Dollars and Democracy

Dollars and Democracy

https://calbudgetcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/Chris-Hoene_The-Womens-Foundation-of-California-Womens-Policy-Institute-Retreat_07.30.2018.pdf

Abramsky lecture

Here is the link to Sasha Abramsky's talk:

 to Sasha's talk. This should be it. https://youtu.be/HT5huCGpJ-U

Friends of the Library Presents: Sasha Abramsky youtu.be Friends of the Library Sacramento State Guest Speaker November 8, 2018 Jumping at Shadows: The Triumph of Fear and the End of the American Dream

The Poor People's Campaign

Our seminar will be considering Rev. Barber and the Poor People's Campaign- either this Friday or next, Dec. &. 

Looking back since our official launch last December, it’s clear just how much we’ve accomplished in a year. We pulled off the most expansive wave of civil disobedience in recent history to draw attention to our country’s distorted moral narrative and called international attention to voter suppression, systemic racism, militarism, ecological devastation, and poverty in the USA. 

We are proud of what we’ve done together, but we are not content. 

Voter suppression across the country, from Georgia to North Dakota, carefully targeted gerrymandering, reckless voter purges, and voter ID laws targeting Brown and Black people (one of which, in Texas, was passed within hours of the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act) all swung elections and exposed the racism corroding our democracy. Just yesterday Mississippians were asked to vote for a woman who jokes about hangings while she defends policies that are strangling white, Black and Brown people who are poor. It should never have gotten this far.

We can’t afford to wait for 2020. This, right now, is our time to build the movement we’re going to need to restore and expand voting rights-- the only moral answer to the abuse of power we saw on election day.

As long as our vote is suppressed, nothing will change. The rights of LGBTQ folks will never be fully realized, families will still be separated at the border, and health care will never be universal.We’re delivering our full demands to Congress next Wednesday December 5 in Washington, D.C. so we can finally enact a moral agenda. We will also formally announce the  2019 Poor People’s Congress, which will bring us back to D.C. in June.

Rev. WillIam Barber

General Motors Layoffs

GM LAYOFFS: President Donald Trump said Monday that he was "very tough" with General Motors CEO Mary Barra Monday following the auto manufacturer's announcement that it will shutter five North American plants and lay off 14,700 workers. Trump said he told Barra that GM "better get back in there soon, that's Ohio." (One of the shuttered plants is in Lordstown, Ohio.)

Trump's "really good feeling" in February from GM "coming back" seems to have dissipated now that the company says his tariffs on foreign metals have cost them an estimated $1 billion. Ford, which is estimated to have lost a similar sum from the metals tariffs, announced last month that it, too, will soon downsize.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who is contemplating a presidential bid, said in a written statement that the layoffs represented "corporate greed at its worst," noting that they came after GM received "a massive tax break from last year's GOP tax bill" and that they followed GM's decision to build its new SUV in Mexico. The layoff announcement prompted auto workers in Canada to walk off the job Monday, according to Reuters. More from POLITICO here. 

Related read: "General Motors News From Ohio, Michigan Could Hurt Trump 2020 Bid," from Roll Call

Make P G & E a Public Utility

The potential bankruptcy of the California utility whose negligence likely plays a role in California’s wildfires is an opportunity for the public to gain control of the state’s energy destiny

Cal Fire found that three separate wildfires across the state in 2017 were caused by PG&E, and the utility could be liable for up to $12 billion in damages from more than 800 civil lawsuits., Mario Tama/Getty Images

There is strong evidence that the wildfires raging through California right now—killing at least 80 people, with at least an additional 1,000 missing as of November 18—have been sparked at least in part by the large investor-owned monopoly utility, PG&E. Further, PG&E’s apparent negligence and its consequences aren’t new. Cal Fire found that three separate wildfires across the state in 2017 were caused by PG&E, and the utility could be liable for up to $12 billionin damages from more than 800 civil lawsuits. With that backdrop, PG&E teeters on the brink of bankruptcy, and the California Public Utility Commission is now thinking of breaking up the utility. But the commission shouldn’t stop at breaking up PG&E. The public should take it over. That, in fact, is what should be happening with investor-owned utilities across the country: move them out of the hands of corporate power and into democratic, local control. PG&E is notorious for taking the money it receives from ratepayers and not putting adequate amounts of that money into its energy infrastructure. But it does pay its CEO, Geisha Williams, handsomely: $8.56 million in 2017, as devastating fires hit PG&E’s service area and as the utility was found negligent for a 2010 gas explosion that killed 8 people.

How Fake News is Produced

How fake news is produced.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/russia-meddling-disinformation-fake-news-elections.html

New York Times - Opinion Video. 

I recommend video 2: 7 rules of Propaganda

Keynesian Economics- What Happened to Greece ?

What is happening in the U.S.?

Time for Another Reinvention 

Socialist parties emerged as dynamic, powerful forces at the turn of the twentieth century. After decades of decline, can they revive themselves in the twenty-first?

Fred Block  November 9, 2018 

Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis speaks at the Brookings Institution. (Steve Purcell / Flickr) 

Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism
by Stephanie L. Mudge
Harvard University Press, 2018, 524 pp.

 

To understand the obstacles facing the left today, we can start with Yanis Varoufakis’s ill-starred turn as Greece’s Finance Minister. Varoufakis came to office with one overriding ambition: to free Greece from the austerity regime imposed by the European Community and the International Monetary Fund. His argument was straightforward. Greece needed substantial relief from a debt burden that could not possibly be repaid, and austerity made a return to economic growth impossible.

Varoufakis used traditional Keynesian arguments to offer his European interlocutors a win-win solution that would make possible renewed growth in Greece and eventual repayment of Greece’s pared-down foreign debt. Europe’s leaders would have none of it. Even social democratic ministers turned away, praising him for his cleverness, then joining with their more conservative counterparts to force neoliberal solutions on Greece. How did Keynesianism become utopian? How did social democrats learn to speak the language of neoliberalism? How, in short, did we get here?

These are the questions that Stephanie Mudge (a colleague of mine at U.C. Davis) seeks to answer in her challenging new book, Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism. Mudge transverses more than a century of European socialism to offer a persuasive and powerful explanation for the rise of what she terms “neoliberalized leftism” in both Europe and the United States. Along the way, she lays down a series of markers for other academics. First, she is working to revive serious analyses of political parties, treating them not simply as puppets in the hands of activists and donors but as sites where experts and intellectuals build coalitions that shape policy outcomes. It is imperative to look at who has been recruited by these parties to write the party platforms and formulate their economic programs. Second, she is trying to build a bridge between the social sciences and history by making individual biographies central to her narrative. She is here reacting against the bias towards structural analysis in sociology and political science, where all too often a focus on institutions renders individual people invisible.

The result is the kind of big book that has become increasingly rare in these times of tightly focused academic monographs. Drawing from history, sociology, political science, and political economy, Mudge has produced an account that transforms our understanding of how European and American left parties changed over the twentieth century and raises important questions about how the left must reinvent itself in the twenty-first.

Progressive Caucus Plans to Govern from the Left

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 

On Monday afternoon, just a block from the White House, a dozen of the country’s most liberal lawmakers gathered in the lobby of the AFL-CIO’s headquarters. The mood was jubilant as Reps. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.)—the co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus—introduced 10 new members of the group to the Washington press corps. A throng of reporters had come to see some of the Resistance’s brightest stars, like New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts’s Ayanna Pressley, together in the nation’s capital for the first time.

“The press is paying attention to us!” Jayapal said. “I like this!”

Representatives from the progressive groups MoveOn and Indivisible were there, too, eager to celebrate a group of new lawmakers who they view as closely aligned with the the priorities of liberal activists.

“This an opportunity for Democrats to have conversations within the party about what kind of party we’re going to be.”

The 2018 midterms have transformed the CPC from a caucus Pocan described as once having “weak, skinny arms” into a 90-member behemoth that makes up nearly 40 percent of all House Democratic membership. And there may be more to come—the CPC is floating invitations to a handful of other incoming freshmen who ran on progressive platforms. The House’s largest values-based caucus, which has never really exercised much voting or policy influence, might finally have enough sway to push an ambitious array of legislation that includes immigration reform, Medicare-for-All, and climate action.

Media Sources

One of the topics we have not had time to cover is the role of media.  Sasha Abramsky covers it some. I found an option.  Ken Cross instructor of the course on 10 Key Decisions posted this.
Use if you find it valuable.

Ken Cross

Media sites

• Communications sources: On my way to the CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations -https://ca.cair.com/sacval/) event on Saturday night last Fall 2017, I had an “epiphany” (be advised this is my one and only epiphany for the year. This is as good as it gets!). In the previous Friday Top 10 seminar the class talked about reliable media sources that report the “facts” in an unbiased manner. I was fortunate enough to have a captive audience of media people at our table at the CAIR event – the CEO/Publisher/Owner of N&R Publications, 2 editors, 3 writers (one was John Flynn, classmate Karen Flynn’s son), 3 media salesmen and an experienced nonprofit leader. Collectively they conservatively have over 125 years in print media and almost 500 years of life experience. I asked them to each list their top 5 communications sources on a 3x5 card without comparing notes. At the end I read their lists and we discussed the media sources. Here they are >

·       FiveThirtyEight (538) http://fivethirtyeight.com/

·       BBC (British Broadcasting Service) (Radio) http://www.bbc.com/

·       CALmatters https://calmatters.org/

·       Capitol Public Radio (CPR) (Radio) http://www.capradio.org/

·       Crooked Media Podcasts (Podcast) https://crooked.com/

·       Democracy Now! (Online TV) https://www.democracynow.org/

·       Moyers & Company (TV archives, online stories, newsletter & podcast) http://billmoyers.com/

·       National Public Radio (NPR) (Radio) http://www.npr.org/

·       News apps 

·       PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) (TV) http://www.pbs.org/

·       PBS Frontline (TV) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/

·       PBS News Hour (TV) https://www.pbs.org/newshour/

·       ProPublica (Online journalism, newsletters & podcasts) https://www.propublica.org/

·       The Atlantic (Magazine & online journalism) https://www.theatlantic.com/

·       The Axe Files with David Axelrod (Podcast) http://rss.cnn.com/services/podcasting/axe/rss

·       The Christian Science Monitor (Newspaper) https://www.csmonitor.com/

·       The Economist (Magazine) https://www.economist.com/

·       The Los Angeles Times (Newspaper) http://www.latimes.com/

·       The Nation (Weekly magazine) https://www.thenation.com/

·       The New York Times (Newspaper) https://www.nytimes.com/

·       The New Yorker (Magazine) https://www.newyorker.com/

·       The Sacramento News & Review (SN&R) (Weekly alternative newspaper) http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/home

·       The Wall Street Journal (Newspaper) https://www.wsj.com/

·       The Washington Post (Newspaper) https://www.washingtonpost.com/

·       Vice News (Online news) https://news.vice.com/en_us

How To Do Progressive Taxes in California

and fund the schools.

https://edsource.org/2018/california-needs-another-master-plan-to-close-the-education-equity-gap/

Wealthy in the U.S..

The Wealth of America's Three Richest Families Grew by 6,000% Since 1982

These three families own a combined fortune of $348.7 billion, which is 4 million times the median wealth of a US family.

November 2, 2018 Chuck Collins  

China and Trade.

Tomgram: Michael Klare, On the Road to World War III?

Posted by Michael Klareat 7:37am, October 30, 2018.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.

Includes analysis of U.S. trade war with China. 

Undocumented immigrants pay billions of dollars in federal taxes each year

Undocumented immigrants pay billions of dollars in federal taxes each year

Here’s how they do it.  Alexia Fernandez Campbell ( no relation) 

https://www.vox.com/2018/4/13/17229018/undocumented-immigrants-pay-taxes