Shaun Richman at In These Times writes—From Company Town to Rebel City: Richmond, California Shows How Progressives Can Win:
Rebel cities have long been laboratories for progressive policy experimentation. Specifically, the small Bay Area city of Richmond, California, has stood out for its boldness. It’s now the subject of a new book by Steve Early, Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City, set to be released next Tuesday by Beacon Press.
A long-time labor activist and frequent writer for In These Times, Early moved to Richmond five years ago. After “thirty-two Boston-area winters,” the placid weather was more of a draw than the city’s vibrant urban reform movement, Early writes. But, naturally, he soon got involved and began taking notes, eventually producing a lively read—an intimate, warts-and-all look at how a small band of activists fought for and won a slightly better world at home. His book is a ray of hope for anyone wondering how to survive, and possibly even thrive, under Donald Trump and a hostile, Republican Congress.
Richmond was once home to factories that built warships and automobiles. Today, what’s left of local industry is a giant oil refinery owned by the global superpower, Chevron. The deindustrialization of Richmond produced the usual urban problems: white flight, declining tax revenue, a corrupt government and a police force that behaved like an occupying army.
In 2004, an “unlikely group of Greens, Latinos, progressive Democrats, African Americans, and free spirits” formed the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA), and began to organize around environmental and good government causes. It grew into a political machine. [...]
Community activists who are just starting out could find examples like Richmond a bit daunting, which makes intimate, contemporary histories like Refinery Town so valuable. The first step, of course, is to find each other. The activists who would go on to form the Richmond Progressive Alliance first coalesced around a successful effort to block construction of an oil-fueled municipal power plant next to the Chevron refinery.
The next project they worked on was a year-long campaign to stop the police from harassing Latino day laborers at their morning meet-up spot outside a local Home Depot. This campaign was also a success, and led to the creation of a day laborer association to improve safety and workers’ wages.
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(Not exactly the kind of nudging to expect from Yglesias but a welcome idea nonetheless.)
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2007—The Uniter Divides: Bush plan fractures the DLC:
Well, the reviews are in. Bush's 11% doctrine speech was a bomb IED.
So now, the scramble is on for politicians of all stripes to distance themselves from his idiotic "plan." Of course, that surge was well underway even before the teleprompter was even hooked up, and Democratic presidential candidates were among the first to find their way to the microphones.
I'd round 'em up for you, but that's not actually what this post is about. This post is about the few "Democrats" who didn't distance themselves. No Democratic presidential candidate was that stupid, of course. And no, I'm not even talking about Lieberman.
I'm talking about the DLC wonks.
In yesterday's LA Times, Will Marshall stunk up the joint on behalf of the DLC, from his perch at the "Progressive Policy Institute," the DLC's "think" tank:
"Conventional wisdom says that presidential candidates who want to be responsible on this are going to hurt themselves with the angry, impassioned activist left," said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank. "But the activist left is out of sync with the American public. Americans don't want to concede this is a total debacle."
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin and Armando join in recapping & discussing last night’s vote-a-rama (and a reminder of the mechanics ahead), the PR flops of the cabinet nomination hearings and the spiraling catastrophe of Trump’s purported ethics “solutions.”
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