After more than thirty years as a media critic, Utne Reader contributor Norman Solomon is running for Congress. Dennis Bernstein at The Progressive spoke to Solomon about this career change. “For more than forty years, I’ve been writing to change the system; now I’m running to change the system,” Solomon told Bernstein.  

For decades, we’ve seen one disaster after another as progressives have routinely left the electoral field to corporate Democrats and their Republican colleagues. We desperately need to go beyond the false choice between staying true to ideals and winning public office. Progressives can—and must—do both.

The article quotes Sean Penn, one of Solomon’s campaign supporters, at a recent fundraising event, recalling a trip he and the candidate took to Iran just before the Iraq war began.

“As hundreds, then thousands, gathered around the circle of singing women, suddenly it was the appearance of the special police,” Penn said. “And then out came the batons. As things got chaotic, I briefly lost Norman in the crowd. I was about twenty-five yards from getting to that inner circle of women who were taking bludgeons to the heads. And then I saw Norman, not flinching, standing directly beside them, and he stayed through it all.”   

Read the rest of Bernstein’s article about Solomon and read his piece “Democrats Must Push Back” at utne.com.

Source: The Progressive , The Real News 

Anyone who has ever had the yearning to vote for an alternative, independent, and progressive third party candidate only to cave in the voting booth and vote Democrat—haunted by voices saying, “You’d be throwing your vote away”—must surely be asking these days, “What if?” After seeing what just a few elected officials can do to the whole political process, each and every one of them has to be saying, “If only we’d voted with our hearts.” After all, as Kevin Drum points out at Mother Jones, “So who was driving the absolutist view in Congress over the past few months? If it was the no-compromise wing of the tea party, that's less than 10% of the country.”

Less than ten percent. No doubt, at some point in the last few decades all those people wishing they could break out of the tired two-party system and vote for a truly progressive-minded candidate could have reached a number in Congress that could rival the number of Tea Partiers taking the country hostage now. What then? What would this country look like had we known that so few could do so much? We’ll never know.

Still, if we must try and find a silver lining in this nobody-wins model of government, maybe it’s this: It turns out we might not being throwing our vote away if we vote more progressively than we previously thought possible. Or, at the very least, form a political base with some teeth, able to make Democrats believe they may be ousted for a more progressive candidate if they continue to woo the Almighty Independent Vote in lieu of actual liberal ideals. This is the conclusion behind recent articles in Dissent and Change-Links.

In “Stopping Obama’s Next Betrayal” Mark Engler has little time for debating whether or not Obama is a true liberal or a centrist. Such discussions don’t “lead very far in terms of suggesting a political response,” Engler writes. Obama is what he is and, no matter what else you say about his administration, it will listen to opposing sides. The problem, according to Engler, is that progressive movements aren’t doing their part in making the president or Congress work for them.

Obama is willing to compromise and cave because progressive movements are not strong enough to enforce discipline among politicians. Nor are they strong enough to consistently outweigh corporate influences within the Democratic Party….

Until a vocal, dedicated, progressive grassroots, taking a page from the Tea Party, can show that it’s far more effective to reposition the center of the debate than it is to forever triangulate in hopes of appealing to “independents,“ Democratic politicians will continue to do the latter.

Similarly Shamus Cooke, in “The Rich are Destroying the Economy,” calls for a strong, organized movement to make politicians respond to progressive ideals, though he is suspect of Democrats being willing or able to rise to the task:

Organized labor needs to bring masses of people in the street all over the country in order to get attention and pressure the government to respond to these demands. And it can succeed, especially if it organizes a serious, protracted campaign and especially if this campaign does not get funneled into supporting Democratic candidates, the surest way to kill campaign momentum.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka recently spoke in favor of a strong, independent labor movement. This is the direction it must take, rather than relying on the Democrats. The labor movement must get its act together, unite to put up a fight and demand specific policies that can concretely address the crisis faced by millions of working people.

So, the silver lining is that maybe we aren’t really stuck with a two-party system. Maybe we wouldn’t be throwing our votes away if we voted the way we actually wanted to vote. At the very least, we’re (oddly) reminded by the Tea Party of what Margaret Mead said about a small group of committed citizens changing the world. (Though she did also use the word “thoughtful.”) That said, if there’s gridlock now in DC, can you imagine what it would be like if the left side of the aisle was actually full of progressive politicians bent on staying true to their ideals instead of caving for the “betterment” of the country?

Source: Dissent, Change-Link, Mother Jones 

Image by Image Editor, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Christine Smallwood's interview with historian Tony Judt in The Nation ended with a much-too-brief exchange about religion and the left. Here it is:

Smallwood: I come from a very religious background, and it seems to me that people on the left are so embarrassed about the language of morality that they've ceded the ground to the right.

Judt: I totally agree. I think it's a catastrophe for both sides. What it means for the left is that it's got no ethical vocabulary. What it means for the right is that it smugly supposes that it's got a monopoly on values. Both sides are completely wrong. There used to be a tradition of left-wing ethics, Orwellian if you like, or pre-Orwell. I'd like to say parenthetically that I come out of a sort of secular dissenting Jewish background, but one with some of the same thoughts of the old dissenting churches—Christian, Jewish—of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which there was a natural correspondence of social values and ethical criteria. And the divorce between them has been one of the disastrous results of the last half-century. I'd love to contribute to re-forming that link.

More! I want more!

Source: The Nation

Barack Obama’s administration has not yet passed a health care bill. Nor has it passed a climate change bill. Nor has it closed Guantanamo Bay. There is, however, one progressive issue where the Obama administration has been extremely productive: regulation.

Under previous Republican administrations, John B. Judis reports for the New Republic that the alphabet soup of federal regulation agencies—the EPA, OSHA, SEC, FCC, and others—were systematically dismantled. Industry representatives were chosen to regulate the industries they represented, and budgets were strategically cut. Obama is turning the tide, appointing actual regulators and increasing funding, even in the midst of the recession. “In doing so,” Judis writes, “he isn’t simply improving the effectiveness of various government offices or making scattered progress on a few issues; he is resuscitating an entire philosophy of government with roots in the Progressive era of the early twentieth century.”

Source: The New Republic 

People with progressive politics shouldn’t reflexively shun sports, says sportswriter and Utne Reader visionary Dave Zirin.

He should know. Zirin is the rare sports journalist who dares to promote left-field politics. In his Edge of Sports columns, his XM Sirius radio show of the same name, his stories for The Nation, and numerous other outlets, he has championed Title IX for advancing women’s sports, taken on the corporatocracy that runs the big leagues, criticized big stadium subsidies from the public till, and addressed issues of race, gender, and sexuality like few other sports personalities.

I recently spoke with Zirin in a lively and enlightening conversation that covered the left’s sports-phobia, the value of the alternative press, and his physical resemblance (or lack thereof) to Muhammad Ali. Here it is:

You’ve staked out a unique niche, exploring the social, cultural, and political issues that swirl around sports. How did you come to define this turf, and what are you trying to accomplish?

“There’s this deeply mistaken idea in our culture that politics is just what people do on Capitol Hill, when in fact politics is in the air we breathe, the food we eat, and in the games we play. And oftentimes, in our society, some of most honest discussions that we have—about racism, about sexism, about homophobia, about corporate power—happen on sports radio and in the world of sports. We can say that we wish this wasn’t so, but as the expression goes, you don’t have to believe in gravity to fall out of an airplane. I mean, it is what it is.

“But unfortunately, people who see themselves as progressives or on the left have completely ceded this very dynamic political space to the right wing. I know so many people on the left who on general principle shun sports. They say, oh, it’s too corporate, it’s too racist, it’s too sexist. And there may be truth in that—but sports is also part of the human experience: It’s physical expression, it’s beauty, and it’s been the site of some of the most electric struggles of the 20th century.

“I mean, there is no denying from a historical perspective that Muhammad Ali is the most famous draft resister in the history of the United States. There is no denying that Title IX is perhaps one of if not the most important reform of the women’s liberation movement. There is no denying that the earliest public LGBT people were people in the world of sports like Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova.

“So this is very real—and yet we on the left are oftentimes very dismissive of it in a way that we shouldn’t be, because issues like everything from the name of the team in my hometown, the Washington Redskins, to whether or not teenage girls have access to play, to whether or not a gay athlete feels like he or she can come out of closet on a team, to whether or not taxpayer money goes to a new stadium—these are all issues which are dynamically political, and it’s about time we had our say.

“I did a book talk for my first book, What’s My Name, Fool!, which has this big picture of Muhammad Ali on the cover. And I did it at a very left wing, anarchist bookstore with tons of antiwar stuff everywhere. And I go into the bookstore to do the talk, and the manager of the store comes up to me and asks, ‘Can I help you?’ and I say, ‘Yeah, I’m Dave Zirin.’ And they say, ‘What? But you’re white.’ And I say, ‘Yeah, I’m white, last I checked.’ And they say, ‘But your picture on the cover of the book . . .’ And I say, ‘No, that’s not me. That’s Muhammad Ali.’ ‘Ohhhhh!’ Later, in that same event, someone asked me—remember, the book is called What’s My Name, Fool!—why I decided to write about Mr. T.

“I raise this not to take a potshot at some well-meaning lefties, but at this bookstore there’s antiwar stuff everywhere, they’re selling Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky—and they don’t know the history of Muhammad Ali. This to me is an act of political masochism. We’re amputating one of the most dynamic parts of our own history as activists.

“That’s why I write what I write, and that’s why I do what I do. I also like traveling around and talking to people. There are so many people in this country who love sports but hate what sports have become. That’s an opening for us to actually have an honest discussion about reclaiming sports from those who would use it to pump messages of militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed. We can go out there with a strong message that says we want to take our sports back, and we would be surprised at the audience we would find.”

You’re in so many media, from TV to print to talk radio to your website. Where is the most exciting media territory in sports right now?

“Two areas, I’d say, and they’re very different areas. The first is sports radio, because it’s like walking into the lion’s den and just taking these ideas down. And the thing that’s interesting about sports radio is that our political media landscape is very segregated. You’ve got your Pacifica Radio and you’ve got your Fox News. But sports radio is a place where a lot of it comes together. Unfortunately, the commentators don’t really reflect the diversity of the listenership, but it is the only kind of place where I’ve been able to go on and get in really hardcore political arguments with the host and then get a whole diversity of calls from people calling in—who agree, disagree. It’s a great place to actually reach people and to actually test what I’m saying in practice. My argument is that there are tons of sports fans who don’t get touched by progressive politics who we can reach through sports. And when I get to do sports radio, it doesn’t always work, but it’s a chance to really put that into practice and test it.

“Also, when I had thought of writing about the politics of sports, every publisher turned me down except an independent press called Haymarket Books. They took a chance on it. And the only reason I get to do like ESPN and MSNBC is because an independent publisher took a chance that the ideas would have a hearing. It’s so critical. Magazines like the Utne Reader, book publishers like Haymarket—it’s so important that they survive and thrive and that we support them. Because otherwise, the bottleneck of ideas in our society becomes so narrow without the independent press. I really owe Haymarket just about everything, really, for just taking a chance on independent thought, which you don’t get in the mainstream media.”

So if there’s this great hunger in the sports world for intelligent discussion, do you think there are going to be more commentators like you, more people who are willing to shake things up?

“I hope so, because we need more. You’re definitely starting to see it on the Internet, and you’re definitely starting to see it on Internet radio as well, and I think we need more of it. I meet people all the time who are really good progressives, and they talk about being sports fans as if it’s their dirty little secret. They’re practically whispering it to me, like, ‘Hey, I’m a sports fan, too,’ as if they watch highlights at 3 a.m. in their closet or something.

“And I want to tell all the progressive sports fans, get out of the closet and into the streets, get out of the closet and onto the blogs, get out of the closet and onto the Web, because this is just space that’s there for us to claim. And the more of us that are out there pushing our ideas about what sports could be, the more opening there’s going to be for the very kind of shake-it-up mainstream sports journalism that I think we so desperately need. It’ll come from below, and I think we can do it.”

Image courtesy of Dave Zirin.

The Democrats will soon control both Congress and the Presidency, but the real reason for progressives to be hopeful is the wealth of up-and-coming intellectuals of the left. Talking Points Memo’s deputy publisher Andrew Golis has compiled a good list of 10 progressive intellectuals that give him hope. The list includes the unflappable Van Jones, co-founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and Rinku Sen, one of Utne Reader’s 50 visionaries who is changing the world.

Golis included a video of his favorite intellectuals, so I’m including one from Jay Smooth, included in the list for his hip hop video blogging: