Judge Finds J20 Prosecutors Failed to Disclose Exculpatory Evidence, Mulls Sanctions
Metro DC DSA member Chip Gibbons provides an update on the J20 trial. On 20 January, 219 protesters were kettled with no prior order to disperse and arrested. Protesters were charged with felony rioting, conspiracy to riot, property destruction and other offenses. Eventually, prosecutors dropped charges against 159 defendants, but 59 remain on trial, facing 61 years in prison.
Trumka: Technology Must Be Used for Good, Not Greed
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka delivered these remarks at the opening meeting of the Commission on the Future of Work and Unions (). After discussing how technology is changing the workplace, he demands that we use technology to "improves lives and raises standards and wages across the board."
The Coming Collapse
Chris Hedges often writes with a kind of grim, puritanical resolve, and this piece is no exception. But after some considerable Democratic Party and Trump bashing, he does offer something like a way out. But, Hedges warns, we need to hurry.
More U.S. Businesses Are Becoming Worker Co-ops: Here’s Why
A solid article on the growing trend of retiring Boomers selling their businesses to their employees. Author Eillie Anzilotti discusses benefits of worker co-ops, how to start one, and the important role of the Democracy at Work Institute in fostering this "alternative to capitalism."
Stop Using Discriminatory AI, Human Rights Groups Say
Earlier this month, a group of human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, The Wikimedia Foundation, and Access Now "called on governments and technology companies to adopt guiding principles to protect human rights." The organizations collaborated to draft the Toronto Declaration on Machine Learning, which uses human rights law to allow those discriminated against by AI algorithms to seek reparations.
The students of 1968 declared ‘Beneath the pavements, the beach
In a substantial historical piece in the feisty Brit journal Red Pepper, Hilary Wainwright quotes a current activist born in 1985: “‘In terms of a direct legacy of 1968, there’s a sense of history that I ought to feel but it isn’t necessarily there. But it remains an incredibly important reference point, not just for me but also for a lot of people I associate with. The story I tell myself – or some of us tell ourselves – is that this was a moving away from a workerist politics, organised around the site of liberation – or of struggle, or the place of opportunity for progressive politics – being defined by, on the one hand, the workplace, and, on the other hand, by the state.’”
‘Revolution was in the air’: the May ’68 events and revolution in the WestA piece from The Bullet (!), journal of the Toronto-based Socialist Project, is from the Italian communist analyst Lucio Magri, who observes of the stalled impulse of 1968: “But it is not easy to make a revolution which right from the beginning is explicitly anti-bourgeois in all its contents. First of all, in an advanced capitalist society there is not a simple polarization between capitalists on one side and proletarians on the other, where the two become increasingly antagonistic and increasingly conscious of this antagonism. On the contrary, there is an extremely complex social scheme in which a socialist transformation would harm the immediate interests of strong groups, while on the other hand the proletariat itself at present is fragmented into diverse conditions of life, work and culture.”
