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American Solidarity Party 🧡

@AmSolidarity

Oct 16

This is Graciela Olivarez.

She grew up poor in the Southwest. She never graduated high school. There’s a good chance you haven’t heard of her.

She was a great American. 🧵

Despite a humble background, she made a successful career in Spanish-language broadcasting. Then, in 1970, when she was in her 30’s, she became the first woman to graduate from Notre Dame Law.

She became a civil rights lawyer for the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, and held various state and federal civil service posts.

One of them was a member of the Nixon administration’s “Commission on Population Growth and the American Future.”

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American Solidarity Party 🧡

@AmSolidarity

Sep 2

An essay from a party member on the meaning of Labor Day:

There was an autoworker, Ben Hamper, who wrote a column in the Flint (later Michigan) Voice, which was the alt-weekly Michael Moore first made his name by running. A lot of his columns got collected and repackaged in an excellent book, Rivethead. The story is that Hamper was born in 1956, a fairly clever kid growing up in Flint, Michigan, the chronological and geographic apex of American industrial unionism, where everyone’s dad worked for GM.

And he could have gone to college but he gets a girl pregnant and so he goes to work on the assembly line. Not even really out of obligation or “Catholic guilt” or whatever but because that seems as good a life course as any, it’s what every man he’s known does, under the mighty UAW the pay’s on par with the kind of “educated” jobs you could get anyway, why not. And so he goes to work on the line and eventually he ends up writing a column about it, and he talks about the color of the factory culture, playing soccer with rivets for balls and cardboard boxes for goals, drinking mickeys of malt liquor in your car on lunch break, and the absurd fursuited mascot “Howie Makem, The Quality Cat” that GM would feature at rallies and shop-floor tours. He talks about being laid off in economic downturns and put into the “job bank” where you get paid waiting to be rehired in the next upswing, developing a perfect rhythm with your partner, training into a rhythm so perfect you can each trade off doing the two-person job yourself for 4 hours while the other one goes out to a bar on the clock, the dignity and solidarity of the American worker.

And time goes on and eventually his marriage fails but he takes it in stride, and his column gets recognized and he takes pride in that and then eventually he has an epiphany, and a complete breakdown, which are basically the same thing. And the inciting incident is when an older line worker, some guy he’d looked up to as a model of quiet, philosophical stolidity, just shits himself and is barely coherent enough to even notice this and he realizes the guy hadn’t been a Zen master, he’d just been checked-out mindless drunk on the line every day. And he realizes that the rivethead life is destroying him, that the only thing holding it together was a budding alcoholism, and that it’s doing the same to all his co-workers. And he looks back and realizes it had done the same to every grown-up man he knew, his father and uncles that growing up he had looked up to as models of masculine strength and fortitude really had just had their spark snuffed out and the life beaten out of them long before, and whatever pride they took in the cars out on the road was a defensive attempt to locate in an external form the sense of self-value that had been exterminated within them. When Marx talked about “alienation”, well...

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American Solidarity Party 🧡

@AmSolidarity

Dec 29, 2023

Thomas Becket died today in 1170.

He was killed in his own cathedral for protecting his Church from government interference.

🧵

We may not see clergy being physically attacked today in the US but government attacks on religious institutions and religious Liberty are absolutely real.

We need more people willing to stand up for their faith, even when the full force of the government is coming down on them.

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American Solidarity Party 🧡

@AmSolidarity

Dec 14, 2023

There are many reasons Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life has remained a favorite over the years. It’s a film masterpiece on its own terms. But it also captures a vision of American life that many people relate to, one that doesn’t quite fit either side of our polarized politics. 🧵

In some ways it seems like a film with conservative attitudes: it celebrates rooted communities, conventional family life, ordinary and unglamorous responsibility.

Yet it also has populist, left-ish economic overtones (so much so that the FBI was suspicious of it at the time). In truth it’s not a radical film, exactly, but it’s clearly against the domination of money and in favor of working people getting a fair shake .

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American Solidarity Party 🧡

@AmSolidarity

Dec 10, 2023

Happy Sunday!

The eclipse of local Blue Laws is one of the ways we’ve elevated consumerism over faith, family, community, and the dignity of work send tweet

🧵

While restrictions on Sunday commerce have been motivated by respect for religion (which SCOTUS has repeatedly ruled constitutional, by the way), this isn’t just a issue of religion vs. secularism. Let’s explore:

Blue Laws help give workers a guaranteed day off, something many of increasingly lack in modern work culture.

Because 24/7 operating hours tend to advantage larger stores and other businesses, Blue Laws also provide some support for smaller, local, and family-owned enterprises.

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American Solidarity Party 🧡

@AmSolidarity

Dec 8, 2023

We hear objections from some folks along the lines of “if we don’t vote for X, Y will win! It’s too important. I’ll vote for you next time.”

The issue with this logic is that every election cycle is framed this way by the duopoly. At some point you need to take the plunge.

A single vote cast is essentially guaranteed to not change the results of a federal election. A vote is a matter of principle. It’s a sign of where your values lie.

If we choose to sacrifice our values just because we want to vote for the person who will actually win, we’re the losers.

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