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UNITE TO PROTEST THE SIXTH YEAR OF U.S. WAR AND OCCUPATION IN IRAQ!
U.S. OUT OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN NOW!
MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT WAR!
MARCH 21, 2009
SIGN ON TO THE UNITY CALL!
The National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations:
Call for Unity
We hope that you and your organization agree that unified national March actions are sorely needed in these times of military and economic crises. We ask that you:
1. Sign the Open Letter to the U.S. Antiwar Movement.
2. Urge all local and national organizations and coalitions to join in building the mobilizations in D.C. in March and the mass actions on March 21.
3. Support the formation of a broad, united, ad hoc national coalition to bring massive forces out on March 21, 2009.
You can sign the Open Letter by writing natassembly@aol.com [if you are a group or individual. (Individual endorsers please include something about yourselves.)] or through the National Assembly website at www.natassembly.org [if you are a group endorsement only]. For more information, please email us at the above address or call 216-736-4704. We greatly appreciate all donations to help in our unity efforts. Checks should be made payable to National Assembly and mailed to P.O. Box 21008 , Cleveland , OH 44121 .
In peace and solidarity,
Greg Coleridge, Coordinator, Northeast Ohio Anti-War Coalition (NOAC); Economic Justice and Empowerment Program Director, Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee (AFSC); Member, Administrative Body, National Assembly
Marilyn Levin, Coordinating Committee, Greater Boston United for Justice with Peace; New England United; Member, Administrative Body, National Assembly
On behalf of the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY STATEMENT URGING UNITY OF THE
ANTIWAR MOVEMENT FOR THE MARCH 2009 ACTIONS
For more information please contact:
natassembly@aol.com or call 216-736-4704
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Bring the Anti-War Movement to Inauguration Day in D.C.
January 20, 2009: Join thousands to demand "Bring the troops home now!"
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.answercoalition.org/
info@internationalanswer.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-544-3389
New York City: 212-694-8720
Los Angeles: 213-251-1025
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
Chicago: 773-463-0311
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) What Would Keynes Have Done?
By N. GREGORY MANKIW
Economic View
November 30, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/business/economy/30view.html?ref=business
2) A Reality Check on D.C. Checkpoints
By Mara Verheyden-Hilliard
Sunday, November 30, 2008; B08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/28/AR2008112802303.html
3) A Team of Whizzes
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
December 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/opinion/02herbert.html?hp
4) The Jig is Up
By Lynn Henderson
Nov/Dec 2008
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/
5) Cashing the Obama Check: Will It Come Back Marked ‘Insufficient Funds?’
By Bruce Dixon
BlackAgendaReport.com
November 5, 2008
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/novdec_08/novdec_08_02.html
6) Don’t Worry! Be Happy! A Little Poverty May Do You Some Good
By Bonnie Weinstein
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/novdec_08/novdec_08.html
7) The Age of Katrina—Not Obama
By BAR executive editor Glen Ford
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.
Black Agenda Report
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/novdec_08/novdec_08_05.html
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1) What Would Keynes Have Done?
By N. GREGORY MANKIW
Economic View
November 30, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/business/economy/30view.html?ref=business
IF you were going to turn to only one economist to understand the problems facing the economy, there is little doubt that the economist would be John Maynard Keynes. Although Keynes died more than a half-century ago, his diagnosis of recessions and depressions remains the foundation of modern macroeconomics. His insights go a long way toward explaining the challenges we now confront.
According to Keynes, the root cause of economic downturns is insufficient aggregate demand. When the total demand for goods and services declines, businesses throughout the economy see their sales fall off. Lower sales induce firms to cut back production and to lay off workers. Rising unemployment and declining profits further depress demand, leading to a feedback loop with a very unhappy ending.
The situation reverses, Keynesian theory says, only when some event or policy increases aggregate demand. The problem right now is that it is hard to see where that demand might come from.
The economy’s output of goods and services is traditionally divided into four components: consumption, investment, net exports and government purchases. Any expansion in demand has to come from one of these four. But in each case, strong forces are working to keep spending down.
CONSUMPTION The Conference Board reports that consumer confidence is near its record low. It is easy to understand why consumers are so scared. House values have declined, 401(k) balances have shrunk and unemployment is up. For many people, the sense of economic uncertainty is greater than they’ve ever experienced. When it comes to discretionary purchases, like a new home, a car, or a washing machine, wait-and-see is the most rational course.
A bit more saving is not entirely unwelcome. Many economists have long lamented the United States saving rate, which is low by international and historical standards.
For the overall economy, however, a recession is not the best time for households to start saving. Keynesian theory suggests a “paradox of thrift.” If all households try to save more, a short-run result could be lower aggregate demand and thus lower national income. Reduced incomes, in turn, could prevent households from reaching their new saving goals.
INVESTMENT In normal times, a fall in consumption could be met by an increase in investment, which includes spending by businesses on plant and equipment and by households on new homes. But several factors are keeping investment spending at bay.
The most obvious is the state of the housing market. Over the past three years, residential investment has fallen 42 percent. With house prices continuing to decline, increased building of new homes is not likely to be a source of robust demand over the next few years.
Business investment has lately been stronger than residential investment, but it is unlikely to pick up the slack in the near future. With the stock market down, interest rates on corporate bonds up and the banking system teetering on the edge, financing new business projects will not be easy.
NET EXPORTS Not long ago, it looked as if the rest of the world would save the United States economy from a deep downturn. From March 2004 to March 2008, the dollar fell 19 percent against an average of other major currencies. By increasing the price of foreign goods in the United States and reducing the price of American goods abroad, this depreciation discouraged imports and bolstered exports. Over the last three years, real net exports have increased by about $250 billion.
In the coming months, however, the situation may well go into reverse. As the United States financial crisis has spread to the rest of the world, fast-moving international capital has been looking for a safe haven. Ironically, that haven is the United States. Since March, the dollar has appreciated 19 percent, a move that will put a crimp in the export boom.
GOVERNMENT PURCHASES That leaves the government as the demander of last resort. Calls for increased infrastructure spending fit well with Keynesian theory. In principle, every dollar spent by the government could cause national income to increase by more than a dollar if it leads to a more vibrant economy and stimulates spending by consumers and companies. By all reports, that is precisely the plan that the incoming Obama administration has in mind.
The fly in the ointment — or perhaps it is more an elephant — is the long-term fiscal picture. Increased government spending may be a good short-run fix, but it would add to the budget deficit. The baby boomers are now starting to retire and claim Social Security and Medicare benefits. Any increase in the national debt will make fulfilling those unfunded promises harder in coming years.
Keynesian economists often dismiss these long-run concerns when the economy has short-run problems. “In the long run we are all dead,” Keynes famously quipped.
The longer-term problem we now face, however, may be more serious than any that Keynes ever envisioned. Passing a larger national debt to the next generation may look attractive to those without children. (Keynes himself was childless.) But the rest of us cannot feel much comfort knowing that, in the long run, when we are dead, our children and grandchildren will be dealing with our fiscal legacy.
So what is to be done? Many economists still hope the Federal Reserve will save the day.
In normal times, the Fed can bolster aggregate demand by reducing interest rates. Lower interest rates encourage households and companies to borrow and spend. They also bolster equity values and, by encouraging international capital to look elsewhere, reduce the value of the dollar in foreign-exchange markets. Spending on consumption, investment and net exports all increase.
But these are not normal times. The Fed has already cut the federal funds rate to 1 percent, close to its lower bound of zero. Some fear that our central bank is almost out of ammunition.
Fortunately, the Fed has a few secret weapons. It can set a target for longer-term interest rates. It can commit itself to keeping interest rates low for a sustained period. Most important, it can try to manage expectations and assure markets that it will do whatever it takes to avoid prolonged deflation. The Fed’s decision last week to start buying mortgage debt shows its willingness to act creatively.
It is hard to say how successful monetary and fiscal policy will be in avoiding a deep downturn. But as events unfold, you can be sure that policymakers in the Fed and Treasury will be looking at them through a Keynesian lens.
In 1936, Keynes wrote, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slave of some defunct economist.” In 2008, no defunct economist is more prominent than Keynes himself.
N. Gregory Mankiw is a professor of economics at Harvard. He was an adviser to President Bush and advised Mitt Romney in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
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2) A Reality Check on D.C. Checkpoints
By Mara Verheyden-Hilliard
Sunday, November 30, 2008; B08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/28/AR2008112802303.html
In June, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, his attorney general and the D.C. police announced the introduction of a military-style checkpoint program under which police stop drivers and allow only those with a police-approved "legitimate reason" to continue on the public roadway. This strategy is sorely in need of a reality check -- or three.
Reality check No. 1: Let's say that you are driving home, exhausted from work, lugging groceries and carrying your child in the back seat. Lights, police and roadblocks await you. Your car is stopped, an armed police officer comes over and you must roll down your window. Your child begins crying. You must now prove to the police officer's satisfaction that you have the right to drive on your own block.
Visiting a friend? You are driving lawfully down the street when you find yourself blocked by police cars. The police suddenly approach your car, flashlight shining. Your license plate number is written down. The officer demands to know who you are, where you are going, what your purpose for driving is, and the name, address and phone number of your friend. He tells you that your reason for driving is not "legitimate"; now you cannot drive past the roadblock.
William Robinson, a retired schoolteacher, coach and 50-year resident of Trinidad, told me that former students simply stopped visiting him during the checkpoints. They turned around because they didn't want to have to answer to the police for just a social call. Robinson is among the plaintiffs suing to end the checkpoint program, which was endorsed in October by the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia and is on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. According to Robinson, the checkpoints stigmatize the whole community: "It's like living under martial law in a police state."
Reality check No. 2: One might say that the checkpoint is an unfortunate inconvenience but that at least it is a way to reduce violent crime. A worthwhile trade-off of constitutional rights for security, so the argument goes. But that is not the case.
According to statistics that the D.C. police have filed with the court, comparing the initial Trinidad checkpoint period to the week immediately preceding it, violent crimes increased 100 percent, as did nonviolent crimes, during the checkpoint period. Also, the number of violent crimes committed during the checkpoint period in the police-designated "neighborhood safety zone" was 10 percent greater than the average for the nine weeks immediately preceding it and more than 40 percent greater than the average for the preceding seven weeks. Shootings surged elsewhere in the city while police were mobilized (or more accurately, immobilized) to stop lawful drivers at Trinidad checkpoints. The June checkpoints in Trinidad were suddenly halted after a night during which nine people were shot in other parts of the city. D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier has referred to some of her policing tactics, including the All Hands on Deck police deployment program, as primarily a public relations tactic. "Absolutely, it's a public relations stunt -- and it works!" she told a Post reporter in August.
Reality check No. 3: Eight years ago, the Supreme Court stated, "Without drawing the line at roadblocks designed primarily to serve the general interest in crime control, the Fourth Amendment would do little to prevent such intrusions from becoming a routine part of American life." Both the federal and local courts of this jurisdiction have described as unconstitutional attempts to impose crime control checkpoints on the public -- even without interrogation components or the refusal of passage. Seventeen years ago, a D.C. court ruled that the District's crime "deterrence rationale" for roadblocks was "antithetical to the Fourth Amendment."
The District is engaged in a dangerous and unprecedented expansion of police power. If the police could use the existence of crime to justify the suspension of constitutional protections, there would be no Constitution left to speak of.
The District needs more than photo-opportunity responses to problems, and its residents deserve respect for their most basic rights. Common sense and the Constitution demand no less.
-- Mara Verheyden-Hilliard
Washington
The writer, a constitutional rights attorney and co-founder of the Partnership for Civil Justice, is representing the plaintiffs suing to end the checkpoint program.
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3) A Team of Whizzes
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
December 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/opinion/02herbert.html?hp
Barack Obama appears to have put together an extraordinarily competent team to cope with the crises abroad and at home — and to begin cleaning up the mess of the past eight years.
So why do I have this uneasy feeling?
Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Eric Holder, Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers ...
Competence is clearly trumping ideology in the next administration, and lord knows after two terms of Bush & Co. it’s time to get back to the idea of smart, capable people advising the president and executing his policies.
What I wonder is whether the members of this team, in addition to their grasp of the issues and success at achieving power, have a real feel for the needs of the people they are supposed to be representing.
I don’t doubt that they have the best of intentions. But the people at the pinnacle of power in Washington are encased in a bubble that makes it extremely hard to hear the voices of those who aren’t already powerful themselves.
On Monday, the president-elect introduced a national security team that will face a nightmarish array of challenges: the promised drawdown in Iraq; a worsening situation in Afghanistan; the crisis unfolding in India and Pakistan; and so on.
But it also has a responsibility to look out for the members of the military who are exhausted from years of valiant service. Many have served three and four (or more) tours in combat, and many thousands have been wounded in mind and body and are having a difficult time putting their lives back together.
So a challenge as important as the challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan is to send the message — and make it stick — that more Americans need to share in the sacrifices required to keep the nation and its interests secure.
President-elect Obama campaigned on the mantra of change. For years the federal government catered increasingly to the interests of the wealthy and the powerful. This reached a destructive crescendo when the ideologues and incompetents of the Bush administration came to power.
That is what needs to change.
Will this new Obama team, as brilliant as it appears to be, begin addressing on day one the interests of those who are not rich and who have not had the ear of those in power?
I think about the cops and firefighters and factory workers and schoolteachers and hospital aides and bank tellers and truck drivers who are having trouble making ends meet, hanging onto their homes, sending their children to college.
Will this new administration really be looking out for them?
One of the reasons the economy is so deeply in the tank is that ordinary Americans have not received a fair share of the economic advances of the past several years. You don’t hear much about this. Americans have been working harder and harder, and more and more efficiently (we are now the hardest working people on the planet, having passed the Japanese in this category), but ordinary workers have not been paid for this enhanced productivity.
As my colleague at The Times, Steven Greenhouse, pointed out in his book “The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker,” published earlier this year:
“Even though corporate profits have doubled since recession gave way to economic expansion in November 2001, and even though employee productivity has risen more than 15 percent since then, the average wage for the typical American worker has inched up just 1 percent (after inflation).”
That was part of a pattern of gross unfairness that has been unfolding for some three decades. No wonder people have depleted their savings and maxed out their credit cards.
The crisis now, of course, is not that wages are stagnant but that the jobs themselves are disappearing. It’s not just change that the nation needs, but big change.
President-elect Obama has talked of a “new dawn of American leadership.” Three-quarters of a century ago, Franklin Roosevelt promised a New Deal and said his biggest task was “to put people to work.”
That’s as appropriate a cue as any for the next president. I hope Mr. Obama’s “new dawn” portends more than just a few nibbles around the edges of change. We need change that brings about more shared sacrifice in wartime and tough times, and a more equitable distribution of the nation’s resources all the time.
I want to know who in the Obama administration will be listening to the young girl on the South Side of Chicago whose future is constrained by a lousy public school, and the factory worker in Toledo whose family’s future has been trampled by unrestrained corporate greed and unfair trade policies.
All the evidence is that the next administration will be competent and smart as hell. Now I’d like to know for whom they plan to deliver.
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4) The Jig is Up
By Lynn Henderson
Nov/Dec 2008
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/
The United States economy is in the greatest financial crisis since the stock market crash and great depression of 1929. This is not the assertion of a few radicals and political “lefties” but the virtually unanimous and sudden conclusion of economists, Wall Street financial experts, Democratic and Republican politicians, and the entire media industry. While the unanimous recognition of the crisis was reached with truly breathtaking speed, almost none of these experts and pundits saw it coming even a few weeks and months ago. And the crisis is not limited to the United States, but has rapidly spread through out the entire world financial system.
We also have virtual unanimity from these same folks on the causes of the financial crisis: The deregulation movement was taken to excess. The lack of government regulation and oversight led to the proliferation of new risky, exotic financial instruments—hedge funds, derivative securities, credit default swaps, securitized and bundled mortgages, etc. These new instruments lacked “transparency” we are told, and were too complicated for the market to accurately evaluate. The usually efficient invisible hand of the free market was unable to perform its normal functions and froze up.
In the housing market, unregulated sub-prime mortgages led to irresponsible lending and borrowing practices that allowed thousands of people to buy homes they really could not afford. When housing prices unexpectedly fell and the higher rates of the sub-prime mortgages kicked in, this triggered a cascading wave of mortgage defaults that led to a credit crunch that quickly spread throughout the entire economy.
There is also near unanimity on what the solution to this crisis is. First, “stabilize” the situation with immediate massive government bailouts of banks, brokerage firms, insurance companies and all other financial institutions “too big to fail.” Provide emergency government guarantees for all loans between banks and banks, banks and brokerage firms, banks and insurance companies—in other words, government guarantees for loans between all the major financial institutions of the country.
They also caution us that this stabilization process will take time, and will be painful. The question of course is—painful for whom? These are the most massive government bailouts in the history of this nation—or any nation, and there are more to come. They are not for free. In the final analysis, wealth will be channeled out of the pockets of the vast majority into the coffers of the financial elite.
But after an admittedly painful period, which will probably include recession, unemployment and other hardships, we are told the economy will be stabilized. Responsible regulations and government oversight will then be put in place which will curb future excesses of greed and speculation and the economy will return to its normal state of growth and prosperity.
None of the above accurately describes the nature, causes and roots of the present financial collapse. Even the comparison with 1929 lacks accuracy. The present financial crisis is more fundamental and more sweeping than the 1929 crash and depression. It is the end of an era. The end of the so-called American Century. The demise of the world financial system which American capitalism set up at the famous Bretton Woods conference in 1944 following WWII. And there is no agreement on what will or can replace it.
For some 50 years now the American working class, or the media’s preferred euphemism, the American middle class, has been the target of an intense class war in which real wages and income have been relentlessly reduced. This has been a one-sided class war with little effective resistance, especially from a hopelessly bureaucratized and conservatized trade union movement, which, in addition, has slavishly tied itself to one of the principle instruments of this class war, the Democratic Party. Everyone recognizes some of the more obvious results of this one-sided class war—an ever-increasing concentration of wealth into the hands of a thin layer at the top. CEO salaries have gone from 40 times that of the average employee to 300 times.
But there is an obvious contradiction here. Economists calculate that approximately 80 percent of the economy is driven by consumer spending. If real wages have been falling over the last 50 years, how has the economy, at least until recently, continued to expand and profits continue to grow? This was accomplished by a number of strategies designed to offset the effect of falling real wages on consumer spending.
The first of these was the simple expedient of drastically increasing the total number of hours worked. Overtime was increased, leisure time was decreased. The single wage earner family was largely eliminated. No longer did one partner work while the other, usually the female, took on the demanding job of running the home and caring for the children. The “Leave It To Beaver” family of the 1950s disappeared from American society.
When this proved insufficient, family members were forced into a second and even a third part time job. Grandpa and grandma were moved into the basement apartment, and shuffled off to Walmart earning extra bucks as greeters to supplement their Social Security check. This is why political and economic apologists for this policy no longer wish to compare individual wage rates over time but rather household income. But the number of extra hours an individual can work is limited, as is the number of additional family members that can be put to work. New steps had to be taken to offset the effect falling wages had on consumer spending and the economy.
The next move was a massive expansion of consumer debt. The credit card industry was born. It was not so long ago that credit cards were mostly limited to business executives who did a lot of traveling. New federal legislation was put in place ending the ability of individual states to regulate credit cards and eliminating all usury laws which capped the maximum interest that could be charged. The nation was flooded with credit cards carrying 20 percent plus interest rates, a return previously only available to Mafia loan operations. The average American family now holds seven of these cards. The banks issuing these cards made record profits and consumer debt soared to record levels. But it did mask the effects of falling real wages and produced a significant if temporary boost in consumer spending.
Paralleling the encouragement of ever more consumer debt was an even more risky policy, the massive and continuous expansion of government debt. We will address this crucial question in greater detail shortly but for now we can note that these record deficit budgets of necessity fueled inflationary pressures. One way these inflationary pressures expressed themselves was an artificial rise in the dollar value of houses—the so-called housing boom.
For most middle-class/working-class families, their home, if they own one, is by far their biggest financial asset. As credit cards maxed out and the size of consumer credit card debt became unsupportable, another particularly dangerous financial gimmick was floated. Consumers were encouraged, and driven by necessity, to take cash equity out of their inflated house value. Second mortgages, third mortgages, home equity loans, became the final desperate hope for keeping their heads above water—for meeting expenses and paying down credit card debt that was killing them with 20 percent plus interest rates. New home buyers were lured into predatory sub-prime and adjustable rate mortgages with the assurance that housing prices would continue to rise indefinitely, allowing them to refinance and even cash out increased equity in the foreseeable future. And again it propped up consumer spending.
The banks made big bucks out of the credit card ploy but it was peanuts in comparison to what they were able to accomplish with the new mortgage schemes. By highly leveraging their mortgage investments, bundling them together into tradeable securities and marketing these throughout the world, they were able to generate some of the largest banking profits in history. When the housing bubble burst, it triggered not just a crisis in the mortgage market but the collapse of a financial house of cards that had been building for decades.
Even more significantly, it exposed fatal flaws in the entire world financial system which had been in place for seventy years, ever since the famous Bretton Woods conference of 1944. When the United States organized the Bretton Woods conference, the U.S. was the largest creditor nation in the world; for all intents and purposes it was the only creditor nation in the world. Today it is the largest debtor nation in the world.
For decades the United States has run ever-larger deficit budgets fueling an ever-larger national debt. In the final analysis this was driven by the need to artificially stimulate an economy whose inadequate wage-driven consumer spending was less and less capable of keeping it on track.
But how was the United States able to do this? How was the United States able to run ever-larger deficit budgets driving an ever-larger national debt? Other nations are not capable of doing this. If Argentina, or Germany or France followed a similar policy it would eventually produce very dire results. The United States was able to pursue such a policy over an extended period of many decades because of the unique, privileged position of the dollar in the world economic system.
The United States won WWII. It won WWII big. It won WWII not just against the Axis powers but against its allies as well. The entire capitalist world came out of WWII in a shambles. Its industrial plants destroyed or in decay, its working classes reduced, dispersed, and demoralized, its political structures in turmoil and its national economies for the most part flat broke.
But the United States came out of WWII immeasurably stronger in every way than when it entered the war. Its industrial capacity had dramatically expanded, incorporating all the new technologies in electronics, chemicals etc. developed during the war. Its working class was intact with better skills and education than prior to the war. It was politically, militarily and financially the dominant capitalist economy in the world.
Prior to WWII, international trade and the settlement of international trade balances were accomplished primarily through the shifting of gold accounts. But by the end of WWII the United States ended up with all the gold, or most of it. A new basis for organizing international trade had to be found and found quickly.
At the 1944 Bretton Woods conference it was agreed that the dollar would replace gold in its international trade function. The dollar would be accepted as good as gold. The dollar would become the reserve currency for the entire capitalist world. This is how the U.S. dollar acquired its unique, privileged position. Or to use a term union members can appreciate, it acquired “super seniority.” This arrangement made certain sense for the world capitalist economy, but only so long as the U.S. economy remained a strong, dominant, expanding economy with a strong financial balance sheet.
What do the continuous deficit budgets and the exploding federal government debt mean? It means this debt has to be funded; the government has to borrow money. It does this by selling U.S. treasury bonds which are government IOUs. Today most of these U.S. treasury bonds are sold in the international market and held by such countries as Japan, the Middle East oil nations and especially China.
The United States has become utterly dependent on continued international purchases of these treasuries and the regular rollover of those already held. As the U.S. debt grows and the dollar becomes shakier these nations become more nervous about continuing these purchases. That’s on one side of the equation; on the other side, the collapse of the dollar as the world reserve currency with nothing to replace it would mean a world-wide crisis and a sharp contraction in international trade—trade on which these nations are very dependent. These are the considerations the holders of U.S. debt are constantly trying to weigh and balance.
This month saw a sea shift in how they weigh and balance the equation. As the crisis unfolded, and the government bailout and infusion of funds began to take place, Treasury Secretary Paulson suddenly and out-of-the-blue made a truly astounding demand that Congress immediately authorize 700 billion dollars to be dispensed by him, as he saw fit, with no congressional or judicial oversight. Despite some claims to the contrary, he essentially got everything he demanded. What provoked such a move?
David Rothkopf, an apparently well-connected scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, lets the cat out of the bag in a major article entitled “9/11 Was Big. This is Bigger.” In the October 12, 2008 Washington Post he writes; “Reports from within the Treasury suggested that the U.S. government intervened in the financial sector, at least in part, in response to Chinese threats to reconsider their policy of buying U.S. debts unless Washington moved to stabilize the markets.”
This signals the end for the U.S. dollar’s status as the world reserve currency—the end of “super seniority” for the dollar. And national leaders throughout the world know it. They are demanding a new worldwide economic conference to deal with the crisis. This conference, explains French President Nicolas Sarkozy, would need “to rebuild the entire global financial and monetary system from the bottom up, the way it was done at Bretton Woods after World War II.” He goes on to conclude, “Laissez-faire—it’s finished. The all-powerful market that is always right, it’s finished.”
Germany’s finance minister offered a similar perspective in remarks to his parliamentary colleagues. “The U.S. will lose its status as the superpower of the world financial system,” Peer Steinbruck declared. “This world will become multipolar. The world will never be the same again.”
The strongly pro-market Financial Times of London chimes in declaring that, “We are at the end of the era of American laissez-faire capitalism.”
It’s all well and good to demand a new Bretton Woods but it ignores the fact that the utterly unique historical conditions allowing for the successful Bretton Woods conference of 1944 no longer exist, nor are they reproducible. There was little in the way of negotiations between equals or even serious two-way discussion at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference. A completely dominant and victorious U.S. capitalism dictated, and the rest of the capitalist world acceded. The usual laws of capitalist international competition were uniquely and temporarily in suspension.
That is certainly not the case in the world today. The European nations calling for a world conference can’t even come up with a cooperative, coordinated response to the crisis among themselves. Ireland was the first to break, on September 30 unilaterally providing government protection for its banks. As funds flowed out of Europe to the protected Irish banks a howl of protest was heard from Germany, France, Britain etc. charging unfair competition. But they had no alternative other than individually extending protection to their own national banks.
Next was Iceland. In the recent decade Iceland had transformed itself into a mini Switzerland, soliciting deposits from all over Europe, especially Britain. Its profitable banking sector grew to ten times as large as its entire gross national product. As the world financial crisis unfolded, the small Icelandic economy was in no position to bail out its enormous banking sector.
When European governments turned down his desperate appeals for assistance, Iceland’s prime minister, Geir Haarde, declared that it was now “every country for itself.” He arranged a temporary loan from Russia, and promised to guarantee domestic depositors in Iceland’s banks while reneging on guarantees to foreign depositors. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown responded by suing Iceland and using counterterrorist legislation to take over Icelandic bank assets and operations in the United Kingdom.
As the stock value of their banks and companies plummet, all throughout Europe governments are unilaterally adopting restrictions to prevent outside capital and sovereign wealth funds from buying up their corporations at fire sale prices. In Italy, for example, the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has created a “national interests committee” to restrict the activities of sovereign wealth funds.
“This is unprecedented,” said Simon Tilford, chief economist for the Center for European Reform. “It has exposed the limits of European integration and coordination when presented with a crisis of this magnitude.”
It’s not unprecedented. It is merely confirmation of the basic law of capitalist competition, between firms and between capitalist nation states. In times of acute crisis, the law’s application becomes particularly brutal, it becomes: “Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.”
What does this all mean for the American middle-class/ working-class? The enormous costs of the Wall Street and banking sector bailouts are unprecedented, with much more to come, including corporate bailouts. Someone will have to pay, and without the aid of a dollar with “super seniority.” How the pace of events plays out is hard to predict but we will certainly see a dramatic intensification of class warfare against the American middle-class/working-class. But it can no longer be a one-sided class war; they will have to resist; they will have no choice. They will not be able to just bare their breasts and accept the incoming rounds.
They are not in an advantageous position to fight this war. The trade union movement will be of little help as it is presently constituted, and it will take time and a tough fight to change it. Unlike most of the major industrial nations, America, has no socialist or labor party which in the heat of battle could be transformed into a fighting political instrument.
Such a party would have to be built from scratch and in the face of deep existing illusions about the progressive nature of the Democratic Party. But the American capitalist elite are not in good shape either. The crisis has shaken them; there is a growing sense of panic and demoralization. No one looks forward to this war. But the war will come. For everyone—the jig is up.
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5) Cashing the Obama Check: Will It Come Back Marked ‘Insufficient Funds?’
By Bruce Dixon
BlackAgendaReport.com
November 5, 2008
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/novdec_08/novdec_08_02.html
“In a sense, we’ve come to the nation’s capital to cash a check...It is obvious that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds’.” —Martin Luther King, I Have A Dream, August 1963.
The vote for the First Black President wasn’t just about race and racism. For tens of millions, it was a vote for peace abroad, for economic and social justice at home. Barack Obama sold himself to the American people as a transformative political figure.
Despite those who now urge Americans to tone down their expectations, many are prepared to collect on the hopes that swept Obama into office. Those hopes and expectations are what we call the “Obama Check.”
The question is, can we cash it?
Election night 2008 was over by 11:00 P.M. eastern time. Only two hours after the polls closed on the west coast, pundits called it for Barack Obama. Now that we know a black boy can indeed grow up to be president, it’s time to get over ourselves, over our wonder and amazed self-congratulation about how far we’ve come, time to look around to see where we really are.
The First Black President carries with him into the Oval Office the hopes and dreams and aspirations of many people he will never meet, but who imagine they know his heart and intentions. Although these things were not on the ballot, and were kept largely out of the discussions by the media and the candidates themselves, the tens of millions who voted for Obama did so because in the main, they want an end to the war. They want to see the military budget and the prison population reduced. They want single payer national health care. They want a more just economy and they objected strenuously to Bush’s—and Obama’s—bailout of Wall Street.
Their expectations of social and economic justice at home and peace abroad are, in Dr. King’s famous language, a gigantic and long-overdue promissory note. A check. The Obama Check. Barack Obama was elected in the hopes that he could help us cash this check. That is the change his voters believed in, that’s what they expect to see, and that is how an Obama presidency will be judged by history.
Can we ever cash the Obama Check?
The day Obama takes office; there will be an incredible 1.1 million African Americans behind bars, a proportion eight times that of whites. Before the mortgage market meltdown the wealth of black families was about one eleventh that of whites. Since then, it’s fallen off a cliff. Whether we look at education, at wages, at morbidity, mortality, unemployment or mass incarceration the gaps between whites and blacks in the U.S. are wide and still growing. With the nation’s First Black President installed, many whites will solemnly assure us that the U.S. is not now, if it ever was, a racist society. The First Black President-elect seems to agree with them, having told us all a year before electing him that we were “90 percent of the way” to a non-racist society.
Will the First Black President be of any use cashing the check for real racial justice, not just for black faces in high places? The clock is already ticking, and every day is an opportunity to lead lost.
The day the First Black President is sworn in the U.S. economy will still be, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, a polite fiction, based on phantom assets, phony profits, inflated valuations, and outright fraud, a house of marked cards where even the bankers know not to trust each other. Millions of families will still face foreclosure, eviction and bankruptcy. Tens of millions more are in debt up to their necks, afflicted with ever-rising interest rates thanks to the tireless efforts of Obama’s running mate Joe Biden, sometimes known as the Senator from MasterCard.
In his first true test of presidential leadership, while still a candidate the First Black President lobbied reluctant Democrats and urged them to pass the Bush-Cheney trillion dollar no-strings-attached parting gift to Wall Street, money that could have been used to fund education, jobs, infrastructure, human needs, and debt relief for ordinary families.
Do we really expect Obama to help us cash the check on economic justice, to be an advocate of measures that lift up ordinary families? The outlook here is not bright either.
Dr. King told us more than forty years ago that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.” On the day the First Black President, supposedly the fulfillment of King’s dream, takes office, the U.S. will be spending more on arms and the military than the rest of the planet combined. But by declaring that he would increase the Pentagon’s budget even over what Cheney and Bush spent at the expense of housing, education and whatever else, the First Black President has already stopped payment on this part of the check.
The day after the election, and the day the First Black President takes office, at least 44 million Americans will have no health insurance at all, and tens of millions more are underinsured. One third of every health care dollar spent in the U.S. goes to maintain private insurance companies, indisputable parasites on the process of health care delivery, making the U.S. health care system the most expensive in the world, even though it takes care of a smaller percentage of its population than any other advanced industrial country. But instead of single payer health care, the First Black President plans to borrow billions with which to pay the Obama Check directly to parasitic insurance companies, and call that “universal health care.”
The day the First Black President takes office there will be over 800 U.S. military bases spanning the globe, more troops in Iraq than were there in 2005 or 2006, U.S. fleets menacing Iran and intermittently bombing Somalia, and a war in Afghanistan. The First Black President will draw down troops in Iraq to send them to Afghanistan, his threats to Iran are identical to those of George Bush—though he hasn’t put them to song, as McCain did—and he does not speak of the ongoing U.S. military involvement in the Horn of Africa. Our First Black President, every bit as much as Dick Cheney, has embraced the phony “war on terror” as the organizing principle of American life.
The peace loving grandmothers who imagine they see God’s Hand on the First Black President will have time to take a longer and more careful look. There will be no peace dividend under an Obama administration. This is a debt our First Black President is unwilling even to acknowledge, much less help us collect on.
Many of the same voices who assured us that the First Black President would be a epoch-making breakthrough—who helped sell us the Obama Check—now caution us not to expect too much. He is after all, only a politician. He’s not president of the movement, he is President of All the People, including the very rich, and obliged to serve the interests of the Pentagon, of parasitic insurance companies, of soulless multinational corporations, and conniving investment bankers.
All indications are that the Obama Check is going to be a difficult one to cash. But it’s what the people voted for, and many of us do intend to collect. With the help of our First Black President, or without it.
Bruce Dixon, the managing editor at Black Agenda Report, is based in Atlanta GA and can be reached at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com
—BlackAgendaReport.com, November 5, 2008
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6) Don’t Worry! Be Happy! A Little Poverty May Do You Some Good
By Bonnie Weinstein
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/novdec_08/novdec_08.html
In the midst of this profound economic meltdown that permeates our every conversation, and the information that is fed to us by the mass media, certain phrases pop forward and stick in your craw. How many times have we, the victims of the mortgage and credit crisis, been admonished for having “lived beyond our means”? How often have we been told we have “made foolish and frivolous spending decisions”?
Then, in that same media, the “economic experts” warn that if the American people don’t start spending again, the economy is going to go even further down the tubes! As usual, we workers are damned if we do, and damned if we don’t. But if we’re already living beyond our means, then how the heck are we supposed spend even more to bail out the wealthy? That would certainly be a foolish and frivolous spending decision!
Such condescending admonitions from the mouthpieces of capitalism are designed to justify a fresh assault on the living conditions of workers—not just here in the U.S. but around the world—in the form of massive bailouts of the wealthy by the poor.
From public schools to social services to the environment, capitalism’s profit-driven chaos is bringing nothing but disaster, devastation, and destruction. Not only are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continuing, but they are escalating and spreading to other countries—and more and more money is being pumped into them. According to the latest War Resisters League U.S. Federal Budget 2009 Pie Chart, total military expenditures, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, represent 54 percent of the Federal Budget, to the tune of $1,449 billion.
And now, due to the capitalists’ own profit-driven mismanagement, the bailout is escalating the theft of funds from all social services and infrastructure. Its effects are being felt in drastic cuts to public education and in the wanton destruction of our environment. Working people everywhere are feeling the pain and are expressing their outrage.
What we need to do is come together to use the power we have to actually do something about it.
Welfare for the rich
The wonderful comic Wonda Sykes put the bailout plainly in perspective in an interview with Jay Lenno when he asked, “The government bailout? Have you been following this stuff?” I transcribed her answer as best I could from a YouTube video. She answered:
Ah! You know, rich people got it good in this country! We refuse to let rich people not be rich! I mean, think about it! Broke people are gonna bail out rich people! . . . And then they don’t want any oversight! They want $700 billion and no oversight! . . . I want receipts, damn it! No oversight? What do you mean, no oversight? “Oh! Because you were so good with the other money . . . here’s some more money—we’re gonna close our eyes.” [She puts both hands over her eyes] . . . You know what? It’s rich welfare. It’s welfare for the rich and that’s all it is. So, to the average taxpayer it’s going to cost, like, two grand? [Lenno interjects, “No, $7,000 dollars every taxpayer.”] $7,000 every taxpayer. And you got the guy there busting his ass working two jobs, barely making $12,000 a year, and now he’s got to cough up something so a Wall Street guy can keep his swimming pool? . . . So the government’s gonna buy up all these bad mortgages, right? So now, in essence, you have rich people living in government housing.
I want them treated like they’re living in the projects. There aren’t any private swimming pools in the projects! Uh-uh! If you got a pool—open it to the public! I want everybody to go in, take a dip. Just treat it like the projects! I want them, every month, they got to go down to social services to pick up their paychecks! And stand in line! Make ’em all stand in line, pick up their paychecks, and they can only cash them at the check-cashing joint next to the liquor store.
Did you know poverty is good for you?
Wanda brings us back down to the earthly reality of the lives of working people, as opposed to the likes of Oprah and The New York Times, both of which are trying to pass this depression off as a quaint period of renewed family values.
Oprah told us the other day that we, i.e., ordinary working people—especially those whose mortgages are being foreclosed—have to accept responsibility for this crisis because we have been “living above our means.” (Her words, of course, were interspersed with commercials telling us what we should own and absolutely must buy today!)
Even more infuriatingly, Oprah, the billionaire, tells us: Heck, we (the poor) might even be better off for this economic crisis! Not only will we finally be forced to become economically responsible and learn to live within our means, but, parents who are out of work will be able to spend more time with their children and save money by playing board games instead of going to the movies; mothers will be forced to prepare more wholesome foods rather than ordering fast-food deliveries. No money and no job means burning less fuel, which will help the environment, and we’ll even drink less alcohol!
Oprah’s show parroted an October 7, 2008, New York Times article by Tara Parker-Pope, entitled, “Are Bad Times Healthy?” The author says:
Economic studies suggest that people tend not to take care of themselves in boom times—drinking too much (especially before driving), dining on fat-laden restaurant meals and skipping exercise and doctors’ appointments because of work-related time commitments . . . . “The value of time is higher during good economic times,” said Grant Miller, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford. “So people work more and do less of the things that are good for them, like cooking at home and exercising; and people experience more stress due to the rigors of hard work during booms.” Similar patterns have been seen in some developing nations.
Dr. Miller, who is studying the effects of fluctuating coffee prices on health in Colombia, says that even though falling prices are bad for the economy, they appear to improve health and mortality rates. When prices are low, laborers have more time to care for their children . . .. In this country, there are already signs of the economy’s effect on health. In May, the market research firm Information Resources reported that 53 percent of consumers said they were cooking from scratch more than they did just six months before—in part, no doubt, because of the rising cost of prepared foods.
So, have no fear, cry the billionaires. Poverty is good for our health! Why, it might finally force us to lose some of those rolls around our middles; in danger of starving,
perhaps, but much better looking! (Some of us might be lucky enough to lose enough weight to fit into one of Sarah Palin’s hand-me-downs when she donates them to charity after the elections!)
In a Times article of October 19, 2008, by Nicholas D. Kristof, entitled, “The Downturn’s Upside,” the author encouragingly reports:
The economic misery is numbingly real, but it’s also true that a downturn isn’t uniformly bad and might even be good for you in several ways: A recession could save your life. Christopher Ruhm, an economist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, argues that death rates go down during economic slowdowns. Professor Ruhm’s research indicates that suicides rise but total mortality rates drop, as do deaths from heart attacks, car accidents, pneumonia and most other causes. For example, each one-percentage-point drop in unemployment in the United States is associated with an extra 3,900 deaths from heart attacks.
. . . Some experts are skeptical. But in downturns we drive less and so car accidents decline, while less business activity means fewer job accidents and less pollution. Moreover, in recessions people have more leisure time and seem to smoke less, exercise more and eat more healthily . . . .A bear market might benefit you, if you are in your working years and won’t have to sell your stocks soon. That’s because you’re probably accumulating stocks now in your retirement account, and you’ll accumulate more when share prices are low . . . .
Falling housing prices harm landlords and speculators but benefit renters and first-time buyers (if they can still get mortgages). These beneficiaries tend to be low-income families, thus in this respect the poor may benefit. Likewise, a recession lowers prices of gas, oil and food, which disproportionately affect the poor.
But what Kristof says next really bugs me the most. It’s just the kind of “conventional wisdom” you hear on Oprah all the time, and there’s nothing that infuriates me more than hearing it from a billionaire. Oprah frequently and sanctimoniously reminds her audience that “money can’t make you happy!” And here Kristof intellectualizes this very same idea.
Income doesn’t have much to do with happiness. Americans haven’t become any happier as they have prospered in the last half-century. . . .
This is called the Easterlin Paradox: Once they have met their basic needs, people don’t become happier as they become richer. In recent years, new research has undermined the Easterlin Paradox, yet it’s still true that happiness has less to do with money than with friendships and finding meaning in a cause larger than oneself.
“There’s pretty good evidence that money doesn’t matter much for how you feel moment to moment,” said Alan Krueger, a Princeton University economist who is conducting extensive research on happiness. “What seems to matter much more is having good friends and family, and time to spend on social activities.”
You might think these people are just out of touch with reality. After all, who doesn’t understand that if you’re sick and hurting you’re much better off under silk sheets and 24-hour care, with the finest physicians and nurses money can buy, than if you’re lying alone, homeless and cold, in a urine-soaked gutter. But propaganda like the Times and Oprah’s is designed to break down the self-respect of all workers, not to mention any respect workers may have for each other.
You’re poor because you’re stupid
What these capitalists are basically telling working people is that it’s your own stupid fault for believing all the lies you’ve been told to get you to sign on to that adjustable-rate mortgage (adjustable that is, by the lenders only—not the borrowers) or sign up for that additional credit card. And there’s nothing you can do about it, they say, so make the best of it. Besides, poverty isn’t such a bad thing anyway!
What else can we expect when the wealthy, who have been stealing and stockpiling the wealth that only working people actually produce, go on an accelerated rampage to steal even more from us by taking away all the things working people fought for to improve our lives and those of our children?
Working people are not only worried about whether or not we can afford a night at the movies. We’re worried about keeping our jobs, our hours, and our benefits. In the meantime, our adult children are trying to figure out how to leave the nest and live on their own. And they’re finding it impossible to do. In fact, they’re lucky if they’re working at all!
Working people are being forced to make much harder choices—between food and gas, or between rent and utilities. Meanwhile, Oprah and The New York Times tell us not to worry; that walking is better for us than driving and, that we should look on the bright side of life!
So not only do they blame us for this economic crisis and tell us we’re stupid for getting ourselves into this situation in the first place, they have the unmitigated nerve to tell us to sacrifice while the wealthy are asked to sacrifice nothing!
Meanwhile, we are only just beginning to feel the depth of poverty that working people are being propelled into.
Crumbling public education: a window into
capitalism’s dark soul
But our children have already begun to suffer from the downturn in the economy. The rate of youth unemployment and underemployment is very high. Among Black youth unemployment is as high as 50 percent. And all children have been experiencing the erosion of public education for years. In San Francisco they don’t call it “school closure”; they call it “doubling up.” It amounts to the same thing—two schools becoming one—but it doesn’t sound quite as bad. And there has been an accelerated deterioration of the public school system just in the last few decades.
In fact, today, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law has transformed the schools into test-regimented, military-entrenched institutions that are severely failing students.
Recruiting, praying, abstinence and testing
The NCLB law ties federal funding to those schools that allow the U.S. military to collect student’s personal and school records and permit them to wander the school grounds in search of fresh cannon fodder for the illegal and immoral wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. To put a moralistic patina on the law, NCLB also protects prayer in schools, and prohibits sex education that condones the prevention of pregnancy and disease other than by abstinence. Schools that can’t prove they comply with all aspects of this law do not receive federal funds.
But the most insidious thing NCLB does in addition to the above is to require standardized tests for students in all schools. Under this law, those schools whose test scores are low are shut down and the teachers fired. This process has already begun and has resulted in thousands of school closures throughout the country. There is no provision for putting more money where it is needed most. There are no funds for hiring more teachers and lowering class sizes or rebuilding crumbling school facilities or equipment. There is only a system of punishment for the children who need the most help and the teachers who have the hardest jobs! Again, the poor are made to pay for the failure of the system.
They want us to pay for everything: for the schools; our healthcare; our food, clothing, and housing; the repair of roads, bridges, and other infrastructure; for the wars and the entire Pentagon budget; and now to bail out the wealthiest in our society. This includes all those who personally made record windfall-profits from mortgages now being foreclosed, from the soaring credit card interest rates, and from the inflated prices of the shoddy merchandise workers are forced to spend their hard-earned money on!
Not only are working people supposed to stand for the gutting of public education and every other social-welfare program; not only are we supposed to foot the bill for the U.S. wars of occupation costing over $700-million a day and $7,000 per second; but we must pay to bail out those who stole billions upon billions of dollars to line their own pockets! But, as the commercials say, “that’s not all!” We’re supposed to look forward cheerfully to our newfound poverty, since it will bring us closer to our children and other family members and “raise our family values!”
Ending welfare as we now know it
Bill Clinton “ended welfare as we knew it” in 1996 when he forced parents to work in order to collect aid, i.e., work at jobs that pay so low that the worker also qualifies for welfare! The law also limits higher education for parents to two years while collecting aid. So parents without an education or job training or even a high school diploma have only two years to complete their education, condemning them to low-paying, go-nowhere jobs—jobs that, by and large, are now on the chopping block.
One could, of course, work full-time at two low-paying jobs, take care of one’s children, and go to school past the two years to earn a higher degree, but this would also mean taking on extra debt for college tuition, supplies, etc. One would also have to pay for someone to watch the children while fitting classroom time into a double-workday schedule. In fact, Clinton’s cutbacks have already put a tremendous strain on single parents. Very few have actually been able to get a higher degree since his dismantling of Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
Now we have a new kind of welfare altogether: welfare for the rich! Talk about ending welfare, as we knew it! Not only has this bipartisan government eliminated welfare for the poor (since it’s not welfare if you have to work for it), but it has completely turned the tables and is now charging the poor to pay for welfare for the rich! Who’d ’a’ thunk?
Back to the dark ages
But really this isn’t new at all. It’s an old, old story that goes back to the roots of capitalism. Working people have always footed the bill for the rich, with their hard work creating wealth for the employer as well as with the inflated price they must pay for their own and their children’s sustenance, above which they have never been paid.
There was a time when children themselves had to work long hours if they were to have enough to eat because their parents barely earned enough to feed themselves. Children were paid a pittance, but would starve otherwise; parents had no alternative but to put their own children to work. It wasn’t unusual for a family to be thrust out of their home by their landlord or boss because they hadn’t put their children to work!
Labor’s struggle has been long, hard, and brutal! Nothing that workers have today was handed to them by a kindly commander of capital. Every hour cut from a child’s day of forced labor was paid for in working-class blood and sweat. We must remember our roots, because that’s what the capitalists want us to go back to!
It’s been at most 100-or-so years since workers routinely labored for 18 hours a day, six days a week, along with their children. But isn’t that what we’re doing when we have to hold down two jobs to make ends meet, leaving kids home alone to care for younger siblings? Are they going to tell us next that if all children—even those as young as two and three—were put back to work it would bring families even closer together?
There is no limit to the depths of poverty the capitalists will force upon the world’s working class in their drive to maintain their rate of profit and accumulate personal wealth.
How can working people get out of this financial crisis?
The most logical way for working people to get out of the financial crisis is to hold responsible the corporations and their CEOs who profited outrageously from these despicable business dealings, and make them pay back the money they stole. All corporate books should be opened for examination by working people, and the swindled money returned.
Another big savings—especially to enable us to rebuild our infrastructure and improve public schools, healthcare, and all social services—would be to bring an immediate end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the Pentagon budget altogether. Bring all the troops home now! Disband all U.S. military bases throughout the world and redirect all their funding toward solving the massive needs of human beings around the globe—eliminating the causes of war in the first place.
Tax the rich, not working people! Tax all income over $100,000 at a progressive rate, i.e., the more money earned, the higher the tax rate you must pay. (Less than 20 percent of American households earn $100,000 or above. The median annual household income is around $50,000.) This simple solution alone could pay for all the things we need for everyone to live happy, healthy, free, and productive lives.
How can working people save themselves and the whole planet in the bargain?
First, we have to realize who we are. We are workers. We are essential to the production of all commodities and the excavation of raw materials necessary to manufacture them. Our labor is responsible for every penny of wealth accumulated by the capitalists, the private owners of the very means of production our labor built and fuels. We are responsible for producing all the profits—including that which the capitalists use to pay our wages. The capitalists pay nothing at all. They have gotten a free ride. Now it’s time for them to pay!
They own the factories, the farmland, the machines of industry, and the carriers of goods and supplies. They themselves produce nothing yet they take almost everything, leaving us the minimum they can get away with! They are not workers. They are the exploiters of workers and the commanders of capital, whose interests are diametrically opposed to the interests of working people the world over.
The capitalists survive by convincing us workers that we’re not smart enough or resourceful enough, and ultimately incapable of surviving without the bosses’ superior intellectual guidance and rule. The capitalists bank on convincing us that the reason they’re rich is that they’re better, smarter, and more capable human beings. Isn’t that the essence of American culture—to be esteemed on the basis of accumulated wealth and power, no matter how they were gotten?
Why do you think the poorest woman likes to own that designer handbag, even if she ends up paying three times as much for it on some high-interest department store credit card? It’s been beaten into our heads from birth and from every possible angle by mass advertising and shows like Oprah’s that carrying that purse or driving that car proves we are worth something!
This little myth that “rich equals better” is the rationale behind capitalist rule. And divide and conquer is the technique they use to establish the inferiority of everyone else. Their ultimate goal is to turn each worker against the other so none will join together to turn against the rich.
Divide and conquer is the only way a tiny capitalist minority can maintain rule over the overwhelming majority of workers. They represent less than one percent of the world’s population yet they own and control over 90 percent of all the wealth, land, and property on the planet. The interests of capitalists and workers could not be further apart.
This fact is the “ace in the hole” of the future of all humankind, because we working people are the overwhelming majority of people on the planet. We are the ones who know how to make and do everything. We don’t need the capitalists or their rotten system that uses up and exploits everything—especially human beings—in the pursuit of private profit. In fact, the capitalist system itself is standing squarely in the way of human advancement.
Ending capitalism is essential to saving the planet
The capitalist system puts the accumulation of vast sums of private profit and personal wealth above all else and is responsible for leading the world to the brink of ecological collapse. Here’s just one example.
The World Bank has bought up and clear-cut natural forests in Sao Jose do Buriti, Brazil, to plant eucalyptus trees, for which they receive “pollution credits.” They have sold these pollution credits to BP, whose Grangemouth oil refineries are poisoning the air and water in and around the town of Grangemouth, Scotland—theoretically “balancing out to zero” the pollution between the two cities. There’s only one catch—aside of course for the fact that the people of Grangemouth are still getting poisoned by the refineries (but that doesn’t count to the capitalists). The eucalyptus trees planted in the forests of Brazil have caused nearby streams and rivers to dry up because they suck up a lot more water than the natural forests, and this is devastating the local environment, drying up streams and rivers, and severely impacting indigenous farmers in the area. You can find out more about this in the documentary The Carbon Connection.1
In such ways does the capitalist profit motive breed chaos and disregard for anything but profits. They plunder and pollute the land. They lie, cheat, swindle, sow division and distrust among people. They make the laws, hire the police, and enlist the armies to maintain their control over the means of production. By maintaining their stranglehold and enslavement of the workers, they protect their exclusive ownership rights to the plentiful wonders of the world, which they wantonly squander.
For them there can be no rational planning in the interests of what is best for the health and welfare of the planet and the myriad forms of life on it.
Their decisions are all self-centered and single-minded. And make no mistake about it: while they may compete, bicker, even battle among themselves from time to time, capitalism’s collective interest lies in maintaining the class distinction between themselves and the masses of workers. They are compelled to do so to maintain their rule over us, over all the wealth we produce with our minds, hands, and backs, and over the land we walk on.
We workers must look after ourselves in the same single-minded way, but from a collective, working class-centered point of view, i.e., always looking out for our and our planet’s best interests. To do this, we must do away with the capitalist system and its chaotic profit motive, sending it straight to hell where it belongs!
Socialism is the answer
That’s all socialism really is: Workers taking over the means of production; democratically and collectively deciding what people need and want; using all our technological skill, know-how, and creativity to produce the best of everything; and eliminating all the waste involved in the production of inferior goods that are designed as a cheap substitute to sell to the poor.
With the fantastic worldwide communications network we already have in place, we could figure all this out—what things and how much of them we need—in no time, so that everyone would be provided with the best of everything. By eliminating the capitalist profit-driven mode of production and replacing it with a socialist mode of production, we could rationally plan and share the work, develop the best, safest, and most efficient production and distribution methods, and distribute everything free of charge to everyone. Without the profit motive tying the overwhelming majority of people to hours of drudgery a day just to keep a roof over their heads (if they’re lucky), all children born will have a chance to live free and develop their potential to the fullest.
Doesn’t it make sense? Allow all people to develop to their fullest; to pursue all their interests; to hone their skills so each one will be able to contribute at his or her fullest capacity to the common good. From each according to skills and abilities, and to each according to individual needs and wants.
In fact, the goal of socialism, or communism, is to eventually eliminate the need for money or any kind of exchange of one form of labor for another, or one thing for another. Instead, everyone just gets all they need and want, and contributes any talents they can develop to the fullest for the betterment of all!
It’s really simple. Under a rational, socialist, planned-economy, each machine that replaces labor, and each young worker joining the workforce, would not take someone’s job away but would simply reduce the total number of hours everyone would have to work, freeing up more time for each to, in turn, develop even more knowledge and skills.
The thing we workers need to comprehend is that together, in unity and solidarity with each other toward such goals, we do have the power to change this dog-eat-dog world into just such a society!
Capitalism? We just don’t need it!
1 The Carbon Connection, the video can be viewed online at CarbonTradeWatch.org
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7) The Age of Katrina—Not Obama
By BAR executive editor Glen Ford
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.
Black Agenda Report
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/novdec_08/novdec_08_05.html
The more delusional Obama supporters behave as if “their candidate’s speech on Thursday will herald a crack in time, after which posterity will speak of Before-Obama (BO) and After-Obama (AO) eras, and the transcendental Age of Obama.” They draw straight lines from Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech to Obama’s nomination acceptance oration. However, the event that far more accurately defines the age is Katrina, the unfolding catastrophe that descended on New Orleans three years ago, this week. Katrina is “the most dramatic manifestation of an implacable racism coiled deeply in the ruling structures of American society, primed to remove concentrations of Blacks from places of value.”
Barack Obama supporters would have you believe that their candidate’s presidential nomination is the glorious, straight-line culmination of the Black Freedom Struggle whose previous high-water mark, they believe, was the 1963 March on Washington, the 45th anniversary of which coincides with this week’s Democratic National Convention. Obama’s public relations agents attempt to bracket the history of modern U.S. race relations within a marketable 45-year period that begins with a snippet from Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and ends—for the time being—with the grand peroration of Obama’s acceptance speech before the cheering multitudes, in Denver. These dates are presented as the bookends of Black struggle—to be amended and extended when President Obama delivers his State of the Union Address, in January.
To the most hopelessly besotted Obamites, their candidate’s speech on Thursday will herald a crack in time, after which posterity will speak of Before-Obama (BO) and After-Obama (AO) eras, and the transcendental Age of Obama.
Having conjured up a nonexistent “mass movement” to describe what is actually a corporate financed and directed electoral campaign that has not championed a single issue worthy of historical note (don’t dare cite partial Iraq withdrawal and for-profit health care schemes), the Democrats now patch Dr. King’s speech into the prologue to the Book of Obama for the purpose of consigning real mass agitation strategies to the past, for all time.
Yet, the unedited version of history—the real deal—commemorates another imminent anniversary, one that starkly illuminates the true political character of the age: Katrina. The events that followed the hurricane’s arrival in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, would reveal the diabolical intentions of U.S. rulers towards African Americans: to methodically remove Blacks from the central cities of the nation. The ongoing, orchestrated catastrophe also demonstrated beyond doubt the moral bankruptcy and political impotence of Black national “leadership.” As I wrote in October, 2005:
“If Black America fails to configure its human, organizational and material resources to effectively resist the theft and ultimate disfigurement of New Orleans, then we will be forced to confront the existence of fundamental, crippling flaws in the African American polity.”
The “the man-made disaster in the Gulf” provided what may have been “the last chance to build a real Movement, encompassing the broadest sectors of Black America.” Certainly, a critical mass of “the people” were eager to intervene. Hardly a Black church was without some Katrina-aid project, thousands of students journeyed to New Orleans as soon as logistics were made available, and popular awareness of the raw injustice of government policy was universal. But pure rot pervaded national Black political circles—as was clearly evident within six months.
“The Congressional Black Caucus, which claims to be the ‘conscience of the congress,’ has shown itself to be an appendage of the White House leadership,” I wrote in February 2006. “They slavishly followed Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s command to make the Democratic Party look good—as opposed to the Republicans—rather than directly address the crisis that was affecting their own people.
“Forty-one of the forty-two Black members of congress obeyed Pelosi’s edict, that the House Committee on Katrina be boycotted. They accepted the order that Democratic legislators would not attend the meetings of the Katrina committee, because it was stacked against the Democratic Party.”
Only Cynthia McKinney, who was soon to lose her House seat from suburban Atlanta, bucked Pelosi’s edict to boycott the Katrina hearings. Pelosi’s unspoken, but transparent, motive was to distance the Democratic Party from issues considered too “Black” in the run-up to congressional elections in November 2006. The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), as a body, weighed compliance with their party leader versus rescue of Black New Orleans, and chose Pelosi—who would continue to smother the Katrina issue after Democrats gained control of the House.
Katrina, that horrific assault on Black humanity, dignity and civilizational rights—the Right to Return and participate in the reconstruction of their city—was (and remains) the greatest test of Black leadership since the days of generalized White Terror in the South, following the collapse of Reconstruction. As the world watched, hundreds of thousands of African Americans were effectively evicted from their city and have since been prevented by every foul and evil means possible from returning.
There was method to this madness. The hurricane had simply provided “disaster capitalism” with an instant route to gentrification, a goal that takes years to accomplish by the usual methods of public and private urban coercion. As I wrote in May 2007, corporate Power had shown its hand:
“Corporate planners and developers believed they had been blessed by nature when Katrina drowned New Orleans, washing away in days the problem-people and neighborhoods that would ordinarily require years to remove in order to clear the way for ‘renaissance.’ Greed led to unseemly speed, revealing in a flash the outlines of the urban vision that would be imposed on the wreckage of New Orleans. As in a film on fast-forward, the ‘plot’ (in both meanings of the word) unfolded in a rush before our eyes: Once the Black and poor were removed, an urban environment would be created implacably hostile to their return. The public sector—except that which serves business, directly or indirectly—would under no circumstances be resurrected, so as to leave little ‘space’ for the re-implantation of unwanted populations (schools, utility infrastructure, public and affordable private housing, public safety, health care).”
Human rights lawyer Bill Quigley, who has documented the river of crimes perpetrated against the people of New Orleans since August 29, 2005, has compiled a “Katrina Pain Index—New Orleans Three Years Later.” It shows a city in which even the size of population is in dispute. The City Council claims 321,000 residents, the U.S. Census Bureau says only 239,000 remain—a loss of 132,000 or 214,000, depending on who you believe, from a pre-Katrina population of 453,000, 67 percent Black. No one can agree on the current racial breakdown.
Local, state and national forces, public and private, have conspired relentlessly to keep New Orleans unlivable to the unwanted classes. Public transportation is down 80 percent. A majority of Black residents were renters, yet no renters have gotten anything from the $10 billion Road Home Community Block Grant. Rents are up 46 percent, most public housing demolished or marked for destruction, while 71,657 “vacant, ruined unoccupied houses” anchor metropolitan New Orleans in social death. The city is number one in physical death by murder, while psychiatric hospital beds are down 56 percent. Three hundred Louisiana National Guardsmen patrol the streets, in lieu of cops.
Is it any wonder that only 11 percent of families have returned to the Lower Ninth Ward? The Katrina crisis continues because Power is determined that the Black and poor will not be permitted re-entry.
Barack Obama denies that racism plays any role in this. “There’s been much attention in the press about the fact that those who were left behind in New Orleans were disproportionately poor and African American. I’ve said publicly that I do not subscribe to the notion that the painfully slow response of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security was racially based. The ineptitude was colorblind,” said Obama on his web site, September 6, 2005. He still says so.
For three years, Power has ensured that the New Orleans Black Diaspora remains scattered. For the forces of organized racism, it is a success story; there’s nothing inept about it. Barack Obama will do nothing to facilitate the return of Black New Orleans, since no “malice” was intended. “...I see no evidence of active malice, but I see a continuation of passive indifference on the part of our government towards the least of these.” But Obama is worse than “passively indifferent.” By denying the reality of racism, he transforms the monumental injustices of Katrina into motiveless mistakes that somehow continue to replicate themselves to the disadvantage of the same group of people.
There is no reason for the Black New Orleans Diaspora to expect any relief from an Obama presidency. In fact, there is no reason to expect anything historically unusual or unique from a President Obama other than his physical Blackness.
“Barack Obama will do nothing to facilitate the return of Black New Orleans.”
Katrina, on the other hand, is the most dramatic manifestation of an implacable racism coiled deeply in the ruling structures of American society, primed to remove concentrations of Blacks from places of value. This overarching imperative to “Negro removal” can become aggressively active in an instant—as we learned in the days following August 29, 2005—or proceed about its work block by block over years, until the offending population is eliminated. Fast or slow, the end results are the same: seven of the top 12 cities in Black population saw a loss in African Americans as a percentage of total residents between 1990 and 2000. (See BAR “No Black Plan for the Cities, Despite Lessons of Katrina,” May 9, 2007.)
The pattern becomes clear. As we reported:
“...the seven cities that became less Black in the Nineties [New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Washington, Dallas, Atlanta] are all concentrated corporate headquarters locations or, in the case of Washington, DC, the headquarters of the federal government. These are places that corporate and finance capital are most keen to ‘make over’ in order to provide the urban ‘ambience’ believed most amenable to their employees, management and clients, and for the general sake of corporate prestige.”
Slow-acting Katrinas in the form of gentrification are what Black folks can expect—and must find ways to resist and defeat—from the ruling Lords of Capital for the foreseeable future, Obama or no Obama. There will be no “age” named after the handsome, articulate and oh-so-slick, but otherwise ordinary corporate candidate for president who used to call himself Barry. This is the Age of Katrina, and Barry is part of the problem.
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."
- Thomas Jefferson, 3rd president of US (1743 - 1826)
Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin (1802)
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/37700.html"
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COURAGE TO RESIST
Where we are at. An appeal for support
Jeff Paterson
Courage to Resist Project Director
October 15, 2008
couragetoresist.org/donate
I'm proud to report that we have more than doubled the number of military objectors advised or directly supported since last year. To do this, our organizing collective has stepped up to the challenge in major ways, and we increased our staffing as well.
We're now attempting to do this work in the context of an unprecedented economic meltdown that financially affects every one of us in some way. Even prior to that, we were competing with a historic presidential election campaign for your donation. Of course we hold out hope for a new foreign policy not based on brutal occupations, but we're not holding our breath. If change does happen, it will take time for any new foreign policy to trickle down to the courageous men and women who are refusing to fight today.
Quick facts about our budget:
--86 percent of our entire budget has come directly from folks such as you.
--We currently rely on approximately 2,000 contributors across the U.S.
--The average donation we receive is just over $40.
--About half of our budget goes directly to supporting individual resisters.
--The remaining 14 percent of our budget comes from small grants made by progressive foundations.
Recently, we brought on board Sarah Lazare as Project Coordinator who has hit the ground running working with resisters, publishing articles, and collaborating with our allies in the justice and peace movement. Sarah is a former union organizer, Democracy Now! intern, and volunteer at a refugee camp in Lebanon.
Also new to our staff is our Office Manager Adam Seibert, who like me is a former Marine. Adam served in Somalia prior to going UA / AWOL under threat of another combat deployment.
I've never felt better about our staff and organizing collective. We're undertaking urgent and unique work that directly contributes to ending war. However, we are currently running a $4,000 monthly deficit. Whether we can move forward with our work to support the troops who refuse to fight is in large part based on your shared commitment to this project.
For a review of our current work with resisters Tony Anderson, Blake Ivy, Robin Long, and our women and men fighting to remain in Canada, please check our homepage. We have also posted an organizational timeline of action that details our work since 2003.
Today I'm asking that you consider a contribution of $100 or more, or become a sustainer at $20 or more a month. With your direct assistance, I'm confident we'll be able to move forward together in challenging our government's policies of empire. Together we have the power to end the war.
couragetoresist.org/donate
Sincerely,
Jeff Paterson
Courage to Resist Project Director
First U.S. military serviceperson to refuse to fight in Iraq
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San Francisco Proposition U is on the November ballot.
Shall it be City policy to advocate that its elected representatives in the
United States Senate and House of Representatives vote against any further
funding for the deployment of United States Armed Forces in Iraq, with the
exception of funds specifically earmarked to provide for their safe and
orderly withdrawal.
If you'd like to help us out please contact me. Donations would be wonderful, we need them for signs and buttons. Please see the link on our web site.
Thank you.
Rick Hauptman
Prop U Steering Commiittee
http://yesonpropu.blogspot.com/
tel 415-861-7425
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WHAT ALL HUMANITY IS UP AGAINST (FROM "60 MINUTES")
[THIS IS TRULY TERRIFYING!...BW]
The Battle Of Sadr City
Weaponry so advanced that it spots the enemy and destroys it from nearly two miles above the battlefield made the difference in the fight for Sadr City last spring. Lesley Stahl's report shows rare footage of the weaponry in action.
October 13, 2008
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4516319n
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"Meditating on the current U.S. public debt-$10,266 trillions-that President Bush is laying on the shoulders of the new generations in that country, I took to calculating how long it would take a man to count the debt that he has doubled in eight years.
"A man working eight hours a day, without missing a second, and counting one hundred one-dollar bills per minute, during 300 days in the year, would need 710 billion years to count that amount of money." -Fidel Castro Ruz, October 11, 2008
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Check out this video of the Oct. 11 protest in Boston:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pPB5IR_hEg
Video: Peace Rally in Providence
October 11th, 2008
Rhode Island Community Coalition for Peace held an anti-war and pro immigration rally at Dexter Training Grounds, beside the Cranston Armory, followed by a march that ended up at Burnside Park around 4:30 p.m. There were 200 people at the rally and more joined the march along the way. Providence Journal video by Kathy Borchers
http://www.projo.com/video/?z=y&nvid=291998
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"These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people, and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people's money to settle the quarrel."
- Abraham Lincoln, speech to Illinois legislature, January 1837
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Subprime crisis explanation by The Long Johns
http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=z-oIMJMGd1Q
Wanda Sykes on Jay Leno: Bailout and Palin
http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=tco5h_ZprMY
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Stop the Carnage, Ban the Cluster Bomb!
Only 20 percent of the hundreds of thousands of unexploded cluster munitions that Israel launched into Lebanon in the summer of 2006 have been cleared. You can help!
1. See the list of more than thirty organizations that have signed a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calling for Israel to release the list of cluster bomb target sites to the UN team in charge of clearing the sites in Lebanon:
http://www.atfl.org/orgs.htm
2. You can Learn more about the American Task Force for Lebanon at their website:
http://www.atfl.org/
3. Send a message to President Bush, the Secretary of State, and your Members of Congress to stop the carnage and ban the cluster bomb by clicking on the link below:
http://action.atfl.org/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=6644&track=spreadtheword
Take action now at:
http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizations/ATFL/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=6644&t=
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SAVE TROY DAVIS
U.S. Supreme Court stays Georgia execution
"The U.S. Supreme Court granted a last-minute reprieve to a Georgia man fewer than two hours before he was to be executed for the 1989 slaying of an off-duty police officer.
"Troy Anthony Davis learned that his execution had been stayed when he saw it on television, he told CNN via telephone in his first interview after the stay was announced."
September 23, 2008
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/09/23/davis.scheduled.execution/
Dear friend,
Please check out and sign this petition to stay the illegal 9-23-08 execution of innocent Brother Mr. Troy Davis.
http://www.amnestyusa.org/troydavis
Thanks again, we'll continue keep you posted.
Sincerely,
The Death Penalty Abolition Campaign
Amnesty International, USA
Read NYT Op-Ed columnist Bob Herbert's plea on behalf of Troy Davis:
What's the Rush?
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
September 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/opinion/20herbert.html?hp
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New on the Taking Aim Program Archive:
"9/11: Blueprint for Truth: The Architecture of Destruction" part 2 is
available on the Taking Aim Program Archive at
http://www.takingaimradio.com/shows/audio.html
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Labor Beat: National Assembly to End the War in Iraq and Afghanistan:
Highlights from the June 28-29, 2008 meeting in Cleveland, OH. In this 26-minute video, Labor Beat presents a sampling of the speeches and floor discussions from this important conference. Attended by over 400 people, the Assembly's main objective was to urge united and massive mobilizations in the spring to "Bring the Troops Home Now," as well as supporting actions that build towards that date. To read the final action proposal and to learn other details, visit www.natassembly.org. Produced by Labor Beat. Labor Beat is a CAN TV Community Partner. Labor Beat is affiliated with IBEW 1220. Views expressed are those of the producer, not necessarily of IBEW. For info: mail@laborbeat.org,www.laborbeat.org. 312-226-3330. For other Labor Beat videos, visit Google Video or YouTube and search "Labor Beat".
http://blip.tv/file/1149437/
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12 year old Ossetian girl tells the truth about Georgia.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5idQm8YyJs4
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SAN FRANCISCO IS A SANCTUARY CITY! STOP THE MIGRA-ICE RAIDS!
Despite calling itself a "sanctuary city", S.F. politicians are permitting the harrassment of undocumented immigrants and allowing the MIGRA-ICE police to enter the jail facilities.
We will picket any store that cooperates with the MIGRA or reports undocumented brothers and sisters. We demand AMNESTY without conditions!
BRIGADES AGAINST THE RAIDS
project of BARRIO UNIDO
(415)431-9925
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Canada: American Deserter Must Leave
By IAN AUSTEN
August 14, 2008
World Briefing | Americas
Jeremy Hinzman, a deserter from the United States Army, was ordered Wednesday to leave Canada by Sept. 23. Mr. Hinzman, a member of the 82nd Airborne Division, left the Army for Canada in January 2004 and later became the first deserter to formally seek refuge there from the war in Iraq. He has been unable to obtain permanent immigrant status, and in November, the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear an appeal of his case. Vanessa Barrasa, a spokeswoman for the Canada Border Services Agency, said Mr. Hinzman, above, had been ordered to leave voluntarily. In July, another American deserter was removed from Canada by border officials after being arrested. Although the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper has not backed the Iraq war, it has shown little sympathy for American deserters, a significant change from the Vietnam War era.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/14/world/americas/14briefs-canada.html?ref=world
Iraq War resister Robin Long jailed, facing three years in Army stockade
Free Robin Long now!
Support GI resistance!
Soldier Who Deserted to Canada Draws 15-Month Term
By DAN FROSCH
August 23, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/23/us/23resist.html?ref=us
What you can do now to support Robin
1. Donate to Robin's legal defense
Online: http://couragetoresist.org/robinlong
By mail: Make checks out to "Courage to Resist / IHC" and note "Robin Long" in the memo field. Mail to:
Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave #41
Oakland CA 94610
Courage to Resist is committed to covering Robin's legal and related defense expenses. Thank you for helping make that possible.
Also: You are also welcome to contribute directly to Robin's legal expenses via his civilian lawyer James Branum. Visit girightslawyer.com, select "Pay Online via PayPal" (lower left), and in the comments field note "Robin Long". Note that this type of donation is not tax-deductible.
2. Send letters of support to Robin
Robin Long, CJC
2739 East Las Vegas
Colorado Springs CO 80906
Robin's pre-trial confinement has been outsourced by Fort Carson military authorities to the local county jail.
Robin is allowed to receive hand-written or typed letters only. Do NOT include postage stamps, drawings, stickers, copied photos or print articles. Robin cannot receive packages of any type (with the book exception as described below).
3. Send Robin a money order for commissary items
Anything Robin gets (postage stamps, toothbrush, shirts, paper, snacks, supplements, etc.) must be ordered through the commissary. Each inmate has an account to which friends may make deposits. To do so, a money order in U.S. funds must be sent to the address above made out to "Robin Long, EPSO". The sender's name must be written on the money order.
4. Send Robin a book
Robin is allowed to receive books which are ordered online and sent directly to him at the county jail from Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble. These two companies know the procedure to follow for delivering books for inmates.
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Yet Another Insult: Mumia Abu-Jamal Denied Full-Court Hearing by 3rd Circuit
& Other News on Mumia
This mailing sent by the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PLEASE FORWARD AND DISTRIBUTE WIDELY
1. Mumia Abu-Jamal Denied Full-Court Hearing by 3rd Circuit
2. Upcoming Events for Mumia
3. New Book on the framing of Mumia
1. MUMIA DENIED AGAIN -- Adding to its already rigged, discriminatory record with yet another insult to the world's most famous political prisoner, the federal court for the 3rd Circuit in Philadelphia has refused to give Mumia Abu-Jamal an en banc, or full court, hearing. This follows the rejection last March by a 3-judge panel of the court, of what is likely Mumia's last federal appeal.
The denial of an en banc hearing by the 3rd Circuit, upholding it's denial of the appeal, is just the latest episode in an incredible year of shoving the overwhelming evidence of Mumia's innocence under a rock. Earlier in the year, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court also rejected Jamal's most recent state appeal. Taken together, state and federal courts in 2008 have rejected or refused to hear all the following points raised by Mumia's defense:
1. The state's key witness, Cynthia White, was pressured by police to lie on the stand in order to convict Mumia, according to her own admission to a confidant (other witnesses agreed she wasn't on the scene at all)
2. A hospital "confession" supposedly made by Mumia was manufactured by police. The false confession was another key part of the state's wholly-manufactured "case."
3. The 1995 appeals court judge, Albert Sabo--the same racist who presided at Mumia's original trial in 1982, where he said, "I'm gonna help 'em fry the n....r"--was prejudiced against him. This fact was affirmed even by Philadelphia's conservative newspapers at the time.
4. The prosecutor prejudiced the jury against inn ocence until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, by using a slimy tactic already rejected by the courts. But the prosecutor was upheld in Mumia's case!
5. The jury was racially skewed when the prosecution excluded most blacks from the jury, a practice banned by law, but, again, upheld against Mumia!
All of these defense claims were proven and true. But for the courts, these denials were just this year's trampling on the evidence! Other evidence dismissed or ignored over the years include: hit-man Arnold Beverly said back in the 1990s that he, not Mumia, killed the slain police officer (Faulkner). Beverly passed a lie detector test and was willing to testify, but he got no hearing in US courts! Also, Veronica Jones, who saw two men run from the scene just after the shooting, was coerced by police to lie at the 1982 trial, helping to convict Mumia. But when she admitted this lie and told the truth on appeal in 1996, she was dismissed by prosecutor-in-robes Albert Sabo in 1996 as "not credible!" (She continues to support Mumia, and is writing a book on her experiences.) And William Singletary, the one witness who saw the whole thing and had no reason to lie, and who affirmed that someone else did the shooting, said that Mumia only arriv ed on the scene AFTER the officer was shot. His testimony has been rejected by the courts on flimsy grounds. And the list goes on.
FOR THE COURTS, INNOCENCE IS NO DEFENSE! And if you're a black revolutionary like Mumia the fix is in big-time. Illusions in Mumia getting a "new trial" out of this racist, rigged, kangaroo-court system have been dealt a harsh blow by the 3rd Circuit. We need to build a mass movement, and labor action, to free Mumia now!
2. UPCOMING EVENTS FOR MUMIA --
SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA -- Speaking Tour by J Patrick O'Connor, the author of THE FRAMING OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, in the first week of October 2008, sponsored by the Mobilization To Free Mumia. Contributing to this tour, the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia will hold a public meeting with O'Connor on Friday October 3rd, place to be announced. San Francisco, South Bay and other East Bay venues to be announced. Contact the Mobilization at 510 268-9429, or the LAC at 510 763-2347, for more information.
3. NEW BOOK ON MUMIA
Efficiently and Methodically Framed--Mumia is innocent! That is the conclusion of THE FRAMING OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, by J Patrick O'Connor (Lawrence Hill Books), published earlier this year. The author is a former UPI reporter who took an interest in Mumia's case. He is now the editor of Crime Magazine (www.crimemagazine.com).
O'Connor offers a fresh perspective, and delivers a clear and convincing breakdown on perhaps the most notorious frame-up since Sacco and Vanzetti. THE FRAMING OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL is based on a thorough analysis of the 1982 trial and the 1995-97 appeals hearings, as well as previous writings on this case, and research on the MOVE organization (with which Mumia identifies), and the history of racist police brutality in Philadelphia.
While leaving some of the evidence of Mumia's innocence unconsidered or disregarded, this book nevertheless makes clear that there is a veritable mountain of evidence--most of it deliberately squashed by the courts--that shows that Mumia was blatantly and deliberately framed by corrupt cops and courts, who "fixed" this case against him from the beginning. This is a case not just of police corruption, or a racist lynching, though it is both. The courts are in this just as deep as the cops, and it reaches to the top of the equally corrupt political system.
"This book is the first to convincingly show how the Philadelphia Police Department and District Attorney's Office efficiently and methodically framed [Mumia Abu-Jamal]." (from the book jacket)
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal has a limited number of THE FRAMING ordered from the publisher at a discount. We sold our first order of this book, and are now able to offer it at a lower price. $12 covers shipping. Send payment to us at our address below:
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 • Oakland CA 94610 • 510.763.2347
www.laboractionmumia.org • LACFreeMumia@aol.com
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Sami Al-Arian Subjected to Worst Prison Conditions since Florida
Despite grant of bail, government continues to hold him
Dr. Al-Arian handcuffed
Hanover, VA - July 27, 2008 -
More than two weeks after being granted bond by a federal judge, Sami Al-Arian is still being held in prison. In fact, Dr. Al-Arian is now being subjected to the worst treatment by prison officials since his stay in Coleman Federal Penitentiary in Florida three years ago.
On July 12th, Judge Leonie Brinkema pronounced that Dr. Al-Arian was not a danger to the community nor a flight risk, and accordingly granted him bail before his scheduled August 13th trial. Nevertheless, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) invoked the jurisdiction it has held over Dr. Al-Arian since his official sentence ended last April to keep him from leaving prison. The ICE is ostensibly holding Dr. Al-Arian to complete deportation procedures but, given that Dr. Al-Arian's trial will take place in less than three weeks, it would seem somewhat unlikely that the ICE will follow through with such procedures in the near future.
Not content to merely keep Dr. Al-Arian from enjoying even a very limited stint of freedom, the government is using all available means to try to psychologically break him. Instead of keeping him in a prison close to the Washington DC area where his two oldest children live, the ICE has moved him to Pamunkey Regional Jail in Hanover, VA, more than one hundred miles from the capital. Regardless, even when Dr. Al-Arian was relatively close to his children, they were repeatedly denied visitation requests.
More critically, this distance makes it extremely difficult for Dr. Al-Arian to meet with his attorneys in the final weeks before his upcoming trial. This is the same tactic employed by the government in 2005 to try to prevent Dr. Al-Arian from being able to prepare a full defense.
Pamunkey Regional Jail has imposed a 23-hour lock-down on Dr. Al-Arian and has placed him in complete isolation, despite promises from the ICE that he would be kept with the general inmate population. Furthermore, the guards who transported him were abusive, shackling and handcuffing him behind his back for the 2.5-hour drive, callously disregarding the fact that his wrist had been badly injured only a few days ago. Although he was in great pain throughout the trip, guards refused to loosen the handcuffs.
At the very moment when Dr. Al-Arian should be enjoying a brief interlude of freedom after five grueling years of imprisonment, the government has once again brazenly manipulated the justice system to deliver this cruel slap in the face of not only Dr. Al-Arian, but of all people of conscience.
Make a Difference! Call Today!
Call Now!
Last April, your calls to the Hampton Roads Regional Jail pressured prison officials to stop their abuse of Dr. Al-Arian after only a few days.
Friends, we are asking you to make a difference again by calling:
Pamunkey Regional Jail: (804) 365-6400 (press 0 then ask to speak to the Superintendent's office). Ask why Dr. Al-Arian has been put under a 23-hour lockdown, despite the fact that a federal judge has clearly and unambiguously pronounced that he is not a danger to anyone and that, on the contrary, he should be allowed bail before his trial.
- If you do not reach the superintendent personally, leave a message on the answering machine. Call back every day until you do speak to the superintendent directly.
- Be polite but firm.
- After calling, click here to let us know you called.
Don't forget: your calls DO make a difference.
FORWARD TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS!
Write to Dr. Al-Arian
For those of you interested in sending personal letters of support to Dr. Al-Arian:
If you would like to write to Dr. Al-Arian, his new
address is:
Dr. Sami Al-Arian
Pamunkey Regional Jail
P.O. Box 485
Hanover, VA 23069
Email Tampa Bay Coalition for Justice and Peace: tampabayjustice@yahoo.com
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Video: The Carbon Connection -- The human impact of carbon trading
[This is an eye-opening and important video for all who are interested in our environment...bw]
Two communities affected by one new global market - the trade in carbon
dioxide. In Scotland, a town has been polluted by oil and chemical
companies since the 1940s. In Brazil, local people's water and land is
being swallowed up by destructive monoculture eucalyptus tree
plantations. Both communities now share a new threat.
As part of the deal to reduce greenhouse gases that cause dangerous
climate change, major polluters can now buy carbon credits that allow
them to pay someone else to reduce emissions instead of cutting their
own pollution. What this means for those living next to the oil industry
in Scotland is the continuation of pollution caused by their toxic
neighbours. Meanwhile in Brazil, the schemes that generate carbon
credits give an injection of cash for more planting of the damaging
eucalyptus plantations.
40 minutes | PAL/NTSC | English/Spanish/Portuguese subtitles.The Carbon Connection is a Fenceline Films presentation in partnership with the Transnational Institute Environmental Justice Project and Carbon Trade Watch, the Alert Against the Green Desert Movement, FASE-ES, and the Community Training and Development Unit.
Watch at http://links.org.au/node/575
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Torture
On the Waterboard
How does it feel to be "aggressively interrogated"? Christopher Hitchens found out for himself, submitting to a brutal waterboarding session in an effort to understand the human cost of America's use of harsh tactics at Guantánamo and elsewhere. VF.com has the footage. Related: "Believe Me, It's Torture," from the August 2008 issue.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/video/2008/hitchens_video200808
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Alison Bodine defense Committee
Lift the Two-year Ban
http://alisonbodine.blogspot.com/
Watch the Sept 28 Video on Alison's Case!
http://alisonbodine.blogspot.com/2007/10/blog-post.html
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The Girl Who Silenced the World at the UN!
Born and raised in Vancouver, Severn Suzuki has been working on environmental and social justice issues since kindergarten. At age 9, she and some friends started the Environmental Children's Organization (ECO), a small group of children committed to learning and teaching other kids about environmental issues. They traveled to 1992's UN Earth Summit, where 12 year-old Severn gave this powerful speech that deeply affected (and silenced) some of the most prominent world leaders. The speech had such an impact that she has become a frequent invitee to many U.N. conferences.
[Note: the text of her speech is also available at this site...bw]
http://www.karmatube.org/videos.php?id=433
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MINIATURE EARTH
http://www.miniature-earth.com/me_english.htm
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"Dear Canada: Let U.S. war resisters stay!"
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/499/89/
Russell Means Speaking at the Transform Columbus Day Rally
"If voting could do anything it would be illegal!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Lri1-6aoY
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Stop the Termination or the Cherokee Nation
http://groups.msn.com/BayAreaIndianCalendar/activismissues.msnw?action=get_message&mview=1&ID_Message=5580
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We Didn't Start the Fire
http://yeli.us/Flash/Fire.html
I Can't Take it No More
http://lefti.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html#9214483115237950361
The Art of Mental Warfare
http://artofmentalwarfare.com/pog/artofmentalwarfarecom-the-warning/
MONEY AS DEBT
http://video. google.com/ videoplay? docid=-905047436 2583451279
http://www.moneyasd ebt.net/
UNCONSTITUTIONAL
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6582099850410121223&pr=goog-sl
IRAQ FOR SALE
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6621486727392146155
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Port of Olympia Anti-Militarization Action Nov. 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOkn2Fg7R8w
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"They have a new gimmick every year. They're going to take one of their boys, black boys, and put him in the cabinet so he can walk around Washington with a cigar. Fire on one end and fool on the other end. And because his immediate personal problem will have been solved he will be the one to tell our people: 'Look how much progress we're making. I'm in Washington, D.C., I can have tea in the White House. I'm your spokesman, I'm your leader.' While our people are still living in Harlem in the slums. Still receiving the worst form of education.
"But how many sitting here right now feel that they could [laughs] truly identify with a struggle that was designed to eliminate the basic causes that create the conditions that exist? Not very many. They can jive, but when it comes to identifying yourself with a struggle that is not endorsed by the power structure, that is not acceptable, that the ground rules are not laid down by the society in which you live, in which you are struggling against, you can't identify with that, you step back.
"It's easy to become a satellite today without even realizing it. This country can seduce God. Yes, it has that seductive power of economic dollarism. You can cut out colonialism, imperialism and all other kind of ism, but it's hard for you to cut that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, you'll fold though."
-MALCOLM X, 1965
http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=987
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A little gem:
Michael Moore Faces Off With Stephen Colbert [VIDEO]
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/57492/
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LAPD vs. Immigrants (Video)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/qws/ff/qr?term=lapd&Submit=S&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Search&st=s
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Dr. Julia Hare at the SOBA 2007
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeo9ewi/proudtobeblack2/
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"We are far from that stage today in our era of the absolute
lie; the complete and totalitarian lie, spread by the
monopolies of press and radio to imprison social
consciousness." December 1936, "In 'Socialist' Norway,"
by Leon Trotsky: "Leon Trotsky in Norway" was transcribed
for the Internet by Per I. Matheson [References from
original translation removed]
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/12/nor.htm
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Wealth Inequality Charts
http://www.faireconomy.org/research/wealth_charts.html
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MALCOLM X: Oxford University Debate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmzaaf-9aHQ
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"There comes a times when silence is betrayal."
--Martin Luther King
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YouTube clip of Che before the UN in 1964
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtATT8GXkWg&mode=related&search
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The Wealthiest Americans Ever
NYT Interactive chart
JULY 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/business/20070715_GILDED_GRAPHIC.html
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New Orleans After the Flood -- A Photo Gallery
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=795
This email was sent to you as a service, by Roland Sheppard.
Visit my website at: http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret
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[For some levity...Hans Groiner plays Monk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
...bw]
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Which country should we invade next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3g_zqz3VjY
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My Favorite Mutiny, The Coup
http://www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic
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Michael Moore- The Awful Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE
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Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LsGoDWC0o
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Free Speech 4 Students Rally - Media Montage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfCjfod8yuw
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'My son lived a worthwhile life'
In April 2003, 21-year old Tom Hurndall was shot in the head
in Gaza by an Israeli soldier as he tried to save the lives of three
small children. Nine months later, he died, having never
recovered consciousness. Emine Saner talks to his mother
Jocelyn about her grief, her fight to make the Israeli army
accountable for his death and the book she has written
in his memory.
Monday March 26, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2042968,00.html
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Introducing...................the Apple iRack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-KWYYIY4jQ
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"A War Budget Leaves Every Child Behind."
[A T-shirt worn by some teachers at Roosevelt High School
in L.A. as part of their campaign to rid the school of military
recruiters and JROTC--see Article in Full item number 4, below...bw]
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"200 million children in the world sleep in the streets today.
Not one of them is Cuban."
(A sign in Havana)
Venceremos
View sign at bottom of page at:
http://www.cubasolidarity.net/index.html
[Thanks to Norma Harrison for sending this...bw]
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FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-fightback-intro.html
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[The Scab
"After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad,
and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with
which he made a scab."
"A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul,
a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue.
Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten
principles." "When a scab comes down the street,
men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and
the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out."
"No man (or woman) has a right to scab so long as there
is a pool of water to drown his carcass in,
or a rope long enough to hang his body with.
Judas was a gentleman compared with a scab.
For betraying his master, he had character enough
to hang himself." A scab has not.
"Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Judas sold his Savior for thirty pieces of silver.
Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of
a commision in the british army."
The scab sells his birthright, country, his wife,
his children and his fellowmen for an unfulfilled
promise from his employer.
Esau was a traitor to himself; Judas was a traitor
to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country;
a scab is a traitor to his God, his country,
his family and his class."
Author --- Jack London (1876-1916)...Roland Sheppard
http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret]
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Award-Winning Writer/Filmmaker Donald L. Vasicek Launches New Sand
Creek Massacre Website"
May 21, 2008 -- CENTENNIAL, CO -- Award-winning filmmaker, Donald L.
Vasicek, has launched a new Sand Creek Massacre website. Titled,
"The Sand Creek Massacre", the site contains in depth witness
accounts of the massacre, the award-winning Sand Creek Massacre
trailer for viewing, the award-winning Sand Creek Massacre
documentary short for viewing, the story of the Sand Creek Massacre,
and a Shop to purchase Sand Creek Massacre DVD's and lesson
plans including the award-winning documentary film/educational DVD.
Vasicek, a board member of The American Indian Genocide Museum
(www.aigenom.com)in Houston, Texas, said, "The website was launched
to inform, to educate, and to provide educators, historians, students
and all others the accessibility to the Sand Creek Massacre story."
The link/URL to the website is sandcreekmassacre.net.
###
Contact:
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
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