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Plant the Seeds for a Progressive Future in San Diego: Support Students for Economic Justice

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In the age of Trump I have heard many a progressive ponder: “What went so wrong?” How in 2017 can we be fighting and, in many cases, refighting battles over basic economic rights and civil liberties? Whatever happened to women’s rights? How can we still be arguing about whether or not climate change exists? How did things get this bad?

In the political realm, as I have written here many times, a big part of the problem is that the Democrats have no bench of talented, young candidates. Indeed, rather than appealing to young voters and activists, it sometimes seems like the party is bent on alienating them. We saw this with the disdain heaped upon the idealism of millennial Sanders supporters in some quarters, and we can still see it in the national party’s frustrating inability to reinvent itself by bringing in new energy.   [Read more…]

On Labor and Climate Justice: ‘An Injury to One is an Injury to All’

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Last week I was proud to see that some of my brothers and sisters in San Diego’s local labor movement made the news by protesting Donald Trump’s speech at the North America’s Building Trades Union’s (NABTU) National Legislative Conference in Washington D.C. As I have written before in this space, this kind of dissent inside the trades is crucial to stopping Trump from dividing and conquering labor and creating a serious rift between the labor and climate justice movements.

Fortunately, as Kris LaGrange reported of Trump’s reception by the trades at the conference, he may have been met with more boos than cheers, despite his efforts to curry favor with this more traditionally conservative union group: “Even though Sean McGarvey, the President of the NABTU clapped at every Trump comment like a drunken seal, it was obvious that the house was divided on the support for the most unpopular ‘President’ in the history of the United States.”   [Read more…]

The American Epidemic of Quiet Desperation Continues Unabated

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America is an increasingly unhappy place and much of what we are currently doing politically is bound to make us feel worse. And while our malaise is surely not just the product of the Trump presidency, it is highly likely that his policies will continue our negative trajectory. As the Guardian recently reported, “Happiness in the US is declining and is expected to continue on a downward path, with Donald Trump’s policies forecast to deepen the country’s social crisis.”

This tale of woe is brought to you not by a gang of depressed liberals, but rather by a UN report, which is “based on Gallup polls of self-reported wellbeing as well as perceptions of corruption, generosity, and freedom [–] this year has a special focus on the ‘story of reduced happiness’ in the US.” According to their report, the US is now ranked 14th, far below the much happier Scandinavian countries, and has rapidly “slid down the international rankings on wellbeing.”   [Read more…]

Hungry and Homeless in College

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Over the more than two decades I have spent teaching at the college level, the vast majority of that time at San Diego City College, I have seen a little bit of everything. From the homeless student sleeping in Balboa Park who ended up at USC to the single mother living in her car with her kids who still got every assignment in on time before transferring to SDSU, there have been far too many stories of triumphs against all odds for me to recount.

Along with those stories come sadder tales like the cab driver supporting his family who almost finished but got knocked out of the game by an unexpected financial challenge or the lost kid who, even though you tried to reach out, lost the battle to despair and commits suicide. When you work at a community college it humbles you quickly. No matter how well you teach, how hard you try, you soon realize that there are so many things out of your control, and that, despite your best efforts, you just can’t help everyone.   [Read more…]

A Deeply Immoral Budget

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They say that budgets are moral documents, and if that is the case, then the Trump administration just released the most immoral budget in the history of the United States.

While there are many things to condemn in Trump’s depraved plan, starting with the way it pays for a completely unnecessary, massive increase in funding for the military industrial complex by eviscerating programs that help the poor, fund education, and maintain the social fabric of the country, there is still something worse than all that contained within it.   [Read more…]

Where’s The Love? Dehumanization, American Style

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The last time I saw Hunter S. Thompson speak before he died, he threw out a good line about how in the post-AIDS world, the New Right began to flourish because people were afraid to touch each other. And how Thompson mused, can we ever expect people to stand together in any other way when they are afraid to do that?

Now, years later, what seemed like a bit of insightful hyperbole appears to be backed up by social research.   [Read more…]

The National Democratic Party is Missing in Action

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By Jim Miller

Many progressives were upset after the national Democratic party leadership recruited Obama’s Labor Secretary Tom Perez to block Minnesota’s Keith Ellison in the race for DNC chair and even more dismayed when Ellison lost very narrowly in the second round of voting.  

While Perez immediately made Ellison Deputy Chair and did what he could to foster unity, it was evident to numerous observers that putting in a guy who, despite a pretty solid record on policy, supported the TPP and clearly represented the interests of the Clinton wing of the party was a mistake.  

The bad feelings weren’t helped by the fact that there was a reprehensible smear campaign waged against Ellison or that big money donors had been stomping their feet and threatening to leave the party if Ellison won.     [Read more…]

The Real Fake News

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Fact-checking is a feeble response in a world where what we think we see and know is more important than the actual truth.

Donald Trump’s continued attacks on the American news media as “the enemy of the American people” have generated quite a stir in mainstream media circles as one might expect. And surely there is good reason to be disturbed by this administration’s punitive stance towards the press.

But what virtually none of the analysis of Trump’s attacks on “fake news” or Steve Bannon’s assaults on what he calls “the corporatist global media,” which both he and the president label “the opposition,” note is the irony that while the new regime is attacking the power of the corporate media, they are also busy installing corporatists in nearly every position of power and pushing an agenda that is every right-wing billionaire’s wet dream.   [Read more…]

Inequality in America: Incomes Collapsing for Bottom 50% as Top 1% Soars

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While most of us were busy watching the Trump administration and their crack team of “populist” millionaires light the world on fire, a new study released by Thomas Piketty, Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, and Emmanuel Saez underlined the fact that the steep costs of our historic level of economic inequality are being borne by those at the bottom of the economic system, particularly here in the United States. As the Market Watch story on this new research outlined:

In the U.S., between 1978 and 2015, the income share of the bottom 50% fell to 12% from 20%. Total real income for that group fell 1% during that time period.   [Read more…]

Hiking as Resistance

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Over the last few weeks I’ve had the pleasure of speaking at a variety of forums along with folks from other activist groups about what needs to be done in the age of Trump. During one of these events at Grossmont College, I was struck by something a colleague of mine who leads nature expeditions for the Sierra Club said about his students and their relationship or lack thereof to the natural world.

Ten years ago, he observed, about half of the students he dealt with had had some experience hiking in the backcountry, roaming the desert, or visiting a state or national park, but that number has been consistently shrinking over the last decade or so.

He told a few stories of students on their first venture into the wild being afraid of getting attacked by mountain lions. Initially many of them are not sure what to do or how to act outside of the city. The experience, he explained, is uncomfortable for them at first, but, after some reassurance and education, they open their eyes to the wonder of the world.   [Read more…]

How Not to Be the Resistance: Local Democratic Party and Union Leaders Fail Early Test

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Last week I dedicated my column to outlining how, despite the emergence of inspiring protests in the streets and amongst the progressive base, many key Democratic figures in Congress and in the national leadership of the building trades unions still didn’t seem to understand what time it was. Sadly, it only took a few more days to see a couple of stunning examples of how not to be the resistance right here in San Diego.

On January 26th, Jessica Hayes, the newly elected chair of the San Diego County Democratic Party, took advantage of her presence at a forum hosted by the Democrats for Equality entitled “#The Resistance: Women Lead the Way” to attack not the dangerous plutocrats running the country, but a key element of the Democratic base: unions.

The last few weeks have also held its challenges for local labor leadership as protesters, including Donna Frye and Irene McCormack, picketed outside the monthly delegates meeting at which there was no mention whatsoever of the elephant in the room, the lawsuits filed against Labor Council President Mickey Kasparian and what this means for local labor at this perilous moment in the history of the movement.   [Read more…]

Feckless Democrats and Business Unionists Fail Early Trump Era Tests

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Making Deals with the Devil

As inspiring as the big marches were last week, it didn’t take long for evidence to emerge that there are still plenty of folks in the Democratic party and elsewhere who just don’t get what time it is. As I wrote on Martin Luther King Jr. day, it was dismaying to see prominent Democrats like Senator Cory Booker and twelve of his Big Pharma funded friends vote against Bernie Sanders’ effort to reduce prescription drug prices before the inauguration.

And that low bar was then pushed a bit further down when ex-Democratic Vice Presidential candidate and consummate corporate tool, Joe Lieberman, gleefully presented Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos while slamming American public education at her confirmation hearing. At that same hearing, Lieberman also failed to disclose that his law firm represents Trump.   [Read more…]

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