Listen to Bill Ayers live on WWL Radio Friday, December 9th at 6pm ET!
Listen live by clicking the link icon below:
When the controversy broke about then Senator Obama having known Bill Ayers, my first thought was “cool, maybe his is one of us. Since then, it is Obama that has disappointed, not Professor Ayers.
My discussion with him will strive to contemplate, contrast and compare the social movement of the 60’s and 70’s with what is happening now. I think he can, as someone who has been fully immersed in the former shed light on the latter.
Great effort has been taken to marginalize, even demonize and true socialist with any chance of influencing the dialogue in this country. While active in the advancement of progressive education, that that alone is considered too “radical” for the “educational industry” speaks volumes about how far right we have been pushed as a Nation.
Today, this nation is under a far more militant resistance against OWS activists than the anti-war activists of the SDS and WU were… I wonder, how will it survive?
I am thrilled an honored to be able to have a conversation with Bill! I am sure we shall all learn much from him.
Bill Ayers is an American elementary education theorist and a former leader in the movement that opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He is known for his 1960s activism as well as his current work in education reform, curriculum, and instruction. In 1969 he co-founded the Weather Underground. He is a retired professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, formerly holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar
The call in number is 646-929-1264 to join the conversation!
Tip: In order to comment in the show’s companion chat, you must create a BTR account, its free and only takes seconds. Chat is monitored during the show, so make yourself heard.
Miss the show? The podcasts are available at the link above, or at the Wild Wild Left
Join Wild Wild Left Radio every Friday at 6pm ET, with Hostess and Producer Diane Gee to guide you through Current Events taken from a Wildly Left Prospective….
WWL Radio: Bringing you controversial, cutting edge, revolutionary, “out there where the buses don’t run” LEFT perspective since January of 2009!
Tag: socialism
Dec 08 2011
WWL Radio #133 Bill Ayers Interview Today!
Oct 14 2011
WWL Radio #126 Occupation Endgame
Join Diane Gee on WWL Radio Friday, October 14th at 6pm EDT!
Listen live by clicking the link icon below:
Occupy Wall Street is again our topic tonight, as I assume it will be for a very long time as long as the Independent Journalists are still able to report freely.
Two very important questions remain.
The first is about how it will fail – for the odds are stacked very highly against the Populace saving themselves from a deeply entrenched and now global Oligarchy. Will it be through violence, being co-opted, being handed austerity and thrown a few bones? Or will they create violence and blame the resistance in order to turn the population against the Occupation, rewarding little Orwellian finger-pointers?
The second is about how it will succeed – for against all odds, we are the many and we could easily regain power if the will to do so is true. Is highly regulated capitalism what we must settle for, perhaps isolationist America-first selfishness, or will we truly break free into sane socialism?
These are the days we have been waiting for my friends. It has begun.
The call in number is 646-929-1264 to join the conversation!
Tip: In order to comment in the show’s companion chat, you must create a BTR account, its free and only takes seconds. I read chat while on air, so make yourself heard.
Miss the show? The podcasts are available at the link above, or at the Wild Wild Left
Join Wild Wild Left Radio every Friday at 6pm EST, via Blog Talk Radio, with Hostess and Producer Diane Gee to guide you through Current Events taken from a Wildly Left Prospective….
WWL Radio: Bringing you controversial, cutting edge, revolutionary, “out there where the buses don’t run” LEFT perspective since January of 2009!
Sep 22 2011
Mondragon Miracle Part 3 of 3: Lessons Learned
“Nothing differentiates people as much as their respective attitudes to the circumstances in which they live. Those who opt to make history and change the course of events themselves have an advantage over those who decide to wait passively for the results of the change.”
Over and over, I see commentary asserting we are stuck with our current cultural norms. The “rational” people of the world patiently explain to me how I am too idealistic. I am naïve and believe too deeply in the good nature of most people. Yet, the rational people only have their assertions to stand on. History is fraught with examples of people who fought for and won real change. People like the Basques in Mondragon. They created lasting change under deplorable conditions. Even a cursory review of history shows change occurs when and where people decide to change. You don’t live in a feudal monarchy rife with slaves and infanticide-all well ingrained institutions the Ancient Greeks considered necessary evils of civilization-because people decided to change.
In the first part of this series, I described how a Jesuit priest named Don Jose created a Basque cooperative–Mondragon. He could hardly have started from a more impossible position. Basque was severely oppressed, poor and under a harsh dictatorship. His Church considered him a pariah, and he was a poor speaker and sermon writer. Yet, he refused to dwell on his disadvantages, concentrating on finding Basque strengths, instead.
In part two, we examined Don Jose’s unique genius in organizing his local society. He felt it was never necessary for someone to win while someone else lost. That scenario showed a lack of ingenuity. He examined problems until he saw a solution allowing the common good for everyone.
Some argue Mondragon arose from Basque because a specific set of non-reproducible circumstances existed. To me, that sounds like rationalization to let ourselves off the hook for not seeking to better our world. While I agree Mondragon originated in Basque due to a specific set of circumstances, clearly those factors are not needed to reproduce cooperative society.
What may be necessary is a certain environment in order to affect positive change. This post will look at some of the factors influencing people’s willingness to change during the creation of Mondragon and how to use those factors to enable change in our own culture.
Aug 15 2011
Mondragon Miracle Part II of III: The Genius of Don Jose
It’s been a rather tough week for capitalists. With people waking up from the illusion of money and riots erupting in otherwise reserved England, I almost feel a little sorry for the advocates of Milton Friedman. Almost.
As you scrape together your last dollars to exchange for gold and throw another bucket of water on your burning London flat, have you considered abandoning this system? There is a choice, you know. We choose to have this system and all the pain that comes with it. Not offering opposition to a bad system is making a choice to continue with the dysfunction.
What’s that? You didn’t know you had choices? No one has explained to you the alternatives? Well, if you don’t feel obligated to ride this sinking ship to the bottom of the ocean, come along with us as we start talking solutions.
In Part I of this three part series, we discussed the history of a little known cooperative venture called Mondragon. This company went from a twelve-man paraffin stove manufacturing plant to a conglomerate that holds Wal-mart at bay in miniscule country of Basque, and employs 130,000 people. The cooperative has a remarkable 80% success rate in business ventures, far outstripping the typical success rate of 20% (less in this market). It has consistently helped the Basque people strengthen their communities with education, health care, housing and a robust social safety net. It creates jobs where none existed before, stabilizing their economy while nearby Spain and Portugal flounder.
How could this one company achieve such miraculous results? Well, it may actually be a divine intervention–through a Jesuit priest named Don Jose. In this segment, I delve deeper into Don Jose’s unique genius in devising the Mondragon system.
Aug 02 2011
Mondragon Miracle, Part 1 of 3: Building the Road We Travel
1941, Office of the Archbishop of Spain:
“They just released you?” Archbishop Balbino Oliver eyed the priest standing before his desk with suspicion. Something about the young man unsettled him.
“I believe it was in error. They did not realize I had written so much against Franco. When God spared my life, I enrolled in the seminary.”
He possessed humility. Good. Yet something about the eyes… “Even under the care of the church, Franco may not let you go so easily.”
“Yes, it is best if I left Spain. I could continue my writing in Belgium. I think I can…”
“God granted you a precious gift, my son.” The Bishop leaned back, considering. His left eye. That was it. “It would be unwise to waste the gift with further agitation of forces beyond your control.” Yes, his left eye stared back slightly wider, giving him a permanently quizzical expression. Father Bertolli had mentioned him losing his eye in an accident.
“But the work I’ve been doing…”
“Is against Church official policy.” The Archbishop leaned forward to study the documents the priest had presented him. “You are Basque, no?”
“Yes, but in Belgium…”
“Father Tillous requested an assistant in Mondragon, only 50 miles from where you grew up. Franco is unlikely to bother you, there.”
“Out there, he is unlikely to need to.” The young man bowed his head curtly, murmuring the obligatory goodbye.
The bishop’s gaze followed his receding figure. Even with his back turned, the young man disturbed him. Perhaps something other than his eye then…
Balbino had no way to know, he had just set Don Jose on course to change the world.
Jul 29 2011
Part II – “!No Pasaran!” – The Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the Fight against Fascism in Spain
Crossposted at Daily Kos
|
The story continues below the fold…
Jan 22 2011
Steal this blogpost!
JR Boyd (ladypoverty.blogspot.com) did not explicitly say, “Steal this blogpost!” but that’s what the voices in my head told me he was saying, in fact, urged me to do, implicitly. And so, bristling with excitement (like a sea urchin stalking the ocean floors stoked on the Bolivian marching powder of Brotherly Love) because he made good on his promise to his sister to “write something that everyone could understand,” I gave in to my worst impulses and stole his work on behalf of my fellows in the unwashed throng of Homo sapiens and whatever portion of Neanderthal made it into the woodpile. The purloined letter:
Relative to the situation in most other countries — or in this country for most of the last century — American employers operate with few restraints. Unions have withered, at least in the private sector, and courts have grown friendlier to business. Many companies can now come much closer to setting the terms of their relationship with employees, letting them go when they become a drag on profits and relying on remaining workers or temporary ones when business picks up.
Socialism, in a nutshell, is the idea that companies should be owned and operated by their employees, rather than dictating the terms by which they live. Communities, in other words, would exert popular control over economic decisions — what gets invested, what gets made, how it is distributed, and so on.
That’s old school socialism, and it evolved out of an acknowledgment that “employers” should be the community, not some minority element that tells everyone else what to do because they are rich enough to buy what’s important.
Socialism was aimed squarely at this question of making the economy democratic; it opposed the dictatorship of bosses in the workplace, from whom life itself must be “earned.” Being able to live decently was always assumed to be a human right by socialists, because threatening someone’s livelihood if they don’t do what you want isn’t an acceptable foundation for liberty in any context. That’s just a fucked-up relationship — and we know this because that’s exactly what we call it when it happens anywhere else in life, whether the relationship is a marriage or between adults and children or whatever. You can’t ask people to make choices in a context where one of the outcomes is that they could very well starve, only to congratulate them on their “freedom” to choose.
The idea that you can have a “political” democracy when many of the most important decisions never even enter the political arena because they are “economic” (and therefore private) is perhaps one of the longest standing criticisms of liberal democracy by socialists — “liberal democracy” meaning capitalism with democratic formalities. If you read Volume 1 of Capital, for example, Marx spends a lot of time on this; even defending Enlightenment conceptions of private property against their industrial counterpart; and ultimately advancing them as communism: he keeps the large-scale industry while jettisoning any “private” claim to it.
Because you are more likely than not a contemporary US audience, when you hear the word socialism, you know it is vaguely bad; perhaps you think it means that the government owns everything instead of individual firms. I’m not going to get into a whole discussion about government here (read: the state) except to say that there is a distinction to be made between democratic and totalitarian forms. The socialist argument has always been that liberal democracy isn’t democratic enough: the people who own what matters will inevitably dominate the government, using it for their purposes against whatever the general populace might prefer. This blog and many others comment on that phenomenon nearly every day.
However, it follows that if the people who own everything are the government, and these people aren’t “the people” but some privileged minority, you end up with the same problem. Remember how Marx begins his discussion of class: the “haves” are the people who possess their own independent means of survival, the “have-nots” are anybody that doesn’t. If you look at a country like North Korea, which is nominally communist, you basically have one guy that possesses every means of self-sufficiency while everyone else is dispossessed. It might call itself “Marxist,” I don’t know. But the class antagonism is more pronounced than in most capitalist societies. Marx postulated a scenario like this in Capital, with his idea of having one big company ultimately hold a monopoly on all economic life in society. That is basically what totalitarian governments adorning themselves with the label “socialist” have produced. You have to regard them accordingly.
Oct 17 2010
Nonviolence does not equal complacency
Originally posted at PoliZeros.
I went to a protest in Philadelphia this past Saturday, and it was more disheartening than anything else. It was against the wars and various other injustices, with a special focus on he recent FBI raids of peace activists and Pennsylvania Homeland Security spying on innocent civilians and activists.
By the end of it, I kind of just felt like going up to the megaphone and asking, “How much moral outrage can one person muster? There are more people handing out fliers here than not, and with this country committing so many disgusting, outrageous acts, I don’t blame you.” I won’t lie, I handed a few out myself. Yet the contrast between the righteous causes featured in the speeches and on the signs and on the fliers and the, as a fellow protester said to me, “complete lack of solidarity” was striking.
Aug 06 2010
Won’t socialism be like the Soviet Union?
I am seeing the socialism = Soviet Union meme, in various guises, over at Orange. I suppose that we are to imagine “socialism” as a meme spouted by right-wing zealots who think that Obama is a socialist, a meme that even Ron Paul had the sense to rebut. And then you had this generous diary by Meteor Blades more than a year ago, suggesting a diversity of “socialist” visions. MB’s concluding line:
No matter what The New York Times, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and many progressives think, socialism isn’t a dirty word. Nor an obsolete one.
This diary will attempt to address the meme head-on in an attempt to reclaim the word “socialism” from right-wing elitists.
(Hijacked over at Orange)
Jul 13 2010
21st-Century Socialism: two books by Marta Harnecker
Book Reviews:
Marta Harnecker: “Latin America and Twenty-First Century Socialism: Inventing to Avoid Mistakes.” Monthly Review 62:3 (July-August 2010), 3-78.
—. Rebuilding the Left. London and New York: Zed Books, 2007.
In this oh-so-brief review I shall try to convey a sense of what counts as “21st century socialism” in the ferment of leftist governance that can currently be found in certain parts of Latin America (e.g. Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador).
(Crossposted to Orange)
Apr 18 2010
Tale of 2 Countries: Small Business, Growth, and Green Jobs
The USA:
Jobs: Small Business Loans Are The Mountain Blocking Economic Recovery
Phillip Williams — Apr 17, 2010
Why Small Business Loans Are Important
The economy has lost 8.4 million jobs since the start of the recession. Small businesses employ the majority of the American workforce, although the largest single employer is still the federal government.
When the economy starts to recover small businesses rely on loans to bring up their inventory levels. Large banks and smaller institutions have been reluctant to introduce new loans after the failure of a large number banking institutions.
Small banks do not have the resources to start lending again, and the number of new loans have gone down since the start of the recession.
Banks that received funds from the Troubled Asset Relief program. The larger banks that were branded as too big to fail have also reduced the number of new loans they make to small businesses. They have reinvested the funds in lower-return, lower-risk treasury bonds instead.
Apr 06 2010
Sure I’ll take a side of Socialist Rhethoric with my Holiday Ham
Aren’t Holidays with the Family a hoot —
especially when “Fans of Fox News” see it as an Opportunity,
to test out their latest Socialism Fear tactics?
Parroting Winger Talking Points is one thing —
But claiming every Govt program is actually a dangerous Socialist Plot,
is really verging on the edge of lunacy …
Responding with civility and common sense — in between helpings of three-bean-casserole, and slices of ham —
can be Challenging to say the least …