Episodes
Saturday Oct 25, 2014
Saturday Oct 25, 2014
Jack Rasmus invites one of the key organizers of the union effort to launch a USA labor party in the 1990s, Mark Dudzic, in the Alternative Vision show’s third weekly show focusing on strategies and tactics for initiating independent political action. Dudzic describes the initial strategy employed by union activists in the early 1990s to launch a bonafide third party in the USA based on the trade union movement. Dudzic describes how the initial ‘labor party advocates’ of 82 union activists and local union officers and staffers launched in Chicago in the early 1990s evolved into the Labor Party Founding Convention in Cleveland in 1996 attended by 1400 delegates. The specific strategies and tactics to form and build a labor party at the time are described by Dudzic, as well as the initial organizational forms of the movement. How those strategies, tactics and organization evolved over time are addressed, as well as how they differ from a ‘Fusion’ party approach used by the ‘working families party’ in New York today. Dudzic also describes how the labor party fared with alliances and running local candidates, what broad social forces initially supported the movement for a labor party in the 1990s, and then changed, leading to its decline beginning in 2000 and after until the official disbanding of the labor party initiative nationwide in 2007. The Labor Party experience raises the question: is a third party, organized from ‘within the union movement’, based upon and relying primarily on support from top union leadership, a viable strategy today for launching independent political action? Subsequent shows in the series will consider more deeply the ‘lessons of the Labor Party’ experience, as well as the experiences of other parties challenging the one Corporate Party (aka Democrat-Republican) in America today. Next Week: interviews and discussions with candidates of successful grass roots local independent elections.
Saturday Oct 18, 2014
Alternative Visions - Which Way for Independent Political Action: Part II - 10/18/14
Saturday Oct 18, 2014
Saturday Oct 18, 2014
Jack Rasmus invites presidential candidate of the Green Party, Jill Stein, to discuss the second in the series of shows on ‘which way for independent political action’. Jill provides her party’s view of what strategies and tactics are on the agenda today in the USA to engage in independent political action, and how the Green Party’s approach differs from other progressive parties and other approaches that reject a political party form of organization for engaging in independent politics. Jill explains how the Green Party’s strategy is both electoral and orientation toward mass movements, which are expanding and growing on a number of ‘fronts’ in the USA—immigrants, low wage workers, community protests against fracking, anti-police repression, and so forth. The focus of the discussion is not on what’s wrong with the mainstream Republican-Democrat parties. That is assumed to be evident. The focus of today’s show is a discussion on ‘how best to engage in independent political action’—and what strategies, tactics and organizational forms are today most relevant to building independent politics. Next week’s third interview in the 4 part series on independent politics in the runup to the November elections will welcome former lead organizer for the Labor Party initiative that was launched by the AFLCIO in the 1990s, Mark Dudzic. Dudzic will discuss the history of that effort, its successes and eventual failure and whether another Labor Party initiative is on the agenda.
Saturday Oct 11, 2014
Alternative Visions - The Way to Independent Political Action: Part 1 - 10/11/14
Saturday Oct 11, 2014
Saturday Oct 11, 2014
Jack Rasmus invites guests, in the first of four consecutive shows before the midterm US elections, to discuss the necessity of independent political action. Jack and guests today, and in subsequent weeks, will discuss the proposition: ‘What is the Way to Independent Politics in the USA’, where independence means from both the Republican and Democratic parties. Jack has asked guests to assume independent politics is a necessity today more than ever before, and to focus in their remarks on how should independent politics be built in the USA today given actual conditions at present? What are the appropriate strategies and tactics for establishing meaningful independent political action—at either national or local levels. Jack invites long time political and union activists, Jerry Gordon, of the Labor Fightback Network, and Jeff Mackler, of Socialist Action, to kick off the discussion. Both guests discuss recent efforts to launch independent politics in Lorrain, Ohio and in Chicago. (Next week’s guests in Part II of the series will include Jill Stein, presidential candidate of the Green Party, and a representative from the ‘Working Families Party’. In subsequent weeks, guests will include Mark Dudzic, the lead organizer of the effort to launch a ‘labor party’ in the USA in the 1990s; and in the show before the midterm elections, interviews of local independent candidates in cities in the USA who have run and won office in the recent past in local government).
Saturday Oct 04, 2014
Alternative Visions - Latin America’s ‘Made in USA’ Recessions - 10/04/14
Saturday Oct 04, 2014
Saturday Oct 04, 2014
Jack Rasmus explains how the emerging recessions in Latin American economies—especially in Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela—are the direct consequence of recent shifting of US economic policies over the past year. Three forces are now converging to drive LATAM economies, especially the big 3 above, into yet another region-wide recession, which almost certainly will now worsen: 1) China’s demand for Latin American commodities, resources, and semi-finished imports is slowing as the China economy itself continues to slow; 2) prior massive free money inflows to Latin America from the US and other advanced economy central banks, which occurred between 2010-13 as a result of USA ‘QE’ and zero rate monetary policies by the US Federal Reserve, are now being reversed—engineering money flows back to the US economy from Latin America and other emerging markets. Meanwhile, a third US policy change is being overlaid on the first two, further exacerbating LATAM economic recessions, in the form of additional negative economic pressure is imposed by the US on Argentina and Venezuela in particular (and potentially Brazil as well pending outcome of elections there) even as their economies slip into recession. Jack explains how shifting US economic policy represents, in effect, efforts by USA policy makers to support a still weak USA economic recovery at the direct expense of emerging market economies, especially in Latin America. The USA has thus now begun ‘exporting’ its economic weakness to other economies, while simultaneously taking advantage of the recessions in Argentina and Venezuela to further destabilize those economies for political purposes as well. Meanwhile, global capitalist economies everywhere have entered a phase where they are attempting to grow their own economies at the expense of their capitalist neighbors, marking a new more desperate stage in the global economy’s flagging recovery.