Dear Commons Community,

 The U.S. gave full approval to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine yesterday, a milestone that may help lift public confidence in the shots as the nation battles the most contagious coronavirus mutant yet.

The vaccine made by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech now carries the strongest endorsement from the Food and Drug Administration, which has never before had so much evidence to judge a shot’s safety. More than 200 million Pfizer doses already have been administered in the U.S. — and hundreds of millions more worldwide — since emergency use began in December.

“The public can be very confident that this vaccine meets the high standards for safety, effectiveness and manufacturing quality the FDA requires of an approved product,” said acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock. “Today’s milestone puts us one step closer to altering the course of this pandemic in the U.S.” 

The U.S. becomes the first country to fully approve the shot, according to Pfizer, and CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement he hoped the decision “will help increase confidence in our vaccine, as vaccination remains the best tool we have to help protect lives.”

U.S. vaccinations bottomed out in July. As delta fills hospital beds, shots are on the rise again — with a million a day given Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Just over half of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated with one of the country’s three options, from Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson. 

While many governments, schools and businesses have put vaccine requirement into place in recent weeks, others said they would hold off until the FDA granted a vaccine its full approval ― a step that goes further than the emergency use authorization that let vaccine distribution kick off in December.

Following the FDA’s approval, President Joe Biden urged decision-makers to put vaccine requirements into place.

“If you’re a business leader, a nonprofit leader, a state or local leader who has been waiting for full FDA approval to require vaccinations, I call on you now to do that,” he said at a news conference. “Require it.”

The biggest institution to take that step Monday was the Pentagon, which had said previously it would begin rolling out a vaccine requirement for all service members as soon as the FDA issued full approval for the shots ― or by mid-September if the approval had still not come by then. The requirement will affect more than a million active-duty service members. 

“These efforts ensure the safety of our service members and promote the readiness of our force, not to mention the health and safety of the communities around the country in which we live,” Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said Monday. 

The New York City Department of Education, the largest school district in the U.S., also announced it will now proceed with a vaccine requirement for all public school teachers and other staff members. 

State University of New York campuses are also going ahead with a vaccine mandate that gives the students, faculty and staff at all 64 SUNY schools 35 days to get both doses of the vaccine. The University of Minnesota and all of Louisiana’s public colleges and universities are also initiating vaccine requirements for students, they confirmed Monday. 

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) announced that all state and public school system employees will now need to either get vaccinated or undergo regular testing “at minimum” of once or twice a week. Louisiana is doing the same with its state employees. 

The FDA’s announcement triggered vaccine requirements across the private sector, too. CVS Health is now requiring all of its corporate staff and many of its store employees to be vaccinated ― a move that affects about 100,000 people. Chevron also became the first major U.S. oil producer to announce a mandate, which will be applied to select employees. United Airlines announced Monday that it was expediting its plans by a month and requiring all employees to be fully vaccinated by Sept. 27.

As for all the talk about booster doses, the FDA’s licensure doesn’t cover those. The agency will decide that separately. 

The FDA already is allowing emergency use of a third dose of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine for people with severely weakened immune systems, such as organ transplant recipients who don’t respond as strongly to the usual two shots. For everyone else who got those vaccinations, the Biden administration is planning ahead for booster starting in the fall — if the FDA and CDC agree.

Also still to be decided is vaccination of children under 12. Both Pfizer and Moderna are studying youngsters, with data expected in the fall. 

GET THE SHOT!

Tony

Josephine Baker

Dear Commons Community,

The remains of American-born singer and dancer Josephine Baker will be reinterred at the Pantheon monument in Paris, making the entertainer who is a World War II hero in France the first Black woman to get the country’s highest honor. 

Le Parisien newspaper reported Sunday that French President Emmanuel Macron decided to organize a ceremony on Nov. 30 at the Paris monument, which houses the remains of scientist Marie Curie,  philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, writer Victor Hugo and other French luminaries.

The presidential palace confirmed the newspaper’s report.

After her death in 1975, Baker was buried in Monaco, dressed in a French military uniform with the medals she received for her role as part of the French Resistance during the war.

Baker will be the fifth woman to be honored with a Pantheon burial and will also be the first entertainer honored. 

Holocaust survivor Simone Veil, one of France’s most revered politicians, was buried at the Pantheon in 2018. The other women are two who fought with the French Resistance during World War II — Germaine Tillion and Genevieve de Gaulle-Anthonioz — and Nobel Prize-winning chemist Curie.

The monument also holds the remains of 72 men.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Baker became a megastar in the 1930s, especially in France, where she moved in 1925 as she was seeking to flee racism and segregation in the United States.

Baker quickly became famous for her “banana skirt” dance routines and wowed audiences at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees and later at the Folies Bergere in Paris.

She became a French citizen after her marriage to industrialist Jean Lion in 1937.

During World War II, she joined the French Resistance. Amid other missions, she collected information from German officials she met at parties and carried messages hidden in her underwear to England and other countries, using her star status to justify her travels.

A civil rights activist, she took part in 1963 in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who made his “I Have A Dream” speech.

This is a well-deserved honor!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Colleges are opening for the new fall semester amid a variety of COVID policies, most of which were designed to protect students, faculty and staff.  However, as the Delta variant surges, faculty are asking their administrations to revisit policies that were established prior to the latest COVID outbreak.  The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article this morning focusing on faculty who have raised issues with COVID policies on their campuses.  The entire article is below. 

Unless something dramatic happens to halt the spread of the Delta variant, we may find ourselves in the same situation we were last year with most colleges relying on remote learning.

Tony

The Chronicle of Higher Education

As Delta Variant Surges, Faculty Urge Their Colleges to Change Course

By Emma Pitt

August 20, 2021

A handful of professors gathered this week under the hot sun on a large grassy field at Clemson University. Propped up next to them were signs that read, “All In for Masks,” and, “A Mask Is a Small Ask.”

Kimberly Paul, an associate professor of genetics and biochemistry, had staged the demonstration. She had been galvanized by a tweet posted by James P. Clements, the university president, of the new-student convocation on August 13. In the photos, students are seated shoulder to shoulder, indoors, many of them maskless. Paul got angry. “I was like, That is it. The university is not taking this seriously.”

(A Clemson spokesperson noted in an email that masks were provided at every seat for a transfer-student event on Monday. He sent a photo, which showed the vast majority of attendees wearing masks.)

New coronavirus cases and hospitalizations in South Carolina were on the rise. Clemson hadn’t yet issued a mask mandate. The state’s attorney general had told the University of South Carolina that lawmakers had intended to ban such requirements, prompting the flagship to back off its mandate. But Paul wanted Clemson to “be brave,” push back, and “own their power in the state,” she said.

So she made a Facebook post, announcing “Walkout Wednesday.”

The day before the event, the state Supreme Court effectively cleared the way for public universities to require masking, and Clemson quickly issued a temporary mask order, valid for three weeks. That period “coincides with the greatest risk predicted by our public-health team’s modeling of the disease,” said Joe Galbraith, the Clemson spokesperson. He noted that the university has robust testing and administered 22,000 tests in the past week, with a positivity rate under 1 percent.

Three weeks, Paul thought, was not enough. The demonstration was still held but became more of a “teach-in” than a “walkout.” From 8 a.m. to about 4 p.m., the professors handed out masks to students and gave them information about Covid testing and how to get vaccinated. Paul thought she’d be “this lone professor with her sad little sign,” but she wasn’t. Ten to 12 people showed up initially, and people stopped by all day, including a counter-protester. The group passed out more than 350 masks.

What Paul discovered, she said, is that her colleagues were frustrated and easily ignited. “I am not an organizer. I had an idea. I put a post together. I put it on Facebook, and that match landed on a whole lot of dry tinder,” she said.

That tinder isn’t confined to Clemson. Faculty groups at colleges across the country are asking or demanding more protective measures be put in place. They worry about the Delta variant of the coronavirus, straggling vaccination rates in some states, and the fact that — though it’s rare — vaccinated people can catch and transmit the virus.

And, they say, colleges have been slow to adjust to this new surge and what it means for campus safety. Some colleges are embracing a return-to-normal approach in which in-person teaching is highly encouraged and masks aren’t required. Those plans made more sense a month or two ago, faculty leaders say.

The vaccine is still proving effective in greatly reducing — though not completely eliminating — both transmission and the severity of symptoms. But now, hospital workers in many states “are seeing admission numbers that resemble what they saw at the height of the pandemic over the winter,” The New York Times recently reported. Texas hospitals “are in crisis mode” with few available ICU beds, said Dale Rice, speaker for the Faculty Senate at Texas A&M University. The university president was exposed to the virus earlier this month.

“This is not a normal time,” Rice said. “We shouldn’t be treating it that way.”

At other institutions, faculty groups have made their mounting concerns known.

Because faculty members at Spelman College have not received “clear and enforceable protocol and safety guidelines” to “ensure our health and well-being,” they would not be teaching face to face, the Faculty Council told students in a Thursday email. The elected body of tenured faculty members, which represents the faculty body’s interests, wrote that in the meantime, “most faculty will use alternative instructional methods for course delivery.”

On Friday, Mary Schmidt Campbell, the president, said through a college spokesperson that Spelman faculty members have decided to return to in-person teaching on Monday. The college “continues to work with the faculty to provide additional guidance on health and safety protocols as rapidly changing circumstances around Covid-19 continue to develop,” she said.

The Faculty Senate at Penn State University on August 13 voted no confidence in the institution’s fall Covid-safety plan. About 150 professors, staff members, and students rallied that day in opposition to it, The Chronicle previously reported. At Santa Barbara City College, the Academic Senate voted no confidence in five of the seven Board of Trustees members after the board had twice opposed a vaccine mandate. The vote wasn’t solely because of the absence of a mandate, but it was “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Raeanne Napoleon, president of the Academic Senate. (The board approved the requirement in August.)

Elsewhere, professors are questioning how seriously administrators are taking rules already in place. The vice president for student affairs at Stony Brook University shared photos on Facebook of an indoors welcome-back event at which some students and a couple of administrators appear unmasked, even though everyone is required to wear face coverings while inside university buildings.

Lauren Sheprow, a spokesperson for Stony Brook, said in an email that the welcome-back event took place inside the campus recreation center, which had been following protocols established by the county and allowed face masks to be optional. During Welcome Week, Stony Brook reassessed the center’s mask-optional protocol and “out of an abundance of caution” will require masks, consistent with all other indoor spaces on campus, effective Saturday, August 21.

When Josh Dubnau, director of the Center for Developmental Genetics at Stony Brook, saw those photos, he thought, This could be a super spreader event. He didn’t blame the students. Rather, he saw it as a “failure of leadership.” Still, Dubnau commended Stony Brook for doing a good job of promoting vaccines. As of August 19, 87 percent of students who are registered in at least one in-person course have submitted proof of vaccination.

In some states, elected leaders have severely limited what protective measures colleges can take. In Texas, Greg Abbott, the governor who is fully vaccinated and recently tested positive for Covid-19, banned government entities from mandating masks or vaccines. In Iowa, the president of the state’s Board of Regents, which oversees the University of Iowa, Iowa State University, and the University of Northern Iowa, said in May that there’d be no mask or vaccine requirements and that classrooms and other campus spaces “will operate at their normal (pre-pandemic) capacity.”

Hundreds of employees have petitioned the regents to reconsider. Northern Iowa’s faculty union filed a complaint against the board with the U.S. Department of Labor Occupational Safety and Health Administration for failing to provide a safe work environment, the Gazette reported. “We recognize that this is a politically charged issue,” the union wrote in an August letter to regents, but “you must answer to your own conscience or higher power whether you did all you could to protect the most vulnerable.”

At the University of South Carolina at Columbia, “the whiplash has been severe,” said Carol E. Harrison, president of the institution’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

In general, faculty members felt “pretty good” at the beginning of the summer about their role in helping the university weather the pandemic, maintain its enrollment, and offer a variety of course modalities to students, said Harrison. That good feeling quickly waned.

In late July, the university announced that it’d require masks indoors on campus. But days later, the state’s attorney general told the president that the mandate was invalid because of a budget proviso the legislature had recently approved. That prompted the university to back down. But then, the state Supreme Court ruled that nothing in the proviso prevented mask mandates. The flagship swiftly reinstated the requirement, which pleased Harrison, though she was shocked that the university had reversed course in the first place.

Faculty members still have other concerns, she said, especially those who are teaching in person who have children who are not eligible to be vaccinated. If a child is exposed to the coronavirus, “you cannot responsibly come in to teach your class when your child is quarantined. You can’t responsibly hire a babysitter for them. I don’t see how you can keep your own distance from your child so that you can be isolated and come teach,” Harrison said.

“We do think that it is possible to hold safe university instruction. We did it last year,” she added. “But it requires a certain amount of flexibility, and we’re not seeing that flexibility right now.”

Stephen Cutler, the interim provost, said he’s directed deans and unit leaders to be “as flexible as possible” with those who are seeking a change of modality in teaching. Regarding faculty parents who worry about their children needing to quarantine, Cutler said that ensuring a continuity of teaching “doesn’t necessarily mean the person who is quarantined has to be the one teaching.” On that front, “we’re just asking individuals at the unit level to work together.”

He noted that South Carolina was one of just a handful of universities to establish saliva-based testing for Covid-19 last year. The university monitored its wastewater, tested students and employees regularly, and used other mitigation strategies to keep positivity rates low, he said. For this fall, “we still have all of those tools in the tool chest.”

And, he said, many faculty members — and students — are eager to be on campus. There’s “a sense of excitement” in the air.

In Alabama, one scholar reached his tipping point.

State lawmakers have banned colleges from requiring students to get Covid vaccines. Colleges also can’t require students to prove their vaccination status before returning to campus or fine unvaccinated students.

Jeremy Fischer, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, considered his institution’s Covid-19 policies inadequate and raised concerns in a petition. Eventually, he began to ask himself whether his relationship with the university “might render me complicit in a moral atrocity.”

It did, he decided. He tendered his resignation.

“Perhaps due to the political nature of this crisis … some faculty, staff, and administrators are looking the other way, holding their tongues, holding their noses, or holding their breath in fear as they prepare to convene or attend in-person gatherings on campus,” he wrote in his resignation letter, which he posted on Twitter.

But this, the philosophy scholar wrote, is “a moral emergency.”

.@RepKinzinger (R-IL) calls Republican "fear-mongering" about Afghan refugees "non-American."

Kinzinger to Republicans who do this: "a) you are either evil at your heart yourself or b) you're charlatan who's only interested in winning an election…" pic.twitter.com/HRhBCcdoOa

— The Recount (@therecount) August 22, 2021

Dear Commons Community,

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) yesterday slammed right-wing media and politicians engaging in “fearmongering” rhetoric about Afghans seeking refuge from the Taliban in America. 

Kinzinger, an Air Force veteran who flew missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been critical of both the Biden and Trump administration’s contributions to failures in Afghanistan leading to the Taliban takeover this month. Thousands of people are still trying to escape the country a week after insurgents overthrew the capital and much of the country. 

Appearing on CNN, Kinzinger said that though he believes the blame lies with both parties, things “can’t continue with just pointing fingers while America’s embarrassed in front of the world.”

He was then asked about members of his party who are using the crisis as a political opportunity, including framing refugees as “invaders.”

Kinzinger noted that most of his GOP colleagues supported legislation passed last month that would make it easier for Afghan nationals who assisted the American military to apply for special immigrant visas. But the 16 House Republicans who voted against it “should be asked why they did,” he added.

“But what you see is in the media echo chamber, this fearmongering,” he continued. “This ‘They’re coming to your neighborhood, these hordes of people that haven’t been vetted.’”

“That is not American. You can always have questions with how this was executed, but America’s always been the country that opens our heart,” he said, adding that refugees in the U.S. have always worked and fought hard for success.

“If anybody wants to go out and fearmonger and continue that darkness in your heart and speaking it so you can win an election: A) you are either evil at your heart yourself, or, B) you’re a charlatan who’s only interested in winning reelection and you truly can’t say you care about the health of the American people.”

In the aftermath of the Afghan government’s collapse, several right-wing media personalities have stoked fears about asylum seekers. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson described it as an invasion, warning viewers that Afghan refugees would probably be settling in their neighborhoods. His colleague Laura Ingraham asked, “Is it really our responsibility to welcome thousands of potentially unvetted refugees from Afghanistan?” And Charlie Kirk, the conservative talk radio host, said President Joe Biden intentionally let Afghanistan collapse so he could let “a couple hundred thousand more Ilhan Omars to come into America to change the body politic permanently.”

Kinzinger has become the moral conscience of the Republican Party!

Tony

Stanley Aronowitz

Dear Commons Community,

Stanley Aronowitz died earlier this week at the age of 88 as a result of complications from a stroke. Stanley was a teacher, scholar, activist, union leader, and a good colleague here at the CUNY Graduate Center.  He was one of a kind in his views on labor, work, unions, class, education, and American politics.  My association with him began in the 1990s when we were on several CUNY-wide committees together.  He was also active in our Ph.D. Program in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center where we came to share some of our experiences.  We were both born and raised in the Bronx and we both worked in the trades in the early part of our lives.  Stanley was a metal worker and I was an iron worker.  He joked about how we ever became professors.  At the Graduate Center we were on a number of panels together to discuss education, technology, and social policy.  It was not easy sharing a stage with Stanley because his larger-than-life personality and activist views dominated any discussion.  Below is an obituary that appeared in Jacobin, and written by a former student, Jaime McCallum, who is now an associate professor of sociology at Middlebury College.  It captures Stanley’s personality well.

May he rest in peace!

Tony

———————————————————————————————-

Jacobin

Stanley Aronowitz Knew That Freedom Begins Where Work Ends

By Jamie McCallum

August 18, 2021

Stanley Aronowitz died this week at the age of 88. He hated work, loved life, and brought his overflowing, exuberant approach to social problems to picket lines, classrooms, and vacation. A fighting left needs more people like him.

In the summer of 2004, as a young graduate student, I emailed Stanley Aronowitz asking for a meeting to discuss an idea for my doctoral dissertation. He replied that there are three reasons to be a professor: June, July, and August. He asked me, politely, to write him again in September.

That was the moment I realized I wanted to be a college professor, which eventually, by incalculable strokes of luck years later, I became — much to Stanley’s dismay.

Stanley had what he called “the last good job in America,” the college professor. It provided reasonable income and autonomy at work, a degree of free expression. He had a union, of which he was a leader, and he loved the job much of the time.

Yet in the essay “The Last Good Job in America” that eventually became a book, he stakes out what I take to be the abiding concern of his entire intellectual career. Written in diary form, near the beginning, he faux-complains about caring for his sick daughter, Nona — he had to “minister to the puking” — which interrupted his workday. It is a day which, when he finally gets around to laying it out, sounds downright leisurely by today’s standards. “Except for the requirement that I teach or preside at one or two classes and seminars a week and direct at least five dissertations at a time, I pretty much control my paid worktime,” he writes.

Stanley was a distinguished scholar of labor, work, unions, class, education, American politics, and Marxism. What sewed these issues together for him was a concern over our collective control of time, time which is so central to our individual concerns of daily life as well as human destiny as a whole under capitalism. He felt that labor unions had surrendered the fight for shorter hours, forfeited their original mission, and were, as a result, doomed to bargaining — “collective begging” he always put it — over a narrow slice of bread-and-butter issues.

Stanley came from the trade union movement. At times, he seemed to be at the center of things, as when he was appointed by Bayard Rustin to coordinate labor support for the March on Washington. By his own account, though, he was a persistent thorn in the side of union officialdom. As an organizer and a proud shit-starter for the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union in north New Jersey, he was “exiled” to Puerto Rico by union leadership where, thankfully, he finally had time to reflect.

When he eventually returned to the states, his experience as a unionist and a voracious reader of history and social theory transformed into a coherent critique of work — including what he saw as work’s apologists, the unions themselves — in False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness. Part critique of the postwar labor movement, part reflection of the Western Marxism of the Frankfurt school, it is the most wide-ranging exploration of working-class consciousness I’ve ever read.

In it, he lays the foundation of his concern with the classed nature of “leisure or unbounded time.” “The distinctions between the private and public realm that constitute the real basis for the cultural autonomy of the working class are constantly being undermined,” he wrote. “Yet the resistance to such invasion is the fundamental condition for the development of a working class movement capable of charting its own historical course.”

Eventually, he landed a full-time teaching gig at the City University of New York (CUNY) in sociology — a discipline he, incidentally, always distanced himself from. Stanley hated the taxonomy of the social sciences, insisting the boundaries were arbitrary, rigid, and mostly for professionals rather than genuine advancement of social phenomena.

Somewhere, sometime, someone will write a full reflection on his life’s work. They will wade into The Crisis in Historical Materialism, an underappreciated reconsideration of Marx in light of the demands of the New Left. What many argued were strategic blind spots of the old union left — the ignorance of “merely cultural” demands for gender, racial, and sexual justice — Stanley saw as cause to rewrite Marx’s seminal argument about the force that served as the engine of historical change. In Stanley’s mind, it wasn’t that Marx was incorrect about the central role of class struggle; it was that Stanley’s definition of what constituted class struggle was far broader than the old man’s.

It was a theme he revisited in How Class Works in 2003, the year I met him, in which he argued for the “sundering the traditional sociological distinction between class and social movement.” Genuine social movements — struggles to “overcome divisions between black and white, native and foreign, men and women, to create a workers’ movement independent of capital” — were, in his telling, synonymous with class formation.

In Stanley’s mind, it wasn’t that Marx was incorrect about the central role of class struggle; it was that Stanley’s definition of what constituted class struggle was far broader.

Future Stanley historians will also have to contend with his careful analysis of the role of technology in the workplace, as he elaborated in The Jobless Future (coauthored with his good friend William DiFazio), and notably in a coauthored book chapter called “The Post-Work Manifesto.” Stanley was less recognized as a scholar of education, though it didn’t stop him from writing two books on the topic, The Knowledge Factory and Against Schooling. I long wondered why he never wrote something extensive about sexuality. He often grappled with the topic when dealing with social theory and labor, and saw much value in studying the libidinal and erotic theory of Freud and Reich in working-class studies.

And then there was that time in 2002 he ran for governor of New York as a Green. George Pataki won the race, but Stanley finished a respectable fifth with 41,797 votes — nearly three times as many, it should be noted, as Andrew Cuomo.

Seizing the Essence of Everyday Life

I went to study sociology at CUNY because I had read False Promises while working for a labor union. As a professor, he vacillated between close readings of the texts and of no readings of them at all. His classes sparkled either way. A good teacher imparts knowledge; a great one inspires you to ask better questions. My time studying with him was a high point of my intellectual life.

Stanley was one of the most charming men I’ve ever met, with a brutal wit, an impossible smile, and guileless eyes — even when he was giving you shit. He was the first person to tell me, casually without prompt, that my hairline was receding. During the oral exam period of my graduate study, for which he was a main evaluator, he made a money bet with me that my analysis of Antonio Gramsci was substantively worse than his. (He later graciously declined to accept my payment of $20 when a fellow graduate student confirmed he was “more right.”)

When I informed him of my intent to accept a job as a professor, he warned me to turn it down. “They’ll never give you a moment’s rest to think,” he said. The last good job in America, turns out, wasn’t good enough for him anymore. (I took the job, not his advice).

I got closer with Stanley after I joined the Board of Directors of the Left Forum, which he cofounded. Left Forum was a new version of the Socialist Scholars Conference, an annual gathering of the US and international left. I was brought on to help bring younger people of different political tendencies into the fold. As an aspiring intellectual, I sat around tables with Frances Fox Piven, Bill Tabb, Rod Bush, Nancy Holmstrom, Stanley, and many other luminaries who made up our organizing crew. I felt like I had been selected for an all-star team without ever having competed in a game.

Stanley seemed almost uninterested in the conference panels we put together on labor and work topics, even if he was on them. By contrast, he championed our forays into cultural studies, or, as he liked to call it, “the essence of everyday life.” We prioritized panels on art, medicine, sports, and even once convened our own classical music concert.

Stanley’s preoccupation with art, music, and movies — always “movies,” never something as pretentious as “cinema” — was explored at times in his formal scholarship and served as a background condition to all his work on critical theory, labor, and unions. He thought the trade union movement had lost sight of their role in transforming the quotidian experiences of everyday life. The simple fact of automatic dues deduction meant that union organizers no longer collected membership fees face to face, a symbol to Stanley of a larger break between workers and their organizations.

He never missed an opportunity to denounce the Wagner Act, often considered the height of the New Deal’s labor victories, as the law that pacified class struggle unionism. It did so, as he wrote in False Promises, by formalizing the union as a state-sponsored administrator of formal rights rather than as an organic expression of working-class aspirations. To him, this compromise was not only a strategic dead end in the long run — it was one more betrayal.

He chose this old classic labor hymn for the epigraph of his book:

“The cloakmakers’ union is a no-good union,

It’s a company union by the bosses.

The old cloakmakers and the Socialist fakers

By the workers are making double crosses.

The Dubinskys, the Hillquits, the Thomases

By the workers are making false promises,

They preach socialism but they practice fascism

To save capitalism by the bosses.”

Where Freedom Begins

To know Stanley, to love him, was to argue with him. I ended up resigning from the Left Forum Board, along with a few other folks, but Stanley stayed on. We all took it personally. Then just two years ago, Stanley agreed to meet me — in the summer! I was visiting New York City and wanted to pick his brain about a book I was writing on labor time.

We met at 9 AM for breakfast at one of his favorite delis in Queens. I ordered a coffee and a donut. He ordered eggplant parmesan and a large Coke — “because of the free refills,” he said, smiling.

The point, Stanley thought, was not simply to abolish work, but to redefine the realm of necessity so that it included all the good things of life — like lots and lots of free time.

At our meeting, he continually returned to a passage of Marx’s which he had memorized like scripture: “The realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases… the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.”

This time, I took his advice. I ended my book by reflecting on this passage. The point, Stanley thought, was not simply to abolish work, but to redefine the realm of necessity so that it included all the good things of life — like lots and lots of free time.

Stanley had no “mundane considerations.” His books, lectures, speeches, even breakfast chats, were full of life. He burst into song in class and at meetings, was always the loudest person in the room, and, for better or worse, talked openly about intimate details of his life to virtual strangers. He put the “vulgar” back in “vulgar Marxism,” he once told me.

A fighting left needs more people like him: a fierce critic from the inside, a lovable opponent, who’s as comfortable in a classroom as on a picket line. As many workers as he brought into the unions, he brought students into the academy and activists into the Left. It would be impossible to live up to his grandeur. But to honor his legacy we should try, anyway.

Jamie McCallum is associate professor of sociology at Middlebury College and the author, most recently, of Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream.

               The Summit research station, which sits two miles above sea level on the Greenland ice sheet. (Credit…Josh Haner/The New York Times                                               

Dear Commons Community,

Something extraordinary happened last Saturday at the frigid high point of the Greenland ice sheet, two miles in the sky and more than 500 miles above the Arctic Circle: It rained for the first time.

The rain at a research station — not just a few drops or a drizzle but a stream for several hours, as temperatures rose slightly above freezing — is yet another troubling sign of a changing Arctic, which is warming faster than any other region on the planet. As reported by the New York Times.

“It’s incredible, because it does write a new chapter in the book of Greenland,” said Marco Tedesco, a researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. “This is really new.”

At the station, which is called Summit and is occupied year-round under the auspices of the National Science Foundation, there is no record of rain since observations began in the 1980s. And computer simulations show no evidence going back even further, said Thomas Mote, a climate scientist at the University of Georgia.

Above-freezing conditions at Summit are nearly as rare. Before this century, ice cores showed they had occurred only six times in the past 2,000 years, Martin Stendel, a senior researcher at the Danish Meteorological Institute, wrote in an email message.

But above-freezing temperatures have now occurred at Summit in 2012, 2019 and this year — three times in fewer than 10 years.

The Greenland ice sheet, which is up to two miles thick and covers about 650,000 square miles, has been losing more ice and contributing more to sea-level rise in recent decades as the Earth has warmed from human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases.

The surface of the ice sheet gains mass every year, because accumulation of snowfall is greater than surface melting. But overall, the sheet loses more ice through melting where it meets the ocean, and through the breaking-off of icebergs. On average over the past two decades, Greenland has lost more than 300 billion tons of ice each year.

This year will likely be an average one for surface accumulation, said Dr. Stendel, who is also coordinator of Polar Portal, a website that disseminates the results of Danish Arctic research. Heavy snowfall early in the year suggested it might be an above-average year for accumulation, but two periods of warming in July and another in early August changed that by causing widespread surface melting.

The warming that accompanied the rain last Saturday also caused melting over more than 50 percent of the ice sheet surface.

Dr. Mote said that these melting episodes were each “one-off” events. “But these events seem to be happening more and more frequently,” he said. “And that tells the story that we are seeing real evidence of climate change in Greenland.”

Something to think about!

Tony

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick blames unvaccinated Black people for Covid spread in his state pic.twitter.com/CfwajqECLM

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 20, 2021

Dear Commons Community,

We do not expect much in the way of truth and honesty from Fox News pundits such as Laura Ingraham but on Thursday, her program reached a new low when guest Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick  blamed unvaccinated Black Americans for the spread of coronavirus in his state (see video above).

Dear Commons Community,

If you watched the news on any of the major media outlets this past week, there was hour by hour coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal.  Surely this is a tragedy but the media is putting too much of the blame on the Biden administration and trying to push our country to become involved again in a never-ending war.  The major blame for all of this is not Biden and United States but the Afghanistan government and its military that completely abandoned the country and left it to the Taliban.  Below is an analysis  courtesy of the Huffington Post.

Tony

__________________________________________________________

Biden, Allies Frustrated With Media’s Hawkish Coverage Of Afghanistan Withdrawal

By Daniel Marans

As President Joe Biden ended his news conference on yesterday afternoon about the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, a reporter called out an especially bellicose question.

“Why do you continue to trust the Taliban, Mr. President?” the reporter said.

Notwithstanding the militant group’s poor human rights record and ultra-conservative Islamist ideology, multiple U.S. administrations have successfully negotiated with the Taliban. The Taliban have complex interests. As Biden noted yesterday, the organization is at war with the faction of the self-declared Islamic State (also known as ISIS), which is competing for power in Afghanistan.

But the reporter’s criticism-masquerading-as-query was the culmination of a week’s worth of dramatic finger-pointing and fretting from a Washington press corps that usually prides itself on neutrality.

Although the White House’s failure to foresee the rapid fall of the Afghan government and prepare accordingly has exacerbated the chaos of the U.S. withdrawal, Biden and his allies are furious with what they see as reporters’ and pundits’ unduly hawkish coverage of the exit.

“The media tends to bend over backwards to ‘both-sides’ all of their coverage, but they made an exception for this,” said Eric Schultz, a deputy press secretary under President Barack Obama. “They both-sides coverage over masks, and vaccines, and school openings and everything else. Somehow [the Afghanistan withdrawal] created a rush to judgment and a frenzy that we haven’t seen in a long time.”

Matt Duss, a foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the de facto leader of the party’s progressive wing and Biden’s rival in the 2020 presidential primary, offered a similar assessment.

“The extent to which the media is privileging voices who have gotten this wrong for years is ridiculous,” he said. “What we’re seeing is an attempt by the Washington foreign policy establishment to expiate its sins of over 20 years by putting this on the Biden administration.”

Journalists who cover the Pentagon spend an inordinate amount of their time with current and former military officials, many of whom go on to lucrative gigs with military contractors that profited from the Afghanistan War. It’s that kind of chumminess that contributed to the media’s amplification of the specious case for the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003.

As The Intercept has chronicled, the problem of media bias toward foreign adventurism is especially acute among talking heads paid to discuss military policy on television. Former U.S. military generals often inveigh against the withdrawal on cable news with just their past military titles rather than their current careers as contractors who stand to profit from an extended presence in Afghanistan.

A source close to the White House identified this dynamic to HuffPost. “They are elevating the Blob, whose members spent years lying about progress in Afghanistan (and who often have financial conflicts of interest),” the source said, using the “blob” colloquialism that refers to the Washington foreign policy establishment. “The result is that many in the press are left effectively endorsing the view that the U.S. should have sent more American service members into Afghanistan to fight and die to stop another Taliban offensive ― despite supposedly being impartial.”

This president himself vented similar frustration Friday during remarks at the White House. “People now say to me and others ― many of you say it on air ― ‘Why did we have to move because no Americans were being attacked? Why did we agree to withdraw 2,500 troops when no Americans were being attacked?’” Biden said.

Biden noted that in the past year the dearth of casualties was thanks to an agreement that then-President Donald Trump made with the Taliban promising a timeline for withdrawal on the condition that the Taliban not attack U.S. forces.

He then noted that if the U.S. reneged on its commitment to announce a timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban would escalate their offensive and the U.S. would have to respond in kind.

“The idea that if I had said on May the 2nd or 3rd, ‘We are not leaving. We are staying,’ does anybody truly believe that I would not have had to put in significantly more American forces ― send your sons and your daughters, like my son was sent to Iraq? To maybe die ― and for what, for what?” Biden asked incredulously.

That’s a question that much of the media has rarely interrogated — until now. News broadcasts on the three major American TV networks ― NBC, CBS and ABC ― have barely mentioned Afghanistan at all in recent years, according to data compiled by media monitor Andrew Tyndall.

The Washington industrial complex is always going to be more in favor of having a muscular military approach. Eric Schultz, senior adviser to former President Barack Obama

Even in 2020, the year in which Trump negotiated his agreement with the Taliban, the three networks mentioned Afghanistan just five times.

At the same time, now that Biden is taking a step that U.S. presidents have been very reluctant to take, he is facing a tidal wave of either negative coverage that omits critical context or outright condemnation from many of the same journalists who ignored the war under Trump and for years before.

For example, one White House correspondent passionately asked Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, why Biden did not see a national interest in keeping troops near the borders of Pakistan, Iran and Tajikistan.

Richard Engel, the chief foreign correspondent of NBC News, has assigned himself the even greater task of defending the U.S.’s ability to create a functioning military and nation-state in Afghanistan.

Responding to Biden’s suggestion that “nothing could have fixed Afghanistan,” Engel tweeted, “I wish he’d come to Kabul more recently, even six months ago.”

For all of his optimism about the United States’ ability to shape politics in countries as different as Afghanistan, Engel apparently had little to say about the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers. The 2019 papers, which made public more than 2,000 pages of government documents discussing the war, reveal the degree to which U.S. military and civilian leaders considered the war unwinnable but lied to the public about the progress they were making.

To critics of the Washington press corps’s coziness with the national security establishment, some reporters’ selective indignation about the withdrawal is nothing new.

“The Washington industrial complex is always going to be more in favor of having a muscular military approach,” said Schultz, who is now a senior adviser to Obama. “That will always be the gravitational pull in Washington.”

What is novel is the willingness of many Democrats, including Biden himself, not to be cowed by hawkish Beltway voices and their chorus in the media.

Biden’s own transformation from an Iraq War proponent and member of the foreign policy “Blob” in good standing to an early and outspoken skeptic of Obama’s surge of U.S. troops in Afghanistan is remarkable.

He has stuck to his guns while under attack in the press, laying out a case for the limits of American military power in an interview with ABC News that would have been unthinkable at the height of the “global war on terror.”

“The idea that we’re able to deal with the rights of women around the world by military force is not rational. Not rational,” he said.

Schultz says that Biden has learned from the experience of Obama, who had to contend with the national security establishment’s skepticism of his decision not to intervene in Syria and his nuclear nonproliferation agreement with Iran.

“As a Democrat, I’m very relieved and encouraged and heartened that the White House knows they’re speaking to the country, not just Playbook subscribers,” Schultz said, referring to Politico’s popular inside-the-Beltway newsletter.

Dear Commons Community,

President Joe Biden is standing firm by his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan, despite chaotic scenes of the Taliban rapidly seizing control and the U.S. rushing to airlift diplomats out of the country.

Behind his confidence is a political bet that a war-weary U.S. public will stick with him and enable him to weather a firestorm of criticism, not just from his Republican opposition but also from Democratic allies who promise to investigate failures surrounding the withdrawal.

Public support for the withdrawal has fallen from earlier this year, but pluralities indicate that Americans still want U.S. forces out, according to two new surveys.

A Yahoo News poll found that 40 percent support the pullout, while 28 percent oppose it. (In July, 50 percent favored the pullout.)

A Morning Consult/Politico poll found that 49 percent support the withdrawal, while 37 percent oppose it. (In April, 69 percent backed withdrawal.)

The criticism has been heaviest over the execution of the withdrawal, including the failure to evacuate U.S. personnel and partners in time for the rapid Taliban takeover. Republican lawmakers, and some Democrats, have compared it to the fall of Saigon, South Vietnam, in 1975.

Biden needs all the political capital he can muster — to spend on signing an infrastructure bill and a $3.5 trillion social safety net package at the core of his domestic agenda, which his party is counting on to survive a difficult midterm election cycle next year.

Democratic strategists say Biden is on solid political footing, arguing that Americans will ultimately see the issue as a simple choice between continuing the occupation and ending it.

“No one likes where this ended up, but it’s hard to see Republicans winning elections on a campaign promise to go back to war in Afghanistan in 2022 or 2024,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic consultant who has worked for the party’s House campaign arm and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid.

Republicans see little opportunity in digging in on a pro-war position, particularly after 20 years of money and lives lost trying to build a democratic state that collapsed like a house of cards as soon as U.S. forces left.

Chris Hartline, a spokesman for the Senate GOP campaign arm, said of the politics of the withdrawal: “It’s hard to tell how it’ll play in the long run.”

But he said the situation paints Biden as a “weak leader” who operates with a “nonchalance” on issues like the border, inflation and now Afghanistan. Taken together, he said, Biden appears “weak, disengaged or just plain lost.”

Matt Gorman, a Republican consultant who has worked on presidential and House races, said the issue of Afghanistan resonates with voters insofar as Biden’s opposition can tie it to his leadership on matters that affect them day to day.

“The biggest political risk here is that it compounds with inflation, gas prices and crime. This is all making Biden look like a bystander,” he said. “He’s watching events and not leading them.”

But to Biden’s allies, the decision to pull out and absorb the short-term pain was a mark of leadership that his three predecessors who oversaw the war lacked the courage to practice. In a speech Monday, Biden said that Americans shouldn’t be asked to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces wouldn’t and that he won’t “pass this responsibility on to a fifth president.”

He defended his decision in an ABC News interview published Wednesday.

“The idea that somehow there’s a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don’t know how that happens,” Biden said. “I had a simple choice. If I said, ‘We’re going to stay,’ then we’d better be prepared to put a whole lot, hell of a lot more troops in.”

His remarks channeled weariness with war among the public, with voters in both parties turning against wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which were launched after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks nearly 20 years ago. Trump capitalized on similar sentiments in his 2016 campaign.

Likely voters support the withdrawal by 51 percent to 37 percent, according to a new poll by Data for Progress, a progressive firm that has been cited by the White House.

“Even with the negative coverage of the last few days, Data for Progress and other pollsters still find net support for withdrawal,” said Sean McElwee, the group’s executive director. “Ultimately, the American public does not support permanent overseas occupation.”

I believe that Biden and the Democrats will weather the Afghanistan withdrawal situation by the time the midterm elections come in 2022.

Tony