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FOCUS: Nina Simone Was a Radical |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=59200"><span class="small">Chardine Taylor-Stone, Jacobin</span></a>
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Saturday, 24 April 2021 11:18 |
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Taylor-Stone writes: "Nina Simone is often remembered for her involvement in the civil rights movement. She was also engaged with the radical political currents of her age, including socialism."
Nina Simone. (photo: Jack Robinson/Getty Images)
Nina Simone Was a Radical
By Chardine Taylor-Stone, Jacobin
24 April 21
Nina Simone is often remembered for her involvement in the civil rights movement. She was also engaged with the radical political currents of her age, including socialism.
 ina Simone’s remark about not discussing fashion but “Marx, Lenin, and revolution” offers a glimpse into the daily political life of Simone away from her more well-known story as civil rights activist and musician. This “girls’ talk” took place with her friend and playwright Lorraine Hansberry — a conversation between two black women that, as Simone says, was not about men or clothes, but about the creative work they were producing and how they saw its role in the liberation of their community.
Referencing Hansberry’s autobiographical play To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, Simone later wrote a song with the same title in tribute to her friend and comrade after Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer at the tragically young age of thirty-four. This friendship and comradeship demonstrates how intimate conversations between political black women have the power to inspire. They take place away from the gaze of men, away from white people; they can be places of respite in which one can reenergize and rejoin the wider movement that often marginalizes and erases the political insights of black women.
To say Nina Simone has been “erased” would be absurd. She is one of the most celebrated musicians of the twentieth century. There’s no need to write another article, biography, or analysis of her political songs. But on the anniversary of her death, we can look at how the story of Simone’s political life is told, and who is telling it; at what they choose to include, and what they do, in fact, “erase.”
Nina Simone is often spoken about as a civil rights activist, and she was. But the civil rights movement encompassed many differing political views on what liberation looked like. Some, like the NAACP, wanted liberal reforms that were criticized for only being beneficial to the African American middle class. Black nationalists sought economic independence and a new black state, separate from racist white America, although it was arguably unclear what that new state would look like, beyond a black version of capitalism. As such, not all civil rights activists were referencing Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin as an example of the conversations they had with friends.
For a woman of fierce intelligence, talent, and brilliance, who knew exactly how she wanted to be heard through her music and performance, we can take this as a statement of purpose rather than as a passing comment. Nina Simone was telling us she was a communist, a comrade, a revolutionary.
Sometimes, black women artists, and especially musicians, who demonstrate some form of left-wing politics get deradicalized into safer versions that make white listeners more comfortable, as white communist folk musician Phil Ochs humorously sang in his anthem “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” Liberal whites may go to civil rights rallies, Ochs sings, “But don’t talk about revolution / That’s going a little bit too far.”
Simone wanted to go that far. Written in response to the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in September 1963 — a white supremacist terror attack that killed four young black girls aged between eleven and fourteen — Simone sings in “Mississippi Goddam”:
They try to say it’s a communist plot
All I want is equality
For my sister my brother my people and me.
This could be read as a response to the McCarthyite Red Scare, in which any talk of equality was conflated with communism and “anti-American” sentiment. But when read in light of her “girls’ talk” with Hansberry and the politics of her social circle, including James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael, and Langston Hughes — all activists that engaged with socialism — these lyrics are a political statement. Simone is on the Left because she sees it as the only route to true equality; “go slow” reforms that placate a racist state are not an option.
We also see reflections of an internationalist politic in “Backlash Blues,” the lyrics of which were taken from a poem written for Simone by Hughes:
But the world is big
Big and bright and round
And it’s full of other folks like me
Who are black, yellow, beige, and brown.
One of the last things Hughes wrote, the poem reflects on Vietnam and on African American men being sent to fight an imperialist war while being treated as second-class citizens at home. Simone tells the listener that she and other racialized groups who are oppressed by the many incarnations of “Mr Backlash” are, in fact, the majority in the world — a statement reflective of a political moment in which organizations like the Black Panther Party were seeking to build international coalitions with other people around the world suffering the effects of American imperialism.
The political history of the black US left is important in contextualizing and understanding Simone’s work, but I want to return to the “girls’ talk” between Simone and Hansberry. To my ear, as a Black woman, socialist, feminist, and musician, the politics of these private and intimate conversations between radical black women appear in Simone’s music. Take the song “Four Women.” Often called a feminist anthem, the song describes the enforced class and gender roles and stereotypes that black women have found themselves trapped in: the “mammy” ; the “tragic mulatto”; the sex worker; the angry black woman.
To me, the song goes beyond a simplistic analysis of slavery and the effect of its legacy on black women today. Rather, I imagine Hansberry and Simone talking about their own lives and the lives of other black women using a Marxist analysis that encompasses race, gender, and class; they would talk about how racism and capitalism created the lives of the women in the song, Aunt Sarah, Saffronia, Sweet Thing, and Peaches — the lives of black women who find themselves constantly having to struggle, survive, and resist.
The political life of Nina Simone cannot be done justice in one short article. She was a tour de force who brought the message of freedom, equality, justice, and liberation to everyone who had the pleasure of hearing her music. But it’s important we don’t pigeonhole her as a civil rights activist: she was a revolutionary — a woman who engaged with the work of Marx and Lenin, and who brought that revolutionary praxis to her music in a way that continues to resonate with us today.
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FOCUS: The Supreme Court Should Be Ashamed of Itself |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36361"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Saturday, 24 April 2021 11:01 |
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Reich writes: "In an appalling ruling yesterday, the Supreme Court's conservative majority rolled back restrictions on sentencing juveniles to life without parole. It's both legally and morally heinous."
Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)
The Supreme Court Should Be Ashamed of Itself
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook
24 April 21
 n an appalling ruling yesterday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority rolled back restrictions on sentencing juveniles to life without parole. It’s both legally and morally heinous.
Not only does this ruling upend clearly established precedent, it imposes patently cruel punishment on some of the most vulnerable members of society. As Sonia Sotomayor noted in her blistering dissent, "70 percent of all youths sentenced to life without parole are children of color,” and oftentimes their crimes are the result of severe trauma and the fact that juveniles’ brains are not fully developed.
The ruling, written by Brett Kavanaugh, shreds two precedent rulings stipulating that both mandatory sentences (sentences imposed automatically upon conviction) and discretionary sentences (sentences imposed at the discretion of a judge) of juvenile life without parole violate the 8th Amendment’s bar on cruel and unusual punishments. The previous rulings created a requirement that a judge make a finding of “permanent incorrigibility” of the defendant in order to sentence them to life without parole, meaning the crime must be so rare and heinous that there is no possibility of rehabilitation.
The conservative majority’s ruling essentially lifted this requirement for finding “permanent incorrigibility,” giving judges much broader discretion in sentencing juveniles to life without parole. It’s the first time in almost two decades that the court has imposed harsher rules for juvenile offenders rather than enacting more leniency. It’s unimaginably cruel, and the Court should be ashamed of itself.
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Justice Sotomayor Impaled Justice Kavanaugh on His Own Previous Rulings |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Saturday, 24 April 2021 08:21 |
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Pierce writes: "From out of the recently Trumpified Supreme Court came yet another decision that murdered precedent. Delivering the death blow was Justice Brett Kavanaugh."
Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts. (photo: Getty Images)
Justice Sotomayor Impaled Justice Kavanaugh on His Own Previous Rulings
By Charles Pierce. Esquire
24 April 21
In the process, she revealed him as the heartless gombeen he is.
 rom out of the recently Trumpified Supreme Court came yet another decision that murdered precedent. Delivering the death blow was Justice Brett Kavanaugh. This was a major flex for the carceral state and a major hit to criminal justice reform. It not only closed off future improvements in that regard, but also undercut what few accomplishments already exist.
The case was Jones v. Mississippi. Over the years, the courts began to look askance at the idea of handing juveniles sentences of life without parole, essentially warehousing individuals for decades in the horrors of the American penal system for crimes they committed as minors. Twice since 2012, the Supreme Court has decided that such sentences were in violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. With a single decision, Kavanaugh, good Jesuit-educated lad that he is, and six of his colleagues decided that, instead, such sentences were both just and commonplace. It is yet another example of the current majority’s enthusiasm for gutting precedent while pretending that it’s not, and it is a monstrous legal offense against humanity.
By those two precedents, judges had to conduct separate proceedings before sentencing juveniles to life without parole and to provide a public explanation for those decisions. The 6-3 decision on Thursday for which Kavanaugh wrote the lead opinion effectively wipes out those two requirements which, in tandem, had reduced radically the number of juvenile convicts doing life without parole. And, in keeping with how that new conservative majority on the Court operates, Kavanaugh argues that he is keeping faith with those decisions he is obviously eviscerating. In his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas at least acknowledged that the Court was overturning precedents set in cases he considered wrongly decided.
Anyway, here, from Mark Joseph Stern at Slate, are the facts of the case in question.
Jones was “the victim of violence and neglect that he was too young to escape.” His biological father was an alcoholic who physically abused his mother, who had severe mental health problems. His stepfather abused him, too, using “belts, switches, and a paddle.” He openly expressed his hatred for Jones. When Jones moved to Mississippi to live with his grandparents, he abruptly lost access to medication he took for mental health issues, including hallucinations and self-harm. Jones’ grandfather beat him, as well. One day in 2004, when Jones’ grandfather tried to hit him, Jones stabbed him repeatedly, killing him. He had turned 15 just 23 days earlier. Jones tried to save his grandfather with CPR but failed. After making minimal efforts to conceal the crime, he confessed to the police.
The judge in the lower court simply ignored the requirements of the two ruling precedents, and that’s how Brett Jones’s life ended up in the oh-so-very-Catholic hands of Brett Kavanaugh, who at one point explains that Jones might not serve the rest of his life in the country’s worst state penal system. Some vague day in the dim future, Kavanaugh suggests, the state of Mississippi might take pity on him and let him go. (Since the Court’s previous decisions required states to re-sentence inmates who’d been sentenced to life without parole, Mississippi re-imposed the sentence in more than 25 percent of its cases, trailing only Louisiana in that regard.) Jesus, what a supercilious twerp.
In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor proved she can see a church by daylight. Edging right up to the limits of intramural politesse, Sotomayor called Kavanaugh out for the heartless, soulless gombeen this decision has revealed him to be.
The Court simply rewrites Miller and Montgomery to say what the Court now wishes they had said, and then denies that it has done any such thing. The Court knows what it is doing. It admits as much.
At which point, Sotomayor impales Kavanaugh on his own previous decisions.
How low this Court’s respect for stare decisis has sunk. Not long ago, that doctrine was recognized as a pillar of the “ ‘rule of law,’ ” critical to “keep the scale of justice even and steady, and not liable to waver with every new judge’s opinion.” Ramos, 590 U. S., at ___–___ (opinion of KAVANAUGH, J.) … Given these weighty interests, the Court “usually re- quire[d] that a party ask for overruling, or at least obtain[ed] briefing on the overruling question,” and then “carefully evaluate[d] the traditional stare decisis factors.” Barr v. American Assn. of Political Consultants, Inc.… Now, it seems, the Court is willing to overrule precedent without even acknowledging it is doing so, much less providing any special justification. It is hard to see how that approach is “founded in the law rather than in the proclivities of individuals.” Ramos, 590 U. S., at ___ (opinion of KAVANAUGH, J.)
Note to self: do not get Justice Sotomayor angry with you. Never do that.
And the final joke of it all is that Mississippi, in its limitless capacity for judicial savagery, had already invented a workaround: simply sentence juvenile offenders to 100 years—and they don’t even have to have killed anyone, either. Here’s to the state of Mississippi, goddamn.
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Amazon Workers Don't Need Apologies From Jeff Bezos. They Need to Organize. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51252"><span class="small">Alex N. Press, Jacobin</span></a>
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Saturday, 24 April 2021 08:21 |
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Press writes: "In his final letter to shareholders before stepping down as Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos promised to do better by workers. Some in the media were impressed, but it's a standard public relations move right out of the anti-union playbook."
In addition to concerns about COVID safety, workers at Amazon have expressed frustration about impossibly high productivity expectations and are therefore starting to unionize. (photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
Amazon Workers Don't Need Apologies From Jeff Bezos. They Need to Organize.
By Alex N. Press, Jacobin
24 April 21
In his final letter to shareholders before stepping down as Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos promised to do better by workers. Some in the media were impressed, but it’s a standard public relations move right out of the anti-union playbook.
 oes your Chair take comfort in the outcome of the recent union vote in Bessemer? No, he doesn’t,” wrote Jeff Bezos in his final letter to shareholders before stepping down as Amazon CEO.
For Bezos, the union drive in the company’s Bessemer warehouse is a sign that “we need to do a better job for our employees.” He pledges to make the company “Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work” (Bezos has always called Amazon Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, with the modifier “Earth” included because of Bezos’s extraterrestrial colonization plans, though the effect is to make the billionaire sound like an alien.)
It’s an unusual admission of the need to Do Better by a CEO who isn’t prone to conceding any ground when it comes to criticism of the company’s working conditions. Some have pointed out the letter’s dystopian discussion of reducing employee injuries by regulating workers’ muscles, and RWDSU president Stuart Appelbaum responded to the letter by saying that “workers need a union — not just another Amazon public relations effort in damage control.” But others are impressed with Bezos for his lip service to working conditions. CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin called it “far and away, the best shareholder letter I’ve ever read,” adding that, “There are some real and profound lessons in there.” Tech journalist Casey Newton said Bezos’s words sound like that of “a man who has at long last gotten the message.” Hook, line and sinker.
In the wake of Amazon winning the union election in Bessemer, I reread Confessions of a Union Buster, a book by Martin Jay Levitt, a pioneer of sorts in the $1-billion-a-year union-busting industry. The book came out in 1993 — copies sell for hundreds of dollars online, if any left-wing book publishers are reading this and want to reissue it — and details union-busters’ bag of tricks. These practices include turning lower-level managers from sympathizing with workers’ plight to waging war on them and stalling the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) process; and then, should the union somehow win the NLRB vote, stalling at the bargaining table until union supporters either leave the company or lose hope (the result of this latter tactic is that only around half of unions reach a first contract).
Another tactic Levitt swears by is that of the well-timed conciliatory letter from the top boss. In his book, we see Levitt restrain even the most dictatorial, monstrous CEOs, alternately pleading with and threatening them on the matter of a humanizing letter. Usually, this letter comes late in the unionization process. As Levitt tells resistant CEOs, the workers need to believe the company can change. They need to hear from the boss himself that he recognizes the company hasn’t always treated its employees as well as it could have before they’ll grant it the chance to change. Fail to do this, warns Levitt, and the workers might well believe that they can only force the company to change by acting collectively, i.e., unionizing.
In case after case in Levitt’s book, we see this letter prove crucial, clinching the company’s success in defeating the union. But none of the bosses change after they win the vote, adds Levitt. In no time, they go back to arbitrary firings and abuse.
There is more criticism than ever of Amazon’s working conditions, where the rates of serious injury are nearly twice the industry average, where workers pee in bottles and defecate in delivery vans, where even the white-collar workers at company headquarters lodge bathroom-related complaints with state agencies. There are now over a million people employed by the tech behemoth and countless more who are in the workforce but denied employee status. They are getting organized, and, to the top brass’s horror, a lot of people are listening to their criticisms of the company.
Amazon kept union-busters on the payroll throughout the Bessemer union drive. One management-side attorney told the Huffington Post that the company may have spent eight figures on union-busting. Bezos’s letter is in keeping with that; it might as well have been written by Levitt. Please, one more chance. We can change. We will stop breaking the law. We will stop blaming workers for their own deaths. Please. Whatever you do, do not organize. We’ll take care of it. Look over here, not over there. No one should fall for it.
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