Carl Finamore's Egyptian revolution photos

Bay area union activist Carl Finamore is just back from his second trip to Egypt. The first was a year ago; he arrived the same day that Mubarak was deposed. He has written a number of reports on Egypt, the working class and unions in Egypt for Talking Union, most recently Generals Still in Charge Tough Days Ahead in Egypt

Carl took lots of great photos on his last trip, here they are.


               

Blues on a Saturday: Howlin' Wolf Back Door Man

Blues on a Saturday: Johnny Otis and Etta James

Yesterday, two giants of the r&b world died: Johnny Otis and Etta James.

JLC President Stuart Appelbaum's Brave Speech on the Middle East

Earlier this week, the Jewish Labor Committee had their annual fundraising dinner. JLC President Stuart Appelbaum gave a brave and on target speech that addressed the Middle East, as well as the progressive role of the JLC on the America scene.

 According to the Jewish Week, Israel's deputy consul general walked out of the speech. 

Here is what Appelbaum said about the Middle East.

I'm Gonna Marry a Corporation

With the second anniversairy of the Citizen's United ruling approaching, I'm planning a series of posts on the issue of corporate personhood. Let's start with something on the lighter side. This song was written by Barabara Joye and performed by Atlanta area singer Anita Paycheck.

How Time Photographed the Protesters

TIME magazine named “The Protester” as its “Person of the Year” last year.Fellow Wichita democratic leftist Russell Fox said they got it right. And, I agree. This behind-the-scenes video shows how photographer Peter Hapak traveled around to seven different countries to capture portraits of protestors for the story. The resulting photographs can be viewed here.

Blues on a Saturday: Freddie King

Freddie King has been selected to be a 2012 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee in the "early influences" category. Allmusic.com says of King

Guitarist Freddie King rode to fame in the early '60s with a spate of catchy instrumentals which became instant bandstand fodder for fellow bluesmen and white rock bands alike. Employing a more down-home (thumb and finger picks) approach to the B.B. King single-string style of playing, King enjoyed success on a variety of different record labels. Furthermore, he was one of the first bluesmen to employ a racially integrated group on-stage behind him.

In the early 1970s, Clayton Crawford and I drove up from Winfield to see King at Wichita's Century II. King was, as I recall, on the underbill of the a three act show. We weren't interest much in hearing the other bands, but we sure wanted to hear King. King, who toured incessantly, had car trouble and couldn't make the gig. The promoters held back this info until after the first band had played. Then they offered a piddling refund. Here are two King classics, which have been covered by many blues and rock artists.

Are corporations persons?

The PPP polling firm has a new survey  out on the South Carolina primary.  The pollsters asked South Carolina voters about the
non-binding "corporate personhood" referendum Steve Colbert hoped to land on the ballot that would ask voters whether "corporations are people" or "only people are people." Only a third of likely voters said they think "corporations are people" compared to two thirds who think that "only people are people." Further, a majority of supporters of every
GOP candidate -- including Mitt Romney -- say that they believe that
"only people are people."

$100 Billion

What to read

Mary Beth Sullivan, "Moving from a War Economy to a Peace Economy"

Tim Lacy on the US Intellectual History blog Now What? Reflections On Historicizing American "Conservatism"

Matthew Lyons on the Three Way Fight blog Conservatism studies: on the value and limits of academic history

 First a blog post summarizing the December 2011 Journal of American History roundtable , titled "Conservatism: A State of the Field" and an activists take on the same roundtable.

Harold Meyerson, "No Longer the Land of Opportunity"

Jeff Madrick "How Austerity is Killing Europe"

Russell Fox likes a Montana Supreme Court decision upholding state's ban on corporate spending on elections.

Adam Holland returns to active blogging with a damning look at Ron Paul's campaign. 

the Campaign for Liberty, an internet forum associated with the Ron Paul campaign, has for the past four years advertised an edition of the notorious anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

I hate beets

I'm pretty much always the opposite of a finicky eater.  When I was a kid, if you put in on my plate, or based it around the table at a family Thanksgiving, I would eat a small helping.  With one exception--beets. If beets were on my place, I wouldn't eat anything on the plate.

My distaste for beets is so deep that I couldn't remember what they taste like, only that they are disgusting.


But now I know. According beet expert and advocate Irving Goldman beets "taste like dirt."

My Books of 2011

It's the time of the year for "top " lists:  Russell Arben Fox's most intellectually stimulating books, Norm Geras presents 12 books he won't be reading in 2012 topping Keiran Healey's list of books not read in 2011, Salon's best tv episodes, Dave Adler's top jazz picks, Rolling Stone's top 50 albums, and many competing political gaffes lists.

Like last year, I've come up with a list of my top 10 books of 2010. The listing is not a a rank listing.

1. 
    John Nichols, The "S" Word: A Short History of an American Tradition...Socialism
   
   
   Nichols has written a persuasive case that socialism is as American as apple pie.  From the forgotten radical economics of founding father Thomas Paine and the utopian socialists who founded the Republican Party to Victor Berger, the socialist Congressman from Milwaukee, who opposed WWI to Michael Harrington it is a great read.
   
   
   The subtitle is a little misleading.  Nichols leaves out some important topics that even a short history should contain: the Populist movement of the 1890s and the most successful Socialist Party of the Debs era--the Oklahoma socialists, discussed brilliantly in Jim Bissett's Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904-1920.
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. 
   John Quiggin, Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us  
   
   A prolific Australian social democratic economist takes on influential, but dead wrong economic ideas.  Be aware that there is another book out with the ZE title and be advised that the forthcoming paperback edition will contain an extra chapter refuting austerity economics. 
   
   From the coverslip:
   
   

   Killing vampires and werewolves is easy enough. But how does one slay economic zombies--ideas that should have died long ago but still shamble forward? Armed with nothing but the truth, John Quiggin sets about dispatching these dead ideas once and for all in this engaging book. Zombie Economics should be required reading for those who would dare reanimate the economic theories that brought us to the edge of ruin."--Brad DeLong, University of California, Berkeley.

   
   
3. 
    Joe Burns, Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America
   
   Carl Finamore reviewed it on Talking Union

   a valuable contribution to resurrecting fundamental lessons from the neglected history of American labor.
   As the title suggests and as he emphasized to me, “the only way we can revive the labor movement is to revive a strike based on the traditional tactics of the labor movement.”
   
   
   But he doesn’t stop there. The author reviews for the reader the full range of tactics and strategy during the exciting, turbulent and often violent history of American labor.Refreshingly, he also provides critical assessments normally avoided by labor analysts of a whole series of union tactics that have grown enormously popular over the last several decades.

   
   
4. Jay Walljasper,  All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons
    
   
   
   Walljasper is a former editor of UTNE Reader and this book is written (compiled, might be more accurate) in a similar style. There are lots of sidebars, interviews and the like.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
5. Louisa Thomas Conscience Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family--a Test of Will and Faith in World War I
   
    Even though I've read two biographies of Norman Thomas, this book by Thomas's great-granddaughter greatly added to my knowledge and appreciation of Thomas.  
   
   Alan Riding's review in the New York Times seems on the mark
   

   
   Louisa Thomas, who never knew her great-­grandfather, might well have chosen to write his biography as a way of meeting him. Instead, in her first book, “Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family — A Test of Will and Faith in World War I,” she has been far more daring. In fact, the lengthy subtitle is a bit misleading. Yes, Norman and his brother Evan were pacifists and their brothers Ralph and Arthur joined the Army. And yes, Evan was jailed as a conscientious objector and Ralph was wounded in the trenches. Yet the thrust of this enthralling book lies with its title: through the experience of her forebears, Thomas examines how conscience fares when society considers it subversive.
   
   At issue is not Norman Thomas’s socialism: it barely enters the picture because he joined the Socialist Party only a month before the end of the war. Instead, we are shown the “making” of a socialist, formed not by Marx but by the Bible.

   Also recommended is Mark Johnson's review and interview of Louisa Thomas on the Fellowship of Reconciliation blog.
    
6. David James Smith, Young Mandela: The Revolutionary Years
   
   This biography covers Nelson Mandela's early years up to his imprisonment in 1964.  Smith's discussion of Mandela's private life seems to depend too much on suppositions and speculation.  What is interesting to me is the ANC's move from non-violence to armed struggle and the close, working relationship between the ANC and the South African Communist Party.
   
   
7. Bruce Watson, Freedom Summer
8. Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice  
   

   

   
   
    Two outstanding books on critical episodes in the civil rights movement: the 1961 Freedom Rides to confront the segregation of interstate bus terminals and the 1964 Freedom Summer to register  African Americans in Mississippi.  Watson is the author of an excellent book on Sacco and Vanzetti (which I have read) and one on the 1912 Bread and Roses strike. Aresensault's book is a long one, but there  is an abridged version and a DVD of the PBS documentary based on it.
   
   

   

   9.   Philip Dray, There is Power in the Union
   
   
   

    I bought this at the bookstore at the 2011 Netroots nation and found that it lives up to its subtitle "Epic Story of Labor in America." It is now out in paperback.    There are other recent general  histories of US labor (Mel Dubofsky's Labor in America: A History and Nelson Lichtenstein's 2003 State of the Union: A Century of American Labor, A.B. Chitty's 2002 From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend, and the 2007 two-volume Who Built America).  They might be preferred by academics or labor studies professionals, but for the general reader, union activist, or occupier, There is Power in the Union is highly recommended.

   
   

   
   

   
   

    

   

   10. Barbara Clark Smith, The Freedoms We Lost:Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America

   
   This is an eye-opening study of the real-life freedoms in revolutionary America. In a post on the History News Network, Smith brings out the huge differences between today's Tea Party and the original. If you find that post  intriguing, you might want to check out the book.

Ron Paul

Holiday Music That Doesn't Suck # 9

The influential bluesman Charles Brown sang two Christmas classics--"Please Come Home for Christmas" and "Merry, Christmas Baby."

Holiday Music That Doesn't Suck #8

Amos Milburn "Christmas Comes But Once a Year." Recorded in 1960 on King Records as the "b" side to a cover of Charles Brown's "Please Come Home for Christmas."

Boeing

Holiday Music That Doesn't Suck #7

Miles Davis and Bob Dorough "Blue Xmas (To Whom It May Concern)"

In 1962, the brass at Columbia Records wanted to include a selection by Miles Davis in a Jingle Bell Jazz holiday compilation album.

Miles turned to the singer, pianist, and songwriter Bob Dorough, who would later write many songs for Schoolhouse Rock.

Blue Xmas has been described as the Christmas song for everyone who hates Christmas or the excess of Christmas.

"When you're blue at Xmas time
You see through all the waste
All the sham, all the haste
And plain old bad taste
It's a time when the greedy
give a dime to the needy."

Holiday Music That Doesn't Suck # 6

Merle Haggard's "If We Make It Through December" is one of the Hag's great songs. It describes the too common real holiday experience of too many Americans--when the lack of a paycheck or an insufficient paycheck puts the gift-giving and holiday festivities out of reach. Not only is this remarkable song far different than the usual holiday fare, it was a hit, topping Billboard's country chart for four weeks in December 1973 and January 1974, and ranking number two in the 1974 year-end chart.

Holiday Music That Doesn't Suck # 5

Allmusic.com says of Canadian singer Holly Cole "her smoky voice is sultry, yet she's ironically humorous and candid while reshaping traditional standards and pop classics. Jazz is her bedrock, but not exclusively." She has recorded two holiday CDs that are well worth a listen: Santa Baby,Live in Toronto and Baby, It's Cold Outside.

There's a video of Cole doing "Santa, Baby" from the Toronto show. The 1953 song was co-written by Joan Javits, the niece of Sen. Jacob Javits and a huge hit for Ertha Kitt. It has been covered by many, many artists. Cole's version is one that doesn't suck.

Holiday Music That Doesn't Suck #4

Charlie Parker "White Christmas" Kenny Dorham (tp) Charlie Parker (as) Al Haig (p) Tommy Potter (b) Max Roach (ds) Recorded at "Royal Roost", NYC, December 25, 1948