The Debut of Our Revolution: Great Potential. But.

While Bernie Sanders was doing a brilliant job of ripping into the Trans-Pacific Partnership during the livestreamed launch of the Our Revolution organization on Wednesday night, CNN was airing a phone interview with Hillary Clinton and MSNBC was interviewing Donald Trump’s campaign manager.

 

That sums up the contrast between the enduring value of the Bernie campaign and the corporate media’s fixation on the political establishment. Fortunately, Our Revolution won’t depend on mainline media. That said, the group’s debut foreshadowed not only great potential but also real pitfalls.

 

Even the best election campaigns aren’t really “movements.” Ideally, campaigns strengthen movements and vice versa. As Bernie has often pointed out, essential changes don’t come from Congress simply because of who has been elected; those changes depend on strong grassroots pressure for the long haul.

 

The Heart of Order

He’d left the water running, flooding neighbors’ apartments. He’d been running around outside naked. By the time police arrived, he was standing in the window of his fourth-floor apartment on Farwell Avenue — a few blocks from where I live in the diverse, unpredictable Chicago neighborhood called Rogers Park — threatening to jump.

He pointed his finger at the cops, pretending he had a gun. “Fuck the police,” he said. The standoff lasted four hours. 

But eventually he capitulated. The forces of sanity held sway. He was taken to a hospital. No one was hurt. (Phew-w-w!) And life in Rogers Park moved on.

US Okay With Surgical Strikes on Yemen Hospitals

  

2016 Pre-election Citizens Grassroots Congress of Central Ohio

CITIZENS GRASSROOTS CONGRESS Set the 2017 people's agenda for Central Ohio by attending the Citizens Grassroots Congress 2016!

Sunday, September 11, 1-5 PM Whetstone Library 3909 N. High St. (43214)

Representatives of community organizations are invited to attend the September Pre-Election, 2016 Citizen’s Grassroots Congress, which will unite community organizations in goals and action to help shape the agenda for Central Ohio’s future from the bottom up! 

Don't leave the future of greater Columbus to current out-of-touch public officials and elite titans. Attend the Citizens Grassroots Congress and help set the Central Ohio agenda at the street level! We want to know what you think are the most important issues for activists to collaborate on between now and the November election.

Film Review: Florence of the Trachea: Go With the Flo

Meryl Streep

British director Stephen Frears’ latest biopic, about wannabe chanteuse Florence Foster Jenkins (the much Oscar-ed and “much-er” Oscar-nommed Meryl Streep), is a winning motion picture on many levels. Florence Foster Jenkins is at all times highly entertaining and occasionally downright hilarious. Based on the real life, eponymous Jenkins, it is a saga about a woman with limited (if any) vocal talent who somehow managed to pursue a career singing classical music. Let’s take a look at some of the dimensions Florence Foster Jenkins explores.

The stylish-looking film shot by London-born director of photography Danny Cohen (who was Academy Award-nominated for 2010’s The King’s Speech) has a “veddy” English sense of class. Florence makes it abundantly clear that Jenkins was a member of the 1% whose wealth enabled her, through a variety of ruses ranging from audience padding to influence peddling - of critics, elite figures in the rarified world of classical music, such as vocal coaches, music hall impresarios and the  renowned conductor Arturo Toscanini (John Kavanagh), etc. - to buy her way onstage.

RIP Rosie: Of canines, epilepsy, kids and cannabis

Black and white dog's face

They called her the luckiest dog in the world, or so read the ad for an adorable puppy who had just been rescued from a kill shelter in Athens County and was now residing at a shelter in Columbus. We visited her on New Year’s Day 2010. My husband knew if he put her in my arms, I’d be hooked, and I was. We took her home and named her Rosie for the Buckeye’s glorious Rose Bowl victory that same day.

Rosie grew into a spotted black and white mutt about the size of a border collie. She was an athletic Frisbee dog: no toss too long, too crooked or too high. Like all dogs, she chased squirrels and barked at mailmen. She ran through the woods scaring up birds and sniffed deeply in the grass for scents only a dog could know. She led the proverbial dog’s life.

Nonviolent Revolt in the Twenty-First Century

I sometimes wonder whether one of the ways in which 'Amercian exceptionalism' manifests is that many US scholars and others are unable to consider the contributions of those who are not from the USA. For example, I routinely read about studies of Martin Luther King Jr. and his associates (such as strategist James Lawson) in relation to nonviolence while the much more insightful and vastly greater contributions of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on the same subject are largely ignored by US scholars (although not, for example, by Professor Mary E. King, one of the best in the field).

I have just read another book that falls into this trap: 'This is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt is Shaping the Twenty-first Century' http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/book/hardcover/this-is-an-uprising/9781568587332

The shame of Milkwaukee

 

Now it is Milwaukee. On Saturday, a car with two African-American men was stopped for “suspicion.” The men fled, the policeman pursued, and the driver, reportedly armed, was shot and killed.

And Milwaukee exploded. Angry crowds confronted police, set fires, threw rocks. At least half-dozen businesses — including a grocery store, a gas station and an auto parts shop — were robbed or destroyed. The Saturday shooting was part of a weekend filled with violence in Milwaukee. Five people were shot and killed overnight Friday.

Milwaukee law mandates an investigation of any police shooting. Immediately, focus goes to the harsh relations between police and the community. But to understand the reaction to the shooting, it is necessary to go much deeper.

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