Alexander Billet surveys Frank Sinatra’s early career, which was shaped by the Popular Front’s experiments in left-wing culture.
Read the Article: Fellow Traveler Frank | Jacobin Magazine
Labor Notes 2015 In Review
As the assault on union standards continues — wherever we still have them — glimmers of hope in 2015 came from grassroots resistance. Al Bradbury looks back on the year for Labor Notes.
Read More: 2015 Year in Review: Grassroots Resistance Points the Way Forward | Labor Notes
Folk Songs from Bernie Sanders
On November 19, 1987, Bernie Sanders went into a recording studio with 30 Vermont musicians. It was a crazy idea that could have produced laughable results, but for some reason, it worked.
James Napoli has the story on Atavist.
Read it: We Shall Overcome
The Fallen of World War Two
Neil Halloran has produced an animated data-driven documentary about war and peace called The Fallen of World War II. It looks at the human cost of the second World War and sizes up the numbers to other wars in history, including trends in recent conflicts.
The data he presents challenged many of my tacit assumptions about the war.
You can view the video above, or access an interactive version at fallen.io.
What Socialism Demands
The PKK and Murray Bookchin
Syrian Kurds have launched an unlikely radical experiment in governance without hierarchy, patriarchy or capitalism. Their inspiration? American political philosopher Murray Bookchin.
Source: America’s Best Allies Against ISIS Are Inspired By A Bronx-Born Libertarian Socialist
Read more about the PKK at this link.
Christians and Muslims
Snowden Meets Roy, Cusack and Ellsberg
The Guardian has published Arundhati Roy’s account of her recent meeting with Edward Snowden in Moscow, along with Daniel Ellsberg and John Cusack. The entire article is a great read, but I was struck especially by this quote from Snowden about the surveillance state.
If we do nothing, we sort of sleepwalk into a total surveillance state where we have both a super-state that has unlimited capacity to apply force with an unlimited ability to know (about the people it is targeting) – and that’s a very dangerous combination. That’s the dark future. The fact that they know everything about us and we know nothing about them – because they are secret, they are privileged, and they are a separate class… the elite class, the political class, the resource class – we don’t know where they live, we don’t know what they do, we don’t know who their friends are. They have the ability to know all that about us. This is the direction of the future, but I think there are changing possibilities in this.
Read Roy’s Account: Edward Snowden meets Arundhati Roy and John Cusack | The Guardian
The Most Radical Idea
Enter the Brownshirts
With GOP presidential candidates amping up the xenophobia, it was only a matter of time until bigots with firearms began to organize. Saturday saw armed protestors assemble at a Mosque in Irving, Texas.
The Dallas Morning News spoke to organizer David Wright.
“They’re mostly for self-defense or protection,” Wright said, eyeing his 12-gauge. “But I’m not going to lie. We do want to show force. … It would be ridiculous to protest Islam without defending ourselves.”
A protester with a bandana over his face showed off his AR-15 to traffic. A 20-year-old who wants to join the Army and ban Islam in the United States carried a Remington hunting rifle…
Read the Report: Armed protesters gather outside Islamic Center of Irving | | Dallas Morning News