Tidbits & Reader Response
June 23, 2012

- VICTORY The Triumphant Gay Revolution

- How to Pass an Anti-Torture Resolution in Your
  City   Guide (Margaret Power)

- Re: What Happens when Public Universities are Run
  by Robber Barons (Meredith Tax)

- Re: What's Needed at This Political Moment?  A
  Debate (Bill Shortell, Avram Barlowe)

- Re: Washington Post's Dana Milbank Pushes Lie
  About Van Jones & Occupy (Chris Lowe)

- Re: Tidbits and Announcements - June 19, 2012
  Southern Worker Now Online (Rev. Jack Zylman)

- Re: West Bank Diaries (David Spodick)

==========

Banner Days

Review by Rich Benjamin

VICTORY

The Triumphant Gay Revolution

By Linda Hirshman New York Times June 21, 2012

    Illustrated. 443 pp. Harper/HarperCollins
    Publishers. $27.99.

His dashing ascot billowing, his flat cap perched just
so (to hide his bald spot), the cleft-chinned Harry Hay
had some impressive head shots. As a student at
Stanford in the early 1930s, he had come out to his
classmates as "temperamental," code for "homosexual."
In 1934, having dropped out of Stanford and moved to
Los Angeles to try a career in pictures - and having
already begun to hone his identity as sensualist and
agitator - he joined the Communist Party. Around 1936,
he turned up at a Halloween party dressed as "the
demise of fascism." The other homosexual bons vivants
were stumped: none were terribly turned on to politics,
so none knew what Harry's costume meant. These men, and
others like them across America, had no core ideology,
no political groups to join, no leaders. Hay changed
that. In 1950, he helped create the Mattachine Society,
the country's first gay rights organization, and
demanded that the people it represented "be respected
for our differences, not for our sameness to
heterosexuals."

This year, the Human Rights Campaign, America's largest
advocacy and lobbying organization for gay, bisexual
and transgender rights, appointed Lloyd Blankfein, the
chief executive of Goldman Sachs, as the first national
corporate spokesman for its same-sex marriage campaign.
"Ameri-ca's corporations learned long ago that equality
is just good business and is the right thing to do,"
Blankfein says in a Web video. The organization also
bestowed on Goldman Sachs its 2012 "corporate equality
award."

How does a movement get from there to here - from Hay
to Blankfein? Linda Hirshman's "Victory: The Triumphant
Gay Revolution" sets out to explain, tracing the
history of gay rights from the early 20th century to
the present.

More at Times website

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/books/review/victory-by-linda-hirshman.html?pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print

==========

- How to Pass an Anti-Torture Resolution in Your City
Guide

Illinois Coalition Against Torture announces free HOW
TO PASS AN ANTI-TORTURE RESOLUTION IN YOUR CITY GUIDE.

In June 2012 the Illinois Coalition Against Torture
(ICAT) published a guide explaining how to pass an
anti-torture resolution in your city. The guide is
based on ICAT's successful efforts to work with
Alderman Joe Moore to get the City Council of Chicago
to pass the anti-torture resolution. In January 2012
the City Council of Chicago unanimously passed the
resolution against torture.  The resolution condemns
torture by the Chicago police, the housing of prisoners
in solitary confinement in state prisons, and the use
of torture by the U.S. government anywhere. Chicago is
the first city in the United States to approve an anti-
torture resolution.

ICAT hopes that other cities will also pass similar
resolutions.  This guide tells you how to do it.

For a copy of the How To Guide, please click on this
link: http://illinois.cat.wordprs.com

For more information, please contact the Illinois
Coalition Against Torture at
[log in to unmask]

Thank you .

Margaret Power

==========

- Re: What Happens when Public Universities are Run by
Robber Barons

Anyone who would like to read more on this subject
can't do better than Thorstein Veblen's 1918 study, The
Higher Learning In America: A Memorandum On the Conduct
of Universities By Business Men.  The more things
change, the more they stay the same.

meredith tax

==========

- Re: What's Needed at This Political Moment?  A Debate

Response to the Working Class Studies panel, as
reported by Betsey Leonard-Wright

What irritated me the most was the quote (maybe
misquote?); "Don't start with existing unions." Who is
she talking to? Those of us progressives already in
positions of responsibility in "existing unions?" There
are thousands of us. None of us think there is any one
"starting point." We are grateful for and supportive of
other movements, like Occupy and the Immokalee Workers.

It will be very difficult in this period to get the
phrase "middle class" out of the mouths of politicians.
The bulk of people who vote resonate to that phrase.
Union leaders are a different story. None of them
should be using that phrase, which condemns the working
poor to damnation. It's all of our job to drive that
term out of the goals of union leadership.

"Working Class," that huge majority which must work to
survive, is once again becoming broadly acceptable.

Full Employment, "Jobs for All" is the central plank of
a working class platform. Having a paid job is the
definition of self-respect in our society. Almost
everyone can work, and wants to work. An important
demand is to change the way people are hired.

IT'S NOT WHAT YOU KNOW, IT'S WHO YOU KNOW

That's the nature of employment today. 60% of workers
get their jobs thru personal contact. Poor people,
especially people of color don't know anybody hiring.
Affirmative Action has mostly outlived its usefulness,
and that's in a period when the gap between black and
white unemployment is widening again.

The answer is to pass a law that says all hiring,
public and private, must be done thru the government.
Experience, measurable ability, and first-come, first-
served will be the standards.

This is a color-blind demand that can energize poor
youth. The schools in poor neighborhoods are collapsing
because all the students know that education as a road
to a good job is a cruel joke for them.

This demand needs to be coupled with a demand for
Shorter Working Hours. There is no other route to full
employment in an economy that has reached such levels
of productivity.

Bill Shortell

===

I intend no disrespect to any of the speakers whose
words Betsy Leondear-Wright cites in her post.  Each of
them have made vital contributions. However, based on
what she shared, which surely doesn't include the full
discussion, I find their exchanges relevant but not
sufficiently grounded in evidence. The "facts" that are
presented - white participation in the civil rights
movement/the percentage of whites who voted for
Obama/the Republic Strike/immigrant protests - are
barely analyzed on their own terms and their
relationship to each other is not debated at all.

I don't especially agree with Herbert's views as stated
here, but I suppose that the other speakers'
disagreement with him is as much the product of their
ideology as it is it their organizing experience. For
me, it's on those who favor a more traditional approach
to what we used to call "the national question" to
prove its enduring validity through an analysis of
current events.

Avram Barlowe

==========

- Re: Washington Post's Dana Milbank Pushes Lie About
Van Jones & Occupy

So it appears that Dana Milbank is a lying piece of
excrement.

However, insofar as Van Jones argues that establishment
liberals and the progressive left should support Barack
Obama, in order to support Occupy Wall Street and the
national Occupy movement that sprang up in solidarity
with OWS, or even their values, he too is either being
disingenuous or mendacious.

Occupy is not pro-Obama as a movement.  It is opposed
to the Obama administration's entire banker-friendly
approach to the economic crisis and to his cozy
relationships with Wall Street.  It is opposed to the
corruption of national politics by big money of which
President Obama is a prime example, since political
contributions from Big Finance comprised about the same
proportion of his 2008 fundraising as his much- vaunted
small donations take.  It is outraged by the fact that
between those two sources of support, the president has
repeatedly chosen the banks and big corporations over
the people.

Many individuals in the Occupy movement or who support
it will nonetheless vote for the president in November,
because they see Mitt Romney as the same but worse and
think he will make life work.  Many others will not
vote for President Obama, because they see such a vote
as complicity in the corruption of the system and the
corporate domination they oppose.

In this, Occupy very much resembles the divisions among
the establishment liberals and progressive left that
Van Jones attacked, although the left side of Occupy
goes further than electorally oriented progressives.
The attitudes Jones attacked are very much Occupy
attitudes, just as much if not more so than those of
Occupiers and sympathizers willing to vote for the
president.

If some significant chunk of Occupy were to play the
role mirroring that of the Tea Party within the
Democratic Party, almost certainly they would organize
in opposition to the president, and in favor of running
primaries against Democrats who support his line of
politics or that of the Democratic Congressional
leadership.

So, Van Jones' attack on disenchanted liberals and
progressives is actually an attack on the Occupy
movement as well.

Moreover, his attack on both is misplaced.  The problem
is not with disenchanted attitudes, which are entirely
justified. The problem is the complicity of the
Democratic establishment with the corrupt domination
Occupy opposes, and the lack of moral courage in the
face of those forces shown by the administration and
the top Democratic leaders.

The problem is also the unwillingness or incapacity of
the pro-Obama progressive left, whom Jones presumably
represents in some sense, to articulate a persuasive
path to changing those facts of Democratic Party life
that would justify abandoning disenchantment.

Of course, that does not make Dana Milbank any less a
lying toady of the pro-1% forces in the DP.  It just
makes Van Jones a diagnostic symptom of the
continuation of the inept strategic drift and political
and moral bankruptcy that has characterized the
Democratic Party since the Reagan years.

The issue really isn't how people vote this year.  The
issue is, how can Democratic strategy and politics be
changed to align with the people, or how can the DP be
displaced? Right now I see no clear path to either, and
so yes, I'm disenchanted, as part of Occupy, and I
resent Van Jones trying to use my movement to promote
his support of the failed strategy.  He doesn't speak
for me or most of those I work with in Occupy Portland.

Chris Lowe Portland, Oregon

==========

- Re: Tidbits and Announcements - June 19, 2012 -
Southern Worker now online

For those of us in the South, this is great to get! I
appreciate the work you are doing on Portside. Keep
your left hand high!

Rev. Jack Zylman

==========

- Re: West Bank Diaries

Your anti-Israel animus is constantly busting out. The
fences/barriers have virtually ended the frequent
indiscriminate bombings. You don't have to exist under
that threat---look at Iraq and Afghanistan where the
bad guys do it against their own people (including
Shi'ite religious services and funerals). I almost hate
being on the same side as you (here).

David H. Spodick

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