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New Ground 116January - February, 2008ContentsNew Ground 116.1 - 02.01.2008
New Ground 116.2 - 02.14.2008
New Ground 116.3 - 03.05.2008
Burger King Lese Majestyby Bob Roman If you want to use the tired metaphor of war to describe the efforts of Florida tomato pickers to improve their lot then you would probably say the battle is currently in the air - though that could change. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) brought together over fifteen hundred supporters, including many public figures, to demonstrate outside of the Burger King corporate headquarters in Miami, Florida, at the end of November. This was to pressure Burger King to agree to the same additional penny per pound of tomatoes picked that other fast food vendors have agreed to. In a counter move, with rather more than just publicity consequences, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange announced that it would forbid its members from participating in such third party agreements. After all, why would farm workers need the CIW when the growers had their very own accrediting agency to certify best practices, including no abuse of workers? This would have been an effective maneuver in the publicity dogfight but that it was just in time for another slavery bust. Three Florida farm workers, after having been beaten and chained for a year, broke free and made it to authorities. Oops. Then came the release a new book by John Bowe, Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy. On top of this, CIW was awarded the 2007 Anti-Slavery award from Anti-Slavery International , a British-based organization established as part of the abolition movement in 1839. Florida tomatoes, anyone? Here in Chicago, Northwestern University's Students for Economic Justice organized a picket outside of an Evanston Burger King in solidarity with CIW's Miami demonstration at the end of November. And, it should be noted, just in time for the first significant snow of the season. Then on Saturday, December 22nd, the ad hoc group in support of CIW here in Chicago organized caroling on State Street. If Evanston during a snowstorm was a tough house, State Street right before Christmas was worse. But we sang and distributed several hundred flyers. The Chicago folks have since adopted a name, Chicago Community for Fair Food. A web site, http://www.chicagofairfood.org , is under construction, along with a MySpace site, http://myspace.com/chicagofairfood . We've also done some tabling in Oak Park. Why is all this the "air war?" It's simply that the real power of the union is in the workplace, on the ground. Contracts, labor laws, and community campaigns can bolster or weaken that power, but they are no substitute. The CIW is pursuing an "air war" because, at present, they must. But ultimately they will have authority in the fields or they will be naught. On Our Way to a Socialist Forumby Bob Roman Chicago DSA has just inaugurated an electronic discussion list. "This is news?" you ask. "Didn't you have one already?" Well, no. The idea has come up periodically for the past few years, and it's mostly been sloth on my part that has delayed it. Not that I had to be the one to do it, but in an all volunteer operation, responsibility tends to go to whomever talks about it. And I've had some fairly specific ideas about the list, based on what I've experienced elsewhere. First of all, the list is being run off our web site provider. We're not paying extra for the service but, more to the point, messages are not being re-formatted or having advertising inserted. At present, there is a 64k limit to the size of the message and traffic is not being archived on line. You can receive messages in a periodic "digest" if you wish. Second, the list is for Chicago DSA members only. Your dues can be in arrears, but not so old that you've been dropped from membership. If we already have your email address, you should have received an invitation to join by the time you receive this hardcopy. Otherwise, go to http://nine.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/chicagodsa to sign up. Incidentally, as the list is for Chicago DSA members only, we will need to know who you are: no anonymous subscriptions. If you're not sure about whether you're "officially" a member these days, call or email the office. If money is a problem, we do have a "busted" dues category; see the coupon in this issue. Third, we do have a mission statement: "This is a discussion list for members of the Democratic Socialists of America Chicago Local only. The prime topics for discussion are DSA strategy, tactics, program, ideas, and practices. A wide variety of opinions and proposals are expected and encouraged, but the moderator will not permit rude or abusive behavior or personal attacks by one list member on another." If that last bit sounds rather threatening, be assured we're not looking for perfection. But have you noticed how much nicer, or at least more restrained, some people are in person as opposed to their persona in email or on the web? We're simply asking that you be kind and generally no worse than you would be if in person. Finally, the electronic edition of New Ground, email announcements and alerts are being handled separately. Please do accept my apology for the delay in implementing this. It's my hope that out of this will grow new projects, new leaders, new friends, and new ideas. Politics and ChristiansBy Bob Roman The Truth About Conservative Christians: What They Think and What They Believe by Andrew Greeley and Michael Hout. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 206 pages, $22.50 This is a polemical book, based on public opinion research, written as an answer to popular political commentary that equates conservative Christian theology with conservative politics. The basic contention is that conservative Christians are "far too varied in their political views to be President Bush's political base" Or, in the words of a popular bumper sticker of some years ago, "Christians are no better than other people, they're just forgiven." The Truth About Conservative Christians examines the opinions, voting behavior, and consumption patterns of Christians (and others, for comparison), in order to draw conclusions not just about politics but culture and religion. Chicagoans will recognize one of the authors, Andrew Greeley, as a Catholic Priest, columnist for the Sun Times, and a highly prolific author: possibly Catholicism's answer to Isaac Asimov, though Greeley's attempts at science fiction were pretty lame. What they may not know is that Greeley is also a sociologist with, naturally, an interest in the sociology of religion. He's currently a professor at University of Arizona but is also on the staff of the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. I remember him as being more than a bit conservative back in the 1970s but most would likely regard his contemporary columns as being rather liberal, at least. Michael Hout is apparently from a similar Irish Catholic background as Greeley though of a younger generation. He's presently the chair of a joint program in demography and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Hout has collaborated with Greeley in a number of other papers. Back when I studied the subject, there were two methodologies used by sociologists, and it typically was a matter of one or the other but not both when it came to individual sociologists, even departments. One was participant observation, a methodology akin to journalism crossed with some aspects of anthropology. The other was statistical: reducing society to numbers in a variety of ways, finding correlation, and trying to tease out causality from the observations. Both Greeley and Hout are firmly in this latter camp. But be assured that the statistics are largely behind the scenes in this book, and the findings are presented in tables that, with few exceptions, are very accessible. One major pitfall to a statistical approach to the study of society is, just what is it that you're measuring? When a person answers a survey question, for example, just what does that answer mean? Sociology is humble enough (unlike economics, for example) to be acutely aware of the ambiguities of measurement, and, with one exception, so are Greeley and Hout. With respect to politics, the authors demonstrate that conservative Christians do vote more conservatively, but not nearly so much as one might expect: class and especially race matter more. A majority of working class conservative Christians vote Democratic though not as much as other working class populations. But if biblical literalism reduces the Democratic vote among whites, exactly the opposite is true among Blacks: "Bible Christians in Afro-American denominations are even more likely to vote Democratic than are other African Americans" The authors' conclusions boil down to the following political advice to Democrats on the conservative Christian vote:
The first two points are really different aspects of a single thing: what is the individual's relation to society and how does one find security among one's fellows. This is not examined in this book. It's a major omission as the advice above implies that the candidate must credibly promise both guns and butter. It also has implications about what policies would be perceived as "credible." Finally, Greeley and Hout assert that economic justice is back on the table: "Get economic justice right, and the Conservative Christians held back by economic injustice will back you." These recommendations are not based on voting behavior alone, but also on research into opinions, sexual behavior (the authors have fun with this), and consumption patterns. It's interesting that the authors' research tends to lend some support to economic historian Robert Fogel's The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism and has thought-provoking links to Senator Jim Webb's history of the Scots-Irish, Born Fighting, though neither work is mentioned in the bibliography. The one major disappointment in this book is the authors' attempt to measure anti-Catholic bigotry. As someone who grew up in a small village dominated by descendants of Yankees out of New England, a village where Catholics were most certainly "outsiders" no matter how long (indeed no matter how many generations) they had lived there, I have some interest in the question. But arguing that if "a majority of a minority group says that a statement about them is not true, they have the right to interpret the statement as a slur," the authors chose to measure anti-Catholicism by answers to two assertions: that Catholics are not permitted to think for themselves and the Rosary is a superstitious devotion. The right to interpret a statement as a slur does not automatically make the statement a good choice to measure bigotry or racism. In my opinion, the choice of these measures is more self-righteous and provocative than useful, a pity because this is still an important issue, as is bigotry towards Jews, a topic not touched in this book. Even so, this is a useful book, not because it promises that everything will be all right for the center-left if only we learn to love Jesus, but because it provides information on how we can build a progressive majority coalition on the basis of policy, not just framing and spin. Other Newscompiled by Bob Roman Heads Up!The 2008 Debs - Thomas - Harrington Dinner will be held a bit earlier in the year than usual on Friday evening, April 25. Also new this year, we'll be at the Crowne Plaza Hotel at Madison and Halsted in Chicago. This is a new facility for us, though the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee held a national convention there back in the mid-1970s. We're still working on the program, but one of our honorees will be Les Orear of the Illinois Labor History Society . We do love those Packinghouse Workers! Young Democratic SocialistsThe Young Democratic Socialists' annual Winter Conference will be held on February 15th through the 17th at the Bayard Rustin High School in New York, NY. The title for this year's gathering is "Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible: Reviving Democratic, Socialist, and Youth Activism." Among the featured speakers and panelists will be Manning Marable, Bill Fletcher, Stephen Eric Bronner, Frances Fox Piven, Nancy Fraser, and Jose LaLuz. For more information, go to http://www.ydsusa.org/news/2008-conference.html or call 212.727.8610. Web Site UpdatesOur web site project for 2007 has been to finish posting what we have of the history of the Debs - Thomas - Harrington Dinner. And it's done; we've taken it about as far as we can with the information here in the office. Which is to say there are some years (such as 1958, 1965, and 1967) for which we have no information whatsoever. And there are others (such as 1961, 1962, 1964, 1969, and 1972) for which we have only some names. If you have any information about these years or leads on where more information might be found, we'd surely love to hear from you. Information on other years would be welcome as well. Thanks, once again, to Ken Okamoto, formerly of the UofC Young Democratic Socialists wherever he may be, for the library research he did on the earliest Dinners. The earliest year for which we have fairly good documentation is 1960. We have dozens of photos (all by Syd Harris, though some are from contact sheets) in the file, and we've posted photos of Emil Mazey (UAW Secretary Treasurer), Hilton Hanna, David Shier, Morris Milgram, Herman Benson, and others whose identities are sometimes unknown or uncertain. We also have an article about the event that was published afterwards by the Socialist Party's newspaper, New America. All this is at http://www.chicagodsa.org/d1960/index.html . While we have no program information, we do have a good selection of photos from 1959, including Norman Thomas and A. Philip Randolph at the speakers' table, Max Shachtman, Lillian Herstein, and others: http://www.chicagodsa.org /d1959/index.html. The home page for the Dinner is http://www.chicagodsa.org/dthdin.html . Eugene V. Debs and Mother JonesThis has been going on for a few years and likely enough will go on for another year or so, but the West Virginia Labor History Association and others have been campaigning to have Eugene V. Debs and Mother Jones honored on first class stamps. They're asking that you send a letter of support to: Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee, Stamp Department, U.S. Postal Service, 1735 N. Lynn St Rm 5013, Arlington, VA 22209 - 6432. One of the ring-leaders of the campaign would like a carbon of the letter: Sanford Berman, 4400 Morningside Rd, Edina, MN 55416. For more information on the process, go to http://www.usps.com/communications/organization/csac.htm .
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