Searching for Ludwig Lore
I’m back in FOIA hell. Some time in the last decade, the FBI began methodically transferring the dead case files of dead Communists to the National Archives and Records Administration. This is a disaster for scholarship on American Communism. If the FBI retains a file, they quickly review it to redact the names of agents and spies and then email you a pdf at no cost to you. If NARA possesses the file, they put you in a ridiculously long queue to meticulously review the file. Years later they’ll tell you that you can get a pdf copy of the file for 80 cents a page (there are often hundreds if not thousands of pages). In the alternative, you can absurdly travel to College Park, MD to view the files on one of their computers and email it to yourself! I’m lucky that I began researching We Always Had a […]
“Why should we worry about organizing groups of people who do not want to be organized?”
The AFL and CIO merged in 1955, and union organizing–particularly measured by union win rates in NLRB elections–began a long, slow decline. Although the labor movement in New York City took an additional four years to unite, when they finally did they pioneered new organizing in the public sector and health care–pointing the way towards a labor movement that could survive Reagan and worse. I could–and probably will–keep writing different versions of this lede. This is why I found Dave Kamper’s new piece at the Forge interesting. Its main thrust is trying to find reasons to be optimistic about the revival of the labor movement after the Teamsters’ UPS victory, and the relatively successful Amazon and Starbucks organizing. It’s mostly fine; a reasonable amount of navel-gazing, nostalgia and a bit of scientific reasoning of a middle aged guy who’s dedicated his life to the theory that we can’t have political […]
Making Sense of the 1950’s Teamsters
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations merged in 1955, with big talk and high hopes for organizing the remaining non-union strongholds in the nation’s economy. Three years later, they were laying off organizers on staff and settling into a routine, on the way to a long, slow decline towards a loss of power, influence and bargaining power. In New York City, though, the newly merged federation approached new union organizing with something like messianic zeal–pioneering new union organizing in the public sector and in health care, and fighting for a labor college and statewide system of socialized medicine–at least until the fiscal crisis. That broad sweep of history is, in a nutshell, what I’m researching for my next possible book project: a history of the New York City labor movement from the merger until the fiscal crisis. First, though, the AFL and CIO needed to merge. […]
The Specificity/Universality of Sinead O’Connor
To the extent that casual music fans (which is to say, most people) know her, it’s as a “one-hit wonder” whose best known song was a cover. It happened to be written by the legendary artist Prince, whose own songwriter demo of “Nothing Compares 2 U” didn’t get released from his vaults until after his untimely death, largely because her performance of it made it hers. Sinead O’Connor was a hell of a songwriter in her own right, and a screaming banshee and pure force of nature on record and stage (I never got to see her live, alas). The songs she wrote, including her best one, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” were brilliant, but so idiosyncratically about her that they’ve been deathly-intimidating for another artist to cover. In that stream-of-consciousness diatribe, addressed to an un-named “you,” a poison pen letter without a standard verse-chorus-verse structure, but with a refrain that […]
Teh Socials
The ignominy of remaining on Elon Musk’s Twitter is becoming too much. As luck would have it I got an invite for Bluesky on the day that the Chief Twit renamed his hopelessly broken, hilariously over-leveraged former public square, “X.” John Scalzi wrote a pissed-off and slightly elegiac blog post about the community that many of us have lost through this one idiot billionaire’s “emperor has no clothes” debacle, and how and when to disentangle one’s writerly platform from that dumpster fire. We could go on about how Musk will be an immediate business school case study for taking the value of a unique, universally-known and globally-appreciated brand and absolutely trashing it in exchange for a symbol best known for porn and/or the button you press on your computer whenever you want to leave something, but… well, actually, I kind of want to talk about the latter! With the switchover […]
Back On My Bullshit
Hello, Internet. I’m blogging again. Or possibly not. I’m starting to re-work my website, in anticipation of my next book. My first website, hosted on a comrade’s server, probably began around 1998. I called it “Why Did Shaun Richman Create This Homepage?” and mostly used it to store pictures, audio files, an occasional written piece for a couple of years. In 2005, I took a break from union work and revamped the website to try this new-fangled “blogging” thing. I registered a domain name, shaunrichman.org (.org because I’m not running my life at a profit; Ha!) and that same comrade, Don Doumakes, hosted and helped me set up Bloxsom software to host it. For several years, I reviewed books, movies and records. I wrote political pieces, vaguely-biographical journal posts and generally tried to hone my craft with an eye towards eventually publishing. At some point, I returned to active union […]
2018 Year in Review: A Tweet Thread
First, a little cheat. @MosheMarvit & I landed an op-ed in the @nytimes a few days before New Years last year. American Workers Need Better Job Protections https://t.co/qZwf2VdmSL — Shaun Richman (@Ess_Dog) December 27, 2018
That Time I Was (Willingly) on Fox News
On a slow news day in March of 2002, I was the token socialist for a roundtable segment on the “O’Reilly Factor.” I think they destroyed the tape, because I haven’t been able to find it on any transcription service. When Fox News still handled this stuff themselves, they claimed there was 12 hours of missing footage from the day – conveniently including the live show and its late-night re-run. Anyway, with some help I was able to dig up this transcript. What’s interesting is how much has – and hasn’t – changed. What hasn’t changed is that Bill O’Reilly has always been a full-of-shit asshole. Even when we went to commercial, he continued to be a sanctimonious prick. What has changed is that nobody could get away with denying the very existence of poverty in America today. And it would be hard to dismissively say “there aren’t a lot […]
Next Stop
I was on the 1 train today, riding from Whitehall (South Ferry) to SoHo. There were a bunch of high-acheiving high school nerds trading notes on AP courses and SAT prep. As the train pulled out of the Rector St. station, one of them misheard the conductor’s garbled “Next Stop!” announcement and gasped, “Wait, is that open now?” Confusion, as every part of this conversation was initially misunderstood by each other: Kid 2: “What, no. Chambers is open.” Kid 1: “No, that other stop that’s always under construction.” Kid 3: “I sincerely hope not. We’re late enough.” Kid 4: “I hear that station’s gonna be closed for, like, three years.” Kid 3: “That station has been closed for, like, 20 years. Like, after 20 years, does anyone even want to go to Cortlandt Street anymore?” Cortlandt St. – for those of you not from around here – has been greyed […]
