Laura Flanders | The Nation
Independence for Indy Publisher Chelsea Green
Eat your heart out, Rupert Murdoch! Book publisher Chelsea Green won’t be up for sale anytime soon. To the contrary, Chelsea Green employees celebrated the Fourth of July this year not only independent but as brand-new employee-owners of their company. On July 2, Chelsea announced that the company had established an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP).
Chelsea Green was founded on South Green in Chelsea, Vermont, by Margo and Ian Baldwin in 1984. With help from some bestsellers like George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant, the company became a successful small publisher, making money and getting recognized by ForeWorld magazine in 2011 as “Publisher of the Year” for its books on politics and sustainable living.
Sustainability became an issue for the company itself four years ago when early investors started itching to be repaid. Selling out and retaining independence in today’s conglomerated market had become a contradiction in terms.
Justice Roberts's Decision Is Not for Cheering
Call me Debbie Downer, but the general jubilation among liberals over Justice Roberts’s ruling makes me shudder. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, writing in her lengthy dissent puts it this way:
THE CHIEF JUSTICE’s crabbed reading of the Commerce Clause harks back to the era in which the Court routinely thwarted Congress’ efforts to regulate the national economy in the interest of those who labor to sustain it.
Judgment Day: Dr. Margaret Flowers on What Follows the Supreme Court Ruling on Healthcare
Margaret Flowers, MD, is a pediatrician whose exasperation with the American healthcare system turned her into a single-payer activist. In 2009 she was arrested at the Senate Round Table on Health Insurance for attempting to speak on behalf of a single-payer plan when single-payer had been cut out of the conversation.
“When Obama was elected I was optimistic, like many people, because he knew what single-payer was,” she told me when we talked. “He’d been on record saying that single-payer was the best solution. It was quickly very clear that that this was a predetermined course, that it was more like a marketing campaign.”
Queer Issues Are Class Issues: Where Next for the LGBTQ Movement?
New York’s forty-second Gay Pride Parade took place on Sunday, drawing tens of thousands of LGBT people and their allies. Alongside politicians—Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor Andrew Cuomo and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn—were celebrities, like Cyndi Lauper and her fellow grand marshals, Phyllis Siegel and Connie Kopelov, New York City’s first legally married same-sex couple.
Also marching Sunday, although less visible in the coverage, were scores of LGBT folks from New York’s homeless shelters, with union members and friends in a contingent led by Queers for Economic Justice. As Amber Hollibaugh, co-director of QEJ, put it in an interview this week, the LGBT movement may have come a long way, but there is a long way still to go.
Chicago Workers' Economic Plan: Go Co-Operative!
As President Obama was speechifying about our economic futures this week, workers in one famous Chicago factory were taking a big step towards theirs.
A group of the workers who occupied the Republic Windows and Doors factory in 2008 have founded a worker-run cooperative. They’ve incorporated in the state of Illinois; they’ve made a bid to buy the machinery from their former employer; now all they are waiting for is a serious response from Serious Energy, the company that took over the plant from Republic.
Chicago Teachers Union Votes 90% Pro-Strike (Update)
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I mentioned a few weeks back that a strike vote might be looming in Chicago. By way of update, on Monday, 90 percent of Chicago Teachers Union members, roughly 23,780 city employees, voted to support a strike if one is called. Although contract talks continue, teachers union chief Karen Lewis called the strike vote not a "win," but rather an “indictment” of the strained relationship between the teachers and Chicago Public Schools officials.
Hoping to avoid the first teachers strike in Chicago public schools since 1987, the union and school district are meeting with the arbitrator up to four times a week. The earliest that teachers can walk out is Aug. 17, four days after classes begin for some students. Most students begin the new school year Sept. 4.
Do We Need a Poor People's Coming-Out Movement?
Governor Andrew Cuomo says raising the minimum wage in New York is harder than passing marriage equality. Is that true? Is it spin? If we were to say it’s true—is it all about money, or could it be that there’s something we need, namely a coming-out movement about poverty in America? Democrats in the New York State Assembly have passed a bill to raise the minimum wage from the federal $7.25 to $8.50 an hour.
Last week, during a Capitol press conference, the governor said this is probably where the bill is stuck at least for this session. There’s likely to be no passing a minimum wage hike through the Republican-controlled Senate, the issue’s just too divisive, said the governor. Isn’t this the same savvy politician who last year convinced four Senate Republicans to pass a bill legalizing same-sex marriage? Cuomo insisted that this time it’s different. “This is broader and a deeper divide,” Cuomo said. “Marriage, in some ways, was more of a personal judgment for people on their personal values.
Tempest Williams: The Mormon Church Is a Corporation (VIDEO)
Terry Tempest Williams is an essayist, environmentalist, author, advocate, connection maker. She’s fascinated by what divides and what connects us—to one another and to the earth. Refuge, which Williams called an unnatural history of family and place, has become a literary classic alongside Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Her latest, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice, starts with an investigation of her mother’s mysterious journals and spirals into a meditation on silence, secrets and voice. What does all of this have to do with politics, rebellion and social change? Everything. Market capitalism commodifies labor and land, splitting our work from the rest of our lives, and our land from our communities. Terry Tempest Williams refuses to choose between the personal and the political, the practical and the poetic. On behalf of us all she demands the right to be whole—and never more powerfully than in her new book.
You can see video of our entire conversation at GRITtv.org. Here’s a rough transcript of our conversation:
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