Soldier in Leaks Case Will Be Made to Sleep Naked Nightly
[Bradley is being stripped of his clothing every night and forced to wait at attention, naked, every morning before getting his clothing back...this is torture to try to get him to implicate Jullian Assange so the U.S. can do the same to him. ...bw]
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
March 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/world/05manning.html?ref=world
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Saturday, March 19, 2011: Resist the War Machine!
8th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq
In San Francisco, people will gather at 12 noon for a rally at UN Plaza (7th & Market Sts.) followed by a march to Lo. 2 boycotted hotels. The theme of the March 19 march and rally will be "No to War & Colonial Occupation - Fund Jobs, Healthcare & Education - Solidarity with SF Hotel Workers!" 12,000 SF hotel workers, members of UNITE-HERE Local 2, have been fighting for a new contract that protects their healthcare, wages and working conditions.
http://www.answercoalition.org/sf/index.html
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U.S./NATO HANDS OFF MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA! END ALL AID TO ISRAEL! STOP FUNDING DICTATORS ACROSS THE GLOBE! MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT FOR WAR AND OCCUPATION! LET THE PEOPLE DECIDE HERE AND EVERYWHERE!
TAX THE RICH! LEAVE WORKERS AND THEIR UNIONS ALONE! DON'T AGONIZE, ORGANIZE!...BW
RALLY AGAINST THE WARS AGAINST WORKING PEOPLE AT HOME AND ABROAD! BACK TO THE STREETS! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2011
ASSEMBLE AT DOLORES PARK AT 11:00 A.M.
NOON RALLY
MARCH AT 1:30 P.M.
THEY are the government, corporate, and financial powers that wage war, ravage the environment and the economy and trample on our democratic rights and liberties.
WE are the vast majority of humanity who want peace, a healty planet and a society that prioritizes human needs, democracy and civil liberties for all.
WE DEMAND Bring U.S. Troops, Mercenaries and War Contractors Home Now: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza! End support of dictators in North Africa!
WE DEMAND an end to FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.
WE DEMAND the immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads.
WE DEMAND trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for ail, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.
Sponsored by the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
www.unacpeace.org
unacnortherncalifornia@gmail.com
415-49-NO-WAR
Facebook.com/EndTheWars
Twitter.com/UNACPeace
TRADUCCION:
Marcha en contra de las guerras: en casa y en el exterior
Ellos son el gobierno y las corporaciones que financian las guerras, destruyen el medio ambiente, la economía y pisotean nuestras libertades y derechos democráticos.
Nosotros, somos la gran mayoría de la humanidad y queremos paz. Un planeta saludable y una sociedad que priorice en las necesidades humanas, la democracia y las libertades civiles para todos.
Nosotros, demandamos que las tropas militares, los mercenarios y los contratistas de guerra que enviaron a Irak, Afganistán, y Paquistán sean traídas de regreso a los Estados Unidos ¡Ahora! Que paren con las sanciones y las amenazas de guerra en contra de los pueblos de Irán, Corea del Norte y Yemen; y que los Estados Unidos deje de colaborar con Israel en la invasión y acoso a Palestina y Gaza. No al saqueo de los pueblos de América Latina, el Caribe y África; que paren la persecución racista que amenaza las comunidades musulmanas y que paren el terror policiaco en contra de las comunidades negras y latinas; derechos totales y legalización para los emigrantes.
Nosotros, demandamos que el FBI pare de inmediato la persecución a los luchadores por la justicia social y la solidaridad internacional; como también pongan un alto a todos los esfuerzos que reprimen y castigan a los contribuidores y fundadores de Wikileaks.
Nosotros, demandamos trillones de dólares para trabajos, educación y servicios sociales; que cesen todos los embargos de viviendas y desalojos; un programa de salud gratuito y de calidad para todos; un programa energético de conversión masiva que salve al planeta y buen el sistema de transporte público. Y reparaciones para las víctimas del terror de estados unidos aquí en casa y en el exterior.
VICTORY IN EGYPT!
U.S. Hands off the Ongoing Egyptian Revolution!
End US Military Aid to Egypt and Israel!
A Statement by the United National Antiwar Committee
On Friday, February 11th, the heroic Egyptian people won a historic victory with the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. Now they are proceeding to secure this victory by moving on to eliminate the rest of this hated regime, and to win the freedom, jobs, equality and dignity which has motivated their revolution from the start.
The announcement of Mubarak's resignation was coupled with news that the officers of the Armed Forces are now running the country. This comes as more and more rank and file soldiers and lower-level officers were joining the protests, and as others stood by as protesters blockaded the state TV, parliament and other government facilities.
We can be sure that the military hierarchy in alliance with what's left of the old regime will do everything in their power to stop the blossoming revolution in its tracks, to tell the protesters they must go home now and wait for gifts from on high.
AND THE DANGER IS REAL THAT WHEN THE MASSES SAY NO THAT THE MILITARY WILL DO WHAT IT DOES BEST.
We can be equally sure that Washington will give its full blessing and backing to these efforts of the remnants of the old regime and the military. Obama has made clear that he is solidly committed to the new face of the Egyptian regime, Omar Suleiman, who has proven over the years that he will collaborate with Washington in its torture and rendition policies. Meanwhile Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was quoted in the New York Times saying that Washington would help organize political parties for future elections in Egypt - a typical maneuver used to subvert revolutions.
The United National Antiwar Committee has repeatedly urged supporters to mobilize for demonstrations called by Egyptian organizations in the US in solidarity with the revolution in Egypt and against US military and diplomatic intervention. UNAC hails the call for today's march in Washington, DC by Egyptian groups, and takes this opportunity to point out the special obligations of antiwar activists in the US given Washington's multifaceted efforts to obstruct the wishes of the majority of the Egyptian people.
The $1.3 billion a year in military aid which the US gives to Egypt must be cut off immediately. All US soldiers serving in Egypt, such as those in the Multinational Force in the Sinai, must be immediately withdrawn. And the US warships headed for Egypt must be immediately turned around.
UNAC has from its founding opposed all US aid to Israel. That position takes on particular importance given the real danger that as the Egyptian revolution advances, Israel will intervene to derail it - or launch new attacks against Lebanon, Gaza, or elsewhere, as a diversionary tactic.
Amidst the euphoria in Cairo, Al Jazeera interviewed a young woman in the crowd, who said:
"Its not just about Mubarak stepping down. It is about the process of bringing the people to power... The issue of women, the issue of Palestine, now everything seems possible."
WE MUST ENSURE THOSE POSSIBILITIES STAY ALIVE! UNAC ENCOURAGES ALL ANTIWAR ACTIVISTS AND ORGANIZATIONS TO STEP UP SUPPORT FOR RALLIES PLANNED BY THE EGYPTIAN COMMUNITY, AND TO INITIATE THEM WHERE NONE ARE PLANNED.
Finally, we urge all supporters of the Egyptian people to redouble efforts to build the national antiwar marches called by UNAC for April 9th in New York and April 10th in San Francisco. These marches, called to demand an end to US wars and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, an end to support for Israeli occupation, and in favor of social justice and jobs, take on ever more importance with the revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere throughout the Arab world and Washington's attempts to crush or derail them.
SUPPORT THE FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY AND AGAINST EXPLOITATION AND OPPRESSION THROUGHOUT THE ARAB WORLD!
BUILD THE NATIONAL ANTIWAR MARCHES ON APRIL 9TH AND 10TH!
For more information: In SF: UNACNorthernCalifornia@gmail.com; (415) 49 NO War; www.unacpeace.org, unacpeace@gmail.com. For NYC information: unac-nyc@juno.com
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VERY IMPORTANT ANTIWAR MEETING SUNDAY, MARCH 13, 1 P.M.: Next UNAC Organizing Meeting to build April 10 March and Rally Against the War: Sunday March 13, at 1 PM, Centro del Pueblo, 474 Valencia Street, (between 15th and 16th Streets second floor in the rear) SF
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SAVE THE DATE: Sunday, APRIL 10, Mass antiwar/social justice march and rally, Assemble: 11 AM Dolores Park, 19th and Dolores; Rally Noon; March at 1:30 pm.
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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.
C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
D. ARTICLES IN FULL
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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To mark the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day
Mothers March and Rally
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
End Poverty, Criminalization, War and Occupation
Gather: 4:30pm,16th & Mission (nr BART)
Stops at Welfare Dept, Chase Bank, Federal Building
Invest in caring not killing!
WOMEN, MEN, YOUNG, OLD, BRING YOUR CHILDREN, FRIENDS, DRUMS, DEMANDS!
We march because:
· Mothers produce/care for the world's people, while war & profit destroy us.
· Most women do caring work - mothers, grandmothers, daughters, partners. Unrecognized, unpaid or low paid we care for children, older people, people
with disabilities, Vets, each other....
· In Haiti & Palestine, wherever there is an occupation, women do the survival work without which resistance would be impossible.
· Resources go to weapons & banks, not to caregivers, healthy food, accessible affordable housing, breast-feeding support, health care, education, living wages, pay equity, care of Mother Earth.
· Budget cuts increase hunger & threaten those of us on lowest incomes, starting with communities of color.
· Poverty, uncaring social services & immigration laws tear children from us.
· Sex workers & homeless people are jailed not supported. As in Oscar Grant shooting, police use our children as target practice. LGBTQ denied civil rights.
· We're robbed of benefits, services & wages that our unwaged & low waged labor & taxes have paid for. We face eviction & foreclosures.
Everywhere people are risking their lives to bring change - from Palestine to Egypt,
from Haiti to Colombia, from the Philippines to Kenya & Nigeria ...
Mothers Marches in CA, Philly, Haiti, Guyana, India, Peru, UK
Planning Group Bay Area: Haiti Action Committee; Legal Action for Women; Ruckus Society; US PROStitutes Collective; Wages Due Lesbians; Women of Color/GWS and individuals from the Bay Area and Santa Cruz.
www.globalwomenstrike.net sf@globalwomenstrike.net 415-626-4114
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"Remembering Triangle - Connecting the Struggles of Immigrant Women Workers Past and Present", Wednesday, March 9th, 6:30-9:30 p.m., City College of San Francisco Mission Campus Auditorium, 1125 Valencia. Presenters include: The Rockin' Solidarity Labor Heritage Chorus, Mark Levy, Francisco Herrera and El Coro Jornalero, La Familia Pena-Govea, Elena Dykewomon, the Chinese Progressive Association, Alice Rogoff, Judith Offer and special guest, Triangle survivor descendant
Eileen Nevitt.
Thanks,
Bill Shields
Chair, Labor and Community Studies
City College of San Francisco
1400 Evans Avenue, Room 224
San Francisco, California 94124
415-550-4473 (phone)
415-550-4400 (fax)
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March 9 (Wednesday) 6:30-9:30PM
Remembers the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and Immigrant Women Workers
At: Berkeley City College Auditorium
2050 Center Street Berkeley
Free, Open to the Public
More information: Email, Laura E. Ruberto, lruberto@peralta.edu
Sponsored by the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at Berkeley City College
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SAY NO TO PG&E "SMART METERS"
PG&E is rolling out their smart meter program in S.F. big time. They are installing meters as fast as they can. PG&E subcontracted WELLINGTON ENERGY Co. to install the smart meters.
We have one hope which is the Huffman Bill, (AB 37). This bill will allow the customers of electrical corporations the choice of declining smart meter installations.
Large numbers of people need to show up on March 10 at 9:30 a.m. at the CPUC on 505 Van Ness Ave. and ask the Commissioners for their support of Assembly bill AB 37.
Please help to spread this.....thanks so much! Leslie
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GI Resistance Pizza / Mailing Party Thursday, March 10, 5 pm to 10 pm at 55 Santa Clara Ave, Suite 126, Oakland CA 94610 (One block north of 580 at Harrison--behind the Budget Inn). We can also use help earlier in the day as well. Call us for more info at 510-488-3559, or courage@riseup.net
We'll be sending out our tri-annual newsletter and fund appeal again next Thursday, March 10th. If you're in the Bay Area that evening, please drop by for our mailing / pizza party! This is a great way to learn more about our work in support of GI resisters.
Newsletter highlights will include updates on the growing international campaign to free alleged Wikileaks whistle-blower Bradley Manning, the ongoing efforts to end Bradley's extreme and illegal pre-trial confinement, and conscientious objector Kyle Wesolowski's recent discharge victory from the Army.
Courage To Resist
484 Lake Park Avenue, No. 41
Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org
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VERY IMPORTANT ANTIWAR MEETING SUNDAY, MARCH 13, 1 P.M.: Next UNAC Organizing Meeting to build April 10 March and Rally Against the War: Sunday March 13, at 1 PM, Centro del Pueblo, 474 Valencia Street, (between 15th and 16th Streets second floor in the rear) SF
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Saturday, March 19, 2011: Resist the War Machine!
8th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq
In San Francisco, people will gather at 12 noon for a rally at UN Plaza (7th & Market Sts.) followed by a march to Lo. 2 boycotted hotels. The theme of the March 19 march and rally will be "No to War & Colonial Occupation - Fund Jobs, Healthcare & Education - Solidarity with SF Hotel Workers!" 12,000 SF hotel workers, members of UNITE-HERE Local 2, have been fighting for a new contract that protects their healthcare, wages and working conditions.
Come to Washington, D.C., on March 19 for veterans-led civil resistance at the White House
March 19 is the 8th anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Iraq today remains occupied by nearly 50,000 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of foreign mercenaries.
Saturday, March 19, 2011, the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, will be an international day of action against the war machine.
The war in Afghanistan is raging. The U.S. is invading and bombing Pakistan. The U.S. is financing endless atrocities against the people of Palestine, relentlessly threatening Iran and bringing Korea to the brink of a new war.
While the United States will spend $1 trillion for war, occupation and weapons in 2011, 30 million people in the United States remain unemployed or severely underemployed, and cuts in education, housing and healthcare are imposing a huge toll on the people.
Actions of civil resistance are spreading.
Last Dec. 16, a veterans-led civil resistance at the White House played an important role in bringing the anti-war movement from protest to resistance. Enduring hours of heavy snow, 131 veterans and other anti-war activists lined the White House fence and were arrested.
In Washington, D.C., on March 19 there will be an even larger veterans-led civil resistance at the White House initiated by Veterans for Peace. People from all over the country are joining together for a Noon Rally at Lafayette Park, followed by a march on the White House where the veterans-led civil resistance will take place.
Many people coming to Washington, D.C., will be also participating in the Sunday, March 20 demonstration at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia to support PFC Bradley Manning. Quantico is one hour from D.C. Manning is suspected of leaking Iraq and Afghan war logs to Wikileaks. For the last eight months, he has been held in solitary confinement, pre-trial punishment, rather than pre-trial detention.
The ANSWER Coalition is fully mobilizing its east coast and near mid-west chapters and activist networks to be at the White House.
In Los Angeles, the March 19 rally and march will gather at 12 noon at Hollywood and Vine.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.AnswerCoalition.org/
info@AnswerCoalition.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-265-1948
Boston: 857-334-5084 | New York City: 212-694-8720 | Chicago: 773-463-0311
San Francisco: 415-821-6545| Los Angeles: 213-251-1025 | Albuquerque: 505-268-2488
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Are you joining us on April 8 at the Pentagon in a climate chaos protest codenamed "Operation Disarmageddon?" It has been decided that affinity groups will engage in nonviolent autonomous actions. Do you have an affinity group? Do you have an idea for an action?
So far these are some of the suggested actions:
Send a letter to Sec. of War Robert Gates demanding a meeting to disclose the Pentagon's role in destroying the planet. He will ignore the letter, so a delegation would then go to the Metro Entrance to demand a meeting.
Use crime tape around some area of the Pentagon. The idea of crime/danger taping off the building could be done just outside the main Pentagon reservation entrance (intersection of Army/Navy) making the Alexandria PD the arresting authority (if needed) and where there is no ban on photography. Hazmat suits, a 'converted' truck (or other vehicle) could be part of the street theater. The area where I am thinking is also almost directly below I-95 and there is a bridge over the intersection - making a banner drop possible. Perhaps with the hazmat/street closure at ground level with a banner from above. If possible a coordinated action could be done at other Pentagon entrances and / or other war making institutions.
A procession onto the Pentagon reservation, without reservations, and set up a camp on one of the lawns surrounding The Pentagon. This contingent would reclaim the space in the name of peace and Mother Earth. This contingent would plan to stay there until The Pentagon is turned into a 100% green building using sustainable energy employing people who work for peace and the abolishment of war and life-affirming endeavors.
Bring a potted tree to be placed on the Pentagon's property to symbolize the need to radically reduce its environmental destructiveness.
Since the Pentagon is failing to return to the taxpayers the money it has misappropriated, "Foreclose on the Pentagon."
Banner hanging from a bridge.
Hand out copies of David Swanson's book WAR IS A LIE. Try to deliver a copy to Secretary of War Robert Gates.
Have short speeches in park between Pentagon and river; nice photo with Pentagon in background.
Die-in and chalk or paint outlines of victim's bodies everywhere that remain after the arrest to point to where real crimes are really being committed.
Establish command center, Peacecom? Paxcom? Put several people in white shirts and ties plus a few generals directing their armies for "Operation Disarmageddon."
Make the linkage between the tax dollars going to the Pentagon and war tax resistance. Use the WRL pie chart and carry banners "foreclose on war" and "money for green jobs not war jobs."
Hold a rally with representative speakers before going to the Pentagon Reservation. This would be an opportunity to speak out against warmongering and the Pentagon's role in destroying the environment.
As part of "Operation Disarmageddon," we will take a tree and plant it on the reservation. Our sign reads, "Plant trees not landmines."
Use crime tape on Army/Navy Drive to declare the Pentagon a crime scene. Do street theater there as well. Other affinity groups could go to selected entrances.
Establish a Peace Command Center at the Pentagon. Hold solidarity actions at federal buildings and corporate offices.
What groups have you contacted to suggest joining us at the Pentagon? See below for those who plan to be at the Pentagon on April 8 and for what groups have been contacted.
Kagiso,
Max
April 8, 2011 participants
Beth Adams
Ellen Barfield
Tim Chadwick
Joy First
Jeffrey Halperin
Malachy Kilbride
Max Obuszewski
David Swanson
April 8 Outreach
Beth Adams -- Earth First, Puppet Underground, Emma's Revolution, Joe Gerson-AFSC Cambridge, Code Pink(national via Lisa Savage in Maine), Vets for Peace, FOR, UCC Justice & Witness Ministries, Traprock, Nipponzan Myohoji Buddhist Order, (National-INt'l) Vets for Peace and WILPF, Pace e Bene, Christian Peace Witness & UCC Justice & Witness (Cleveland).
Tim Chadwick -- Brandywine, Lepoco, Witness against Torture, Vets for Peace (Thomas Paine Chapter Lehigh Valley PA), and Witness for Peace DC.
Jeffrey Halperin -- peace groups in Saratoga Spring, NY
Jack Lombardo - UNAC will add April 8 2011 to the Future Actions page on our blog, and make note in upcoming E-bulletins, but would appreciate a bit of descriptive text from the organizers and contact point to include when we do - so please advise ASAP! Also, we'll want to have such an announcement for our next print newsletter, which will be coming out in mid-December.
Max Obuszewski - Jonah House & Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore
Bonnie Urfer notified 351 individuals and groups on the Nukewatch list
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RALLY AGAINST THE WARS AGAINST WORKING PEOPLE AT HOME AND ABROAD! BACK TO THE STREETS! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2011
ASSEMBLE AT DOLORES PARK AT 11:00 A.M.
NOON RALLY
MARCH AT 1:30 P.M.
THEY are the government, corporate, and financial powers that wage war, ravage the environment and the economy and trample on our democratic rights and liberties.
WE are the vast majority of humanity who want peace, a healty planet and a society that prioritizes human needs, democracy and civil liberties for all.
WE DEMAND Bring U.S. Troops, Mercenaries and War Contractors Home Now: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza! End support of dictators in North Africa!
WE DEMAND an end to FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.
WE DEMAND the immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads.
WE DEMAND trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for ail, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.
Next organizing meeting Sunday, February 20, 1:00 P.M., Centro del Pueblo, 474 Valencia Street (between 15th and 16th Streets, San Francisco)
Sponsored by the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
www.unacpeace.org
unacnortherncalifornia@gmail.com
415-49-NO-WAR
Facebook.com/EndTheWars
Twitter.com/UNACPeace
TRADUCCION:
Marcha en contra de las guerras: en casa y en el exterior
Ellos son el gobierno y las corporaciones que financian las guerras, destruyen el medio ambiente, la economía y pisotean nuestras libertades y derechos democráticos.
Nosotros, somos la gran mayoría de la humanidad y queremos paz. Un planeta saludable y una sociedad que priorice en las necesidades humanas, la democracia y las libertades civiles para todos.
Nosotros, demandamos que las tropas militares, los mercenarios y los contratistas de guerra que enviaron a Irak, Afganistán, y Paquistán sean traídas de regreso a los Estados Unidos ¡Ahora! Que paren con las sanciones y las amenazas de guerra en contra de los pueblos de Irán, Corea del Norte y Yemen; y que los Estados Unidos deje de colaborar con Israel en la invasión y acoso a Palestina y Gaza. No al saqueo de los pueblos de América Latina, el Caribe y África; que paren la persecución racista que amenaza las comunidades musulmanas y que paren el terror policiaco en contra de las comunidades negras y latinas; derechos totales y legalización para los emigrantes.
Nosotros, demandamos que el FBI pare de inmediato la persecución a los luchadores por la justicia social y la solidaridad internacional; como también pongan un alto a todos los esfuerzos que reprimen y castigan a los contribuidores y fundadores de Wikileaks.
Nosotros, demandamos trillones de dólares para trabajos, educación y servicios sociales; que cesen todos los embargos de viviendas y desalojos; un programa de salud gratuito y de calidad para todos; un programa energético de conversión masiva que salve al planeta y buen el sistema de transporte público. Y reparaciones para las víctimas del terror de estados unidos aquí en casa y en el exterior.
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B. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.:
[Some of these videos are embeded on the BAUAW website:
http://bauaw.blogspot.com/ or bauaw.org ...bw]
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'America Is NOT Broke': Michael Moore Speaks in Madison, WI -- March 5, 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgNuSEZ8CDw&feature=player_embedded
Answer to Michael Moore: We ain't Gonna Play the Game No More!
By Bonnie Weinstein
info@socialistviewpoint.org
socialistviewpoint.org
The problem with Michael Moore's speech in Wisconsin March 5, 2011 is that the 14 Democratic emigres have already given away the economic security of the workers--their pay; their benefits; their vacations; their sick-days; their overtime. They have even convinced organized labor to accept the pay cuts, shorter hours--anything but unemployment, starvation and homelessness!
What noble choices the good Democrats have given to the masses of struggling working people in Wisconsin and everywhere!
In the prelude to his speech, Moore lauds those "heroic 14 Democratic" émigrés that have already given away the workers hard-won benefits and conditions for holding firm and staying away--"not one has come back!" he cheers.
Where are the rest of the Democratic politicians around the country? Where's Obama when masses of workers are being sold down the river? What about all the Democratic governors and mayors who are doing the same thing in their respective states and cities across the country. There isn't one state or city that's lavishing more on social services; on schools; on community medical centers; on healthcare--everyone everywhere EXCEPT THE TOP ONE PERCENT is being asked to give back and give up and surrender to the new middle ages--with the Democrats pretending and promising to steal a little less from workers than the Republicans! Workers can't depend upon any party that claims to represent both workers and the bosses. The jig is up!
Working people need to make democratic decisions based upon our own needs and wants and what is good for us and our families; like whether to spend trillions of OUR dollars on wars based upon lies; or on massive bailouts to corporations who have stolen and hoarded the wealth for themselves; or whether to use the fruits of our labor to pay for healthcare; schools; housing; all the things people need to live healthy, free and happy lives.
Working people produce the wealth; working people should have democratic control over that wealth and the means of production they operate to produce it.
The game of voting for one capitalist liar over another is over. It's like plea-bargaining when you are innocent. It's a lose/lose situation and certainly, the workers of the world are losing the game!
No, America is not broke. But telling workers to depend upon the capitalist electoral process, which only allows workers to vote for one capitalist representative over another, is preposterous and makes workers broke!
We workers must take that wealth that we, and we alone create, into our own hands. We can. We are the majority. And it's the only hope for creating a happy and healthy future for all of us, our children and the world. As Rosa Luxemburg said, the only choice for workers is Socialism; or else, we will continue the plunge into Barbarism!
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Michael Moore: People Still Have the Power
http://www.readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/63-63/5157-michael-moore-people-still-have-the-power
More GRITtv
"This is a movement that is not going to stop," says filmmaker Michael Moore of the uprising in Madison, Wisconsin (and across the country--all 50 states held solidarity rallies this weekend). "I knew sooner or later people would say they've had enough."
Michael joins Laura in studio for part one of a two-part conversation about the war on working people in America. He notes that it started in 1981 with Reagan's attack on the air traffic controllers, and it's mostly targeted the poor, as with Clinton's welfare reform. But the attacks on middle class families have finally reached a point where people aren't going to take it anymore.
Watch out for part two tomorrow!
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BP Oil Spill Scientist Bob Naman: Seafood Still Not Safe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3VdxvMnDls
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Exclusive: Flow Rate Scientist : How Much Oil Is Really Out There?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsHl3kn63ZA&NR=1
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Labor Beat: No Concessions Emergency Meeting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaFrWNi2gM0
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Iraq Veterans Against the War in Occupied Capitol, Madison, WI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7K0wn73uJU
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A joke:
A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party, and a CEO are
sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there is a plate with a
dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies,
looks at the tea partier and says,"watch out for that union guy, he
wants a piece of your cookie."
Marc Luzietti
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Charlie Sheen on 9/11
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PviXgj-yS5Y
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18th dead baby dolphin washes ashore in Northern Gulf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybFeuSNszSg&feature=player_embedded
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[This is a great video. Kipp Dawson, the school teacher in the video, is an old friend...bw]
Middle Class Revolution
Hundreds packed USW headquarters Feb. 24. 2011, to rally for the middle class and stand up against attacks on workers in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and elsewhere. Check out highlights here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_UmZYlSyC5U
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Wisconsin "Budget Repair Bill" Protest
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TmSNPpzkWc
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solidarity
'We Stand With You as You Stood With Us': Statement to Workers of Wisconsin by Kamal Abbas of Egypt's Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services
February 20th, 2011 3:45 PM
About Kamal Abbas and the Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services:
Kamal Abbas is General Coordinator of the CTUWS, an umbrella advocacy organization for independent unions in Egypt. The CTUWS, which was awarded the 1999 French Republic's Human Rights Prize, suffered repeated harassment and attack by the Mubarak regime, and played a leading role in its overthrow. Abbas, who witnessed friends killed by the regime during the 1989 Helwan steel strike and was himself arrested and threatened numerous times, has received extensive international recognition for his union and civil society leadership.
KAMAL ABBAS: I am speaking to you from a place very close to Tahrir Square in Cairo, "Liberation Square", which was the heart of the Revolution in Egypt. This is the place were many of our youth paid with their lives and blood in the struggle for our just rights.
From this place, I want you to know that we stand with you as you stood with us.
I want you to know that no power can challenge the will of the people when they believe in their rights. When they raise their voices loud and clear and struggle against exploitation.
No one believed that our revolution could succeed against the strongest dictatorship in the region. But in 18 days the revolution achieved the victory of the people. When the working class of Egypt joined the revolution on 9 and 10 February, the dictatorship was doomed and the victory of the people became inevitable.
We want you to know that we stand on your side. Stand firm and don't waiver. Don't give up on your rights. Victory always belongs to the people who stand firm and demand their just rights.
We and all the people of the world stand on your side and give you our full support.
As our just struggle for freedom, democracy and justice succeeded, your struggle will succeed. Victory belongs to you when you stand firm and remain steadfast in demanding your just rights.
We support you. we support the struggle of the peoples of Libya, Bahrain and Algeria, who are fighting for their just rights and falling martyrs in the face of the autocratic regimes. The peoples are determined to succeed no matter the sacrifices and they will be victorious.
Today is the day of the American workers. We salute you American workers! You will be victorious. Victory belongs to all the people of the world, who are fighting against exploitation, and for their just rights.
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Stop LAPD Stealing of Immigrant's Cars
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0lf4kENkxo
On Februrary 19, 2011 Members of the Southern California Immigration Coalition (SCIC) organized and engaged in direct action to defend the people of Los Angeles, CA from the racist LAPD "Sobriety" Checkpoints that are a poorly disguised trap to legally steal the cars from working class people in general and undocumented people in particular. Please disseminate this link widely.
Venceremos,
SCIC
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Protesters weather major snowstorm in Wausau, Wisconsin.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7enVDAr1IY&feature=player_embedded
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[For subtitles, press the little red cc at the bottom, right of the screen.]
Sout Al Horeya Amir Eid - Hany Adel - Hawary On Guitar & Sherif On Keyboards
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgw_zfLLvh8
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Hymn of Egyptian revolution on Youtube with EN subtitels "Saut al Hurria" (Voice of the revolution)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ5CqhL5X4o
First Responders
Wednesday, February 16th, in the State Capitol, Madison, Wisconsin, well over ten thousand citizens representing many others (teachers and students, nurses, custodial workers, firefighters, parents, families, community members and staunch union supporters) gathered to say NO! to Governor Scott Walker's so-called "Repair Bill"
The message was unequivocal and clear: no rolling back workers collective bargaining rights and to NEGOTIATE not LEGISLATE our way toward a better future.
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WikiLeaks Mirrors
Wikileaks is currently under heavy attack.
In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove Wikileaks from the Internet, you will find below a list of mirrors of Wikileaks website and CableGate pages.
Go to
http://wikileaks.ch/Mirrors.html
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Labor Beat: Labor Stands with Subpoenaed Activists Against FBI Raids and Grand Jury Investigation of antiwar and social justice activists.
"If trouble is not at your door. It's on it's way, or it just left."
"Investigate the Billionaires...Full investigation into Wall Street..." Jesse Sharkey, Vice President, Chicago Teachers Union
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSNUSIGZCMQ
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Oil Spill Commission Final Report: Catfish Responds
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3ZRdsccMsM
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The Most Heroic Word in All Languages is Revolution
By Eugene Debs
Eugene Debs, that greatest son of the Middle American west, wrote this in 1907 in celebration of that year's May Day events. It retains all of its vibrancy and vitality as events breathe new life into the global struggle for emancipation. "Revolution" remains the most heroic word in every language. -The Rustbelt Radical
Today the slaves of all the world are taking a fresh breath in the long and weary march; pausing a moment to clear their lungs and shout for joy; celebrating in festal fellowship their coming Freedom.
All hail the Labor Day of May!
The day of the proletarian protest;
The day of stern resolve;
The day of noble aspiration.
Raise high this day the blood-red Standard of the Revolution!
The banner of the Workingman;
The flag, the only flag, of Freedom.
Slavery, even the most abject-dumb and despairing as it may seem-has yet its inspiration. Crushed it may be, but extinguished never. Chain the slave as you will, O Masters, brutalize him as you may, yet in his soul, though dead, he yearns for freedom still.
The great discovery the modern slaves have made is that they themselves must achieve. This is the secret of their solidarity; the heart of their hope; the inspiration that nerves them all with sinews of steel.
They are still in bondage, but no longer cower;
No longer grovel in the dust,
But stand erect like men.
Conscious of their growing power the future holds up to them her outstretched hands.
As the slavery of the working class is international, so the movement for its emancipation.
The salutation of slave to slave this day is repeated in every human tongue as it goes ringing round the world.
The many millions are at last awakening. For countless ages they have suffered; drained to the dregs the bitter cup of misery and woe.
At last, at last the historic limitation has been reached, and soon a new sun will light the world.
Red is the life-tide of our common humanity and red our symbol of universal kinship.
Tyrants deny it; fear it; tremble with rage and terror when they behold it.
We reaffirm it and on this day pledge anew our fidelity-come life or death-to the blood-red Banner of the Revolution.
Socialist greetings this day to all our fellow-workers! To the god-like souls in Russia marching grimly, sublimely into the jaws of hell with the Song of the Revolution in their death-rattle; to the Orient, the Occident and all the Isles of the Sea!
VIVA LA REVOLUTION!
The most heroic word in all languages is REVOLUTION.
It thrills and vibrates; cheers and inspires. Tyrants and time-servers fear it, but the oppressed hail it with joy.
The throne trembles when this throbbing word is lisped, but to the hovel it is food for the famishing and hope for the victims of despair.
Let us glorify today the revolutions of the past and hail the Greater Revolution yet to come before Emancipation shall make all the days of the year May Days of peace and plenty for the sons and daughters of toil.
It was with Revolution as his theme that Mark Twain's soul drank deep from the fount of inspiration. His immortality will rest at last upon this royal tribute to the French Revolution:
"The ever memorable and blessed revolution, which swept a thousand years of villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood-one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two Reigns of Terror, if we would but remember it and consider it: the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death on ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the horrors of the minor Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror, which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over, but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves."
-The Rustbelt Radical, February 25, 2011
http://rustbeltradical.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/the-most-heroic-word-in-all-languages-is-revolution/
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New music video by tommi avicolli mecca of the song "stick and stones," which is about bullying in high school, is finished and up on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of_twpu3-Nw
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New antiwar song that's bound to be a classic:
box
http://www.youtube.com/user/avimecca
by tommi avicolli mecca
(c) 2009
Credits are:
Tommi Avicolli Mecca, guitar/vocals
John Radogno, lead guitar
Diana Hartman, vocals, kazoo
Chris Weir, upright bass
Produced and recorded by Khalil Sullivan
I'm the recruiter and if truth be told/ I can lure the young and old
what I do you won't see/ til your kid's in JROTC
CHO ooh, put them in a box drape it with a flag and send them off to mom and dad
send them with a card from good ol' uncle sam, gee it's really just so sad
I'm the general and what I do/ is to teach them to be true
to god and country flag and oil/ by shedding their blood on foreign soil
CHO
I'm the corporate boss and well I know/ war is lots of dough dough dough
you won't find me over there/ they just ship the money right back here
CHO
last of all it's me the holy priest/ my part is not the least
I assure them it's god's will/ to go on out and kill kill kill
CHO
it's really just so sad
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Free Bradley Manning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4eNzokgRIw&feature=player_embedded
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Supermax Prison Cell Extraction - Maine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jUfK5i_lQs&feature=player_embedded
Warning, this is an extremely brutal video. What do you think? Is this torture?
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Did You Know?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY
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These videos refer to what happened at the G-20 Summit in Toronto June 26-27 of this year. The importance of this is that police were caught on tape and later confirmed that they sent police into the demonstration dressed as "rioting" protesters. One cop was caught with a large rock in his hand. Clearly, this is proof of police acting as agent provocatours. And we should expect this to continue and escalate. That's why everyone should be aware of these facts...bw
police accused of attempting to incite violence at G20 summ
Protestors at Montebello are accusing police of trying to incite violence. Video on YouTube shows union officials confronting three men that were police officers dressing up as demonstrators. The union is demanding to know if the Prime Minister's Office was involved in trying to discredit the demonstrators.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWbgnyUCC7M
quebec police admit going undercover at montebello protests
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAfzUOx53Rg&feature=related
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Domestic Espionage Alert - Houston PD to use surveillance drone in America!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpstrc15Ogg
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15 year old Tells Establishment to Stick-it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U_gHUiL4P8&feature=player_embedded#
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Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVGqE726OAo&feature=player_embedded
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LOWKEY - TERRORIST? (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmBnvajSfWU
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Coal Ash: One Valley's Tale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E7h-DNvwx4&feature=player_embedded
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Flashmob: Cape Town Opera say NO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wElyrFOnKPk
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"Don't F*** With Our Activists" - Mobilizing Against FBI Raid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyG3dIUGQvQ
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C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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MECA Middle East Children's Alliance
Howard & Roslyn Zinn Presente! Honor Their Legacy By Providing Clean Water for Children in Gaza
http://www.mecaforpeace.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=13
Howard Zinn supported the work of the Middle East Children's Alliance (MECA) from the beginning. Over the years, he lent his name and his time countless times to support our work. Howard and Roz were both personal friends of mine and Howard helped MECA raise funds for our projects for children in Palestine by coming to the Bay Area and doing events for us.
On the first anniversary of Howard's passing, I hope you will join MECA in celebrating these two extraordinary individuals.
- Barbara Lubin, Executive Director
YES! I want to help MECA build a water purification and desalination unit at the Khan Younis Co-ed Elementary School for 1,400 students in Gaza in honor of Howard & Roslyn Zinn.
http://www.mecaforpeace.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=13
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Call for EMERGENCY RESPONSE Action if Assange Indicted,
Dear Friends:
We write in haste, trying to reach as many of you as possible although the holiday break has begun.......This plan for an urgent "The Day After" demonstration is one we hope you and many, many more organizations will take up as your own, and mobilize for. World Can't Wait asks you to do all you can to spread it through list serves, Facebook, twitter, holiday gatherings.
Our proposal is very very simple, and you can use the following announcement to mobilize - or write your own....
ANY DAY NOW . . . IN THE EVENT THAT THE U.S. INDICTS JULIAN ASSANGE
An emergency public demonstration THE DAY AFTER any U.S. criminal indictment is announced against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Spread the word and call people to come out, across the whole range of movements and groups: anti-war, human rights, freedom of information/freedom of the press, peace, anti-torture, environmental, students and youth, radicals and revolutionaries, religious, civil liberties, teachers and educators, journalists, anti-imperialists, anti-censorship, anti-police state......
At the Federal Building in San Francisco, we'll form ourselves into a human chain "surrounding" the government that meets the Wikileaked truth with repression and wants to imprison and silence leakers, whistleblowers and truthtellers - when, in fact, these people are heroes. We'll say:
HANDS OFF WIKILEAKS! FREE JULIAN ASSANGE! FREE BRADLEY MANNING!
Join the HUMAN CHAIN AROUND THE FEDERAL BUILDING!
New Federal Building, 7th and Mission, San Francisco (nearest BART: Civic Center)
4:00-6:00 PM on The Day FOLLOWING U.S. indictment of Assange
Bring all your friends - signs and banners - bullhorns.
Those who dare at great risk to themselves to put the truth in the hands of the people - and others who might at this moment be thinking about doing more of this themselves -- need to see how much they are supported, and that despite harsh repression from the government and total spin by the mainstream media, the people do want the truth told.
Brad Manning's Christmas Eve statement was just released by his lawyer: "Pvt. Bradley Manning, the lone soldier who stands accused of stealing millions of pages secret US government documents and handing them over to secrets outlet WikiLeaks, wants his supporters to know that they've meant a lot to him. 'I greatly appreciate everyone's support and well wishes during this time,' he said in a Christmas Eve statement released by his lawyer...." Read more here:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/mannings-message-christmas-eve-i-gr/
Demonstrations defending Wikileaks and Assange, and Brad Manning, have already been flowering around the world. Make it happen here too.
Especially here . . .
To join into this action plan, or with questions, contact World Can't Wait or whichever organization or listserve you received this message from.
World Can't Wait, SF Bay
415-864-5153
sf@worldcantwait.org
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Email received from Lynne Stewart:
12/19/10; 12:03pm
Dear Folks:
Some nuts and bolts and trivia,
1. New Address
Lynne Stewart #53504 - 054
Unit 2N
Federal Medical Center, Carswell
P.O. Box 27137
Fort Worth, TEXAS 76127
2. Visiting is very liberal but first I have to get people on my visiting list Wait til I or the lawyers let you know. The visits are FRI, SAT, SUN AND MON for 4 hours and on weekends 8 to 3. Bring clear plastic change purse with lots of change to buy from the machines. Brief Kiss upon arrival and departure, no touching or holding during visit (!!) On visiting forms it may be required that you knew me before I came to prison. Not a problem for most of you.
3. One hour time difference
4. Commissary Money is always welcome It is how I pay for the phone and for email. Also need it for a lot that prison doesn't supply in terms of food and "sundries" (pens!) A very big list that includes Raisins, Salad Dressing , ankle sox, mozzarella (definitely not from Antonys--more like a white cheddar, Sanitas Corn Chips but no Salsa etc. To add money, you do this by using Western Union and a credit card by phone or you can send a USPO money order or Business or Govt Check. The negotiable instruments (PAPER!) need to be sent to Federal Bureau of Prisons , 53504-054, Lynne Stewart, PO Box 474701, Des Moines Iowa 50947-001 (Payable to Lynne Stewart, 53504-054) They hold the mo or checks for 15 days. Western Union costs $10 but is within 2 hours. If you mail, your return address must be on the envelope. Unnecessarily complicated ? Of course, it's the BOP !)
5. Food is vastly improved. Just had Sunday Brunch real scrambled eggs, PORK sausage, Baked or home fried potatoes, Butter(sweet whipped M'God !!) Grapefruit juice Toast , orange. I will probably regain the weight I lost at MCC! Weighing against that is the fact that to eat we need to walk to another building (about at far as from my house to the F Train) Also included is 3 flights of stairs up and down. May try to get an elevator pass and try NOT to use it.
6. In a room with 4 bunks(small) about two tiers of rooms with same with "atrium" in middle with tv sets and tables and chairs. Estimate about 500 on Unit 2N and there are 4 units. Population Black, Mexicano and other spanish speaking (all of whom iron their underwear, Marta), White, Native Americans (few), no orientals or foreign speaking caucasians--lots are doing long bits, victims of drugs (meth etc) and boyfriends. We wear army style (khaki) pants with pockets tee shirts and dress shirts long sleeved and short sleeved. When one of the women heard that I hadn't ironed in 40 years, they offered to do the shirts for me. (This is typical of the help I get--escorted to meals and every other protection, explanations, supplies, etc. Mostly from white women.) One drawback is not having a bathroom in the room---have to go about 75 yards at all hours of the day and night --clean though.
7. Final Note--the sunsets and sunrises are gorgeous, the place is very open and outdoors there are pecan trees and birds galore (I need books for trees and birds (west) The full moon last night gladdened my heart as I realized it was shining on all of you I hold dear.
Love Struggle
Lynne
The address of her Defense Committee is:
Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
1070 Dean Street
Brooklyn, New York 11216
For further information:
718-789-0558 or 917-853-9759
Please make a generous contribution to her defense.
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Help end the inhumane treatment of Bradley Manning!
Bradley Manning Support Network. December 22, 2010
The Marine Brig at Quantico, Virginia is using "injury prevention" as a vehicle to inflict extreme pre-trial punishment on accused Wikileaks whistleblower Army PFC Bradley Manning (photo right). These "maximum conditions" are not unheard-of during an inmate's first week at a military confinement facility, but when applied continuously for months and with no end in sight they amount to a form of torture. Bradley, who just turned 23-years-old last week, has been held in solitary confinement since his arrest in late May. We're now turning to Bradley's supporters worldwide to directly protest, and help bring a halt to, the extremely punitive conditions of Bradley's pre-trial detention.
We need your help in pressing the following demands:
End the inhumane, degrading conditions of pre-trial confinement and respect Bradley's human rights. Specifically, lift the "Prevention of Injury (POI) watch order". This would allow Bradley meaningful physical exercise, uninterrupted sleep during the night, and a release from isolation. We are not asking for "special treatment". In fact, we are demanding an immediate end to the special treatment.
Quantico Base Commander
Colonel Daniel Choike
3250 Catlin Ave, Quantico VA 22134
+1-703-784-2707 (phone)
Quantico Brig Commanding Officer
CWO4 James Averhart
3247 Elrod Ave, Quantico VA 22134
+1-703-784-4242 (fax)
Background
In the wake of an investigative report last week by Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com giving evidence that Bradley Manning was subject to "detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries", Bradley's attorney, David Coombs, published an article at his website on Saturday entitled "A Typical Day for PFC Bradley Manning". Mr. Coombs details the maximum custody conditions that Bradley is subject to at the Quantico Confinement Facility and highlights an additional set of restrictions imposed upon him under a Prevention of Injury (POI) watch order.
Usually enforced only through a detainee's first week at a confinement facility, or in cases of violent and/or suicidal inmates, the standing POI order has severely limited Manning's access to exercise, daylight and human contact for the past five months. The military's own psychologists assigned to Quantico have recommended that the POI order and the extra restrictions imposed on Bradley be lifted.
Despite not having been convicted of any crime or even yet formally indicted, the confinement regime Bradley lives under includes pronounced social isolation and a complete lack of opportunities for meaningful exercise. Additionally, Bradley's sleep is regularly interrupted. Coombs writes: "The guards are required to check on Manning every five minutes [...] At night, if the guards cannot see PFC Manning clearly, because he has a blanket over his head or is curled up towards the wall, they will wake him in order to ensure he is okay."
Denver Nicks writes in The Daily Beast that "[Bradley Manning's] attorney [...] says the extended isolation - now more than seven months of solitary confinement - is weighing on his client's psyche. [...] Both Coombs and Manning's psychologist, Coombs says, are sure Manning is mentally healthy, that there is no evidence he's a threat to himself, and shouldn't be held in such severe conditions under the artifice of his own protection."
In an article to be published at Firedoglake.com later today, David House, a friend of Bradley's who visits him regularly at Quantico, says that Bradley "has not been outside or into the brig yard for either recreation or exercise in four full weeks. He related that visits to the outdoors have been infrequent and sporadic for the past several months."
In an average military court martial situation, a defense attorney would be able to bring these issues of pre-trial punishment to the military judge assigned to the case (known as an Article 13 hearing). However, the military is unlikely to assign a judge to Bradley's case until the pre-trial Article 32 hearing is held (similar to an arraignment in civilian court), and that is not expected until February, March, or later-followed by the actual court martial trial months after that. In short, you are Bradley's best and most immediate hope.
What can you do?
Contact the Marine Corps officers above and respectfully, but firmly, ask that they lift the extreme pre-trial confinement conditions against Army PFC Bradley Manning.
Forward this urgent appeal for action widely.
Sign the "Stand with Brad" public petition and letter campaign at www.standwithbrad.org - Sign online, and we'll mail out two letters on your behalf to Army officials.
Donate to Bradley's defense fund at www.couragetoresist.org/bradley
References:
"The inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning's detention", by Glenn Greenwald for Salon.com, 15 December 2010
"A Typical Day for PFC Bradley Manning", by attorney David E. Coombs, 18 December 2010
"Bradley Manning's Life Behind Bars", by Denver Nicks for the Daily Beast, 17 December 2010
Bradley Manning Support Network
Courage To Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org
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KOREA: Emergency Response Actions Needed
The United National Antiwar Committee urges the antiwar movement to begin to plan now for Emergency 5pm Day-of or Day-after demonstrations, should fighting break out on the Korean Peninsula or its surrounding waters.
As in past war crisis and U.S. attacks we propose:
NYC -- Times Square, Washington, D.C. -- the White House
In Many Cities - Federal Buildings
Many tens of thousands of U.S., Japanese and South Korean troops are mobilized on land and on hundreds of warships and aircraft carriers. The danger of a general war in Asia is acute.
China and Russia have made it clear that the scheduled military maneuvers and live-fire war "exercises" from an island right off the coast of north Korea (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea) by South Korea are very dangerous. The DPRK has made it clear that they consider these live-fire war exercises to be an act of war and they will again respond if they are again fired on.
The U.S. deployment of thousands of troops, ships, and aircraft in the area while South Korea is firing thousands of rounds of live ammunition and missiles is an enormously dangerous provocation, not only to the DPRK but to China. The Yellow Sea also borders China. The island and the waters where the war maneuvers are taking place are north of the Korean Demilitarized Zone and only eight miles from the coast of the DPRK.
On Sunday, December 19 in a day-long emergency session, the U.S. blocked in the UN Security Council any actions to resolve the crisis.
UNAC action program passed in Albany at the United National Antiwar Conference, July 2010 of over 800 antiwar, social justice and community organizations included the following Resolution on Korea:
15. In solidarity with the antiwar movements of Japan and Korea, each calling for U.S. Troops to Get Out Now, and given the great increase in U.S. military preparations against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, National Peace Conference participants will organize immediate protests following any attack by the U.S. on Korea. U.S. war preparations include stockpiling hundreds of bunker-busters and conducting major war games near the territorial waters of China and Korea. In keeping with our stand for the right of self-determination and our demand of Out Now, the National Peace Conference calls for Bringing All U.S. Troops Home Now!
UNAC urges the whole antiwar movement to begin to circulate messages alerts now in preparation. Together let's join together and demand: Bring all U.S. Troops Home Now! Stop the Wars and the Threats of War.
The United National Antiwar Committee, www.UNACpeace.org
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In earnest support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange:
http://readersupportednews.org/julian-assange-petition
rsn:Petition
We here undersigned express our support for the work and integrity of Julian Assange. We express concern that the charges against the WikiLeaks founder appear too convenient both in terms of timing and the novelty of their nature.
We call for this modern media innovator, and fighter for human rights extraordinaire, to be afforded the same rights to defend himself before Swedish justice that all others similarly charged might expect, and that his liberty not be compromised as a courtesy to those governments whose truths he has revealed have embarrassed.
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GAP Inc: End Your Relationship with Supplier that Allows Workers to be Burned Alive
http://humanrights.change.org/blog/view/workers_burned_alive_making_clothes_for_the_gap
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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT! FREE KEVIN COOPER!
Reasonable doubts about executing Kevin Cooper
Chronicle Editorial
Monday, December 13, 2010
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/12/13/EDG81GP0I7.DTL
Death penalty -- Kevin Cooper is Innocent! Help save his life from San Quentin's death row!
http://www.savekevincooper.org/
http://www.savekevincooper.org/pages/essays_content.html?ID=255
URGENT ACTION APPEAL
- From Amnesty International USA
17 December 2010
Click here to take action online:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&template=x.ascx&action=15084
To learn about recent Urgent Action successes and updates, go to
http://www.amnestyusa.org/iar/success
For a print-friendly version of this Urgent Action (PDF):
http://www.amnestyusa.org/actioncenter/actions/uaa25910.pdf
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Free the Children of Palestine!
Sign Petition:
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41467.html
Published by Al-Awda, Palestine Right to Return Coalition on Dec 16, 2010
Category: Children's Rights
Region: GLOBAL
Target: President Obama
Web site: http://www.al-awda.org
Background (Preamble):
According to Israeli police, 1200 Palestinian children have been arrested, interrogated and imprisoned in the occupied city of Jerusalem alone this year. The youngest of these children was seven-years old.
Children and teen-agers were often dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night, taken in handcuffs for questioning, threatened, humiliated and many were subjected to physical violence while under arrest as part of an ongoing campaign against the children of Palestine. Since the year 2000, more than 8000 have been arrested by Israel, and reports of mistreatment are commonplace.
Further, based on sworn affidavits collected in 2009 from 100 of these children, lawyers working in the occupied West Bank with Defense Children International, a Geneva-based non governmental organization, found that 69% were beaten and kicked, 49% were threatened, 14% were held in solitary confinement, 12% were threatened with sexual assault, including rape, and 32% were forced to sign confessions written in Hebrew, a language they do not understand.
Minors were often asked to give names and incriminate friends and relatives as a condition of their release. Such institutionalized and systematic mistreatment of Palestinian children by the state of Israel is a violation international law and specifically contravenes the Convention on the Rights of the Child to which Israel is supposedly a signatory.
Petition:
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41467.html
We, the undersigned call on US President Obama to direct Israel to
1. Stop all the night raids and arrests of Palestinian Children forthwith.
2. Immediately release all Palestinian children detained in its prisons and detention centers.
3. End all forms of systematic and institutionalized abuse against all Palestinian children.
4. Implement the full restoration of Palestinian children's rights in accordance with international law including, but not limited to, their right to return to their homes of origin, to education, to medical and psychological care, and to freedom of movement and expression.
The US government, which supports Israel to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars a year while most ordinary Americans are suffering in a very bad economy, is bound by its laws and international conventions to cut off all aid to Israel until it ends all of its violations of human rights and basic freedoms in a verifiable manner.
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"Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority, which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests."..."Publishing State Secrets" By Leon Trotsky
Documents on Soviet Policy, Trotsky, iii, 2 p. 64
November 22, 1917
http://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/foreign-relations/1917/November/22.htm
FREE JULIAN ASSANGE! FREE BRADLEY MANNING! STOP THE FBI RAIDS NOW!
MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT WAR!
To understand how much a trillion dollars is, consider looking at it in terms of time:
A million seconds would be about eleven-and-one-half days; a billion seconds would be 31 years; and a trillion seconds would be 31,000 years!
From the novel "A Dark Tide," by Andrew Gross
Now think of it in terms of U.S. war dollars and bankster bailouts!
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For Immediate Release
Antiwar movement supports Wikileaks and calls for and independent, international investigation of the crimes that have been exposed. We call for the release of Bradley Manning and the end to the harassment of Julian Assange.
12/2/2010
For more information: Joe Lombardo, 518-281-1968,
UNACpeace@gmail.org, NationalPeaceConference.org
Antiwar movement supports Wikileaks and calls for and independent, international investigation of the crimes that have been exposed. We call for the release of Bradley Manning and the end to the harassment of Julian Assange.
The United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC) calls for the release of Bradley Manning who is awaiting trial accused of leaking the material to Wikileaks that has been released over the past several months. We also call for an end to the harassment of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks and we call for an independent, international investigation of the illegal activity exposed through the material released by Wikileaks.
Before sending the material to Wikileaks, Bradley Manning tried to get his superiors in the military to do something about what he understood to be clear violations of international law. His superiors told him to keep quiet so Manning did the right thing; he exposed the illegal activity to the world.
The Afghan material leaked earlier shows military higher-ups telling soldiers to kill enemy combatants who were trying to surrender. The Iraq Wikileaks video from 2007 shows the US military killing civilians and news reporters from a helicopter while laughing about it. The widespread corruption among U.S. allies has been exposed by the most recent leaks of diplomatic cables. Yet, instead of calling for change in these policies, we hear only a call to suppress further leaks.
At the national antiwar conference held in Albany in July, 2010, at which UNAC was founded, we heard from Ethan McCord, one of the soldiers on the ground during the helicopter attack on the civilians in Iraq exposed by Wikileaks (see: http://www.mediasanctuary.org/movie/1810 ). He talked about removing wounded children from a civilian vehicle that the US military had shot up. It affected him so powerfully that he and another soldier who witnessed the massacre wrote a letter of apology to the families of the civilians who were killed.
We ask why this material was classified in the first place. There were no state secrets in the material, only evidence of illegal and immoral activity by the US military, the US government and its allies. To try to cover this up by classifying the material is a violation of our right to know the truth about these wars. In this respect, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange should be held up as heroes, not hounded for exposing the truth.
UNAC calls for an end to the illegal and immoral policies exposed by Wikileaks and an immediate end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an end to threats against Iran and North Korea.
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Courage to Resist needs your support
By Jeff Paterson, Courage to Resist.
It's been quite a ride the last four months since we took up the defense of accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower Bradley Manning. Since then, we helped form the Bradley Manning Support Network, established a defense fund, and have already paid over half of Bradley's total $100,000 in estimated legal expenses.
Now, I'm asking for your support of Courage to Resist so that we can continue to support not only Bradley, but the scores of other troops who are coming into conflict with military authorities due to reasons of conscience.
Please donate today:
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38590
"Soldiers sworn oath is to defend and support the Constitution. Bradley Manning has been defending and supporting our Constitution."
-Dan Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistle-blower
Iraq War over? Afghanistan occupation winding down? Not from what we see. Please take a look at, "Soldier Jeff Hanks refuses deployment, seeks PTSD help" in our December newsletter. Jeff's situation is not isolated. Actually, his story is only unique in that he has chosen to share it with us in the hopes that it may result in some change. Jeff's case also illustrates the importance of Iraq Veterans Against the War's new "Operation Recovery" campaign which calls for an end to the deployment of traumatized troops.
Most of the folks who call us for help continue to be effected by Stoploss, a program that involuntarily extends enlistments (despite Army promises of its demise), or the Individual Ready Reserve which recalls thousands of former Soldiers and Marines quarterly from civilian life.
Another example of our efforts is Kyle Wesolowski. After returning from Iraq, Kyle submitted an application for a conscientious objector discharge based on his Buddhist faith. Kyle explains, "My experience of physical threats, religious persecution, and general abuse seems to speak of a system that appears to be broken.... It appears that I have no other recourse but to now refuse all duties that prepare myself for war or aid in any way shape or form to other soldiers in conditioning them to go to war." We believe he shouldn't have to walk this path alone.
Sincerely,
Jeff Paterson
Project Director, Courage to Resist
First US military service member to refuse to fight in Iraq
Please donate today.
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38590
P.S. I'm asking that you consider a contribution of $50 or more, or possibly becoming a sustainer at $15 a month. Of course, now is also a perfect time to make a end of year tax-deductible donation. Thanks again for your support!
Please click here to forward this to a friend who might
also be interested in supporting GI resisters.
http://ymlp.com/forward.php?id=lS3tR&e=bonnieweinstein@yahoo.com
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Add your name! We stand with Bradley Manning.
"We stand for truth, for government transparency, and for an end to our tax-dollars funding endless occupation abroad... We stand with accused whistle-blower US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning."
Dear All,
The Bradley Manning Support Network and Courage to Resist are launching a new campaign, and we wanted to give you a chance to be among the first to add your name to this international effort. If you sign the letter online, we'll print out and mail two letters to Army officials on your behalf. With your permission, we may also use your name on the online petition and in upcoming media ads.
Read the complete public letter and add your name at:
http://standwithbrad.org/
Courage to Resist (http://couragetoresist.org)
on behalf of the Bradley Manning Support Network (http://bradleymanning.org)
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610
510-488-3559
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Committee to Stop FBI Repression
P.O. Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
Dear Friend,
On Friday, September 24th, the FBI raided homes in Chicago and Minneapolis, and turned the Anti-War Committee office upside down. We were shocked. Our response was strong however and we jumped into action holding emergency protests. When the FBI seized activists' personal computers, cell phones, and papers claiming they were investigating "material support for terrorism", they had no idea there would be such an outpouring of support from the anti-war movement across this country! Over 61 cities protested, with crowds of 500 in Minneapolis and Chicago. Activists distributed 12,000 leaflets at the One Nation Rally in Washington D.C. Supporters made thousands of calls to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. Solidarity statements from community organizations, unions, and other groups come in every day. By organizing against the attacks, the movement grows stronger.
At the same time, trusted lawyers stepped up to form a legal team and mount a defense. All fourteen activists signed letters refusing to testify. So Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandon Fox withdrew the subpoenas, but this is far from over. In fact, the repression is just starting. The FBI continues to question activists at their homes and work places. The U.S. government is trying to put people in jail for anti-war and international solidarity activism and there is no indication they are backing off. The U.S. Attorney has many options and a lot of power-he may re-issue subpoenas, attempt to force people to testify under threat of imprisonment, or make arrests.
To be successful in pushing back this attack, we need your donation. We need you to make substantial contributions like $1000, $500, and $200. We understand many of you are like us, and can only afford $50, $20, or $10, but we ask you to dig deep. The legal bills can easily run into the hundreds of thousands. We are all united to defend a movement for peace and justice that seeks friendship with people in other countries. These fourteen anti-war activists have done nothing wrong, yet their freedom is at stake.
It is essential that we defend our sisters and brothers who are facing FBI repression and the Grand Jury process. With each of your contributions, the movement grows stronger.
Please make a donation today at stopfbi.net (PayPal) on the right side of your screen. Also you can write to:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
P.O. Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
This is a critical time for us to stand together, defend free speech, and defend those who help to organize for peace and justice, both at home and abroad!
Thank you for your generosity! Tom Burke
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Please sign the petition to stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal and
and forward it to all your lists.
"Mumia Abu-Jamal and The Global Abolition of the Death Penalty"
http://www.petitiononline.com/Mumialaw/petition.html
(A Life In the Balance - The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, at 34, Amnesty Int'l, 2000; www. Amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/001/2000.)
[Note: This petition is approved by Mumia Abu-Jamal and his lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, San Francisco (E-mail: MumiaLegalDefense@gmail.com; Website: www.MumiaLegalDefense.org).]
Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012
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Short Video About Al-Awda's Work
The following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's work since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown on Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l Al-Awda Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected over the past nine years.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial support to carry out its work.
To submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to
http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html and follow the simple instructions.
Thank you for your generosity!
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COURAGE TO RESIST!
Support the troops who refuse to fight!
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
Donate:
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/57/
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D. ARTICLES IN FULL (Unless otherwise noted)
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1) College the Easy Way
By BOB HERBERT
March 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/opinion/05herbert.html?hp
2) China Unveils Economic Plan With Focus on Raising Incomes and Reining in Pollution
By MICHAEL WINES
March 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/world/asia/05china.html?hp
3) Bahrainis Fear the U.S. Isn't Behind Their Fight for Democracy
By THOMAS FULLER
"'As soon as it looks like the U.S. is not supporting royal families in the gulf region, it starts to raise eyebrows everywhere - in Qatar, in Saudi Arabia, in Kuwait, in Oman,' Mr. Gengler said. 'The U.S. can't turn its back on the Bahraini royal family without implicitly abandoning the idea of monarchies in the gulf.'"
March 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/world/middleeast/05bahrain.html?ref=world
4) Soldier in Leaks Case Will Be Made to Sleep Naked Nightly
[Bradley is being stripped of his clothing every night and forced to wait at attention, naked, every morning before getting his clothing back...this is torture to try to get him to implicate Jullian Assange so the U.S. can do the same to him. ...bw]
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
March 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/world/05manning.html?ref=world
5) Teacher Layoff Plans in Los Angeles Pose Broad Implications
By JENNIFER MEDINA
March 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/us/05layoffs.html?ref=education
6) Policing in Public Housing Leads City to Pay Some Plaintiffs
By AL BAKER and JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN
March 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/nyregion/05settle.html?ref=nyregion
7) Bradley Manning's forced nudity to occur daily
By Glenn Greenwald
Saturday, Mar 5, 2011 07:06 ET
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/03/05/manning
8) Libyan rebels seize British SAS troops-Sunday Times
Reuters Africa
Sun Mar 6, 2011 1:24am GMT
http://af.reuters.com/article/libyaNews/idAFLDE72500520110306
9) America Is NOT Broke
By Michael Moore, Open Mike Blog
March 6, 2011
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/274-41/5178-america-is-not-broke
10) Answer to Michael Moore: We ain't Gonna Play the Game No More!
By Bonnie Weinstein
info@socialistviewpoint.org
socialistviewpoint.org
11) NATO's inevitable war (Part II)
Reflections of Fidel Castro Ruz
Havana, March 4, 2011
http://www.granma.cu/ingles/reflections-i/4marzo-NATO-2.html
12) The Real News on Jobs
By Robert Reich
robertreich.org
March 4, 2011
http://robertreich.org/post/3638565075
13) Talks to Resolve Wisconsin Battle Falter
By MONICA DAVEY
March 7, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/us/08wisconsin.html?hp
14) High Fascism
By RHONDA GARELICK
March 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/opinion/07Garelick.html?hp
15) Degrees and Dollars
By PAUL KRUGMAN
March 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/opinion/07krugman.html?hp
16) No Crime, but an Arrest and Two Strip-Searches
"The more recent trend, from appeals courts in Atlanta, San Francisco and Philadelphia, is to allow searches no matter how minor the charge. Some potential examples cited by dissenting judges in those cases: violating a leash law, driving without a license, failing to pay child support."
By ADAM LIPTAK
March 7, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/us/08bar.html?hp
17) Answering the Public, Egypt Names a New Cabinet
"Reports that the state security police were burning and shredding incriminating documents led to the rampage on Saturday, as well as a protest at the Interior Ministry on Sunday. After several hours, plainclothes police officers dispersed hundreds of protesters with sticks, knives and rocks, while soldiers fired into the air, sending echoes of gunfire through downtown Cairo for the first time in weeks. ...Packaged like WikiLeaks, but under the banner 'State Security Leaks,' many of the documents were burned around the edges, suggesting that reports of document burning may have been accurate."
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR and MONA EL-NAGGAR
March 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/world/middleeast/07egypt.html?ref=world
18) Bahrain's Promised Spending Fails to Quell Dissent
By THOMAS FULLER
March 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/world/middleeast/07bahrain.html?ref=world
19) REPORT on Emergency Labor Meeting
(Cleveland, Ohio - March 4-5, 2011)
emergencylabor@aol.com
20) In Letter, Wisconsin Democrats Demand Compromise, Offer to Meet Walker at Border
By Sarah Seltzer | Sourced from AlterNet
Posted at March 7, 2011, 8:57 am
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/513353/in_letter%2C_wisconsin_democrats_demand_compromise%2C_offer_to_meet_walker_at_border/#paragraph4
21) Academics Challenge Tuition Increases in Britain [and U.S. military's tuition aid needs oversight, report says]
[Talk about burying a news story. The second story on U.S. military tuition aid was simply attached to this first story -- see full article below...bw]
By THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
March 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/world/europe/07iht-educBriefs07.html?ref=world
22) Tight Budgets Mean Squeeze in Classrooms
By SAM DILLON
March 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/education/07classrooms.html?ref=us
23) Wisconsin Democrats Urge New Talks on Labor Bill
By MONICA DAVEY
March 7, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/us/08wisconsin.html?ref=us
24) Growing with the Flow
By Bonnie Weinstein
Socialist Viewpoint
March/April 2011
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/
25) Egyptian Workers: Complete the Revolution!
By Chris Kinder
Socialist Viewpoint
March/April 2011
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/marapr_11/marapr_11_02.html
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1) College the Easy Way
By BOB HERBERT
March 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/opinion/05herbert.html?hp
The cost of college has skyrocketed and a four-year degree has become an ever more essential cornerstone to a middle-class standard of living. But what are America's kids actually learning in college?
For an awful lot of students, the answer appears to be not much.
A provocative new book, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses," makes a strong case that for a large portion of the nation's seemingly successful undergraduates the years in college barely improve their skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing.
Intellectual effort and academic rigor, in the minds of many of the nation's college students, is becoming increasingly less important. According to the authors, Professors Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia: "Many students come to college not only poorly prepared by prior schooling for highly demanding academic tasks that ideally lie in front of them, but - more troubling still - they enter college with attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors that are often at odds with academic commitment."
Students are hitting the books less and partying more. Easier courses and easier majors have become more and more popular. Perhaps more now than ever, the point of the college experience is to have a good time and walk away with a valuable credential after putting in the least effort possible.
What many of those students are not walking away with is something that has long been recognized as invaluable - higher order thinking and reasoning skills. They can get their degrees without putting in more of an effort because in far too many instances the colleges and universities are not demanding more of them.
The authors cite empirical work showing that the average amount of time spent studying by college students has dropped by more than 50 percent since the early 1960s. But a lack of academic focus has not had much of an effect on grade point averages or the ability of the undergraduates to obtain their degrees.
Thirty-six percent of the students said they studied alone less than five hours a week. Nevertheless, their transcripts showed a collective grade point average of 3.16. "Their G.P.A.'s are between a B and a B-plus," said Professor Arum, "which says to me that it's not the students, really - they share some of the blame - but the colleges and universities have set up a system so that there are ways to navigate through it without taking difficult courses and still get the credential."
The book is based on a study, led by Professor Arum, that followed more than 2,300 students at a broad range of schools from the fall of 2005 to the spring of 2009. The study (available at highered.ssrc.org) showed that in their first two years of college, 45 percent of the students made no significant improvement in skills related to critical thinking, complex reasoning and communication. After the full four years, 36 percent still had not substantially improved those skills.
The development of such skills is generally thought to be the core function of a college education. The students who don't develop them may leave college with a degree and an expanded circle of friends, but little more. Many of these young men and women are unable to communicate effectively, solve simple intellectual tasks (such as distinguishing fact from opinion), or engage in effective problem-solving.
"This is a terrible disservice, not only to those students, but also to the larger society," said Professor Arum. "I really think it's important to get the word out about the lack of academic rigor and intellectual engagement that's occurring at colleges and universities today."
While there are certainly plenty of students doing very well and learning a great deal in college, this large increase in the number of students just skating by should be of enormous concern in an era in which a college education plays such a crucial role in the lifetime potential of America's young people. It can leave the U.S. at a disadvantage in the global marketplace. But, more important, the students are cheating themselves - and being cheated - of the richer, more satisfying lives that should be the real payoff of a four-year college experience.
"You have to ask what this means for a democratic society," said Professor Arum. "This is the portion of the population that you would expect to demonstrate civic leadership in the future, civic engagement. They are the ones we would expect to be struggling to understand the world, to think critically about the rhetoric out there, and to make informed, reasoned decisions.
"If they're not developing their higher order skills, it means they're not developing the attitudes and dispositions that are needed to even understand that that's important."
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2) China Unveils Economic Plan With Focus on Raising Incomes and Reining in Pollution
By MICHAEL WINES
March 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/world/asia/05china.html?hp
BEIJING - China's leaders unwrapped a new five-year economic blueprint on Saturday that set ambitious goals to raise ordinary people's incomes, rein in pollution and energy use, and build advanced-science industries in fields like biotechnology and environmental protection.
After five years of scorching growth, averaging 11.2 percent a year, the plan projected an average 7 percent annual rise in the gross domestic product through 2015. The government also pledged a war on inflation, officially pegged at 4.9 percent in January but believed by experts to be considerably higher.
The moves are crucial to shifting China's economic base away from factory exports toward one rooted in demand for goods and services by increasingly affluent consumers. And that is crucial to the Communist Party's central aim: keeping the allegiance of a society that wants a bigger share of the nation's prosperity.
The new plan was the centerpiece of an annual report on the government's work that Prime Minister Wen Jiabao presented on Saturday to the National People's Congress, China's quasi-legislature. Past reports have set broadly similar targets for China's development, which the report frankly acknowledged had not always been met.
"We are keenly aware that we still have a serious problem in that our development is not yet well-balanced, coordinated or sustainable," the report said. Among the shortcomings it cited were a widening gap between the rich and poor, an "irrational industrial structure," sharply rising land and housing prices, and illegal seizures of people's land and the demolition of their homes by state-backed developers.
Some main economic goals may be especially hard to attain.
Mr. Wen set an 8 percent target for gross domestic product growth this year, implying slower growth in succeeding years. But many economists believe the economy will grow faster, just as growth in 2010 exceeded the government's target. Soaring land and home prices have also proved difficult to curb.
But the report claimed impressive gains on other important fronts that are at the head of plans for the next five years, including a 19.1 percent cut in the amount of energy used per unit of economic growth, a rapidly expanding service economy and a boom in the high-technology sector. The government opened a national nanotechnology research center and is building 50 engineering centers, 32 national engineering laboratories and 56 other labs focusing on technologies like digital television and high-speed Internet, the report said.
Software sales, integrated circuit production and other advanced products like microcomputers all logged double-digit increases last year.
In the next five years, raising standards of living appears to be perhaps the government's main priority.
The government pledged to keep prices "basically stable" through 2015, limiting inflation to 4 percent this year, and to raise household income by an annual average of 7 percent, roughly in line with economic growth.
That would break from the past 20 years, in which the growth of ordinary workers' income has regularly lagged behind the growth in gross domestic product, and consumer spending as a share of the economy has dropped to a record low.
The report called expanding domestic demand "a long-term strategic principle" and pledged to increase subsidies to low-income households, extend broadband Internet to rural areas and smaller cities, and expand retail sectors like chain stores and online commerce.
Retail sales of consumer goods should grow 16 percent in 2011 alone, it stated.
Environmental protection, energy conservation and technology also are allotted ambitious goals: in technology, for example, laying a million kilometers, or 621,000 miles, of new fiber optic cable; and adding 35 million new broadband internet ports, to a total of 223 million; and drafting a plan to support emerging high-technology industries.
The report pledges to further reduce energy consumption per unit of G.D.P. by 16 percent, and carbon dioxide emissions per unit by 17 percent. And for the first time, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported, the government will place a cap on total energy use, limiting consumption to the equivalent of four billion tons of coal by 2015.
The government also promised to build "well-equipped statistical and monitoring systems" to gauge greenhouse gas emissions, accelerate construction of sewage treatment plants, retrofit coal-fired power plants with pollution controls and continue a pilot program to develop low-carbon cities.
China's military spending will rise 12.6 percent in 2011 to 583.6 billion renminbi, or about $88.6 billion, a separate Finance Ministry report stated on Saturday, slightly less than the 12.7 percent increase announced on Friday by a legislative spokesman.
That resumes a long string of double-digit annual increases in military spending that was interrupted in 2010, when spending rose only 7.5 percent, perhaps, analysts said, because money was diverted to address the global economic crisis.
Since 1989, the budget has risen by an average of 12.9 percent per year, according to GlobalSecurity.org, a private organization that maintains an online database of military-related information. Many analysts, including those in the Pentagon, say that China's actual military spending is probably considerably greater than the reported sums.
The resumption of rapid growth follows a year in which China's neighbors have expressed concern about the military's increasingly muscular behavior in waters off its Pacific coast and along the tense border with India. But the spokesman, Li Zhaoxing, repeated China's longstanding position that the military is a defensive force and that it "will not pose a threat to any country."
Mr. Wen's annual report, like those before it, offered a sheaf of paeans to the Communist Party's stewardship of the nation, with staggering statistics to support them. China's international prestige "grew significantly"; its "brilliant achievements" in economics "clearly show the advantages of socialism with Chinese characteristics."
The state opened 4,986 kilometers, or 3,100 miles, or new railroads and 120,000 kilometers, or nearly 74,600 miles, of highways; completed 230,000 sports and fitness projects for rural residents; built or renovated 891 hospitals and 1,228 health clinics.
And while Western economies still struggle to recover from the 2008 global economic collapse, China has moved on. "All the measures we took," Mr. Wen's report said, "have proven to be entirely correct."
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3) Bahrainis Fear the U.S. Isn't Behind Their Fight for Democracy
By THOMAS FULLER
"'As soon as it looks like the U.S. is not supporting royal families in the gulf region, it starts to raise eyebrows everywhere - in Qatar, in Saudi Arabia, in Kuwait, in Oman,' Mr. Gengler said. 'The U.S. can't turn its back on the Bahraini royal family without implicitly abandoning the idea of monarchies in the gulf.'"
March 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/world/middleeast/05bahrain.html?ref=world
MANAMA, Bahrain - As more than 100,000 protesters descended into the streets on Friday, women uniformly dressed in black flowing robes carried signs saying, "Revolution: The only solution."
Three weeks of pro-democracy protests in this island nation have followed the pattern of those in Egypt and Tunisia, with cellphones and Facebook posts propelling the movement and a botched, deadly crackdown by security forces two weeks ago serving to embolden the demonstrators.
Yet those who lead and take part in the nearly daily demonstrations here say they fear at least one key difference: The United States may not be fully on their side.
"The U.S. is not acting like they did in other countries," said Ali Najaf, who marched on Friday amid a sea of red-and-white Bahraini flags. "We thought they would support the people."
Unlike in the case of Egypt, where President Obama promised to "stand up for democracy" and called for a change of power "now," Washington has backed the royal family in Bahrain with statements supporting the country's still-undefined proposal for dialogue with the opposition.
Obama administration officials say they believe the royal family has earned the right to try to navigate this period, after heeding the United States's plea to call off the security forces who shot the protesters, killing seven of them. The president's national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, has conferred with the country's crown prince, Sheik Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, whom an administration official described as sensible.
On Sunday, Mr. Obama said he welcomed a "commitment to reform" by the king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa.
But opposition parties say they do not believe there is enough pressure to produce genuine change.
Opposition parties are demanding the dissolution of the government and a true constitutional monarchy to replace King Hamad's near-absolute powers.
In a region ruled by sultans and kings, the prospect of a democratic uprising in Bahrain has been deeply unsettling to America's oil-producing allies in the Persian Gulf, especially because the majority of Bahrain's citizens are Shiites.
The king, like most royalty on the western rim of the Gulf, is Sunni.
A majority Shiite government could further alter a religious balance already upset by the ascendance of the Shiite-led government in Iraq after the American-led war that toppled Saddam Hussein.
At a ramshackle mosque overflowing with worshipers on Friday, the most senior cleric of the Shiite community in Bahrain offered a veiled but somber message for the pro-democracy movement: America and the West support democratic aspirations in the Arab world - but only to a point.
"They are looking out for their own interests," Sheik Isa Qassim said in his Friday sermon.
Foreign countries had supported democracy around the globe and even waged wars in the name of democracy, he said. "But these countries offer only cool, verbal support when it comes to regimes friendly to them," Mr. Qassim said, an apparent reference to the Bahrain government.
Protesters here say their dreams of democracy are being thwarted by the United States' desire to protect a large naval base in Bahrain, by the perception that Shiites reflexively side with Iran, and by the influence of neighboring Saudi Arabia, which analysts say would probably not accept a Shiite-led Bahrain.
Justin Gengler, a former Fulbright scholar in Bahrain, said he did not expect the United States to abandon its support for the Khalifa family, which has run this country for more than two centuries.
"As soon as it looks like the U.S. is not supporting royal families in the gulf region, it starts to raise eyebrows everywhere - in Qatar, in Saudi Arabia, in Kuwait, in Oman," Mr. Gengler said. "The U.S. can't turn its back on the Bahraini royal family without implicitly abandoning the idea of monarchies in the gulf."
Opposition politicians here are seeking to convince Washington that a constitutional monarchy in Bahrain would not be a threat to regional stability. An elected government would be inherently more stable, said Matar Ebrahim Ali Matar, a Shiite member of Parliament who resigned after the government crackdown.
"The United States should support this wave of democracy - it's coming," Mr. Matar said. "If it doesn't happen this year, it will come in the coming years."
Under the current political system the lower house of Parliament is elected, but its lawmaking powers are curtailed by an upper house, whose members are appointed by the king, who also has wide-ranging powers to pass decrees.
After introducing some democratic reforms in the early part of the last decade, the government reversed course and cracked down on dissent last year, arresting 23 people and accusing them of terrorism.
Like other dissidents arrested in recent years, they were tortured - "regular beatings to all part of the body, sexual assaults, hanging for prolonged periods of time, electric prods," said Faraz Sanei, a researcher on Bahrain and Iran in the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch. The 23 men were released last month as a concession to the opposition.
The protests and crackdown appear to have heightened tensions in Bahrain. In the early hours of Friday, several people were injured in clashes between Sunnis and Shiites in a town outside of Manama, the capital.
The cause of the violence remained unclear, but riot police officers were called in to disperse crowds of young men carrying sticks, axes and other weapons.
Mark Landler contributed reporting from Washington.
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4) Soldier in Leaks Case Will Be Made to Sleep Naked Nightly
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
March 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/world/05manning.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON - Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, the Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking government files to WikiLeaks, will be stripped of his clothing every night as a "precautionary measure" to prevent him from injuring himself, an official at the Marine brig at Quantico, Va., said on Friday.
Private Manning will also be required to stand outside his cell naked during a morning inspection, after which his clothing will be returned to him, said a Marine spokesman, First Lt. Brian Villiard.
"Because of recent circumstances, the underwear was taken away from him as a precaution to ensure that he did not injure himself," Lieutenant Villiard said. "The brig commander has a duty and responsibility to ensure the safety and well-being of the detainees and to make sure that they are able to stand trial."
Private Manning is a maximum-security detainee under "prevention of injury watch," a special set of restrictions - a step his supporters, who contend that he is not suicidal, have said is unjustified. He has not been elevated to the more restrictive "suicide watch" conditions.
Lieutenant Villiard said the new rule on clothing, which would continue indefinitely, had been imposed by the brig commander, Chief Warrant Officer Denise Barnes. He said that he was not allowed to explain what prompted it "because to discuss the details would be a violation of Manning's privacy."
In recent months, Private Manning's supporters have criticized his treatment as unduly harsh, contending that he is being pressured to agree to implicate Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks co-founder, as a conspirator in the leaking of diplomatic and military files. Lieutenant Villiard denied that the new conditions were intended to "pressure or punish" Private Manning.
Private Manning's lawyer, David E. Coombs, first complained in a blog posting on Thursday that his client had been stripped the previous night, and wrote on Friday that it had happened again. He criticized the measure as an unjustified "humiliation" of his client.
"There can be no conceivable justification for requiring a soldier to surrender all his clothing, remain naked in his cell for seven hours, and then stand at attention the subsequent morning," he wrote. "This treatment is even more degrading considering that Pfc. Manning is being monitored - both by direct observation and by video - at all times."
Mr. Coombs contended that stripping his client was medically unjustified.
"If a person is at risk of self-harm, then you get them treatment, you get them to a mental health professional and address the issue - you don't strip them," he said, adding in a separate telephone interview, "There is no excuse, no justification to having a soldier stand at attention naked. There can be no mental health reason for that."
Lieutenant Villiard, who says Private Manning is permitted to have two blankets at night, says detainees are awakened each morning and immediately come out of their cells. Private Manning cannot be given his underwear back before then, he said, because that would require waking him up ahead of time.
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5) Teacher Layoff Plans in Los Angeles Pose Broad Implications
By JENNIFER MEDINA
March 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/us/05layoffs.html?ref=education
LOS ANGELES - Last year, when the school district here handed out thousands of layoff notices, Samuel Gompers Middle School in South Central stood to lose half of its roughly 150 teachers. Now, with the district planning to lay off as many as 4,500 teachers under what school leaders call a doomsday budget, the school could have been even worse off.
But under a court ruling, not a single teacher at the school would be let go. Instead, Gompers and 44 other schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District would be exempt from any layoffs at all.
The ruling, which ratified a settlement agreed to by plaintiffs and the school district, is being appealed by the teachers' union. And even as it plays out in a state where schools are facing the prospect of devastating layoffs, it could have implications for districts across the country facing similar cuts. The lawsuit has the support of, among others, Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, who once worked for the teachers' union here.
Last spring, the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups sued the school district on behalf of parents, saying that their children's right to an education, guaranteed in the State Constitution, would be violated by the layoffs. Like most districts in the country, Los Angeles has long had an agreement with the union that layoffs are based primarily on seniority, so that the most recently hired teachers are the first to go. That left schools like Gompers, already saddled with high teacher turnover, the most vulnerable.
Lawyers for the parents argued that the layoffs would disproportionately affect poor, black and Latino students, who are more likely to attend schools that are difficult to staff and have a high proportion of inexperienced teachers.
If the ruling is upheld for the seemingly inevitable layoffs this summer, Los Angeles, the second-largest district in the country, will be among the first to dismiss teachers using criteria other than seniority.
"It's simply crazy to say that we have to do this based on when people were hired," Mr. Villaraigosa said in an interview. He has spent considerable effort attacking the union's policies in recent months and said that the lawsuit was just one of many steps he hopes will overhaul the way hiring and firing is done in the city's schools.
"This is really just the tip of the iceberg," he said. "But we have to start somewhere. We haven't had any other kind of real change, and this clearly opens the door to more."
But Julie Washington, the vice president of United Teachers Los Angeles, said that the ruling was "gutting seniority" and that the new layoff process would wreak havoc in the city's schools. In the last several months, Ms. Washington has received dozens of calls from union leaders in other parts of the country who worry that they could soon be fighting similar lawsuits.
"You could have a senior teacher who is a nine-year veteran and has spent thousands of hours training and getting better here lose her job," Ms. Washington said. "All of that is just disregarded with one swoop."
In essence, the ruling put the rights of students above the job protections that teacher unions widely consider sacrosanct.
"These students deserve the best of what we have promised them," said Catherine Lhamon, a lawyer with Public Counsel and one of the lead lawyers in the case. "If you have students who are going to see 17 different teachers in a year because so much is churning, they are not getting that. This puts districts on notice that they cannot do that, no matter what the budget circumstances are."
With districts in California likely to issue as many as 30,000 layoff notices to teachers in the next two weeks - state law sets a March 15 deadline for the notices to go out - and school systems across the country facing huge budget cuts, the battle here will be closely watched. And parents and advocates in other cities could file similar lawsuits.
But the case also points to a split among the advocates who are pushing for the changes. Many political and school leaders say that seniority-based layoffs are antiquated and should be abolished entirely. Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of the District of Columbia schools, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York have crusaded against so-called "last in, first out" policies for years. For them, the court ruling is Los Angeles does not go far enough.
In many ways, some advocates see the battle between politicians and unions leaders as a distraction. More important, they say, is the fact that after years of budget cuts the students who have the greatest need for stability in school have become the least likely to have it.
"It is really cynical for the political vultures to make this about a victory against the unions," said Michelle Fine, a professor at the City University of New York who testified for the plaintiffs as an expert witness in the case. "This is really just about how we distribute the pain. The remedy itself is very sad."
The plan would most likely mean teacher layoffs in middle-class areas that are accustomed to having the same teachers come back year after year. So while Sonia Miller, the principal at Gompers, will have less turmoil this year, the churn will be passed on elsewhere.
"You cannot emphasize how hard it is to teach at a place like this, and to have teachers who want to be here walk out the door is devastating," she said. "What I want is for my kids to have a fighting chance, and that's all I really care about. This ruling will by no means make equal education across the board, but at least we will have a chance."
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6) Policing in Public Housing Leads City to Pay Some Plaintiffs
By AL BAKER and JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN
March 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/nyregion/05settle.html?ref=nyregion
New York City has quietly reached settlements with several plaintiffs in a federal class-action lawsuit alleging that the city's trespassing-enforcement policies in public housing complexes are discriminatory and unlawful, lawyers and others said this week.
Of the 16 claimants originally named in the lawsuit, which was filed in January 2010, nine have agreed to settle, according to court papers, city officials and lawyers involved in the case. The city made its offers in October and December and is in the process of paying a total of slightly more than $170,000, with individual payments ranging from $5,000 to $75,000, said a spokesman for the comptroller's office.
The lawsuit, filed in United States District Court in Manhattan, claims that residents of public housing complexes, as well as their visitors, are subjected to police aggression and unwarranted trespass stops and arrests. Both stops and arrests have increased substantially between 2004 and 2008, the plaintiffs say. The suit also contends that the city's enforcement tactics are aimed at minority-dominated communities and, therefore, violate equal protection rights.
"You could not imagine this practice going on in many of the white neighborhoods of the city," said William D. Gibney, director of the special litigation unit for the Legal Aid Society.
Despite the settlements, the suit, filed by the Legal Aid Society, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, is continuing, with depositions set for "the next few weeks," said Johanna B. Steinberg, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense fund.
None of the payments are an admission of wrongdoing, said Connie C. Pankratz, a spokeswoman for the city's law department. She declined to discuss the city's strategy in settling with some plaintiffs and said the city had filed a motion to dismiss the overall claim.
"We believe the settlements were in the best interest of all parties," Ms. Pankratz said.
Before the lawsuit was filed, public housing officials arrayed a "safety and security task force" to address tenants' safety concerns, said Sheila Stainback, a spokeswoman for the city's housing authority. Days after it was filed, Reginald H. Bowman, the president of a council of public housing residents' leaders, wrote to the plaintiffs that the litigation could harm a process of "influencing the change in policy and practices that we all agree need to be changed."
On June 8, the Police Department put new public safety initiatives into effect for public housing, an effort that began a year earlier partly in response to concerns raised by the Civilian Complaint Review Board. Specifically, police officials revamped the rules for floor-to-floor sweeps of high-rises to make clear that officers could not temporarily detain someone suspected of trespassing unless the officer reasonably believed the person should not be there. The department also developed new training for officers, focusing on the legal standard for taking police action.
"Police officers assigned to public housing developments try to provide safety for the low-income residents who live there that occupants of doormen buildings elsewhere take for granted," said Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, the department's chief spokesman. "One of the ways they accomplish this is through vertical patrols."
Lawyers pursuing the lawsuit say more is necessary.
"We still see too many instances of illegal arrests occurring around the city in public housing residences," said Mr. Gibney, of the Legal Aid Society. "So, the change that did occur has not seemed to stop the practice."
He and Ms. Steinberg said that while the settlements were a welcome compensation for some of the plaintiffs, the loss of more than half of the original complainants did not help the case. Still, Ms. Steinberg noted, all that is needed to go forward is "at least one person." Six plaintiffs remain; one withdrew from the case without a settlement.
Eleanor Britt, 63, one of the remaining plaintiffs, said no price could be put on the issues of policing, safety and civility in the city's housing authority.
Things crystallized for her in January 2009, when her grandson Roman Jackson, then 24, was arrested on a trespassing charge while talking with others in a stairwell at the Taft Houses in Harlem. He did not have identification with him. The police took him away, she said, then knocked on her door, where he was living, asking for his identification. The charge was later dismissed.
"The district attorney looked at the paperwork and said, 'We are not going to move on this case,' " Mr. Gibney said.
Before it was cleared up, though, the episode rippled with trouble in Mr. Jackson's life. He received letters the next week from his employer "to ask him what happened," Ms. Britt said. "He was just very, very upset by what happened."
Now, she said, "I want to see change take place. It's about being treated with dignity and respect."
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7) Bradley Manning's forced nudity to occur daily
By Glenn Greenwald
Saturday, Mar 5, 2011 07:06 ET
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/03/05/manning
To follow-up on yesterday's observations about the prolonged forced nudity to which Bradley Manning has been subjected the last two days: brig officials now confirm to The New York Times that Manning will be forced to be nude every night from now on for the indefinite future -- not only when he sleeps, but also when he stands outside his cell for morning inspection along with the other brig detainees. They claim that it is being done "as a 'precautionary measure' to prevent him from injuring himself."
Has anyone before successfully committed suicide using a pair of briefs -- especially when under constant video and in-person monitoring? There's no underwear that can be issued that is useless for killing oneself? And if this is truly such a threat, why isn't he on "suicide watch" (the NYT article confirms he's not)? And why is this restriction confined to the night; can't he also off himself using his briefs during the day?
Let's review Manning's detention over the last nine straight months: 23-hour/day solitary confinement; barred even from exercising in his cell; one hour total outside his cell per day where he's allowed to walk around in circles in a room alone while shackled, and is returned to his cell the minute he stops walking; forced to respond to guards' inquiries literally every 5 minutes, all day, everyday; and awakened at night each time he is curled up in the corner of his bed or otherwise outside the guards' full view. Is there anyone who doubts that these measures -- and especially this prolonged forced nudity -- are punitive and designed to further erode his mental health, physical health and will? As The Guardian reported last year, forced nudity is almost certainly a breach of the Geneva Conventions; the Conventions do not technically apply to Manning, as he is not a prisoner of war, but they certainly establish the minimal protections to which all detainees -- let alone citizens convicted of nothing -- are entitled.
The treatment of Manning is now so repulsive that it even lies beyond what at least some of the most devoted Obama admirers are willing to defend. For instance, UCLA Professor Mark Kleiman -- who last year hailed Barack Obama as, and I quote, "the greatest moral leader of our lifetime" -- wrote last night:
The United States Army is so concerned about Bradley Manning's health that it is subjecting him to a regime designed to drive him insane. . . . This is a total disgrace. It shouldn't be happening in this country. You can't be unaware of this, Mr. President. Silence gives consent.
The entire Manning controversy has received substantial media attention. It's being carried out by the military of which Barack Obama is the Commander-in-Chief. Yes, the Greatest Moral Leader of Our Lifetime and Nobel Peace Prize winner is well aware of what's being done and obviously has been for quite some time. It is his administration which is obsessed with destroying and deterring any remnants of whistle-blowing and breaches of the secrecy regime behind which the National Security and Surveillance States function. This is all perfectly consistent with his actions in office, as painful as that might be for some to accept (The American Prospect, which has fairly consistently criticized Obama's civil liberties abuses, yesterday called the treatment of Manning "torture" and denounced it as a "disgrace"). As former Army officer James Joyner (and emphatic critic of WikiLeaks and Manning) writes:
Obama promised to close Gitmo because he was embarrassed that we were doing this kind of thing to accused terrorists. But he's allowing it to happen to an American soldier under his command?
And I'll say this again: just fathom the contrived, shrieking uproar from opportunistic Democratic politicians and their loyalists if it had been George Bush and Dick Cheney -- on U.S. soil -- subjecting a whistle-blowing member of the U.S. military to these repressive conditions without being convicted of anything, charging him with a capital offense that statutorily carries the death penalty, and then forcing him to remain nude every night and stand naked for inspection outside his cell. Feigning concern over detainee abuse for partisan gain is only slightly less repellent than the treatment to which Manning is being subjected.
UPDATE: Robert Parry, at Consortium News, documents how crucial was forced nudity to the Bush detention and interrogation regime; Marcy Wheeler recalls how Bush-era official documents emphasized the importance of prolonged nudity in breaking down detainees; and in The Guardian, Ryan Gallagher writes about "Bradley Manning and the stench of U.S. hypocrisy."
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8) Libyan rebels seize British SAS troops-Sunday Times
Reuters Africa
Sun Mar 6, 2011 1:24am GMT
http://af.reuters.com/article/libyaNews/idAFLDE72500520110306
LONDON, March 6 (Reuters) - Libyan rebels have captured a British special forces unit in the east of the country after a secret diplomatic mission to make contact with opposition leaders backfired, Britain's Sunday Times reported. The team, understood to number up to eight SAS soldiers, were intercepted as they escorted a junior diplomat through rebel-held territory, the newspaper said.
The Foreign Office said in a brief statement it could neither "confirm or deny" the report.
Earlier on Saturday the Geneva-based Human Rights Solidarity group, which employs a number of Libyan exiles, told Reuters by telephone that a team of "eight special forces personnel" had been seized by rebels. Both the Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office repeatedly declined to comment on the group's report.
The SAS intervention apparently angered Libyan opposition figures, who ordered the soldiers locked up on a military base, according to the Sunday Times.
Opponents of longtime Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi fear he could use any evidence of Western military intervention to rally patriotic support away from a two-week-old uprising against his 41-year autocratic rule.
Citing Libyan sources, the Sunday Times said the special forces troops were taken by rebels to Benghazi, Libya's second largest city and epicentre of the insurrection, and hauled before one of its most senior politicians for questioning.
The paper said the junior diplomat they were escorting was preparing the way for a visit by a more senior colleague ahead of establishing diplomatic relations with the rebels.
The Sunday Times said Libyan opposition officials were said to be trying to hush up the incident for fear of a backlash from ordinary Libyans.
(Reporting by Stefano Ambrogi; editing by Mark Heinrich)
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9) America Is NOT Broke
By Michael Moore, Open Mike Blog
March 6, 2011
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/274-41/5178-america-is-not-broke
America is not broke.
Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you'll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.
Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.
Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer "bailout" of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can't bring yourself to call that a financial coup d'état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.
And I can see why. For us to admit that we have let a small group of men abscond with and hoard the bulk of the wealth that runs our economy, would mean that we'd have to accept the humiliating acknowledgment that we have indeed surrendered our precious Democracy to the moneyed elite. Wall Street, the banks and the Fortune 500 now run this Republic - and, until this past month, the rest of us have felt completely helpless, unable to find a way to do anything about it.
I have nothing more than a high school degree. But back when I was in school, every student had to take one semester of economics in order to graduate. And here's what I learned: Money doesn't grow on trees. It grows when we make things. It grows when we have good jobs with good wages that we use to buy the things we need and thus create more jobs. It grows when we provide an outstanding educational system that then grows a new generation of inventers, entrepreneurs, artists, scientists and thinkers who come up with the next great idea for the planet. And that new idea creates new jobs and that creates revenue for the state. But if those who have the most money don't pay their fair share of taxes, the state can't function. The schools can't produce the best and the brightest who will go on to create those jobs. If the wealthy get to keep most of their money, we have seen what they will do with it: recklessly gamble it on crazy Wall Street schemes and crash our economy. The crash they created cost us millions of jobs. That too caused a reduction in revenue. And the population ended up suffering because they reduced their taxes, reduced our jobs and took wealth out of the system, removing it from circulation.
The nation is not broke, my friends. Wisconsin is not broke. It's part of the Big Lie. It's one of the three biggest lies of the decade: America/Wisconsin is broke, Iraq has WMD, the Packers can't win the Super Bowl without Brett Favre.
The truth is, there's lots of money to go around. LOTS. It's just that those in charge have diverted that wealth into a deep well that sits on their well-guarded estates. They know they have committed crimes to make this happen and they know that someday you may want to see some of that money that used to be yours. So they have bought and paid for hundreds of politicians across the country to do their bidding for them. But just in case that doesn't work, they've got their gated communities, and the luxury jet is always fully fueled, the engines running, waiting for that day they hope never comes. To help prevent that day when the people demand their country back, the wealthy have done two very smart things:
1. They control the message. By owning most of the media they have expertly convinced many Americans of few means to buy their version of the American Dream and to vote for their politicians. Their version of the Dream says that you, too, might be rich some day - this is America, where anything can happen if you just apply yourself! They have conveniently provided you with believable examples to show you how a poor boy can become a rich man, how the child of a single mother in Hawaii can become president, how a guy with a high school education can become a successful filmmaker. They will play these stories for you over and over again all day long so that the last thing you will want to do is upset the apple cart - because you - yes, you, too! - might be rich/president/an Oscar-winner some day! The message is clear: keep you head down, your nose to the grindstone, don't rock the boat and be sure to vote for the party that protects the rich man that you might be some day.
2. They have created a poison pill that they know you will never want to take. It is their version of mutually assured destruction. And when they threatened to release this weapon of mass economic annihilation in September of 2008, we blinked. As the economy and the stock market went into a tailspin, and the banks were caught conducting a worldwide Ponzi scheme, Wall Street issued this threat: Either hand over trillions of dollars from the American taxpayers or we will crash this economy straight into the ground. Fork it over or it's Goodbye savings accounts. Goodbye pensions. Goodbye United States Treasury. Goodbye jobs and homes and future. It was friggin' awesome and it scared the shit out of everyone. "Here! Take our money! We don't care. We'll even print more for you! Just take it! But, please, leave our lives alone, PLEASE!"
The executives in the board rooms and hedge funds could not contain their laughter, their glee, and within three months they were writing each other huge bonus checks and marveling at how perfectly they had played a nation full of suckers. Millions lost their jobs anyway, and millions lost their homes. But there was no revolt (see #1).
Until now. On Wisconsin! Never has a Michigander been more happy to share a big, great lake with you! You have aroused the sleeping giant know as the working people of the United States of America. Right now the earth is shaking and the ground is shifting under the feet of those who are in charge. Your message has inspired people in all 50 states and that message is: WE HAVE HAD IT! We reject anyone tells us America is broke and broken. It's just the opposite! We are rich with talent and ideas and hard work and, yes, love. Love and compassion toward those who have, through no fault of their own, ended up as the least among us. But they still crave what we all crave: Our country back! Our democracy back! Our good name back! The United States of America. NOT the Corporate States of America. The United States of America!
So how do we get this? Well, we do it with a little bit of Egypt here, a little bit of Madison there. And let us pause for a moment and remember that it was a poor man with a fruit stand in Tunisia who gave his life so that the world might focus its attention on how a government run by billionaires for billionaires is an affront to freedom and morality and humanity.
Thank you, Wisconsin. You have made people realize this was our last best chance to grab the final thread of what was left of who we are as Americans. For three weeks you have stood in the cold, slept on the floor, skipped out of town to Illinois - whatever it took, you have done it, and one thing is for certain: Madison is only the beginning. The smug rich have overplayed their hand. They couldn't have just been content with the money they raided from the treasury. They couldn't be satiated by simply removing millions of jobs and shipping them overseas to exploit the poor elsewhere. No, they had to have more - something more than all the riches in the world. They had to have our soul. They had to strip us of our dignity. They had to shut us up and shut us down so that we could not even sit at a table with them and bargain about simple things like classroom size or bulletproof vests for everyone on the police force or letting a pilot just get a few extra hours sleep so he or she can do their job - their $19,000 a year job. That's how much some rookie pilots on commuter airlines make, maybe even the rookie pilots flying people here to Madison. But he's stopped trying to get better pay. All he asks is that he doesn't have to sleep in his car between shifts at O'Hare airport. That's how despicably low we have sunk. The wealthy couldn't be content with just paying this man $19,000 a year. They wanted to take away his sleep. They wanted to demean and dehumanize him. After all, he's just another slob.
And that, my friends, is Corporate America's fatal mistake. But trying to destroy us they have given birth to a movement - a movement that is becoming a massive, nonviolent revolt across the country. We all knew there had to be a breaking point some day, and that point is upon us. Many people in the media don't understand this. They say they were caught off guard about Egypt, never saw it coming. Now they act surprised and flummoxed about why so many hundreds of thousands have come to Madison over the last three weeks during brutal winter weather. "Why are they all standing out there in the cold? I mean there was that election in November and that was supposed to be that!
"There's something happening here, and you don't know what it is, do you ...?"
America ain't broke! The only thing that's broke is the moral compass of the rulers. And we aim to fix that compass and steer the ship ourselves from now on. Never forget, as long as that Constitution of ours still stands, it's one person, one vote, and it's the thing the rich hate most about America - because even though they seem to hold all the money and all the cards, they begrudgingly know this one unshakeable basic fact: There are more of us than there are of them!
Madison, do not retreat. We are with you. We will win together.
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10) Answer to Michael Moore: We ain't Gonna Play the Game No More!
By Bonnie Weinstein
info@socialistviewpoint.org
socialistviewpoint.org
The problem with Michael Moore's speech in Wisconsin March 5, 2011 is that the 14 Democratic emigres have already given away the economic security of the workers--their pay; their benefits; their vacations; their sick-days; their overtime. They have even convinced organized labor to accept the pay cuts, shorter hours--anything but unemployment, starvation and homelessness!
What noble choices the good Democrats have given to the masses of struggling working people in Wisconsin and everywhere!
In the prelude to his speech, Moore lauds those "heroic 14 Democratic" émigrés that have already given away the workers hard-won benefits and conditions for holding firm and staying away--"not one has come back!" he cheers.
Where are the rest of the Democratic politicians around the country? Where's Obama when masses of workers are being sold down the river? What about all the Democratic governors and mayors who are doing the same thing in their respective states and cities across the country. There isn't one state or city that's lavishing more on social services; on schools; on community medical centers; on healthcare--everyone everywhere EXCEPT THE TOP ONE PERCENT is being asked to give back and give up and surrender to the new middle ages--with the Democrats pretending and promising to steal a little less from workers than the Republicans! Workers can't depend upon any party that claims to represent both workers and the bosses. The jig is up!
Working people need to make democratic decisions based upon our own needs and wants and what is good for us and our families; like whether to spend trillions of OUR dollars on wars based upon lies; or on massive bailouts to corporations who have stolen and hoarded the wealth for themselves; or whether to use the fruits of our labor to pay for healthcare; schools; housing; all the things people need to live healthy, free and happy lives.
Working people produce the wealth; working people should have democratic control over that wealth and the means of production they operate to produce it.
The game of voting for one capitalist liar over another is over. It's like plea-bargaining when you are innocent. It's a lose/lose situation and certainly, the workers of the world are losing the game!
No, America is not broke. But telling workers to depend upon the capitalist electoral process, which only allows workers to vote for one capitalist representative over another, is preposterous and makes workers broke!
We workers must take that wealth that we, and we alone create, into our own hands. We can. We are the majority. And it's the only hope for creating a happy and healthy future for all of us, our children and the world. As Rosa Luxemburg said, the only choice for workers is Socialism; or else, we will continue the plunge into Barbarism!
*'America Is NOT Broke': Michael Moore Speaks in Madison, WI -- March 5, 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgNuSEZ8CDw&feature=player_embedded
America Is NOT Broke
By Michael Moore, Open Mike Blog
March 6, 2011
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/274-41/5178-america-is-not-broke
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11) NATO's inevitable war (Part II)
Reflections of Fidel Castro Ruz
Granma, Havana, March 4, 2011
http://www.granma.cu/ingles/reflections-i/4marzo-NATO-2.html
(Taken from CubaDebate)
WHEN Gaddafi, aged just 28 and a colonel in the Libyan army, inspired by his Egyptian colleague Abdel Nasser, overthrew King Idris I in 1969, he implemented important revolutionary measures such as agrarian reform and the nationalization of oil. The growing income was dedicated to economic and social development, particularly educational and health services for the small Libyan population located in a vast desert territory with very little arable land.
An extensive and deep sea of "fossil water" existed beneath that desert. When I heard about an experimental cultivation area I had the impression that, in the future, those aquifers would be more valuable than oil.
Religious faith, preached with the fervor that characterizes Muslim nations, in part helped to compensate for the strong tribal tendency which still survives in that Arab country.
Libyan revolutionaries devised and implemented their own ideas in relation to legal and political institutions, which Cuba, as a principle, respected.
We totally abstained from expressing any opinions concerning the concepts of the Libyan leadership.
We can clearly see that the fundamental concern of the United States and NATO is not Libya, but the revolutionary wave unleashed in the Arab world, which they wish to prevent at all costs.
It is an irrefutable fact that relations between the United States and its NATO allies in recent years were excellent until the rebellion in Egypt and in Tunisia arose.
In high-level meetings between Libya and NATO leaders, none of the latter had any problems with Gaddafi. The country was a secure source of high-quality oil, gas and even potassium supplies. The problems which arose between them in the early decades had been overcome.
Strategic sectors such as oil pumping and transportation were opened up to foreign investment.
Privatizations were extended to many public enterprises. The International Monetary Fund exercised its beatific role in the implementation of those operations.
Logically, Aznar was fulsome in his praise of Gaddafi and after him, Blair, Berlusconi, Sarkozy, Zapatero and even my friend the King of Spain, paraded past the sardonic regard of the Libyan leader. They were happy.
Although it might seem that I am mocking that is not the case; I am simply asking myself why they now want to take Gaddafi before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
They are accusing him 24 hours a day of firing on unarmed citizens who were protesting. Why did they not explain to the world that the weapons and, above all, the sophisticated machinery of repression possessed by Libya, was supplied by the United States, Britain and other illustrious hosts of Gaddafi?
I strongly oppose the cynicism and lies currently being used to justify the invasion and occupation of Libya.
The last time that I visited Gaddafi was in May 2001, 15 years after Reagan attacked his very modest residence, where he took me to see what was left of it. It received a direct hit from the aircraft and was considerably destroyed; his little daughter three years of age died in the attack: she was murdered by Ronald Reagan. There was no prior agreement on the part of NATO, the Human Rights Committee, or the Security Council.
My previous visit had taken place in 1977, eight years after the beginning of the revolutionary process in Libya. I visited Tripoli; I took part in the General People's Congress in Sebha; I toured the first agricultural experiments with water pumped from the vast sea of fossil waters; I visited Benghazi, I was the object of a warm reception. It was a legendary country which had been the scenario of historic battles in World War II. It did not as yet have six million inhabitants, nor were its enormous volumes of oil and fossil waters known. The former Portuguese colonies in Africa had already been liberated.
We had fought for 15 years in Angola against mercenary armies organized along tribal lines by the United States, the Mobutu government, and the well-equipped and trained racist apartheid army. This army, following U.S. instructions, as is now known, invaded Angola in 1975 in order to prevent its independence, reaching the outskirts of Luanda with its motorized forces. A number of Cuban instructors died in that brutal invasion. Resources were sent with all urgency.
Expelled from that country by Cuban internationalists and Angolan troops to the border of South African occupied Namibia, the racists were given the mission of eliminating the revolutionary process in Angola.
With the support of the United States and Israel they developed nuclear weapons. They already possessed them when the Cuban and Angolan troops defeated their land and air forces in Cuito Cuanavale and, defying the risk - using conventional tactics and means - advanced toward the border with Namibia, where the apartheid troops were attempting to resist. Twice in their history our forces have been at risk of attack by those kinds of weapons: in October of 1962 and in southern Angola, but on that second occasion, not even deploying those nuclear weapons that South Africa possessed could they have prevented the defeat which marked the end of the odious system. Those events took place under the government of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Piet Botha in South Africa.
There is no talk of that and the hundreds of thousands of lives which the imperialist adventure cost.
I regret having to recall those events when another great risk is hovering over the Arab peoples, because they are not resigned to continue being the victims of plunder and oppression.
The Revolution in the Arab world so much feared by the United States and NATO is that of those who lack all rights in the face of those who flaunt all privileges, and thus is destined to be more profound than the one unleashed in Europe in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille.
Not even Louis XIV, when he proclaimed that he was the state, possessed the privileges of King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz of Saudi Arabia and far less the vast wealth that lies below the surface of that almost desert country, where yankee transnationals determine the pumping and thus the price of oil in the world.
When the Libyan crisis began, extraction in Saudi Arabia rose to one million barrels a day at minimum cost and, in consequence, by that concept alone, the income of that country and those who control it has risen to one billon dollars a day.
No one should imagine that the Saudi people are swimming in money. There are moving accounts of the living conditions of many construction workers and those in other sectors obliged to work 13 to 14 hours a day for paltry wages.
Shocked by the revolutionary wave which is shaking the prevalent system of plunder, in the wake of what took place with workers in Egypt and Tunisia, but also unemployed youth in Jordan, the occupied territories of Palestine, Yemen and even Bahrain and the Arab Emirates with higher per capita income, the upper echelons of the Saudi hierarchy has been impacted by the events.
As opposed to other times, today the Arab peoples receive almost instantaneous information on events, albeit exceptionally manipulated.
The worst thing for the status quo of the privileged sectors is that those persistent events are coinciding with a considerable increase in food prices and the devastating impact of climate change, while the United States, the largest producer of corn in the world, is wasting 40% of that product and a significant part of soy production on biofuels to feed automobiles. Lester Brown, the best informed American ecologist in the world on agricultural products, can surely give us an idea of the current food situation.
The Bolivarian president, Hugo Chávez, is making a valiant effort to find a solution without NATO intervention in Libya. The chances of his attaining that objective would improve if he can achieve the feat of creating a broad movement of opinion before and not after the intervention takes place, and the peoples do not have to see the atrocious experience of Iraq repeated in other countries.
End of Reflection.
Fidel Castro Ruz
March 3, 2011
10:32 p.m.
Translated by Granma International
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12) The Real News on Jobs
By Robert Reich
robertreich.org
March 4, 2011
http://robertreich.org/post/3638565075
Are we making progress on the jobs front? The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports 192,000 new jobs in February (220,000 new jobs in the private sector and a drop in government employment), and a drop in the overall unemployment rate from 9 to 8.9 percent.
We're heading in the right direction but far too slowly to make a real dent in unemployment. To get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent by 2014 we'd need over 300,000 new jobs a month, every month, between now and then.
Overall, the number of unemployed Americans - 13.7 million - is about the same as it was last month. The number working part-time who'd rather be working full time - 8.3 million - is also about the same.
But to get to the most important trend you have to dig under the job numbers and look at what kind of new jobs are being created. That's where the big problem lies.
The National Employment Law Project did just that. Its new data brief shows that most of the new jobs created since February 2010 (about 1.26 million) pay significantly lower wages than the jobs lost (8.4 million) between January 2008 and February 2010.
While the biggest losses were higher-wage jobs paying an average of $19.05 to $31.40 an hour, the biggest gains have been lower-wage jobs paying an average of $9.03 to $12.91 an hour.
In other words, the big news isn't jobs. It's wages.
For several years now, conservative economists have blamed high unemployment on the purported fact that many Americans have priced themselves out of the global/high-tech jobs market.
So if we want more jobs, they say, we'll need to take pay and benefit cuts.
And that's exactly what Americans have been doing.
Employers have demanded wage and benefit concessions from their unionized workers and often got them. Detroit is creating auto jobs again - but new hires are getting about half the pay that auto workers were getting before. Airline workers are taking home 30 to 50 percent less than they did years ago. And so on.
Conservatives say it's not enough. That's why unions have to be busted - and why some governors are seeking to abolish laws requiring workers to become dues-paying union members in order to get certain jobs. Hence, the fights brewing in the Midwest.
Meanwhile, millions of non-union workers have accepted cuts in pay and benefits just to keep their jobs. Health benefits have been slashed, pension contributions from employers dramatically cut, wages dropped or "frozen."
Millions of private-sector workers have been fired and then re-hired as contract workers to do almost exactly what they were doing before, but without any benefits or job security.
The current attack on public-sector workers should be seen in this light. The charge is they now take home more generous pay and benefit packages than private-sector workers. It's not true on the wage side if you control for level of education, but it wasn't even true on the benefits side until private-sector benefits fell off a cliff. Meanwhile, across America, public-sector workers have been "furloughed," which is a nice word for not collecting any pay for weeks at a time.
At this rate, the unemployment rate will continue to decline. But so will the pay and benefits of most Americans.
Conservative economists have it wrong. The underlying problem isn't that so many Americans have priced themselves out of the global/high-tech labor market. It's that they're getting a smaller and smaller share of the American pie.
Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written thirteen books, including The Work of Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, Supercapitalism, and his most recent book, Aftershock. His "Marketplace" commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes.
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13) Talks to Resolve Wisconsin Battle Falter
By MONICA DAVEY
March 7, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/us/08wisconsin.html?hp
CHICAGO - Talks appear to have broken down between Wisconsin's Democratic state senators and representatives of Gov. Scott Walker, whose plan to cut collective bargaining rights and benefits for public workers has created a major battle in the state, some of the Senate Democrats said on Sunday.
Senator Fred Risser, one of 14 Democrats who left Wisconsin last month to prevent the Republican-dominated Senate from approving the collective bargaining measure, said it now seemed conceivable that he and his fellow Democrats would return to Wisconsin, at some point in the future, without a negotiated compromise.
"We have always said we would go back eventually," Mr. Risser said, adding that the Democrats had yet to make any decision about when to go back to Madison, a move that would open the way for a vote on the proposal by Mr. Walker, a Republican elected in November. "We will have accomplished some of our purpose - to slow things up and let people know what was in this bill."
The Democrats left the state on Feb. 17, the day that a vote was expected on Mr. Walker's measure in the state Senate. While Republicans control the chamber, they need 20 senators - and, thus, at least one Democrat - to take votes on fiscal matters.
If the Democrats return, the Republicans, who hold a 19-14 majority in the Senate, are expected to pass the measure. The Democrats say that while they cannot permanently block that outcome, they believe public opinion has turned against the measure and that the Republicans may lose their majority in a recall effort that is now underway against senators over this issue; recalls efforts are being mounted against both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate.
In recent days, the Democrats have been in conversations with Republican leaders over the issues most objectionable to the Democrats in Mr. Walker's proposal - elements aimed at lessening the political power and bargaining rights of public sector unions.
But Mr. Walker, who has said his plans were needed to help solve the state's current and future budget woes, has indicated that he would not be swayed on such issues. And after talks failed at the end of last week, some Democrats said they believed Mr. Walker would never consider removing collective bargaining rights from a broader package aimed at cutting pension and health care benefits to reduce the state's deficit.
"He turned down any effort to compromise on the workers' rights program," Mr. Risser said.
Still, while a spokesman for Mark Miller, the Democrats' leader in the Senate, acknowledged that there had been a "setback" in talks with the governor's representatives, he also said that reaching some sort of negotiated deal remained a top priority for the senate Democrats.
"I don't think anyone is willing to throw in the towel yet," said Mike Browne, the spokesman for Mr. Miller.
A spokesman for Mr. Walker did not respond to a request for comment late Sunday.
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14) High Fascism
By RHONDA GARELICK
March 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/opinion/07Garelick.html?hp
AS I left a Paris cafe the other night, instead of the usual "Bonsoir, Madame," the waiter called after me, "Happy Fashion Week!" as if we were all celebrating a national holiday.
Maybe we were. Fashion is more than business in France: it's a mythology, a secular religion, a source of national pride, especially during Fashion Week, when the country recalls its history as the birthplace of haute couture.
In recent days, though, in response to the anti-Semitic diatribe by Christian Dior's creative director, John Galliano, the French have been recalling a far more ominous chapter in their history.
According to witnesses, a drunken Mr. Galliano exploded at a woman seated near him in a Paris bar. "Dirty Jewish face, you should be dead," he is said to have told her. "Your boots are of the lowest quality, your thighs are of the lowest quality. You are so ugly I don't want to see you. I am John Galliano!"
France is highly sensitive to such matters, and reprisals came quickly. Dior fired Mr. Galliano, who now faces charges of using a racial insult, a crime in France. But beyond the spectacle of one man's abhorrent politics, the episode invites consideration of the curious relationship between French fashion and fascism.
During the Occupation, the Nazis and their French allies recognized the power and national prestige of the French fashion industry and sought to harness it. When the collaborationist Vichy government took over direction of the French lifestyle magazine Paris Soir, it announced in its pages a "summer of couture ... and shopping." The Nazis were so enamored with fashion's place in French culture that in their plans for postwar Europe, they stipulated that, unlike other industries, the fashion sector would remain in France.
Many in fashion were eager to play along. Lucien Lelong, a designer who supported Vichy and whose house stayed open during the war, saw couture as a political force: "Our role is to give France the face of serenity. The more elegant Frenchwomen are, the more our country will show the world that we are not afraid."
French fashion publications advocated a deep connection between the cultural splendor of couture and Frenchwomen's national, even genetic identity.
"Every woman in Paris is a living propaganda poster, the universal function of the Frenchwoman is to remain chic," wrote one fashion journalist in the early 1940s. "Frenchwomen are the repositories of chic, because this inheritance is inscribed in their race," wrote another. And as Vichy continued to toe the Nazi line about Aryan physical fitness, more French fashion magazines began focusing on exercise and diet for women.
Although not everyone in the world of French fashion fell in line with fascist ideas, it's no coincidence that many did. After all, there are deep and unsettling parallels between the industry, particularly in Europe, and fascism's antidemocratic aesthetic.
Both, for example, rely on a handful of oracular, charismatic leaders who issue proclamations to (select) crowds. Fascist leaders offered their followers the prospect of an enhanced, mythic identity - a dream of youth and beauty, the same attributes promised by high fashion.
While fashion has moved far beyond the worst of the Vichy years, the role of the stylized, quasi-mythical celebrity-designer remains in the form of figures like Mr. Galliano and Chanel's Karl Lagerfeld; Mr. Galliano has been known to costume himself as a pirate or a Proustian dandy, while Mr. Lagerfeld sticks to a somewhat Goth interpretation of an 18th-century Prussian officer.
At the root of the whole system is the most elusive myth of all: the impossible promise that fashion can vanquish physical inadequacy and aging, conferring the beauty and youth we see on the runways and on every page of Vogue - a cult of physical perfection very much at home in the history of fascism.
And although we insist on the racial diversity of fashion's current standards of beauty, the fascists' body ideal has persisted and expanded far beyond Europe. The hallmarks of the Nazi aesthetic - blue eyes, blond hair, athletic fitness and sharp-angled features - are the very elements that define what we call the all-American look, still visible in the mythic advertising landscapes of designers like (the decidedly non-Aryan) Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein.
Which brings us back to Mr. Galliano in the Paris bar. His was not a generic anti-Semitic tirade, but the self-conscious pronouncement of a world-class arbiter of taste ("I am John Galliano!"). Not only did he use ethnic slurs, he accused the woman of being unattractive and unfashionable, associating both with ethnicity, with being Jewish (which she happened not to be).
The link is clear: like a fascist demagogue of yore, he was declaring that she did not belong to the gilded group who wear the right boots, and from this Mr. Galliano slid effortlessly to a condemnation of her very flesh, and a wish for her death.
Last week the French daily Le Monde declared that by firing Mr. Galliano, Dior had sounded the "death knell for the myth of the omnipotent designer." That may be premature, given the myth's deep roots. But the drunken ramblings of one man in a bar may have set off an important discussion about a less pretty undercurrent in a multibillion-dollar industry. Happy Fashion Week.
Rhonda Garelick, a professor of English and performing arts at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is working on a cultural biography of Coco Chanel.
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15) Degrees and Dollars
By PAUL KRUGMAN
March 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/opinion/07krugman.html?hp
It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That's why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that "If we want more good news on the jobs front then we've got to make more investments in education."
But what everyone knows is wrong.
The day after the Obama-Bush event, The Times published an article about the growing use of software to perform legal research. Computers, it turns out, can quickly analyze millions of documents, cheaply performing a task that used to require armies of lawyers and paralegals. In this case, then, technological progress is actually reducing the demand for highly educated workers.
And legal research isn't an isolated example. As the article points out, software has also been replacing engineers in such tasks as chip design. More broadly, the idea that modern technology eliminates only menial jobs, that well-educated workers are clear winners, may dominate popular discussion, but it's actually decades out of date.
The fact is that since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by "hollowing out": both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs - the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class - have lagged behind. And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated.
Why is this happening? The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information - loosely speaking, that computers help those who work with their minds, while hurting those who work with their hands.
Some years ago, however, the economists David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that this was the wrong way to think about it. Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, "cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules." Therefore, any routine task - a category that includes many white-collar, nonmanual jobs - is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can't be carried out by following explicit rules - a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors - will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.
And here's the thing: Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be of the kind that's hard to automate. Notably, with production workers in manufacturing down to about 6 percent of U.S. employment, there aren't many assembly-line jobs left to lose. Meanwhile, quite a lot of white-collar work currently carried out by well-educated, relatively well-paid workers may soon be computerized. Roombas are cute, but robot janitors are a long way off; computerized legal research and computer-aided medical diagnosis are already here.
And then there's globalization. Once, only manufacturing workers needed to worry about competition from overseas, but the combination of computers and telecommunications has made it possible to provide many services at long range. And research by my Princeton colleagues Alan Blinder and Alan Krueger suggests that high-wage jobs performed by highly educated workers are, if anything, more "offshorable" than jobs done by low-paid, less-educated workers. If they're right, growing international trade in services will further hollow out the U.S. job market.
So what does all this say about policy?
Yes, we need to fix American education. In particular, the inequalities Americans face at the starting line - bright children from poor families are less likely to finish college than much less able children of the affluent - aren't just an outrage; they represent a huge waste of the nation's human potential.
But there are things education can't do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It's no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you'll get a good job, and it's becoming less true with each passing decade.
So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn't the answer - we'll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.
What we can't do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don't exist or don't pay middle-class wages.
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16) No Crime, but an Arrest and Two Strip-Searches
"The more recent trend, from appeals courts in Atlanta, San Francisco and Philadelphia, is to allow searches no matter how minor the charge. Some potential examples cited by dissenting judges in those cases: violating a leash law, driving without a license, failing to pay child support."
By ADAM LIPTAK
March 7, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/us/08bar.html?hp
WASHINGTON
Albert W. Florence believes that black men who drive nice cars in New Jersey run a risk of being questioned by the police. For that reason, he kept handy a 2003 document showing he had paid a court-imposed fine stemming from a traffic offense, just in case.
It did not seem to help.
In March 2005, Mr. Florence was in the passenger seat of his BMW when a state trooper pulled it over for speeding. His wife, April, was driving. His 4-year-old son, Shamar, was in the back.
The trooper ran a records search, and he found an outstanding warrant based on the supposedly unpaid fine. Mr. Florence showed the trooper the document, but he was arrested anyway.
A failure to pay a fine is not a crime. It is, rather, what New Jersey law calls a nonindictable offense. Mr. Florence was nonetheless held for eight days in two counties on a charge of civil contempt before matters were sorted out.
In the process, he was strip-searched twice.
"Turn around," he remembered being told while he stood naked before several guards and prisoners. "Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks."
The treatment stung. "I consider myself a man's man," said Mr. Florence, a finance executive for a car dealership. "Six-three. Big guy. It was humiliating. It made me feel less than a man. It made me feel not better than an animal."
The Supreme Court is likely to decide this month whether to hear Mr. Florence's case against officials in New Jersey over the searches, and there is reason to think it will.
The federal courts of appeal are divided over whether blanket policies requiring jailhouse strip-searches of people arrested for minor offenses violate the Fourth Amendment. Eight courts have ruled that such searches are proper only if there is a reasonable suspicion that the arrested person has weapons or contraband.
The more recent trend, from appeals courts in Atlanta, San Francisco and Philadelphia, is to allow searches no matter how minor the charge. Some potential examples cited by dissenting judges in those cases: violating a leash law, driving without a license, failing to pay child support.
Although the judges in the majority in Mr. Florence's case, the one heard in Philadelphia, said they had been presented with no evidence that the searches were needed, they nonetheless ruled that they would not second-guess corrections officials who said they feared that people like Mr. Florence would smuggle contraband into their jails.
The most pertinent Supreme Court decision, Bell v. Wolfish, was decided by a 5-to-4 vote in 1979. It allowed strip-searches of people held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York after "contact visits" with outsiders.
On the one hand, such visits are planned and may provide opportunities for smuggling contraband in a way that unanticipated arrests do not. On the other, as Judge Marvin E. Frankel of Federal District Court in Manhattan wrote in the case in 1977, contact visits take place in front of guards. "The secreting of objects in rectal or genital areas becomes in this situation an imposing challenge to nerves and agility," Judge Frankel wrote.
The recent decisions allowing strip-searches of all arrestees have said they were authorized by the Supreme Court's Bell decision. In the Atlanta case, Judge Ed Carnes said that new inmates enter facilities there after "one big and prolonged contact visit with the outside world."
In Mr. Florence's case, the majority used interesting reasoning to justify routine strip-searches.
"It is plausible," Judge Thomas M. Hardiman wrote, "that incarcerated persons will induce or recruit others to subject themselves to arrest on nonindictable offenses to smuggle weapons or other contraband into the facility."
Mr. Florence's lawyer, Susan Chana Lask, said that would make sense if her client were "Houdini in reverse" - a master of becoming incarcerated though blameless, in the hope of passing along contraband to confederates waiting for him inside.
In his dissent in Mr. Florence's case, Judge Louis H. Pollak, a former dean of Yale Law School, was also skeptical of the majority's theory. "One might doubt," he wrote, "that individuals would deliberately commit minor offenses such as civil contempt - the offense for which Florence was arrested - and then secrete contraband on their persons, all in the hope that they will, at some future moment, be arrested and taken to jail to make their illicit deliveries."
In urging the Supreme Court not to hear Mr. Florence's case, officials from Burlington County, N.J., allowed that "perhaps petitioner's frustration is understandable."
But jails are dangerous places, the brief said. "It might even be argued that those arrested on nonindictable or other 'minor' offenses would be particularly anxious," the brief reasoned, to make sure that everyone around them was thoroughly searched.
Mr. Florence's son has drawn a lesson from what he saw from the back seat in 2005. "If he sees a cop and we're together," Mr. Florence testified in 2006, "he still asks, 'Daddy, are you going to jail?' "
I wrote recently about a criminal libel action in Paris over a book review. On Thursday, a French court ruled against the unhappy author, Karin Calvo-Goller, saying she had abused the judicial process by complaining about a review that did not go beyond "the limits of free criticism to which all authors of intellectual works expose themselves."
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17) Answering the Public, Egypt Names a New Cabinet
"Reports that the state security police were burning and shredding incriminating documents led to the rampage on Saturday, as well as a protest at the Interior Ministry on Sunday. After several hours, plainclothes police officers dispersed hundreds of protesters with sticks, knives and rocks, while soldiers fired into the air, sending echoes of gunfire through downtown Cairo for the first time in weeks. ...Packaged like WikiLeaks, but under the banner 'State Security Leaks,' many of the documents were burned around the edges, suggesting that reports of document burning may have been accurate."
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR and MONA EL-NAGGAR
March 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/world/middleeast/07egypt.html?ref=world
CAIRO - Egypt's interim prime minister appointed a new caretaker cabinet on Sunday, answering a public demand to eliminate most ministers with links to former President Hosni Mubarak, even as protesters nationwide continued to try to storm the offices of hated institutions.
Egyptians were riveted by a trove of secret police documents seized while protesters rampaged through a central office of the state security organization on Saturday night, which began popping up on Facebook.
Reports that the state security police were burning and shredding incriminating documents led to the rampage on Saturday, as well as a protest at the Interior Ministry on Sunday. After several hours, plainclothes police officers dispersed hundreds of protesters with sticks, knives and rocks, while soldiers fired into the air, sending echoes of gunfire through downtown Cairo for the first time in weeks.
The reviled plainclothes security police officers were last seen in force trying to violently suppress the protests that led to the ouster of Mr. Mubarak on Feb. 11, and their re-emergence on Sunday created new tension.
The army, which has been running the country since Mr. Mubarak's departure, had apologized for previous outbursts of violence by the security forces, but its use of them on Sunday showed signs of impatience with repeated demonstrations despite constant pleas for patience and calm.
The demonstration ended Sunday with a compromise: 10 of the protesters could enter the building to confirm that the secret police were not destroying documents.
The military government reacted sharply to the sacking of the secret police headquarters, issuing a statement demanding that citizens return the purloined files and refrain from publishing and circulating them.
But the documents posted on the Internet, whose authenticity could not be immediately confirmed, created a sensation.
Packaged like WikiLeaks, but under the banner "State Security Leaks," many of the documents were burned around the edges, suggesting that reports of document burning may have been accurate.
Some were embarrassing for public figures, suggesting, for example, that a famous newspaper editor had bought a heavily discounted mansion from a corrupt politician later convicted of murder.
Others revealed efforts by state security to rein in a popular television host, Mona el-Shazly, and to defame Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency who became an opposition leader.
The file on Ms. Shazly, the most influential late-night television host in Egypt, accused her of harboring the socialist sympathies that had landed her father in jail and "made her adopt an incendiary approach in discussing issues related to the Ministry of the Interior."
The report called her talk show "imbalanced" and said that she had to be warned by state security that she "has gone beyond her limits."
Ms. Shazly reacted with outrage and demanded an investigation into the files. "This way of dealing with citizens was enough to destroy not only the state security service, but also the state itself," she said on her show on Sunday.
The file on Mr. ElBaradei, who was considered a possible presidential candidate, noted an e-mail "from somebody named Wael Ghonim (being investigated now)" offering to set up a Web site for him. As is well known now, Mr. Ghonim was the Google executive behind some of the main Internet activity that led to the government's fall. He was arrested and then released during the 18-day rebellion.
The new cabinet nominated by Prime Minister Essam Sharaf includes Nabil Elaraby, a respected former United Nations ambassador and former judge on the International Court of Justice in The Hague, who will be foreign minister. He replaces Ahmed Aboul Gheit, who had held the post since 2004 and was widely disliked by the Tahrir Square protesters after he reportedly described them as "thugs" in a cabinet meeting.
At a democracy forum last Friday, Mr. Elaraby detailed a list of problems that plague the Egyptian government, including a lack of separation of powers, a lack of transparency and a lack of judicial independence.
Mr. Mubarak had often pursued a foreign policy, in particular in critical areas like Israel and the Arab world, based on his personal preferences. Foreign policy should be based on Egypt's interests, Mr. Elaraby said, including "holding Israel accountable when it does not respect its obligations."
He described Egypt as passing through a "dangerous phase" in the current constitutional vacuum.
"The transition period will not resolve these issues," Mr. Elaraby said. "But what it can do is prepare us to be in a position and a place from which we can move forward."
Two other major figures in the new cabinet are the ministers of the interior, Mansour el-Essawy, and justice, Mohamed Abdelaziz el-Gendy.
Mr. Essawy, considered the rare high official who previously resisted government pressure over sweetheart land deals, said he was eager to fix the tarnished image of the police by focusing the state security apparatus on threats like terrorism. A main demand of the protesters, who have again established an encampment on Tahrir Square, is that the secret police be disbanded.
At least four of the new cabinet ministers, including Mr. Elaraby, were proposed by the coalition of youth groups behind the protests, members said.
"All the repulsive faces are gone from the cabinet," said Hassan Nafaa, a political science professor at Cairo University. The new ministers, he said, "are not associated with corruption and do not have a bad reputation."
There was some objection, however, to the decision to retain Gen. Sayyid Meshaal as minister of military production, which oversees military-owned factories. His reappointment has fueled speculation that the military council was protecting its own.
Liam Stack contributed reporting.
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18) Bahrain's Promised Spending Fails to Quell Dissent
By THOMAS FULLER
March 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/world/middleeast/07bahrain.html?ref=world
MANAMA, Bahrain - The leaders of Bahrain's opposition movement said Sunday that they would not be mollified by offers of money and jobs, raising the prospect of a protracted standoff between protesters and the embattled government of this strategically important Persian Gulf island nation.
"This is about dignity and freedom - it's not about filling our stomachs," said Ebrahim Sharif, a former banker who helped lead a protest on Sunday at the gates of a government building.
Protesters in Bahrain have held daily demonstrations for the past three weeks, undeterred by a government crackdown that killed seven people. The protests continued on Sunday, with thousands of people gathering in Manama's Pearl Square, the epicenter of the movement.
Bahrain's Interior Ministry announced over the weekend that it was seeking to hire 20,000 people, a measure it said was designed to benefit job seekers and improve security in the country, which is home to a United States naval base.
The oil-rich countries of the gulf, led by Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, are also reportedly considering a plan to provide billions of dollars to Bahrain and Oman as part of an effort to address social problems and quell protests.
The recent spike in oil prices has given Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer, and its neighbors more scope for handouts and subsidies, part of a longstanding tradition of trading cash for domestic peace.
As protests have spread across the Arab world, the Persian Gulf countries have opened their wallets more than usual.
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia last month announced $37 billion worth of pay raises, unemployment checks and other benefits. The king of Bahrain, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, offered 1,000 dinars, about $2,600, for each family. In January, the government of Kuwait said each citizen would receive the equivalent of $3,500. And last week the sultan of Oman decreed that anyone without a job would be eligible for a monthly stipend of $375.
But in Bahrain and Oman, monetary concessions have yet to assuage protesters.
More than 100,000 people - about one in five Bahraini citizens - joined a protest in Manama on Friday where many shouted "Down, Down Hamad!" The king's family, which is Sunni, has ruled the Shiite-majority country for more than two centuries.
Smaller protests have also continued in Sohar, a northern industrial city in Oman, which is ruled by Sultan Qaboos bin Said.
"Poor people took the money, but are still insisting on getting political reform," said Abdul Jalil Khalil Ebrahim, a senior member of Wefaq, the largest opposition party in Bahrain.
Mr. Ebrahim says future payments in Bahrain by regional governments will be diminished by corruption and may not reach the people who need them. In addition, the cash does not address the central demands of protesters - for democracy.
"They are throwing slogans to absorb the anger of people," Mr. Ebrahim said of the government, which is controlled by Bahrain's royal family. "But the core of this is political, not financial."
In response to e-mailed questions, Maysoon Sabkar, a spokeswoman for Bahrain's government, said that support from the gulf countries and the initiative to create jobs at the Interior Ministry were "not aimed at ending protests in Bahrain, but they do form part of an overall program to make necessary improvements for the benefit of all."
Ms. Sabkar reiterated that the government's main focus was a proposal for a national dialogue.
The opposition has refused to negotiate until the government, led by the king's uncle, Prime Minister Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa, steps down. The prime minister has been in power 40 years.
The opposition says it plans to ratchet up pressure on the government in the coming weeks. The protests have damaged tourism and the financial industry, said Mr. Sharif, the former banker, who now heads a secular opposition party known as Wa'ad.
"We will see every week another activity that will take the momentum higher," Mr. Sharif said in an interview on Sunday. "We are attacking peacefully all the institutions of the state."
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19) REPORT on Emergency Labor Meeting
(Cleveland, Ohio - March 4-5, 2011)
emergencylabor@aol.com
BUILDING UNITY TO DEFEAT UNION-BUSTING AND CONCESSIONS
Ninety-six union leaders and activists from 26 states and from a broad cross-section of the labor movement gathered at the Laborers Local 310 Hall in Cleveland on March 4-5, 2011, in response to an invitation sent out in January urging them to "explore together what we can do to mount a more militant and robust fight-back campaign to defend the interests of working people." [See excerpts from Letter of Invitation and list of endorsers of the meeting below.]
Three weeks prior to the Emergency Labor Meeting (ELM), unionists and community and student activists in Wisconsin unleashed a resistance movement against Governor Scott Walker's union-busting and concessionary attacks that in a short time has breathed new life into the labor movement. The sustained occupation of the State Capitol and the sustained mobilizations in the streets -- including 7,000 people who marched on March 3 "Against All Concessions for Workers" at the initiative of National Nurses United and 50,000 people who rallied on March 5 -- have galvanized working people across the country.
Participants in the ELM took full note of the new situation and of the grave dangers to the U.S. labor movement and to workers' and democratic rights posed by Governor Walker's attacks. They pledged to make the fight against union-busting and the budget cuts/concessions in Wisconsin the centerpiece of an emergency action plan centered on two national days of action called by the labor movement:
* March 12: Participants pledged to go back to their unions and workers' organizations to promote the March 12 Day of Action called by the Wisconsin AFL-CIO. Brother David Newby, President-Emeritus of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO, attended the ELM and relayed the proposal from his state federation that all unionists and labor activists in Wisconsin and neighboring states mobilize in Madison on March 12, with labor-led solidarity actions the same day in cities across the country.
* April 4: Participants welcomed the call issued by Larry Cohen, International President of the Communication Workers of America (CWA) to organize on April 4, the anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a "not-business-as-usual" Nationwide Day of Action at workplaces and communities across the country in support of labor rights. This call has since been supported by the AFL-CIO Executive Board, which is urging "movement-wide dramatic actions" on this day.
Participants agreed to go back to their unions and communities to promote broad support for this April 4 Day of Action in all ways deemed appropriate by unions and community organizations on the ground, including, where possible, industrial actions. They also urged support for these actions around demands that link the struggle in defense of labor rights to the struggle against budget cuts and concessions, and that point to solutions to the federal and state budget deficits, including taxing the rich and the corporations, cutting the war budget, and creating 27 million full-time jobs through a massive public works program (which could be launched immediately and without raising the U.S. budget by a penny with a $1 trillion "Bridge Loan" from the Federal Reserve).
To promote these actions, participants pledged to go back to their cities to build "We Are All Wisconsin!" committees of labor and community activists.
Also, in the event the Walker bill is approved by the Wisconsin legislature, the state's labor movement has announced that it is prepared to launch a recall campaign designed to remove from office seven members of the Wisconsin Senate. The Wisconsin State AFL-CIO, in fact, has already initiated a fundraising campaign for this purpose. [To send a donation, or for updates on this campaign, go to http://www.wisaflcio.org or call 414-771-0700.]
In Ohio, a bill to deny collective-bargaining rights to public employees is likely to pass in the General Assembly. Ohio labor and its allies are already gearing up to get the bill rescinded through a referendum. To qualify for a referendum for the ballot in Ohio, supporters must gather about 230,000 valid signatures within 90 days after the bill passes and is signed by the governor. The Ohio labor movement is organizing to gather the necessary number. The bill will not be implemented for 90 days regardless, but if the requisite number of signatures is submitted and validated, the bill will be held in abeyance pending the November 2011 election. A bill passed by the Ohio General Assembly in 1997 to gut workers' compensation was never implemented because of a successful labor-led campaign to rescind it through a referendum vote.
Participants in the Emergency Labor Meeting discussed a "Perspectives" document submitted by the ELM Organizing Committee. Changes and additions were made to the text, which will serve as the framework for future efforts undertaken by a Continuations Committee that will emanate from the meeting. [See Perspectives document below.]
Participants also took a stand urging the ELM Continuations Committee, in collaboration with the fighting unions and community organizations, to consider the possibility of organizing in the not-too-distant future a broader and open Labor-Community Conference structured around the points included in the ELM Perspectives document.
Throughout the four panel discussions of the meeting, participants submitted a whole host of proposals and ideas aimed at bolstering the capacity of the labor movement to assert its independence and fight back against the employers' and government's offensive. These will be incorporated into a "Tool Box" on the new website that will be set up by the ELM Continuations Committee.
For example, proposals on how best to organize labor-community coalitions, with reports on activities of the "We Are All Wisconsin!" committees in different cities, will be included in the Tool Box. Also included will be articles and proposals geared to helping to educate union members about the roots of the current economic and financial crisis from a working-class perspective. These are just two of the many sections that will be included in the Tool Box. Participants entrusted the new Continuations Committee with the task of publishing as many of these texts as possible in Spanish and other languages, to strengthen the ties with immigrant workers.
Participants left the meeting encouraged by the new fight-back movement in the country and by the necessary contribution to this movement that this ELM effort can provide. All unionists and activists interested in working with the ELM Continuations Committee to advance the goals contained in the ELM Perspectives document should write to
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PERSPECTIVES APPROVED BY EMERGENCY LABOR MEETING
1 - As they are doing throughout most countries, the corporate class is using the financial crisis orchestrated by them to launch unprecedented attacks on the job security, living standards, working conditions and useful public services once enjoyed by the working class in the United States. This cold-blooded offensive threatens the very existence of our unions.
2 - Labor movement unity in action -- public and private sector, the two federations and the independent unions -- is indispensable to success in stopping and reversing this assault.
3 - As recent events in Wisconsin have reaffirmed, the key to an effective fight-back is mobilization of the union ranks. We envision a strategy that includes both actions in the workplace and in the streets.
4 - We must go to the streets to defend trade union and democratic rights, as public sector workers are now doing. The right to collective bargaining is a right enshrined in universally recognized Conventions 87 and 98 of the UN-based International Labor Organization (ILO); it is also a human right codified in the UN Charter. In fact, the United States is on trial before world public opinion for violating basic labor rights at home. The ILO ruled recently that the state of North Carolina was out of compliance with international labor standards for denying collective-bargaining rights for public sector workers, and the ILO called on North Carolina and the U.S. government to repeal this ban on collective-bargaining rights.
5 - We must also go to the streets to oppose the concessions demanded by the bosses and the government. There is plenty of money available without demanding givebacks from public employees, but this requires changing our nation's priorities to raise taxes on the rich, redirect war dollars to meet human needs, and more -- all demands that we must place on the federal government. We can no longer effectively deal with such crucial issues as health care and retirement through collective bargaining alone.
6 - We not only defend the social insurance model -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public education, food stamps, unemployment insurance, etc. -- but demand that these programs be strengthened and improved. And it is high time we follow the example won by our Canadian sisters and brothers decades ago by extending Medicare to all.
7 - Nor can contract negotiations create the 27 million full-time jobs urgently needed today. Since the private sector has failed to do this (in fact, the corporations continue to off-shore good full-time jobs in their continued drive to lower labor costs), we need a public sector that can put America back to work rebuilding our neglected and crumbling infrastructure, revitalizing mass transit, and promoting a sustainable economy. The public sector and public services provide the basic core safety net for human rights.
8 - In fighting for such independent solutions to our country's crises we would return to what once was the bedrock of trade unionism -- our unions champion the needs of the entire working class, including the unemployed, not just our dues-paying members. That approach was what enabled the historic labor victories during the depths of the Great Depression. This is not only the right thing to do; with union density at near record lows we cannot win the big struggles just on our own.
9 - To cement working class unity we reject every attempt to divide us by race, skin color, gender, immigration status, religion, or sexual orientation. This means not only politically correct resolutions but active support to all targets of such pernicious discrimination.
10 - A unified, energized working class could reach out for even wider alliances. There are millions of students, mom-and-pop businesses, family farmers, and others who are being squeezed by the corporate class. Seeking to partner with the Chamber of Commerce and corporate America, however, can only lead to failure for labor and its allies.
11 - Our goals cannot be met while American blood and vast amounts of our tax dollars are being consumed by unjust wars to advance the global corporate agenda. We say end the wars, bring all of our troops home now -- and put the war budget to work for human needs.
12 - Instead of supporting wars of intervention, the labor movement should embrace international worker solidarity. The mutual declarations of support between protesters in Madison and insurgent independent unions in Egypt are a proud example that deserve wide emulation.
13 - Since many of the attacks we face today have bipartisan support, labor must act independently of these two parties. To the extent that the labor movement subordinates its demands to agreements with these parties in the name of "shared sacrifice," it will not be able to defend effectively the interests of its members and of the working-class majority.
14 - The call to protect the right to collective bargaining must include the demand to repeal all laws that prevent workers, such as those in the U.S. South, from having the right to bargain collectively and arrive at enforceable contracts. All laws, such as the Taft-Hartley Act, that prevent the consolidation of strong unions in the Southeast and other regions of the country must be repealed.
15 - We must view organizing the South as fundamental to rebuilding a strong national labor movement in this country.
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EXCERPT FROM LETTER OF INVITATION
TO THE EMERGENCY LABOR MEETING
"We want this meeting to address how we can spur more effective action by the labor movement to win the creation of millions of new jobs at the expense of Wall Street and the rich; a moratorium on home foreclosures; defense of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; protection of pensions; closing the widening gap in economic and social inequality; enactment of the Employee Free Choice Act; redirection of war dollars to meet human needs; and generating federal support for state and city governments that are poised to lay off even more teachers and other public employees, support that includes allocating sufficient resources to ensure that ALL of our children have access to quality public schools and affordable higher education."
ENDORSERS OF CLEVELAND EMERGENCY LABOR MEETING
Donna Dewitt, President, South Carolina AFL-CIO - David Newby, President Emeritus. Wisconsin State AFL-CIO* - Jos Williams, President, Washington Metro Council, AFL-CIO - Ken Riley, President, International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) Local 1422 - Karen Lewis, President, Chicago Teachers Union (AFT) Local 1* - Henry Nicholas, President, National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees, AFSCME - Jim Savage, President, USW Local 10-1 - Lew Moye, President, St Louis Chapter, Coalition of Black Trade Unionists - Eduardo Quintana, President, International Association of Machinists (IAM) Local Lodge 933* - David Poklinkoski, President and Business Manager, IBEW Local 2304 - Monadel Herzallah, President, Arab American Union Members Council - USLAW-affiliate - Dominick Patrignani, President IUE-CWA Local 81359 - Jeff Crosby, President, North Shore Labor Council - Traven Leyshon, President Green Mountain Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO - Ron Dicks, International Vice President, International Federation of Professional and Technical Employees (IFPTE)* - Erin McKee, President, Charleston Central Labor Council* - Tim Paulson, Executive Director, San Francisco Labor Council - San Francisco Labor Council, AFL-CIO - Laborers Local 310 - Laborers Local 483 - GEO 6300 (IFT-AFT). - Portland Jobs with Justice - Sonia Ivany, National Vice-President, Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, President, New York City, LCLAA - Andrea L. Delgado, Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA) - Dennis Serrette, Education Director, Communications Workers of America* - Tom Leedham, Secretary-Treasurer, Teamsters Local 206 - Ashaki Binta, Field Orgnizer, UE* - Sal Rosselli, Interim President, National Union of Healthcare Workers* - Gladys McKenzie, Field Representative, AFSCME Council 5 (Minnesota)* - Phil Qualy, Minnesota State Legislative Director, United Transportation Union* - Mark Dudzic, National Coordinator, Labor Campaign for Single-Payer Health Care* - Saladin Muhammad, member of Black Workers For Justice and Coordinator of UE Local150's International Worker Justice Campaign - Jesse Sharkey, Vice President, Chicago Teachers Union (AFT) Local 1* - Virginia Robinson, former Treasurer and Reporting Secretary, Cleveland AFL- CIO; retired member, Steelworkers Union - Bill Henning, Vice President, CWA Local 1180 - Gabriel Prawl, ILWU Local 52 ,Executive Co-chair African American Longshore Coalition - Eduardo Rosario, Grievance Representative, AFSCME Local 375, New York City* - John Wagner, Executive Secretary-Treasurer, Tri-County Regional Labor Council, AFL-CIO* - Jan D. Pierce, retired Vice President, CWA District One - Ed Sadlowski, Staff Representative, Wisconsin Council 40, AFSCME, AFL-CIO*; Member, Local 938; membership in Council 40 Field and Support Staff Union - Mary Prophet, Co-Chair, Ca Teachers' Association Peace & Justice Caucus; KPFA Community Advisory Board; Steering Committee, USLAW* - Jerry Tucker, former Intl UAW Exec Board Member; Center for Labor Renewal Co-Founder - David Riehle, United Transportation Union Local 650 Vice-Chairman; past local Chairman 1989-2007 - Chris Silvera, Secretary-Treasurer, Teamsters Local 808 - Sandy Eaton, RN; Chair, National Nurses United Legislative Council* - Dr. Peter Rachleff, professor of history, Macalaster College; author and researcher on U.S. labor, immigration and African American history - Mary Nichols-Rhodes, LPN, Ohio coordinator, Progressive Democrats of America - Dean Gunderson, Minnesota Association of Professional Employees Region 5 Director and past local president - Gregory Cendana, Executive Director, Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, AFL-CIO - Bill Fletcher, Jr., Center for Labor Renewal; BlackCommentator.com - Jim Lafferty, UAW Legal Service Workers; Director, National Lawyers Guild Los Angeles - Dr. Jack Rasmus, Member, American Federation of Teachers University Council, University of California Berkley; Former National First Vice President, National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981; former local union Vice President and Business Representative, CWA Local 9415 and SEIU Local 715 - Alan Benjamin, Executive Committee, San Francisco Labor Council; Co-Convenor, Workers Emergency Recovery Campaign - Jim Hamilton, State Executive Committee, Missouri AFT* - Carolyn Park, Steward, AFSCME Local 232* - Mike Carano, Member Teamsters Union Local 348, member, State Council, Single-Payer Action Network Ohio (SPAN Ohio)* - Bill Leumer, Former President, International Association of Machinists Local 565*; Co-Convenor, Workers Emergency Recovery Campaign - Russell Bannan, LCLAA Denver Metro Communication Coordinator; Colorado Jobs with Justice Executive Board; Colorado Young Workers Steering Committee - Bill Onasch, Retired former vice president, ATU Local 1287* - Steve Early, labor journalist, lawyer, and former CWA International Representative; author of Embedded with Organized Labor and The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor - Dan La Botz, National Writers Union/UAW* - Clarence Thomas. Executive Board, ILWU Local 10 - Lenny Potash, Co-Chair Labor United for Universal Healthcare* - Fred Hirsch, Executive Board Member, Plumbers & Fitters Local 393; Delegate to the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council and to the Santa Clara and San Benito Counties Building & Construction Trades Council* - Dan Kaplan, Executive Secretary, AFT Local 1493, the San Mateo (CA) Community College Federation of Teachers* - Ann Robertson, Executive Board Member, California Faculty Association - San Francisco State University - Delegate to San Francisco Labor Council* - Allan Fisher, Executive Board Member, AFT Local 2121 - Delegate to San Francisco Labor Council* - Marc Rich, United Teachers Los Angeles delegate to Los Angeles County Federation of Labor* - Paul Bigman, Business Representative, IATSE Local 15; Treasurer, Washington State Jobs with Justice* - Harry Kelber, The World of Labor - Genevieve Morse, member, Massachusetts Teachers Association, shop steward in the Classified Staff Union at the University of Massachusetts Boston and elected delegate to 2010 annual MTA conference - Steve Edwards, President, AFSCME Local 2858, Chicago, IL and Steering Committee member, Public Workers Unite! - Ira Grupper, labor journalist, Louisville KY - Phyliss Walker, President, AFSCME Local 3800 (clerical workers) at the University of Minnesota - Muata Greene, Labor Liaison for EMT's,Paramedics & Inspectors of FDNY - Lee Sustar, member, National Writers Union/UAW Local 1981; labor journalist - Ron Lare, UAW Local 600, former Local-wide Executive Board member - Bernie Hesse, Political Director and Director of Special Projects, UFCW 1189 (St Paul MN)* - Randy Raskin, Vice General Chairman, United Transportation Union General Committee of Adjustment (UP-former C&NW) St Paul/Minneapolis* - SEIU Local 49 (Portland, OR) - Jerry Gordon, Retired International Representative, United Food and Commercial Workers Union*; Secretary, Emergency Labor Meeting
[* for id only]
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20) In Letter, Wisconsin Democrats Demand Compromise, Offer to Meet Walker at Border
By Sarah Seltzer | Sourced from AlterNet
Posted at March 7, 2011, 8:57 am
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/513353/in_letter%2C_wisconsin_democrats_demand_compromise%2C_offer_to_meet_walker_at_border/#paragraph4
Just a short time ago, the Wisconsin Democratic senators had a letter hand-delivered to Governor Walker and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, pointing out the concessions made by public workers and offering to meet in person (at the Wisconsin-Illinois border) to work out a compromise. This may look tempting given the eroding poll numbers of the Republicans throughout the course of this standoff.
The text of the letter, signed by Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller, is below:
Dear Governor Walker and Senator Fitzgerald:
Over the past several weeks we have witnessed an unprecedented public debate in Wisconsin over the value of public workers and the importance of collective bargaining rights. I write today to offer to meet, in-person, as soon as possible to resume discussions on how we reach a bipartisan solution to our differences on January 2011 Special Session Senate and Assembly Bill 11.
The working people of Wisconsin are deeply concerned about what the future holds for their families, and for the great state they call home. Now more than ever they are counting on us as leaders to work together to resolve our differences to move our state forward.
Since the bill's introduction, public workers have come forward to offer economic concessions and Democrats have offered a number of proposals to try to reach a bipartisan resolution.
I assure you that Democratic State Senators, despite our differences and the vigorous debate we have had, remain ready and willing to find a reasonable compromise. To that end, I would ask that you or your authorized representatives agree to meet with us near the Wisconsin-Illinois border to formally resume serious discussions
as soon as possible.
The people of Wisconsin are overwhelmingly supportive of us reaching a bipartisan, negotiated compromise. Senate Democrats stand ready to do just that, we ask that you do the same.
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21) Academics Challenge Tuition Increases in Britain [and U.S. military's tuition aid needs oversight, report says]
[Talk about burying a news story. The second story on U.S. military tuition aid was simply attached to this first story -- see full article below...bw]
By THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
March 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/world/europe/07iht-educBriefs07.html?ref=world
Academics challenge British tuition increases
Hundreds of academics from Oxford and Cambridge have signed a letter to the British government demanding that the planned increase in tuition fees to £9,000 from £3,290 be halted and a public commission of inquiry be established to look into the plan.
"Universities are being forced to take major decisions, with unknown consequences, to a breakneck timetable," said the letter, which was addressed to Business Secretary Vince Cable and Universities Minister David Willets.
"We are being asked to 'fly blind' over matters of the utmost importance in respect to our ability to continue to deliver world-class education and research," said the letter, which was signed by 681 faculty members from Britain's two oldest universities.
A government paper setting out details of the new funding arrangement, which was expected in March, has been delayed, and Professor Peter de Bolla, one of the organizers of the letter, told the BBC that institutions were essentially being asked to set fees "in the dark," without a clear understanding of the consequences of their decisions.
- D.D. GUTTENPLAN
U.S. military's tuition aid needs oversight, report says
While the U.S. Defense Department is improving its oversight of institutions benefiting from its tuition-assistance funds, a new federal report finds that it has much catching up to do.
According to the report, issued last week, the department lacks the necessary overview of post-secondary institutions and needs to become more systematic in its assessment of such institutions. The study, carried out by the Office of Government Oversight, was initiated in 2009, a year in which $517 million in government money went to 377,000 military personnel.
The report found that the department's own review process only included brick-and-mortar universities, even though about 71 percent of coursework that benefited from military tuition assistance was done through distance learning programs.
The department said it agreed with the report's recommendations and was planning to create a more systematic review of institutions benefiting from tuition assistance funds.
"The Department of Defense concurred with those findings and have already taken steps to make the corrective actions," said Major Monica Bland Matoush, a Pentagon spokeswoman.
- CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE
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22) Tight Budgets Mean Squeeze in Classrooms
By SAM DILLON
March 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/education/07classrooms.html?ref=us
Millions of public school students across the nation are seeing their class sizes swell because of budget cuts and teacher layoffs, undermining a decades-long push by parents, administrators and policy makers to shrink class sizes.
Over the past two years, California, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio, Utah and Wisconsin have loosened legal restrictions on class size. And Idaho and Texas are debating whether to fit more students in classrooms.
Los Angeles has increased the average size of its ninth-grade English and math classes to 34 from 20. Eleventh- and 12th-grade classes in those two subjects have risen, on average, to 43 students.
"Because many states are facing serious budget gaps, we'll see more increases this fall," said Marguerite Roza, a University of Washington professor who has studied the recession's impact on schools.
The increases are reversing a trend toward smaller classes that stretches back decades. Since the 1980s, teachers and many other educators have embraced research finding that smaller classes foster higher achievement.
Rachael Maher, a math teacher in Charlotte, N.C., said she had experienced the difference between smaller and larger classes. She has watched her seventh-grade classes grow since her school system ran into budget trouble three years ago. Before, her classes averaged 25 students; this year they average 31.
"They say it doesn't affect whether kids get what they need, but I completely disagree," Ms. Maher said. "If you've gained five kids, that's five more papers to grade, five more kids who need makeup work if they're absent, five more parents to contact, five more e-mails to answer. It gets overwhelming."
In Detroit, the authorities are so overwhelmed by financial troubles that they are debating a deficit-reduction proposal that would increase high school class sizes to 60 students. Michigan's state superintendent of public instruction, Michael P. Flanagan, said that the plan was unlikely to be put into effect, but that "class sizes will be higher than you and I would like."
In New York City, average elementary class sizes have grown to 23.7 students from 21.8 since 2008, according to official data.
In Utah, one of the few states that collect class size data each year, median class size has increased by several students in many grade levels since 2008. It now ranges from 22 students in kindergarten to 31 students in high school chemistry classes.
"All the budget cuts have started our class sizes on that climb upward," said Judy W. Park, associate superintendent of the State Office of Education in Utah. "During the last two years, our schools have really seen it."
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said a number of surveys had shown that parents cared more about small classes than anything except school safety.
But budget cuts are forcing schools to raise class sizes, putting those who advocate shrinking them on the defensive.
Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, a group that presses for smaller classes in New York and nationally, said many states enacted policies limiting student numbers during the late 1980s and 1990s.
"But now, in the majority of states, you're seeing definite increases in class sizes because of the recession and budget cuts," Ms. Haimson said. "Unfortunately we've also seen the rise of a narrative that's become dominant in education reform that insists that class size doesn't matter."
Research that convinced many policy makers of the benefits of small classes was conducted in Tennessee.
Helen Bain, who served as the president of the nation's largest teachers union in the 1970s, became a strong advocate for the idea. When she was a seventh-grade teacher early in her career, Ms. Bain recalled, her students learned quickly in classes of 15 or 20 students, but less effectively as class sizes grew.
"When it got to 35, I told the principal, 'I can't teach this many children,' " she said.
In the 1980s, Ms. Bain persuaded Tennessee lawmakers to finance a study comparing classes of 13 to 17 students in kindergarten through third grade with classes of 22 to 25 students. The smaller classes significantly outscored the larger classes on achievement tests.
In the decades since, researchers, including the Princeton economist Alan Krueger, have conducted studies that they say confirm and strengthen the validity of the Tennessee findings.
Others, including Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, have argued that the impact of small classes on achievement has been exaggerated and that giving students a skillful teacher is more cost-effective.
Those who support that notion include Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who last Sunday told governors gathered in Washington to consider paying bonuses to the best teachers to take on extra students.
Mr. Duncan said he would prefer to put his own school-age children in a classroom with 28 students led by a "fantastic teacher" than in one with 23 and a "mediocre" teacher.
Bill Gates made a similar argument to the governors, portraying the movement to reduce class sizes as one of the most expensive and fruitless efforts in American education.
The federal Department of Education collects nationwide class size data every few years, and the average has declined steadily for half a century. In 1961, the average elementary school class had 29 students, and the average high school class had 28. In 2007-8, the most recent year with data, the elementary school average was 20, and the high school average was 23.4.
Dr. Roza, who is an adviser to Mr. Gates, said she had measured a recent decline of half a percent in the total number of employees in American public education. "That's meant some growth," she said, but average class sizes have not ballooned.
"Maybe the national average went up one kid," Dr. Roza said. "But I don't think we've jumped to 30 kids per class."
The nationwide movement to shrink classes dates to the early 1980s, when Texas passed a law limiting class sizes, to 22 students in elementary grades. Tennessee followed with class-size reduction measures for the early grades.
In 1996, California lawmakers approved a measure to reduce class sizes to 20 for kindergarten through third grade. Today, more than 30 states have some form of programs to reduce class sizes.
But many have been challenged since the recession.
In Texas, the state comptroller in December proposed loosening the class size limit, saying it could save $558 million in teacher salaries. That proposal has found backers in a Legislature that is weighing $10 billion in cuts from public education over two years, but teachers and parent groups are outraged.
In California, which has spent about $20 billion on a class-size reduction program, state officials deferred financing for it in 2009 and reduced penalties to districts that allowed average classes to grow above the limits.
In Florida, where voters in 2002 approved a ballot initiative amending the State Constitution to cap elementary classes at 18 students and high schools at 25, the authorities are struggling with those limits.
"If an elementary gets a 19th student during the year, they have to hire a teacher and split the class, and that makes no sense," said Wayne Blanton, executive director of the Florida School Boards Association.
In November, a ballot initiative that asked voters to repeal class-size limits won a majority, but it fell short of the 60 percent required to overturn a constitutional amendment.
As of late last year, Florida school districts had accumulated $41 million in penalties for exceeding the caps. Palm Beach County's penalty alone totaled $16.6 million.
This year districts have been appealing the penalties, and state officials have reduced many. Florida lawmakers are debating ways of giving school systems more flexibility without violating the law.
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23) Wisconsin Democrats Urge New Talks on Labor Bill
By MONICA DAVEY
March 7, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/us/08wisconsin.html?ref=us
CHICAGO - Senate Democrats from Wisconsin on Monday called on Gov. Scott Walker and his Republican colleagues to restart stalled negotiations over a bill that would curtail collective bargaining rights for public workers.
"I would ask that you or your authorized representatives agree to meet with us near the Wisconsin-Illinois border to formally resume serious discussions as soon as possible," Senator Mark Miller, leader of the minority Democrats, wrote in a letter that was hand-delivered to the offices of the governor and the senate majority leader in the Capitol on Monday morning.
Mr. Miller and 13 other senate Democrats have been camped out in Illinois for more than two weeks to prevent a vote from taking place on the collective bargaining measure that has divided the state, brought business nearly to a halt in Madison, the state capital, and has become the most visible in a series of such battles in statehouses around the country.
A spokesman for Mr. Walker did not respond to requests for comment on Monday morning, and there was no sign that either side saw room for compromise: Mr. Walker has consistently said that he views limits to collective bargaining as a crucial element of his plan to balance the state's budget, while Democrats have argued that collective bargaining should not be in jeopardy as long as state workers accept cuts to their pension and health care benefits.
Still, for a time last week, there were signs that a compromise might be possible, according to some Democrats involved in the discussions. Scott Fitzgerald, the Republican majority leader in the senate, met with several of the Democrats in Kenosha early in the week, and representatives of the governor held talks with the Democrats later in the week. But by Sunday night, the Democrats said, the talks had clearly broken down, and senate Republicans had set up a series of punishments for the Democrats: they may be arrested if the police spot them in Wisconsin; they may soon be fined $100 a day; and they may not receive their paychecks unless they pick them up in person.
Senator Fred Risser, one of the Democrats, said it now seemed conceivable that he and his fellow Democrats would return to Wisconsin at some point without a negotiated compromise.
"We have always said we would go back eventually," Mr. Risser said, adding that the Democrats had yet to make any decision about when to go back to Madison, a move that would open the way for a vote on the proposal by Mr. Walker, a Republican elected in November. "We will have accomplished some of our purpose - to slow things up and let people know what was in this bill."
But Senator Jon Erpenbach, another Democrat, said on Monday that there remained ways for the Republicans to persuade the Democrats to return to Madison. If the Republicans remove the issue of collective bargaining from the bill that Mr. Walker has described as an immediate "budget repair bill," and instead make it part of the larger, two-year budget proposal to be considered in the next few months, Democrats would be satisfied, Mr. Erpenbach said. "Then there would be hearings, then there would be opportunities to really look at this," he said.
Republicans, however, have said the Democrats must return to Madison to consider the proposal as it is. Some have suggested that the 14 Democrats - feeling pressure from constituents back home - are now divided on what to do and are unsure exactly how to proceed in a situation that appears to have no end in sight.
Mr. Walker's proposal contemplates significant changes to most public sector unions, limiting collective bargaining to matters of wages only and limiting raises to the Consumer Price Index unless the public approves higher raises in a referendum. The governor would require most unions to hold votes annually to determine whether most workers still wish to be members. And he would end the state's collection of union dues from paychecks.
The Democrats left the state on Feb. 17, the day that a vote was expected on Mr. Walker's measure in the state Senate. While Republicans control the chamber, they need 20 senators - and, thus, at least one Democrat - to take votes on fiscal matters.
If the Democrats return, the Republicans, who hold a 19-to-14 majority in the Senate, are expected to pass the measure. The Democrats say that while they cannot permanently block that outcome, they believe public opinion has turned against the measure and that the Republicans may lose their majority in a recall effort that is now underway against senators over the issue; recall efforts are being mounted against both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate.
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24) Growing with the Flow
By Bonnie Weinstein
Socialist Viewpoint
March/April 2011
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/
There is a sweeping tide driving worker's protests across the globe. The demand not only for democracy and the toppling of dictators but for economic justice is at the root of these struggles. Class collaboration-the idea that workers and capitalists can be in an equally beneficial relationship-is the fundamental stumbling block to workers' victory in this struggle.
In Egypt, according to a Democracy Now!1 interview with Khaled Ali, a labor lawyer with the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights, "The average number of strikes taking place from February 12th until the present is between 30 and 60 strikes per day" protesting wage disparities and corruption; demanding increases in the minimum wage; calling for the removal of corrupt officials in institutions and companies; and the right to have their own, independent labor organizations.
In the U.S., in addition to wage cutbacks and freezes and increased workloads, labor's right to collective bargaining is being challenged. And, while in Egypt and elsewhere, the very right to form independent unions is against the law; in the U.S., the unions are rendered powerless by labor laws such as the Taft-Hartley Act that prohibits sympathy strikes and mass picket lines.
And Wisconsin's State Assembly has passed a bill forcing workers to accept great cuts in their standard of living, and to give up collective bargaining. (It has yet to be passed in the Wisconsin Senate and the battle against it continues.) Similar attempts are being made in states across the country. In Ohio, Senate leaders agreed to allow state workers the right to negotiate wages, but would now bar public employees from striking. In Oklahoma, the House is considering legislation to ban collective bargaining with municipal unions; and in Tennessee, lawmakers have introduced legislation to prevent collective bargaining between teachers' unions and local school boards.2
Workers everywhere are in a similar predicament. Not only are they blamed for causing the economic collapse because they are "living too high on the hog." They are being made to pay for corporate bailouts while corporate profits soar; pay the trillions spent on wars-not only with their tax dollars but as cannon fodder in these wars-while they have no say about whether or not to wage these wars. Meanwhile the gap between the wealthy and the poor grows ever wider.
Yet, workers are still under the illusion that only by allying with the "liberal wing" of the ruling classes of their respective countries will they be able to win some economic and/or democratic gains. They are still under the illusion that bourgeois democracy-based upon paid-for electoral, politics-can represent the interests of workers. They are told to vote for the most liberal in hopes that the cutbacks and assaults on workers will not be too great. The alternative of democratic worker's control of government and the workplace is not mentioned as an option although it's the only solution to the economic crisis brought on by world capitalist rule.
Labor bureaucrats and government unions
In Egypt the unions are run by the government-at least, that's the way it has been-although today, some Egyptian workers have a different idea and are forming independent unions. In the U.S., bureaucrats in alliance with the Democratic Party-a wholly capitalist party-run the unions.
The purpose of this alliance is to lead workers to rely on lesser-evil politics-voting for one rich politician over another based upon personality and public relations-as the only means to improve their lot in life. But this alliance has achieved nothing of the sort and has, in fact, led to an all out assault upon living standards and working conditions.
The struggle of the working class is centered at this moment on whether or not they will take matters into their own hands or continue to rely on "progressive capitalist rulers" to offer them a handout to appease their protest, i.e., will workers settle for another massive sell-out?
The power of mass action in the streets
The good news is that there are problems with the class-collaborationist, sell-out plans being conjured up by capitalists and bureaucrats behind closed doors. First, the economic system of capitalism is no longer capable of granting meaningful concessions to workers-not here or anywhere in the world. Instead, the most liberal of capitalists are offering workers only massive cutbacks!
Second, too many workers are getting to the end of their economic rope. They are fast coming to the point of having nothing else to lose and everything to gain by fighting back. That's what prompted the massive upsurge we see today.
Third, the working masses have tasted victory through the power of mass action, unity and solidarity in the streets-mass democracy in action-they have succeeded in expelling dictators; changing forever the very perception of the relationship of forces between workers and capitalists.
The overwhelming majority of people in the streets from Egypt to Wisconsin are workers. And that is where the balance of power lies only if workers organize themselves into independent, democratically run, action-oriented organizations that can consciously and overwhelmingly challenge the power of the capitalist minority.
In order to be truly independent, workers must come to the understanding that no organization can represent the interests of both workers and capitalists. The interests of the two are diametrically opposed to one another. Whether they are liberal or conservative, the capitalist makes bank off the exploitation and subjugation of workers.
Corporations are not democratic organizations. They are ruled by who owns them; not by who works for them. The only bargaining power workers have depends upon the solidarity they can achieve among their fellow workers to stand firmly in support of their common interests in direct opposition to the employer.
Worldwide working-class consciousness
The similarities of struggle between workers around the globe have been made transparent through modern technology. Former land-based peasants are being funneled onto the garbage heaps of modern capitalist cities where there are cell phones, the Internet, TV and worldwide news agencies. No country on the globe is free of modern, industrial capitalist media and communication devices.
The bourgeoisie have always taken advantage of their ability to transcend borders as long as there is something for sale behind them.
But, the world's working class has also transcended borders. That has been proven in Wisconsin when a worker's hand-made sign reads, "Yesterday I was in Wisconsin. Today I'm in Egypt!"
The victory in Egypt taught a lesson to the workers in Wisconsin. Victory in Wisconsin can inspire workers throughout the world.
Class collaboration: the recipe for a sell-out
But that victory is not assured. Right now the labor bureaucracy in allegiance with the Democratic Party is demanding that workers give up on all their economic demands in order to retain collective bargaining, and hopefully, keep their jobs. In other words, workers can have collective bargaining as long as they don't ask for anything and accept the cuts they have been "offered." Just as the workers in Egypt have been "offered democracy" as long as the army remains in control!
There can be no alliance between the capitalist class and the working class because the capitalist class profits from the enslavement of workers. That's what capitalist governments do whether they are dictatorships or capitalist democracies, which are not democratic at all.
Neither the Democratic nor Republican parties are democratically run. Their leadership is based upon wealth and power, not rule by the majority. The majority gets to vote for one capitalist or another. Whoever spends the most money wins the race. Whoever contributes the most money determines who that big-spender and ultimate winner will be.
Workers do not get to vote on whether or not to go to war; to bail out corporate thieves; whether to dump polluted wastes into the oceans and streams; whether to drill for oil off-shore; whether to spend money on schools, healthcare, housing.
There is no room in capitalist "democracy" for worker's democracy even though workers are the overwhelming majority and they do all the work!
Mass actions in the streets, such as is happening from Egypt to Wisconsin, Ohio and beyond, are a good beginning. In effect, they are like strikes. Business cannot go on as usual when tens-of-thousands are marching in the streets for jobs, food and justice during work hours.
The rebellions taking place today have a momentum of their own. When masses of people experience the power of solidarity and democratic action in the streets; when they experience victory; they lose fear and they gain trust in their numbers!
The next step is for workers to organize on their jobs and in their own communities. To form democratically functioning workers organizations that can act against these assaults on their lives and living standards.
With modern technology, the commonality of the struggle reveals that workers have the know-how, tools and ability to govern themselves-to democratically figure out what is needed and fulfill those needs without the interference of the capitalist class. Workers must empower themselves with the ability to organize society for the benefit of all, without the need for war, slavery and weapons of mass destruction and the private accumulation of capital.
Through these kinds of organizations, workers will have the power to carry out majority decisions about what goes on at their jobs, in their communities, in their schools. Such independent, working-class-based organizations will be able to challenge the power of the capitalist class; disarm them; depose them and finally replace that despotic, capitalist minority with the democratic dictatorship of the majority of humanity-the working class-acting in the ultimate interest of all the inhabitants of our planet.
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25) Egyptian Workers: Complete the Revolution!
By Chris Kinder
Socialist Viewpoint
March/April 2011
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/marapr_11/marapr_11_02.html
Spreading uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa look to Egypt as a great example for their own struggles.
How the uprising in Egypt can inspire the world
As uprisings against tyranny continue to consume the Middle East and North Africa, sparked partly by the Tunisian events, but mainly by the Egyptian Revolution's successful overthrow of the neo-monarchial Mubarak, working people and revolutionary youth in the Mid-East and around the world face a key question. Are these upsurges and revolutionary movements centrally about getting rid of dictators and establishing some form of democracy? Or are they really about the whole neo-colonial, socio-economic imperialist system that created and propped up most of the tyrants of the Middle East, and also grips the world in a punishing downward spiral of lowering living conditions and attacks on working people that grows directly out of its insatiable drive for profit?
The financial crisis in the imperialist centers, the massive, international commodities speculation that followed, and the huge upward transfer of wealth throughout the world-masquerading as a "debt crisis"-has already created ripples of protest and rebellion worldwide. Working people in Greece, France, Britain, Ireland, and now even the state of Wisconsin and other states in the American Midwest are battling hard against foreclosures, privatizations, cutbacks, massive unemployment, tuition and price increases, attacks on unions, and the outright robbery of being forced to pay off huge loans to the very set of banks and finance capitalists who caused the crisis in the first place. And capitalist governments everywhere, whether autocratic or "democratic," are insisting that their people must pay the piper, and accept a brutal austerity so that the super rich finance capitalists can get richer.
Libya in flames
In the latest wave of protests and outright revolt, tyrannical rulers in the Middle East and North Africa, from Morocco to Iran and just about everywhere in between, are the chief targets of the mass uprisings. At this writing, Libya is the white-hot center of this broadening upsurge. Opposition to the 40-year rule of one man has led to what is now an outright civil war, in which perhaps as many as 600 to 1,000 have been killed in little more than a week, according to one close observer of the situation. Determined to remain in power, president-for-life Moammar Khadafy unleashed the dogs of war against his own people with unbridled brutality. Reports of dead bodies with their hands tied behind their backs, and helicopters flying low over houses and randomly firing at anyone who moves on the ground, are bubbling out through cell phones, as Khadafy tries to choke off all information.
Khadafy made a rambling, semi-incoherent, and some would say insane televised diatribe in which he presented himself as a martyr (!) of Libyan independence from colonialism who is willing to be martyred again in this struggle against his own people. The irony of Khadafy's "anti-colonialist" rant is lost on no one, as his regime now enjoys being the third largest oil supplier to the European Union, and has especially close relationships with both Britain and Italy, the former colonial power. But a bullet in the head could be what he gets fairly soon, as entire police and military units, including air force pilots, have gone over to the opposition, and protesters are arming themselves. Khadafy is already looking like a Hitlerian madman, holed up in a bunker in Tripoli, as the opposition now controls practically the whole eastern half of Libya, including Benghazi, the second largest city in the country, and most recently controls some cities in western Libya as well.
While the Khadafy regime was for years considered a rogue "terrorist" state, most of the other targeted autocracies are neo-colonial regimes that have been central to the U.S. imperialist network of client states for 30-40 years or more, with economies reeling under the grip of neo-liberal policies that allow easy exploitation by international speculators mostly based in imperialist centers. Unprecedented in modern times, these revolts are a strong harbinger of things to come, in an age in which the power of the imperialist center in the U.S. is beginning to weaken, and unravel.
Central to the Middle East uprisings is the February 2011 Revolution in Egypt
As Egypt is the largest of the Middle Eastern countries (82 million), and possessed of the most powerful and active labor movement in the region, a rising there was bound to be an inspiration and a model for revolts against similar regimes around the region and world. Paraphrasing one protester, if people in Tunisia provided a spark for Egyptians, the Egyptian people have sent out a spark to the whole world. Even some of the tens-of-thousands of union protesters in Wisconsin have said, "This is our Egypt." And while the now-famous 18 days of consistent and heroic protests by huge masses of working-class and middle-class Egyptians in Cairo's Tahrir Square were mainly led by unemployed young college graduates with cell phones and Facebook pages, the revolt was driven forward by a massive explosion of strikes by fed-up workers in many Egyptian cities.
The tyrant Mubarak was finally forced to resign on February 11th. Surrounded by sycophants and unclear on the reality of the situation, Mubarak's last statement in which he refused to resign came as he was pressured from his family to stay on at all costs to protect their ill-gotten wealth. Forced out the very next day, Mubarak resembled nothing so much as the last Czar of Russia, who abdicated the throne in the face of a mass upsurge in the first wave of the Great Russian Revolution, in February 1917.
According to most of the protesters, this was just the beginning. As one put it, "We've gotten rid of Mubarak; now we have to get rid of the Mubarak dictatorship." And what a dictatorship Mubarak's regime was. Riddled with nepotism and massive corruption at all levels, Mubarak's administration survived only through blatantly rigged elections, and by instilling a climate of fear in the populace through unbridled police terror and torture. The rigging of the parliamentary election of 2010 was so transparent that someone on the inside sent video clips of poll workers filling out stacks of ballots for Mubarak's party, which were all over YouTube. In the end, after an increasingly brutal, last ditch struggle to cling to power, Mubarak slunk off as a used-up relic.
The mother of all Egyptian tyrannies
The Egyptian army tops, organized in a council of generals, seeing that Mubarak had outlived his usefulness, sent him out to pasture in the "resort" town of Sharm el Sheikh, in order to avoid the "chaos" that Mubarak warned about, should he have to leave. The military could do this easily, since they are the mother of all Egyptian tyrannies. Since the British puppet king Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in a coup led by military officers, the military has been the real employer of all Egyptian governments. It was the military that put Gamel Abdul Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Hosni Mubarak in power, each of whom arose directly out of the military. This series of regimes was consolidated under Mubarak into one of the most oppressive dictatorships in the Arab world. Secret police arrested and tortured political opponents and common criminals at will, and political parties only existed with state permission. Although he's left, and there's been no chaos, the real masters of the state have a plan to contain the revolution, and their plan targets workers first and foremost.
The generals set aside Mubarak's fraudulent constitution, dissolved his blatantly rigged crony-parliament, and promised a revised constitution in ten days. This miraculously quick fix to a complex mess was to be drafted in private by a committee of "experts" appointed by the generals. A referendum on this "new" constitution was to follow in two months, with general elections to follow in September. The army tops had calculated exactly what the minimum was that they had to do to get the protesters to go home and the workers back to work. This has been their "job" for decades. But the communiqués from the military included increasingly harsh threats to workers to get back to work or else.
The lies and the reality: U.S. imperialism
Meanwhile, the U.S. overlords under Obama claim to be oh-so friendly to aspirations of the masses for democratic reform in the Middle East and North Africa right now. Their options? They don't really have much choice. Either get on the "democratic" bandwagon now, or risk losing the ability to control any new regimes that may emerge once the smoke has settled in the Middle East. Never mind that they supported Mubarak (to the tune of $55 billion over 30 years, almost all for the military), and other dictators like him (Tunisia, Bahrain, Jordan, Yemen, Morocco, etc.) for decades. After all, they also supported Saddam Hussein well before going for "regime change" against him.
The "regime change" thing swings both ways. A couple decades earlier, the U.S. helped install the Shah of Iran through a CIA-engineered coup against a democratically elected regime that had nationalized the oil industry, which the U.S. thought belonged to it. For the U.S., it's whatever works for "us." Protecting U.S. interests in economic resources such as oil, and the ability for U.S. capital to freely penetrate these post-colonial economies, is the predominate consideration.
Intentional feed to Wikileaks?
The question has been raised; did the U.S. consciously help start these Middle East revolts, by leaking secret diplomatic cables about corruption in Tunisia to Wikileaks? Of course the U.S. has no interest in seeing revolutionary movements, which could threaten its most closely held interests in the region. So, no, while they MAY have made such leaks, they absolutely didn't want today's upsurges. But did the U.S. want reform? Absolutely. The top echelons of the U.S. government make stupid mistakes, but don't count on that to be the case in every instance. In this case, they wanted reform at the palace level, because they saw, as did the Egyptian military on February 11th, that dictators like Mubarak have outlived their usefulness. A rigid and transparently corrupt regime is not a good bet for protecting the interests of U.S. financial imperialism for very long. Bottom line: the U.S. wanted change precisely in order to avoid today's mass popular rebellions!1
This goes to the heart of how the modern imperialist-dominated world works, so a bit of history is in order. In 1956, Egypt under Gamel Abdul Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, thereby completing the expropriation of British interests in Egypt, which had begun in 1952. After much hand wringing in European capitals, a coalition of British, French and Israeli forces was put together to take the Canal back through military intervention. Just as this "coalition" force was poised to finish off Egyptian military resistance, the U.S. under Dwight D. Eisenhower put an end to the effort, and, in effect, supported an upstart pan-Arab nationalist against its "sister" imperialists who were seeking to get "their" property back. Why did this apparently anti-imperialist act on the part of the U.S. happen?
There's a new sheriff in town: U.S. imperialism
Prior to World War II, imperialism consisted principally of colonial occupation, in which European powers like France and Britain physically owned colonies such as Egypt, in order to extract wealth of one sort or another. In order to enforce this "paradigm," so to speak, shooting people down in the streets was the normal response. In Egypt in 1919, the year in which rebellions spread throughout the world in response to the Russian Revolution of 1917, British troops slaughtered thousands to crush an uprising against British rule. But after World War II, the flames of rebellion spread throughout the world, from Africa to the Indian sub-continent to China and South Asia. Exhausted and war-ravaged imperialist centers were unable to control these massive outpourings in the usual way. As a rule however, while some ex-colonial societies managed to escape capitalism, such as China, most produced "national liberation" regimes, which (while mouthing "socialism" in some cases) failed to definitively overthrow capitalism, and eventually, as in Egypt, became amenable to imperialist capital penetration. A new imperialist "paradigm" (there's that word again) had fallen into place.
The U.S., through fits and starts, led the way. After taking over Spain's Western Hemisphere and Asian colonies in the Spanish-American War of 1898, the U.S. brutally put down rebels in Cuba and the Philippines, and went on to intervene militarily more or less at will in what it considered to be its hemisphere. But the pattern that eventually emerged was not the same as European colonial imperialism: it was an imperialism that mainly operated through "independent" puppet regimes in countries that were colonized more through economic penetration and controls rather than through direct military occupation.
The real meaning of the Suez crisis of 1956
But in the Suez crisis of 1956, while different methods of imperialist control were involved in the background, they certainly were not front and center. What was front and center was U.S. dominance of the world. According to the U.S. ruling class, it, and no one else, had "won" World War II; and this was now the "American Century." (It was actually the Soviet Red Army that defeated the vast bulk of the German army, while the U.S. dithered on an invasion of Europe, but that's another story.) In the Suez crisis, the U.S. gave the word to British and French imperialism that it, the U.S., and no one else, would be top dog. The British got the message: there would not be another British imperialist initiative without close cooperation with the U.S., and U.S. approval. It was the final death knell of the British Empire.
Ironically, as an Arab nationalist who nationalized the Canal and other industries, Nasser didn't work out that well for U.S. imperialism. But through the Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak regimes, all has been made well. Nasser may have talked pan-Arab "socialism," but he was a top-down autocrat who was owned by the military. Though mostly nationalized, the Egyptian economy was never controlled by the workers who produced the wealth, nor was it definitively removed from the international capitalist market.
How the U.S. tries to get control of the situation today
Flash forward to the present day. What are the problems facing the U.S.? Mostly, it's that puppet regimes have become nonviable, people are in the streets in open rebellion, and the outcomes are uncertain. But the U.S. knows, and has learned from, the chief lessons of the class struggle. It (that is, the U.S. ruling class) has learned these lessons better than the working class has. The lesson in this case is that you can no longer control colonial people by simply shooting them down in the street, as the British did in 1919 and as Khadafy is doing today. It doesn't work. There are too many of them, and not enough mercenaries willing to go to their own deaths defending some tyrant. Instead you use much more subtle controls, in which economic penetration is combined with promotion of regimes that work. Whether autocratic or "democratic," they must be able to either keep the people in fear or control them through false consciousness. The question becomes, when and how to intervene (through "regime change," or more subtle "reform") to manipulate the situation.
In the present situation in Egypt and the Middle East, promotion of "democracy" is the only hope for the U.S. With the whole region in a state of revolt, the consciousness of the masses becomes critical. The fact that the dominant consciousness so far seems to be "democratic" in nature is a great boon to the U.S. In the present-day world of total domination and control by U.S.-centered financial and corporate interests, "democracy" is a blessing. In "democracy," everyone, both rich and poor, has the same right to sleep under bridges and pick up scraps of food off the ground. But talk of expropriation is forbidden. This is just the way the world's bourgeoisie has wanted it, since the French Revolution of 1789.
Some of the protesters were taken in by the array of promises offered by the military after Mubarak's ouster, but not all. Many of the Tahrir Square protesters had in fact been victimized, arrested and tortured by the army in the days of protest before Mubarak resigned. The army had also facilitated attacks on the protesters by thugs and plain-clothes police (some on horses and camels and waving swords) sent by Mubarak's Interior Ministry, before sealing the square against them. And after two days of jubilation in the streets over Mubarak's departure, and declarations of "the army and the people are one," a different reality quickly emerged as the generals began to make almost daily threats against strikers, demanding a return to work. Meanwhile in Tahrir Square, some called on people to leave the square in the days after Mubarak's fall, others chanted "we will not leave until our demands have been met."
Getting rid of Mubarak had been the over-arching focus and main point of unity for the protesters. And while virtually none said that the ousting of the tyrant was all there was to it, contradictions and differences immediately began to manifest themselves once he was gone. While most were clear on getting rid of all the holdovers from Mubarak's regime still in government, many started emphasizing various individual demands, such expropriating the vast wealth of Mubarak and his family (some estimates go as high as $70 billion), or releasing the political prisoners taken hostage during the 18 days. But the chief contradiction broke along class lines, and focused on demands for a democratic reform of government versus the rampant social issues such as poverty, unemployment, and low wages. One protester said the following in an interview published on Alternet:
"Many analysts in the media speak of Egypt's economy, they say that the economic growth did not trickle down to the poor and this is why this is happening. This is too simplistic. This revolution is not about poverty or need. The people in the streets from all walks of life, rich and poor, are there because they want freedom, freedom, freedom..."2
The masses of striking and protesting Egyptian workers, facing chronic unemployment or under-employment, low wages, rising food prices, having to take two jobs to feed their families, and unable to get a decent education for their children because of the decrepit state of public schools, or unable to get a decent job because of the need to bribe somebody, surely take a dim view of that statement.
The question was thus posed: simple "regime change," or social revolution?
In Egypt, the social-democratic, top-down "socialism" of Gamel Abdul Nasser has long only been a distant memory. Although Egyptians retain some of the benefits of the original Nasser regime on paper at least (everyone is entitled to a free college education), privatization has gutted most of these gains. Colleges are plagued with reduced wages for teachers and classes of 3,000, while so-called "public" hospitals now routinely turn away even emergency patients who can't afford to pay.
A come-and-get-it policy on steroids
Following waves of increasing privatizations of Nasser's state industries, Egypt in 2004-08 under Mubarak embarked on a come-and-get-it policy on steroids. Similar to an increasingly liberal policy toward foreign investors in Tunisia, and driven by the U.S. banking system and its rapacious toxic assets machine, it was an economic free-for-all that entailed selling large pieces of Egypt's banks to the highest international bidder. As foreign financial interests gobbled up Egyptian banks, Egypt also eased the rules on foreign property investment, creating a magnet for global real estate speculation, making Egypt a hot spot for tourist-oriented investment. And as if that wasn't enough, Egypt (and the United Arab Emirates) even eliminated capital requirements for investment, meaning that speculators could buy whatever they wanted with no money down, which encourages speculative movement of capital, and does nothing for local economies (and in fact creates negative results).3
As time went on, there was a downturn in the second half of 2009, as oil prices fell and foreign banks slashed their holdings in Arabic countries. Enter Hosni Mubarak's son, Gamal Mubarak, who became the de facto ruler and designated "heir" of this so-called (what was that again?) "republic." (Since when do republics have "heirs?") Gamal Mubarak, as effective ruler, reordered the domestic agenda through key ministers and sycophantic allies in the ruling NDP (National Democratic Party), and consciously rigged the 2010 parliamentary elections, thereby undermining Mubarak senior's rules of political engagement: limited oppression with safety valves is preferable to total control of society.4
International speculation causes food price hike
Meanwhile, in March 2008, there was a dramatic hike in food prices that led thousands of Egyptian people on the brink of starvation to riot. This problem was caused by unfettered speculation by investment banks in commodities' trading following the crash of the housing market in 2007, as well as deregulation of commodities markets that occurred under the Clinton administration. Following the 2000 deregulation, "dark" unregulated futures trading markets emerged, created by Wall Street, European investment banks and several oil companies.
"These transactions didn't involve customary bone fide commodity traders, such as an airline company hedging on the price of jet fuel by purchasing futures contracts. As prominent hedge funds manager Michael McMasters noted before a U.S. Senate panel in 2008, this amounts to 'a form of electronic hoarding and greatly increases the inflationary effect of the market. It literally means starvation for millions of the world's poor'."5
Workers were generally less sanguine than most about the military takeover, as they immediately mounted an escalating series of protests and strikes over notoriously bad wages, lousy working conditions, and rising prices of food and other commodities, in an attempt to seize initiative in the opening provided by the temporary lifting of the Mubarak regime's reign of fear. In reply, the military immediately began a crack down.
Yet these were just the sorts of conditions, which have been sending masses of Egyptian working people into the streets for years. A 2009 AFL-CIO report indicated that over 1.7 million workers engaged in more than 1900 strikes and other forms of protest from 2004 to 2008.6 And in April of 2008 there was a major labor action that spilled over into a popular uprising in the textile/industrial city of Mahala. Labor activists organized two days of massive protests that saw roads being blocked and local residents leaving their homes and pulling down Mubarak's pictures and posters for the first time since he came into office in 1981.7
As for workers' strikes, under Mubarak, all unions had to belong to a government-controlled labor federation run by Mubarak's flunkies. Strikes were illegal if not approved by this federation, which signed off on maybe three out of the perhaps tens-of-thousands of workers' strikes that took place under Mubarak's 30-year reign. Although strikes did win some gains (such as a big raise in the minimum wage), in most cases, police, tanks and sometimes troops were called out to suppress them. Always acting independently of Mubarak, workers are now organizing their own unions and federation. Defend the right to strike! Make the right to organize independently of the government legal!
Rapidly spreading uprisings face similar problems
What we are looking at now is something that we have never seen before in history. In the age of neo-liberal globalization, we now have a world in which imperialist control, through domination by financial penetration of all capitalist countries/markets, is so total, that it's getting harder and harder to make national distinctions as to conditions of struggle. The fact is that imperialist capitalism is everywhere; it's dominating everything; and it provides the causal substrate to each society's problems. Thus, in the Middle East, when Egypt blows, uprisings follow all around the region: most of these countries have exactly the same problems. It's becoming more and more obvious that we need an international revolutionary perspective and program to point to an international, proletarian, revolutionary solution, based on overthrowing capitalism, and instituting workers' rule.
The huge "victory march" held in Cairo on Friday, February 18th, one week after Mubarak's departure, while nascent leadership figures declared it to have the purpose of holding the military's feet to the fire on protesters' demands, and while it did show determination on the part of the masses to see the revolution materialize in real gains, came dangerously close to being a simple celebration of the ouster of the tyrant, or, as the military statement put it, "the people have won." The people have not yet won! Like the Russian masses who overthrew the Czar in February 1917, they have only achieved the first step.
Revolutionary tasks still not finished!
Not only have the people not yet won, but there is a dark threat looming over the revolutionary masses from above. This was made clear by the army council's harshest threat against striking workers so far, in which it said it would no longer allow "illegal" demonstrations that stop production and will take action against them. "Illegal" "demonstrations" that stop production? Wasn't the entire 18-day revolt in Tahrir Square an "illegal" demonstration that stopped production? This is the heart of the Mubarak dictatorship still showing its fangs.
Any repetition of state suppression of workers strikes and sit-downs such as happened under Mubarak (even if done by "legal" means at first)-if the military is allowed to get away with it-will be the beginning of the end of the Egyptian Revolution. Now, the most urgent task of the revolution is to support workers, defend and extend strikes, and mobilize against any attempt by the military to suppress them. Unraveling the Mubarak dictatorship should also involve the arrest and prosecution of secret police torturers, thugs, criminals, and hangers-on guilty of crimes against society.
The greatest threat
But an even greater threat to the revolution than that presented by the continued military domination of the state is the confidence that so many of the protesters seem to have (to varying degrees, to be sure) in the ability and willingness of the military government to carry through on their wishes. Most people in the street seem willing to support the military "in so far as" it carries out the democratic tasks, which protesters have called for. But the military tops-the very same who yesterday were Mubarak's friends and allies-still have power, and they are acting in secret! Instead of appointing a committee of experts to "re-write" the constitution in ten days behind closed doors, there should be an elected constituent assembly to come up with a new basic document of state. The military can't do this, because all they care about is "stability"-in translation, that means the safety of their billions and the billions of the rest of the capitalist ruling class. But the people in the streets could demand it, and win it, if they apply the same determination that they showed in forcing Mubarak out.
People in the streets forced the Czar out in February 1917 in Russia. But by that time, the Czar was little more than a front man for the real rulers, the capitalist class and large landholders. When he abdicated, they set up a "Provisional Government" to tide things over. The people had "won"... or had they? The real issues, which had been summed up in the slogan, "peace, land, and bread," were unchanged. The Provisional government tried to continue the losing, and brutal inter-imperialist war with Germany; they refused to expropriate the big landholders who oppressed the majority peasants; and they were unable to provide the basic food needs of the people. So another revolution, the October Revolution, was needed.
"Peace" deal means billions for the military
Egypt today may have Facebook (which can get cancelled along with the rest of the internet at the whim of tyrants), but it is actually very similar to Russia in February 1917. The Egyptian military's "provisional government" maintains a cruel war against the Palestinians, which is the result of Anwar Sadat's having signed the Camp David Accords and a peace treaty with Israel. (It is since then that the Egyptian military has been enriched by a steady stream of U.S. billions.) And as land in Egypt is snapped up for private use, and the international commodities market drives up the price of food, Egyptian working people are the victims.
Furthermore, any democratic reforms that the army council does institute can be manipulated, as long as the corrupt and rapacious capitalist class-which includes rich generals and rich retired generals by the boatload, hiding in their gated communities in the desert-remains in power. But why should they retain power? What did they do to overthrow Mubarak, to make this revolution? They were the power behind Mubarak, the boss of Mubarak, and the heart of the Mubarak dictatorship that the protesters want to see gone. And they-the generals who now want to outlaw strikes once again-know the importance of those workers that they want to get back to work, because it is they, the workers, that create all wealth. And if I'm not mistaken, that would refer to (what they think is) THEIR wealth, the billions that they've extracted and stolen from honest working people for decades! How much of it did they actually create themselves? Answer: none. It's not their wealth; it belongs to the people, the working people who created it. This is not just about Mubarak's billions, it's about the billions or trillions, siphoned off the labor of workers around the world by ruling classes.
To working people belongs the power!
So, to the working people belongs the power! To the masses of workers (whether striking or not), the unemployed youth with cell phones and Facebook, and the middle-class people, old and young, willing to support working people, who laid their lives on the line to come out to Tahrir Square-to them belongs the power! But most of them don't see it that way now-they think the military will give it to them, and therein lies the danger to the revolution. They need to take it themselves. It's their revolution to lose, or win!
The revolution in Egypt will never be complete if it stagnates, waits for handouts from the military, and fails to take on the socio- economic problems caused by capitalism and imperialism. Already there are rumors that Mubarak is still manipulating things behind the scenes, while the military maintains a number of his loyalists in the cabinet, and works in private to palm off Mubarak's rigged constitution to the people with a few Band-Aids on it. And the standard of living of masses of people will be impossible to improve as long as national capitalists continue to rake in billions in their gated communities, and as long as the economy remains trapped within the imperialist financial web.
Egyptian workers: take the lead, go forward!
Furthermore, a "liberated" Egypt, which continues to work in alliance with Israel and the U.S. to imprison Gazan Palestinians in their own mini-state, and generally looks the other way as Israel continues to build settlements and bulldoze Palestinians off the land, is not really a revolution worth the name. But the Egyptian revolution so far is already an international inspiration to millions! A completed revolution would actively work with the other uprisings throughout the Middle East and the world, starting with: break the blockade of Gaza! Help the people there rebuild, and provide support for Palestinian and anti-Zionist Israeli working people to fight together for a liberated workers' Palestine in which all ethnicities can live side by side in peace, cooperation and safety!
Egyptian workers, who have been struggling independently around front-line economic issues for years, now have a unique opportunity to lead the revolution forward to a true liberation of the Egyptian people. This would be a liberation from the yoke of capitalism and imperialism, and it would be a liberation that they would democratically control from top to bottom. Again, the example of the Revolution of 1917 in Russia is instructive. After the overthrow of the Czar in February, and the evident refusal of the Provisional Government to solve any of the fundamental problems, the Bolshevik Party led by Lenin and Trotsky fought to complete the revolution. They called for no support to the Provisional Government, and for the workers to take the power through their soviets (workers' councils).
The example of the Bolsheviks
Once the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917 and formed a soviet government, society was restructured to put the interests of ordinary working people first. Big landowners were expropriated, the land was nationalized, and the peasants were supported in working land that formerly was denied to them. The soviet government also managed to extract Russia from the brutal horrors of World War I, by signing a peace treaty with the Germans. And while the revolution was set upon by reactionary "white" armies and imperialist intervention (including by the U.S.), banks and industries were nationalized to prepare the way for worker-controlled production for use, not profit.
In Egypt today, workers do not have either workers councils or a Bolshevik-Leninist (Trotskyist) leadership. But during the 18 days, workers organized defense guards in the neighborhoods to protect against "looters" (most likely Mubarak's thugs, or prisoners set free by the regime to wreak havoc), and they set up checkpoints around Tahrir Square to prevent provocateurs from bringing in weapons. The next step now could, and should be the formation of delegated workers councils, which could begin to exercise local and regional government functions, and eventually be able to challenge the military for power. Such workers councils could demand the release of political prisoners still held by the state, oppose any confidence in the Mubarak-without-Mubarak government, and demand the immediate election of a peoples' constituent assembly. Along with this should go the development of cells in the army, and maintenance of organized, armed defense guards, to undermine and defend against army attacks on striking workers or the peoples' movement.
And to those with the vision to see the need to carry the revolution forward to completion: build a Bolshevik style party! Follow the lead offered by Lenin and Trotsky and the Russian Revolution! Do not waver! The revolution must go ahead; so that one-day soon we'll see a great victory that will shake the world. And then we'll be able to say, long live the Egyptian October!
Chris Kinder is an Oakland activist, socialist and coordinator of the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal.
1 For an interesting piece on how the U.S. pushed for palace reform is Virginia Tilley, "No 'Berlin Moment,' In Egypt," at: http://mondoweiss.net/2011/01/no-berlin-moment-in-egypt.html
2 Michael Winship, "Insider's Account of Egypt: 'A Truly Civilized, Peaceful People Who Decided to Regain Control of Their Destiny,'" 12 February 2011, www.alternet.org/story/149899
3 Nomi Prins, "The Egyptian Uprising Is a Direct Response to Ruthless Global Capitalism," 04 February 2011, www.alternet.org/story/149793. Nomi Prins is a senior fellow at the public policy center Demos, and author of, Behind the Bailouts: Bonuses, and Backroom Deals.
4 Larbi Sadiki, "Inception: Dreams of Revolution," Al Jazeera, 02 February 2011
5 Robert Alvarez, "Food, Egypt and Wall Street," Counter Punch, February 4-6, 2011. Robert Alvarez is an Institute for Policy Studies Senior Scholar.
6Jane Slaughter, "In Egypt, the Strikers Take Center Stage," Labor Notes/Counterpunch, 10 February 2011
7Emad McKay, "Egypt Labor Not Resting After Mubarak's Ouster," The Electronic Intifada, February 15, 2011
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