Meeting details:
- Rochambo Coffee & Tea House, 1317 E Brady St
- January 8, 2019
- 6:30
Time for updates/planning:
- Various reading groups
- Last meeting, we considered having one group organize both approachable book club and periodical club; and a second group organize both theory book club and periodical club.
- However organized, there is a lot of interest and this needs to get off the ground
- Tom/Tancrede were working on theory
- Chris was to find someone to head approachable groups; also to check in with Andrew
- Right wing / law enforcement infiltrators
- Democratic socialism 101 and 102
- With meetings decreasing from every 2 weeks to ever 4 weeks, should education committee take on something else? Eg, a symposium with different speakers on the same topic. Antiwar seems like a perfect fit for this idea. However, if we can’t pull this off we need to get started on an antiwar topic for a general meeting. There are a lot of different ideas, eg:
- War is evil and should be avoided at all costs
- Eg, Salvador Allende in Chile, the only use for a military is to overrule the popular will. If Chile had abolished its military, could there ever have been a coup?
- US use of drones and cluster bombings throughout Muslim world has created terrorists where previously there had been no terrorists
- “Democratic socialism” itself is a reaction against revolutionary socialism. Could explore this idea: violence is polarizing, has not been effective
General meeting topics
- Finalize these topics:
- Economics for socialists / famines (Chris)
People are working on these topics:
- Taylor
- Public option for funeral/burial services
- Andrew
- Electoral college and gerrymandering
- YIMBYs and gentrification. Building more housing units does not put downward pressure on prices
- Tom
- Public control over finance:
- Directing investment towards projects/firms with the greatest benefit which may not be most profitable
- how federal reserve is governed
- Fed lends money to banks at lower rates than those banks lend to ordinary people. So banks literally cannot lose
- macroeconomic policy
- Public control over finance:
- Ian
- McCarthyism
- Antiwar–Nick
- Foxconn–Mary (with race-to-the-bottom policies/Chris)
- Chris
- Race to the bottom
- Housing/predatory lending
- Housing/redlining
- Nationalizing companies
- Meidner plan
- How the public sector funds vast majority of R&D
- Full employment
- Retirement
Anyone interested in taking these topics?
- Police abolition. I have some background on a mobile crisis response team
- Capitalism’s weeping angels. Less than a decade after the banking crisis, the reforms of Dodd-Frank are already getting rolled back
- https://theintercept.com/2018/08/20/dodd-frank-rollback-banking-bill/
- Capital strike. Opponents of failed referendum that would have ended the state law that prohibited rent controls basically argued that if they did not get their way, they would stop building housing in order to harm ordinary Californians as well as collapse property taxes, also to harm ordinary Californians. On the very same day that this referendum was defeated, Austin voters overwhelmingly passed a referendum creating a $250 bond for affordable housing. While this bond measure has some serious problems, the comparison is striking: public investment for the public good
- Background on the referendum: https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article213328069.html
- Very good evidence that rent control would not have affected construction: https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/09/28/will-rent-control-kill-california-housing-production-not-necessarily-data-shows/
- Austin referendum: https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2018/11/07/2018-election-250m-affordable-housing-bond.html
- Antisemitism
- https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/11/antisemitism-squirrel-hill-pittsburgh-shooting-racism
- https://972mag.com/how-the-sjp-taught-me-to-confront-anti-semitism/133572/
- https://www.thejc.com/culture/features/hunting-communists-they-were-really-after-jews-1.10702
- https://972mag.com/yes-the-right-of-return-is-feasible-heres-how-it-can-be-done/130560/
- https://972mag.com/an-alliance-of-hate-the-israeli-rights-ties-to-european-facism/118580/
- A few topics filed under “selling socialism to small businesses”
- Entrepreneurship in the Nordic countries
- http://www.demos.org/blog/2/19/16/david-brooks-incorrect-about-northern-europe
- http://www.demos.org/blog/3/16/16/nordic-innovation-arguments-never-die
- Social welfare and entrepreneurship
- https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/welfare-makes-america-more-entrepreneurial/388598/
- Entrepreneurship in the Nordic countries
- US at will employment law contrasted with employment law in other countries
- Professional sports lockouts
- Long term unemployment
- https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-terrifying-reality-of-long-term-unemployment/274957/
- A closer look at poverty, unemployment, underemployment, and cost of living.
- Economics for socialists
- See here where Amazon’s $15/hour raise was deemed “suicidal” by libertarians: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/10/bernie-sanders-shows-how-to-do-politics
- Cooperatives in Italy
- https://thenextsystem.org/learning-from-emilia-romagna
- 20 hour work week (capitalism taking from us things other than money)
- https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/working-hours-vacation-productivity-united-states-nordic
- We need to do a deep organizing topic ASAP
- See if Derek will talk about building trust through mutual aid for a few minutes. Then talk about how social media can only do the most shallow of organizing:
- https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/log-off-facebook-twitter-social-media-addiction
- https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/12/log-off-social-media-twitter-organizing-facebook
- See if Derek will talk about building trust through mutual aid for a few minutes. Then talk about how social media can only do the most shallow of organizing:
- Yellow vests
- Open borders
- electoral:
- https://jacobinmag.com/2017/12/democratic-party-minnesota-farmer-labor-floyd-olson
- capital strike:
- University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
- https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/09/pittsburgh-upmc-hospital-single-payer-amazon
- Failed referendum to repeal rent control prohibition in California. The argument was essentially “if you do this we will stop building housing and the problem will get worse.” That same day, Austin voters approved public spending on affordable housing. The contrast is clear: the private sector threatens capital strike if they have to charge affordable rents; the public sector does not.
- https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article213328069.html
- Very good evidence that rent control would not have affected construction: https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/09/28/will-rent-control-kill-california-housing-production-not-necessarily-data-shows/
- Compare to Austin referendum: https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2018/11/07/2018-election-250m-affordable-housing-bond.html
- University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
- employee stock ownership plans:
- https://theintercept.com/2018/12/26/esop-plans-employee-ownership-bernie-sanders/
- Vulture (venture) capital / private equity
- https://newrepublic.com/article/145813/cause-consequences-retail-apocalypse
- https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bje7zm/this-invisible-industry-might-be-the-worst-thing-about-late-capitalism
- When it went bankrupt, Toys R Us sold 1 out of every 5 toys in the entire country: https://theweek.com/articles/761124/how-vulture-capitalists-ate-toys-r
- https://www.newsday.com/business/analysis-private-equity-ownership-common-in-retail-bankruptcies-1.13503349
These topics are ready to go:
- Intellectual property in science/engineering – Chris