Museum workers unions, forming in a time of mass movements

The pandemic and the George Floyd uprising...

Comments (0) Activism, Art, labor

Courtesy of the artist. Watch yourself, readers — that machete is sharp!

It shouldn’t be surprising to see museum workers organizing unions, when we are in the midst of an upsurge of labor protest. But only a few years ago, who would have thought these people, long taken for granted by their museum directors, invisible to the art world and ignored by the media, would become front page news?

Why museum workers are organizing

When we think of museum workers, we may think of the curators whose names we see in art reviews or museum publicity. Overlooked are the museum workers we actually encounter — the security guards in the galleries, the public-facing staff at information booths, behind the counters in the shop or selling us tickets, or taking our coats, or leading tours. Not to mention the more invisible staff assisting the curators, creating the publicity and developing the website, digitizing the collection, or the art handlers who move and install the art work.

It’s a bit of a shocker when news stories reveal their wages. At these cultural institutions so precious to us, many or even most of their workers do not even make a living wage, some only minimum wage or a few quarters above. “Ancient art, Ancient wages,” chanted by striking Museum of Fine Arts workers, speaks for museum workers nationwide.

Guerrilla Girl at the MCA Union’s one-day strike, from their Instagram.

When a few museum workers published the crowdsourced “Arts + All Museums Salary Transparency” Google sheet, over 3,000 more shared their salaries and benefits. Now people could look at pay for their and other job categories, and they saw the exploitation was systemic and nation-wide. Of course they would start talking union — they were seeing unequal pay for the same work, white men making more than women and people of color, and museum directors earning earning high six figures while denying even cost-of-living raises to their employees.

A union wrests wage and benefit data from the employer when bargaining begins. This makes the system-wide injustices personal, another critical moment when power shifts to the workers.  That was when the Philadelphia Museum of Art Union learned that one in five employees were making less than $15/hr, half of the hourly part-time employees were making less than $12/hr, and 60% of full-time employees were making less than $50,000/yr. They also learned how much less they were earning than their peers at other museums — about 1/3 less than median pay in their region and their peer group nationally.

Awareness of these wage disparities compounded dismay over other museum scandals. For years arts activists were calling for a “racial reckoning” over museum hierarchy, collection and exhibition; exposing sexual misconduct and bullying by managers; and protesting donors for egregiously immoral exploitation.

Eleven museums unionized in 2019, but since then another 23 formed, as both mass layoffs during the pandemic and the George Floyd uprising exposed every injustice with a new urgency. Museum workers were not only demanding (and winning) some dramatic pay increases, such as The New Museum Union’s $6,000 increase for the lowest paid full-time employees.* They were making a broad claim for a share in power within the institution, which only unionization could give them.

They were demanding and winning

  • protection from overwork and assignments outside of their job description;
  • protection from discipline and firing without just cause;
  • measures for health and safety;
  • and notice before layoffs, with severance pay and continuation of health insurance.

                                                   The Museum Union Wave, by Lela Johnson. Courtesy of the artist.

“We’re so over these systems of oppression.”

These are the more familiar trade union concerns. But the unions were forming during a broad confluence of social struggles, and workers in many museums were placing these demands in the broader context of racism, gender discrimination and anticapitalism. Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, immigration demonstrations, Native American pipeline protests, the Sanders campaign, the Resistance against Trump were spilling over into museums, with museum activists out in the street and then leading widely publicized attacks on museum culture. (more…)

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New Yorker Union wins big

How they won and why it matters

Comments (1) Activism, Culture, labor, Media

News flash! Eustace is a dad. And even Eustace’s butterfly is ready to go on strike. Drawing by Reilly Branson, reillybranson.com, Instagram: @rad_reilly. By permission.

They were less than 200 people, who made a difference for many more — about 120 in the New Yorker Union, and in their sister unions 18 in Ars Technica, and 15 in Pitchfork. They won a hard-fought contract with owner Condé Nast. It was a life-changing win with meaning reaching beyond their office walls. The grievances of these largely youthful staffs were the grievances of their generation of creative workers, and of precarious workers generally — unemployed, underemployed, underpaid in at-will jobs, abused at work, while reminded how fortunate they are.

I work with art and writing students who have some tough years ahead, if they want to do the work they love and that can draw on their skills, creativity and progressive values. They are writing poetry, novels, articles, making art, on the way to the dream job. Most likely just a dream,  something writing or art-related, that also pays the rent. Meanwhile they wait tables, work as low-paid editors, web content providers, and gallerists, juggling part-time jobs, working at will or on short-term contracts.

I hope they look at what these three unions did and feel some optimism when they graduate and are asking themselves what comes next. I hope that they find some inspiration in this victory and that this group of fewer than 200 creative workers will have made a difference for them.

Tactics matter: Playing the media against the media bosses
Before I get into why it could matter, let’s look at what the three unions had to do.  First they faced down the intimidation of their bosses. They moved past the myth that they should feel lucky to work at their “dream jobs,” which sound so good at the party or look so good on the resume or the obituary. Their picket sign nailed it: “You Can’t Eat Prestige.”

Lauren Leibowitz captured a bold, assertive action right in management’s face only a month after staff announced they formed the union. Gathering for this picture in the New Yorker office, they showed they would be fearless (probably weren’t, seems like a scary thing to do for at-will workers).

That was their first big step, uniting the three staffs –  in the New Yorker Union both full-time staff and permalancers, editors, fact checkers, proofreaders, web producers, designers, and writers also in the other two unions. How could these three groupuscules stand up to one of the biggest magazine publishers, Condé Nast, and its media Leviathan owner, Advance? (more…)

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Meghan, Harry, Oprah and the media:

Unasked questions in "the best interview ever"

Comments (0) Media, Politics

 Harry’s story is even more remarkable than Meghan’s; in his fairy tale, the prince is the one who is “woke.” Cartoon ©Reilly Branson 2021. reillybranson.com, Instagram: @rad_reilly. By permission.  

They laughed when I told them I was writing about Oprah’s interview with Meghan Markle and ex-Prince Harry. “You’re taking that BS seriously?” They were Gen Z. My boomer friends had a different laugh, thinking I would be ridiculing the ex-royals, like reviewing a really bad movie.

History is a really bad movie. Yet historians don’t laugh.

My feelings are divided. Enormous unearned wealth and privilege coming out of a eugenics-based, white supremacist institution … but also a talented biracial woman who marries a prince, but rejects the submissive role imposed on her and turns the tables on racist media and the royal family. And when she walks away, she takes her royal husband with her, both of them speaking out against institutional racism and supporting Black Lives Matter. And contributing to Color of Change, among other organizations. A strange story, and I kinda like it.

If we need to laugh, maybe we should have a laugh at the media, where even respected critics lost their sense of proportion over the interview. One of journalism’s sharpest critics of softball political interviews, NYU Journalism Prof. Jay Rosen, tweeted: “That was the best interview I ever watched. … Let it launch a thousand clips.”

But my favorite for substance was Margaret Sullivan’s praise. The Washington Post media critic and former NY Times public editor said the interview was “perfection”: Oprah proved she was “the best celebrity interviewer ever.”

It was certainly a skillful interview, a good teaching example for students and for professional journalists. Sullivan described Oprah’s “relentless follow-up questions, compassionate demeanor and focused skill in eliciting bombshell after bombshell … circling back to emotional or newsmaking comments like a heat-seeking missile. …  a master-class in using follow-up questions to clarify, to get the specifics, to nail down the news.”

All true, and it was certainly compelling TV. But let’s not just focus on Oprah’s technique. Marvelous theater, but it was still celebrity interviewing. That means, Oprah let Meghan and Harry frame the interview. In my idea of good in-depth interviewing, you question the subjects’ framing, you don’t just help them elaborate it.

(more…)

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School reopening safety failures:

Covid crisis exposes deep problems, the need for thinking big

Comments (0) schools

“Welcome Back, Covid!” Comic by Reilly Branson, reillybranson.com, Instagram: @rad_reilly. By permission.

The debate over safe school reopening is far from settled a month after the Center for Disease Control released its guidance. The guidance is clear enough, but sets standards so high that few schools can meet them for a full return to in-class teaching.

The push for reopening goes on anyway, with local authorities and school boards saying the classrooms are safe, and too many parents and teachers mistrusting them. The story is multifaceted and complex, because the pandemic has laid bare deep problems with schools, just as with so many other of our institutions. In this article, I’ll look at how difficulty meeting the CDC standards shows the need to address long-standing failures of public education, an abiding crisis which has deep structural roots. The American Recovery Plan Act allocates  $122.8 billion for elementary and secondary schools, but the list of needed resources is long, and it will take more than money to transform a culture content to perpetuate racism and inequality.

First, the CDC Guidance and the difficulty of safe reopening. The CDC warns that safety depends on crucial “mitigation measures.” Masking and physical distancing are the most important, along with hand washing, cleaning, and ventilation. Ensuring that students wear masks correctly might be hard enough. (CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said that only 60% of schoolchildren are “reliably masking.”) But teachers are also thinking about how to have physical distancing in overcrowded classes, hand washing when there are no sinks in the classrooms and no soap or hot water in the lavs, filthy classrooms with privatized and unaccountable janitorial staff, and ventilation in 100-year old buildings. Surveys in a number of cities show parents, who also know the state of the buildings, don’t trust the schools to keep their children safe.

Can schools be safe when the community isn’t?

Hard enough to meet these safety guidelines, but there’s one even more difficult and controversial: the community transmission level. The level in the schools is associated with the level in the community, and the CDC “underscores the importance of controlling disease spread in the community to protect teachers, staff, and students in schools.” Yet cities are removing restrictions on masks, distancing and in-door dining just when they’re reopening the schools.

When the CDC issued its guidance Feb. 12, almost 99% of children lived in “red zones,” with the highest level of Covid-19 transmission.* The guidance says that teaching in red zone schools should be remote for middle and high schools, hybrid for elementary schools, unless they can “strictly implement all mitigation strategies”  — and that means “physical distancing of 6 feet or more required.” Schools in the orange zone should operate in hybrid mode with 6 feet of physical distancing. That’s 6 feet, period. Not, as in blue or yellow zones, “6 feet or more to the greatest extent possible.”

This guideline for distancing becomes a bit slippery, and many districts require only 3 feet.

“Covid Safety Lapses Abound” (more…)

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Mayor Lightfoot and Chicago teachers face off

Are the scientists really saying the schools are safe?

Comments (3) labor, Media, Politics

The two school unions, CTU and SEIU 73, went on a march together in the 2019 teachers strike, solidarity between the teachers and the service workers. Photo: Considered Sources, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Despite the mayor’s threats to retaliate against teachers who refuse to return to in-person teaching,  71% of teachers voted to authorize a strike. 

Is it safe for Chicago’s teachers and students to teach in person? Mayor Lightfoot says the science is clear  and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) have meet safety standards. Why won’t that pesky union trust the science, asks the Tribune’s editorial board?

Not just the teachers — parents don’t think the schools are safe either. It’s not the science that the teachers don’t trust, it’s the mayor and CPS. The union says there have been 64 schools with COVID cases in January alone, even without a mass return to the buildings. CPS said in December that only 37% of students will return to in-person classes, only about a third of Black and Latinx students. Lightfoot’s brilliant plan would have teachers in empty classrooms zooming to kids at home.

CPS and the Tribune editors refer to a short opinion piece by three CDC scientists. Who could disagree with CDC scientists? Leave aside that the studies described in the piece took place in Wood County, Wisconsin, pop. 75,000, and North Carolina, where public health staff from two university medical schools partnered with the schools in a newly created, NIH-funded collaborative.

Under what conditions will schools be safe? The authors say preventing transmission in schools requires action to reduce transmission in the community, such as restricting in-door dining and recreation, which Chicago now allows. The authors also say the schools should not only require universal face mask use and handwashing, but also dedensify the classrooms. Reminder that Chicago schools are notorious for large class sizes.  Many school districts take this concern seriously enough to have children show up only two days/ week in order to reduce the  class sizes; but that isn’t part of CPS planning. And it isn’t likely that CPS has the money or will for “expanding screening testing to rapidly identify and isolate asymptomatic infected individuals” and “options for online education, particularly [for] those at increased risk of severe illness or death if infected with SARS-CoV-2.”

Is there even a scientific consensus about what it would take to send the teachers and kids back into the buildings? There are no agreed metrics. Here’s one that the mayor would find inconvenient: “For schools to open, spread in a community should be below what the CDC considers “high incidence,” or 50 cases of the virus per 100,000 people over a 28-day period, Tara C. Smith, an epidemiology professor at Kent State University, told Vox in an email.”

Only 50 per 100,000, says the epidemiologist. Chicago’s incidence in the 28 days ending 2/2/2021 was 759.*  The CDC considers the number of new cases per 100,000 in the last 14 days  a “core indicator” and “threshold for risk of introduction and transmission of COVID-19 in schools”: in the last 14 days, Chicago’s new cases per 100,000 was 281. The CDC considers more than 200/100,000 indicates “the highest risk of transmission in schools.”

(more…)

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The counter-revolution will be televised!

The Capitol attack and the challenge for the left

Comments (1) Activism, Politics

Comic by Reilly Branson, reillybranson.com, Instagram: @rad_reilly. By permission.

How the terrorists won
It was a failed coup, but the terrorists’ assault on Congress was the kind of failure the “losers” can boast about. True, they didn’t manage to hang Mike Pence or capture or kill any representatives or senators, or seize the electoral college votes or stop the count. And the attack has become a crushing political reversal for Trump and his House and Senate enablers.

But maybe not so bad for the terrorists. They showed how easy it is to “breach” the heart of government, a display of power that shocked the world and gives them credibility. Far from being cowed by their crowdsourced exposures and arrests, they are riding high, planning new attacks on state capitals and again on Washington to disrupt the inauguration and, still trying, to overturn the election.

They walked out of the Capitol laughing and carrying souvenirs. The only bars they were behind were in DC hotels. After the mayhem, they could be seen lounging at the Willard Hotel smoking cigars. How could you call this anything but a triumph for them?

When movements contest state power, victory and defeat can be ambiguous; triumph can inhere in defeat, a tactical defeat can be a strategic win. The terrorists’ are using the spectacle to recruit new members and project their credibility as serious defenders of the white nation.

The experts argue about what to call it. If it wasn’t a successful coup, it looked like the dress rehearsal for one. This was Coup 101 for every white supremacist and fascist actor, a performance that could teach better than any manual or tweet thread. We saw in its “failure” how it could have succeeded in its maximal objectives.

The mob was an undisciplined assortment of all kinds of Trump supporters. Protest tourists taking selfies swelled the ranks, happy to go along with armed and disciplined terrorists who had police and military experience. It’s a mistake to think they are all alike, and we’ll learn more about the people in between those extremes. The more activist among them seemed a combination of DIY and militants capable of detailed planning, somehow well-informed about the location of obscure offices of key Democrats.

Like and unlike a coup
As in classic coups, there was apparent coordination between the insurgents and strategic allies: their political enablers, who called the election results fraudulent; authorities in the security bureaucracy who made sure the Capitol police were vastly outnumbered; communications centers (social media and right wing TV); and official informants in the Capitol police or even Republican representatives and their staff. It looked like part of an inside-outside strategy, with conventional politicians allying with the terrorists — an alliance that tells us we have arrived at a very dangerous time.

Like but also unlike the classic coups. There wasn’t active, open participation by the military and federal agencies. But there was a long-planned and relentlessly executed “collapsing and emptying out” of security forces and federal agencies.* Command decisions were made to deploy less than a fifth of the Capitol police and deny requests and offers of reinforcements.

I won’t describe the scenarios to overturn the election that Trump might have imagined. We have been obsessing over them for years, and they are easy to find in mainstream media. Were any realistic? Clearly some conditions were missing — mainly, the election was not close. Trump also lacked sufficiently subservient military, law enforcement, judiciary, and key Republican officeholders, despite four years depleting government and replacing professionals with lackeys. He could rely on police and national guard holding back, but not on their organized participation. Yet holding back was close to enough. The terrorists came within minutes of reaching House members before they were evacuated.

So some pieces were not ready on the chess board. But in 10 years, or 20, they may be in place, because the conditions that led to the assault will be here long after the passing of Trump and this cohort of insurrectionists. The weakened federal agencies may be rebuilt, but white supremacy and the other deep cultural and social divides that shaped the fascist base of support will be here at least for decades. That base is baked into the Republican coalition, the result of decades of the accumulation of cultural and social power.

So this time conditions weren’t quite ripe. Maybe the Trump insurgents will go down in history as “premature fascists.”

Left strategy for the inauguration: Stay home!
We knew there would be a white supremacist march, but we were at home watching it on TV. After months of direct action in the George Floyd movement and tireless mobilization in the elections, the mass movements and activists stayed aside waiting for the authorities to defend the Capitol.

Even knowing Trump had been working behind the scenes, waiting at home seemed quite sensible. We spend hundreds of billions on security — how hard could it be to deploy the Capitol police, the DC police, the many federal law enforcement agencies, the national guard? It was always easy enough when it was Black people or leftists demonstrating.

Relying on the authorities didn’t work out so well. Still, it’s good the left stayed home, and they should stay home this weekend and on inauguration day. That’s the advice of American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner. “Stay home, follow it on TV or social media, and watch the far right overreach, get arrested and take all the blame. … The spectacle, and the story, will be right-wing thugs versus the police, getting busted. It just doesn’t get any better than that.”

Kuttner is assuming that law enforcement, “massively embarrassed by the security failure at the U.S. Capitol, will be out in force.” Staying home isn’t passivity, it’s not disengagement — it’s so strategic that Kuttner could quote Napoleon: “Never interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake.” (more…)

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Idiot’s Guide to the Illinois Fair Tax Amendment

How should I know what's good for me? The...

Comments (0) Politics

If only this woman had read the Chicago Tribune editorials, she wouldn’t want to “Tax the Rich.” Photo by Timothy Krause, 9.17.12 (CC BY 2.0) Flickr 

Urgent:  I need help! I’m so stressed out about Nov. 3. I not only have to decide whether I should vote for a normal politician over a racist nutter, I also have to decide whether I should vote “Yes” for an amendment that will lower my taxes!

“Yes” sounds like the smart vote. But all the wise men are telling me, for my own good and the good of all Illinois, to vote “No.”

What to do, what to do?

I thought I knew what was good for me, but then I read the Chicago Tribune editorials, and the sage counsels of the Chicago Civic Foundation, and the Chicago Chamber of Commerce, and the Illinois Manufacturers Association. And I read that letter Ken Griffin sent to his 1000 employees. Ken’s the wisest (and richest) billionaire in Illinois. He is so sincere in his conviction that the amendment would raise taxes on billionaires that he donated $53.75 million, of his own money, to defeat it!

Fifty million! Now that, that, is an honest man! And the Illinois Policy Institute … have to credit them, they’re a THINK TANK!

Well, I was a philosophy major, so I should be able to figure this out on my own.  Not French postmodern philosophy, no, that’s even deeper than the Tribune editorials.

No, no, no! I studied the Anglo-American way, analytic philosophy. Ordinary Language Dept. My teachers were students of students of Ludwig Wittgenstein, so I know that my difficulty with political language is really quite simple: It makes no sense. Ludwig tells me, Once you see that political language is just BS, then you’re not confused any more.

So here is my guide to the muddle over the tax amendment: I will translate the arguments of the wise men into ordinary language. (more…)

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Kim Foxx v. Pat O’Brien: The important vote you may have missed

Criminal justice reform and racism...

Comments (0) Politics

Coalition to End Money Bond rallies at the Thompson Center, Chicago, June 17, 2019. Photo by Charles E. Miller.(CC BY-SA 2.0) Via Flickr

Trump or Biden may be the apocalyptic contest, but the lives of thousands of Chicagoans depend on whether incumbent State’s Attorney Kim Foxx defeats her challenger Pat O’Brien. The winner will be in charge of the second largest prosecutors’ department in the country, whose 700 plus state’s attorneys charge and prosecute thousands of mostly poor and Black people.

They get to decide whether to release or charge them, recommend or oppose bail, and whether to send them to prison and a life of social exclusion. Now, since 2016, Chicago and Cook County have a state’s attorney, Kim Foxx, who says she wants to reform our notoriously punitive system. She is opposed by Pat O’Brien, running as a Republican and branding himself the tough-on-crime, “law-and-order” candidate.

Foxx is supported by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, progressive unions and activists, and the Democratic Party. She had overwhelming support in the Black community in her 2016 landslide victory (72% of the vote) and also in the 2020 primary. Republican Pat O’Brien’s base is in some of the white-majority suburbs and wards — in particular, wards where Chicago police live. He is endorsed by Trump-supporting John Catanzara, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, which gave O’Brien almost $58,000, and the editorial boards of the Chicago Tribune and Daily Herald.

Maybe that’s all my readers need to know to cast their vote for Foxx. But the election is not just about these two individuals, it is another front in America’s race war. We need to unpack the underlying racism of O’Brien’s comments on crime, drugs and gangs, because his assumptions are shared by Police Supt. David Brown, the editors of the Chicago Tribune, and, inconsistently, Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Like the rest of the Democratic Party with the exception of a few aldermen, Mayor Lightfoot endorses Foxx; but she also endorses Police Supt. Brown’s overpolicing and demands for more detention and prosecution, with their disproportionate impact on Black and Latinx communities.

What can progressive prosecutors accomplish?
Foxx came into office thanks to a massive grassroots campaign by Black Lives Matter activists to oust States Attorney Anita Alvarez. Alvarez was not only complicit in the coverup of the police murder of Laquan McDonald, she represented a department with a history of prosecutorial misconduct and wrongful convictions. Foxx ran as a reformer, promising a raft of policies to restore integrity and reduce incarceration.

How well did she do? (more…)

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How to vote for judges (or not)

When will the movement come for the judges?

Comments (2) Politics

Four judges, impartial arbiters of the law, all rated “Highly Qualified” by their Bar Associations. Hogarth, “The Bench,” 1758. 

First the protests were against police. Then Black Lives Matter activists went on to expose the role of prosecutors, and now we have reformers elected as state’s attorneys, district attorneys and state attorney generals. Kim Foxx in Cook County was one of those, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Chesa Boudin in San Francisco.

But when will the movement come for the judges?

It better be soon.

There are 80 judges on my ballot in Chicago, and I only heard of two because of a county-wide campaign against them.

We don’t know who the judges are, but we’re supposed to “do our civic duty” and vote for them anyway. I had a suspicion that most voters don’t. So I took a close at the 2018 midterm results in Chicago, and my suspicion was pretty much confirmed. About 40% of the voters didn’t bother voting for the 31 judges running unopposed. The other judges on the ballot were up for retention – you had to vote “Yes” or “No.” About 1/3 of the voters ignored them and didn’t vote at all; of the ones who voted, about ¼  voted “NO!” Half of those judges had 20% or more “NO!” votes, and some a lot more.*

When I saw that, my blood pressure plummeted. My breathing was labored. I had to sit down.

And then I had a laugh.

No newspapers mentioned those refractory voters, but to me their behavior was the most interesting thing you could say about the judicial results. You can interpret those stats a lot of ways. My choice is, maybe they are casting a mad “NO!” vote for our entire judicial system. Could that be the sneaking suspicion worrying our city fathers, the reason we see these newspaper editorials and mailers shaming us into voting for judges? Should we piously do our “civic duty” and vote for them?  Or …

There are some decent judges … but how do we know how to separate them from the others? I’ll make some suggestions below, and you can also look at the Bar Association ratings in voteforjudges.org and the research on each judge at Injusticewatch.org, some of which I’ll summarize.

But first, allow me a bit of a rant, for which you will please declare me in contempt of court. And don’t expect me to channel our political class’s piety about preserving an independent judiciary. They are independent neither of Chicago’s Democratic machine,* nor of the real estate and financial elites who are their patrons and donors. And they are certainly not independent of our secular Church of Mass Incarceration, in which they are the priests and enforcers.

Find your sample judicial ballot from Injustice Watch here. Sample ballot for Chicago here.

(more…)

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GOTV: Ways to Vote/Act/Volunteer to defeat Trump

Comments (0) Activism, Politics

Between 15 and 26 million people protested, in the largest protest movement in US history — if they all vote, could that be a game-changer? “Protesting the murder of George Floyd, Washington, DC, 6.6.20.” Photo by Ted Eytan (CC BY-SA 2.0) Flickr.

If you think defeating Trump is the most important task for progressives and socialists, here are some things you can do and organizations that can help you do them. While it’s always important to volunteer, volunteers are especially important since enthusiasm for Biden is low and his volunteer operation lags. Fortunately, enthusiastic loathing of Trump easily overcompensates for Biden’s enthusiasm deficit. Let’s look at how we can help turn that loathing into votes.

This article has three parts:

Part I Basic information about how to vote — links to websites that will guide you to register to vote; find your polling place; vote by mail, vote early, vote on election day, become a poll watcher or poll worker, or even a deputy registrar. If you’re in a swing state, what you do matters nationally. But if you aren’t, your vote is still important for down ballot races and ballot measures, such as Illinois’ Fair Tax Amendment.

Part II “Get Out The Vote,”  is for people who want to work with voter mobilization groups to get others to vote — their websites show how easy it is.

Part III has important information about voting in Chicago and Illinois. If you’re in a blue state like Illinois, it may seem less urgent to vote. This section highlights votes that will make a huge difference in Chicago and Illinois.

I. Basic information: Registering, voting by mail and in person.
First, of course, register to vote, know your polling place, decide whether to vote by mail, vote early, or vote on election day. But once you’ve done that, there is an easy and intuitive step you can take to multiply your impact. You can share your information — talk to family, friends, people in your workplace or community to find out if they plan to vote and help them answer any questions they have about how to vote and about candidates. In fact, some of the GOTV organizations take this as an organizing model. For example, Rock the Vote asks you to get three friends to vote, MoveON helps you build a team of ten.

Most people don’t know if they can register online or vote by mail, but most states allow both. Forty states offer online registration, and one more, Oklahoma, is phasing it in. As for voting by mail, only seven states require an excuse, and some even send all registered voters an application. You can see your details here in a cool NY Times infographic.  (Don’t get so busy you can’t stop and smell the infographics.)

Here is another website that can answer your questions with another smartly designed infographic: Fivethirtyeight’s “How to Vote in the 2020 Election,” with information for all 50 states and DC. (more…)

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