Day: December 23, 2006

Hershey’s Corporate Kiss-Off

This article was originally published in the January-February 2003 issue of “The Socialist.” The recent announcement by the trust that operates the Hershey Industrial School that it was considering selling a large stake in the Hershey Foods Corporation set off waves of protest in the town of Hershey, PA, that eventually sunk the proposal. What kind of company town has effective veto power over its corporate benefactor’s business plans? Clearly, Hershey is a company town like know other. To understand it better, one should place the town’s history in the context of the social reform movement of the turn of the century that formed alternative model communities founded with the aims of conquering the abject poverty and gross inequalities of the era’s great cities. The most identifiable are the socialist cooperatives like Robert Owen’s New Harmony, IN and Job Harriman’s New Llanos, CA, but socialists did not have a monopoly […]

This Is His Testimony: Jon Langford of the Mekons

This is his testimony. In 1991, Jon Langford and his mates from Leeds, the Mekons, had just missed their opportunity as rock-n-roll’s latest last best hope. After almost 15 years of lineup changes, a bunch of classic albums with lousy distribution, countless raucous alcohol-soaked tours and stylistic shifts from punk to country, dance and back, the Mekons were on the verge of saving rock music from big hair and empty heads when fights with A&M Records left their newest record without an outlet in the U.S., just as Nirvana opened up the radio to so-called “alternative rock.” They called that record “The Curse of the Mekons,” but their contract problems and bad luck didn’t piss them off as much as the fall of the Soviet Union and the media’s declaration of the “death of socialism.” “How can something really be dead when it hasn’t even happened,” long-time lefty Langford demands […]