Seven? Eight? Ten?

Who's counting?
Certainly not Aaron Sorkin.

Sidebar:
✓ Was Bobby Seale really bound and gagged in court? Did the anti-war activists actually dress up in police uniforms? We break down Aaron Sorkin’s new movie: What’s Fact and What’s Fiction in The Trial of the Chicago 7 by Matthew Dessem (Slate)

✓ Sorkin’s film plays fast and loose with characters and facts, but he got one thing right: Retrying the Chicago Seven by Todd Gitlin (American Prospect)

✓ The Chicago 8 Trial, Revisited by John Kendall Hawkins (CounterPunch)

Are the Democratic Socialists of America For Real?

In the last year, the biggest American socialist organization has experienced a surge in membership. "As it builds on this momentum, there are several big questions facing DSA. What is its relationship to the Democratic Party? Should central leadership serve as administrators or ideological tone-setters? And how can its membership -- which skews white and male -- come to represent an increasingly diverse country?" In other words, can it can transform enthusiasm into real and effective political power?

Are the Democratic Socialists of America For Real? by Kate Aronoff (The New Republic, 2017-08-07)

Yelling at buildings is not enough

The resistance is gratifying and fun and maybe consciousness-raising, but real change will come from an aggressive and eventually victorious opposition.

In the fight over the omnibus spending bill, the Democrats didn't do too badly: no funding for the border wall; no penalty for sanctuary cities; no rollback of environmental programs; no gutting of consumer financial protections; plus funding for ACA subsidies, Planned Parenthood, miners’ health benefits, and Medicaid payments for Puerto Rico.

But both the reactionaries now in power and the neoliberals they replaced must be overcome in 2018 and 2020 if the republic is to be set back on the road toward economic and social justice from which it was deflected 40 years or so ago. It will do us no good to go back to the politics and policies that made the reactionaries' victory possible -- inevitable -- in the first place.

Comprehensive Government Funding Bill Released (U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations).

The story is not THAT citizens are in the streets. The question that needs to be addressed is WHY.

I think that we've got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. -- Rev. Martin Luther King

The mainstream media is shocked -- shocked! -- by the damage caused by the protestors in Baltimore, but the real story is the grinding poverty and neglect wrought by capital and the powerlessness of citizens living under the thumb of oligarchy.

"Baltimore," Shawn Gude writes, "is like so many other cities with their own Freddie Grays: a place in which private capital has left enormous sections of the city to rot, where a chasm separates the life chances of black and white residents — and where cops brutally patrol a 'disposable' population."

(Photo: The Baltimore Sun)

Observers have long puzzled over the passivity of average Americans suffering impoverishment and disenfranchisement at the hands of a kleptocratic elite.

Is this the beginning of the American Spring?

The rest of the story: Why Baltimore Rebelled by Shawn Gude (Jacobin).
10,000 Strong Peacefully Protest In Downtown Baltimore, Media Only Reports The Violence & Arrest of Dozens by AJ Woodson (Black Westchester).
Eyewitnesses: The Baltimore Riots Didn't Start the Way You Think. Baltimore teachers and parents tell a different story from the one you've been reading in the media. By Sam Brodey and Jenna McLaughlin (Mother Jones)

Reading list: “A corrupt, unresponsive and plutocratic disaster”: How Mitch McConnell and the GOP remade Washington in their image. Now that the GOP's in control, Mitch McConnell is letting some things pass — and taking all the credit. By Elias Isquith (Salon).
Why So Many Americans Feel So Powerless by Robert Reich (robertreich.org).
American Political Passivity, Anti-Authoritarianism, and Building a Base by Bruce E. Levine (WarIsACrime).
Rise of the New Black Radicals by Chris Hedges (TruthDig).