out of options. The "surge" policy that will now be implemented is an attempt to somewhat stabilize the situation in Baghdad. This is the most that the new policy can hope for -- temporary stabilization -- because a surge in troops does little to address the issues that are fomenting the insurgency. Once the surplus soldiers are called back, or once the insurgents adapt to the increased numbers, attacks will escalate again and Washington will be in the same position that it is in now.

Neat labor history site

Here's a really attractive site on labor history in Chicago: The Labor Trail which flash and one of the new web mapping services.

Edwards Courts Unions Heading into ‘08

By Marie Horrigan New York Times Published: January 4, 2007

Coming out of a 2004 campaign year in which he staged an upstart bid for the Democratic presidential nomination and ended up on the ticket as the party’s vice presidential running mate, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards could have bided his time before committing to another White House try in 2008.

But Edwards, who is independently wealthy from his past career as a successful trial lawyer, hardly left the national campaign trail. In the interim — and leading up to his official candidacy announcement in New Orleans Dec. 28 — Edwards has continued to tour the nation honing his message on a theme he calls the great issue of our time: combating poverty.

Edwards’ official occupation as he entered the presidential derby was head of a recently established center on poverty issues at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, where he attended law school. He hopes that the issue will earn him significant support within the party’s traditional base of liberal activists, and more general support among voters in a nation where, statistics show, the gap between the wealthiest and least affluent Americans is growing.

His efforts may be bearing fruit, as his anti-poverty theme is drawing attention from segments of an important Democratic political constituency: organized labor.

Edwards threw his weight behind efforts to increase minimum wage levels in Ohio, Arizona and Michigan. In April, he marched a picket line with Teamsters Union President James Hoffa and service workers at the University of Miami.

Last year, Edwards spoke at the national conventions for three major unions: the AFL-CIO, the Change to Win Coalition and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. It was at the latter that Edwards proclaimed the labor movement “the greatest anti-poverty program in the United States.”

“I believe in a Democratic Party of big ideas . . . a Democratic Party that’s not afraid of saying the word ‘union,’” he told more than 7,000 attendees at the Teamsters’ June convention in Las Vegas, according to release from the union.

The UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity “helped spark a nationwide renewal of interest” in poverty and class issues, Edwards said in his resignation letter dated Dec. 28, the same day he announced his candidacy. A book co-written by Edwards, titled “Ending Poverty in America,” is scheduled to come out in April, about the time that the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination will be picking up steam.

His singular approach to the issue appears to be giving Edwards entree to possible union endorsements, from which he was excluded in 2004. Although Edwards also emphasizing the need to reduce poverty that year, he was viewed by many labor leaders as too inexperienced after just a single term in the Senate; some also looked askance at his profile as the “Southern alternative” to Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry — who won the nomination and picked Edwards as his running mate — and Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, now chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Edwards’ blue-collar roots are well established. His background as the son of a millworker and first member of his family to go to college won him credentials among rank-and-file union members, his campaign argued.

While most candidates courting unions focus on specific sectoral concerns, Edwards has taken a new approach, making economic populism and the value of unions part of his general message to all audiences, Kusnet said.

And another difference, Kusnet said, was Edwards’ experience on the picket line. “Other than Jesse Jackson [the longtime African-American activist], I don’t think there anybody who’s run for president who’s made themselves that visible in day-to-day union work,” he said.

But one change is likely to help Edwards, according to Kusnet — the insertion of Nevada into the early round of Democratic presidential nominating events. Edwards has made his strongest ties among SEIU and UNITE HERE, two unions with strong organizations in Nevada, a state where the hospitality and service industries are driving economic forces.

“They’re not just strong in the sense of being long-established, stable institutions, they’re dynamic organizing unions there. And that tends to be the kind of situation where people are more likely to vote as union members,” Kusnet said.

Official sanction from union leaders, however, will not be the most important issue to the campaign, Palmieri said. “Whether we get endorsements or not, we think that union household voters will be a big part of Edwards’ supporters,” she said.

11 Rules for Radicals

After mentioning Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals recently , I came across a short summary on the internet . While the whole book is worth reading here's the essence.

In 1971, Saul Alinsky wrote an entertaining classic on grassroots organizing titled Rules for Radicals. Those who prefer cooperative tactics describe the book as out-of-date. Nevertheless, it provides some of the best advice on confrontational tactics. Alinsky begins this way:

What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.

His “rules” derive from many successful campaigns where he helped poor people fighting power and privilege

For Alinsky, organizing is the process of highlighting what is wrong and convincing people they can actually do something about it. The two are linked. If people feel they don’t have the power to change a bad situation, they stop thinking about it.

According to Alinsky, the organizer — especially a paid organizer from outside — must first overcome suspicion and establish credibility. Next the organizer must begin the task of agitating: rubbing resentments, fanning hostilities, and searching out controversy. This is necessary to get people to participate. An organizer has to attack apathy and disturb the prevailing patterns of complacent community life where people have simply come to accept a bad situation. Alinsky would say, “The first step in community organization is community disorganization.”

Through a process combining hope and resentment, the organizer tries to create a “mass army” that brings in as many recruits as possible from local organizations, churches, services groups, labor unions, corner gangs, and individuals.

Alinsky provides a collection of rules to guide the process. But he emphasizes these rules must be translated into real-life tactics that are fluid and responsive to the situation at hand.

Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have. If your organization is small, hide your numbers in the dark and raise a din that will make everyone think you have many more people than you do.

Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people.
The result is confusion, fear, and retreat.

Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of an opponent. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.

Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy. “If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”

Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag. Commitment may become ritualistic as people turn to other issues.

Rule 8: Keep the pressure on. Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period for your purpose. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.”

Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself. When Alinsky leaked word that large numbers of poor people were going to tie up the washrooms of O’Hare Airport, Chicago city authorities quickly agreed to act on a longstanding commitment to a ghetto organization. They imagined the mayhem as thousands of passengers poured off airplanes to discover every washroom occupied. Then they imagined the international embarrassment and the damage to the city’s reputation.

Rule 10: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, “Okay, what would you do?”

Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.

According to Alinsky, the main job of the organizer is to bait an opponent into reacting. “The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.”

Boyda dissapointing stand on escalation

Last Friday, The Think Progress blog took a look at some disappointing comments by newly-elected Kansas Rep Nancy Boyda.

FACT CHECK: Congress Does Not Have To Fund Escalation In Iraq

Last night on ABC News, newly elected Rep. Nancy Boyda (D-KS) said she would support funding for 20,000-40,000 more troops in Iraq because President Bush “is the commander in chief. …We don’t get that choice. Congress doesn’t make that decision.” Watch it: [on the Think Progress site by clicking here.]

Boyda is wrong on the facts. A recent Center for American Progress memo explains how Congress could — and should — prevent Bush from sending more troops into a civil war in Iraq without a clear mission. An excerpt:

Although the new Congress should not refuse to provide the funds that the troops already in Iraq and Afghanistan need, it can place an amendment on the supplemental funding bill that states that if the administration wants to increase the number of troops in Iraq above 150,000, it must provide a plan for their purpose and require an up or down vote on exceeding that number.

Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-PA), an Iraq war veteran, came out strongly in opposition to escalation, saying, “We need to listen to the military experts, people like Gen. Colin Powell, Gen. Abizaid, that say, ‘Listen, the surge isn’t going to work.’” Another newly elected member, Rep. Health Shuler (D-NC) was more circumspect. Shuler said he didn’t think escalation was “the solution” but would consider it if “that’s what our military leaders said.”

Here are the phone and fax numbers for Rep. Boyda

Congressperson Boyda's telephone numbers:

Washington, DC office: Phone:(202) 225-6601 Fax:(202) 225-7986

Topeka office Phone:(785) 234-8111 Fax:(785) 234-9111

Hopefully, she'll get an earful on February 3 at the Second Congressional District Democratic Party convention in Topeka where she'll be the special guest.

James Brown

Uncle Dave Lewis has a very informative analysis of James Brown on the allmusic.com website which includes some sound clips of those who influenced Brown and those who influenced him.

Sunflower, agitation, radicals, and Saul Alinsky

Randy Schofield of the Wichita Eagle's editorial board wrote an column in Friday's paper praising and criticizing Sunflower Community Action.

It took 15 years, but the city of Wichita finally emptied the trash at 10th and Volutsia. About time. It was beginning to smell all across the city.

The home had become an outrageous monument to neighborhood blight, with piles of junk in the yard and an owner unwilling to clean it up.

Neighbors complained for years, to no avail.

This week, city workers finally hauled off the trash.

The neighbors are thrilled.

And a large share of the credit goes to Sunflower Community Action, a nonprofit group that is everywhere these days, agitating on issues such as racial profiling, blight and payday loans.

The group is getting attention and getting things done. But not everyone is thrilled with its tactics.

And I wonder myself: Does it go too far?

Schofield agonizes over whether Sunflower's sometimes confrontational tactics might turn people off. He writes

I still think such in-your-face protests are ill-advised, because they turn off many citizens inclined to support the group's efforts. They could also make decision makers less willing to talk and partner in a constructive way.

But in the end, he concludes

I'm certain of one thing: The piles of trash would still be festering in the yard at 10th and Volutsia without the months of aggressive activism by the Sunflower group. It's helping low-income neighborhoods that lack political clout find their voice.

Whatever you think about its tactics, give this to Sunflower: It's committed to getting things done.

The same thing can't always be said of our public officials.

I'm glad Sunflower is here, making some noise and shaking things up.

There was one curious moment in Schofield's column. He cites Sunflower organizer J.J. Selmon as saying that the group are not "dangerous radicals." Unfortunately, the term radical has been degraded in American parlance to mean simply extremist of the right or left. Historically, the term has a far wider meaning laid out in a wikipedia article

The term Radical (latin radix meaning root) was used from the late 18th century for proponents of the Radical Movement and has since been used as a label in political science for those favouring or trying to produce thoroughgoing political reforms which can include changes to the social order to a greater or lesser extent.

Selmon's main point was that Sunflower tactics are carefully chosen and implemented with discipline and care and tactical.

That's an approach very similar to Saul Alinsky, one of America's great community organizers whose most famous books are Rules for Radicals (1971) and Reveille for Radicals.(1946). in RfR Alinsky described radicals in this manner

America's radicals are to be found wherever and whenever America moves close to the fulfillment of its democratic dream. Whenever America's hearts are breaking, there American radicals were and are. America was begun by its radicals. America was built by its radicals. The hope and future of America lies with its radicals.

What is the American radical? The radical is that unique person to whom the common good is the greatest personal value. He is that person who genuinely and completely believes in mankind. The radical is so completely identified with mankind that he personally shares the pain, the injustices, and the sufferings of all his fellow men.

David Sirotta argues for the contemporary relevance of Alinksy in a recent book review.

Books on Iraq

EPIC, the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, which I have found to be one of the most reliable sources of information on Iraq has come out with a list of the ten best books on Iraq in 2006, honorable mentions, classics, and a longer list of recommended books. It's a very well done page. For each of the recommended books there is a separate more information page which has excerpts from reviews, links to articles by the authors, and so forth.

Take a look, and consider a New Year's Resolution to read at least one book on Iraq in 2007. And consider ordering it through the EPIC site as a portion of your order will benefit their work.

Top 10 Books of 2006

(1) Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward -- A New Approach by The Iraq Study Group, James A. Baker III, and Lee H. Hamilton
(2) The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq by Rory Stewart
(3) Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Group, 2006, 482 pgs, ISBN: 159420103X).
(4) Baghdad Burning II: More Girl Blog from Iraq by Riverbend (The Feminist Press, 2006, 190 pgs, ISBN: 1558615296) and Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq (The Feminist Press, 2005, 304 pgs, ISBN: 1558614893).
(5) Reaching for Power: The Shi'a in the Modern Arab World by Yitzhak Nakash
(6) The Kurds: Nationalism and Politics edited by Faleh A. Jabar and Hosham Dawod
(7) The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq by Patrick Cockburn
(8) No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah by Bing West
(9) Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq by Michael Goldfarb
(10) Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green

Christian Caryl discusses four recent books about Iraq in a an article ("What About the Iraqis?") in the latest New York Review of Books. It's well worth reading, sort of a Cliff Notes if you don't have the time to read the 3,988 pages in EPIC's list. Here are two crucial paragraphs.

It is an aspect of the problem often overlooked in reporting of the war, but Iraq today is a country in the grip of revolutionary change. The American occupation swept away the institutions of Saddam's regime without providing for new ones to replace them. It encouraged a remarkable flowering of pluralism in expression (including satellite television, avidly competing newspapers, and cell phones), allowing Iraqis to discuss the problems of their own society with a freedom that is still rare in the Arab world, while failing to provide many basic services or respond to widespread unemployment. It organized democratic elections and stimulated the growth of local self-government without ever dealing with the conditions that prevented these new participatory institutions from effectively exercising power—and watched helplessly as they were bypassed by other forms of community self-assertion... [e.g., activist clerics] Most catastrophically of all, the occupation government never managed to offer Iraqis a basic level of security —a situation that led to the expansion of already existing militias and encouraged the growth of new ones.

Many American commentators mistakenly assume that the democratic freedoms brought by the Americans have simply allowed the inherent weaknesses of Iraqi society to come out into the open. Certainly Iraqi society has always been deeply divided against itself; but under the occupation it has been turned upside down. The middle class, under attack from criminals and murderous ideologues, is abandoning the country. According to the Iraq Index of the Brookings Institution, the authorities have issued two million passports since August 2005. An estimated 40 percent of Iraq's professional classes have left the country. New elites are rising in their place, sometimes through the use of violence; needless to say, this is not the sort of civil society that the Americans were hoping to promote. There is evidence, for example, that some of the Shiite parties have embarked on systematic assassination campaigns against leading Baathist officials, including secret policemen and air force officers who flew missions against Iran during the Iran–Iraq war in the 1980s.

Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century: The Resurgence

Monday, January 8 at 9 p.m. on KPTS Channel 8 and overnight repeat at 4 a.m. (That's for Wichita, check your local listing elsewhere).

Sixty years after the Holocaust, many parts of the world are experiencing a
dramatic surge of anti-Semitism from hate propaganda to vandalism to attacks
on Jews themselves. In Europe, violent acts against Jews and Jewish
institutions have more than doubled since the 1990s. Hosted and narrated by
Judy Woodruff, this documentary explores the roots of anti-Semitism and
examines how and why it continues to flourish today.

Ten Step Program for Democrats

Some good ideas from Jonathon Tasini. Here's the intro which contains the critical idea.

The lesson from the 2006 election is that people want dramatic change, not poll-tested, cautious half-measures. So, be bold.

The threat to a progressive agenda is not the lack of hugs and soaring rhetoric. Rather, the challenge is pretty clear: Will Democrats be willing to break from the false worship of the twins gods of the so-called “free market” and so-called “free trade”? This worship has made Democrats quiver, tremble and crumble in the face of policies that have been devastating to our country and the world for the past several decades, and made them incapable of advancing ideas and proposals that people so desperately

"Free market” and “free trade” are both marketing phrases. There is no such thing as a “free market” because every corporation in America profits thanks to subsidized public goods like education, roads, the electric power grid, and (albeit, too permissive) regulatory management of the stock market, which imposes stability and deters dishonest behavior. So-called “free trade” is a mirage—nothing is free about a global trading regime that has iron-clad protection for capital investment and corporate intellectual property, and thrives on controlling and suppressing wages of workers, particularly in China.

Will Democrats stand up and clearly say that the real choice is not over politically empty slogans or accusations of ‘protectionism’ but over what rules we want to govern how the economy operates for the benefit of our families and communities? Do we want rules that support people and their communities or rules that help powerful, global corporations? Once Democrats do so, the political road is easy because such a plea has broad support across the country, no matter how people define themselves ideologically. It comes down to this: Are you for everyone having health care, a fair wage, solid retirement, and being able to live in a democratic system that allows the people to decide how corporations behave?

How Free Trade Hurts

Senators Bryan Dorgan and Sherrod Brown in the Washington Post

Over the past 100 years, Americans have built a thriving middle class. It's the envy of the world, and it didn't come easily. At the turn of the 20th century, America was split dramatically between the haves and have-nots. It was a harsh work world for many: nasty, brutish and, too often, short. Worker activism, new laws and court decisions changed all that during the past century. The American Dream seemed within reach of everyone who worked hard and played by the rules. That is what's at stake when we talk about trade policy: America's middle class and the American Dream. Fair trade is not the enemy of more trade. It's how we expand international trade without reversin

g U.S. economic progress.

Opinion Round-up

A few of the more interesting opinion pieces, I've seen recently.

A few of the more interesting opinion pieces I've seen recently

	Barbara Eihrenriech on "Wretched and Excess" Santa Claus is coming . . . to Wall Street. Goldman Sachs’ employees are getting bonuses that average over $600,000 a head and run up to $100 million for some of the top guys, though it’s a safe bet the cleaning crew won’t be seeing any of this largesse. Holiday parties are another measure of the frenzy in the financial and tech industries, reaching levels of excess not seen since the dot-com era: Hand-rolled cigars, $500 a shot champagne and caviar servings, “signature cocktails” like pomegranate martinis, custom disco lighting, and bevies of near-naked elves.
	Robert Reich. "An Introduction to Populist Economics" The incomes of the bottom 90 percent of Americans have increased about 2 percent in real terms since then, while that of the top 1 percent has increased over fifty percent. Yet the philosophical debate is coming up all the time these days, and it helps explain the new economic populism. Consider, for example, the Bush cuts. They’ve mainly benefitted the top fifth of taxpayers. Supply-siders argue the cuts have generated enough extra revenues to pay for themselves so they haven’t enlarged the budget deficit. That’s debatable but let’s make the heroic assumption the supply-siders are correct and no one has been made worse off. Yet even so, most Americans have not benefitted – nothing has trickled down. Real median wages have barely budged since they were enacted. So the underlying question is whether they’re justified by the fact that rich Americans have gained from them while no one has lost ground. The answer is no. They’ve widened inequality.
	Thomas Palley, "The Economics and Politics of Trade Deficits" The real contribution of the U.S. to the trade deficit, which is international economic policy. Over the last twenty-five years successive Republican and Democratic administrations have assiduously created a global economy in which goods, capital, finance, and corporations are free to move. This new system has boosted profits by allowing companies to establish export-production platforms in low wage countries and batter America’s unions into submission. Big box retailers, such as Wal-Mart, have also supported the new arrangements since they benefit from global sourcing. The purpose of the new system has always been access to cheap low wage production. It has never been expanded balanced trade.
	Harold Meyerson "The Populist Persuasion" The new-model Democrats who emerged from the 2006 elections may differ on cultural questions, how to get out of Iraq, and hiking taxes on the rich. Some of their differences -- such as those over warrantless wiretapping -- may lead to real internal conflict. Most won't -- either because the differences aren't that great, or the issues are ones that the party leadership needn't bring to a vote. What unites the party is a populist perspective that follows as the night the day the current era of Republican-sponsored plutocracy. Can the Democrats suppress their cultural differences and stress their economic commonalities, as they did in the days of their New Deal majorities? Can they win back the working-class whites who've been lost to them since the days of Robert Kennedy? Those are long-term challenges, but this year's elections certainly put the Democrats on that road.

Food insecurity in Latino community

Increasing access to healthier food and to federal nutrition assistance programs could help stem growing food insecurity in the Latino community, where nearly one in five people (19.6%) have limited or no access to nutritious food each year, according to a new report released on December 20 by the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the U.S. The report is Sin Provecho: Latinos and Food Insecurity, and the executive summary can be downloaded from here.

“Lack of access to resources is forcing far too many Latino families into choices no one should have to make, such as between having a roof over their heads or putting food on the table. A lack of affordable, nutritious food also has devastating health consequences, such as increasing hunger and obesity, affecting not only the Latino community but the well-being of our entire nation,” stated Janet Murguía, NCLR President and CEO.

Among the report’s findings:

• Healthy foods may be out of reach for many low-income and Latino communities. One study found that predominantly Hispanic communities had 38% less fresh fruit and vegetable retailers than areas with smaller Hispanic populations.
• Many eligible Latinos are not participating in food assistance programs. Data suggest that more than three million eligible Hispanics are not participating in the Food Stamp Program. Lack of culturally- and linguistically-appropriate information and confusion about eligibility rules are common reasons why Latinos are not participating at higher levels.
• Many Latino legal immigrants and U.S. citizens are restricted or deterred from accessing food stamps. Numerous legal immigrants are barred from participating in the Food Stamp Program. Furthermore, due to fear and confusion about program restrictions, U.S. citizen children with immigrant parents are far less likely than U.S. citizen children with a citizen parent to participate in the Food Stamp Program.

Saddam Execution

David Hirst has a good obit of Saddam Hussein in The Guardian

The Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who was executed this morning at the age of 69, may not yield many general biographies - he was personally too uninteresting for that - but he will be a case study for political scientists for years to come. For he was the model of a certain type of developing world despot, who was, for over three decades, as successful in his main ambition, which was taking and keeping total power, as he was destructive in exercising it.

Yet at the same time, he was commonplace and derivative. Stalin was his exemplar. The likeness came from more than conscious emulation: he already resembled him in origin, temperament and method. Like him, he was unique less in kind than in degree, in the extraordinary extent to which, if the more squalid forms of human villainy are the sine qua non of the successful tyrant, he embodied them. Like Stalin, too, he had little of the flair or colour of other 20th-century despots, little mental brilliance, less charisma, no redeeming passion or messianic fervour; he was only exceptional in the magnitude of his thuggery, the brutality, opportunism and cunning of the otherwise dull, grey apparatchik.

Misusing Jesus

Christian Century, a leading Protestant magazine has a very interesting article "Misusing Jesus How the church divorces Jesus from Judaism" by Amy-Jill Levine is a Jewish New Testament scholar who teaches at Vanderbilt Divinity School.

...when Christian congregants, ministers and professors do acknowledge that Jesus was Jewish, they often provide no content for the label. The claim that "Jesus was a Jew" may be historically true, but it is not central to the teaching of the church.

The problem is more than one of silence. In the popular Christian imagination, Jesus still remains defined, incorrectly and unfortunately, as "against" the Law, or at least against how it was understood at the time; as "against" the Temple as an institution and not simply against its first-century leadership; as "against" the people Israel but in favor of the gentiles. Jesus becomes the rebel who, unlike every other Jew, practices social justice. He is the only one to speak with women; he is the only one who teaches nonviolent responses to oppression; he is the only one who cares about the "poor and the marginalized" (that phrase has become a litany in some Christian circles). Judaism becomes in such discourse a negative foil: whatever Jesus stands for, Judaism isn't it; whatever Jesus is against, Judaism epitomizes the category.

This divorcing of Jesus from Judaism does a disservice to each textually, theologically, historically and ethically.

Levine critiques not only the sub rosa anti-Semitism that appears in the Palestinian theologian Naim Ateek of the Sabeel Center, but also in feminist and liberation theologians, and even more surprisingly in such mainstream Christian institutions as
he World Council of Churches press in Geneva; Fortress Press, which is connected to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America; and the Catholic (Maryknoll) Orbis Books.

Eric Lee on the Edwards campaign

Eric Lee, visionary international labor activist and creator of the invaluable LabourStart website, has entry on his blog about the John Edwards campaign for President. After recommending that unions emulate Edwards use of the internet as an organizing tool, Eric discusses the importance of the Edwards campaign for American unions and the democratic left..

..a running thread in everything I have written for some years now is the question of whether the trade union movement has a future or not. You might be asking yourself what this has to do with the Edwards campaign. The answer is: plenty.

Edwards did not come out of the trade union movement; he made his millions (and they were millions) as a lawyer. He may have had working-class roots, but they appear to be behind him now. And yet in recent years, especially since his defeat in the 2004 elections (when he first ran for the Democratic nomination, and then as John Kerry's vice presidential candidate), he has made a sharp turn toward the unions.

This has been in evidence for some time now, and a quick glance at his activities over the last year or so show that he's been in the thick of the fight against poverty, and helped get several states to enact higher minimum wages than the stingy Republican administration in Washington.

This is great stuff, and combined with his constant appearances at union events and expressions of support for union causes, he did two things this week that cement the bond between John Edwards and the trade union movement.

First, in his two-minute online video, placed on YouTube (where else?), standing in front of a ruined New Orleans house, he spoke about all the great work that's been done – this was at the very end – to organize workers into unions. It was a brief reference, but it was a clear mention of Edwards' strong belief in the positive role of trade unions.

And it gets better. Today, the campaign named its manager, the man who is leading the effort to get Edwards into the White House. That man is David Bonior, a name I've certainly come across as he's also the Chair of a group called American Rights at Work -- an organization that's been around since 2003 promoting its vision of the US as “a nation where the freedom of workers to organize unions and bargain collectively with employers is guaranteed and promoted.”

If this stuff sounds mild to Europeans and others, it sounds positively radical to Americans. The percentage of American workers organized into unions has been plummeting for decades, and is below 10% in the private sector.

Studies have shown that a majority of workers in the US would join unions if they could, but they don't because of a well-grounded fear that they could lose their jobs if they do.

Every day, people get sacked by their employers for trying to join unions. There has long been a corporate reign of terror in the workplace and ever since I've been politically active (this goes back some time) unions have called for changes to the country's laws to make it easier to join unions.

So now we have a presidential campaign boosting a candidate who is the most pro-labour politician in America today, run by a labour studies professor (I'm not making this up) who until yesterday was running a workers' rights organization. This is the kind of politics we haven't seen in America for more than a generation.

It bears comparison to the nearly successful 1934 California gubernatorial campaign by Upton Sinclair, a socialist running as a Democrat, under the slogan “End Poverty in California”. It reminds one of the campaigns of the Socialist Party in its heyday, when Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas could get close to a million votes.

And on a personal level, I'm reminded of a Presidential campaign that was discussed, and then abandoned, by Michael Harrington back in 1978-9. Harrington proposed then to launch is campaign from the ruins of the South Bronx – something echoed by Edwards' decision today to launch his own campaign from still-devastated New Orleans.

None of this means that Edwards is a socialist – far from it. But I mention this to point out that there is a radical tradition in American politics, closely linked to the unions (Debs, of course, was a great railway union leader before becoming a politician). Edwards may well fit into this tradition.

The problem with that tradition is that it never came close to winning the Presidency. That may be about to change.

Today, polls in the state of Iowa, the first battleground state in the long series of Democratic Party primaries and caucuses, show Edwards in the lead – ahead of Hillary Clinton and all the others.

Edwards is running on an explicitly pro-union message, unashamed of his connections to the labour movement in his country. And he's doing so with the kind of website that every union and campaigning organization should aspire to have.

That's why his campaign interests me so much, and why I intend to do what I can to learn about it, report on it, and participate in it.

Raise Less Corn: an old slogan reborn

One of the slogans of the 19th century Populist movement was "raise less corn and more hell." It has now been reborn in an op-ed and book by George Pyle, a former editorial page editor for the Salina Journal.

From the op-ed

The USDA's own summary of the issues facing American agriculture --"Strengthening the Foundation for Future Growth in U.S. Agriculture" -- still views farming as an industrial process needing to ramp up production and increase exports.

It's a blueprint for yet another round of taxpayer subsidies that push farmers to max out their production using all the fertilizer and pesticides they can afford.

The government dropped nearly $144 billion on farm subsidies between 1995 and 2004, according to calculations by the Environmental Working Group. The bulk of that money went to an ever-shrinking number of giant companies and cooperatives.

The resulting cut-rate price of corn further encourages feedlot fattening of cattle, hogs and poultry rather than the more natural grazing. The nitrogen-heavy runoff from those massive feeding operations, combined with all the fertilizer that flows from wheat and corn fields in the Plains and upper Midwest, endangers municipal water supplies and once-teeming sea life downstream in the Gulf of Mexico.

Soil conservation is always a part of farm legislation, but a small part. In Kansas, for example, federal farm payments over the decade ending in 2004 totaled $6.2 billion for production subsidies and $1 billion for conservation. When budget hawks start looking for savings, it is the conservation plans, not the subsidies, that are on the chopping block.

And from the books description

farmers are promised a better future if they play ball with the corporations, but caught between the brutal new market and antiquated government support systems, they are forced to grow too much of the wrong crops — crops that will be fed to animals who cannot tolerate them, shipped as dubious "aid" to struggling countries, drive the farmer's take-home pay ever downward, and make us all fatter.

Gallup poll of Cubans

There have been only two independent polls of Cubans since 1994. The results of a recent poll by Gallup were released just before Christmas and reported in the Miami Herald. Some interesting results

Results from the recent Gallup Poll of Cuba, conducted with 1,000 residents of Havana and Santiago portray a populace that is profoundly unhappy with its lack of personal freedom. However, the data also suggest that any changes are likely to take place within the existing political system.

When asked about the country's current leadership, urban Cubans were split fairly evenly: 47% said they approve, while 40% disapproved, and 13% did not offer a response.

Strangest Christmas Newspaper Story: Allen Ginsberg in Wichita

One of the strangest newspaper articles to appear on a Christmas must be Becky Tanner's piece on Allen Ginsberg in Monday Wichita Eagle. It's an interesting article, part of series of vingettes on Kansas history, but it just strikes me as weird for it to appear on December 25.

It seems the beat poet visited Wichita in 1966 and wrote one of his most famous poems here.

Here's the beginning:

"Thy sins are forgiven, Wichita!

Thy lonesomeness annulled, O Kansas dear!

as the western Twang prophesied

thru banjo, when lone cowboy walked the railroad track past an empty station toward the sun sinking giant-bulbed orange down the box canyon --

Music strung over his back

and empty handed singing on this planet earth

I'm a lonely Dog, O Mother!"

--Allen Ginsberg,

Wichita Vortex Sutra

Wichita was once hip with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Beat Generation and counterculture pioneer.

A homosexual. Known to use illegal drugs. An anti-war activist.

The raw language of his poems shocked and repulsed Bible Belt America.

He came to Wichita in 1966 and wrote one of his most famous and critically acclaimed works, "Wichita Vortex Sutra," in opposition to the Vietnam War.

He read his works at Moody's Skid Row Beanery at 627 E. Douglas and Wichita State University and, when interviewed by The Wichita Eagle, told a reporter: "The city imposes a dark night on the soul of its youth."

Also check out,

• the Beats in Kansas webpage
• Pat O'Conner on Moody's Skid Row Beanery
• Lee Strief on Ginsberg's Vortex

Around this time, I was a junior high school student in Nashville, Tennessee and a family friend took me to a lecture series at Vanderbilt University over a period of a week or two. It has pretty heady stuff--Martin Luther King, Jr., Stockely Carmichael. and Allen Ginsberg. It all made a big impression. Monday's article made me wonder if Ginsberg might have read "Wichita Vortex Sutra" at Vanderbilt. I would have liked to think that I would have remembered a Kansas connection since that was where I grew up and went to school through the sixth grade and returned there for high school, but maybe not.

Iranian election setback for Ahmadinejad

A good round-up from Doug Ireland, despite some funky formatting.

An article on the increased cultural repression prior to the election from Quantara.de, a German site on dialogue with Islamic societies.

A slightly different, and less encoraging analysis from Jonathon Edelstein who warns that the electoral defeat of Ahmadinejad should not be viewed as an overwhelming popular rejection.

What does seem to be apparent from the election is a de facto "stop Ahmedinejad" alliance between the conservatives and the reformists. Khamenei continued to use the Guardians to reject many reformist candidates, but he recognized that he needed the votes of the pro-reform electorate, so he proved willing to allow them somewhat more political space than in 2004. This resulted in a modest reformist comeback on some of the larger municipal councils, as well as female trade unionist Soheila Jelodarzadeh's victory among working-class Tehran voters in the Majlis by-election.

This alliance is possibly aimed at securing Ahmedinejad's defeat for re-election in 2009, as well as ensuring that Khamenei is replaced by a like-minded successor (who in all likelihood will be Rafsanjani). As such, it might last at least through the medium term. But whatever the pragmatic accommodations that Khamenei and the reformists have reached, they must be viewed in light of the steady ratcheting-closed of Iranian political space that has occurred since 2001. As Pepe Escobar puts it in the Asia Times, Iran is steadily evolving from a schizophrenic, quasi-democratic theocracy into a clerical autocracy" run by Khamenei and his cronies, and the future looks like one in which electoral politics will matter even less than they do now.

Anita O'Day

Anita O'Day, the legendary jazz singer, died around Thanksgiving. I thought most of the obituaries I read and heard were rather cliched and not terribly well-informed. I don't recall a mention of her recording of "Let Me Off Uptown" with the Gene Krupa Band. This fantastic song featured a duet with the African American trumpeter Roy Eldridge. In 1941 it must have been a spectacularly daring, social convention challenging song.

(Spoken)
Anita: Hey Joe
Roy: What d'ya mean Joe, My name's Roy
Anita: Well come here Roy and get groovy
You bin uptown?
Roy: No I ain't bin uptown but I've bin around
Anita: You mean to say you ain't bin uptown?
Roy: no I ain't bin uptown, what's uptown?

(Sung)
Anita: If it's pleasure you're about
And you feel like steppin' out
All you've got to shout is
Let me off uptown

If it's rhythm that you feel
Then it's nothing to conceal
Oh, you've got to spiel it
Let me off uptown

Rib joints, juke joints, hep joints
Where could a fella go to top it

If you want to pitch a ball
And you can't afford a hall
All you've got to call is
Let me off uptown
(Spoken)
Roy: Anita, oh Anita, say I feel somethin'
Anita: Whatcha feel Roy? The heat?
Roy: No it must be that uptown rhythm
I feel like blowin'
Anita: Well blow Roy, blow.

(Roy's trumpet to finish)

There's video of the Krupa band performing this, but I couldn't find it on youtube. There is this video of "Thanks for the Boogie Ride" which also features O'Day and Eldridge.



A friend, a little older and originally from the West Coast, had emailed me about O'Day's passing. I got to thinking that O'Day played a larger role in his musical universe than mine because of a pre-rock/post aesthetic gulf. Most jazz fans who came to the music from 60's rock came for the instrumental giants starting with Coltrane and Davis and working back to Paker and Gillespie and beyond. We may have picked up on some vocalists, but we rarely became "fans." (Billie Holiday, being an exception, but as much for her tragic narrative as for her music). At least that's my impression.

David Hadju, music critic for the New Republic, has written a very perceptive article on O'Day which brings out another reason that O'Day was not fully appreciated.

O'Day did her greatest, most enduring, and most influential work while she was stoned out of her mind. More to the point, the music was not merely made possible by drugs; it was music of the drug experience, an expression of what it meant for its singer to be high. It remains potent, music of euphoria and abandon, and the fact that it derives its potency not simply from human gifts but from the submission of those gifts to narcotics is the treachery, the exhilarating and harrowing glory, of Anita O'Day's music.

Boredom was the one thing that was intolerable to O'Day. Her music was the manifesto of her devotion to kicks at all cost. Ecstatic, indulgent, risky, excessive, and volatile, it was drug music, improvised in a state of simulated euphoria and imagined immunity. To make such music was an act of fearlessness, though not of bravery. O'Day, pickled by dope, knew no fear; but it was Ella Fitzgerald, lucid as she willed impossible scat lines into being, who was brave.

Support Goodyear Strikers

Nearly 16,000 Goodyear employees, including over 1000 in Topeka, are facing the holidays without paychecks. For two and a half months, the United Steelworkers (USW) members have been on strike in a brutal fight for job security and a fair deal on retiree health care. They are sacrificing and fighting the fight for good jobs for all of us—and they need our support.

Please take these two steps for them:

Make a generous donation to support striking Goodyear workers and make their holidays a little happier. One hundred percent of your donation will go to the Goodyear workers and their families. Click here to donate.

Tell Goodyear to respect workers and keep its promises. Sign the petition.

Hype and Hope about murder

Jill Leovy,a reporter for the LA Times, has a very intresting article in SALON--"Don't Believe the Hype about murder." She examines the extraordinarily high murde rates affecting young black males, but says that much of the conventional wisdom about gangs, teenage mothers, etc. making the problem much worse thanin the past is just plaing wrong.

The real story of black male homicide is that the historic disproportion between black and white death rates is shrinking, and it has been -- albeit unevenly -- for a long time.

The disproportion between white and black death rates reaches back deep into American history. Historians Roger Lane and Eric Monkkonen, for example, both found markedly higher homicide rates among blacks in analyzing data from 19th century American cities.

The Centers for Disease Control and Preventon began keeping statistics for blacks as a separate group only in 1950. The agency's count shows that homicide death rates for black men then were 28 percent higher than in 2003 and 12 times the white male rate. Spikes in these rates came in the early 1970s, around 1980, and again in the recession years of the early 1990s. Each spike was roughly as high as the last. But running through these spikes is a gradual long-term trend of lower rates and racial convergence.

This suggests we need to take another look at the widespread assumptions that urban violence is the byproduct of modern street gangs, single-parent black families, crack cocaine and the proliferation of handguns. These things matter. But so do deeper and more enduring factors. The reality is that blacks in 1976 were almost twice as likely to die from homicide as blacks in 2004, and the disparity between black and white rates was 20 percent higher than today.

She concludes with this observation:

History suggests that we should be wary of any claims about some unprecedented spiral into nihilism in the inner city, since such claims are perennial. History suggests that it is worth asking questions different from the ones we have been asking, and that we should take the longer view.

Photographic Reminder

The KC Star on Sunday December 10 had an article about the local branch of the national archives. It included what my friend Fred Whitehead called a "stunning photograph" which was accompanied by this caption.

Tarred and feathered: Amid the charged political climate of World War I, John Meintz, a German-American who lived in Minnesota, had joined an agrarian organization that some officials deemed disloyal. A mob attacked him, but he wore his marks of scorn long enough to have them photographed.

Labor Activist's Killers Must Be Found

[From an email from US LEAP]

The 2004 murder of US trade unionist Gilberto Soto has yet to be solved. He was killed in El Salvador, where authorities have yet to adequately pursue his case and bring his murderers to justice. Please read this action alert about his case, from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters:

Labor Activist’s Killers Must be Found

On November 5, 2004, Teamsters Port Division Representative Gilberto Soto was assassinated in Usulutan, El Salvador. Soto, an American citizen, had returned to his native country to meet with Central American trade union leaders and port drivers, and to document worker rights violations.

The murder remains unsolved.

In a gruesome echo of the Salvadoran government’s response to the death squad assassinations of the 1980s, the Salvadoran Interior Minister labeled Soto’s death a “common crime” within days of his murder—and before the government had launched any investigation.

One Salvadoran official took the assassination seriously and sprang into action: Beatrice de Carrillo, the ombudsman and director of the official Salvadoran Human Rights Office. Though her office is mandated by the Salvadoran constitution, the police refused to give her access to the investigation files or the officers conducting the investigation. She predicted that the government would soon make an arrest, call the murder a “crime of passion” and then after the media attention faded, ultimately drop the case.

That’s exactly what happened. Within a week the government of El Salvador arrested Soto’s mother-in-law, claiming that she hoped to collect the Teamsters’ million-dollar life insurance policy. In fact, Soto’s policy was for only $50,000 and his children were the beneficiaries, not his wife. Fourteen months later, Soto’s mother-in-law was acquitted. The government has continued to obstruct, frustrate and harass Dr. de Carrillo. She has also received death threats because of her ongoing search for the truth.

On November 15, 2006, the International Labor Organization (ILO) issued a report that demanding that the Salvadoran government reopen the case file on Soto’s murder.

The Teamsters union has joined with labor leaders in El Salvador to demand that the true killers be brought to justice. If we allow this murder to go unsolved, labor and human rights leaders will never be safe in El Salvador. Tell Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Ambassador to the United States from El Salvador Rene Leon to demand that the Salvadoran government reopen the investigation into the Gilberto Soto murder and protect and the work of
the Salvadoran Human Rights Ombudsman.

Check out the Teamsters website for more information and the sign the petition

Jay McShann, Jazz Giant, Passes

Jay McShann, a giant of jazz, passed away on December 7 at the age of 90. McShann led the last great Kansas City big band in the 1930s and early 1940s. It was with McShann that Charlie Parker cut his earlier records. (Here's a CD of early Bird with McShann that I would like to hear.) McShann's band featured the blues vocals of Walter Brown, but it was a very important band. Check out this collection of his early 1940s sides. The All Music Guide says " last of the great Kansas City swing big bands." I've read that the McShann band was far more adventurous than what was captured on disc. It is also said that the trunk carrying McShann's arrangements was lost and never recovered when he was drafted into WWII.

After the war when big band swing was out of style, McShann regrouped with a jump swing band. There are number of fine cuts by his groups on the Mercuary Blues and Rhythm Story the Southwest and West Coast.

In 1969 McShann was rediscovered and often featuring violinist Claude Williams, he toured constantly, recorded frequently, and appeared at many jazz festivals, being active into the mid-'90s.

Of his more recent recordings, I recommend Last of the Blue Devils, Man from Muskogee, and Still Jumpin' the Blues--recorded when he was 83.

I had the pleasure of hearing McShann live several times in Wichita and Kansas City.

90 Years of McShann (KC Star)

Slideshow with some McShann music--very nice!!!

KC Star story on Clint Eastwood, McShann, and Pinetop Perkins.

"I grew up listening to a record of `Hot Biscuits' by Jay McShann," Clint Eastwood said. "That and a beer was as good as it got when I was a kid."

The official Jay McShann website

NPR Jazz Profile with sound segments both interviews and music

McShann was featured, along with other KC swing giants in the 1979 documentary Last of the Blue Devils, watch an excerpt here.

New Look

I've decided to try a new look for my blog when I upgraded to the new beta version of Blogger. Unfortunately, this meant losing some of the formatting. Specifically, my list of links and Kansas blogs are gone. But just temporarily. I'll add them back. Maybe bit by bit.

Brownback is running

Well, it's almost official, Kansas Senator Sam Brownback is running for President, or actually running for running for President. He's formed an exploratory committeee.

Jeff Sharlet, author of the devestating Rolling Stone profile of Brownback ("God's Senator"), suggest in the Revealer that "Brownback is running not so much for president, I suspect, as for the leadership of the conservative branch of the G.O.P."

I wonder whether Brownback's quixotic Presidential bid will be so embarrassing that it will severely damage his 2010 Senate re-election campaign and result in Kansas electing its first Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1932.

In the latest Survey USA poll he only has 53% approval from Kansans as Senator. He only has $600,000 in his Senate campaign fund which will be transferred to the Presidential campaign. (Brownback did marry into the Staufer family which owned the Topeka newspaper and broadcasting stations so he can probably self-finance to some degree).

In 2010 there just might a Democratic candidate of stature to take him on. Gov. Kathleen Sebelius will be at the end of her second term. Congressman Dennis Moore from Kansas City/Johnson County is now solidly entrenched having won with over 60 percent. Hopefully, Congresswoman Nancy Boyda (Topeka) will be completing her second term. Attorney General Paul Morrison and Lt. Gov. Mark Parkinson, who converted to the Dems after having served as GOP state chair not too long ago would also be possibilities.

BTW, in 1996 Brownback's campaign did some nasty push polling against Democratic challenger Jill Docking, who had married into the famous Democratic family. Voters were asked if it would make a difference if they knew she was from an East Coast Jewish family, etc.

That and massive secret dollars from the ultra-right wing Koch family were keys to his election.

Bill Roy on the Election

Bill Roy is retired physician and former member of Congress. He narrowly lost to Bob Dole in a Senate race in 1974. Here is his Nov. 25 column in the Topeka Capital Journal.

Election also was about religion and its place

The election results in Kansas have been getting a lot of national attention, because many traditional Republicans joined Democrats and independents in rejecting Republican religionist candidates. An aberration, or a bellwether election?

Nearly three of five Kansans voted against lay preacher Phill Kline for attorney general because he scared hell out of them with his brand of evangelical Christianity. And Nancy Boyda upset Congressman Jim Ryun, who after 10 years was best known for reading his Bible on the House floor and placing the Good Book beside his guest book.

Surely by now, even casual political observers recognize the Kansas Republican Party -- and the national party -- are totally submissive to evangelicals such as Kline. Even the GOP's never-competitive gubernatorial candidate figured he needed religionist Sen. Susan Wagle on his ticket.

Did Democrats also narrowly win nationally because of voters' belated rejection of America's religious party?

Kevin Phillips, one-time Republican strategist and longtime political historian and strategist, puts it well: "Now that the GOP has been transformed by the rise of the South, the trauma of terrorism and George W. Bush's conviction that God wanted him to be president, a deeper conclusion can be drawn: The Republican Party has become the first religious party in U.S. history."

The less polemical John C. Danforth, an ordained Episcopal priest and former three-term U.S. senator from Missouri, also recognizes the Republican Party is beyond doubt a religious party.

Danforth laments in his recently published book, "Faith and Politics": "But this is not a coalition of traditional Republicans and Christian Right in the nature of a merger of equals. This is the takeover of the Republican Party by the Christian right."

Danforth found, "That is the significance of the Terry Schiavo case. It was the total victory of Christian conservative activism over broadly shared Republican principles, a victory won with no resistance from traditional Republicans."

Kline and Danforth are two greatly different people, but both, at least at one time were pillars of the winning religionist party.

Kline is representative of the true believers who would meld Christianityand America's government. They would govern by their interpretation of the words of the Bible, just as Muslims govern by the Shari'ah, civil law from the Koran.

In contrast, Danforth is a devout Christian who believes in the separation of church and state, writing that "to call this a Christian country is to say non-Christians are of some lesser order, not full-fledged citizens of one nation."

Danforth also explains: "The idea God speaks to one group more than to others, or that one group uniquely represents the will of God, makes it impossible to give outsiders the sense that they too are welcome participants in the life of our country."

But Danforth also danced to the tune of the Religious Right when running for office. And he tells how he rationalized it. He opposed abortion by opposing Roe v. Wade on constitutional grounds.

Danforth confesses, "In my closest campaign, the 1982 race for re-election to the Senate, support of pro-life people who voted for me mainly because of my opposition to abortion was the difference between winning and losing."

Will recent election defeats strengthen, rather than weaken the place of Christian conservatives in the Republican Party? Will Republicans decide they lost because they were soft on religiosity and become more submissive to America's 40 million evangelicals who also make up about 40 percent of their vote?

Or, will Republicans look at their losses nearly everywhere outside the South and conclude they lost because voters fear the earthly policies of end-day Christians who anticipate Christ's imminent return and the Rapture? And become again a secular party.

As Phillips explains in his book, an "American Theocracy" bodes ill for our nation and the world. Depending on where we go from here, 2006 may be the most important election in decades.

Janitors March for Justice in KC

Justice For Janitors – Kansas City

March For Justice

Saturday, November 18th

3:00 PM

J.C Nichols Fountain, PLAZA

Kansas City SEIU members have been locked in negotiations with BG Service Solutions, the largest cleaning contractor in the city, since September. Most janitors who work for BG currently make $6.90/hour or less, and cannot afford the present health care plans for their families. In addition, BG never gives raises to the vast majority of their employees, although they raise rates they charge building owners every year. KC janitors have had enough and are negotiating for a better contract, with higher salaries and real raises, and a health care plan which provides for the families as well as the employees.

BG already pays significantly more to its employees in other cities, such as Denver and Minneapolis. In these places, SEIU members have affordable health care. Yet BG has rejected out of hand the union's financial and health care proposals. BG has also refused to share employee information with the union, for which we have filed federal charges. The message of BG at the bargaining table has been quite clear – their vision of the future of the cleaning industry in Kansas City is a part-time workforce, with no benefits, making $6.50 an hour (Missouri's new minimum wage).

As Kansas City janitors struggle to make a decent living, they need the support of the community. On Saturday, we will again march from the JC Nichols fountain through the Plaza to an important BG-serviced building to protest the conditions of KC SEIU members.

Join SEIU members in saying Enough is Enough! Kansas City will not support poverty wages paid by BG and other contractors in the city. The community at large should not have to pay for our members going to the emergency room – the only health care plan they really have available. These companies need to own up to the health care crisis they are forcing upon the city by refusing to look for more affordable solutions.

For more information, please contact Justin McBride for more information at 816-529-8680 or mcbridej@seiu1.org or visit us on-line at http://www.seiu1mo.org/

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