From NOEBIE.net
One hundred and fifty years ago, on June 2, 1865, Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith, commander of Confederate forces west of the Mississippi, signed the Union Army’s terms of surrender. This marked the final end of the Civil War which, as Patrick Ayers explains, can also truly be described as America’s Second Revolution.
Read More: 1865: A Revolutionary Turning Point in U.S. History | Socialist Alternative
At the Left Forum in New York City on May 30th, Chris Hedges opened a discussion of why Karl Marx is essential at a time when global capitalism is collapsing.
The final stages of capitalism, Marx wrote, would be marked by developments that are intimately familiar to most of us. Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system would begin to consume the structures that sustained it. It would prey upon, in the name of austerity, the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens. It would, as it has, increasingly relocate jobs, including both manufacturing and professional positions, to countries with cheap pools of laborers. Industries would mechanize their workplaces. This would trigger an economic assault on not only the working class but the middle class—the bulwark of a capitalist system—that would be disguised by the imposition of massive personal debt as incomes declined or remained stagnant. Politics would in the late stages of capitalism become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content and abjectly subservient to the dictates and money of global capitalism.
But as Marx warned, there is a limit to an economy built on scaffolding of debt expansion. There comes a moment, Marx knew, when there would be no new markets available and no new pools of people who could take on more debt. This is what happened with the subprime mortgage crisis. Once the banks cannot conjure up new subprime borrowers, the scheme falls apart and the system crashes.
Read the Remarks in Full: Chris Hedges: Karl Marx Was Right – Chris Hedges – Truthdig
In a fascinating and provocative essay Rachel Laudan writes for Jacobin that our obsession with eating natural and artisanal is ahistorical, and she argues that we should demand more high-quality industrial food.
Read The Essay: A Plea for Culinary Modernism | Jacobin
Cory Doctorow details the story of Matthew DeHart, a veteran from a multi-generational military/intelligence family, whose Tor server ran him afoul of our government.
DeHart once discovered an unencrypted folder of damning documents on his server, which quickly disappeared and was replaced with an encrypted folder of the same size, with the same name. The unencrypted docs detailed an FBI investigation into some very dirty CIA tricks, possibly involving the still-unsolved slew of anthrax-laced letters sent to Congress in 2001. Not long after, DeHart was spooked by a visit from the FBI to one of his contacts, and he destroyed all potentially compromising storage associated with his server. That’s when things got weird.
Read the Story: Hacktivist sees too much, FBI lock him up on child-porn charges, produce no evidence – Boing Boing
Danny Katch asks the question: Can the Democratic Party be used for good?
The question is whether the left can use the Sanders campaign to gather a new generation of young activists and bring them closer to socialism–or whether it will be the radicals who get used once again by the Democrats…
This debate is not about “political purity” on one side and clever tactics on the other. Both sides believe their position is both principled and strategic, and there’s no need to paint Sanders supporters as imperialist sellouts or those who won’t join his campaign as unthinking dogmatists. Instead, there are three questions that are more useful points of departure for the discussion.
Read The Full Article: Can the Democratic Party be used for good? | SocialistWorker.org
Here are some excellent thoughts from Railroad Workers United concerning the derailment of Amtrak 188.
If we are serious about preventing future catastrophes of this nature, we must equip railroad workers with the necessary tools to enable them to perform the job safely. Pointing fingers at this or that employee (at any level in the company, union or management) might make some folks feel better, but it does little or nothing to prevent future accidents. Railroad Workers United believes it is time we learn from these terrible tragedies and get serious about implementing the necessary measures to ensure safe railroad operations.
Read More: Railroad Workers United: The Wreck of #AMTRAK188 Talking Points From RWU
There needs to be a discussion of how to solve these problems without hurting our pensioners and workers.
What happens when you’ve been kicking the fiscal can down the road for years, but the road suddenly hits a dead end? That’s what Chicago – and the state of Illinois – are about to find out.
Read More: How Illinois’ Pension Debt Blew Up Chicago’s Credit – ProPublica
Bill Droel takes a look at the meat packing industry as exposed in The Chain: Farm Factory and the Fate of Our Food by Ted Genoways, a new book in the tradition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.
A dirty and perhaps infected carcass more likely makes its way down the line. Workers suffer more injuries, including a nerve-damaging infection that is only detected later. Our relatively inexpensive meat “comes at a high cost to its workers.”
Read More: Food Processing | Catholic Labor Network
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is demanding cutbacks and concessions, but teachers are pushing back amid a wider attack on public-sector unions. Lee Sustar reports.
Source: Chicago teachers vs. Rahm: Round two | SocialistWorker.org
Carl Magnes writes in Jacobin:
The rapid growth of mega-festivals is a physical expression of the increasingly aggressive class barriers and inequities that fracture the social economy of art and music. They offer only a few strictly defined identities. You can be a member of the creative elite; an owner of capital; hired staff; or a member of the policed, regulated audience. The fences, hierarchy of privileges, and security guards are a live theater version of our cultural life’s stratification.
Read More: Money Before Music | Jacobin