Larry Piltz :
VERSE | TRUE HOMELAND

Posted on July 24, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

American Bird of Prey by DonkeyHotey / Flickr.

TRUE HOMELAND

Why is this sweet world we live in
so torn between chaos and Zen
with extremes at either end
like enemies and lifelong friends
starvation and stock dividends
a young child’s death yet love transcends
are we really blowing in these winds
with not that much on which to depend
can we compromise in a scale of ten
must our safe place be a lion’s den
and our safe word something to defend
must we wait around for the worst to begin
if peace breaks out don’t we all win
there’s a lot to learn if we don’t pretend
that chaos comes from some original sin
what starts the wars again and again
who stands to gain from this which men
they must not care we all are kin
nor care about the shape we’re in
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Alan Waldman :
TELEVISION | ‘800 Words’ is a fun Aussie-Kiwi comedy-drama

Posted on July 24, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

The top-watched series features enjoyable characters & situations with an Aussie family trying to fit in to a New Zealand town.

By Alan Waldman | The Rag Blog | July 24, 2017

Australian-New Zealand TV series 800 Words is a hit
with all demos.

[In his Rag Blog column, Alan Waldman reviews some of his favorite films and TV series that readers may have missed, including TV dramas, mysteries, and comedies from Canada, England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Scotland. Most are available on DVD, Netflix and/or Netflix Instant Streaming, and some episodes are on YouTube.]

Last year PBS stations ran the first eight-episode season of the top-watched Australian-New Zealand TV series 800 Words; the second season has aired down there and a third season has been ordered. At imdb.com more than 91.3% of 601 viewers gave it thumbs up and 25.1% rated it a perfect 10.
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David P. Hamilton :
NATO: An obituary

Posted on July 23, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

Who will follow the capitalist class clown car into future military adventures to protect the profits of fossil energy tycoons?

In the face of Trump’s clown car, Cold War rationales may no longer hold NATO together. Cartoon by Carlos3653  / Wikimedia Commons.

By David P. Hamilton | The Rag Blog | July 23, 2017

PARIS — NATO died recently. Over the past few months, its decline was rapid. Its death has yet to be reported in corporate media. It died because, as principally a vehicle for U.S. imperialism, it required U.S. leadership.

Once that fell into the hands of a cabal of incompetents, no NATO country was any longer willing to follow this capitalist class clown car into future military adventures to protect the profits of fossil energy tycoons.
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Henry Mecredy :
BOOKS | Tracy Kidder: ‘The Soul of a New Machine’ revisited

Posted on July 23, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

It’s a fine tale of a product development project that unfolds in secrecy, in a mild paranoia born of corporate competition.

By Henry Mecredy | The Rag Blog | July 22, 2017

Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway’d
Or wak’d to ecstasy the living lyre
Instead copy’d some things already made
And squander’d thus their own creative fire
                                     —Gray/Mecredy

[The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (July 1981: Little, Brown and Company).]

This Pulitzer-winning 1981 book is a delightful account of the development of an electronic product by a design team in the late seventies, at a now-defunct company called Data General. It’s a fine tale of a product development project that unfolds in secrecy, haste, and a kind of mild paranoia born of corporate competition.
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Thorne Dreyer :
The life and times of leftist journalist
Jack A. Smith (1934-2017)

Posted on July 20, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

Including a personal memoir from the former Guardian editor, plus the Rag Radio interview.

Jack A. Smith (1934-2017)

By Thorne Dreyer | The Rag Blog | July 20, 2017

Below, see “Jack A. Smith: My life and times at The Guardian,” originally published by The Rag Blog in August 2012, and listen to Thorne Dreyer’s 2012 Rag Radio interview with Smith.

On July 10, Jack Smith’s wife, Donna Goodman, sent us the following message:

I wanted to let you know that Jack Smith, my life partner and the creator and editor of the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter and Calendar, has died… I know you and he did an interview together not so long ago. We read it together when the family gathered after his death.

Jack A. Smith died of complications of COPD in New Paltz, New York, on June 29, 2017.

Jack Smith started out as a reporter for United Press International, but UPI fired him when he was indicted for refusing the draft (he spent nine months in federal prison). He later wrote for and then edited the prominent leftist newspaper, The Guardian (not the liberal British daily), in the 1960s-1980s, and was, as I wrote in 2012, “one of the most important figures in progressive journalism in the 20th century.”
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The Rag Blog :
METRO EVENT | A ‘tale of two rebel cities’ with Steve Early & Nick Licata on July 27

Posted on July 18, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

Learn how Seattle and Richmond, California, became models for municipal action in the Trump era.

Nick Licata, left, and Steve Early.

Steve Early and Nick Licata will also share a “tale of two rebel cities” with host Thorne Dreyer on Rag Radio, Friday, July 28, 2-3 p.m. (CT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed live here.

Event: A Tale of Two Rebel Cities
What: Book party and discussion
Who: Steve Early and Nick Licata
When: Thursday, July 27, 2017, 7-9 p.m.
Where: Scholz Biergarten
Address: 1607 San Jacinto Blvd, Austin, TX 78701
Telephone: 512-474-1958
Cost: Free and open to the public
Sponsors: Austin Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Left Elect, and Labor Notes

AUSTIN — Steve Early and Nick Licata will speak at a book party and discussion tagged “A Tale of Two Rebel Cities” on Thursday, July 27, from 7-9 p.m., at Scholz Biergarten, 1607 San Jacinto Blvd., Austin 78701.

Steve Early is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Richmond Progressive Alliance, and the Communications Workers of America (CWA). His new book, published by Beacon Press, is Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City. The book includes an introduction by Bernie Sanders.
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Lamar W. Hankins :
Hypocrisy: Outrage over Russian meddling, but what about the U.S.’ global history?

Posted on July 15, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

Overthrowing elected governments is the most extreme form of interference in election results.

After the military overthrew Manuel Zelaya, Hillary Clinton wouldn’t call it a coup. State Department photo by Michael Gross.

By Lamar W. Hankins | The Rag Blog | July 15, 2017

Hypocrisy seems to be as much a part of American life as apple pie or Thanksgiving. And hypocrisy is prominent once again in the reactions of Americans, especially the political class, to the FBI.’s investigation into Russian interference in the most essential feature of our democratic system — free elections.

Seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies have confirmed Russian hacking into computer files related to the presidential election of 2016. I abhor Russian interference in our elections as much as any American (with the exclusion of President Donald Trump and his minions, who won’t forthrightly acknowledge that it occurred), but I cannot forget how our beloved country has interfered in the free elections of numerous other countries over the years.
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Alice Embree :
METRO | Demonstrators say ‘No’ to Trumpcare; Seven arrested outside Sen. Cornyn’s office

Posted on July 12, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

Austin protesters vote with their feet against a bill that would be disastrous for health care and a bonanza for wealth care.

The Rag Blog‘s Alice Embree was one of seven arrested at the demonstration. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.

By Alice Embree | The Rag Blog | July 12, 2017

AUSTIN — On Thursday, July 6, more than 200 Austinites told Texas Sen. John Cornyn to vote against the draconian Senate healthcare bill — officially titled the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA) and unofficially known as Trumpcare.

Protestors filled the sidewalk at 221 West 6th Street, where Senator Cornyn has a 15th-floor office in the Chase Bank Tower. Seven people, including the author, were arrested for blocking the sidewalk in front of Cornyn’s office.
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Alice Embree :
METRO | Alice Kresensky Cunningham
(July 14, 1935 – June 23, 2017)

Posted on July 10, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

As part of a faith-based social justice ministry, Cris played a sustaining role for many movement activists and groups.

Cris Cunningham in the late 1960s. Photo by Alan Pogue /
The Rag Blog.

By Alice Embree | The Rag Blog | July 10, 2017

AUSTIN — Cris Cunningham died on June 23, 2017, in Damariscotta, Maine, from complications of Parkinson’s. She was director of the University of Texas YMCA for many years, making that space available to The Rag for its office, to documentary photographer Alan Pogue for his darkroom, to the Birth Control Counseling Project started by women on the Rag staff, to the peer counseling project WomenSpace, and to other worthy causes.
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David P. Hamilton :
Emmanuel Macron, ‘centrist’ revolutionary

Posted on June 20, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

He combined social liberalism — covering all the identity politics bases — with neoliberal economics.

Election posters for Macron and Le Pen, La Clusaz, France. Photo by David r jenkins / Wikimedia Commons.

By David P. Hamilton | The Rag Blog | June 21, 2017

PARIS — Emmanuel Macron has totally changed the landscape of French politics. Previously, French politics was characterized by a right-left spectrum of several parties, two of which, Socialists on the left and Republicans in the right, contended for leadership. The center of this spectrum was relatively poorly represented. The only self-proclaimed centrist in the 2012 presidential election, Francois Bayrou, get only 9% of the vote.

The usual result of presidential elections was for the Socialists to run against the Republicans. These previously dominant parties remained relatively ideologically distinct. When they had to rule together, as when Socialist president Mitterrand was saddled with a rightest prime minister Chirac, it was considered an aberration.
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Chellis Glendinning :
Psychohistory in the Age of Trump

Posted on June 20, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

Comparisons between Nazi Germany and Trump´s U.S.-in-process abound these days.

Trump salutes. Donald in Reno, Nevada, January 10, 2016.
Photo by Darron Birgenheier / Flickr.

By Chellis Glendinning | The Rag Blog | June 21, 2017

CHUQUISACA, Bolivia — As befits the times, I have been studying Nikolaus Wachsmann´s KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps and re-reading Uprooted Minds: Surviving the Politics of Terror in the Americas, by Nancy Caro Hollander.

As a resident of Bolivia, I’ve also had the chance to befriend Latin American activists who were jailed and tortured, or fled, during the dictatorships of the 1970s-’80s, including one man who was among very few to escape a massacre committed by the same battalion that years earlier had murdered Che Guevara (“Interview with a Revolutionary,” Wild Culture, 27 Nov 2016) and another who fled directly from being tortured, his jaw broken and blood soaking his shirt, to the airport to escape to Sweden.
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Lamar W. Hankins :
American culture: Appropriated, revised,
and invented

Posted on June 20, 2017 by Thorne Dreyer

There is virtually no part of our culture that is not borrowed from somewhere else.

Woody Guthrie: “I steal from everyone.” Photo by Al Aumuller / New York World-Telegram and the Sun / Public Domain.

By Lamar W. Hankins | The Rag Blog | June 20, 2017

To paraphrase something the musicologist Charles Seeger once said (as reported by his son Pete Seeger), “Plagiarism is basic to all culture.” He might as well have said, “Appropriation is basic to all culture.”

In fact, Pete Seeger spent a good deal of his 94 years learning music from a variety of cultures and teaching others the songs and tunes he encountered in his travels. Without Pete’s work, I may never have heard Cuban songs. Certainly, without his work and that of Zilphia Horton, Guy Carawan, and Frank Hamilton altering an old Negro spiritual, we might not have had what came to be called the anthem of the civil rights movement in this country, “We Shall Overcome,” which has been heard in other struggles around the world, such as in South Africa’s Soweto Township, in Tiananmen Square, and North Korea.
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