cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4534411

The Spectre of Communism is haunting the internet

https://www.mlreadinghub.org/study-materials/reading-list

I wanna self-study a bunch, with the goal of having an idea of how to organize better.

Is this a good reading list?

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2492720

The five books from the image that I got are:

In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States by Ana Raquel Minian

Third Worlds Within: Multiethnic Movements and Transnational Solidarity by Daniel Widener, Vijay Prashad (Foreword)

The States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization by Mohamed Amer Meziane, Jonathan Adjemian (Translator)

Ron Carey and the Teamsters: How a UPS Driver Became the Greatest Union Reformer of the 20th Century by Putting Members First by Ken Reiman

Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman

These five books sit atop by vinyl record-player or gramophone or whatever you call it nowadays (I think people just say record-player). The very last one is the one I want to read the most, Empire of Normality. The third one, The States of the Earth, seems very interesting to me and I think everyone else should read it. The first two seemed like no-brainers to someone like me and the fourth one is just 'cause like labor unions and Monthly Review (I always read Monthly Review and Science & Society, the last two Marxist academic journals still standing).

Currently reading:

Das Kapital by Karl Marx

An Ideological History of the CPC by Huang Yibing (translated into English from Chinese)

A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin

Das Kapital is what I'm reading for the second time. I plan to finish it this time. The second book is apart of a trilogy of books called An Ideological History of the CPC (Volumes 1 - 3), each written by a separate author, and translated from Chinese into English. It costs about $170 for the entire trilogy box-set, but you'll frequently see it on sale on Amazon.com. A Dance with Dragons is the fifth book in the series A Song of Ice and Fire, right after the fourth book A Feast of Crows (which the bad TV show Game of Thrones is very loosely based off of).

And that's about all I'm reading and all of which I will read. The rest I may get from my local library (everyone should patronize their local library; they're currently being attacked by evangelicals, TERFs, and MAGAts).

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2483233

Check it out.

A friend of mine wrote this.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2482605

From the article:

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Mayor Brandon Johnson‘s office said they were informed of the University of Chicago Police Department’s intention to dismantle the encampment early Tuesday morning and reached out to “reiterate serious safety and operational concerns about this plan.”

In an updated statement released Tuesday afternoon, the mayor’s office said University police requested Chicago police’s assistance but CPD “expressed an unwillingness to participate.”

University police “ultimately decided to move forward with the removal independently,” according to the mayor’s office.

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Damn, even Mayor Brandon Johnson can't get them to stop and I like that guy.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2463555

Read the entire thing here:

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Last week, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey lambasted the United Auto Workers (UAW) in a social media post on X (formerly Twitter) ahead of a union vote at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama, set for mid-May. Ivey has been campaigning for months against autoworker unionization in the state.

Ivey’s post referenced an anti-union op-ed by Nathaniel Ledbetter, speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives, to which Ivey added: “The UAW is NOT the good guy here. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for calling out the UAW for what it is — corrupt, shifty and a dangerous leech.” Her post went semi-viral, garnering over 400,000 views, and it was reposted by her close political ally in resistance to autoworker unionization, the Business Council of Alabama (BCA).

While Ivey’s fierce opposition to the UAW is no secret, what was noteworthy about her post was the so-called media outlet she cited: Yellowhammer News.

Yellowhammer is no ordinary “news” site. It is co-owned by a longtime political consultant, Paul Shashy, who has deep ties to the Alabama political and business establishment, which is driving the opposition to the UAW. Indeed, in March 2023, the Business Council of Alabama, which is coordinating a statewide anti-union campaign, announced its hiring of Shashy as a political strategist.

None of this appears to be disclosed in Yellowhammer’s day-to-day coverage of topics, like the autoworker union drive, despite the owner’s apparent conflict of interest. Moreover, while Shashy purchased Yellowhammer in late 2023, its past owners have been lobbyists and consultants for major state politicians and executive directors of the Alabama GOP.

All told, the relationships between Yellowhammer’s ownership and Alabama’s anti-union politicians and business groups shed more light on what unionizing autoworkers are up against. Essentially, Alabama’s anti-union corporate forces have at their service one of the state’s biggest “media” networks, which is owned by someone who directly works for the BCA. As it churns out coverage and op-eds hostile to the UAW, those same corporate forces and their political allies can then invoke all this as “news.”

“A Partisan Site”: The Rise of Yellowhammer

On its website, Yellowhammer News claims to be “Alabama’s second-largest media outlet.” It tells advertisers that its news site has 57 million annual pageviews, 35,000 email subscribers, 25 radio affiliates and TV broadcasting to over 800,000 households. It has 107,000 followers on Facebook.

Yellowhammer describes itself as “Alabama’s preeminent outlet for news, analysis and much more.” It says it is “committed to delivering the news in a manner that reflects the state of Alabama, its people and their values.” Its catchphrase is “We know Alabama.”

But Yellowhammer is far from a regular news site. It has a documented history as a conservative operation owned and run by GOP political consultants and lobbyists with deep ties to corporate interests in Alabama.

According to a 2019 Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) story, Yellowhammer was founded in 2011 by a political consultant named Cliff Sims, who also served as the site’s CEO. Later revelations showed that two extremely well-connected lobbyists, Tim Howe and John Ross, were co-owners of Yellowhammer.

In January 2011, Howe and Ross became principals of an influential new lobbying firm, Swatek, Azbell, Howe & Ross. At the time, Ross was the executive director of the Alabama Republican Party, a position Howe also previously held. Their firm disclosed numerous clients that included prominent Alabama corporations, trade associations and advocacy groups.

It wasn’t known until 2014 that Howe and Ross were — in the words of the CJR story — the “benefactors” of Yellowhammer. This revelation came after Eddie Curran, an Alabama-based independent investigative journalist, published a leaked email with Yellowhammer CEO Sims seeking guidance from lobbyist Howe — referred to by Sims in the email as “Ghost Writer” — around a video that Sims was working on.

Yellowhammer’s ties to corporate power and the GOP were documented in the CJR story, which reported that Yellowhammer had received over $185,000 from advertising and in-kind donations from Republican PACs and political campaigns. Later investigations from NPR and Floodlight suggested links between Alabama Power, the state’s powerful electric utility, and Yellowhammer.

Yellowhammer has long been conservative in its orientation, but Curran told Truthout the site’s politics is not its main driver. “The issue with Yellowhammer is not its ideology, agree with it or not,” said Curran. “Think of the conservative politics as the bait. Yellowhammer’s true raison d’etre, so to speak — and for that matter, its business model — is as a pay-for-play operation.”

New Yellowhammer Owner Is a Republican and Business Consultant

In 2017, Yellowhammer’s founder, Sims, stepped down as CEO to join the Trump administration as assistant communications director for White House message strategy. In 2018, Sims was reassigned as senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Yellowhammer changed ownership in 2017 — Allison Ross, the wife of John Ross, became a co-owner — and then, in August 2023, another important new ownership change was announced.

Paul Shashy, a prominent Alabama political consultant, purchased the Yellowhammer media network, along with Thomas Harris, the former president and CEO of Merchant Capital. They moved Yellowhammer’s outlets into a new umbrella entity, YHN Media Group LLC.

Shashy was the campaign manager for both of Alabama’s sitting U.S. senators, Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville. A 2018 Yellowhammer profile noted that Shashy had the “trust” of “the state’s biggest businesses and top-tier Republican candidates” and stated that “Shashy is going to be shaping Alabama elections and influencing the entire political scene for the next half-century.”

Shashy is a principal of the consulting firm SR Communications, which counts the Alabama Senate Republican Caucus among its clients. Alabama public records, which list Shashy as an “LLC member” of the firm, show that SR Communications has a $60,000 contract through December 2024 to provide “communications services” for the Senate president pro tempore, who is currently Alabama State Sen. Greg Reed. In August 2023, Tim Howe, the former lobbyist who was Yellowhammer’s former owner and editor, was appointed as Reed’s chief of staff.

Public records reveal that numerous other Alabama Republican political candidates and judges have paid tens of thousands of dollars to SR Communications, Shashy’s firm, over the past year alone, and over $350,000 since 2021.

For example, 13 filings from December 2021 through January 2024 show Alabama Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth paid SR Communications a total of $21,100. In March 2024, Twinkle Andress Cavanaugh, Republican president of the Alabama Public Service Commission, filed a $10,000 payment to SR Communications for polling services. In November 2023, ProgressPAC, the Business Council of Alabama’s PAC, reimbursed SR Communications for a total of $2,089 as an “Expense Paid For GOTV In-Kind Contribution for HD16 Bryan Brinyark,” who was running for the Alabama House.

Filings show payments to SR Communications from numerous other candidates, ranging from state school board candidates to judges to members of the Alabama House of Representatives.

Shashy’s Yellowhammer co-owner, Thomas Harris, is also no minor figure. While leading Merchant Capital, it long ranked as Alabama’s top investment bank, managing over a billion dollars’ worth of government bonds, and was among the top financial underwriters in the nation.

Shashy, Yellowhammer and the Business Council of Alabama

A few months before Shashy purchased Yellowhammer, he was hired by the Business Council of Alabama.

“The Business Council of Alabama (BCA) is proud to announce the hiring of… Paul Shashy with SR Communications as political strategist,” said a March 2023 statement. Yellowhammer also wrote up the news.

As Truthout previously reported, the BCA is a statewide business association whose core 15-member governing leadership is composed of some of Alabama’s most powerful corporations, including the state’s biggest bank, electric utility and health care company. The BCA’s larger 135-member board includes representatives from automakers Toyota, Honda and Mercedes.

The BCA is a key player coordinating the statewide campaign against the UAW and autoworker unionization in Alabama. It started an anti-UAW website and has published anti-union op-eds. The BCA is also closely allied with Governor Ivey in resisting autoworker unionization. The BCA is one of Ivey’s top donors, and key corporations within the BCA governing leadership are also top Ivey donors. Top staffers of the Ivey administration formerly worked for the BCA.

Alabama’s Katie Britt was the CEO and president of the BCA from 2019 to 2021, after which she successfully ran for the U.S. Senate in a campaign managed by Shashy.

Yellowhammer coverage of the UAW has been hostile, using language that frames the union as villainous. For example, a March 4 op-ed by Clay Scofield, who stepped down last year as the majority leader in the Alabama Senate to work for the BCA, was titled “Even a small dose of labor union snake oil could prove poisonous to Alabama’s economy.”

An April 3 story by a staff writer on UAW President Shawn Fain was titled “Union boss escalates attacks on Governor Kay Ivey in tirade at North Carolina rally,” and referred to Fain’s “assault” on “Alabama’s Mercedes-Benz leadership, Governor Kay Ivey and the Business Council of Alabama.”

An April 9 story uncritically recited Alabama House Majority Leader Scott Stadthagen’s message that the “UAW’s Alabama expansion is an attempt to hijack state’s success.” The April 25 op-ed by Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter that Kay Ivey cited warned about “the UAW’s trail of destruction” and its “legacy of corruption, destruction and usury.”

The list could go on. None of these articles appear to disclose that they were published while Yellowhammer’s owner is, according to the most recent publicly available records, working for the BCA, the group that is coordinating the statewide campaign, in close alliance with Kay Ivey, against autoworker unionization in the state.

In contrast, Yellowhammer’s coverage of the BCA is much rosier, with uncritical staff write-ups on BCA events and initiatives that essentially parrot the subjects they cover, whether that be the BCA members or BCA-allied politicians.

Truthout reached out over email to Yellowhammer News, Paul Shashy and the Business Council for Alabama for comment but did not receive responses from them.

“Corrupt” and “Shifty”?

All this brings us back to Kay Ivey invoking Yellowhammer in her campaign against autoworker unionization and the BCA reposting Ivey’s quip about the UAW being “corrupt, shifty and a dangerous leech.”

What this Truthout analysis reveals is that this well-known Alabama “media” outlet publishing anti-union content referenced by politicians and business groups resisting the UAW is, in fact, owned by a prominent consultant who works for these same anti-union forces and who is deeply embedded within their wider political operation.

These conflicts surrounding Yellowhammer as a new source offer a window into the wider influence machine of Alabama conservatives and business groups. Nor should the irony be lost that Governor Ivey calls the UAW “corrupt” while invoking such news sources.

Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

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Read the entire article. It's great and relevant.

Glad the UAW and several other unions are supporting the protests.

why porkies get into philantropy? it seems that the answer is not "because they're philantropists!"

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2436414

Fae's also Autistic, like me.

Fae didn't know it was technically an American holiday till I told faer today for our therapy session.

Fun fact: the wife of the person that was executed became a CPUSA member (the wife of one of the leaders of the group)!

Her house was burned down and the FBI took all her papers from the wreckage, her burnt memoirs and all that, and whatever else she was writing.

All that history... lost.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2435724

Check it out.

Only nine minutes long.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2435607

Check it out.

About 40 minutes long.

You can just listen to it while you're doing other things.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2427667

Shawn Fain does give me hope.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2426220

Your thoughts on the article?

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2426198

Read this article.

It's great.

And not too long.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2425113

We have to stop Project 2025...

But I feel powerless at times.

After the conclusion of the 7th Congress, the Danish Communist Party will continue its pressure on politicians and stockholders to end their support for the state [occupying Palestine]. We will increase our struggle for a ceasefire now, for a release of detainees and hostages now and for humanitarian aid to reach the needy now. We realize these will only be the firsts steps on a long road, a road that in the end will lead to a free Palestine, free from apartheid.

The DKP is not alone in the struggle for a free Palestine. The Palestinian people are not alone. The party is part of the movement which has taken the streets of Danish towns and cities. Danish arms factories have been blockaded. The boycott of [Zionism], from a stop for [Zionist] groceries to rejecting the masking of genocide with songs, is stronger than ever before.

We see a unity in that struggle which gives us hope. The Danish Communist Party will build upon that unity and from our Congress will reach out to all around us with the demand: for a “free Palestine, from the River to the Sea.”

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2340051

Yeesh

Today Marks 133 rd Birth Anniversary of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, Father of Indian Constitution, Architect of Modern India, Greatest Of All Time, Founder of Navayana Buddhism, Remarkable figure in fighting for Annihilation of Sanatana, Casteism, and Varma System

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2263203

The article:

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I love driving. I know driving is kind of evil. But I love it. I love my stupid little car—a 2015 Volkswagen Golf TDI. It’s diesel. It gets 45 miles per gallon. It’s a 6-speed stick shift. It was cheap (due to Volkswagen recalling every diesel they sold after being caught doing really evil stuff to cheat the emissions standards of the U.S., and then needing to offload all those cars) and it goes fast and is tiny and I love zipping around country corners and pretending I’m a racecar driver (while remaining at a reasonable speed, of course; I would never break the law). Vroom vroom.

But over the last few years, driving has become a much more miserable experience for me. I hope not to negate my own responsibility here, but, I think, it’s not that I’ve changed, it’s that everything else has: every car around me is suddenly humongous, all of their headlights seem designed to blind me and cause me to crash into a telephone poll, and, worst of all, the people behind the wheel of these humongous and bright cars seem to actively want to kill me, and, presumably, everyone else on the road too.

People seem to agree that drivers have gotten worse in the last few years, that headlights have gotten too bright, and that cars have gotten too big and dangerous. And yet, many, many people keep buying these huge, dumb cars, despite the fact that they cost way too much money. The average car price is now $47,000. That is, frankly, insane.

Perhaps the pandemic made people worse at driving and more prone to antisocial behavior; perhaps some people are affected by Long Covid and cannot think as clearly as they barrel down the road. Perhaps people are more stressed and depressed and taking that out on everyone.

All those things are probably true. But I think they’re also all related—they sit under the umbrella of a culture designed to atomize us into machines indifferent to (or even actively seeking pleasure in) death and destruction. Cars and driving are not the cause of this problem; rather they are the most effective tool to enact a purposeful societal violence. Which is what, in many ways, they’ve always been. We’ve simply made those tools much more effective at doing their jobs recently. If we have any hope of challenging our ever-more-insane car culture, we first must correctly identify the problem.

As the United States has grown ever-more reliant on cars, there’s been a growing counter-movement. Young people seem to want cars less these days; they prefer living in cities with public transit. Organizations that promote things like adding bike lanes and redesigning streets to make them less car-centric have sprouted up in nearly every midsize and large American city. And while these movements are commendable, they’re not very successful: America’s streets are more dangerous for pedestrians now than they’ve been in 40 years. The number of pedestrians killed by cars has increased by 77 percent (!!!) just since 2010.

How can it be that fewer people value cars and driving at the same time that our culture becomes more car-centric and less pedestrian friendly? It’s probably because we’ve mis-identified the source of the issue at hand. Saying cars are the root of America’s social rot is like saying missiles are the cause of war. Violence is the point of war, not an unintended consequence; and missiles are the tool through which that violence is carried out. And violence is the point of our transportation system in the United States; and cars are the tool through which that violence is carried out.

We often hear the story that the interstate highway system was constructed without regard for urban communities, especially Black communities—that the suburbs and their attendant roads were made for white people and that the destruction of cities and the wealth and culture they contained was an unnecessary and evil consequence of that creation. But that’s not really what happened. Our car culture was built by our government with the explicit intent to isolate people from one another; the objective was to destroy community.

As I wrote in my book How to Kill a City, the suburbs were envisioned as a way to break solidarity. In the 1940s, there were growing movements (gay, feminist, cross-racial, anti-capitalist, pro-union, etc.) in American cities. The suburbs helped solve that problem with a carrot and stick.

White people got the carrot (surprise surprise)—they were gifted very cheap land and mortgages and cars and the wealth that those things created in exchange for their politics and communities and identities. “No man who owns his house and lot can be a communist,” William J. Levitt, the creator of the prototypical suburb Levittown said. “He has too much to do.”

And People of Color got the stick—their communities and wealth and the brewing radicalism within those communities were all destroyed by the highways rammed through them. Which, again, was not an unintended consequence, but the exact point. Joseph Mccarthy (of the McCarthy era and many other bad things), actually got his start as a shithead by linking urbanism and multifamily housing to communism, and encouraging the destruction of all of those things to prevent the destruction of capitalism.

(As an aside, gentrification functions in a largely similar way to suburbanization in terms of reifying individualist politics and culture: once cities were hollowed out, white people were encouraged to move back into them, but now with suburbanized values, thus further entrenching the geography of individualism (for more on all this, read my book, as well as Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind).

But the question remains: if suburbanization and highways and cars were always tools to reinforce this system of individualism and stratification, then why has driving suddenly gotten so much worse? (And by most accounts it really has: 54 percent of Americans think driving is more miserable now than before the pandemic).

Well, if we can consider the car of the mid-1900s one of the most effective tools/weapons of industrial post-war capitalism, we might now consider the modern car an updated technology for our new-ish era of capitalism. Today it's not so much the physical landscape that needs destroying, but the remaining social bonds that tie us together and the institutions that once fostered those bonds (schools, workplaces, unions, government agencies, etc.).

This is an era of constant competition—steady, full-time work replaced by the gig economy in which we are all fighting each other as independent entities for the same slice of the pie. And that competition can only occur through hyper-individualism. Cars (along with several other powerful technologies, such as, I’d argue, the DSM 😛) are the perfect tool to accomplish this task.

In a really great essay on cars and neoliberalism, Patrick McCarthur, building on the work of psychologist Zygmunt Bauman, argues that our age of capitalism is a “hunter’s utopia” in which a population’s collective ideals of progress are replaced by individualist ideals of survival. Any and all progress is now measured by how good we are at surviving the system in which we are now trapped (and then we call this state of survival mode “freedom”).

“...everyone must continue to hunt to survive, even if they are not really hunters,” McCarthur writes. “Thus, in a neoliberal framework, people have the freedom to be anyone, but the social system carries the assumption that everyone must have the same relative requirements and expectations.”

We’re all free to hunt as we please, but we all must hunt, and we’re all in competition for the same boar, or deer, or whatever (IDK I’ve never hunted). Which creates a kind of arms race—if we must fight each other to survive, we will begin an obsessive search for the perfect tools and strategies to outperform one another (this is starting to sound a lot like The Hunger Games).

And so it’s no surprise that cars have gotten bigger and more dangerous; it’s no coincidence that these bright-ass headlights are made without any regard for other people—because our age of capitalism requires us to be in a constant battle with each other. Who cares if your car kills kids and blinds drivers? That’s the point. Better I survive than you.

All the way back in the year 2000, when SUVs were first becoming popular, automakers essentially admitted this: they told the New York Times that people were no longer wanting to be “other-oriented”and thus no longer wanted to buy cars associated with others (think: families and minivans), and instead were becoming “self-oriented”—less social, and more fearful of crime and society itself. Big, dangerous cars like SUVs became the preferred tools of a completely self-focused era.

In a more recent Times article, citing an AAA survey, the paper pondered how a large percentage of drivers these days could admit to enacting aggressive and illegal behavior behind the wheel (speeding, running red lights, tailgating), while simultaneously disapproving of those behaviors in others. Given the context of the hunter’s utopia we live in, the answer becomes clear—people will do anything to make their driving more aggressive and effective at enacting violence, but don’t like the idea that others could too, not because there’s a moral problem with that, but because it threatens their dominance in the hunt.

In 2017, I was one of many people nearly killed by James Alex Fields as he rammed his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville. In addition to giving me terrible PTSD, it also gave me a hatred of Dodge Challengers. It’s no coincidence Fields drove this very American, very muscle-y car. It’s no coincidence that it, along with the Dodge Charger, are the cars most closely associated with the U.S. Military. And it’s no coincidence that fascists, ever the bleeding edge of capitalism, are increasingly using cars as weapons against protestors: cars have become tools of war, and fascists were the first to capitalize on this fact.

But now we’ve all been drafted into the battle, and we’ve all been forced to fight.

My car will be above 100k miles soon, and I’ll likely have to get a new one in the next year or so. Part of me wants another fun, zippy, small car, one that allows me to feel the road, the outside world. But, I don’t know. I might go with something safer and more practical—something that allows me to effectively compete.