China’s Chernobyl – COVID-19, HBO Vs. Socialism, And The Bad Habit Of Disaster-WatchingAlthough we love to talk of “learning from history”, it’s true that this is one of those many things in life that’s easier said than done. A single event can teach us many things or it can teach us nothing. It can be universal or particular in its causes and after-effects, and often both at once, and depending on the angle you observe an event from it can mean whatever you want it to. Often we look at things of particular significance and extrapolate them into telling us what we want – for instance, learning from 1938, Chamberlain, and Munich that “it is always wrong to attempt to negotiate with competing powers”, while 1914 would teach us that this approach can be just as disastrous as so-called ‘appeasement’. What happened in Soviet Ukraine in 1986 is an example of the inverse, when an event with universal ramifications was reduced to its particular details. The explosion at Reactor Four of Pripyat’s Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, and the subsequent environmental and political crisis that has scarred Ukraine’s environment for decades since, that pumped deadly amounts of radiation into the air around the world and contributed significantly to the collapse of the Soviet Union, is not taken to be the consequence of improper safety protocols, the capturing of political regulatory organs by vested interests, and the danger of covering up disasters instead of properly responding to them – it’s either simply about nuclear power, or more often – especially in our modern world of western political decay and insecurity – about ‘authoritarianism’. A cursory glance at the facts, and that the second other great nuclear disaster at Fukushima in Japan in 2011 took place within a liberal-democratic state with a free press, makes this claim look very flimsy. Little about Chernobyl’s general causes could be called exclusively Soviet – COVID-19 shows us this, that political cover-ups are an inevitable part of government in the modern world, and that what happened in the USSR in 1986 was Soviet in its particulars but dealt with things that were even present in classic blockbuster movie Jaws, in which the mayor of a small resort town refuses to close the beach even after a shark has mauled several swimmers because it’s the tourist season. So it is that, as with many other issues of our own we’re not willing to face, we take these trappings, journalists threatened and whistleblowers arrested by state security, ordinary citizens bewildered and abandoned, old functionaries making bland propaganda speeches and sinister images of uniform government power dealing brutally with the consequences of all the lies, and we make them the whole of the event. The universality of Chernobyl – this could happen anywhere – becomes particular: this could happen under socialism.
https://lateralthinkingtechnology.wordpress.com/2021/07/23/chinas-chernobyl-covid-19-hbo-vs-socialism-and-the-bad-habit-of-disaster-watching/Medicare For All, the Squad and the DSA: Who Controls Whom?The #ForceTheVote episode and now the silence around mobilizations for M4A are telling, however. They reveal the absolute failure of DSA and how they never had a lick of actual power. Socialist politics is not about posturing and preening like a peacock, it is about actually gaining material, tangible victories that improve the lives of the most unfortunate of our society. In a recent interview with the DSA house blog, Bhaskar Sunkara, publisher of Jacobin magazine, said “I used to believe that electoral politics comes last, that first you organize the class and civil society and you build, and you’re patient, and then one of the manifestations of your success is electoral success. But now I think that electoral politics is a jumping off point… I feel like this is the avenue for success.” Jimmy Dore’s #ForceTheVote stunt showed in stunning Technicolor a reality that Sunkara would love to ignore (probably to sell more magazines). When AOC refused to Force the Vote, Providence DSA passed a resolution condemning her refusal. But why should AOC care what Rhode Islanders say when she was elected by New Yorkers, most of whom are not in DSA? Her constituents didn’t challenge her to Force the Vote, a California podcaster named Jimmy Dore did! AOC will not face any consequences for this because she is accountable only to her constituents and not the larger membership of DSA!
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/07/29/medicare-for-all-the-squad-and-the-dsa-who-controls-whom/Pork and Beans Revolution:, mutual aid and soupThe city of Chicago, like most cities, faces the contradictory problems of hunger and food waste. General estimates suggest that the city of Chicago wastes 55 million pounds of food every month and from every link in the supply chain: farms to grocers to restaurants to consumers. Every food operation will have waste, despite efforts to minimize it in the name of profit – in some part because profit benefits from the scarcity created by waste. Meanwhile, thanks largely to Covid-19 and the resulting economic implosion, the food insecurity rate has doubled to nearly 800,000 or 1 in 3 Chicagoans. Utilizing this waste could avail 17lbs of food per person, per week. By applying our food waste – bones, trimmings, scraps – from regular service at Vincent with the generosity of our customers and farmers we were able to provide approximately 7,500 meals between March and November of 2020 (or nearly 200 per week) to furloughed service industry workers, quarantined seniors through the Center on Halsted, and local unhoused communities through Edgewater Mutual Aid. Donated funds from suppliers like Beam Suntory and our $5 “Soup for a Stranger” menu option totaled $4,000 – half of which was spent on paper cups and other packaging, the other half on beans, rice, and vegetables. Ingredients this far processed rarely require more than an hour’s worth of active labor to turn into soup, easily managed into the kitchen’s production schedule. With over 7,300 restaurants in the city, if each was to produce 200 meals, every food insecure person in Chicago could rely on two quality meals weekly.
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/pork-and-beans-revolution-mutual-aid-and-soup/