What did you expect? Are you really surprised? I won’t call him a hero, Micah, though I’m sure many will. What he did was adventurist and provocative, and has put other lives, especially black lives, in serious danger as the police get set to overreact. Trayvon Martin = No conviction Sandra Bland = No conviction Kathryn Johnson = No conviction Sean Bell = No conviction Eric Garner = No conviction Rekia Boyd = No conviction Amadou Diallo = No conviction Mike Brown = No conviction Junabu Gray = No conviction Kenneth Chamberlain = No conviction Travares McGill = No conviction […]

Happy Slave-owners revolt day, everyone. Remember, the British Empire abolished slavery in 1831, 34 years before the U. S. All other things being equal (a large caveat), had the American Revolution failed, slavery would have ended 34 years sooner. I’ve skipped a couple of weeks in my weekly blog because after Orlando and slogging through the acrimonious divisions in the Sanders movement, I didn’t know what to say. I was discouraged, I suppose also because I kept holding out the hope that Bernie could win the nomination. But discouragement is one of those weapons the ruling class uses to keep […]

Revolutions are about power, about working people taking control of the future. Bernie’s campaign has achieved more power for working people than any movement in years, involving millions of people fighting for Socialism! And, while not winning the election outright, he more importantly blazed a path that shows how to have a largely peaceful (that depends on the ruling class), democratic revolution. We can do this, comrades! It’s now clear to me that from the beginning, Bernie’s vision of a path to power was through the Democratic Party. Where would he/we be if he decided in May 2015 to run […]

I came this close to buying a ticket to Chicago today for the People’s Summit next week, but the I Ching said “It does not further one to go anywhere.” Only half kidding. Plus I’ve been facing health issues which stress won’t help. Why did I want go so much? Our movement is in a crucial phase, as it always is. Perhaps Democracy for America is a good model for how to turn Bernie’s campaign into an ongoing movement. DFA came out of Howard Dean’s campaign in 2004. It’s a testament to the democracy of that organization that Dean came […]

We may be closer to this revolution thing than we think. It’s pretty clear that if there was a nationwide one-person-one vote election, Bernie Sanders would win a majority. So, if Bernie doesn’t get the nomination, the will of the majority is not being served by the broken and undemocratic election system we have. Don’t we have a mandate to demand that the entire electoral system be revamped along the lines of the much more democratic European parliamentary model  — no electoral college, one day of nationwide voting, proportional representation, no outside money? Here’s a thought to take to Chicago, […]

One of the most important contributions of the Sanders campaign has been the exposure to millions of people, especially young people, of the highly undemocratic nature of U. S. society. Those activists who’ve been around for a while must each of us had our moments when we realized that our 5th grade American History wasn’t too accurate. For me, it was the mis-named Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964, which wasn’t about free speech so much as it was about the right to raise money on campus to support the Civil Rights struggle in the south, particularly the voting […]

Michael Moore said recently in the context of the Flint water crisis that the auto workers sit-down strikes in 1936-37 in Flint created the middle class. Out of the Flint stikes came the CIO, which immeasurable empowered workers in their fight for a living wage. An interestingly ironic corollary to this notion is that this strike and thereby the development of the middle class was led by the Communist Party USA, and some allied groups such as the Socialist Party, the Socialist Worker’s Party, the IWW, and the League for Industrial Democracy (which founded SDS).  Of these, the Communist Party […]

It’s terrific that our Bernie revolution has brought the concept of socialism back into the national political dialogue. If we were to do nothing further, this would still be huge, as they say. What we haven’t done yet is incorporate the essential concepts of Marxism into our discussions. The vicious attack of anti-communism that started in the 50s has everyone scared to say the word Marx. A lot of people have even come to blame Marx for the failures and crimes of the late Communist movement, which is sort of like blaming John Locke for the extremism of the thermadorian […]

If by some bizarre fluke of the electoral process, Bernie is denied the nomination, we need to think about our next steps. The whole brouhaha over Bust or Blue is a reactionary distraction which only helps the ruling class. As Robert Reich so artfully put it early on, the ruling class is still the ruling class. They don’t give up easily. Our task, win or lose, is to unite our movement and consolidate the power we have achieved. The choices we make regarding what to do or how to vote should not be seen as individual decisions, as strongly as […]

How does he do it? How many times have we thought this, said this, or heard this? How does he do it. An under-appreciated aspect of the Sanders campaign is its living contradiction to ageism. He’s great on ending racism and sexism for the most part, some ways to go, but what he is manifesting to the world is a 74 year old man with the energy of a 25 year old. Is he on amphetamine, like Kennedy? I wouldn’t blame him. (I used to like that speed stuff). Most likely it’s the energy of the people. There is nothing […]