We’re in the midst of a new era of momentum and militancy around labor organizing. We’re seeing headline grabbing organizing campaigns at Starbucks and Amazon shifting the political landscape. But beyond Starbucks and Amazon, union organizing has been spreading to sectors across the country.
In our latest episode, we talk with labor organizer and writer Daisy Pitkin about her new book “On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union.” We talk about her work organizing a series of factory laundromats in Phoenix, AZ in the early 2000s. Pitkin worked with immigrant women working in the terrible conditions to organize a union. Most notably, she worked with a woman named Alma, who Pitkin describes as “the gutsiest worker leader I’ve ever met.”
This was all done despite a vicious corporate backlash in the reddest of red states.
Currently, Pitkin is organizing Starbucks workers in the Rust Belt. We discuss the Starbucks campaign and the future of labor organizing.
“Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.”
-William Gibson
Hiding out in the Good Friday press dump, the Biden administration announced it was opening up more public land to oil and gas drilling. The New York Times reported it as Biden trying to bring down high gas prices and save some sort of face for the 2022 elections. This is a reversal of his 2020 campaign promise to end new oil and gas leasing. It locks in new fossil fuel extraction despite his pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The consultation prize for environmentalists is a sharp increase in cost for oil companies.
Former Student for a Democratic Society Dick Flaks once said “the people who are running society are the corporate liberals. They want to stabilize, not repress.” They want to stabilize business as usual and even extreme repression, as we saw under Trump, becomes destabilizing. It’s why you saw everyone from Wall Street CEOs like Chase’s Jamie Dimon to the anti-worker National Association of Manufacturers to the Wall St. Journal saying the 2020 election wasn’t stolen and denouncing the Capitol Riot.
The ruling class prefers corporate liberals like Joe Biden or Jeb Bush than a lunatic like Trump at the helm. Unfortunately, for the rest of us and fate of human existence on this planet, they also prefer having oil and gas as part of their “business as usual.” This is why Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema were top recipients of oil and gas dollars. It’s also why Manchin and Sinema and 50 Republican senators have so much sway over our political system. The oil and gas industry gave over $139 million to both parties into the 2020 election.
And currently, it’s why Biden is now reversing course on public lands oil and gas drilling permits.
If it wasn’t Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema blocking legislation for oil and gas, it’d be two other Democrats. The political system, by design, is inherently corrupt. It is owned by the oil and gas sector, as well as a variety of other industries (banks, real estate, manufacturers) that want to keep things stable for an ever-growing economy.
Keep It in the Ground
BOEM lease auction disruption at the New Orleans Superdome in 2016. Pic via Center for Biological Diversity
In 2015-2016, I worked with others to organize disruptions at Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) public ocean and land auctions in a campaign to keep fossil fuels in the ground on public lands. Obama had rejected the permit for the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline in 2015 after a four year campaign and many within the climate movement had high hopes and we next moved to get him to ban fossil fuel extraction on public lands.
Our campaign continued to build and organize. The central strategy was the disruption of federal BLM and BOEM auctions where the leases were being sold off to the highest bidder. We organized protests and disruptions across the West targeting federal auctions in Colorado, Nevada and Utah. The tactic fit into a strategy of drawing attention to the administration’s policy of lease sales, disrupting them where we could and growing a bigger bolder movement.
The disruption of public lands auctions had become widely known after climate activist Tim DeChristopher had successfully bid $1.8 million for leasing rights to drill on 14 parcels of land. He was a student at the time and didn’t have the money. Consequently, Tim was charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with a federal felony and spent 21 months in prison.
In the New Orleans Superdome, we had our biggest splash as we marched 200 people into the middle of BOEM auction where they were selling off leases in the Gulf of Mexico. As Gulf organizer Cherri Foytlin put it,“We want to stop these lease sales. As long as these leases go through, [industry] is tying us to an archaic economy and an archaic way of doing things that is destroying our earth.”
As part of that campaign, I also attended an Obama fundraiser in Columbus OH that year and disrupted his address at the Ohio Democratic Party “Annual State Dinner” calling on him to end the federal public leasing program. He laughed and bantered back and forth with us until police took us away. I got banned from the Greater Columbus Convention Center for a year.
But, ultimately, in his remaining days in office, Obama did nothing to end fossil fuel extraction on public lands. Despite his rhetoric of “hope and change,” Obama was just another corporate liberal dedicated to keeping the economy stable for corporations and the ruling class.
Build a ferocious movement
It’s not lost on many of us that Biden’s reversal comes just weeks after the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UNIPCC) most recent dire warnings about it being a “now or never” moment on climate. Many from the reformist environmental non-profit industrial complex think that asking Democrats nicely will get us what we need. As during the Clinton and Obama eras, that’s clearly not working.
Centrist Democrats are also waging war on the left flank of their own party and racial justice and labor movements. When Biden says that we need to FUND the police and centrist Democrats in the Senate sink a key Dept. of Labor nominee, it’s a clear message that the forces of neo-liberalism and law and order run deep within the party.
In struggles around fossil fuels, it’s no different. From crackdowns on water protectors at Standing Rock and Line 3 to Manchin siding with Republicans to kill climate legislation, it happens over and over.
We need a bigger more ferocious climate movement. There needs to be much less compromise and playing electoral games with the Democrats. People are hungry for militancy. We see that militancy at fights around pipelines, old growth logging, development of luxury homes in Detroit and other points of destruction, but we need to meet the crises in our world at a greater scale.
A little historical perspective.
In 1935 rubber workers in Akron, Ohio formed a union called the United Rubber Workers Union. They created 39 local chapters and begin a strike against poor working conditions, low wages and few benefits. The American Federation of Labor attempted to call off the strike. So thousands left abandoned union leadership, and instead used sit-down strikes and long picket lines to win their demands. The mayor of Akron attempted to send the police in to put down the strike, but police refused to face off against thousands of organizer workers.
By 1969, draft resisters had built a formidable movement against the war in Vietnam. Their disruptive actions sparked a shift in tactics from legal protest to mass civil disobedience, drawing the Johnson administration into a confrontation with activists who were largely suburban, liberal, young, and middle class — the core of Johnson’s Democratic constituency.
Pictured in this photo, Quaker Robert Eaton not only was arrested in civil disobedience actions, he spent three years in prison for draft resistance.
Right now, lots of talking heads and armchair pundits are talking about how weak and ineffective the left is. But, everywhere I go as an organizer and every time I look at my inbox, people are reaching out to get involved and get involved with action. Organizing is the act of building power and mobilizing is the act of using the power you’ve built. Our power is already here, we just need to organize it. So, get busy, the ruling class won’t overthrow itself.
Our first in person event!We’re excited to co-host our comrade and frequent guest Jake Conroy, aka the “Cranky Vegan,” in Oakland, CA on March 4th.
Climate justice organizers are the Bay Area is going to be hosting a series of talks and trainings this year focused on effective campaigns and bold action for climate justice.
The first talk will feature long time animal rights organizer and former political prisoner Jake Conroy. RSVP and join us.
For a month, a group of truckers, anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and various elements of Canada’s far right occupied the streets around Canada’s capital in Ottawa. They’ve also occupied border crossings between Canada and the U.S. The so-called “Freedom Convoy” has demanded everything from an end to vaccine mandates and mask mandates to the jailing of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. They’ve targeted Canada’s liberal ruling class, but have disrupted and harassed the lives of Ottawa residents. Police and the Conservative Party either have stood by or been in active support
This past week, Trudeau declared a state of emergency not seen since unrest in Quebec in the 1970s. The police first cleared the trucker blockade on the Ambassador Bridge. And then police moved in to clear the truckers occupation of Wellington Street resulting in 100 arrests.
In our latest episode, we get into it! The left media universe includes YouTubers with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, hundreds of podcasts and journals like Jacobin with 60,000 subscribers monthly. Yet that has translated in little support for on-the-ground organizers working in workplaces, frontline communities and the streets.
As we reach the end of the first year of the Green and Red Podcast, we have more clear ideas on what we’ve done both good and not-as-good and where we want to go moving forward.
There are about one million podcasts in America, many of them political and many of them stressing some form of Left or radical politics, at least rhetorically. Finding a place within an independent media and political galaxy of that size is not easy, but we believe we offer information, insight, and even instruction in ways that others don’t.
In our latest episode, we have a lively discussion with Eileen Flanagan (@eileenflanagan) of Choose Democracy about mass organizing efforts to defend democracy from Trump.
We discuss their efforts to recruit and prepare thousands to hit the streets, taking advantage of “cracks” in ruling class institutions, like Wall Street and the military, and turning anxiety about Trump remaining in power into action. We also discussed longer term organizing efforts around climate justice and challenging white supremacy.
BOSTON, MA: June 3, 2020: Thousands take part in a Black Lives Matter march and rally on the Boston Common in Boston, Massachusetts. (Staff photo by Nicolaus Czarnecki/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald)
Back in the first week of June, 2020, soon after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin, I found myself once again in the streets marching in the streets of Oakland, CA and taking action for black lives. I’d been here many times before after the murders of Michael Brown, Philandro Castile and Alton Sterling. Beyond that, I’ve been organized and partaken in campaigns, direct actions and mass protests on a myriad of issues from the war in Iraq to knocking Wall Street banks for their financing of fossil fuels to the Indigenous uprising around Standing Rock for decades.
In this episode, we go myth busting. Our target is “Camelot” itself.
It’s the 60th anniversary of the election of John F. Kennedy and since his untimely death in 1963, he has been elevated to liberal sainthood by all parts of the establishment. We discuss JFK’s legacy, and debunk the many enduring lies that people–from Oliver Stone to QAnon to today’s liberal scholars and media– still believe about John Kennedy’s saintly acts, whose politics have lived on in Clinton, Obama, and now Joe Biden.
We get into John and Robert Kennedy’s relationship with the red-baiting Joe McCarthy; and JFK’s role as a civil rights “hero” (while simultaneously wire-tapping Martin Luther King). We also pierce the myth, perpetuated by Oliver Stone’s film “JFK”, that Kennedy wanted to withdraw troops from Vietnam and end the Cold War.
December 20th is also the 29th anniversary of the release of Oliver Stone’s film and we take particular aim at its falsehoods.
In our latest episode, we get into it! The left media universe includes YouTubers with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, hundreds of podcasts and journals like Jacobin with 60,000 subscribers monthly. Yet that has translated in little support for on-the-ground organizers working in workplaces, frontline communities and the streets.
cross-posted from Medium 
In our latest episode, we have a lively discussion with 
In this episode, we go myth busting. Our target is “Camelot” itself.