Race and Politics- Strategic Racism

Join the Cesar Chavez march on Sat.

Brothers and Sisters, 

Join me in the march to commemorate the life and times of human rights leader Cesar Chavez in Sacramento’s 14th Annual Cesar Chavez March.Arriving early will allow you to find better parking as well as friends who will be marching with Team Ali.

When: Saturday, March 29, 2014 10:00am - 1:00pm
Where: Southside Park (corner of 'T' Street and 6th Street)

The march will end at Cesar Chavez Park downtown. In addition to live music, food, dancing and vendors of all kinds, there will be a schedule of speakers.

Chavez film- Inspiring

by Randy Shaw

Cesar Chavez, a feature film on the farmworker leader, was previewed in Berkeley on March 5 prior to its March 28 national release. Based on the audience response, the film will help inspire a new generation of young activists to push for social justice, and will particularly resonate with Dreamers and others pushing for immigration reform.
The atmosphere was electric in Berkeley’s California Theater as a full house waited in anticipation for Diego Luna’s new film, Cesar Chavez. A block long line of people were turned away, reflecting an interest in the movie that Luna hoped would return when the film is released in three weeks.
Having spent years researching and thinking about Cesar Chavez for my book, Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century, I was intrigued by how a feature film would handle the long and complex story of the farmworkers movement. And I think it covered the story of Cesar Chavez himself remarkably well for the years covered in the movie.
http://youtu.be/awP3yXv-4ng

American Dream Myth - Stiglitz on Income Inequality

Congressional Progressive Caucus Budget

On Wednesday morning, the 73-member Congressional Progressive Caucus unveiled its annual budget.  

“We want to re-create an economy that works for the American worker, not just the richest 1 percent,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) at a Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) press conference inside the Capitol, flanked by CPC co-chairs Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) in addition to fellow caucus members Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Matt Cartwright (D-Pa.).

In today’s Congress, too often a grim landscape of neoliberalism in gridlock, the CPC’s Better Off Budget stands little chance of passing. But that’s not so much the point: The proposal is a broad statement of values, an effort to flush austerity out of the annual budget debates that are often dominated by the Right. By fashioning an alternative to Paul Ryan’s safety-net-slashing schemes, progressives hope to shift the conversation away from austerity and toward economic fairness.  

Moral Outrage disrupts Georgia Capitol

ATLANTA — There was a son of a sharecropper and an advocate for the homeless, a college student and a great-grandmother, a retired store manager and the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church.

By the end of the day, they were among the 39 people who were arrested Tuesday during choreographed waves of civil disobedience here at the state Capitol in protest of the state’s refusal to expand Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act. See slide show: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/19/us/protest-disrupts-georgia-senate-session-on-bill-to-block-medicaid-expansion.html?

They shouted slogans and unfurled banners from the Senate gallery, sang spirituals in the marble rotunda and held a sit-in blocking the entrance to the governor’s office.

The Moral Monday movement, which began last year in North Carolina, took firm root in Georgia on Tuesday, where the arrests at the Capitol were the group’s boldest action since it started protesting here in January. There were similar protests in South Carolina, where a smaller but persistent campaign of civil disobedience played out for the third week in a row.

The movements are rare stirrings of impassioned, liberal political action in a region where conservative control of government is as solid as cold grits and Democrats are struggling for survival more than influence.

Bernie Sanders: I Am Prepared to Run for President

Bernie Sanders says he is “prepared to run for president of the United States.” That’s not a formal announcement. A lot can change between now and 2016, and the populist senator from Vermont bristles at the whole notion of a permanent campaign. But Sanders has begun talking with savvy progressive political strategists, traveling to unexpected locations such as Alabama and entertaining the process questions that this most issue-focused member of the Senate has traditionally avoided.

In some senses, Sanders is the unlikeliest of prospects: an independent who caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate but has never joined the party, a democratic socialist in a country where many politicians fear the label “liberal,” an outspoken critic of the economic, environmental and social status quo who rips “the ruling class” and calls out the Koch brothers by name. Yet, he has served as the mayor of his state’s largest city, beaten a Republican incumbent for the US House, won and held a historically Republican Senate seat and served longer as an independent member of Congress than anyone else. And he says his political instincts tell him America is ready for a “political revolution.”

Paul Ryan's Irish Amnesia

Timothy Egen 

An Irish girl guarding her family’s last few possessions after eviction for nonpayment of rent, during the potato famine. A wood engraving from The Illustrated London News, April 1886.

Credit Print Collector/Getty Images

IN advance of St. Patrick’s Day, I went time traveling, back to the 1840s and Ireland’s great famine. On one side of the Irish Sea was Victorian England, flush with the pomp and prosperity of the world’s mightiest empire. On the other side were skeletal people, dying en masse, the hollow-bellied children scrounging for nettles and blackberries.

A great debate raged in London: Would it be wrong to feed the starving Irish with free food, thereby setting up a “culture of dependency”? Certainly England’s man in charge of easing the famine, Sir Charles Trevelyan, thought so. “Dependence on charity,” he declared, “is not to be made an agreeable mode of life.”

And there I ran into Paul Ryan. His great-great-grandfather had fled to America. But the Republican congressman was very much in evidence, wagging his finger at the famished. His oft-stated “culture of dependency” is a safety net that becomes a lazy-day hammock. But it was also England’s excuse for lethal negligence.

There is no comparison, of course, between the de facto genocide that resulted from British policy, and conservative criticism of modern American poverty programs.

DSA Meeting. Sat. March 15, 2014.

All DSA  members and allies are invited to a meeting of DSA on March 15, 2014 from 2 pm- 4pm. at the Sol Collective,    2574 , 21^st. Street in Sacramento. ( Parking is on the street)  By this blog post  we are reaching out  and inviting  all of  the DSA members in the region, many of whom we do not have in frequent contact on our  e mail lists.   

  Agenda;   Report from the national DSA Convention.  ( you can see videos from the convention here http://www.dsausa.org/convention_2013_report)

             New Directions for our local DSA.

Report from the YDS  conference.,Developing  a new ( or renewed) strategy for DSA, 

Our relationship with the Sacramento Progressive Alliance.

Planning for future elections

March 15, State Capitol.

Event details below:

What: Don't Frack California rally

Where: Capitol lawn, Sacramento, CA (N Street, between 12th and 13th streets)

When: Saturday, March 15 from 1 p.m. to 5 p.

The Great U-Turn. Robert Reich

By Robert Reich

Do you recall a time in America when the income of a single school teacher or baker or salesman or mechanic was enough to buy a home, have two cars, and raise a family? 

I remember. My father (who just celebrated his 100th birthday) earned enough for the rest of us to live comfortably. We weren’t rich but never felt poor, and our standard of living rose steadily through the 1950s and 1960s. 

That used to be the norm. For three decades after World War II, America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen. During those years the earnings of the typical American worker doubled, just as the size of the American economy doubled. (Over the last thirty years, by contrast, the size of the economy doubled again but the earnings of the typical American went nowhere.)  

In that earlier period, more than a third of all workers belonged to a trade union — giving average workers the bargaining power necessary to get a large and growing share of the large and growing economic pie. (Now, fewer than 7 percent of private-sector workers are unionized.) 

Then, CEO pay then averaged about 20 times the pay of their typical worker (now it’s over 200 times). 

In those years, the richest 1 percent took home 9 to 10 percent of total income (today the top 1 percent gets more than 20 percent). 

Response to the Drought

Environmental Water Caucus Unveils Real-Time Drought Response

by Dan Bacher 

As the drought continues, Governor Jerry Brown and other politicians continue to promote the Bay Day Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) to build the peripheral tunnels as the "solution" to California's water problems.

Others in Congress, such as Representatives David Valadao and Devin Nunes and House Majority Leader John Boehner, are using the drought as an opportunity to promote legislation that will eviscerate protections for Central Valley salmon, in order to ship Delta water to corporate agribusiness interests and oil companies, and to build more dams throughout the state.

On the other hand, the Environmental Water Caucus, a broad coalition of fishing groups, Indian Tribes, conservation groups and environmental justice organizations, has released a response to the drought pointing to ways that permanently use less water and better manage the hundreds of existing dams and reservoirs that already exist.  

March 15, State Capitol.

Event details below:

What: Don't Frack California rally

Where: Capitol lawn, Sacramento, CA (N Street, between 12th and 13th streets)

When: Saturday, March 15 from 1 p.m. to 5 p.

Working Class Origins of International Women's Day

The Working-Class Origins and Legacy of International Women’s Day

http://www.ueunion.org/ue-news/2014/the-working-class-origins-and-legacy-of-international-women%E2%80%99s-day

Portside Date: 

March 4, 201UE News

Alicia Williamson

March 8 is International Women’s Day (IWD), an annual tradition that began over a hundred years ago. While celebrations continue worldwide, few people remember that the holiday was first initiated by American Socialists. As legend would have it, they were inspired to hold a demonstration in order to mark the anniversary of an 1857 female garment workers’ strike in New York. However, the more accurate account is that in 1908, the Socialist Party of America established a National Woman’s Committee to aid in the party’s recruitment efforts, and the committee’s first action was to declare the last Sunday in February to be Woman’s Day.
Either way, IWD’s origin was both socialist and feminist in nature, specifically calling for the celebration of working women and the mobilization of all workers to fight for women’s social, economic, and political equality. Theresa Malkiel, a New York labor activist and member of the National Woman’s Committee, declared the Socialist Party to be acting as an “oracle, proclaiming the happiness of the days to come” through the creation of the holiday, describing its purposes “as a day of woman’s coming greatness, as a token of her just demands, [and] as a protest against her present disqualification.”

Who Is Provoking the Unrest in Ukraine? A Debate on Role of Russia, U.S....

As tensions build, U.S. facing 'zero options' in Ukraine

Corporate tax dodges- Boeing leads the way

State and local governments have awarded at least $110 billion in taxpayer subsidies to business, with 3 of every 4 dollars going to fewer than 1,000 big corporations, the most thorough analysis to date of corporate welfare revealed today.

Boeing ranks first, with 137 subsidies totaling $13.2 billion, followed by Alcoa at $5.6 billion, Intel at $3.9 billion, General Motors at $3.5 billion and Ford Motor at $2.5 billion, the new report by the nonprofit research organization Good Jobs First shows.

Dow Chemical had the most subsidies, 410 totaling $1.4 billion, followed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire-Hathaway holding company, with 310 valued at $1.1 billion.

The figures were compiled from disclosures made by state and local government agencies that subsidize companies in all sorts of ways, including cash giveaways, building and land transfers, tax abatements and steep discounts on electric and water bills.