April 2024

There were 26 posts published in April 2024 (this is page 1 of 3).

Once again, it is up to us

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the presidential immunity appeal from Donald Trump this week (coverage from Election Law Blog, Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse, CNN takeaways, CNN live coverage, and The Bulwark). The outcome is uncertain, but appears to be headed for delaying the January 6th trial past the 2024 election. In 2022, I wrote a post on the theme of “it is up to us”, and this post can be considered a refrain. Several weeks ago, I wrote that our hopes for the courts to stop Donald Trump have been dashed. It is time for us to stand up to fight for our country. I just got a copy of “A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump” from the library today, looking to take some action soon. It is time to get started.

Can worker’s cooperatives be successful?

Hamilton Nolan/How Things Work: Interview with Erik Forman, labor activist, and creator of The Drivers Cooperative (via Tracy Durnell). Three points I found interesting were Erik’s comments about (1) businesses could be capitalized (started) for $200K-$300K in loans, (2) “… could we just start companies that are owned by workers from the start, and are therefore run by workers in their own interests, and return wealth to the community instead of extracting it?”, and (3) “The main barrier is access to capital. We can build businesses that generate profit, but because the business is worker-owned, it doesn’t fit in the normative forms that venture capital prefers, and there really isn’t a large supply of risk capital for initiatives that serve a social purpose. It’s kind of the entire problem of capitalism, right? Workers don’t have capital. Definitionally. Otherwise we would not be workers.”. I enjoyed the article, and thought about myself as a career worker. I think that most people want a job, not a business, that starting and running a business is too much work, they would rather be paid for their labor and not deal with the other aspects of business ownership. For people working in the tech industry (computers, aviation, whatever tech you want to look at), it seems to me that there may be opportunities at the low end (small businesses), but few examples of cooperative business with a large number of employees. Certainly something to think about….

Gregory Alvarez: “Living Like It’s 99: No Social Media, No Smartphone” (via Tracy Durnell) – A personal story about stopping use of a smartphone and social media and still not using it 3 years later. Good example to use to examine our own habits….

Crooks and Liars.com: Four years ago yesterday, Donald Trump announced that “injecting bleach and shining light into the body would cure COVID-19” – it’s amazing we survived Trump, much less COVID-19!

I have been having problems today with copying files to a USB drive, getting this error: “You’ll need to provide administrator permission to copy this file”, I used to not have this problem. Looked at this posting on the problem, but doesn’t seem to work. Lazyweb, can you help me?

Elle Griffin writes about recent BigPub merger settlement (merger did not go through), and how few new copies of most books are sold, and lots of other interesting financial details. I mostly buy used books, so I can believe this story (via Simon Willison). Killer quote:

The DOJ found that, of 58,000 books published in a year, “90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.”

https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books

Looking into protest songs

I have been looking into what protest songs/chants have been used in the past five to ten years. Researcher Noriko Manabe from Indiana University has a recent journal article and a set of posts on Medium collecting songs and chants from US protests since 2017:

Journal of Music and Politics: Chants of the Resistance: Flow, Memory, and Inclusivity

Medium: Collection of posts on chants and songs since 2017

Also, I found these links:

National Women’s History Museum: Brief overview of protest songs

The Commons Social Change Library: Listen and Watch to 40 years of Australian Blockading Songs

How to stop Donald Trump

I entered the title of this post as a search phrase in Google, and here are some of the top results:

Indivisible.org: Defeat Trump Toolkit – This resource was created in January 2023, has suggestions for organizing events, recruiting group members, and links to other content at Indivisible.org.

DefeatTrump.org: Site created by Indivisible.org. Has a way to sign up for a mailing list, and more targeted resources.

A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump: Published in March 2020 and written by Barack Obama’s campaign manager. Quote from the Amazon page: ” A playbook for the common citizen, A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump addresses the many things individuals can do in 2020 every day, without having to leave their jobs, move to Iowa, or spend every waking moment on the election.”

Congressman Jerry Nadler: Some specific actions listed, slanted toward stopping Trump during his term as president.

The New Yorker: Nine Ways to Oppose Donald Trump – Written in December 2016 after the election, the article lists nine specific ways to help stop Trump from being successful in office.

The Guardian: “Election season has come. Here’s what you need to do to stop Trump from winning” – Written in September 2023, Robert Reich (former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton adminstration) has some advice/suggestions for getting involved.