Op-Ed

The tax bill advertised by Republicans as a Christmas gift to the American people is in fact a gift to the Global Corporate CEOs and other such executives on incentive compensation plans.  The most favored of this group are the executives of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) with Lockheed Martin at the top.  Their gifts – to transition from multi-millionaires to billionaires.

The earlier 10% increase in military spending specially benefited MIC executives and their Carlyle Group directors.  The cut in the corporate income tax rate will probably increase their compensation at a generous multiple of the percentage which that cut represents to the increase in corporate net income and rate of return on equity.

Well, we tried a petition, and I tried a

AUTHOR’S NOTE: For those who want to see Sen. Franken remain in office at least until the Ethics Committee process has run its course, there’s a “We support Al Franken” petition at change.org with over 60,000 signatures as of December 8 – https://www.change.org/p/charles-schumer-we-support-al-franken

hat was the headline on a Politico story dated 9:08 a.m. on December 6. The story had no element of alleged touching, making the use of “forcibly” an example of yellow journalism. The accuser, Franken’s seventh, said Franken tried to kiss her as she was leaving a radio studio in 2006. She was then a “Democratic congressional aide,” according to Politico, which withheld her name. Franken told Politico, “This allegation is categorically not true…. I look forward to fully cooperating with the ongoing [Senate] ethics committee investigation.”

Introduction

When I began this essay I thought I aimed at a rather modest target, but the “story grew in the telling” and reached out further and further to interweave more and more threads, and therefore required much more time and thought than originally foreseen. Yet I believe the effort to have been worthwhile, opening a bit of new territory for socialism. It sets out from one of Rosa Luxemburg’s most enduring postulates and conjugates it with the topic of civil disobedience which, (as far as the author knows, has never been associated this giant of socialist thought.

One of the protagonists of the civil disobedience movement was Rosa Parks, the other “rose” to whom this monograph is dedicated to and honored in the title, for being as a quintessential representative of civil disobedience as understood and practiced by Gandhi and King.

A further disobedient rose worthy of recognition is Sandra Harris who reviewed this essay and recommended addressing “class morality.”

A Disobedient Rosa: What Brings the Masses into Motion

“Imagine being so bad at drumming that you become a Nazi,” someone tweeted in response to the recent and scandalous New York Times’

OK, here’s a good one: What’s the position of women in the antiwar movement?

This was circa 1967, when I was a college kid just coming of age, psychologically and politically. I was a hippie. I had stopped cutting my hair. I’d discovered pot. And I was outraged by the Vietnam War. I was also still swaddled in the sexism of the day, and I laughed knowingly at the answer to this little joke:

Prone.

By the early ’70s, women’s rights emerged as a movement and a lot of men began to see that sort of humor in a stunningly different context. I went through a year of shame and shock as I became aware of my own sexism — “you gotta control your woman” — and did my best to embrace feminism and surrender the stupid male birthright that this was my world more than it was hers . . . that I was the boss, that sex was something to be pried loose from her.

hose aren’t the only questions raised by the surprise assault accusation by radio performer Leeann Tweeden against comedian-turned-US Senator Al Franken, but they might be enough to offend everyone. And everyone probably should be offended by one or another aspect of this story – a dicey opinion to have so early in a story, but let’s look closely at what we know now (late on November 16).

Start with the accusations: There are two, and they are quite different in important respects. The two alleged incidents occurred during a two-week USO tour to Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan in December 2006. The accusations of 2017 first appeared on a KABC website. She works for KABC, which ran the story under Leeann Tweeden’s byline and with the fundamentally problematical headline:

Things fall apart, the center cannot hold . . .

The “man’s world” I grew up is shattering into fragments of shame, contrition and desperate denial. Allegations of sexual harassment and abuse are catching up with powerful perps, sometimes decades after the fact. On Capitol Hill, we now know about a “creep list.” Women shouldn’t ride alone in an elevator with these guys. This is our democracy.

The only real surprise in all this is that suddenly it matters . . . that women — as well as young males, children of both genders — were harassed, humiliated, raped by powerful male adults: that “me too” resonates in the news. At one time, outright denial of a sexual abuse allegation wasn’t even necessary because, even if it were true, so what? That was then. The idea of “a man’s world” was solid and, well, boys will be boys.

In a recent incident in the United States, yet another unarmed man was shot dead by police after opening his front door in response to their knock. The police were going to serve an arrest warrant on a domestic violence suspect – the man’s neighbour – but went to the wrong address. See ‘Police kill innocent man while serving warrant at wrong address’.

For those who follow news in the United States, the routine killing of innocent civilians by the police has become a national crisis despite concerted attempts by political and legal authorities and the corporate media to obscure what is happening. See ‘Killed by Police’ and ‘The Counted: People killed by police in the US’.