The Revolutionary Times

In Memoriam: Comrade Helen Sanberg, Detroit DSA

2010-03-30T17:48:00.000-07:00

Dear Comrades,

In Jewish families, upon the death of a loved one, it is customary for the family to observe a week of grieving during which friends come to the home of the deceased to comfort the family. This practice is known as "sitting Shiva (Shiva in Hebrew means seven)." Helen's daughter, Suzanne, and Helen's partner, Bob, will be sitting Shiva at Helen and Bob's apartment from Tuesday, 3/30 through Friday, 4/2 from 5-8 PM and on Saturday, 4/3 from 1-4 PM. The address is 30785 Hunters Drive, Apartment 23 in Farmington Hills (The Hunters Ridge apartment complex is located near the intersection of Orchard Lake and Fourteen Mile Roads.). It is customary, but not required, to bring food for the family.

In Solidarity,
David Green, Chair
Detroit DSA

An interesting analysis: Reflections of Fidel Health reform in the United States

2010-03-25T20:41:00.000-07:00

GRANMA INTERNATIONAL
Havana. March 25, 2010

http://tinyurl. com/yk78mlc

Reflections of Fidel
Health reform in the United States
(Taken from CubaDebate)

BARACK Obama is a fanatical believer in the imperialist capitalist system
imposed by the United States on the world. "God bless the United States," he
ends his speeches.

Some of his acts wounded the sensibility of world opinion, which viewed with
sympathy the African-American candidate?s victory over that country?s
extreme right-wing candidate. Basing himself on one of the worst economic
crises that the world has ever seen, and the pain caused by young Americans
who lost their lives or were injured or mutilated in his predecessor?s
genocidal wars of conquest, he won the votes of the majority of 50% of
Americans who deign to go to the polls in that democratic country.

Out of an elemental sense of ethics, Obama should have abstained from
accepting the Nobel Peace Prize when he had already decided to send 40,000
soldiers to an absurd war in the heart of Asia.

The current administration?s militarist policies, its plunder of natural
resources and unequal exchange with the poor countries of the Third World
are in no way different from those of its predecessors, almost all of them
extremely right-wing, with some exceptions, throughout the past century.

The anti-democratic document imposed at the Copenhagen Summit on the
international community ? which had given credit to his promise to cooperate
in the fight against climate change ? was another act that disappointed many
people in the world. The United States, the largest issuer of greenhouse
gases, was not willing to make the necessary sacrifices, despite the sweet
words of its president beforehand.

It would be interminable to list the contradictions between the ideas which
the Cuban nation has defended at great sacrifice for half a century and the
egotistic policies of that colossal empire.

In spite of that, we harbor no antagonism toward Obama, much less toward the
U.S. people. We believe that the health reform has been an important battle,
and a success of his government. It would seem, however, to be something
truly unusual, 234 years after the Declaration of Independence in
Philadelphia in 1776, inspired by the ideas of the French encyclopedists,
that the U.S. government has passed [a law for] medical attention for the
vast majority of its citizens, something that Cuba achieved for its entire
population half a century ago, despite the cruel and inhumane blockade
imposed and still in effect by the most powerful country that ever existed.
Before that, after almost half a century of independence and after a bloody
war, Abraham Lincoln was able to attain legal freedom for slaves.

On the other hand, I cannot stop thinking about a world in which more than
one-third of the population lacks the medical attention and medicines
essential to ensuring its health, a situation that will be aggravated as
climate change and water and food scarcity become increasingly greater in a
globalized world where the population is growing, forests are disappearing,
agricultural land is diminishing, the air is becoming unbreathable, and in
which the human species that inhabits it ? which emerged less than 200,000
years ago; in other words, 3.5 million years after the first forms of life
emerged on the planet ? is running a real risk of disappearing as a species.

Accepting that health reform signifies a success for the Obama government,
the current U.S. president cannot ignore that climate change is a threat to
health, and even worse, to the very existence of all the world?s nations,
when the increase in temperatures ? beyond the critical limits that are in
sight ? is melting the frozen waters of the glaciers, and the tens of
millions of cubic kilometers stored in the enormous ice caps accumulated in
the Antarctic, Greenland and Siberia will have melted within a few dozen
years, leaving underwater all of the world?s port facilities and the lands
where a large part of the global population now lives, feeds itself and
works.

Obama, the leaders of the free countries and their allies, their scientists
and their sophisticated research centers know this; it is impossible for
them not to know it.

I understand the satisfaction in the presidential speech expressing and
recognizing the contributions of the congress members and administration who
made possible the miracle of health reform, which strengthens the
government?s position vis-?-vis the lobbyists and political mercenaries who
are limiting the administration?s faculties. It would be worse if those who
engaged in torture, assassinations for hire, and genocide should reoccupy
the U.S. government. As a person who is unquestionably intelligent and
sufficiently well-informed, Obama knows that there is no exaggeration in my
words. I hope that the silly remarks he sometimes makes about Cuba are not
clouding his intelligence.

In the wake of the success in this battle for the right to health of all
Americans, 12 million immigrants, in their immense majority Latin American,
Haitian and from other Caribbean countries, are demanding the legalization
of their presence in the United States, where they do the jobs that are the
hardest and with which U.S. society could not do without, in a country in
which they are arrested, separated from their families and sent back to
their countries.

The vast majority of them immigrated to Northern America as a consequence of
the dictatorships imposed on the countries of the region by the United
States, and the brutal policy to which they have been subjected as a result
of the plunder of their resources and unequal trade. Their family
remittances constitute a large percentage of the GDP of their economies.
They are now hoping for an act of elemental justice. When an Adjustment Act
was imposed on the Cuban people, promoting brain drain and the dispossession
of its educated young people, why are such brutal methods used against
illegal immigrants of Latin American and Caribbean countries?

The devastating earthquake that lashed Haiti ? the poorest country in Latin
America, which has just suffered an unprecedented natural disaster that
involved the death of more than 200,000 people ? and the terrible economic
damage that a similar phenomenon has caused in Chile, are eloquent evidence
of the dangers that threaten so-called civilization, and the need for
drastic measures that can give the human species hope for survival.

The Cold War did not bring any benefits to the world population. The immense
economic, technological and scientific power of the United States would not
be able to survive the tragedy that is hovering over the planet. President
Obama should look for the pertinent data on his computer and converse with
his most eminent scientists; he will see how far his country is from being
the model for humanity he extols.

Because he is an African American, there he suffered the affronts of
discrimination, as he relates in his book, The Dreams of My Father; there he
knew about the poverty in which tens of millions of Americans live; there he
was educated, but there he also enjoyed, as a successful professional, the
privileges of the rich middle class, and he ended up idealizing the social
system where the economic crisis, the uselessly sacrificed lives of
Americans and his unquestionable political talent gave him the electoral
victory.

Despite that, the most recalcitrant right-wing forces see Obama as an
extremist, and are threatening him by continuing to do battle in the Senate
to neutralize the effects of the health reform, and openly sabotaging him in
various states of the Union, declaring the new law unconstitutional.

The problems of our era are far more serious still.

The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other international
credit agencies, under the strict control of the United States, are allowing
the large U.S. banks ? the creators of fiscal paradises and responsible for
the financial chaos on the planet ? to be kept afloat by the government of
that country in each one of the system?s frequent and growing crises.

The U.S. Federal Reserve issues at its whim the convertible currency that
pays for the wars of conquest, the profits of the military industrial
complex, the military bases distributed throughout the world and the large
investments with which transnationals control the economy in many countries
in the world. Nixon unilaterally suspended the conversion of the dollar into
gold, while the vaults of the banks in New York hold seven thousand tons of
gold, something more than 25% of the world?s reserves of this metal, a
figure which at the end of World War II stood at more than 80%. It is argued
that the [U.S.] public debt exceeds $10 trillion, more than 70% of its GDP,
like a burden that will be passed on to the new generations. That is
affirmed when, in reality, it is the world economy which is paying for that
debt with the huge spending on goods and services that it provides to
acquire U.S. dollars, with which the large transnationals of that country
have taken over a considerable part of the world?s wealth, and which sustain
that nation?s consumer society.

Anyone can understand that such a system is unsustainable and why the
wealthiest sectors in the United States and its allies in the world defend a
system sustained only on ignorance, lies and conditioned reflexes sown in
world public opinion via a monopoly of the mass media, including the
principal Internet networks.

Today, the structure is collapsing in the face of the accelerated advance of
climate change and its disastrous consequences, which are placing humanity
in an exceptional dilemma.

Wars among the powers no longer seem to be the possible solution to major
contradictions, as they were until the second half of the 20th century; but,
in their turn, they have impinged on the factors that make human survival
possible to the extent that they could bring the existence of the current
intelligent species inhabiting our planet to a premature end.

A few days ago, I expressed my conviction, in the light of dominant
scientific knowledge today, that human beings have to solve their problems
on planet Earth, given that they will never be able to cover the distance
that separates the Sun from the closest star, located four light years
distant, a speed that is equivalent to 300,000 kilometers per second ? if
there should be a planet similar to our beautiful Earth in the vicinity of
that sun.

The United States is investing fabulous sums to discover if there is water
on the planet Mars, and whether some elemental form of life existed or
exists there. Nobody knows why, unless it is out of pure scientific
curiosity. Millions of species are disappearing at an increasing rate on our
planet and its fabulous volumes of water are constantly being poisoned.

The new laws of science ? based on Einstein?s theories on energy and matter
and the Big Boom theory as the origin of the millions of constellations and
infinite stars or other hypotheses ? have given way to profound changes in
fundamental concepts such as space and time, which are occupying
theologians? attention and analyses. One of them, our Brazilian friend Frei
Betto, approaches the issue in his book La obra del artista: una vision
hol?stica del Universe (The Artist?s Work: a Holistic View of the Universe),
launched at the last International Book Fair in Havana.

Scientific advances in the last 100 years have impacted on traditional
approaches that prevailed for thousands of years in the social sciences and
even in philosophy and theology.

The interest that the most honest thinkers are taking in that new knowledge
is notable, but we know absolutely nothing of President Obama?s thinking on
the compatibility of consumer societies with science.

Meanwhile, it is worthwhile, now and then, to devote time to meditating on
those issues. Certainly human beings will not cease to dream and take things
with the due serenity and nerves of steel on that account. It is a duty ? at
least for those who chose the political profession and the noble and
essential resolve of a human society of solidarity and justice.

Fidel Castro Ruz
March 24, 2010
6:40 p.m.

Translated by Granma International

Dead Prez Lecture 3 pm Saturday 12/12/09

2009-12-10T15:47:00.000-08:00

A Michigan State YDS Publication

2009-11-24T18:29:00.000-08:00

Be a Realist, Demand The Impossible!

By Chris OBrien

November 24, 2009

What’s the matter with American socialism? The days of easy credit are over, the Great American Jobs Machine has broken down, and Wall Street’s decadence has been revealed for all to see. In short, capitalism is less appealing than ever. Our friends in Germany, Portugal, and Latin America have recently made gains under similar circumstances. And yet we American socialists seem incapable of any fundamental breakthrough. Why? Our problems, I think, are twofold: first, we have the wrong attitude, and second, the wrong strategy. I’ll deal with each problem in turn.

Socialists are a pessimistic bunch. It’s pretty obvious why. We’ve been losing, a lot. The left, which 40 years ago remained a small but vital undercurrent in our society, has seen little but defeat since then. The social-democratic left has been marginalized within the Democratic Party, to the point where the Obama Administration seems intent on replacing moderate Republicans as the official voice of corporate America. Notice, for example, that demanding single-payer health insurance, once a staple of Democratic Party platforms, now marks one as an irresponsible radical.

What of the radical left itself? Faced with the ever-growing power of capital, and with our own corresponding enervation, we tend to moderate ourselves, to promote ‘realistic’ and ‘pragmatic’ reforms. Instead of socialism, we demand only ‘economic justice,’ instead of an end to exploitation, a ‘living wage.’ But even these goals are out of reach. What was once mere liberalism comes to seem almost revolutionary.

The problem, in short, is that we have become unable or unwilling to articulate our original vision. We no longer believe in socialism. Oh, we believe in it, but in the same way we might believe there is a black hole at the center of our galaxy: we accept that it is theoretically possible, but the notion strikes us as faintly magical, not anything we’ll ever see. This resignation makes socialists vulnerable to the old jibes that our ideas are basically utopian. If we want to have any practical success, we’d better just accept the rules of the capitalist game.

This moderation is fatal. The more pragmatic and ‘realistic’ we are, the less we have to say that really matters to anyone. Socialism’s distinct advantage is that it, and it alone, seriously addresses the problems people face everyday in their working and consuming lives- the numbing intensity of the capitalist workplace, the sense of inferiority and purposelessness it generates, the ultimately futile temptations of consumerism. The small fact that capitalism is driving us toward environmental disaster. No other political philosophy can really deal with these problems. When we ignore them, when we confine ourselves to ordinary ‘progressive’ issues- no matter how worthy those issues are- we willingly give up on our single greatest asset. Worse yet, we give up on workers and the poor (and the environment, too).

Socialists in America are a little like awkward teenagers. We recognize that we are somehow unique, different, and this frightens us. We wish to be normal and ‘popular’, so we start to act like everyone else, to imitate their language and feign their interests. But by doing this, we obliterate whatever made us interesting in the first place, and so become less popular than ever. As everyone should have learned by now, if you want to make friends and influence people you need to stop worrying too much about what they think.

We need self-confidence, basically.

Of course, self-confidence isn’t enough. The Spartacist League and the Revolutionary Communist Party have it, and they’re even worse off than we are. We also need an intelligent strategy. Once we’ve convinced ourselves that socialism is decent and necessary, how do we convince everyone else?

One classic approach is to organize lots of protests and marches and petitions, with the hope of convincing those in power to change their ways. The Nation, with its ‘open letters to President Obama’, etc., follows this strategy. Today, one evrn hears some talk amongst The Nation types about ‘holding Obama’s feet to the fire.’ How’s this project going? Not well, these quotes, unearthed by Bhaskar Sunkara of The Activist, suggest:

Attending the [National Equality March] was a "waste of time at best," Barney Frank told a reporter a few days before. "The only thing they’re going to be putting pressure on is the grass."

According to NBC News’ John Harwood, administration officials viewed demonstrators–and, in fact, anyone who criticizes Obama from the left–as an "Internet left fringe" that "needs to take off their pajamas, get dressed and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult."

The problem, of course, is that we have no hope at the moment of competing with Washington DC’s other interest groups, particularly when those groups are funded by Goldman Sachs or Humana. Trying to influence politicians in Washington just won’t work. Speaking truth to power, Noam Chomsky once observed, is a waste of time. Those in power probably already know the truth, they just don’t care.

One might also follow what I’ll call the didactic strategy. This is what Chomsky himself seems to favor. It assumes that once you’ve gotten all the information out there, you’ll be able to convince people that capitalism is really horrible, and they will then go about taking political power and changing things for the better. Politics in this view, is really just a form of education.

This strategy actually has a lot of merits. We do need to educate people. It just happens to be too conservative. Simply lecturing to people probably won’t convince them. Instead, we need to demonstratethat socialism is better. Rather than convincing people to take political power at some future date, we should be helping them to gradually acquire power now. We need to figure out how we can place political and economic power into the hands of working people- we will teach them about socialism by creating it (gradually, step by step). The key to such a project, I think, is an old slogan on the international left: Dual Power. This is the notion that we should engage in traditional electoral politics while also building radical democratic institutions, with the later supplementing and eventually supplanting the former. With such a twofold approach, we could go about building a movement that’s both democratic and authentically socialist. Here are some highly schematic suggestions on how to do this:

Dual Power 1: Building Alternative Structures We tend to fall into the liberal trap of equating democracy with electoral politics. In a genuinely socialist society, though, democracy would be radically expanded. Workplaces, as well as the local and national (and eventually international) economies, would be organized democratically. Moreover, at the level of municipal government, one would want to see a great deal of direct democracy. As socialists, we should be working to build up alternative democratic institutions within the existing economy.

Of course, this insight isn’t exactly novel. But, while leftists repeat it almost to the point of cliché, there seems to be very little discussion of how to translate it into a concrete, practicable program. If we are serious about building egalitarian organizations outside of government bureaucracy, two actually existing institutions might be helpful: labor unions and cooperatives. Of course, unions are quite weak in this country, and there leadership has an awful record. However, rank-and-file labor organizers and unionists are often quite radical, temperamentally if not ideologically.¹ An interesting project for YDS would be to discuss how we might go about stimulating the latent radicalism of unionists, and combating their rather scrofulous leadership. As we saw in the 1930’s with the CIO, militant unions can do wonders for the working class.

Co-ops are already relatively popular. Our goal should be to make them even more so. Our job should also be to remind co-op members that these highly successful institutions should be impossible, given capitalist ideology. Both unions and cooperatives teach people that democracy within the economy can have a real positive impact upon their lives. They are both democratic socialism, in embryonic form.

Dual Power 2: Succeeding in Electoral Politics On the other side of the equation, how does the left achieve electoral success? Since a mass-based Social Democratic Party doesn’t seem to be an option at the moment, perhaps we should think (and act) more locally. As sociologist G. William Domhoff demonstrates in an interesting series of articles (see http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/local/), municipal governments in the United States are typically controlled by local real estate developers, eager to attract capital to their community and to use public resources for their own enrichment.

A particularly striking example of this was Chicago’s recent Olympics debacle. As Doug Henwood points out on his blog (http://doughenwood.wordpress.com/), studies have found that the Olympics doesn’t bring many long-term economic benefit to the cities that host it, at least if you include ordinary people in the analysis. It does make lots of money for local real estate interests. Since Chicago real estate magnates are major supporters of Mayor Richard Daily (not to mention favorite son Barack Obama), both of these gentlemen were willing to spend large amounts of public money on the Olympics. The point is: if Chicago could expend all these resources on a vanity project, why couldn’t it devote more to programs that actually improve people’s lives? City governments waste our money in similar ways all the time: think of all the public funds spent on stadiums and shopping centers and ‘enterprise zones’ that enrich developers at the expense of everyone else.

If socialists could win control of a local government or two, we could redirect some of these funds toward worthwhile projects. Not only would this help a lot of people out (and presumably make us a bit more popular), it would also be potentially quite radical. For example, public support for limited-equity housing cooperatives could erode the grip of the capitalist housing market. One could also imagine local governments supporting environmentally friendly cooperative industry. It would be wonderful if working class Americans started to associate socialism with jobs and cheaper, better housing- rather than with gulags and pretentious intellectuals.

Socialists could also open up city governance to ordinary people, in the form of neighborhood councils with real budgeting and planning powers. If successful this could make it much harder for capitalists to erode working class gains.

Best of all, we have models for this sort of program. For example, Bologna, Italy, under a long period of Socialist and Communist government, was able to make tremendous gains for its population. A book entitled Red Bologna, published in the 1970’s when the Italian left was at its peak of popularity and militancy² discusses the left’s achievements in that city. These were quite impressive: popular participation in budgeting and urban planning, free public transportation at rush hour, a heavily cooperativized retail sector, not to mention lots of cooperatively-owned industry and radical changes in education. Moreover, these things happened under severe budget constraints and under a strongly anti-socialist national government. The objective conditions, in other words, weren’t all that different from our own.³

What’s exciting about these ideas is that they are simultaneously more realistic and more radical than most current proposals from the left. It’s increasingly hard to imagine the Democrats passing EFCA or socializing the healthcare system, but it is possible to imagine us successfully campaigning for a local election, radicalizing a union local, or setting up a co-op. The left even has some experience doing these sorts of things. If we can do them on a small scale, then as we amass broader support, we could do them on an increasingly larger scale (winning national elections, radicalizing the whole labor movement). The point is that we coordinate these smaller projects so that they all lead toward the larger goal of building socialism. Who knows? The consequences could be revolutionary.

Keeping Healthy

2009-08-17T19:06:00.000-07:00

The following is an assortment of resources and info. shared with us from YDS's national office.

Health care industry profit spread

Insurance exec income spread

Gary Peters Town Hall on Health Care: Show UP!

594	Rep.	Gary	Peters	DEM	MI	District 9	Host Monster.com Job Fair	9/3			Marriot Pontiac-Auburn Hills		9:30 a.m.

Healthcare professionals are hanging the flyers linked above in their examination rooms and offices all over the country. Patients are sharing them with families and colleagues.

Make copies and take the flyers with you to the healthcare reform town halls and other events! Pass them out to your Senators, Representatives and to the Press. Send them to your friends and colleagues.

The Right's Strategy for Town Hall Meetings

The blog Talking Points Memo has retrieved the following talking points -- which is in its entirety in the link below -- that detail an intentional harassment strategy against Democratic members of Congress.

Complete details here

Tips include:You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep's

presentation. Watch for an opportunity to yell out and
challenge the Rep's statements early. If he blames Bush
for something or offers other excuses -- call him on it,
yell back and have someone else follow-up with a shout-
out. Don't carry on and make a scene -- just short
intermittent shout outs. The purpose is to make him
uneasy early on and set the tone for the hall as clearly
informal, and free-wheeling. It will also embolden
others who agree with us to call out and challenge with
tough questions. The goal is to rattle him, get him off
his prepared script and agenda. If he says something
outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right down.
Look for these opportunities before he even takes
questions.

Health Care is at a critical point; the best results will come from dialogue, activism is encouraged, but we are reminded by the American Right how NOT to engage and sustain democracy.

Please feel free to contact MSU YDS if you are interested in working on a campus or community project related to the success of single payer health care in America.

Lit Review: Theories of Development, Peet and Hartwick

2009-08-10T06:12:00.000-07:00

Allison Voglesong

MSU James Madison College

International Relations 2010

MC 320 paper, written 2009.06.01

Part of YDS initiative to share student publications in the spirit of critical dialog. Please comment!

Review of Theories of Development, Richard Peet and Elaine Hartwick, Guilford Press, 1999, 234 pages

Development and Oppositional Space

1.
   There are many ways to explain and understand development. In "Theories of Development," Peet and Hartwick define development as a process of "social reproduction within environments" (288); present and critique its historiography founded in the "positivistic social science" (107) of modernization theory and its "sex-affective production" systems (261); and present an alternative vision of development that supports "subjugated knowledges and oppositional social movements" (279). I find value in the authors' discussion on development "as the social use of economic progress" (275), I agree with their critique of "capitalism as the social form taken by the modern world," and I echo their call for "social control of the reproduction of existence" (276) so that development policy may no longer reflect the preponderance of production, but rather emphasize building "transformative capacity"(121) through what I call constructive opposition.
2.
   Peet and Hartwick illustrate extant development theory as an extension of "modernization," what Parsons synthesized as "the enhancement of adaptive capacity (particularly in the economy's function of using resources effectively) as the main 'advance' projecting 'social evolution'" (118). The value system of modernization secures a "neoevolutionary" and hierarchical social order where "growth [was] founded on capitalist efficiency" (14). Modernization theory's features of structural functionalism -- its systemic organization -- includes social "adaptation, differentiation, [and] integration" (118). Put simply, "how developed a society was could be measured in terms of indices of similarity with the ["structural specialization" (122)] characteristics of modern industrial society" (121). The policies of development characterized by economic neoliberal intention are processes that Peet and Hartwick assert prejudice "instruments of power" over "natural methods of measurement" (11). Therefore, the modernization approach to development is destructive to third world development because its adaptive approach is historically entrenched in the capitalist global structure, and encourages a "bias towards equilibrium" (120) of an imbalanced global power structures -- one that makes development necessary at all.
   The separation of women from natural reproductive practices (i.e. relegation to informal economy labor) supports modernization development theory as a capitalist structure of "power inherent in the theorization of differences" (246). Several of the varying modes of feminism understands the destructive nature of neoliberal development policies for all marginalized and oppressed identities/entities. Modernization's structural functionalism "superimposed the scientific and economic paradigms created by Western gender-biased ideology on communities previously immersed in other cultures with entirely different relations with the natural world" (269). Modernization's pinnacle equilibrium is "imbued with Western notions of the sexual division of labor" (255); Peet and Hartwick believe feminism is relevant because "women arguably are becoming the majority of the new global working class" (242), and that the relationship between "modes of production with social forms of gender relations" (262) has increased women's subordination to men through modern development policies. The separation of public from private modes of production and reproduction are "sex-affective" (261) examples of "how women and their labor [have] been integrated into global capitalism by... core countries [which] explain[s their] marginalization and oppression" (254).
3.
   I share a large portion of Peet and Hartwick's sentiments on development, particularly as it "attends to the social consequences of production" (2), or rather, modernization's "deficiency" (280) in tending to them. Ultimately, we share the desire to seek "a wider strategy of transforming power relations in society at large," so that "all activities employing labor organized through social relations... [are] connected with the direct reproduction of immediate life" (290). Their "critical modernism" approach (Chapter 8) -- more specifically their adoption of "radical democracy" (288) -- seeks to transform development policy into a "directly and cooperatively" managed program to satisfy "locally defined, but universally present, needs" (291).    Contemporary development practices, explained above as under the influence of "modern products of reason" (250), are illustrated by Peet and Hartwick as guilty of: "limited aims (an abundance of things), the timidity of its means (copying the West), and the scope of its conception (experts plan it)" (280). Modernization's limited aims (i.e. structural adjustment goals of IFIs) are to be refocused through radical democracy to entail control... by all its members as direct and equal participants" (289). More importantly, this method reorients development aims towards capacity-building; employing "control over production and reproduction within a democratic politics quite different from either private ownership or state control" (18). Addressing modernization's timidity of its means in terms of socialist feminism Peet and Hartwick seek to "reformulate development in a way that combines, rather than separates, everyday life and the wider societal dimension, with productive activities of all kinds considered as a totality rather than split into [the] hierarchical types" (253) produced by Western structural functionalism.
   I am most enamored by Peet and Hartwick's critical modernist approach to the scope of conception of modern development, which I will refer to as "constructive opposition." Under the auspices of "retention" (281) of some modernization thought, movement beyond neoliberal development economics requires "several, radically different, socioeconomic models, with free debate among their proponents" (282). I am weary of immediately adopting their recommendation that a "revitalized social democratic/developmental state model" will be able to, by means of whatever ambiguous manifestation, "produce growth with equity" (284). Peet and Hartwick recognize I am not alone in such caution: "interventions into the development process take many forms, some of which are incomparable but even in opposition" (273). What makes their analysis unique is their articulation of social movement opposition in two ways. First, they necessitate opposition against existing development structures, whereby "contradictions provoke crises, the people affected build social movements, and these accumulate into widespread popular opposition to the existing forms of social life" (286). Similarly, they sew opposition together with the concept of linkages and "social movements, old and new, [as] united in their opposition to resource deprivation" (287).
4.
   I agree that a re-conceptualized development theory needs oppositional space within and between its various social movements seeking to democratize social reproduction. Somewhat of an opportunity for airing out the defunct contemporary discourse of development, "constructive opposition" allows for the international division of labor to be reevaluated and cooperatively reconstituted. Reproductive capacity can, by this method, be stimulated by social movements, whose "action involves power in the sense of transformative capacity" (121), which is one conception of development theory that I agree with (for now).

Lit Review: Imperial Encounters, Roxanne Doty

2009-08-06T06:45:00.000-07:00

Allison Voglesong

MSU James Madison College

International Relations 2010

MC 320 paper, written 2009.05.27

Part of YDS initiative to share student publications in the spirit of critical dialog. Please comment!

Review of Imperial Encounters, Roxanne Doty, Borderline Series, 1996, 224 pages

The Proletarian Third World and Discursive Representation

A Hypostatized “Other”

The "third world" identity is politically sensitive because its discourse assumes the totalization of an "other" identity, but it is politically significant because, as a result of colonialism's imperial "rhetorical strategy" (11), the contemporary third world identity - and its development - has been hierarchically reified (36). In "Imperial Encounters," Roxanne Doty explains the discursive separation of self from other as an imperialist device employed by "Western"-thinking colonial nations (33) who contemporarily seek to "discipline" (129) the third world via development policy. She argues that the amalgamations of distinct indigenous identities were homogenized but never united, as illustrated by contemporary development theory whereby "positioning" (11) the "other" hypostatizes the third world. Doty identifies both the self/other separation and the bereavement of third world agency an expression not only of Western imperialism but also of the world capitalist system's colonial roots. Going beyond Doty's theorization of an imperialist North/South divide, I contribute the idea that such hierarchical "positioning," otherwise the simultaneous employment of the "logic of difference" and the "logic of equivalence" (12), is analogous to the social stratification of the proletariat as determined by the bourgeoisie, a theory characterized in the Marxist critique of capitalism, or as I critique, the world capitalist system.

Colonial Legacy, Aid, and the Discursive “Other”

Colonialism's legacy both a physical and rhetorical creation of the "third world" by the Western-thinking world. In the 1890's the US sought to annex the Philippines, which Doty explains as an example of US participation in the "Western bond" whereby the "right to conquest... established a fundamental bond between powers possessing this right and a divide between these powers and their subjects/victims" (34-5). Conquest of the Philippines stigmatized the nation as a non-sovereign (44) representative entity whose quantum identity was non-white (30), while also "linking together in relations of similarity and complementarity" (43). This "discursive economy" (45) homogenized the Filipino identity as a "lower element of humanity" (43), which "rendered the Filipino incapable of exercising agency" (44). The hegemony of the Western bond discursively established the imperial representational practices seen in "the construction of the Philippine/Filipino other... Significantly, the discourse instantiated in this imperial encounter exemplified the representational practices that were at work more globally in constructing the West and its colonial other(s)" (28).

The contemporary issues of foreign assistance, democracy and human rights importantly parallel the imperialist Western conquest of the third world in that the discussed "other," again the third world, was constructed by Western thought. Doty illustrates this with the academic discourse at MIT which constructed the third world "subject identity" (135) as passionate rather than pragmatic. In this case, the discursive economy was used to define third worlders as a "dangerous people," classified as politically unstable (132) and in need of development and democracy. Development framed under the auspices of democracy, Doty notes, was "never [in] the presence of a clear and unambiguous signified, but rather [in] the absence of certain characteristics in "third world" subjects" (136). Foreign assistance is framed by Doty as "deployment of disciplinary techniques" (129) and she notes that its "motive force remains outside of the "third world" society and its indigenous culture, social structures, and inhabitants" (134). Discriminately administered foreign assistance was therefore "a strategy for combating the dangers that confronted the project of an international, liberal, capitalist social order" (131). For Doty, this particular constitution of the North/South dichotomy "normalized... the hierarchical relationship" (142) between the West and the third world.

Positioning the Third World Proletariat

Whereby Doty makes explicit the relationship between the creation of the North/South identity hierarchy and the world capitalist system, she less obviously explores capitalism's relationship to the concurrent internal stratification of the third world. The hypostatized "other" is evident in "the rhetorical strategies found in discourse [which] entails the positioning of subjects and objects vis-a-vis one another. What defines a particular kind of subject is, in large part, the relationships that the subject is positioned in relative to other kinds of subjects... [This] establishes various kinds of relationships between subjects and between subjects and objects" (11). In the case of the Philippines, the Western bond undertook the divide-and-conquer practice to establish "knowledge" of the Filipino "native" in order to "justify U.S. conquest, violence, and subsequent control" (37). Doty cites Dean Worcester, who "ranked Filipinos hierarchically from the Negritos, the lowest both physically and mentally, to the Indonesians of Mindaneo, the highest" (37). Academic Kennon separated "the good but ignorant" Filipino and the bad Filipino... [which] permitted the denial of any collective sense of revolutionary nationalism" (37). The development of the very term Filipino was a representational practice which "worked to deny homogeneity or "peoplehood" to the inhabitants" (38) of the Philippines, later taking "credit for creating a unified identity" (38). This "hierarchy of race" (38) within the third world is analogous to the bourgeoisie's deliberate inter-proletarian stratification because "colonial discourse presupposed [Filipino] capacity for agency" (44), and therefore power.

Doty indicates how the racialization of the third world is politically significant because "the earlier mission [of colonization] to uplift and civilize was replaced with the intent 'to trigger, to stimulate, and to guide the growth of fundamental social structures and behaviors'" (134). Foreign assistance was granted to "emerging peoples" (132) of nations whose capacity to self-govern was based on the discursive classification, or "reverse visibility," (142) of democracy throughout the third world. Plainly stated by Congressman Zablocki, the administration of foreign assistance based on a democratic prerogative was not to absolutely increase world democracy, but rather to "reconcile the unreconciled among men and nations to the continued validity and viability of the present world system" (132) of capitalism. A "failure to achieve practical improvements in the lives of people throughout the world would provoke unrest and bring political extremists to power" (129); similar logic guides the bourgeoisie to establish and maintain - through arbitrarily constructed, differentiated identities - a middle class buffer between itself and the disposessed proletariat. Finally, the discursive nature of establishing the non-democratic other "obscured the undemocratic character of policies ostensibly aimed at promoting democracy and of the international order itself -- institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank" (137).

Capitalism at Play

Doty focuses on the idea that the "logic of equivalence... subverts positive identities" (11) and cancels out essential third world differences because "each of the contents of these differential elements is equivalent to the others in terms of their common differentiation between colonizer and colonized" (12). However, I believe that positioning is significant to the "representational practices... that framed North/South relations" in terms of "different and unequal kinds of international subjects" (45). This disenfranchisement and division of the "proletarian" third world therefore supports the idea of a world capitalist system. To recapitulate, "the proliferation of [self/other] discourse... illustrates an attempt to expel the "other," to make natural and unproblematic the boundaries between the inside and the outside. This in turn suggests that identity and therefore the agency that is connected with identity are inextricably linked to representational practices" (168). The third world, as the proletariat, is incapable of exercising power and agency, where distinct identities are aggregated in a hierarchical, racialized "other" position. These "representational practices were not epiphenomenal" (48) or unintentional but rather "constructed the very differences that [identity] transformation ostensibly would eliminate" (136). The third world, akin to the proletariat, has thus been conquered and divided by the hand of the world capitalist system, because "the construction of meaning and the construction of social, political, and economic power are inextricably linked" (170) to the system's stratified structure.

YDS MEETING SAT AUG 1 Noon @ Student Union

2009-07-31T13:31:00.000-07:00

"The task of the intellectual is not to create revolutions but to join them whenever and wherever the people wage them. Commitment is an act, not a word." -- Satre

Up to the task?

Saturday August 1st

12:00 noon @ Student Union

MSU Young Democratic Socialists

Join us at our general meeting and bring ideas about what you'd like to see happen this year.

Already in consideration are the following programs:

Continuing YDS Response to Tuition Hike

Spring forum on 21st Century Socialism @ MSU

MSU YDS keynote speaker: Prof. Bill Ayers, University of Illinois, Chicago

Difficult Dialogues and 21st Century Chautauqua

Meeting location for 09-10

Detroit DSA partnership/representation

MSU YDS prefigures very widely on some major campus events for 2009 - 2010. The "Difficult Dialogues" program is going to be controversial and will more than likely receive state and possible national attention. The Chautauqua program (not connected to "Difficult Dialogues") will take students to various parts of the state to explore the question, What should a more ethical, sustainable Michigan economy look like?

ADL "Difficult Dialogues" Program Needs YDS Voices

Ryan is the only YDSer that's been going to the meetings at Hillel House with JSU, etc; despite good intentions, this program is in imminent danger of getting bogged down in the all-to-familiar quagmire of "let's not push our limits, we all have a lot to do and maybe this year should just be a planning year." We need to have more of a presence from students that are conscious of the multitude of forms that racism and discrimination can take, particularly those who are really commited to moving beyond the typical dialogue of "tolerance" and "liberalism."

Also on Saturday's docket:

Joint film showing and discussion, "The Spook Who Sat By the Door" (note: this movie was summarily banned by United Artists due to its revolutionary content) and "Catch a Fire," with the Du Bois Society and Langston Hughes Society.

See you @ The Union

Allison Voglesong

The Unemployment Timebomb is Quietly Ticking

2009-07-05T03:30:00.000-07:00

The unemployment timebomb is quietly ticking
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Telegraph
July 4 2009

One dog has yet to bark in this long winding crisis. Beyond riots in Athens
and a Baltic bust-up, we have not seen evidence of bitter political protest
as the slump eats away at the legitimacy of governing elites in North
America, Europe, and Japan. It may just be a matter of time.

One of my odd experiences covering the US in the early 1990s was visiting
militia groups that sprang up in Texas, Idaho, and Ohio in the aftermath of
recession. These were mostly blue-collar workers, ? early victims of global
"labour arbitrage" ? angry enough with Washington to spend weekends in
fatigues with M16 rifles. Most backed protest candidate Ross Perot, who won
19pc of the presidential vote in 1992 with talk of shutting trade with
Mexico.

The inchoate protest dissipated once recovery fed through to jobs, although
one fringe group blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995.
Unfortunately, there will be no such jobs this time. Capacity use has fallen
to record-low levels (68pc in the US, 71 in the eurozone). A deep purge of
labour is yet to come.

The shocker last week was not just that the US lost 467,000 jobs in May, but
also that time worked fell 6.9pc from a year earlier, dropping to 33 hours a
week. "At no time in the 1990 or 2001 recessions did we ever come close to
seeing such a detonating jobs figure," said David Rosenberg from Glukin
Sheff. "We have lost a record nine million full-time jobs this cycle."

Earnings have fallen at a 1.6pc annual rate over the last three months. Wage
deflation is setting in ? like Japan. Interestingly, The International
Labour Organisation is worried enough to push for a global pact, fearing
countries may set off a ruinous spiral by chipping away at wages try to gain
beggar-thy-neighbour advantage.

Some of the US pay cuts are disguised. Over 238,000 state workers in
California have been working two days less a month without pay since
February. Variants of this are happening in 22 states.

The Centre for Labour Market Studies (CLMS) in Boston says US unemployment
is now 18.2pc, counting the old-fashioned way. The reason why this does not
"feel" like the 1930s is that we tend to compress the chronology of the
Depression. It takes time for people to deplete their savings and sink into
destitution. Perhaps our greater cushion of wealth today will prevent
another Grapes of Wrath, but 20m US homeowners are already in negative
equity (zillow.com data). Evictions are running at a terrifying pace.

Some 342,000 homes were foreclosed in April, pushing a small army of
children into a network of charity shelters. This compares to 273,000 homes
lost in the entire year of 1932. Sheriffs in Michigan and Illinois are
quietly refusing to toss families on to the streets, like the non-compliance
of Catholic police in the Slump.

Europe is a year or so behind, but catching up fast. Unemployment has
reached 18.7pc in Spain (37pc for youths), and 16.3pc in Latvia. Germany has
delayed the cliff-edge effect by paying companies to keep furloughed workers
through "Kurzarbeit". Germany's "Wise Men" fear that the jobless rate will
jump from 3.7m to 5.1m by next year. The OECD expects unemployment to reach
57m in the rich countries by the end of next year.

This is the deadly lag effect. What is so disturbing is that governments
have not even begun the spending squeeze that must come to stop their
countries spiralling into a debt compound trap.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy, with a good nose for popular moods, says:
"We must overhaul everything. We cannot have a system of rentiers and social
dumping under globalisation. Either we have justice or we will have
violence. It is a chimera to think that this crisis is just a footnote and
that we can carry on as before."

The message has not reached Wall Street or the City. If bankers know what is
good for them, they will take a teacher's salary for a few years until the
storm passes. If they proceed with the bonuses now on the table, even as
taxpayers pay for the errors of their caste, they must expect a ferocious
backlash.

We are fortunate that the US has a new president enjoying a great reservoir
of sympathy, and a clean-broom Congress. Other nations must limp on with
carcass governments: Germany's paralysed Left-Right coalition, the
burned-out relics of Japan's LDP, and Labour's death march in Britain. Some
are taking precautions: Silvio Berlusconi is trying to emasculate Italy's
parliament (with little protest) while the Kremlin has activated
"anti-crisis" units to nip protest in the bud.

We are moving into Phase II of the Great Unwinding. It may be time to put
away our texts of Keynes, Friedman, and Fisher, so useful for Phase 1, and
start studying what happened to society when global unemployment went
haywire in 1932.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/5742937/The-unemployment-timebomb-is-quietly-ticking.html

Article Critique: “New Trends in Democracy and Development: Democratic Capitalism in South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya” - Rita Kiki Edozie

2009-04-29T19:20:00.000-07:00

In her article titled “New Trends in Democracy and Development: Democratic Capitalism in South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya” Professor Rita Kiki Edozie of the International Relations department at Michigan State University examines the “complex relationship between capitalism and democracy in contemporary democratic regimes in Africa from the perspective of current trends in economic globalization” (43). The article follows the prospects of democracy in the three mentioned African countries and the scandals surrounding their dominant political parties: The African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in Nigeria, and the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) in Kenya (Edozie 43).

Edozie uses the theoretical frameworks of political economy and comparative studies to show how the global regimes of capital are having effects on contemporary national democratic politics and how a democratic crisis in each country is associated with an economic crisis. Among these are South Africa’s French Connection Scandal, Nigeria’s Globacom Affair, and Kenya’s Anglo-Leasing Finance Scandal (Edozie 43). According to Edozie, when considering the relationship between capitalism and democracy, one must consider two things: the region’s context of economic development and economic conditions that foster the emergence of democracy, as well as the performance of democratic regimes that speak to the conditions required for democratic stabilization, consolidation, and effective performance (45).

Edozie explains that in the developing world context, the analyses of problems that influence democracy are defined in socio-political, economic, and cultural, terms Edozie labeled as external or extrinsic (47). In the case of Africa, such factors cause significant effects on unevenly developed economic structures in developing democracies. Democratic transitions in which economic and democratic reform occur simultaneously allow for the formation of “democratic capitalism” (Edozie 48). From here Edozie moves into specific examples in the African context: South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya’s network of democratic capitalism. All three countries serve as important examples of the “phenomena” of democratic capitalism and show how intrinsic features such as liberal democracies and pluralism, along with extrinsic features such as global laissez-faire capitalism are contributing to a crisis of democracy (49). These three countries were selected because they are among the wealthiest of African economies on the continent. However, compared to other advanced industrial democracies throughout the world these African countries are relatively poor (Edozie 49).

Beginning with South Africa, the crisis of democracy is attributed to the second election and the assumption of Thabo Mbeki as the executive power. After his rise to power, the ANC become more centralized and dominating and “talking left while acting right” (Edozie 50). Others such as Jacob Zuma further tarnished the name of the ANC by illegally benefitting from a multibillion dollar arms contract, or the “French connection” as Edozie terms it. The tension originally began as a power dispute between Jacob Zuma, the Deputry President of the ANC and Bulelani Ngcuka, head of South Africa’s Directorate of Special Investigations. Ngcuka illegally benefitted from an arms trade deal with his financial partner Schabir Shaik, the director of the Nkobi Holdings and the African Defence Systems (Edozie 56). Tension built within the party as those with different ideologies (pro-reform vs. traditional revolutionary beliefs) clashed. Such internal conflict made it impossible for the ANC government to focus effectively on the issues of South Africa such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic and unemployment among others. and put democracy at risk.

Next Edozie moves onto Nigeria and its incumbent ruling party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). In Nigeria much of the political tension was caused between the battles between the country’s legislature and the executive. Impeachment charges were brought against then President Obasanjo and then counter charges against key legislators. Later on when Abubaka won the presidency, tension arose between the Southern Christians and the Northern Muslims. More pro-economic reform policy was pushed by the executive, putting more emphasis on personal power politics and the ideology of Nigerian ethno-regionalism (Edozie 50).
Under the NARC regime Edozie elaborates on the Globacom Affair. This affair had international connections, and very heavy relations with the US Department of Justice, the FBI, and Congressman William Jefferson. The Nigerian Presidency claimed to have been acting on behalf of the FBI to investigate the Vice President involvement in the laundering of money from privatization program funds and using them to purchase shares in Globacom and other US ‘front’ companies (Edozie 54). Such accusations of scandal, money laundering, and corruption are never conducive to democracy, and to accuse a President of those wrongdoings truly damages democracy in Nigeria.

Finally Edozie elaborates on the crisis in Kenya and the historic transition election in 2002 that brought President Mwai Kibaki and the National Rainbow Coalition Party (NARC) to power. With Kibaki’s ascension to power came Kenya’s adaptation of nurture capitalism in democratic politics. In 2003 a sensational corruptions scandal was discovered in Nigeria, now known as the Anglo-Leasing Finance Scandal. Its major players included NARC, President Kibaki, and a host of his other key ministers. The government of Kenya wanted to replace its passport printing system and sources its bids from international companies. A French firm quoted the transaction at 6million Euros, and a British firm, Anglo-Leasing Finance, quoted 30 million dollars. The scandal happened when the contract was awarded to Anglo-Leasing, which then sub-leased the contract to the French firm for 6 million dollars. NARC ministers were implicated but no charges were brought against them (Edozie 58-9). When the people can’t trust their own elected officials due to monetary scandal, democracy is in danger indeed.

Edozie’s collection of data for the three countries suggests that the democratic crises experienced by each country are linked to national and global economic structures including elites, electorates, and capitalist interests (60). These developing countries more aggressively “seek business investment for the purpose of economic growth and poverty reduction” (Edozie 61). But because of this, they tend to turn into nurture capitalist economies because they must rely on large domestic and international corporations who exploit the people of these countries. The governing bodies of these countries tend to support no-reform policies rather than economic reform because they realize how harmful such polices are to the welfare and interests of the people. Even still, since economic policy almost always presides with the executive and elite who are loyal to the central banks and creditors, they tend to form political majorities in parliament mobilized to support the technocratic, pro-reform economic policy (Edozie 62). Therefore, the interests of the people are never really given a chance.

Edozie’s evidence showing that people of these countries are demanding more than just democratic representation (such as suffrage, entitlements, or political rights) is her overall strength. She does not say that the political parties in South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria have taken part in corrupt practices, but gives specific evidence of their wrongdoings as well as shows how the people reacted to them. She uses the labor strikes, demonstrations, riots, and militant conflicts of the people to show that constituencies in all three countries are demanding democracies that provide the redistribution of the already scarce resources (Edozie 62). Democratic capitalism is being rejected by the people. The future of the countries depend on whether or not each country can get beyond their crises through peaceful political means. In the case of South Africa it may mean allowing other parties than the ANC to have a share in the political process of the country. Similar are the cases in Nigeria and Kenya where there is a need to create a multi-ethnic, multiparty systems that foster national development and equal access to material wealth for everyone, rather than just the elite few.

Works Cited:

Edozie, Rita Kiki. “New Trends in Democracy and Development: Democratic Capitalism in South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya.” Politikon. 35:1, 43-67.

THINK BEFORE YOU DRINK: WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT BACARDI

2009-04-25T20:56:00.000-07:00

link

Rock around the Blockade, which campaigns in solidarity with Cuba, has launched a Boycott Bacardi campaign to highlight the organised attempts by the Bacardi company to undermine the Cuban Revolution – a stance belied by its publicity for its apparently ‘Cuban’ rum.

In advertising its lead brand white rum, Bacardi plays on its Cuban roots, misleading drinkers into believing that Bacardi still has some links with the island. In fact the Bacardi empire is based in the Bahamas and the Bacardi company broke all ties with Cuba after the Revolution of 1959, when its cronies in the hated Batista dictatorship were overthrown by a popular guerrilla movement led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.

Since then the Bacardi company has backed illegal and violent attempts to undermine the Cuban Revolution, including funding the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF), a virulently anti-Castro right-wing exile organisation based in Miami, which has been responsible for systematic acts of terrorism against Cuba. Bacardi’s lawyers also helped draft the US Helms-Burton Act, which extends the United States’ blockade of Cuba to third countries, in breach of international trade law. So central was the role of Bacardi’s lawyer, Ignacio E Sanchez (a CANF member) in establishing Helms-Burton that US Senator William Dengue said the law should be renamed the Helms-Bacardi Protection Act.

The Helms-Burton Act was designed to tighten still further the United States blockade of Cuba. The blockade prevents the sale of food, medicines and other essential supplies to Cuba and threatens other countries (including Britain) if they trade with Cuba. It has been estimated that the blockade has cost Cuba over $40 billion in lost production and trade. Every year the US blockade is overwhelmingly condemned by the United Nations.

The blockade is responsible for severe shortages and suffering among the Cuban people. For instance, the prestigious American Association for World Health (AAWH) reported in 1997 that the US blockade is contributing to malnutrition and poor water quality in Cuba and that Cuba is being denied access to drugs and medical equipment which is causing patients, including children, to suffer unnecessary pain and to die needlessly. The AAWH gave examples of a heart attack patient who died because the US government refused a licence for an implantable defibrillator, of Cuban children with leukaemia denied access to new life-prolonging drugs and of children undergoing chemotherapy who, lacking supplies of a nausea-preventing drug, were vomiting on average 28 times a day.

The AAWH concluded that a humanitarian catastrophe had been averted only because the Cuban government has maintained a high priority for a system designed to deliver primary and preventive care to all its citizens. It is worth recording that, despite the effects of the blockade, Cuba last year received a World Health Organisation (WHO) award for meeting all the WHO targets for all countries by the year 2000 – the only country so far to have done so.

This is the humane, socialist system that Bacardi seeks to destroy.

Through its support for the blockade and its funding of CANF, Bacardi shares the responsibility for the suffering imposed on Cuba over the last 40 years by those who refuse to accept the socialist path chosen by the Cuban people. At the beginning of June 1999, the courts of Cuba issued a lawsuit against the US government and its representatives for human damages as a result of aggression perpetrated against Cuba for the last 40 years, based on witness statements and recently declassified US government papers. These crimes include the destruction of ships and civilian aircraft, biological and guerrilla warfare, the firebombing of factories and crops, assassination and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by US-trained mercenary troops in April 1961. The death toll from these activities is set at at least 3,400 Cuban citizens. These are the sort of terrorist acts supported by the Bacardi empire.

Not content with this, Bacardi has now resorted to stealing the Havana Club label. Although the blockade means that Cuban rum cannot be sold in the USA, in 1974 Cubaexport registered the Havana Club trademark there to prevent its use by other companies. The rights to the trademark were bought by the French company Pernod Ricard when it set up a joint venture with Havana Club Holdings in 1994 - in the face of threatening letters from Bacardi.

In 1996, Bacardi started illegally marketing its own Havana Club. Pernod Ricard sued. But, thanks to a section (section 211) hastily tacked onto last year’s US budget after frantic lobbying by Bacardi’s lawyers, Bacardi won. Section 211 arbitrarily stipulates that no court in the USA may recognise or in any way validate any claim regarding trademarks and commercial names related to properties ‘confiscated’ by the Cuban government. Bacardi claims Havana Club uses former Bacardi assets nationalised by Cuba in 1960. Section 211 contravenes international trade law, and Pernod Ricard is taking the case to the World Trade Organisation. As Castro pointed out, ‘I hope no one will now complain if we start marketing a Cuban Coca-Cola.’

Boycott Bacardi!

The Boycott Bacardi campaign launched by Rock around the Blockade will use petitions, protests, leaflets, stickers and direct action to expose the truth behind Bacardi’s ‘Cuban’ image and persuade consumers not to buy Bacardi. People throughout Britain will be asked to pledge not to buy any Bacardi products and pubs, clubs, student bars and shops will be asked not to stock them.

The campaign aims to threaten Bacardi’s profits and force them to get off Cuba’s back. It will build on the success of similar campaigns against other multinational companies involved in inhumane activities, such as that against Nestle for promoting powdered baby milk in underdeveloped countries and that against Shell for its involvement in atrocities committed against the Ogoni people in Nigeria. These campaigns attracted worldwide support and forced the companies involved to reconsider their policies.

Already a number of student bars and pubs have decided to make a stand against Bacardi’s activities by no longer stocking Bacardi and replacing it with Havana Club, a genuine Cuban rum whose sales bring much-needed hard currency into the Cuban economy. The challenge from Havana Club worldwide has left Bacardi sales down an estimated $25 million since 1990.

Don’t drink Bacardi – it’ll leave a bad taste in your mouth!

For further information contact Rock around the Blockade
c/o FRFI, BCM Box 5909, London WC1N 3XX

Tel: 020 7837 1688 Fax: 020 7837 1743
e-mail: rcgfrfi@easynet.co.uk

"Really Really Free Market" and State News Response by Allison Voglesong (YDS Co-Coordinator)

2009-04-20T10:46:00.000-07:00

Help us promote the Really Really Free Market which is a block north of campus across from Gumby's in a park. Bring a chair and share at this fun skill-oriented "free market" where everything is free. Arrange through each other to bring whatever you want to give away for free. Or, just come take a study break and dig through some neat free stuff, learn (or share) how to do something useful (fix a bike/play a game) and enjoy the sounds of local music at its best. Leftover market items are (tentatively) going to VOA, feel free to indicate to us if you can help transport donations (depending on the nature of donations there is a possible bike brigade where small loads are taken by bike to donation sites. However, feel free to let us know if you've got a car you're willing to donate, then large items have a way of being donated.)

Got a good idea for this Really Really Free Market? Join the facebook group and let us know you plan to make it happen. There are no official organizers, so come join the horizontal effort to make cool stuff happen.

Saturday, April 25th
Valley Court Park, East Lansing
10 am -- 3 pm

Monday, April 20th, 2009
Students Protest In-State Tuition Increases
Response by Allison Voglesong

"Other members, such as international relations junior Allison Voglesong, said more students should be involved. “This is what being active is. If you want people to show up, throw a kegger — that is what students respond to,” Voglesong said." -The State News, April 20, 2009

Here's the VIDEO, which is a little better to clarify:

THE QUOTE IN THE PUBLISHED ARTICLE is a startling misrepresentation of my statement, particularly considering that the original comment I made regarding "keggers" was made in jest. The reporter asked me to repeat the point I had made to another protester that was not put into context in the article. More frustrating is that the young lady asked me to repeat myself and I made it clear to her that I was not suggesting our strategy to gain student interest in protesting the tuition increase was to throw keggers to get names on petitions.

Quite simply I am disappointed that more students show more interest in assemblies like "Cedarfest" and less interest in assembling to confront real problems that directly affect their ability to go to college. What was the point of Cedarfest that got so many people involved? Observing the frequency of "keggers" and their popularity, I find it discouraging that tuition is treated with such apathy here at MSU. Sadly, the State News Reporter, Ursula, did not choose to include that point when noting my comment about the appeal of "keggers" to large numbers of students. My bottom line is that it's too bad more students don't care and/or aren't vocal about this tuition issue. How do we get more students interested (at the very least) in what is going on with their school and their investment in their education? I think that point is well represented by my comments towards the end of the video.

If there are any responses, first answer the underlying question I'm trying to address. What is it that students respond to best or most often when assembling together? I'd love to know how to get more students excited about making a difference to encourage university transparency and accountability. It's too bad the tuition issue in itself isn't exciting enough.

Allison Voglesong

James Madison 2010
Major International Relations
Political Economy Specialization
Co-Coordinator, MSU Young Democratic Socialists
Member, Roosevelt Institution

Poll: Many Americans prefer socialism over capitalism

2009-04-14T01:54:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: Teresa Albano
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/09/09 14:54

This poll made our day.

According to a recent Rasmussen Report, only 53 percent of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism.

Not a very good spread for the profits-before-people, greed-is-good crowd. Ayn Rand must be rolling in her grave.

These numbers of course reflect the deep, transformative moment we are living in. An economic depression is a powerful force for people to experience, leading them to question the system that got us here.

Then there is the 20 percent that say socialism is better than capitalism, according to Rasmussen. Another wow! Twenty-seven percent are not sure which is better.
As the population gets further away from the Cold War years, the more they are open to socialism. The under 30 population is essentially divided: 37 percent prefer capitalism, 33 percent socialism and 30 percent are undecided.

Thirty-somethings are a bit more supportive of the current system with 49 percent for capitalism and 26 percent for socialism.

But the ones over 40 strongly favor capitalism, and just 13 percent of those believe socialism is better. What happened to the radical baby boomers?!

As you may imagine, those who have money to invest chose capitalism by a 5-to-1 margin. But for the rest of us who have no money to invest – a quarter of us say socialism would be o.k. Only 40 percent of non-investors think capitalism is better.

These are amazing statistics considering Rasmussen did not define either capitalism or socialism in their questions.

In an earlier survey by the polling firm they found, 70 percent of Americans prefer a free-market economy. When using the term “free market economy,” Rasmussen asserts, it attracts more support than using the term “capitalism.”

“Other survey data supports that notion. Rather than seeing large corporations as committed to free markets, two-out-of-three Americans believe that big government and big business often work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors,” the poll summary stated.

Imagine how Americans would react if truly a national conversation was had on the benefits of socialism. Right now most Americans see it as a “government-managed” economy and they aren’t convinced the government could do any better than the corporate royalty, according to further poll findings.

Not included in the current popular view of socialism is democratization of the economy – where representatives of all communities, unions, schools, etc., would actually be involved in steering economic policy and decision making on all levels – micro and macro.

Recently, a colleague of mine, Sam Webb, the chair of the Communist Party said of the current economic and political situation:

“Is there any reason to think that millions in motion can't transform this country and world into the just, green, sustainable and peaceful "Promised Land" that Martin Luther King dreamed of?

“It would be a profound mistake to underestimate the progressive and socialist potential of this era. The American people have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity within their reach.”

While polls are just a snapshot of a very fluid and dynamic process of what people think, the more long term forces of the economy are already having this profound effect.

Dyson Visits, YDS Documents and Interacts

2009-04-13T19:25:00.000-07:00

From the Left (no pun intended): Nicole Iaquinto, Co-Founder MSUYDS; Michael Eric Dyson (top), Professor of Sociology, Georgetown University; Michael Davidson (bottom), MSUYDS member; Allison Voglesong, Co-Coordinator MSUYDS

Many a YDS member came to MSU's Kellogg Center to fill the Big Ten room on April 9th to hear Dr. Michael Eric Dyson speak at the 2009 Race in 21st Century America 6th National conference. Dyson went above and beyond the theme of "Health Care and Communities of Color," delivering (and occasionally singing) a rousing address well into the night. Participants were given the opportunity to dialog with the guest, and YDS members stuck around to snap this photo at the end of the night.

Dr. David Green's Presentation @ YDS Panel on Economic Crisis

2009-04-08T12:08:00.000-07:00

Compared to Europe, American labor dreadfully passive in the face of corporate exploitation

2009-04-05T12:52:00.000-07:00

NY Times, April 5, 2009
In America, Labor Has an Unusually Long Fuse

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
The workers and other protesters who gathered en masse at the Group of
20 summit meeting last week in London were continuing a time-honored
European tradition of taking their grievances into the streets.

Two weeks earlier, more than a million workers in France demonstrated
against layoffs and the government?s handling of the economic crisis,
and in the last month alone, French workers took their bosses hostage
four times in various labor disputes. When General Motors recently
announced huge job cuts worldwide, 15,000 workers demonstrated at the
company?s German headquarters.

But in the United States, where G.M. plans its biggest layoffs, union
members have seemed passive in comparison. They may yell at the
television news, but that?s about all. Unlike their European
counterparts, American workers have largely stayed off the streets, even
as unemployment soars and companies cut wages and benefits.

The country of Mother Jones, John L. Lewis and Walter Reuther certainly
has had a rich and sometimes militant history of labor protest ? from
the Homestead Steel Works strike against Andrew Carnegie in 1892 to the
auto workers? sit-down strikes of the 1930s and the 67-day walkout by
400,000 G.M. workers in 1970.

But in recent decades, American workers have increasingly steered clear
of such militancy, for reasons that range from fear of having their jobs
shipped overseas to their self-image as full-fledged members of the
middle class, with all its trappings and aspirations.

David Kennedy, a Stanford historian and author of ?Freedom From Fear:
The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945,? says that
America?s individualist streak is a major reason for this reluctance to
take to the streets. Citing a 1940 study by the social psychologist
Mirra Komarovsky, he said her interviews of the Depression-era
unemployed found ?the psychological reaction was to feel guilty and
ashamed, that they had failed personally.?

Taken together, guilt, shame and individualism undercut any impulse to
collective action, then as now, Professor Kennedy said. Noting that
Americans felt stunned and desperately insecure during the Depression?s
early years, he wrote: ?What struck most observers, and mystified them,
was the eerie docility of the American people, their stoic passivity as
the Depression grindstone rolled over them.?

By the mid-1930s, though, worker protests increased in number and
militancy. They were fueled by the then-powerful Communist and Socialist
Parties and frustrations over continuing deprivation. Workers also felt
that they had President Roosevelt?s blessing for collective action
because he signed the Wagner Act in 1935, giving workers the right to
unionize.

?Remember, at that time, you had Hoovervilles and 25 percent
unemployment,? said Daniel Bell, a professor emeritus of sociology at
Harvard. ?Many people felt that capitalism was finished.?

General strikes paralyzed San Francisco and Minneapolis, and a six-week
sit-down strike at a G.M. plant in Flint, Mich., pressured the company
into recognizing the United Automobile Workers. In the decade?s ugliest
showdown, a 1937 strike against Republic Steel in Chicago, 10 protesters
were shot to death. That militancy helped build a powerful labor
movement, which represented 35 percent of the nation?s workers by the
1950s and helped create the world?s largest and richest middle class.

Today, American workers, even those earning $20,000 a year, tend to view
themselves as part of an upwardly mobile middle class. In contrast,
European workers often still see themselves as proletarians in an
enduring class struggle.

And American labor leaders, once up-from-the-street rabble-rousers, now
often work hand-in-hand with C.E.O.?s to improve corporate
competitiveness to protect jobs and pensions, and try to sideline
activists who support a hard line.

?You have a general diminution of union leadership that was focused on
defending workers by any means necessary,? said Jerry Tucker, a longtime
U.A.W. militant. ?The message from the union leadership nowadays often
is, ?We don?t have any choice, we have to go down this concessionary
road to see if we can do damage control,? ? he said.

In the case of the Detroit automakers, a strike might not only hasten
their demise but infuriate many Americans who already view auto workers
as overpaid. It might also make Washington less receptive to a bailout.

Labor?s aggressiveness has also been sapped by its declining numbers.
Unions represent just 7.4 percent of private-sector workers today.

Unions have also grown more cautious as management has become more
aggressive. A watershed came in 1981 when the nation?s air traffic
controllers engaged in an illegal strike. President Reagan quickly fired
the 11,500 striking traffic controllers, hired replacements and soon got
the airports running. After that confrontation, labor?s willingness to
strike shrank markedly.

American workers still occasionally vent their anger in protests and
strikes. There were demonstrations against the A.I.G. bonuses, for
instance, and workers staged a sit-down strike in December when their
factory in Chicago was closed. But the numbers tell the story: Last
year, American unions engaged in 159 work stoppages, down from 1,352 in
1981, according to the Bureau of National Affairs, a publisher of legal
and regulatory news.

Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University, said that while
demonstrations remain a vital outlet for the European left, for
Americans ?the Internet now somehow serves as the main outlet? with
angry blogs and mass e-mailing.

Left-leaning workers and unions that might be most prone to stage
protests during today?s economic crisis are often the ones most
enthusiastic about President Obama and his efforts to revive the
economy, help unions and enact universal health coverage. Instead of
taking to the streets last fall to protest the gathering economic crisis
under President Bush, many workers and unions campaigned for Mr. Obama.

Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, said there were
smarter things to do than demonstrating against layoffs ? for instance,
pushing Congress and the states to make sure the stimulus plan creates
the maximum number of jobs in the United States.

?I actually believe that Americans believe in their political system
more than workers do in other parts of the world,? Mr. Gerard said. He
said large labor demonstrations are often warranted in Canada and
European countries to pressure parliamentary leaders. Demonstrations are
less needed in the United States, he said, because often all that is
needed is some expert lobbying in Washington to line up the support of a
half-dozen senators.

Professor Kennedy saw another reason that today?s young workers and
young people were protesting less than in decades past. ?This
generation,? he said, has ? found more effective ways to change the
world. It?s signed up for political campaigns, and it?s not waiting for
things to get so desperate that they feel forced to take to the streets.?

------------------------------

Spartans- Unite! Say No To Hike!

2009-04-01T21:45:00.000-07:00

MSU YDS Public Statement Regarding Proposed Tuition Increase and the Failure of Our Student Government to Oppose 9% Tuition Hike 3/31/09

If you go onto MSU’s website and search for the word “inclusion,” it will not take long to locate President Simon’s “Statement on Core Values”. This document lays out the fundamental values that guide our “civil engagement with one another and with the society we serve;” one of these values is “inclusiveness.” According to the “Statement on Core Values,”

“Our commitment to inclusion means we embrace opportunities for all. It means that we ensure individuals who come from ordinary backgrounds but who possess extraordinary talents, passion, and determination can find the path to success. It means building a vibrant, intellectual community that offers and respects a broad range of ideas and perspectives. We embrace a full spectrum of experiences, viewpoints and intellectual approaches because it enriches the conversation and benefits everyone, even as it challenges us to grow and think differently.”

The problem with this statement is that there is a contradiction between the image being put forward by the university and the actions of the Board of Trustees and ASMSU with regards to our tuition.

As we all know, we are currently in the midst of an economic crisis that is regularly being called the “worst since the Great Depression.” This crisis has hit Michigan especially hard with an unemployment rate of 12% in February 2009 a staggering 4.6% increase over the previous year (http://www.milmi.org/), a foreclosure rate that rose by 10% in just a month from January to February (http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/michigan), and the worst state economy in the nation. At the same time, U.S. News and World Report ran an article on March 27 pointing out that B.A.’s are quickly becoming the new high school diploma. And yet, in the middle of this economic maelstrom, our Board of Trustees is proposing a 9% tuition hike!

This tuition hike works to directly contradict MSU’s claim to be a university that supports and encourages diversity and inclusion. As education at MSU becomes increasingly unaffordable for working class and poor students, the university will become an increasingly elitist institution, available only to the rich and privileged of society. In addition this will be harmful to those attending the university as they are increasingly denied the opportunity of interacting with those who’s experiences and background are different from their own. And, those students who are able to claw their way through college will quickly be subjected to a renewed form of indentured servitude as they are forced to contribute 8% of their monthly income to repaying student debts. Finally, in light of the increasing need for college degrees to get decent jobs, the university is condemning poor and working class people to a potentially perpetual state of joblessness. The proposed tuition hike is exploitative, classist and racist.

Rather than relying on students to supply for its budget needs, the University ought to reevaluate its spending habits and ask who is benefiting from these actions. In 2008, our university completed construction of the $15.5 million Skandalaris football center, and construction is currently being continued on the $90 million dollar Secchia Center, a new MSU medical school located in Grand Rapids Michigan.

In her “Statement on Core Values,” President Simon also states that “great universities, like great companies, are rooted in fundamental values that define their contributions to society and that endure regardless of who is at the helm.” In light of these vanity projects and the proposed tuition hike, one must stop and wonder where MSU’s values lay, and whether it is not truly a company exploiting its students in the name of profit. An article posted on Inside Higher Ed.com in 2008 stated that Merit Based aid still makes up about 70% of college aid, despite the fact that such aid, by failing to take into account disparities in U.S. lower education, often goes to “those who could still otherwise afford a college education.” Once again, one is left to wonder why the university does not divert some of those funds to providing more need based scholarships if it is truly committed to promoting diversity.

The MSU Young Democratic Socialists would like to encourage our student government to engage in independent thought and fight for the rights of its constituency, the students, rather than simply towing the line of the Board of Trustees. After all, as I was told once by a friend, “what is the point of a government if it does not work for its people?”

Michigan State University Young Democratic Socialists

Allison Voglesong, MSU YDS Co-Chairperson, Logistics and Publicity

Ryan Wyeth, MSU YDS Co-Chairperson, Director of Communications and Public Relations

Press Release

2009-03-23T22:47:00.000-07:00

MSU Young Democratic Socialists Host Panel Discussion of Economic Crisis

East Lansing, Michigan, 09/11/2009- On March 26th, the Michigan State University Chapter of Young Democratic Socialists (YDS) will be hosting an event titled “Finding a Way Out,” a panel discussion about the current economic crisis, its causes, and potential solutions to this crisis.

The event will be open to the MSU and East Lansing community and will be taking place in Club Spartan, on the third floor of Case Hall on the MSU campus. This panel will feature both MSU faculty and students from various points in the political spectrum, as well as representatives from National YDS and Democratic Socialists of America.

The event will be structured in such a way that, after a short presentation by each of the panel members, the majority of the event will be dedicated to encouraging discussion between the audience and panel members. In this way, we hope to create a space dedicated to community discussion of the crisis, and hope to spark an ongoing dialogue within the community about the crisis, what we as people wish to see done in response to it, and the best ways to achieve these goals.

For more information about the event “Finding a Way Out,” please contact Ryan Wyeth at msuyds@gmail.com, or join the Facebook event “Finding a Way Out: Panel Event on the International Economic Crisis.”

MSU Young Democratic Socialists is a student chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) America’s largest socialist organization. Its members come from a wide variety of political backgrounds, but all believe in the important role that economics plays both in the oppression of people around the world, and in their fight against this oppression. They aim both to equip themselves with an alternative view of the problems facing us today and to find alternative solutions to these problems.

For more information about MSU YDS, please contact Ryan Wyeth at msuyds@gmail.com, or visit our Facebook group, “MSU Young Democratic Socialists,” or our blog at http://therevolutionarytimes.blogspot.com/.

ECONOMIC CRISIS PANEL NEXT WEEK!

2009-03-19T17:34:00.000-07:00

Join us for our panel and discussion on the International Economic Crisis

Thursday March 26

7 - 9 pm

Club Spartan, 3rd Floor Case Hall

Panelists include:

David Green, Chairman of Detroit Metro Democratic Socialists of America

Dr. R. K. Edozie, Associate Professor of International Relations, James Madison College

Allison Voglesong, Co-Coordinator of MSU Young Democratic Socialists

Peter Klein, Chairman of MSU Young Communist League

SEE YOU THERE!

Why I don't want to "save" Africa

2009-03-14T20:07:00.001-07:00

Mistaking Africa: Problem Defined

On a recent trip to South Africa, I experienced some of the misunderstanding that Curtis Keim explains in his book, Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind. As I was giving a walking tour of Zonkizizwe, South Africa (the township I had been living in for three months working at a children’s center) to a visiting group of Michigan State University students, several girls began to take pictures of children standing by the side of the road. The children were obviously poor, and were watching, bewilderedly, as a group of strange abemulungu (white people) passed. I had to ask them not to do that, because it was disrespectful to the children. They didn’t understand why it was rude, because they were simply capturing how “cute” they were. They didn’t realize that they were treating like these children like animals in the zoo, viewing them as “exotic,” or different enough to capture on film. I though to myself, would these girls have taken pictures of random children in the United States? Why were these children, despite their impoverished condition, any different? This theme of Americans depicting African people as “others” is the primary concern of Keim. Throughout the book he presents several stereotypes and misconceptions ‘we,’ the West tend to have about the African continent and its people. Africa appears in the public eye quite frequently, Keim argues, though it might not show up in the news it “shows up in advertising, movies, amusement parks, cartoons, and many other corners of our society” (Keim 3). Usually, through these interpretations, Africa is seen as distant, exotic, filled with famine, disease, civil war, cannibals, and primitive people, cultures, and languages. Africa is portrayed as backward and needing help from outside countries to deal with the great many ills of society and the economy. African people are often portrayed as ignorant and child like, depending on aid and gifts from these outside countries in order to survive. These images are caused by leftover and current racism, a history of Western exploitation of Africa, and through the self-definition of Western culture and identity. One way in which Americans in general misunderstand the interaction with Africa is through the savior complex of “We Should Help Them,” described more fully in chapter 6 of the text.

Should We Help Them?

After showing his class a video about a village named Wassetake in northern Senegal, Keim was approached by several of his students who wanted to help the people living there. They saw the everyday life of the people living there to be a struggle to survive, while Keim saw strong people dealing learning to handle tough situations in their lives. While he recognized that the students wanted to help purely out of good will, Keim questions the notion of “helping” African countries all together. He asks the reader to keep three questions in mind in this situation: Do they really need our help? What is wrong with life as they live it? What kind of help would be truly useful to them? (83).

For the last 150 years, Keim says, Americans and Europeans have made it a tradition to “help” the continent of Africa. In fact, much of the colonization done by the West was justified by using this excuse. Colonialism was considered the “white man’s burden” to take care of Africa, not exploit it. Missionaries were also sent to African countries to “spread the good news,” while the Cold War attempted to save Africa from communism. The West frequently comes into Africa during time of war to help refugees, or during times of famine. More recently, ‘we’ assist in “developing” African countries by reforming their governments, regulating their economies, and influencing the lives of the people living there in other ways (Keim 83-4). Keim argues that there are five different ways in which this “assistance” to Africa has been administered by the West: authoritarianism, through the market economy, gift giving, conversion, and participation (84). He also critiques each mode of assistance, attempting to analyze its effectiveness in truly helping Africa and its people.

Authoritarianism – the “Top Down” Plan

Authoritarianism, according to Keim, came in the form of the new African leaders that took power when African countries began to achieve their independence in the 1950s and 60s. These new leaders, with their western educations, took power and implemented “top-down” policies that greatly affected their countries. They believed that the poor were unable to make rational, informed decisions about the economy, so they took steps to invest in their countries by borrowing money from other to invest in education, health care, roads, and state run factories (85). By the 1970s, many of these countries were deeply in debt and could not afford to pay back the money they had borrowed. Here enters the second form of “aid” to Africa—loans made to boost market economies.

The Market Economy and Help

In order to stop the economic decline of African countries in the 1980s, two large financial agencies called the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) created new plans to help develop African countries—with a price. Countries would now have to abandon their goals of industrialization and turn instead to the production of raw materials. In order to receive money, countries had to agree to certain structural adjustment plans (SAP) that would “reduce the government’s rode and shift economic growth into private hands” (Keim 87). These programs created significant changes in the way the countries ran. Taxes and tariffs were lowered, education and health care budgets were cut, many government owned businesses had to be sold, currencies were devalued, and urban food subsidies cut (Keim 87). How the SAPs have affected Africa is still under much controversy today. Some SAPs have seemed to produce economic growth and income equity, others have not. Some have proved to disrupt the social and economic aspects of countries by taking away jobs from people, raising inflation to the point where local currencies were destroyed, or education and health care systems completely gutted. Either way, the question becomes: were the goals of the SAPs to help the African people, or to help the West, as the west “reaps the rewards of African raw materials, investments, and interest on bad loans, while Africans struggle to survive” (87).

Conversion—Cultural Relativism Gone Wrong

Another way in which the West has attempted to aid Africa is through the sharing of thoughts, ideas, and rituals (or in the opinion of some, the forcing of these ideas). The main idea behind such exchanges is that African countries are inferior and their goal should be to become more like the West. This can be done through religion, education, and commercial advertising among other mediums (Keim 89). Conversion can be harmful to Africans because often times it influences them to step away from traditional cultures, villages, and countries. The educated people then leave Africa to work in Europe or America as a part of what is known as the “brain drain” (Keim 90). Though Keim believes there is nothing wrong with two different cultures coming in contact with one another, he does believe the interaction between the two should be constructive and that a sort of cultural harmony should be reached. One culture should not take priority over the other, and people should never be made to feel that their culture is inferior. When this happens, people are more likely to become dependent on the culture that claims to dominate.

Gift Giving, or Creating Dependents?

Gift giving can happen in the form of individual donors, or through foreign aid. Critics of such aid point to the fact that it is often given in amounts too large, too little, in ways too useless, or too inefficient. Many aid attempts in the past have failed miserably, creating a wide variety of social problems. It has helped widen the gender gap between men and women in African societies, benefitted urban elites at the expense of the poorer villagers, and has taken away pride, work, and initiative from local people. Keim goes on to say that gift giving, if not properly moderated, can “foster dependence, weaken local initiative, and empower people who do not care about all members of the community. It can advance ideas and tastes that are not good for Africa. It can promote superior-inferior relationships between the West and Africa” (92). Creating such relationships goes against the meaningful ways in which human being and cultures can most constructively learn from one another.

Participatory Help—the “Bottom Up” Plan

Help through participation assumes that no country needs to do something for another country, but that both countries work together to “identify problems and needs, mobilize resources, and assume responsibility themselves to plan, manage, control, and assess the individuals and collective actions they decide upon” (Keim 94). This kind of interaction also assumes that local people are educated, have resources, self-confidence, organization, and self-discipline—not rely on gifts or other people’s skills to get the job done. In these situations, if outside money, knowledge, or equipment is provided, they come in small, appropriate amounts (Keim 94). Such partnership makes it possible to help people of African countries without turning to large lending agencies such as the IMF or the World Bank.

Military Assistance

Though military help does not offer help to African countries such as the more direct form of aid previously mentioned, it greatly represents the way in which Americans and other Westerners view Africa. These forms of help have come in the form of military presence in Africa, much of which has been oppressive rather than liberating. Two examples of this are the United State’s military advice and aid during the time of the Cold War, and the newly created AFRICOM military operation—with a headquarters that is to be permanently based somewhere in Africa (Keim 95-6). Military help is often justified by the United States as being a way to promote African security from such ills as “communism,” or the influence of countries like China. When threats like these arise, US military presence in Africa goes up. It is still in question whether or not this kind of help is truly being administered for African security, or to help the United States secure their economic interests African countries.

Rethinking Our Notion of Help

In this chapter Keim makes it quite clear that there are indeed problems on the continent of Africa, and that it is perfectly ok to “want to help them [African people]” develop their countries, but that it must be done in such a way that preserves the humanity of those helping, and those being helped. Throwing large amounts money at the problem isn’t going to fix anything. It can create dependence on aid, and leave room for individuals to make a profit off of resources that were supposed to go to the greater good. Other forms of assistance can often be exploitative, or suggest that certain aspects of different African cultures are inferior. Assistance can be helpful and beneficial to both sides, if done correctly. If we are to help countries develop, we should keep this in mind, along with a few other suggestions from Keim. He reminds us that all cultures, including our own, have room for development. Development does include economic growth and material comfort, but personal wealth should not be a primary goal—equal resources should be guaranteed for all in order to live a happy, healthy life. Development should help empower communities and ordinary people to organize for themselves. This means that the ideas about what is to be done in the community should come from those living there, along with the primary energy and resources.

What must be remembered however, above all things, are that all parties involved are indeed human, and should be treated as such. African people are not so different from Americans, though cultures, customs, languages, and histories may vary. No human being is so low as to require the assistance of someone who thinks they are better than everyone else. The same goes for countries. I think back to my days in Zonkizizwe, watching the children get treated like pets, and sometimes babies because they were “different” or “poor.” I know I could have easily been born into any one of their situations. Because of that, and the simple fact that I have respect for all of humanity, I refrained from any treatment that would have made them seem like the “other” from myself. If more people could think that way, I am confident that more plans to help aid African countries would succeed.

Works Cited
Keim, Curtis. Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind. Boulder: Westview Press, 2009.

Say NO to SAPs in Africa!

2009-03-05T17:14:00.001-08:00

It is refreshing to read African perspectives on the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) imposed on African countries by Bretton Woods institutions, as is the case in Our Continent Our Future: African Perspectives on Structural Adjustment. Such a view is not often heard, as reports of failures, deficits, and continued underdevelopment in Africa made by mainly Western sources is what reaches media outlets. Authors Thandika Mkandawire and Charles C. Soludo weave together evidence from 30 different individual studies, 25 of which are done by Africans themselves, in an attempt to summarize an African perspective on the poor economic state of African countries and the systemic policies and programs that continue to inhibit their growth. Not only do they describe Africa’s economic problems due to SAPs and their continued failure to bring about positive growth, but they propose alternatives (or ‘policy prescriptions’) that move away from structural adjustment policy and toward ‘broadening and developing fundamentals’ in a number of economic development sectors, including socio-politics and sustainable development of which I will focus exclusively. Progress in this sector, Mkandawire and Soludo argue, is vital to the development prospects of African countries and to Africa as a whole.

Africa, in the Ages of Development and Structural Adjustment

Africa wasn’t always in the poor economic state that it is now. After the majority of African countries gained their independents after the 1960s, Africa was on its way to becoming a developed continent. According to Mkandawire and Soludo, by the mid-1970s, many African countries were progressing in economic and social development as “[s]ome level of industrialization had been initiated, levels of school enrolment had increased, new roads had been constructed, [and] the indigenization of the civil service had advanced…” (20). Even so these economies were still extremely underdeveloped because of their recent history of colonialism and colonial exploitation of economic means. In an attempt to better develop their states, African countries turned to Bretton Woods institutions for loans. When these countries found that they could not repay the loans, loaning institutions such as the World Bank began to impose Structural Adjustment Programs on them in order to open up their economies and leave room for economic growth. Three major policy actions that were central to these growth-oriented programs were “(a) more suitable exchange-rate policies; (b) increased efficiency of resources use in the public sector; and (c) improvement in agricultural policies” (Mkandawire and Soludo 42). These policies were implemented as short to medium terns macroeconomic stabilization measures to restore the balances of countries both internally and externally. Various reforms were implemented such as industrial policy, agricultural, financial, trade, labor market, education, and administrative reforms (Mkandawire and Soludo 42-8). Several countries, such as Ghana, had effective implementation up until 1994 but then suddenly dropped and were replaced by new ones such as Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia and Uganda (Mkandawire and Soludo 84). This pattern of growth and then relapse continues to occur today, and for the large part SAPs have failed in most African countries. Many are wondering, what are the reasons for this?

Arguments for the Effectiveness/Ineffectiveness of SAPs

Mkandawire and Soludo explore a few on both sides of the spectrum. Some argue that is the fault of the African countries, that African societies are too unstable to handle reforms, that money is being misused, or some other kind of corruption is taking place. Explanatory variables blame Africa for trade restrictions such as the lack of openness to trade, lack of financial depth, deficient public service and infrastructural provision, lack of social capital, high macroeconomic volatility and uncertainty, terms-of-trade shocks, drought, offsetting effects of aid, and external debt-burden (Mkandawire and Soludo 82). Others argue that is the staunch and unfamiliar policies of primarily Western nations being out of place in African societies, and that BWIs take little care to incorporate policies that are in accordance with the specific histories African countries and that is has nothing to do with the inherent characteristics of African countries. In any case, the fact of the matter is that Bretton Woods institutions are failing to effectively implement their programs. It is time to move onto something else, argues Mkandawire and Soludo, toward something they term as ‘broadening and developing fundamentals’ in African countries. What they mean is simply that when creating effective policies, the following issues must be addressed: equity, economic growth, economic stability, and political legitimacy. Emphasis must be put on not only economic growth in areas of GDP or trade, but equal attention and investment must be put on the social and infrastructural development, something SAPs have tended to ignore in the past. One area in which the fundamentals need to be strengthened are in the realms of socio-political and sustainable development.

Socio-political and Sustainable Development:
The Push for Capacity Building and Democratization

Areas in which need attention are those in which “social capital,” “social capability,” and “social structure of accumulation” can be achieved (Mkandawire and Soludo 124). This would prepare Africans for the task of controlling their own countries and in turn controlling their own fates. Africans need to gain the technical skills to deal with what Mkandawire and Soludo call the “physical hardware of investment,” along with organizational skills, the skills to govern markets, workplace management skills, the ability to form labor relations, state-society relationships, and the freedom to participate in ideological, social, and cultural consumption patterns that correspond with class, gender, and ethnic lines (124). In order for such a society to be possible, economic policy must be compatible with the process of democratization.

According to Mkandawire and Soludo, SAPs have affected democratization of African countries in three ways. SAPs relate to a growing private space, which ends up informalizing economic life and marginalizing large parts of the population. SAPs have also affected the political legitimacy of post-colonial governments by affecting its ability to implement its own policies. Finally, SAPs have interfered with the process of policy making by leaving little room for countries to make their own policy choices (75-6). Mkandawire and Soludo believe that in order to have enough strength to carry out effective policy dealing with technical capacity, political legitimacy, and social welfare, and due to the extensive history of social pluralism and the artificiality of national borders, democracy is the only way to carry out the necessary programs (125). Moving toward amore democratic governance would take reforming civil service sectors, generating programs for capacity building on both the micro and macroeconomic level—only then can the fiscal capacity of the state be effectively reformed.

Conclusion

I completely agree with Mkandawire and Soludo that only through democracy is the kind of change necessary able to be implemented. No economic policy can flourish if the political system of the country is on the verge of collapse. Thus far, Bretton Woods Institutions have failed to take into account pre-existing factors such as social pluralism and arbitrarily drawn national borders of African countries, and they have tried to impose a foreign, Western culture through their policies and programs. This naturally creates resistance, and the SAPs have failed to significantly increase growth in all sectors of African countries. Socio-political strength is necessary for African people to make choices that correspond with African ways of life. If Africans were given more say in how SAPs were implemented in their countries, and then were allowed to be agents of change, perhaps more structural adjustment would be affective. I believe this is the message that Mkandawire and Soludo have been trying to get across in their book, and that this is the only way Africa will be able to catch up in the world of development. Any time wasted due to pride, stubbornness, economic exploitation or misunderstanding on the part of the Bretton Woods institutions means more suffering for individual African people. The children and future leaders of African countries face a future of concentrated poverty, unemployment, lack of access to health care, income and housing disparities, insufficient educational systems, unattainable higher education, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic among countless others ills that come with economic underdevelopment. If this is to change, the African people cannot afford to wait any longer. Structural Adjustment Programs must attempt to meet African people halfway, or there will be no more Africa to speak of to develop.

Works Cited

Thandika, Mkandawire and Charles C. Soludo. Our Continent Our Future: African Perspectives on Structural Adjustment. Trenton: African World Press, Inc, 1999.

Bobby Seale Speaks at Michigan State University!

2009-02-22T13:10:00.001-08:00

January 15th, 2009. 5pm.

I look around me-- the auditorium in the Kellogg Center on MSU's campus is packed-- it’s standing room only. Around the room I see students, professors, deans of colleges, members of the community, the old and the young, all gathered together to hear Mr. Bobby Seale’s keynote speech titled “The State of Black Politics in the 21st Century.” Even the aisle ways are crowded with people, standing sitting, doing whatever they have to do to catch a glimpse of the legend before them. People who would normally never be in the same room with one another come together, waiting in anticipation to hear a legend speak before them.

Bobby Seale walks across the stage and stands tall behind the podium. Though his khaki pants, striped blue sweater and black baseball cap make Bobby Seale look pretty laid back, but the man is anything but. At age 74, Mr. Seale is still a firecracker, or as some have said: “He don’t play.” What more could one hope for former Co-founder and Chairman of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense? As a sign of my appreciation for all the great things that this man did and stood for (and continues to do and stand for) I eagerly fulfilled his every wish, demand, and answered his every question. Whether it be to get the man some coffee or more ice for his water, to move the plastic tree away from the podium so “people can see [him], not some ugly shrubbery”, or explain the purpose of the Kellogg Center—I was happy to do it all.

Mr. Seale begins his speech with some background information from his early life and about the beginnings of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. The most touching parts were when he talks about how he met Huey P. Newton and their academic adventures railing their professors for subscribing to racist ideologies while teaching the history of Black people. Newton, he said, was so smart he often dumbfounded his professors, who were unable to justify their actions. He was able to recall and recount facts and laws in painstaking detail. This skill proved handy when the Black Panthers were dealing with insolent people “in authority” such as corrupt police officers that were harassing people in Black neighborhoods.

Mr. Seale also spoke more on the ideology of the Panthers. He rejected the myth that the Panthers were the antithesis to the Civil Rights movement lead by Martin Luther King, Jr. They operated under not a doctrinaire form of socialism, but one that changed and flexed with the times. The BPP advocated for SELF DEFENSE rather than unprovoked violence, and for the ballot over the bullet. However, said Mr. Seale, “…if you take away our right to the ballot, then you force us to use the bullet because if you are taking away our lives.”

After some foreground, Mr. Seale then got into the bread and butter of his keynote speech. The state of Black politics in the United States, he said, is the state of politics itself! This goes along with my thinking about the Black Liberation Struggle (see “Why the ‘White’ Girl Joined the Black Struggle” blog post), that the Black struggle has been one for true peace and parity, unburdened by race, class, gender, sexuality, physical ability, etc. It is the struggle for true democracy. There needs to be a new movement he said, and this time it needs to involve the whole world.

Mr. Seale also offered some practical advice as to how this needs to be done. When participating in activism for social justice, you can’t completely “drop out of the system”, he said. You have work against the wrongs of the system, while still maintaining your own autonomy within the system. There also needs to be more community organizing, more community effort in organizing against injustice. This was the ideology fueling the Black Panthers. They were constantly in motion, bringing people together as a community in order to meet the needs of the people. So in addition to more community organizing, there is a need for more participatory democracies in communities. This mean having real people’s community control—such as control over the police, not “police review boards.” He asked the younger folks in the room to start thinking of other ways that more ways in which the community can take more control of what goes on.

Overall, Mr. Seale’s speech was great. He touched on a lot of salient points, including one that is close to my heart—the need for more community building and organizing. The atmosphere made it all the more inspiring. I really loved seeing the diverse group of people gathered together to hear him speak, to see and appreciate a piece of Black history in the flesh. After almost two years of organizing for the event—fundraising, asking for more funds, booking, advertising, going back and forth with agents, and planning his itinerary down to the very minute, Mr. Seale’s time with us at Michigan State was over as quickly as it had begun. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it.

Much love and thanks goes out to my partners Arice and Susan for their relentless efforts to get Mr. Seale here and keep him happy. Also, much credit goes out to all the other members of the MSU Young Democratic Socialists and the W.E.B. Du Bois Society for their contributions to this event. Without your help, it would not have been possible!

PANEL EVENT DATE CHANGE

2009-02-16T15:08:00.000-08:00

This is to notify our readers that our upcoming panel, scheduled for this Thursday, Feb. 19, has been RESCHEDULED.

THE NEW DATE IS THURSDAY MARCH 26

Thanks, we look forward to seeing you there!

The Language of Oppression: the degradation of Black languge in the USA and South Africa

2009-02-13T06:46:00.000-08:00

I know about structural racism …. Racial oppression through entrenched systems in society through various public bodies, laws, corporations, the prison system, universities...you name it. But when the idea of racial oppression through use of language was introduced to me, I was suddenly taken aback. I had never though about it before-- was there such a thing as a linguistic hierarchy? After making some connections in my mind, I came to conclude that this is so. For the sake of making this blog entry brief, I will say that English is at the top of this hierarchy. I come to this conclusion because it seems like everywhere you go, you can find some sort of evidence that English is spoken there.

In a world where global politics are becoming more important than ever, how will people continue to communicate with one another? Will people continue to place an emphasis on learning to speak English as a common language, or will they attempt to broaden their horizons and learn to speak the language of others?

Some more things to ponder:

Have you ever stopped to think about the words you are using, or the way you are speaking in order to express yourself? How does your language or diction differ from that of other surrounding you? Do you think you speak "better" English than others?

Picture this scenario. It’s a stereotypical one at best, but it speaks to my point. An African-American child grows up in the ghetto where she learns to speak a form of colloquial English known to some as "Ebonics," or in more technical terms, Black Vernacular English. She grows up in a community where this is the dominant form of languages spoken. She doesn't think anything is wrong with the way she talks, it's just how she grew up. However, the outside world of "proper English speakers" would tend to disagree. The way she speaks is unacceptable and crude. She is accused of sounding ignorant and stupid because of the way she speaks and misses out on many opportunities in life such as being considered for job, housing, etc. How is this fair? Why isn't it OK for her to express herself in a way that feels comfortable for her? Why must she conform to certain standards of language in order to be taken seriously?

Geneva Smitherman, a university distinguished professor at Michigan State University, explores such oppressive parallels between the Black speech communities in both the United States of America (USA) and the Republic of South Africa (RSA). Though the culture, history, demography, legal structure, and other important elements of both countries have significant differences, there is a basis for comparing the Black politics in both countries as it relates to language (316).

Both the RSA and USA are attempting to adopt policies centered around the creation of the English language as an official and premier language of the country. In the RSA this would be a policy of “English Plus,” and in the USA “English Only” (316). This presents fundamental problems for all linguistic minorities, including those who speak African or Pidgin Languages in the RSA or Black Vernacular English (Ebonics) in the USA (317).

According to Smitherman, such impositions can be though of as modern day “internal colonialism” in both countries, similar to the extermination of Native Americans from the USA, the introduction of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade to the global market, and the conquest of South Africa by the Netherlands and later Great Britain (317-18). Such internal colonialism is not just a polarization between and oppressor nation and a colonized people but an entrenched system of “racial capitalism” where Europeans are socially constructed as the “superior” race with superior qualities and characteristics (318). In order to do this, the Europeans created elaborate systems of law, education, politics, customs, and cultural belief sets to support the economic exploitation of the indigenous peoples (318). One can see how the European claim of superior language could greatly affect each one of these systems.

Linguistic colonialism in both the RSA and USA negatively affects the Black populations. The colonizers’ languages, English and Afrikaans in the RSA and English in the USA are considered to be much more prestigious than African languages or Ebonics. Such imposition of language makes it impossible for Africans and African Americans to experience life and learning, as they are forced to use a language that makes it impossible to properly reflect the real life of Black communities (320). Though Blacks share this major similarity, they do experiences some differences as well in their experience.

Africans brought to the USA as slaves were almost completely stripped of their native languages while Africans were allowed to keep their languages in the RSA. However, the British policy in the RSA regulated other African languages in the RSA as having a lower status by considering them “dialects” instead of “languages” (321). Africans who learned to speak English were given rewards by the British in form of allowing them to become part of a class of Black elite with special economic and social privileges.
On the other hand, African Americans developed a form of pidgin English in order to communicate with their masters as well as other Blacks who were brought to the USA as slaves. Their masters often mixed slaves who spoke different languages and came from different parts of West Africa together, and they developed their own forms of communication as a survival mechanism (322-3).

Presently in both the USA and RSA the legacy of internal colonialism continues to connect to Black language politics and pose barriers to moving toward a linguistic democracy. Blacks who speak primarily Ebonics or an African English are scrutinized for not speaking “good” English and award social and economic benefits such as jobs and mobility to those who can speak English properly (340). Language is being used to divide the Black community into groups competing with one another for material and social wealth, making it that much more impossible for Black people across the globe to stand in solidarity against the capitalist systems that continue to oppress them. At the end of the article Smitherman pushes for the Black community to unite and pressure the dominate white elite toward linguistic democratization (341).

One thing is for certain—these languages with their variations, history, and cultural influence aren’t going away any time soon. Both sides need to develop a way to make room for the diversity of people within them and the way in which they express themselves. If some happy medium can't be reached, future generations of Black people will be both physically and psychologically damaged by the internal colonialism of language heiarchy and its practices.

Another thing that certain-- respect should be given to all people, regardless of what words they choose to use. All language is sacred; it brings dreams and ideas to life, sharing the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of humans to the rest of the world.

Works Cited:

Smitherman, Geneva. “Language and Democracy in the USA and the RSA.” Ed. Roseanne Dueñas González and Ildikó Melis. Language Ideologies: Critical Perspectives on the Official English Movement. Lawrence Elbaum Associates, 2001. 316-344.

Call for Papers

2009-02-10T15:37:00.000-08:00

SCOUT BANANA, in conjunction with Michigan State University's African Studies Center and Office of International Development, invites you to submit a manuscript to Articulate: Undergraduate Research Applied to International Development.

Articulate is an undergraduate journal that publishes academic papers and writings (research papers, field work, interviews, etc.) on issues in international development, focusing primarily on African studies and health care issues. Our journal focuses on relationships between development, health care, and the African continent. Articulate is a forum for students to contribute to, as well as make, the debates in international development. Undergraduate students remain a vital, untapped force that can bring new ideas, perspectives, and concepts into the development dialogue. Our goal is to spark, share, and spread knowledge to create innovative change now.

Articulate is peer-reviewed by fellow undergraduate students and an appointed editorial board. Publication is based on relevance, quality, and originality. We ask for submissions that are 10-15 pages long and formatted in the Chicago Manual of Style with 200-word abstracts. In addition, we ask that the author's name, major, college, and university appear on a separate cover sheet, with no reference to the author within the manuscript.

Potential topics, include, but are not limited to:
The effectiveness of foreign aid, microfinance, and social enterprise in Africa
Intersections of gender, religion, ethnicity, and sexuality in African development
Ethics and development in African countries
Historical analyses and case studies of health care programs in Africa
Politics of water and medicine in Africa
The role of African youth in development programs and projects
Effects of conflict and forced migration on health care and development

In addition, Articulate is also seeking brief reflective essays on young peoples' experiences in Africa. Ideally, these pieces are 2-3 single-spaced pages and can take a variety of creative forms. These essays should explore how development work is from the perspective of a young person from the Global North, entering the Global South. Is it how you thought it would be? What did you enjoy and hate about it? What do you wish you'd known when you were just 'studying' as opposed to working in Africa on health-related issues? Other themes may be considered with consultation from the Editor-in-Chief.

Papers will be accepted until March 15th, 2009 with an intended publication date during Spring 2009. For submissions, please contact the Editor-in-Chief at articulate@scoutbanana.org. For more information on SCOUT BANANA, check out www.scoutbanana.org.

Not an undergraduate student? Paper too long? Still want to get your ideas published as a volunteer or researcher in the field? Inquire at: banana@scoutbanana.org.

Are you an undergraduate looking to be a larger part of SCOUT BANANA? Can you peer review articles extremely well and motivate others to do the same? Apply for the Editor-in-Chief position, contact: alex.h@scoutbanana.org

Picket with Striking Workers at MSU Today

2009-02-10T01:16:00.000-08:00

Forwarded from the Wrong for Michigan: Truth about the Right to Work Scam facebook group:

Come join the Michigan Laborers' as they picket Sandborn Construction at Michigan State University.

Meet up: 6:45am on the corner of Kalamazoo and S. Clippert St near the Nature Walk (near the Steakhouse and Admiral Gas Station)

Picket Location: On the Corner of Birch Rd and Shaw Lane (near the Breslin Center)

Picket Time: 7am - 2pm

If you can't make it first thing in the morning, come join us whenever you can.

Picketers will receive a free orange Laborers' T-shirt!

Contact me if you have any additional questions...see you there!

Solidarity!

Jon Byrd

--------------------------

--------------------------------------------------

Comrades,

We must come out and support Laborers Local 499 in their struggle against Sandborn Construction! Laborers 499 have gone on strike several times against the non union Sandborn Construction and the use of non union labor by the University. Students groups and unions such as the Young Democratic Socialists and Graduate Employees Union have played a big role in helping the Laborers win their previous fights, and now is not the time to stop.

Organized labor as a whole as been under constant attack during the last 8 years of the Bush regime, and especially in our State due to the auto crisis. With the Employee Free Choice Act coming to Washington within the year, unions will soon be under more pressure from the far-right and big business. Supporting our brothers and sisters on the picket line now will help us develop ties to labor, and let them know they still have allies on campus for their current and upcoming fights.

In Solidarity,
-Peter

YDS To Host Panel on Economic Crisis 2/12

2009-02-03T16:01:00.001-08:00

Update: Bobby Seale Campus Visit

2009-01-31T20:12:00.000-08:00

MSU-YDS

Update: Bobby Seale Visit

(Pictures and Video to come soon!)

MSU YDS, in collaboration with the W.E.B. DuBois Society, another MSU student group dedicated to racial, social, and sexual justice, recently hosted a visit by Bobby Seale, co-founder and former chairman of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Mr. Seale arrived at MSU on January 14 and left on the morning of January 16, with the main events taking place on the fifteenth. The day consisted of two “mixers,” the main speaking event, and a dinner with various DuBois Society and YDS members, along with some of our campus sponsors. At the “mixers,” Mr. Seale interacted and talked with students from two of MSU’s residential colleges: James Madison College, and the Residential College for the Arts and Humanities. The main event took place at the Kellog Hotel and Conference Center at 5:00 P.M. and consisted of a lecture by Mr. Seale on “The State of Black Politics in the Twenty-First Century.” The main event was very well attended with only standing room left in the auditorium due to an audience of over 300 MSU students and East Lansing community members. After their departure, Grace Rutledge, who accompanied Mr. Seale on his visit, told us that Mr. Seale had nothing but good things to say about his stay at MSU.

Significance

We, the members of MSU YDS, believe that this event was of great importance in encouraging dialogue within the MSU-East Lansing community both about the implications of the recent election of America’s first black president, and also about the current financial crisis. Mr. Seale addressed President Obama’s recent election and it’s relation to the ongoing struggle for civil rights in the United States, in which the Black Panthers were, of course, played a major part. He also discussed the importance of community organizing and support in times of need like the current crisis, using his own experiences with the Black Panther Party as examples of such activities. The event was, unfortunately, especially relevant in the context of the recent shootings of black youth by police officers. We hope, however, that Bobby Seale’s visit will help to promote dialogue pertaining to these ongoing assaults against minority communities, the structural problems behind them, and what actions might be taken to address these problems.

Follow-up

In the wake of this event, MSU YDS has seen an increase in membership and in interest in the group. We are hoping to ride this momentum and continue dialogue on MSU’s campus about the need for socialism during this vital time in American history.
On the 12th of February, MSU YDS will be hosting a panel discussion about the need for viable alternatives to the capitalist system if we are ever to emerge from this economic crisis, and socialism as one of these alternatives. The panel will include both faculty and student panelists and the event will be titled “Finding a Way Out”. The date for the event is February 12th, and the event will take place at 6 pm. Some members of MSU YDS are also planning on attending the YDS National Conference in New York.

oh my god

2009-01-14T22:17:00.000-08:00

people who attempt to regurgigate arguments in favor of this are stupid motherfuckers

statement of Anarchist Federation (UK) on Gaza

2009-01-10T21:53:00.000-08:00

Statement produced by the Sheffield and Manchester Anarchist Federation group's on the conflict in Gaza, in solidarity with the victims of the conflict, and for internationalism.

One thing is absolutely clear about the current situation in Gaza: the Israeli state is committing atrocities which must end immediately. With hundreds dead and thousands wounded, it has become increasingly clear that the aim of the military operation, which has been in the planning stages since the signing of the original ceasefire in June, is to break Hamas completely. The attack follows the crippling blockade throughout the supposed ‘ceasefire’, which has destroyed the livelihoods of Gazans, ruined the civilian infrastructure and created a humanitarian disaster which anyone with an ounce of humanity would seek an end to.

But that's not all there is to say about the situation. On both sides of the conflict, the idea that opposing Israel has to mean supporting Hamas and its ‘resistance’ movement is worryingly common. We totally reject this argument. Just like any other set of rulers, Hamas, like all the other major Palestinian factions, are happy and willing to sacrifice ordinary Palestinians to increase their power. This isn’t some vague theoretical point – for a period recently most deaths in Gaza were a result of fighting between Hamas and Fatah. The ‘choices’ offered to ordinary Palestinian people are between Islamist gangsters (Hamas, Islamic Jihad) or nationalist gangsters (Fatah, Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigades). These groups have shown their willingness to attack working class attempts to improve their living conditions, seizing union offices, kidnapping prominent trade unionists, and breaking strikes. One spectacular example is the attack on Palestine Workers Radio by Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, for “stoking internal conflicts”. Clearly, a “free Palestine” under the control of any of these groups would be nothing of the sort.

As anarchists, we are internationalists, opposing the idea that the rulers and ruled within a nation have any interests in common. Therefore, anarchists reject Palestinian nationalism just as we reject Israeli nationalism (Zionism). Ethnicity does not grant “rights” to lands, which require the state to enforce them. People, on the other hand, have a right to having their human needs met, and should be able to live where they choose, freely.

Therefore, against the divisions and false choices set up by nationalism, we fully support the ordinary inhabitants of Gaza and Israel against state warfare – not because of their nationality, ethnicity, or religion, but simply because they're real living, feeling, thinking, suffering, struggling human beings. And this support has to mean total hostility to all those who would oppress and exploit them –the Israeli state and the Western governments and corporations that supply it with weapons, but also any other capitalist factions who seek to use ordinary working-class Palestinians as pawns in their power struggles. The only real solution is one which is collective, based on the fact that as a class, globally, we ultimately have nothing but our ability to work for others, and everything to gain in ending this system – capitalism – and the states and wars it needs .

That this seems like a “difficult” solution does not stop it from being the right one. Any “solution” that means endless cycles of conflict, which is what nationalism represents, is no solution at all. And if that is the case, the fact that it is “easier” is irrelevant. There are sectors of Palestinian society which are not dominated by the would-be rulers – protests organised by village committees in the West Bank for instance. These deserve our support. As do those in Israel who refuse to fight, and who resist the war. But not the groups who call on Palestinians to be slaughtered on their behalf by one of the most advanced armies in the world, and who wilfully attack civilians on the other side of the border.

YDS Participation in Bobby Seal Events

2009-01-07T22:15:00.000-08:00

YDSers,

We are jointly hosting Bobby Seal's Jan 14-16 stay (Wednesday -Friday first week of school) and, as the DuBois society's sister chapter there is an expectation we participate. Even with the great work the DuBois society and many YDS members have already accomplished, there are many areas of such an event needs warm bodies and bright minds to do.

The main event is THURSDAY JAN 15
Kellogg Auditorium
Doors at 4:45, Lecture 5
"The State of Black Politics in the 21st Century"

We have the privilege of attending two "mixers" and a dinner
(details on this to come, I can't find the info but its on the way)

IT IS IMPERATIVE WE PITCH IN TO HELP MAKE THIS INTO THE GREAT EVENT IT IS SHAPING UP TO BE.

An email will be distributed regarding a pre-semester meeting (or two or three) to discuss MSUYDS participation for the event. Please contact vogleson@msu.edu and let us know your best time for a meeting so we can get as many people as possible in on this.
Tentatively it will be Sunday, at any time, place tbd.

Spread the word about the event, comrades. It's important.

"Why I Am a Socialist" -- Chris Hedges, Dec 29, 2008

2008-12-31T15:57:00.001-08:00

Why I Am a Socialist Posted on Dec 29, 2008

By Chris Hedges

The corporate forces that are looting the Treasury and have plunged us
into a depression will not be contained by the two main political
parties. The Democratic and Republican parties have become little more
than squalid clubs of privilege and wealth, whores to money and
corporate interests, hostage to a massive arms industry, and so adept at
deception and self-delusion they no longer know truth from lies. We will
either find our way out of this mess by embracing an uncompromising
democratic socialism-one that will insist on massive government relief
and work programs, the nationalization of electricity and gas companies,
a universal, not-for-profit government health care program, the
outlawing of hedge funds, a radical reduction of our bloated military
budget and an end to imperial wars-or we will continue to be fleeced and
impoverished by our bankrupt elite and shackled and chained by our
surveillance state.

The free market and globalization, promised as the route to worldwide
prosperity, have been exposed as a con game. But this does not mean our
corporate masters will disappear. Totalitarianism, as George Orwell
pointed out, is not so much an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia.
?A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly
artificial,? Orwell wrote, ?that is when its ruling class has lost
its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.?
Force and fraud are all they have left. They will use both.

There is a political shift in Europe toward an open confrontation with
the corporate state. Germany has seen a surge of support for Die Linke
(The Left), a political grouping formed 18 months ago. It is co-led by
the veteran socialist ?Red? Oskar Lafontaine, who has built his
career on attacking big business. Two-thirds of Germans in public
opinion polls say they agree with all or some of Die Linke?s platform.
The Socialist Party of the Netherlands is on the verge of overtaking the
Labor Party as the main opposition party on the left. Greece, beset with
street protests and violence by disaffected youths, has seen the rapid
rise of the Coalition of the Radical Left. In Spain and Norway
socialists are in power. Resurgence is not universal, especially in
France and Britain, but the shifts toward socialism are significant.

Corporations have intruded into every facet of life. We eat corporate
food. We buy corporate clothes. We drive corporate cars. We buy our
vehicular fuel and our heating oil from corporations. We borrow from
corporate banks. We invest our retirement savings with corporations. We
are entertained, informed and branded by corporations. We work for
corporations. The creation of a mercenary army, the privatization of
public utilities and our disgusting for-profit health care system are
all legacies of the corporate state. These corporations have no loyalty
to America or the American worker. They are not tied to nation states.
They are vampires.

?By now the [commercial] revolution has deprived the mass of
consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing,
shelter, food, even water,? Wendell Berry wrote in ?The Unsettling
of America.? ?Air remains the only necessity that the average user
can still get for himself, and the revolution had imposed a heavy tax on
that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is far more thorough and
final than military defeat.?

The corporation is designed to make money without regard to human life,
the social good or impact on the environment. Corporate laws impose a
legal duty on corporate executives to make as much money as possible for
shareholders, although many have moved on to fleece shareholders as
well. In the 2003 documentary film ?The Corporation? the management
guru Peter Drucker says: ?If you find an executive who wants to take
on social responsibilities, fire him. Fast.?

A corporation that attempts to engage in social responsibility, that
tries to pay workers a decent wage with benefits, that invests its
profits to protect the environment and limit pollution, that gives
consumers fair deals, can be sued by shareholders. Robert Monks, the
investment manager, says in the film: ?The corporation is an
externalizing machine, in the same way that a shark is a killing
machine. There isn?t any question of malevolence or of will. The
enterprise has within it, and the shark has within it, those
characteristics that enable it to do that for which it was designed.?
Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface Corp., the world?s largest
commercial carpet manufacturer, calls the corporation a ?present day
instrument of destruction? because of its compulsion to ?externalize
any cost that an unwary or uncaring public will allow it to
externalize.?

?The notion that we can take and take and take and take, waste and
waste, without consequences, is driving the biosphere to destruction,?
Anderson says.

In short, the film, based on Joel Bakan?s book ?The Corporation:
The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power,? asserts that the
corporation exhibits many of the traits found in people clinically
defined as psychopaths.

Psychologist Dr. Robert Hare lists in the film psychopathic traits and
ties them to the behavior of corporations:

callous unconcern for the feelings for others; incapacity to maintain
enduring relationships; reckless disregard for the safety of others;
deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit; incapacity
to experience guilt; failure to conform to social norms with respect to
lawful behavior.

And yet, under the American legal system, corporations have the same
legal rights as individuals. They give hundreds of millions of dollars
to political candidates, fund the army of some 35,000 lobbyists in
Washington and thousands more in state capitals to write corporate-
friendly legislation, drain taxpayer funds and abolish government
oversight. They saturate the airwaves, the Internet, newsprint and
magazines with advertisements promoting their brands as the friendly
face of the corporation. They have high-priced legal teams, millions of
employees, skilled public relations firms and thousands of elected
officials to ward off public intrusions into their affairs or halt messy
lawsuits. They hold a near monopoly on all electronic and printed
sources of information. A few media giants-AOL-Time Warner, General
Electric, Viacom, Disney and Rupert Murdoch?s NewsGroup- control
nearly everything we read, see and hear.

?Private capital tends to become concentrated in [a] few hands,
partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because
technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage
the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the
smaller ones,? Albert Einstein wrote in 1949 in the Monthly Review in
explaining why he was a socialist. ?The result of these developments
is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be
effectively checked even by a democratically organized political
society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are
selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced
by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the
electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the
representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the
interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover,
under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control,
directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio,
education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases
quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective
conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.?

Labor and left-wing activists, especially university students and well-
heeled liberals, have failed to unite. This division, which is often
based on social rather than economic differences, has long stymied
concerted action against ruling elites. It has fractured the American
left and rendered it impotent.

?Large sections of the middle class are being gradually
proletarianized; but the important point is that they do not, at any
rate not in the first generation, adopt a proletarian outlook,? Orwell
wrote in 1937 during the last economic depression. ?Here I am, for
instance, with a bourgeois upbringing and a working-class income. Which
class do I belong to? Economically I belong to the working class, but it
is almost impossible for me to think of myself as anything but a member
of the bourgeoisie. And supposing I had to take sides, whom should I
side with, the upper class which is trying to squeeze me out of
existence, or the working class whose manners are not my manners? It is
probable that I, personally, in any important issue, would side with the
working class. But what about the tens or hundreds of thousands of
others who are in approximately the same position? And what about that
far larger class, running into millions this time-the office-workers and
black-coated employees of all kinds- whose traditions are less definite
middle class but who would certainly not thank you if you called them
proletarians? All of these people have the same interests and the same
enemies as the working class. All are being robbed and bullied by the
same system. Yet how many of them realize it? When the pinch came nearly
all of them would side with their oppressors and against those who ought
to be their allies. It is quite easy to imagine a working class crushed
down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly
anti-working- class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made
Fascist party.?

Coalitions of environmental, anti-nuclear, anti-capitalist,
sustainable-agriculture and anti-globalization forces have coalesced in
Europe to form and support socialist parties. This has yet to happen in
the United States. The left never rallied in significant numbers behind
Cynthia McKinney or Ralph Nader. In picking the lesser of two evils, it
threw its lot in with a Democratic Party that backs our imperial wars,
empowers the national security state and does the bidding of
corporations.

If Barack Obama does not end the flagrant theft of taxpayer funds by
corporate slugs and the disgraceful abandonment of our working class,
especially as foreclosures and unemployment mount, many in the country
will turn in desperation to the far right embodied by groups such as
Christian radicals. The failure by the left to offer a democratic
socialist alternative will mean there will be, in the eyes of many
embittered and struggling working- and middle-class Americans, no
alternative but a perverted Christian fascism. The inability to
articulate a viable socialism has been our gravest mistake. It will
ensure, if this does not soon change, a ruthless totalitarian
capitalism.

From the Israeli socialist magazine, Challenge

2008-12-30T09:48:00.000-08:00

30 December, 2008
ISRAEL PREFERS WAR RATHER THAN PAY THE PRICE OF PEACE
Filed under: Palestine — admin @ 4:14 pm

From the Israeli socialist magazine, Challenge.

by Yacov Ben Efrat

Israel’s military operation called Molten Lead started on Saturday, December 27, 2008 and took more than 200 lives in its first day, much to the satisfaction of the Israeli public. Already on Friday there were cries of “Go get ‘em!” from the columns of the leading newspapers, and on Saturday the Gazans got what Israelis have long been wishing them. This was no spontaneous operation, no mere response to the recent firing of rockets on the towns of the Negev. In the preceding half year of calm, while warning that Hamas was arming itself, Israel carefully planned the attack to extract the highest possible price.

Officially, the campaign was intended to return that calm to the area under conditions more favorable to Israel. But the aims go farther. Israel is trying to bring Hamas back to the negotiating table with Egypt on terms that will be good for the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its president, Abu Mazen. Hamas failed to use the six-months calm “constructively” by reaching a deal with Abu Mazen, and now it is paying the price. Israel wants it to end armed resistance, recognize the legitimacy of the Oslo Accords, and accept the terms of the Quartet. In other words, Hamas is supposed to yield its control over Gaza and blend into the PA as a minor partner.

The countdown started in November when, rejecting an Egyptian proposal, Hamas failed to attend a meeting with the PA in Cairo. For Israel’s Gaza campaign is no solo performance. The step was coordinated with Jordan and Egypt—and won Abu Mazen’s blessing too. The Muslim Brotherhood, to which Hamas belongs, constitutes the main opposition to the Egyptian, Jordanian and Palestinian regimes. We have here the same Arab-Israeli axis that went against Hezbollah in Lebanon two years ago. Again it has total support from the White House. This time too, Israel serves as the executive agent, whose task is to reduce the common enemy.

Hamas, for its part, has made all possible mistakes. The first was its takeover of Gaza in June 2007, which caused the Israeli blockade to harden, harming civilians. The latest mistake was its resumption of armed struggle against Israel.

Hamas wants its rule over Gaza to be acknowledged, so that it can then compete with the PA for the West Bank. It has played a double game. On the one hand, it took part in the democratic process of the PA elections three years ago—even coming out victorious. On the other hand, the PA and its elections were a creation of the Oslo Agreement, which Hamas refuses to recognize.

Khaled Mashal, leader of the movement, has not contented himself with opening fronts against the PA and Israel. He has also provoked the Egyptian regime, not only by rejecting its proposals, but also by demanding that it open the Rafah Border, an act that would violate Egypt’s international commitments. At the grassroots level, Hamas has joined the Muslim Brotherhood in a campaign of incitement against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

For all these reasons, Gaza today stands alone against Israeli military might. From his refuge in Damascus, Mashal calls for a third Intifada, although the Palestinians have not yet recovered from the second. While Hamas lusts for power, ordinary Palestinians are tired, confused, and above all frustrated. On one side they have Abu Mazen, who is ready to swallow all the frogs Israel puts on his plate. On the other side they have Hamas, caught in the conception that its regime is God’s will, even at the cost of Heaven Now.

Within three minutes of starting its operation, Israel had killed or wounded hundreds. It is not difficult to imagine what will happen after three weeks of this. The purpose is to introduce Hamas to earthly reality—and, if possible, to restore the respect that Israel lost in Lebanon two years ago. In this regard, we may define Molten Lead as a repair operation for the second Lebanon War, in accordance with the recommendations of the Winograd Commission that investigated the debacle.

But what is Israel’s real situation? Is it as strong as it is trying to appear by spilling blood in Gaza? What effect will the pictures of torn bodies, scattered in the yard of the Police Academy, ultimately have on Israelis? Or the piercing shrieks of the mothers? Most Israelis want to reach some form of normality and become a society that, in the words of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, “it’s fun to live in.” Where is the “fun” in such massacres, recycled for 60 years?

During the last 40 of those years, Israel has systematically trampled another people, refusing to end the Occupation. The Palestinians have lost all rights. Their life proceeds amid settler pogroms, military roadblocks, closures, separation walls, and grueling poverty. Olmert has said (but only after it was clear he was on the way out) that there won’t be any choice for Israel but to withdraw from all the Occupied Territories, including East Jerusalem. If that is really his position, he has wasted his term in empty talk. In action, Israel’s position is the opposite. It does not withdraw, it does not dismantle even the outposts it calls illegal, most of the settlers remain in their homes, the army continues to control the borders, and Gaza continues to sink in despair.

Molten Lead has no political justification. Even if Hamas does return to the negotiating table, Israel will have nothing to offer. For it remains as unwilling as ever to pay the price of peace—that is, to end the Occupation. Because it has not paid, the rockets fall on Sderot and other Negev towns. Israel then uses the rockets as an excuse for continuing not to pay. Another excuse is the “no partner” mantra. When Israel says it is ready for a Palestinian state, it does not mean in all the Occupied Territories—its talk of a state, therefore, is wool over the eyes. Israel’s unwillingness to pay is the source of Hamas’s strength. The movement rests on three pillars: poverty, the weakness of the PA, and the lack of a diplomatic prospect.

It is Israel that plunged Gaza into its present condition. The disengagement of 2005 was unilateral, refusing any role to the PA and leaving the field open for the Hamas takeover. The responsibility for what is now occurring in Gaza rests, therefore, almost exclusively on Israel. Perhaps Molten Lead will end, indeed, in an “improved” cease-fire. Perhaps we shall soon see the Hamas leadership in Cairo again. But a renewal of calm will result in no solution. What solution can there be as long as the Territories continue to sink in corruption, poverty and despair? How long will it take until a new calm gives way to another massacre?

And how long can Israeli society go on living as an Occupier? How long until the country’s internal social gaps, together with the ever worsening conflict, land a blow many times worse than rockets from Gaza? The basic problem isn’t Hamas. It is the nationalist consensus of Israel’s political parties, which have prodded the present transitional government to carry out this massacre, whose only real purpose is to continue putting off the price of peace.

Bobby Seale to speak at MSU!!

2008-12-30T06:22:00.001-08:00

*PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY!*

The W.E.B. Du Bois Society and the Young Democratic Socialists Present

Co-founder and former Chairman of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense

Bobby Seale

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

Join us for an inspiring lecture given by a historic icon and legend within the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements:

"The State of Black Politics in the 21st Century"

Lecture begins at 5pm in the Kellogg Hotel and Conference Center Auditorium, followed promptly by a Q&A Session.

Doors open at 4:45pm

For more information, please e-mail

msuduboissociety@gmail.com or

msuyds@gmail.com.

Also, see attached flier.

We would like to thank all

of our sponsors for their support:

The Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Initiatives• James Madison College • The Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs and Services • The Residential College of Arts and Humanities •The Multicultural Business Program • The African American and African Studies Program • Case Hall Government • Lyman Briggs College

Free Gaza!

2008-12-28T15:23:00.001-08:00

Gaza today: 'This is only the beginning'
By Ewa Jasiewicz

As I write this, Israeli jets are bombing the areas of Zeitoun and Rimal
in central Gaza City. The family I am staying with has moved into the
internal corridor of their home to shelter from the bombing. The windows
nearly blew out just five minutes ago as a massive explosion rocked the
house. Apache's are hovering above us, whilst F16s sear overhead.

UN radio reports say one blast was a target close to the main gate of Al
Shifa hospital ? Gaza and Palestine's largest medical facility. Another
was a plastics factory. More bombs continue to pound the Strip.

Sirens are wailing on the streets outside. Regular power cuts that plunge
the city into blackness every night and tonight is no exception. Only
perhaps tonight it is the darkest night people have seen here in their
lifetimes.

Over 220 people have been killed and over 400 injured through attacks that
shocked the strip in the space 15 minutes. Hospitals are overloaded and
unable to cope. These attacks come on top of existing conditions of
humanitarian crisis: a lack of medicines, bread, flour, gas, electricity,
fuel and freedom of movement.

Doctors at Shifaa had to scramble together 10 make shift operating
theatres to deal with the wounded. The hospital's maternity ward had to
transform their operating room into an emergency theatre. Shifaa only had
12 beds in their intensive care unit, they had to make space for 27 today.

There is a shortage of medicine ? over 105 key items are not in stock, and
blood and spare generator parts are desperately needed.

Shifaa's main generator is the life support machine of the entire
hospital. It's the apparatus keeping the ventilators and monitors and
lights turned on that keep people inside alive. And it doesn't have the
spare parts it needs, despite the International Committee for the Red
Cross urging Israel to allow it to transport them through Erez checkpoint.

Shifaa's Head of Casualty, Dr Maowiye Abu Hassanyeh explained, 'We had
over 300 injured in over 30 minutes. There were people on the floor of the
operating theatre, in the reception area, in the corridors; we were
sending patients to other hospitals. Not even the most advanced hospital
in the world could cope with this number of casualties in such a short
space of time.'

And as IOF Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenaz said this
morning, 'This is only the beginning.'

But this isn't the beginning, this is an ongoing policy of collective
punishment and killing with impunity practised by Israel for decades. It
has seen its most intensified level today. But the weight of dread,
revenge and isolation hangs thick over Gaza today. People are all asking:
If this is only the beginning, what will the end look like?

11.30am
Myself and Alberto Acre, a Spanish journalist, had been on the border
village of Sirej near Khan Younis in the south of the strip. We had driven
there at 8am with the mobile clinic of the Union of Palestinian Relief
Committees. The clinic regularly visits exposed, frequently raided
villages far from medical facilities. We had been interviewing residents
about conditions on the border. Stories of olive groves and orange groves,
family farmland, bulldozed to make way for a clear line of sight for
Israeli occupation force watch towers and border guards. Israeli attacks
were frequent. Indiscriminate fire and shelling spraying homes and land on
the front line of the south eastern border. One elderly farmer showed us
the grave-size ditch he had dug to climb into when Israeli soldiers would
shoot into his fields.

Alberto was interviewing a family that had survived an Israeli missile
attack on their home last month. It had been a response to rocket fire
from resistance fighters nearby. Four fighters were killed in a field by
the border. Israel had rained rockets and M16 fire back. The family,
caught in the crossfire, have never returned to their home.

I was waiting for Alberto to return when ground shaking thuds tilted us
off our feet. This was the sound of surface to air fired missiles and F16
bombs slamming into the police stations, and army bases of the Hamas
authority here. In Gaza City , in Diere Balah, Rafah, Khan Younis, Beit
Hanoon.

We zoomed out of the village in our ambulance, and onto the main road to
Gaza City , before jumping out to film the smouldering remains of a police
station in Diere Balah, near Khan Younis. Its' name - meaning 'place of
dates' - sounds like the easy semi-slang way of saying 'take care', Diere
Bala, Diere Balak ? take care.

Eyewitnesses said two Israeli missiles had destroyed the station. One had
soared through a children's playground and a busy fruit and vegetable
market before impacting on its target.

Civilians Dead
There was blood on a broken plastic yellow slide, and a crippled, dead
donkey with an upturned vegetable cart beside it. Aubergines and
splattered blood covered the ground. A man began to explain in broken
English what had happened. 'It was full here, full, three people dead,
many many injured'. An elderly man with a white kuffiyeh around his head
threw his hands down to his blood drenched trousers. 'Look! Look at this!
Shame on all governments, shame on Israel, look how they kills us, they
are killing us and what does the world do? Where is the world, where are
they, we are being killed here, hell upon them!' He was a market trader,
present during the attack.

He began to pick up splattered tomatoes he had lost from his cart, picking
them up jerkily, and putting them into plastic bags, quickly. Behind a
small tile and brick building, a man was sitting against the wall, his
legs were bloodied. He couldn't get up and was sitting, visibly in pain
and shock, trying to adjust himself, to orientate himself.

The police station itself was a wreck, a mess of criss-crossed piles of
concrete ? broken floors upon floors. Smashed cars and a split palm tree
split the road.

We walked on, hurriedly, with everyone else, eyes skyward at four apache
helicopters ? their trigger mechanisms supplied by the UK 's
Brighton-Based EDM Technologies. They were dropping smoky bright flares ?
a defence against any attempt at Palestinian missile retaliation.

Turning down the road leading to the Diere Balah Civil Defence Force
headquarters we suddenly saw a rush of people streaming across the road.
'They've been bombing twice, they've been bombing twice' shouted people.

We ran too, but towards the crowds and away from what could possibly be
target number two, 'a ministry building' our friend shouted to us. The
apaches rumbled above.

Arriving at the police station we saw the remains of a life at work
smashed short. A prayer matt clotted with dust, a policeman's hat, the
ubiquitous bright flower patterned mattresses, burst open. A crater around
20 feet in diameter was filled with pulverised walls and floors and a
motorbike, tossed on its' side, toy-like in its' depths.

Policemen were frantically trying to get a fellow worker out from under
the rubble. Everyone was trying to call him on his Jawwal. 'Stop it
everyone, just one, one of you ring' shouted a man who looked like a
captain. A fire licked the underside of an ex-room now crushed to just 3
feet high. Hands alongside hands rapidly grasped and threw back rocks,
blocks and debris to reach the man.

We made our way to the Al Aqsa Hospital. Trucks and cars loaded with the
men of entire families ? uncles, nephews, brothers ? piled high and
speeding to the hospital to check on loved ones, horns blaring without
interruption.

Hospitals on the brink
Entering Al Aqsa was overwhelming, pure pandemonium, charged with grief,
horror, distress, and shock. Limp blood covered and burnt bodies streamed
by us on rickety stretchers. Before the morgue was a scrum, tens of
shouting relatives crammed up to its open double doors. 'They could not
even identify who was who, whether it is their brother or cousin or who,
because they are so burned' explained our friend. Many were transferred,
in ambulances and the back of trucks and cars to Al Shifa Hospital.

The injured couldn't speak. Causality after casualty sat propped against
the outside walls outside, being comforted by relatives, wounds
temporarily dressed. Inside was perpetual motion and the more drastically
injured. Relatives jostled with doctors to bring in their injured in
scuffed blankets. Drips, blood streaming faces, scorched hair and shrapnel
cuts to hands, chests, legs, arms and heads dominated the reception area,
wards and operating theatres.

We saw a bearded man, on a stretcher on the floor of an intensive care
unit, shaking and shaking, involuntarily, legs rigid and thrusting
downwards. A spasm coherent with a spinal chord injury. Would he ever walk
again or talk again? In another unit, a baby girl, no older than six
months, had shrapnel wounds to her face. A relative lifted a blanket to
show us her fragile bandaged leg. Her eyes were saucer-wide and she was
making stilted, repetitive, squeaking sounds.

A first estimate at Al Aqsa hospital was 40 dead and 120 injured. The
hospital was dealing with casualties from the bombed market, playground,
Civil Defence Force station, civil police station and also the traffic
police station. All leveled. A working day blasted flat with terrifying
force.

At least two shaheed (martyrs) were carried out on stretchers out of the
hospital. Lifted up by crowds of grief-stricken men to the graveyard to
cries of 'La Illaha Illa Allah,' there is not god but Allah.

Who cares?
And according to many people here, there is nothing and nobody looking out
for them apart from God. Back in Shifa Hospital tonight, we meet the
brother of a security guard who had had the doorway he had been sitting in
and the building ? Abu Mazen's old HQ - fall down upon his head. He said
to us, 'We don't have anyone but God. We feel alone. Where is the world?
Where is the action to stop these attacks?'

Majid Salim, stood beside his comatosed mother, Fatima. Earlier today she
had been sitting at her desk at work ? at the Hadije Arafat Charity, near
Meshtal, the Headquarters of the Security forces in Gaza City. Israel's
attack had left her with multiple internal and head injuries, tube down
her throat and a ventilator keeping her alive. Majid gestured to her, 'We
didn't attack Israel, my mother didn't fire rockets at Israel. This is the
biggest terrorism, to have our mother bombarded at work'.

The groups of men lining the corridors of the over-stretched Shifaa
hospital are by turns stunned, agitated, patient and lost. We speak to one
group. Their brother had both arms broken and has serious facial and head
injuries. 'We couldn't recognise his face, it was so black from the
weapons used' one explains. Another man turns to me and says. 'I am a
teacher. I teach human rights ? this is a course we have, 'human rights'.
He pauses. 'How can I teach, my son, my children, about the meaning of
human rights under these conditions, under this siege?'

It's true, UNRWA and local government schools have developed a Human
Rights syllabus, teaching children about international law, the Geneva
Conventions, the International Declaration on Human Rights, The Hague
Regulations. To try to develop a culture of human rights here, to help
generate more self confidence and security and more of a sense of dignity
for the children. But the contradiction between what should be adhered to
as a common code of conducted signed up to by most states, and the
realities on the ground is stark. International law is not being applied
or enforced with respect to Israeli policies towards the Gaza Strip, or on
'48 Palestine, the West Bank, or the millions of refugees living in camps
in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

How can a new consciousness and practice of human rights ever graduate
from rhetoric to reality when everything points to the contrary ? both
here and in Israel ? The United Nations have been spurned and shut out by
Israel , with Richard Falk the UN's Special Rapporteur on Human Rights
held prisoner at Ben Gurion Airport before being unceremoniously deported
this month ? deliberately blinded to the abuses being carried out against
Gaza by Israel . An international community which speaks empty phrases on
Israeli attacks 'we urge restraint?minimise civilian casualties'.

The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated regions on the planet.
In Jabbaliya camp alone, Gaza 's largest, 125,000 people are crowded into
a space 2km square. Bombardment by F16s and Apaches at 11.30 in the
morning, as children leave their schools for home reveals a contempt for
civilian safety as does the 18 months of a siege that bans all imports and
exports, and has resulted in the deaths of over 270 people as a result of
a lack of access to essential medicines.

A light
There is a saying here in Gaza ? we spoke about it, jokily last night. 'At
the end of the tunnel?there is another tunnel'. Not so funny when you
consider that Gaza is being kept alive through the smuggling of food, fuel
and medicine through an exploitative industry of over 1000 tunnels running
from Egypt to Rafah in the South. On average 1-2 people die every week in
the tunnels. Some embark on a humiliating crawl to get their education,
see their families, to find work, on their hands and knees. Others are
reportedly big enough to drive through.

Last night I added a new ending to the saying. 'At the end of the tunnel,
there is another tunnel and then a power cut'. Today, there's nothing to
make a joke about. As bombs continue to blast buildings around us, jarring
the children in this house from their fitful sleep, the saying could take
on another twist. After today's killing of over 200, is it that at the end
of the tunnel, there is another tunnel, and then a grave?', or a wall of
international governmental complicity and silence?

There is a light through, beyond the sparks of resistance and solidarity
in the West Bank, '48 and the broader Middle East. This is a light of
conscience turned into activism by people all over the world. We can turn
a spotlight onto Israel's crimes against humanity and the enduring
injustice here in Palestine, through coming out onto the streets and
pressurizing our governments; demanding an end to Israeli apartheid and
occupation, broadening our call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, and
for a genuine Just Peace.

Through institutional, governmental and popular means, this can be a light
at the end of the Gazan tunnel.
-----

Ewa Jasiewicz is an experienced journalist, community and union organizer,
and solidarity worker. She is currently Gaza Project Co-coordinator for
the Free Gaza Movement.

http://www.FreeGaza.org

Why the "white girl" joined "the Black struggle."

2008-12-22T13:47:00.000-08:00

Last week I wrote about a certain transformation of mine--one of racial transcendence and of forming bonds of solidarity with African-African Americans. I told you how I overcame my fears about personally interacting with Black people and how I was able to build strong relationships with people I would have otherwise avoided, simply because they were “different” from myself. But what I failed to tell you was why I was moved to do it. Why was it so important for me to learn more about Black culture, or to truly understand the consequences of Black history in the United States? What motivated me from just knowing about the history of racial struggle in this country, to actively doing something about achieving racial justice in the present by joining Black organizations on campus? What moved me to study African American and African studies in school or decide to devote my life to working toward equalizing educational opportunity for children of color across the Diaspora? In a world where many would argue racism no longer exists, I can’t help but point to the overwhelming amount of racism that still exists. Though outward and obvious forms of racism such as slavery or segregation are no longer allowed, a new kind of racial exploitation has taken its place. Now it is through racist institutions and structures such as laws, public bodies, corporations, and universities that perpetuate racial disparities. The fact of the matter is my dedication to the Black liberation struggle is not one that is seen among the majority of white people in this country. I hope that by sharing my reasons and the stories of two other brave white women, Viola Liuzzo and Silvia Baraldini, I will be able to convince others to see the truth as I did, and to be moved away from the status quo and toward action against injustice.

In March of 1965, a group of peaceful protestors in Selma, Alabama were attacked by state troopers as they Marched toward Montgomery. A few days later another group of protestors, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., won a court order allowing for another march from Selma to Montgomery directing the state to protect the marchers. The Governor at that time, a well known racist, told the White House that the state couldn’t afford to pay for the mobilization of the National Guard, so President Johnson sent in 1,900 of Alabama’s National Guard, 2,000 regular army soldiers, and 200 FBI agents and US marshals to protect the march. Viola Liuzzo, a 39 year old housewife from Detroit watched the second march move toward the Alabama capital. Liuzzo had watched the disaster of the first march on TV and decided she needed to do something to aid the Civil Rights marchers. Against the wishes of her husband and five children, Liuzzo drove alone from Michigan to Alabama in her family’s car to assist where she could.

Earlier in the week before the second march, Liuzzo had spent most of her time working at the hospitality desk in Brown Chapel at Selma and used her car to take people back and forth to Montgomery’s airport. The last day of the march to Montgomery, she worked at the first aid station, aiding those who had fainted from heat or exertion during the march. She then watched Dr. King deliver his "How long will it take? ... Not long, because mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord” speech. When the march ended, there were thousands of people from across the country who had come to participate in the marche, just like Liuzzo, that needed to get out of the city. She loaded her car with passengers, mostly black, and headed back toward Selma. When the passengers were dropped off, Liuzzo and Leroy Moton, a black teenager, headed back to Mongomery to pick up more people. After being harassed several times before leaving Selma, they stopped at a traffic light. Soon another car pulled up beside them. When the lights changed, the car began to speed up and chased Liuzzo. The chase went on for almost 20 miles as she tried to outrun her pursuers. All the while she was singing “We Shall Overcome” at the top of her lungs. Soon the other car closed in—a car full of Klansmen. One of the men fired twice into Liuzzo’s car, killing her.

An all white jury in Alabama acquitted the three Klansmen for the murder of Liuzzo. Since they could not be charged with murder in federal courts, they were tried under another law with conspiring to deprive her of her civil rights. They were found guilty, and served only 10 years in prison. The punishment given to these men was hardly appropriate for such a heinous act of injustice.

Another great woman, Silvia Baraldini, gave up her white privilege to aid in the struggle for people of color. At 14, she moved to the United States from Italy with her parents. Later on in life she attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she became a political activist. She became active in both the Black Power and Puerto Rican independence movements in the US between the 1960s and 80s.

In 1982 Baraldini was sentenced to 43 years in prison for conspiring to commit two armed robberies, driving a getaway car during the prison break of convicted murderer and fellow political activist Assata Shakur, who was wrongly accused of shooting and killing a New Jersey State Trooper, and for contempt of court for refusing to testify before a Grand Jury that was investigating the activities of the Puerto Rican independence movement.

Soon after her conviction, a campaign for her release began in Italy, mainly among leftist parties and movements. Her supporters claimed that the harshness of her punishment was due to her political beliefs and for her participation in the Black Liberation Army. Her punishment was seen as unfair and disproportionate to her “crimes.” Had she been convicted for the same crimes in Italy, her sentence would have only been a maximum of 25 years in prison.

After serving time in several maximum-security prisons, and after repeated petitions by the Italian government for her transfer, Baraldini was transferred to Italy to serve the remainder of her sentence. According to the terms of the agreement, she was supposed to stay in prison until 2008, but was released on house arrest in 2001. In 2006, she was released from detention in September of 2006 by a general pardon approved by the Italian Parliament.

Both of these women recognized the injustice that their brothers and sisters of color were facing in the United States. Both knew that despite what anyone else told them, they were doing the right thing by stepping up and taking on the burden of joining the struggle to end racism against people of color. They realized that the Black struggle is what American socialists and communists recognized earlier in US history: the struggle for true democracy. They struggled for a kind of democracy where racism, class division, and feelings of fear and hatred toward people “different” from the social norm were abolished. Viola Liuzzo and Silvia Baraldini were willing to give up the privilege that so many white women cherish and achieve freedom for all human beings at any price, including their lives. They believed, as I believe, that everyone on this earth deserves the right for equal opportunity. Seeing that such equality was being denied to people of color through racist institutions and structures, seeing the contradictions within our own government, we must be willing to face scrutiny and disapproval from the loved ones in our lives as well as expulsion and punishment from the society around us in order to do what’s right. In the face of great suffering, where do you stand? Are you willing to watch your brothers and sisters get beat down in the street, are you ready to watch democracy burn, or are you ready to take a stand and do something to change it?

CHICAGO WORKERS TO REST OF COUNTRY: "DON'T LET IT DIE!"

2008-12-13T23:32:00.000-08:00

CHICAGO WORKERS TO REST OF COUNTRY: "DON'T LET IT DIE!"
By David Bacon
New America Media, 12/11/08
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=a3d3cc49a93f6bfac1b3f22114371524

When the day finally comes that Raul Flores loses his job, he
will face a bitter search for another one. "I've got a family to
support, so I've got to do whatever it takes," he says. "It's going
to be hard. The economic situation is not good, but I can't just
wait for something to happen to me."
That puts Flores in the same boat as millions of other U.S.
workers. Last month alone 533,000 workers lost their jobs, the
highest figure in 34 years. A week ago, the heads of the big three
auto companies were in Washington DC, pleading for loans to keep
their companies afloat. As a price, lawmakers and pundits told them
they had to become "leaner and meaner," and in response, General
Motors announced it would close nine plants and put tens of thousands
of workers in the street. Ford and Chrysler described a similar
job-elimination strategy.
What makes Flores special? He didn't just accept the
elimination of his job. Instead, he sat in at the Chicago plant
where he worked for six days, together with 240 other union members
at Republic Windows and Doors.
Republic workers were not demanding the reopening of their
closed factory. They've been fighting for severance and benefits to
help them survive the unemployment they know awaits them. Yet their
occupation can't help but raise deeper questions about the right of
workers to their jobs. Can a return to the militant tactics of
direct action, that produced the greatest gains in union membership,
wages and job security in U.S. history, overturn "the inescapable
logic of the marketplace"? Can employers, and the banks that hold
their credit lines, be forced to keep plants open?
Unlike the auto giants, Republic was not threatening
bankruptcy. It makes a "green product," Energy-Star compliant doors
and windows that should be one of the bedrock industries for a new,
more environmentally sustainable economy. But Bank of America, as it
was receiving $25 billion in Federal bailout funds, pulled the
company's credit line. Perhaps that alone led President-elect Obama
to support the workers. The bank-enforced closure undermines his
program for using environmentally sustainable jobs to replace those
eliminated in the spiraling recession. He called Republic workers
"absolutely right. What's happening to them is reflective of what's
happening across this economy."
Federal law requires companies to give employees 60 days
notice of a plant closure, or pay them 60 days severance pay, to give
them breathing room to find other jobs. Republic workers got three
days, and no money. "They knew they'd be out on the street
penniless," says Leah Fried, organizer for Local 1110 of the United
Electrical Workers. "When the negotiating committee came back to the
factory to report that the company didn't even show up to talk with
them, the workers were so enraged they voted unanimously not to leave
until they got their severance and vacation pay."
While the workers' acted to gain their legally-mandated
rights, the plant occupation resurrects a tactic with a radical
history. In 1934, auto workers occupied the huge Fisher Body plants
in Flint, Michigan, and when the battle was over, the United Auto
Workers was born. Sitdown strikes spread across the country like
wildfire. Occupying production lines in plant after plant, workers
won unions, better wages, and real changes in their lives.
Seventy years later, the workers who have inherited that
legacy of unionization and security are on the brink of losing
everything. Just since 2006 the United Auto Workers has lost 119,000
members. The threat of plant closure has been used to cut the wages
of new hires in half, to $14.50, the same wage paid on the window
lines at Republic, where the union is only four years old.
Flores certainly hopes that those whose livelihoods are in
peril will rediscover the tactic. "This is the start of something,"
he urges. "Don't let it die. Learn something from it." And the
sitdown was successful. After six days sitting-in, and a rally of
1000 people in front of the bank, JP Morgan, another beneficiary of
Federal assistance that owns 40% of Republic, put up $400,000, and
Bank of America another $1.35 million. That was enough to pay the
legally-mandated severance, the workers' accrued vacation, and two
months of health care. Flores and his coworkers then voted to end
the occupation.
Fran Tobin, midwest organizer for Jobs with Justice, a
coalition of labor and community groups with chapters around the
country, shares Flores' optimism. "I think this is not the last time
we're going to see American workers occupying American plants, as
part of a move to save jobs and turn things around," he says.
Organizers for Jobs with Justice are fanning out with a program they
call a "Peoples' Bailout." "We need to ask, 'What kind of an economy
and recovery do we want?'" Tobin emphasizes. He lists funds for a
jobs program, rather than huge loans to banks, a moratorium on home
foreclosures, investment in infrastructure repair, and helping local
and state governments (and public worker) survive the crisis without
massive budget cuts.
Flores, Tobin and Fried all agree that none of those demands
can be won without unions and workers willing to fight for them.
That makes the Republic plant occupation more than just a local
confrontation. "This might not be the right tactic in every
situation, but people know we need to be fighting back," Fried says.
Will the unions in auto plants and other workplaces hit by
layoffs take up the challenge of the Republic workers? To Flores,
they have to do something more than just watch the elimination of
their jobs. "We've got to fight for our rights," he emphasizes.
"It's not fair that they just kick us out on the street with nothing.
Somebody has to respond."

Republic sit-in ends, workers declare victory!

2008-12-12T14:34:00.000-08:00

rom: PWW
Author: John Bachtell
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 12/11/08 11:44

CHICAGO — Workers occupying Republic Windows and Doors declared victory after they unanimously voted to approve a settlement reached after three days of negotiations with the company and Bank of American, its chief creditor.

“The occupation is over,” said Armando Robles, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers Local (UE) 1110 president. “We have achieved victory. We said we will not go until we got justice and we have it.” UE represents the 250 production workers at the plant.

The settlement totals $1.75 million and provides workers with eight weeks of pay, two months of continued health coverage and accrued and unused vacation pay. Money from Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, which owns 40% of the company, will be placed in a separate fund to administer the payments.

"This is about more than just money, said UE Western Region President Carl Rosen. "It's about what can be achieved when workers organize and stand up for justice."

The workers weren’t able to save the plant, which will close. However, UE Director of Organization Bob Kingsley announced the creation of a new foundation dedicated to reopening the plant starting with seed money from the UE national union and the thousands of dollars of donations to UE Local 1110's Solidarity Fund that have come in from across the country and around the world. The fund will be called the “Window of Opportunity Fund.”

The occupation started Dec. 5 when it was shut down after the company’s main financier, Bank of America, refused to extend a line of credit. The occupation became a symbol of workers across the country struggling with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and what’s seen as a failure of the federal bailout of banks and financial institutions. The day the occupation started, the U.S. Labor Department said 533,000 more jobs were lost in November.

The action created a storm of outrage because Bank of America recently received a $25 billion bailout package from the federal government, but decided it wouldn’t go to keep manufacturing operations running. When the company skipped a Dec. 5 meeting with the United Electrical Workers’ union (UE) and Bank of America, the workers unanimously voted to stage a sit-in.

“These workers are to this struggle perhaps what Rosa Parks was to social justice 50 years ago,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson said. “This, in many ways, is the beginning of a larger movement for mass action to resist economic violence.”

The action against some of the most powerful economic forces in the nation generated worldwide solidarity and support including from President-elect Barack Obama, who called the workers’ demands “absolutely right.” Food, money and solidarity messages poured in and area unions, religious and community activists demonstrated daily with the workers.

Many solidarity actions were part of the Jobs with Justice Coalition People’s Bailout Now Week of Actions Dec. 7-13. A group of religious leaders in town for a meeting of Interfaith Workers Justice rallied at the plant Dec. 9.

“We’re here to stand with these workers to support them in their struggle for justice,” Rev. Nelson Johnson told the World. Johnson is co-president and board member of Interfaith Worker Justice and vice-president of the Pulpit Forum in Greensboro, N.C.

“People need to work and this is no time for the banks or the company to betray the interests of the American people who made this [bailout] money available for moments precisely like this one that should directly benefit the workers here,” said Johnson.

The company, maker of vinyl windows for the home construction market, had employed 300 workers at the factory, including 250 unionized production workers, for 45 years. The firm started as a family operation but now the Wall Street behemoths Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank, have controlling interest in the company.

Republic closed the factory with three days notice when Bank of America refused it a $5 million line of credit. As chief investor, BA has effectively controlled the company’s finances. The abrupt closure clearly violated the federal WARN Act, requiring employers to give 60 days notice of a mass layoff (Illinois state law mandates 75 days) or pay the workers and continue their health benefits for that time.

City, county and state officials called for breaking ties with Bank of America if they don’t release funds so the workers could receive what they were owed. They also called for an investigation into what Bank of America is doing with the bailout funds, perhaps investing in overseas operations but not in the United States.

“The government gave $25 billion to BA. They are supposed to work with businesses to keep them open, not shut them down,” Lalo Munoz, 54, told the World. Munoz, a machine operator, had worked at the plant for 34 years.

Others see the banks and corporations as taking advantage of the financial and economic crisis to break unions, shed worker benefits and pensions. UE spokespersons say Republic, which received millions of dollars in city subsidies, bought a similar plant in Iowa. Speculation is production will be restarted in the non-union Iowa plant. The role of the banks in this decision is not known.

“The workers want Bank of America to keep the plant open and the workers employed,” said UE's Rosen. “There is always a demand for windows and doors. But with Barack Obama’s stimulus proposal, there will be even greater demand for the products made by Republic’s workers. It doesn’t make sense to close this plant when the need is so obvious."

jbachtell @ cpusa.org

Socialism's Comeback

2008-12-12T00:34:00.000-08:00

Socialism's Comeback
By Neil Clark
New Statesman (UK)
December 2008
http://www.newstatesman.com/europe/2008/12/socialist-party-socialism

At the beginning of the century, the chances of
socialism making a return looked close to zero. Yet
now, all around Europe, the red flag is flying again
"If socialism signifies a political and economic system
in which the government controls a large part of the
economy and redistributes wealth to produce social
equality, then I think it is safe to say the likelihood
of its making a comeback any time in the next
generation is close to zero," wrote Francis Fukuyama,
author of The End of History, in Time magazine in 2000.
He should take a trip around Europe today.

Make no mistake, socialism - pure, unadulterated
socialism, an ideology that was taken for dead by
liberal capitalists - is making a strong comeback.
Across the continent, there is a definite trend in
which long-established parties of the centre left that
bought in to globalisation and neoliberalism are seeing
their electoral dominance challenged by unequivocally
socialist parties which have not.

The parties in question offer policies which mark a
clean break from the Thatcherist agenda that many of
Europe's centre-left parties have embraced over the
past 20 years. They advocate renationalisation of
privatised state enterprises and a halt to further
liberalisation of the public sector. They call for new
wealth taxes to be imposed and for a radical
redistribution of wealth. They defend the welfare state
and the rights of all citizens to a decent pension and
free health care. They strongly oppose war - and any
further expansion of Nato.

Most fundamentally of all, they challenge an economic
system in which the interests of ordinary working
people are subordinated to those of capital.
Nowhere is this new leftward trend more apparent than
in Germany, home to the meteoric rise of Die Linke
("The Left"), a political grouping formed only 18
months ago - and co-led by the veteran socialist "Red"
Oskar Lafontaine, a long-standing scourge of big
business. The party, already the main opposition to the
Christian Democrats in eastern Germany, has made
significant inroads into the vote for the Social
Democratic Party (SPD) in elections to western
parliaments this year, gaining representation in Lower
Saxony, Hamburg and Hesse. Die Linke's unapologetically
socialist policies, which include the renation
alisation of electricity and gas, the banning of hedge
funds and the introduction of a maximum wage, chime
with a population concerned at the dismantling of
Germany's mixed economic model and the adoption of
Anglo-Saxon capitalism - a shift that occurred while
the SPD was in government.

An opinion poll last year showed that 45 per cent of
west Germans (and 57 per cent of east Germans) consider
socialism "a good idea"; in October, another poll
showed that Germans overwhelmingly favour
nationalisation of large segments of the economy. Two-
thirds of all Germans say they agree with all or some
of Die Linke's programme.

It's a similar story of left-wing revival in
neighbouring Holland. There the Socialist Party of the
Netherlands (SP), which almost trebled its
parliamentary representation in the most recent general
election (2006), and which made huge gains in last
year's provincial elections, continues to make headway.
Led by a charismatic 41-year-old epidemiologist, Agnes
Kant, the SP is on course to surpass the Dutch Labour
Party, a member of the ruling conservative-led
coalition, as the Netherlands' main left-of centre
grouping.

The SP has gained popularity by being the only left-
wing Dutch parliamentary party to campaign for a "No"
vote during the 2005 referendum on the EU
constitutional treaty and for its opposition to large-
scale immigration, which it regards as being part of a
neoliberal package that encourages flexible labour
markets.

The party calls for a society where the values of
"human dignity, equality and solidarity" are most
prominent, and has been scathing in its attacks on what
it describes as "the culture of greed", brought about
by "a capitalism based on inflated bonuses and easy
money". Like Die Linke, the SP campaigns on a staunchly
anti-war platform - demanding an end to Holland's role
as "the US's lapdog".

In Greece, the party on the up is the Coalition of the
Radical Left (SYRIZA), the surprise package in last
year's general election. As public opposition to the
neoliberal econo mic policies of the ruling New
Democracy government builds, SYRIZA's opinion-poll
ratings have risen to almost 20 per cent - putting it
within touching distance of PASOK, the historical left-
of-centre opposition, which has lurched sharply to the
right in recent years. SYRIZA is particularly popular
with young voters: its support among those aged 35 and
under stands at roughly 30 per cent in the polls, ahead
of PASOK.

In Norway, socialists are already in power; the ruling
"red-green" coalition consists of the Socialist Left
Party, the Labour Party and the Centre Party. Since
coming to power three years ago, the coalition - which
has been labelled the most left-wing government in
Europe, has halted the privatisation of state-owned
companies and made further development of the welfare
state, public health care and improving care for the
elderly its priorities.

The success of such forces shows that there can be an
electoral dividend for left-wing parties if voters see
them responding to the crisis of modern capitalism by
offering boldly socialist solutions. Their success also
demonstrates the benefits to electoral support for
socialist groupings as they put aside their differences
to unite behind a commonly agreed programme.
For example, Die Linke consists of a number of internal
caucuses - or forums - including the "Anti-Capitalist
Left", "Communist Platform" and "Democratic Socialist
Forum". SYRIZA is a coalition of more than ten Greek
political groups. And the Dutch Socialist Party - which
was originally called the Communist Party of the
Netherlands, has successfully brought socialists and
communists together to support its collectivist
programme.

It is worth noting that those European parties of the
centre left which have not fully embraced the
neoliberal agenda are retaining their dominant
position. In Spain, the governing Socialist Workers'
Party has managed to maintain its broad left base and
was re-elected for another four-year term in March,
with Prime Minister JosÃ© Luis RodrÃguez Zapatero
promising a "socialist economic policy" that would
focus on the needs of workers and the poor.

There are exceptions to the European continent's shift
towards socialism. Despite the recent election of
leftist Martine Aubry as leader of the French Socialist
Party, the French left has been torn apart by
divisions, at the very moment when it could be
exploiting the growing unpopularity of the Sarkozy
administration.

And, in Britain, despite opinion being arguably more
to the left on economic issues than at any time since
1945, few are calling for a return to socialism.
The British left, despite promising initiatives such as
September's Convention of the Left in Manchester, which
gathered representatives from several socialist groups,
still remains fragmented and divided. The left's
espousal of unrestricted or loosely controlled
immigration is also, arguably, a major vote loser among
working-class voters who should provide its core
support. No socialist group in Britain has as yet
articulated a critique of mass immigration from an
anti-capitalist and anti-racist viewpoint in the way
the Socialist Party of the Netherlands has.
And even if a Die Linke-style coalition of progressive
forces could be built and put on a formal footing in
time for the next general election, Britain's first-
past-the-post system provides a formidable obstacle to
change.

Nevertheless, the prognosis for socialism in Britain
and the rest of Europe is good. As the recession bites,
and neoliberalism is discredited, the phenomenon of
unequivocally socialist parties with clear, anti-
capitalist, anti-globalist messages gaining ground, and
even replacing "Third Way" parties in Europe, is likely
to continue.

Even in Britain, where the electoral system grants huge
advantage to the established parties, pressure on
Labour to jettison its commitment to neoliberal
policies and to adopt a more socialist agenda is sure
to intensify.

Chicago workers shut down plant -- a sign of more to come?

2008-12-09T07:22:00.000-08:00

On Saturday a group of 250 unionized workers peacefully shut down the Republic Windows and Doors plant after they were given 3 day’s notice that their factory was closing. They were also told that they would not be getting their severance packages or their vacation pay. With the thought of losing their jobs in an already unforving economy, workers decided to take action and are still protesting at this very moment.

So what started this mess in Chicago? As the workers closed down the plant in shifts, union leaders talked to the press outside and criticized the bailout of the plant that is leaving ordinary laborers behind while the head honchos on top leave with millions. The company claims that it can’t pay its employees because cancelled loans from the Bank of America won’t let them.

The Bank of America received $25 million by the US government in order to give out to corporations in the form of loans. Republic Windows and Doors was one of the many factories that was given tax payer money by the government during the bailouts, and their loans were to come from the Bank of America. When their loan money was cancelled and their monthly sales had almost fallen by half ($2.9 million), CEO Rich Gillman decided to close the doors of the factory. The Bank of America responded that they were not responsible for the factory’s financial obligations to its employees, therefore resolving itself of any guilt. It does seem rather ironic doesn’t it… taxpayer money being handed out to banks and corporations and not being used to better the working conditions for the TAX PAYING workers. Workers and protesters outside the factory realize how badly they had been exploited and carrying signs that say: “You got bailed out, we got sold out.”

Workers along with US Representative Luis Gutierrez (D) arranged for a meeting with company officials on Friday, but were angered when no officials showed up. Another meeting was scheduled for today in the afternoon.

The workers of the Republic factory are finding themselves in the national spotlight, providing hope and encouragement for workers across the country that find themselves without jobs. Many of the workers are surprised to see support coming from Rev. Jesse Jackson who has delivered food for the striking workers, the governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich who has urged all corporations in Illinois to not accept loans from the Bank of America, and even Barack Obama who spoke in favor of their strike. “The workers who are asking for the benefits and payments that they have earned, I think they’re absolutely right and understand that what’s happening to them is reflective of what’s happening across this economy,” he said at a news conference on Sunday.

Such action is reminiscent of the workers’ struggles in the 1920s and 30s. It has been compared to the 1936-37 sit down strikes by General Motors factory workers in Flint, MI as a way to unionize the Auto Industry. As the United States finds itself on the brink of another depression, is this a sign of things to come? Will similar protest be seen around the country as the economy continues to get worse?

We can only hope so.

It may be the only hope for the working class people of this nation.

The media myth: Detroit's $70-an-hour autoworker

2008-12-08T21:17:00.000-08:00

From: PWW

Author: Eric Boehlert
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 12/05/08 14:47

From Media Matters: http://mediamatters.org/columns/200811250012?f=h_column

It's been one week since New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote that at General Motors, "the average worker was paid about $70 an hour, including health care and pension costs."

The nugget was part of a column in which Sorkin argued that the government should not bail out the ailing Big Three automakers and that they instead should embrace bankruptcy.

Sorkin's point was that labor costs were out of control -- workers enjoyed "gold-plated benefits" -- and that during bankruptcy, the auto companies could address those runaway wages.

As I mentioned, it's been one week since the column appeared, which seems like plenty of time for Sorkin and the Times to correct the misleading $70-an-hour claim. But to date, there's been no clarification from the newspaper of record or from Sorkin himself.

And he isn't alone. Appearing on NPR last week, Times senior business correspondent Micheline Maynard told listeners that the "hourly wage" of Detroit's union autoworkers had been driven up "towards $80 an hour."

Somebody at the Times needs to clarify the record, because the average United Auto Workers member is not paid $80 an hour. Or even $70. Not even close. Yet (thanks to the Times?) the issue has become a central talking point in the unfolding national debate about the future of America's automotive industry.

Indeed, that $70-an-hour meme, actively promoted by the anti-union conservative media, has ricocheted around the traditional press as well as the political landscape, where it was picked up by congressional critics last week during hearings and used to argue against aiding GM, Ford, and Chrysler.

For the record, I'm not from Michigan, and I don't have friends or family members who work in the auto or auto-supply business. And honestly, I think there are compelling arguments on both sides of the question about whether to bail out the U.S. auto industry. So I'm genuinely torn on the issue. But what's obvious to me is that it's harmful to public discourse when the press, on such a central issue facing our country, fails to clearly state the facts and instead perpetuates misinformation with sloppy reporting -- reporting that seems to hold blue-collar workers to a different standard than their white-collar counterparts.

Last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced that automotive executives should return to Washington in coming weeks to "make their case, to the Congress and the American people," for a federal bailout. And as Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner for economics Paul Krugman wrote recently, "[M]aybe letting the auto companies die is the right decision, even though an auto industry collapse would be a huge blow to an already slumping economy. But it's a decision that should be taken carefully" [emphasis added].

But having the media echo conservative misinformation and bandy about urban-myth salary figures about allegedly high-on-the-hog GM workers does not constitute a careful review of the facts.

Question: Is the press just being sloppy on this issue of supposedly pampered autoworkers, or are there other elements in play? Because honestly, I've had trouble escaping the not-very-subtle elitist, get-a-load-of-this tone that has run through the media's misinformation on the topic; i.e., "These autoworkers get paid that?!"

Answer: No, they don't, so please stop reporting it. (And why has the press been so reticent to note that Big Three autoworkers recently made significant concessions to management?)

And it's funny, because I don't remember hearing much coverage in the press about AIG workers' six- and seven-figure salaries when the U.S. government announced it was bailing out the insurance giant. And I haven't seen or heard a single press reference to the annual salaries pocketed by Citigroup employees, even though the government has moved in quickly to bail the banking giant out of a hole its executives dug.

As Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) pointed out during congressional hearings last week, "There is apparently a cultural condition that's more ready to accept aid to a white-collar industry than the blue-collar industry, and that has to be confronted."

That cultural condition seems to extend to, and be embraced by, today's white-collar press corps.

Make no mistake: The $70-an-hour claim represents a classic case of conservative misinformation. It's also a very dangerous one. The falsehood about autoworkers is being spread at a crucial time, when a make-or-break public debate is taking place, a debate that could affect millions of American workers.

* "Lavish contracts granted to the United Auto Workers, for instance, put GM on the hook for more than $70 an hour per worker." [New York Post]
* "The United Auto Workers are keen on saving their jobs and the $70-an-hour paychecks that go with them." [National Review]
* "[T]here's no reason that a UAW worker should get total compensation of $70 an hour when the average American only makes about $25 an hour in total compensation." [James Gattuso, from the conservative Heritage Foundation, appearing on MSNBC]
* "Given that we're in tough economic times, it's hard for the average American to muster a lot of sympathy for workers at the Big 3 automakers when all of the companies pay out over $70 per hour in wages, pension and health care benefits." [Right Wing News]
* "The bailout as proposed today is a bailout of the UAW; it's not the auto industry. A Big Three worker in Detroit makes $73 an hour if you include all the benefits." [Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, appearing on the syndicated television show Inside Washington]
* "Companies at which union workers make $71 an hour in wages and benefits -- compared to just $47 an hour at Toyota's U.S. plants -- are not going to be saved by a $25 billion government check." [Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, writing at Human Events Online]
* "Big Three union workers, with their gold-plated health care plans, make about $73 an hour in total compensation." [Conservative columnist Amanda Carpenter at Townhall.com]
* "When you're paying $73.73 an hour to those people with salary and benefits and your competition is paying $48 to its workers, you're going to get your butt kicked in the marketplace unfortunately." [Conservative radio host Lars Larson]
* "The average Detroit autoworker makes more than $100K each year." [On-screen Fox News graphic]

Let's note that any suggestion in the press that most UAW workers earn, or are paid, $70 an hour is spectacularly dishonest. Period. (As one Daily Kos diarist pointed out last week, according to the UAW website, the base pay for a worker in a UAW plant is about $28 an hour.)

What that $70 figure (or $73) actually represents is what it costs GM in total labor expenses, on an hourly basis, to manufacture autos.

Do you see that there's a big distinction? General Motors doles out $70 an hour in overall labor costs to manufacture cars. But individual employees don't get paid $70 an hour to make cars. (The discrepancy between costs and wages is explained by additional benefits, pension fees, and health-care costs GM pays out to current and retired employees.)

Simply put, GM's labor costs are not synonymous with hourly wages earned by UAW employees. Many in the press have casually used the two interchangeably. But they're not.

Felix Salmon at Portfolio did perhaps the best job explaining the misinformation at play:

The average GM assembly-line worker makes about $28 per hour in wages, and I can assure you that GM is not paying $42 an hour in health insurance and pension plan contributions. Rather, the $70 per hour figure (or $73 an hour, or whatever) is a ridiculous number obtained by adding up GM's total labor, health, and pension costs, and then dividing by the total number of hours worked. In other words, it includes all the healthcare and retirement costs of retired workers. [emphasis in original]

Indeed, according to this Associated Press report, a chunk of GM's $70-an-hour labor costs goes toward paying current retirees' pensions and health-care coverage. In other words, that's money that's not going to end up in the pocket of any autoworker when he cashes his paycheck this week. That's money GM has to set aside in order to pay off costs associated with workers already in retirement. That money has absolutely nothing to do with calculating the hourly wage of a full-time UAW employee today. None.

So, no, UAW workers don't make $70 an hour even if you factor in benefits, because a portion of those benefits are going to people who retired years ago.

Nonetheless, that formulation (wages+benefits=$70 an hour) has been widespread. That's what Sorkin did in his Times column: "The average worker was paid about $70 an hour, including health care and pension costs."

Not only is that inaccurate, but there's also a problem in terms of perception. It's true that autoworkers don't earn annual salaries and that when calculating hourly wages, the cost of benefits paid directly to the worker can be included. But some media outlets have been so casual and sloppy in presenting the facts that news consumers are left with the false impression that GM workers pocket $70 an hour. That's not true, and it seems some in the press are doing very little to correct that misperception.

For instance, BusinessWeek also used the same convoluted language: "Older UAW members make more than $70 per hour in combined wages and benefits." Dallas Morning News columnist Cheryl Hall did it, too: "GM's average worker makes $78.21 an hour in wages and benefits."

Why does the press use that convoluted equation when calculating how much autoworkers supposedly make?

I have a hunch it's because that $70 an hour is a real eyepopper. It makes a very deep impression within the space of just a few words.

I'm sure everybody understood the $70-an-hour implication in Sorkin's column, especially since he also lamented the "gold-plated benefits" UAW workers enjoyed. (They were "off the charts," he stressed.) And since it's harder to back up a claim of gold-plated benefits by citing the actual hourly wage of UAW workers ($28), Sorkin went with the $70 figure, along with completely nebulous language about "health care and pension costs."

The takeaway from Sorkin's column was quite clear: GM is mismanaged, and its workers are wildly overpaid.

By the way, here's the right way to cover the issue: In a November 18 column, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's David Nicklaus wrote that the Big Three "need to bring their labor costs, which average $72 an hour, closer to the Honda or Toyota level of about $45." Note how Nicklaus never implied that labors costs equaled take-home wages. Why? Because they don't. (And kudos to Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein, who refuses to use the $70-an-hour figure because it's so misleading.)

How much money GM's workers make is certainly relevant when discussing the unfolding automotive crisis. But the press should stop confusing the issue, and tainting the perceptions of news consumers, by casually suggesting that $70-an-hour labor costs represent what UAW workers pocket every 60 minutes.

That's misleading and dishonest.

And that's why it's still not too late for Sorkin and the Times to correct the record.

Chomsky: Is There Truth in Obama's Advertising?

2008-12-02T16:59:00.001-08:00

Chomsky: Is There Truth in Obama's Advertising?
By Noam Chomsky, Democracy Now!
Posted on November 28, 2008, Printed on December 2, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/108964/

Let's begin with the elections. The word that the rolls off of everyone's tongue is historic. Historic election. And I agree with it. It was a historic election. To have a black family in the white house is a momentous achievement. In fact, it's historic in a broader sense. The two Democratic candidates were an African-American and a woman. Both remarkable achievements. We go back say 40 years, it would have been unthinkable. So something's happened to the country in 40 years. And what's happened to the country -- which is we're not supposed to mention -- is that there was extensive and very constructive activism in the 1960s, which had an aftermath. So the feminist movement, mostly developed in the 70s -- the solidarity movements of the 80's and on till today. And the activism did civilize the country. The country's a lot more civilized than it was 40 years ago and the historic achievements illustrate it. That's also a lesson for what's next.

What's next will depend on whether the same thing happens. Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below. And the answer to what's next depends on people like you. Nobody else can answer it. It's not predictable. In some ways, the election -- the election was surprising in some respects.

Going back to my bad prediction, If the financial crisis hadn't taken place at the moment that it did, if it had been delayed a couple of months, I suspect that prediction would have been correct. But not speculating, one thing surprising about the election was that it wasn't a landslide. By the usual criteria, you would expect the opposition party to win in a landslide under conditions like the ones that exist today. The incumbent president for eight years was so unpopular that his own party couldn't mention his name and had to pretend to be opposing his policies. He presided over the worst record for ordinary people in post-war history, in terms of job growth, real wealth and so on. Just about everything the administration was touched just turned into a disaster. [The] country has reached the lowest level of standing in the world that it's ever had. The economy was tanking. Several recessions are going on. Not just the ones on the front pages, the financial recession. There's also a recession in the real economy. The productive economy, under circumstances and people know it. So 80% of the population say that the country's going in the wrong direction. About 80% say the government doesn't work to the benefit of the people, it works for the few and the special interests. A startling 94% complain that the government doesn't pay any attention to the public will, and on like that. Under conditions like that, you would expect a landslide to a opposition almost whoever they are. And there wasn't one.

So one might ask why wasn't there a landslide? That goes off in an interesting direction. And other respects the outcome was pretty familiar. So once again, the election was essentially bought. 9 out of 10 of the victors outspent their opponents. Obama of course outspent McCain. If you look at the -- and we don't have final records yet from the final results, but they're probably going to be pretty much like the preliminaries a couple of months ago. Which showed that both Obama and McCain were getting the bulk of their financing from the financial institutions and for Obama, law firms which means essentially lobbyists. That was about over a third a few months ago. But the final results will probably be the same. And there is a -- the distribution of funding has over time been a pretty good predictor of what policies will be like for those of you who are interested, there's very good scholarly work on this by Tom Ferguson in Umass Boston, what he calls the investment theory of politics. Which argues essentially that elections are moments when groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state and has quite the substantial predictive success. Gives some suggestion as to what's likely to happen. So that part's familiar. The -- what the future is as I say, depends on people like you.

The response for the election was interesting and instructive. It kept pretty much to the soaring rhetoric, to borrow the cliche, that was the major theme of the election. The election was described as an extraordinary display of democracy, a miracle that could only happen in America and on and on. Much more extreme than [what] Europe [could accomplish]. There's some accuracy in that if we keep to the West. That couldn't have happened anywhere else. Europe was much more racist than the United States and you wouldn't expect anything like that to happen.

On the other hand, if you look at the world, it's not that remarkable. So let's take the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. Haiti and Bolivia. In Haiti, there was an election in 1990 which really was an extraordinary display of democracy much more so than this.

In Haiti, there were grassroots movements, popular movements that developed in the slums and the hills, which nobody was paying any attention to. And they managed, even without any resources, to sweep into power their own candidate. A populist priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. That's a victory for democracy when popular movements can organize and set programs and pick their candidate and put them into office, which is not what happened here, of course.

I mean, Obama did organize a large number of people and many enthusiastic people in what's called in the press, Obama's Army. But the army is supposed to take instructions, not to implement, introduce, develop programs and call on its own candidate to implement them. That's critical. If the army keeps to that condition, nothing much will change. If it on the other hand goes away activists did in the sixties, a lot can change. That's one of the choices that has to be made. That's Haiti. Of course that didn't last very long. A couple of months later, there was military coup, a period of terror, we won't go through the whole record. Up the present, the traditional torturers of Haiti, France, and the United States have made sure that there won't be a victory for democracy there. It's a miserable story. Contrary to many illusions.

Take the second poorest country, Bolivia. They had an election in 2005 that's almost unimaginable in the West. Certainly here, anywhere. The person elected into office was indigenous. That's the most oppressed population in the hemisphere, those who survived. He's is a poor peasant. How did he get in? Well, he got in because there were again, a mass popular movement, which elected their own representative. And they are the source of the programs, which are serious ones. There's real issues, And people know them. Control over resources, cultural rights, social justice and so on.

Furthermore, the election was just an event that was particular stage in a long continuing struggle, a lot before and a lot after. There was day when people pushed the levers but that's just an event in ongoing popular struggles, very serious ones. A couple of years ago, there was a major struggle over privatization of water. An effort which it would in effect deprive a good part of the population of water to drink. And it was a bitter struggle. A lot of people were killed, but they won it. Through international solidarity, in fact, which helped. And it continues. Now that's a real election. Again, the plans, the programs are being developed, acted on constantly by mass popular movements, which then select their own representatives from their own ranks to carry out their programs. And that's quite different from what happened here.

Actually what happened here is understood by elite elements. The public relations industry which runs elections here -- quadrennial extravaganzas essentially -- makes sure to keep issues in the margins and focus on personalities and character and so on-and-so forth. They do that for good reasons. They know -- they look at public opinion studies and they know perfectly well that on a host of major issues both parties are well to the right of the population. That's one good reason to keep issues off the table. And they recognize the success.

So, every year, the advertising industry gives a prize to, you know, to the best marketing campaign of the year. This year, Obama won the prize. Beat out Apple company. The best marketing campaign of 2008. Which is correct, it is essentially what happened. Now that's quite different from what happens in a functioning democracy like say Bolivia or Haiti, except for the fact that it was crushed. And in the South, it's not all that uncommon. Notice that each of these cases, there's a much more extraordinary display of democracy in action than what we've seen-important as it was-here. And so the rhetoric, especially in Europe is correct if we maintain our own narrow racist perspective and say yeah, what happened was in the South didn't happen or doesn't matter. The only matters is what we do and by our standards, it was extraordinary miracle, but not by the standards of functioning democracy. In fact, there's a distinction in democratic theory, which does separate say the United States from Bolivia or Haiti.

Question is what is a democracy supposed to be? That's exactly a debate that goes back to the constitutional convention. But in recent years in the 20th century, it's been pretty well articulated by important figures. So at the liberal end the progressive end, the leading public intellectual of the 20th century was Walter Lippman. A Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy progressive. And a lot of his work was on a democratic theory and he was pretty frank about it. If you took a position not all that different from James Madison's. He said that in a democracy, the population has a function. Its function is to be spectators, not participants. He didn't call it the population. He called it the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders. The ignorant and meddlesome outsiders have a function and namely to watch what's going on. And to push a lever every once in a while and then go home. But, the participants are us, us privileged, smart guys. Well that's one conception of democracy. And you know essentially we've seen an episode of it. The population very often doesn't accept this. As I mentioned, just very recent polls, people overwhelmingly oppose it. But they're atomized, separated. Many of them feel hopeless, unorganized, and don't feel they can do anything about it. So they dislike it. But that's where it ends.

In a functioning democracy like say Bolivia or the United States in earlier stages, they did something about it. That's why we have the New Deal measures, the Great Society measures. In fact just about any step, you know, women's rights, end of slavery, go back as far as you like, it doesn't happen as a gift. And it's not going to happen in the future. The commentators are pretty well aware of this. They don't put it the way I'm going to, but if you read the press, it does come out. So take our local newspaper at the liberal end of the spectrum, Boston Globe, you probably saw right after the election, a front page story, the lead front page story was on how Obama developed this wonderful grassroots army but he doesn't have any debts. Which supposed to be a good thing. So he's free to do what he likes. Because he has no debts, the normal democratic constituency, labor, women, minorities and so on, they didn't bring him into office. So he owes them nothing.

What he had was an army that he organized of people who got out the vote for Obama. For what the press calls, Brand Obama. They essentially agree with the advertisers, it's brand Obama. That his army was mobilized to bring him to office. They regard that as a good thing, accepting the Lippman conception of democracy, the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders are supposed to do what they're told and then go home. The Wall Street Journal, at the opposite end of the spectrum, also had an article about the same thing at roughly the same time. Talked about the tremendous grassroots army that has been developed, which is now waiting for instructions. What should they do next to press forward Obama's agenda? Whatever that is. But whatever it is, the army's supposed to be out there taking instructions, and press work. Los Angeles Times had similar articles, and there are others. What they don't seem to realize is what they're describing, the ideal of what they're describing, is dictatorship, not democracy. Democracy, at least not in the Lippman sense, it proved -- I pick him out because he's so famous, but it's a standard position. But in the sense of say, much of the south, where mass popular movements developed programs; organize to take part in elections but that's one part of an ongoing process. And brings somebody from their own ranks to implement the programs that they develop, and if the person doesn't they're out. Ok, that's another kind of democracy. So it's up to us to choose which kind of democracy we want. And again, that will determine what comes next.

Well, what can we anticipate if the popular army, the grassroots army, decides to accept the function of spectators of action rather than participants? There's two kinds of evidence. There's rhetoric and there's action. The rhetoric, you know, is very uplifting: change, hope, and so on. Change was kind of reflective any party manager this year who read the polls, including the ones I cited, would instantly conclude that our theme in the election has to be change. Because people hate what's going on for good reasons. So the theme is change. In fact, both parties put both of them, the theme was change. So the theme is change. In fact both parties, both of them the theme was change. You know, break from the past, none of old politics, new things are going to happen. The Obama campaign did better so they won the marketing award, not the McCain campaign.

And notice incidentally on the side that the institutions that run the elections, public relations industry, advertisers, they have a role -- their major role is commercial advertising. I mean, selling a candidate is kind of a side rule. In commercial advertising as everybody knows, everybody who has ever looked at a television program, the advertising is not intended to provide information about the product, all right? I don't have to go on about that. It's obvious. The point of the advertising is to delude people with the imagery and, you know, tales of a football player, sexy actress, who you know, drives to the moon in a car or something like that. But, that's certainly not to inform people. In fact, it's to keep people uninformed.

The goal of advertising is to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices. Those of you who suffered through an economics course know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. But industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year to undermine markets and to ensure, you know, to get uninformed consumers making irrational choices.

And when they turn to selling a candidate they do the same thing. They want uninformed consumers, you know, uninformed voters to make irrational choices based on the success of illusion, slander, and effective body language or whatever else is supposed to be significant. So you undermine democracy pretty much the same way you undermine markets. Well, that's the nature of an election when it's run by the business world, and you'd expect it to be like that. There should be no surprise there. And it should also turn out the elected candidate didn't have any debts. So you can follow Brand Obama can be whatever they decide it to be, not what the population decides that it should be, as in the south, let's say. I'm going to say on the side, this may be an actual instance of a familiar and unusually vacuous slogan about the clash of civilization. Maybe there really is one, but not the kind that's usually touted.

So let's go back to the evidence that we have, rhetoric and actions. Rhetoric we know, but what are the actions? So far the major actions are selections, in fact the only action, of personnel to implement Brand Obama. The first choice was the Vice President, Joe Biden, one of the strongest supporters of the war in Iraq in the Senate, a long time Washington insider rarely deviates from the party vote. In cases where he does deviate they're not very uplifting. He did break from the party and voting for a Senate resolution that prevented people from getting rid of their debts by, individuals, that is, from getting rid of their debts by going into bankruptcy. It's a blow against poor people who've caught in this immense debt that's a large part of the basis for the economy these days. But usually, he's a, kind of, straight party-liner with the democrats on the sort of ultra naturalist side. The choice of Biden was a, must have been a conscious attempt to show contempt for the base of people who were voting for Obama, or organizing for him as an anti-war candidate.

Well, the first post-election appointment was for Chief of Staff, which is a crucial appointment; determines a large part of the president's agenda. That was Rahm Emanuel, one of the strongest supporters of the war in Iraq in the House. In fact, he was the only member of the Illinois delegation who voted for Bush's effective declaration of war. And, again, a longtime Washington insider. Also, one of the leading recipients in congress of funding from the financial institutions hedge funds and so on. He himself was an investment banker. That's his background. So, that's the Chief of Staff.

The next group of appointments were the main problem, the primary issue that the governments' going to have to face is what to do about the financial crisis. Obama's choices to more or less run this were Robert Rubin and Larry Summers from the Clinton -- Secretaries of Treasury under Clinton. They are among the people who are substantially responsible for the crisis. One leading economist, one of the few economists who has been right all along in predicting what's happening, Dean Baker, pointed out that selecting them is like selecting Osama Bin Laden to run the war on terror.

Yeah, I'll finish. This saves me the problem of what's coming next, so I'll finish with the elections. Let me make one final comment on this. There was meeting on November 7, I think of a group of couple, of a dozen advisers to deal with the financial crisis. Their careers were, records were reviewed in the business press, and Bloomberg News had an article reviewing their records and concluded that these people, most of these people shouldn't be giving advice about the economy. They should be given subpoenas.

Because most of them were involved in one or other form of financial fraud, that includes Rahm Emanuel, for example. What reason is there to think that the people who brought this crisis about are some how going to fix it? Well, that's a good indication of what's likely to come next, at least if we look at actions. We couldn't, but it won't. You can bring this up. Ask what we expect to see in particular cases. And there's evidence about that from statements from Obama's website. I'll mention just one thing about Obama's website, which gives an indication of what's happening. One of the major problems coming is Afghanistan and Pakistan. That's pretty serious. Take a look at Obama's website under issues, foreign policy issues. The names don't even appear. I mean, we're supposed to be ignorant and meddlesome outsiders. We're not supposed to know what Brand Obama is. So you can't find out that way. The statements that you hear are pretty hawkish. And it doesn't change much as you go through the list. So it's up to you to continue.

MIT Professor Chomsky, a world-renowned linguist, and author of more than 100 books, spoke last week to a packed audience in Boston at an event organized by Encuentro 5. His talk was titled "What Next? The Elections, the Economy, and the World."
© 2008 Democracy Now! All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/108964/

Walmart transforms human beings into stampeding animals

2008-11-28T16:01:00.000-08:00

this culture of consumerism turns human beings into herds of stampeding animals. it's almost cliche for a socialist to say that capitalism strips us of our very humanity. this walmart case of stampeding christmas shoppers trampling a worker to death gives new meaning to what was once widely considered a socialist cliche.

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The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

November 29, 2008
Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death
By JACK HEALY and ANGELA MACROPOULOS

A Wal-Mart employee in suburban New York died after he was trampled by a crush of shoppers who tore down the front doors and thronged into the store early Friday morning, turning the annual rite of post-Thanksgiving bargain hunting into a Hobbesian frenzy.

At 4:55 a.m., just five minutes before the doors were set to open, a crowd of 2,000 anxious shoppers started pushing, shoving and piling against the locked sliding glass doors of the Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., Nassau County police said. The shoppers broke the doors off their hinges and surged in, toppling a 34-year-old temporary employee, Jdimypai Damour, 34, of Jamaica, Queens, who had been waiting with other workers in the store’s entryway.

People did not stop to help the employee as he lay on the ground, and they pushed against other Wal-Mart workers who were trying to aid Mr. Damour. The crowd kept running into the store even after the police arrived, jostling and pushing officers who were trying to perform CPR, the police said.

“They were like a stampede,” said Nassau Det. Lt. Michael Fleming. “Hundreds of people walked past him, over him or around him.”

Mr. Damour was taken from the Wal-Mart to nearby Franklin Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 6:03 a.m., the police said. His exact cause of death has not been determined. The police said that three other shoppers were injured and a 28-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant was taken to the hospital for observation.

One shopper, Kimberly Cribbs, said she was standing near the back of the crowd at around 5 a.m. on Friday when people started rushing into the store. She said several people were knocked to the ground, and parents had to grab their children by the hand to keep them from being caught in the crush.

“They were falling all over each other,” she said. “It was terrible.”

Crowds began building outside the Wal-Mart at 9 p.m. Thursday and grew throughout the night, as eager shoppers queued up in a line that filled the sidewalk and stretched toward the boundary fence of the Green Acres Mall.

At 3:30 a.m., store employees called the Nassau police to report that the crowd was growing quickly, the police said. Officers came by to try to organize the line, but were called away to a Circuit City, a Best Buy and a B.J.’s Wholesale Club nearby, to deal with crowds there.

A half-dozen Wal-Mart employees lined up in the entryway trying to hold back the crowd by pushing against the locked sliding doors, but they were overwhelmed by the force of the crowd, Lieutenant Fleming said.

As the doors snapped open and people streamed in, several people fell on top of one another. The 34-year-old employee who died was at the bottom of the pile, the police said.

On Friday, Wal-Mart released a statement saying that the man who was killed had been working for Wal-Mart through a temp agency. The company called the death “a tragic situation,” and said it was working with police.

“The safety and security of our customers and associates is our top priority,” Wal-Mart said in a statement.

Lieutenant Fleming said that the store “could have done more” to prevent the melee.

“I’ve heard other people call this an accident, but it’s not,” he said. “This certainly was foreseeable.”

Victory for Venezuela's Socialists in Crucial Elections

2008-11-25T21:13:00.001-08:00

Victory for Venezuela's Socialists in Crucial Elections

November 2008

James Petras

The pro-Chavez United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) won 72% of
the governorships in the November 23, 2008 elections and 58% of the
popular vote, dumbfounding the predictions of most of the
pro-capitalist pollsters and the vast majority of the mass media who
favored the opposition.

PSUV candidates defeated incumbent opposition governors in three
states (Guaro, Sucre, Aragua) and lost two states (Miranda and
Tachira). The opposition retained the governorship in a tourist
center (Nueva Esparta) and won in Tachira, a state bordering
Colombia, Carabobo and the oil state of Zulia, as well as scoring an
upset victory in the populous state of Miranda and taking the
mayoralty district of the capital, Caracas. The socialist victory was
especially significant because the voter turnout of 65% exceeded all
previous non-presidential elections. The prediction by the propaganda
pollsters that a high turnout would favor the opposition also
reflected wishful thinking.

The significance of the socialist victory is clear if we put it in a
comparative historical context:

1. Few if any government parties in Europe, North or South American
have retained such high levels of popular support in free and open
elections.

2. The PSUV retained its high level of support in the context of
several radical economic measures, including the nationalization of
major cement, steel, financial and other private capitalist
monopolies.

3. The Socialists won despite the 70% decline in oil prices (from
$140 to $52 dollars a barrel), Venezuela's principle source of export
earnings, and largely because the government maintained most of its
funding for its social programs.

4. The electorate was more selective in its voting decisions
regarding Chavista candidates ? rewarding candidates who performed
adequately in providing government services and punishing those who
ignored or were unresponsive to popular demands. While President
Chavez campaigned for all the Socialist candidates, voters did not
uniformly follow his lead where they had strong grievances against
local Chavista incumbents, as was the case with outgoing Governor
Disdado Cabello of Miranda and the Mayor of the Capital District of
Caracas. Socialist victories were mostly the result of a deliberate,
class interest based vote and not simply a reflex identification with
President Chavez.

5. The decisive victory of the PSUV provides the basis for
confronting the deepening collapse of world capitalism with socialist
measures, instead of pouring state funds to rescue bankrupt
capitalist banks, commercial and manufacturing enterprises. The
collapse of capitalism facilitates the socialization of most of the
key economic sectors. Most Venezuelan firms are heavily indebted to
the state and local banks. The Chavez government can ask the firms to
repay their debts or handover the keys ? in effect bringing about a
painless and eminently legal transition to socialism.

The election results point to deepening polarization between the hard
right and the socialist left. The centrist social-democratic
ex-Chavista governors were practically wiped from the political map.
The rightist winner in Miranda State, Henrique Capriles Radonsky, had
tried to burn down the Cuban embassy during the failed military coup
of April 2002 and the newly elected Governor of Zulia, Pablo Perez,
was the hand picked candidate of the former hard-line rightwing
Governor Rosales.

While the opposition controlled state governorships and municipal
mayors can provide a basis to attack the national government, the
economic crisis will sharply limit the amount of resources available
to maintain services and will increase their dependence on the
federal government. A frontal assault on the Chavez Government
spending state and local funds on partisan warfare could lead to a
decline of federal welfare transfers and would provoke grassroots
discontent. The rightwing won on the basis of promising to improve
state and city services and end corruption and favoritism. Resorting
to their past practices of crony politics and extreme obstructionism
could quickly cost them popular support and undermine their hopes of
transforming local gains into national power. The newly elected
opposition governors and mayors need the cooperation and support of
the Federal Government, especially in the context of the deepening
crisis, or they will lose popular support and credibility.

Conclusion

There is no point in expecting the mass media to recognize the
Socialist victory. Its effort to magnify the significance of the
opposition's 40% electoral vote and their victory in 20% of the
states was predictable. In the post-election period, the Socialists,
no doubt, will critically evaluate the results and hopefully re-think
the selection of future candidates, emphasizing job performance on
local issues over and above professed loyalty to President Chavez and
'Socialism'. The immediate and most pressing task facing the PSUV,
President Chavez, the legislators and the newly elected Chavez
officials is to formulate a comprehensive socio-economic strategic
plan to confront the global collapse of capitalism. This is
especially critical in dealing with the sharp fall in oil prices,
federal revenues and the inevitable decline in government spending.

Chavez has promised to maintain all social programs even if oil
prices remain at or below $50 dollars a barrel. This is clearly a
positive and defensible position if the government manages to reduce
its huge subsidies to the private sector and doesn't embark on any
bailout of bankrupt or nearly bankrupt private firms. While $40
billion dollars in reserves can serve as a temporary cushion, the
fact remains that the government, with the backing of its majorities
in the federal legislature and at the state levels, needs to make
hard choices and not simply print money, run bigger deficits, devalue
the currency and exacerbate the already high rates of annual
inflation (31% as of November).

The only reasonable strategy is to take control of foreign trade and
directly oversee the commanding heights of the productive and
distributive sectors and set priorities that defend popular living
standards. To counter-act bureaucratic ineptness and neutralize lazy
elected officials, effective power and control must be transferred to
organized workers and autonomous consumer and neighborhood councils.

The recent past reveals that merely electing socialist mayors or
governors is not sufficient to ensure the implementation of
progressive policies and the delivery of basic services. Liberal
representative government (even with elected socialists) requires at
a minimum mass popular control and mass pressure to implement the
hard decisions and popular priorities in the midst of a deepening and
prolonged economic crisis.

Minutes 11/20 Meeting

2008-11-24T07:52:00.000-08:00

Here are some of the important details covered in our meeting Thurs 11/20.

Next week's meeting has been changed to Tuesday 11/25 at 9 pm at our normal meeting place, room 220H Snyder Hall.

RSO Leader Training
We really need a YDS member to sign up for a simple 2-hour session offered by the Department of Student Life.
Wed. Dec 3
6-8 pm
Please contact Allison ASAP if you are free to do this training. It is very important YDS have this as a resume item. The training consists of Financial Management and Organization Structure training. It's not the most exciting topic, but the facilitator has expressed interest in making sure YDS is present at this session.

Obama/Socialism Presentation
We are still working on choosing a date.
Possibly supplement Bobby Seal event (Jan 14-16) with this presentation as sort of preface or follow-up? Discussion with the DuBois society on this is underway. This could ease event promotion and bolster interest and attendance for both events.
Check your inbox for the newsletter with links to the current presentation
Please contact the corresponding members if you are interested in contributing to:
Video introduction: Reid
Defining Socialism: Ryan, Allison
History/Overview of US Socialist Movement: Austin
Obama Foreign Policy:
Obama Health Care: Christina, Cory
Obama Economy: Allison, Cat
Conclusion: Reid
Presentation Logistics and Promotion: Reid
(links are to emails)

Peace Over Prejudice: Know Your Allies Presentation
Date: Monday 12/1
Time: 6:30 pm (duration approx. 2 hours)
Location: Wonders Kiva
We will be presenting a version of the "chip game." We still need to figure out logistics such as materials (where we get them, how much we need). Austin will provide literature on the game rules to assist presenters. Rules should be available on blog soon also.
Delicious food will be served after all the presentations, and we will have a table for others to visit. We will have our banner and literature to pass out. We discussed having a way to expand upon the chip game at the table. What that actually entails has not been specified, and is open for discussion.
Reid and Ryan are our PoP members, and will be presenting. Contact them if you wish to contribute or have any questions.

Bobby Seal Event
Jan 14-16
Right now the DuBois society is working on the details of the firm offer. Soon we will need YDS members to assist with the media blitz for the event (tentatively tied to our Obama presentation) as well as logistics such as escorting Mr. Seal during his 3-day visit. There is soon to be a sign-up for hour-by-hour slots to cover the escort process.
If you are interested in helping with the event, please contact the DuBois Society's Jennifer White or our very own (and very awesome) Ryan.
YDS members must attend the dinner with Bobby Seal. Austin can provide excuse notes for work class obligations. Luckily, it is early in the semester so no one should have lots of homework or big tests or anything. Please notify your bosses/professors soon, get substitutes for work, whatever, and don't hesitate to ask Austin for an excuse note if you need it. It is very important for everyone attend!

External Affairs: 21st Century Chautauqua, MADI
Despite our strong presence at past MADI Leadership programs, our membership discussed scaling back efforts to maintain YDS presence at these functions. The 21st Century Chautauqua events have been garnering much more attention, and discussion was held to create a Chautauqua Liaison Committee. This (potential) committee would consist of several members whose responsibility is to ensure YDS has a presence at each week's Chautauqua. Reports back during general membership meetings are recommended. Look forward to deciding on this committee during our next meeting.

(Dean Esquith really wants Austin to hold some of these Chautauqua discussions specifically on critical race relations and political economy. In that case, we do not have to spend the entire discussion convincing the facilitator to cede to our fundamental points of argument, they will be the very topic of discussion.)

Debate: Blog Rules and Regs
It is important to maintain a positive image of YDS, particularly in what we say in our blog. Discussion was held regarding administrative rights on the blog and the power of removal. It has been suggested (not decided) that everyone have the right to remove another member's post. Guidelines should be established regarding what is and is not acceptable. If a member feels another member's post should be removed, swift action is encouraged. However, after removal substantive debate justifying publication and removal is necessary, and the membership should come to a decision on the post. This is only a suggested solution, but some members feel it is better to have removed something and replace it, rather than have debatable/objectionable material online for long periods of time. This is up for discussion and will be on the agenda for our next meeting.

RCAH Reading Room
Members are encouraged to solicit free books from their respective local libraries over winter break. We are in the process of getting a reading room bookshelf for the RCAH, and want *good* leftist/socialist literature. We need a volunteer to draft a summary of the focus for the socialist reading room, with both RCAH students and faculty in mind. Please contact Austin if you are interested in helping with this.

Educate Yourself
While the ultimate goal is to create a series of links to alternative news sources for our blog readers/users to utilize, here are a few good starting points. Views expressed by some sources (whose political agendas are more clear than others) are not necessarily explicitly shared by MSU YDS.
Democratic Socialists of America
The BBC
LibCom
The Real News Network
This list is in its infancy, please contact Peter with your further suggestions, as these resources will go on our blog.

DSA Newsletter is attached to your email

If you have new ideas, event opportunities, information or other business, please email YDS in order to add it to our upcoming meeting agenda. Thanks!

Tentative Meeting Agenda 12/2
Old Business
1. RSO Leadership Training: finalize details
2. Obama/Socialism: Update on presentation, discuss date/time finalization
3. POP Presentation: Update, make sure all materials are secured, verify presenters and attendees
4. Bobby Seal: specifics on this contingent upon feedback from DuBois Society. Possible sign-up for escorting, verification of dinner attendance
5. Chautauqua Liason Committee: Decision on committee creation, sign-up to be member
6. RCAH Reading room: Discuss or draft summary
7. Alternative News Sources: further suggestions for sites to visit?
Action Items
1. Discussion: Debate regarding blog content parameters, content removal rules/regs
New Business
?
Adjourn

Socialism: The Movement of the Majority!

2008-11-20T14:36:00.000-08:00

http://www.blackcommentator.com/300/300_ror_socialism_movement_majority.html

Socialism: The Movement of the Majority!
Represent Our Resistance
By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board

Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads directly to the most comprehensive socialization of production; it, so to speak, drags capitalists, against their own will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialization… Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few… the bulk of the profits go to the ‘geniuses’ of financial manipulation… Monopoly, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small and weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations - all these have given rise to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compels is to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism.

-Lenin, “Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism”

PBS’s Frontline presents a documentary titled War Briefing. An “expert” on the Afghanistan war states that the Taliban could be won over to “our side,” its sounds natural to the ear. Some few Taliban, good Taliban will remain in place as leaders to lord over villages of the poor and women with impunity. It will be a better life for the Afghanis - nestled into the hierarchical structure that best benefits corporations like Exxon-Mobile. And of course, Exxon-Mobile, providing a service for all, will have its route to oil.

The producers can assume its audience is caught up in the rhetoric of freedom” Only in America can I watch and listen to a “free,” “educational” broadcast in a “free” nation!

Won over “to our side.”

What is “our side”? What is on “our side”?

Exxon-Mobile rejected its shareholders’ request to invest in renewable energy until the top brass discovered how such investment would be “good for the company” - not the people - the company.

On “our side,” we can no longer speak of the United States as representing a republic. In 1950, writes Gore Vidal, the original constitution “was secretly replaced with the apparatus of the national security state.” In a national security state, money is funneled into “war-related matters” abroad, and, I would add, money is spending on developing a world-class prison industrial complex, complete with a high-tech surveillance apparatus. In a national security state, institutions encouraging free thinking are counterproductive, subversive.

So it isn’t surprising that political rhetoric on “our side” delivers to the people a definition of “freedom.” Freedom is something “we have” and others don’t have. A principal of the national security state holds up a card with a graphic display consisting of numbers and lines adding up to the message: we have; they don’t. Another principle flashes a photo of a naked, ashy, African or Latino boy. Freedom is and must be “brought to” other nations. OKAY!

Freedom is the strongest man, the most beautiful woman, the wealthiest entrepreneur or corporation - the people who matter on “our side.” Freedom is the right of billionaire capitalists to ask and to receive a bailout at the expense of the ruled. Freedom is corporate short cuts, regardless of who loses a limb or what worker is laid off.

Freedom on “our side” is being told that the Democratic Party is your party. That “re-distribution of wealth” is socialism! Communism! - the other side! But we have but one Party, and it’s the Party of the Capitalists. The melding of the government and the corporate world has yielded an increasingly dominate national security state - with a sprinkling of fundamental Christianity. Freedom is not freedom for workers to form labor unions free from government control! Freedom is not a single-payer health care plan! Worker-lead unions and single-payer health care isn’t profitable for anti-human capitalists.

Freedom is recognizing your deficiencies and seeking ways (legal or illegal - it’s all good for the national security state) to overcome your unnatural condition. That’s being wholeheartedly on “our side.”

Freedom is accepting the insanity of these anti-human rulers, unconditionally - unconstitutionally!

Because freedom is, you lose - no matter how hard you strive to be on “our side.” Freedom is ownership of all resources for the few.

Freedom is never the right to a quality life - for workers and the oppressed. It is never about the right to work at a meaningful job or have health care, decent housing and education. Freedom is not about equality among human beings. It’s shopping from a city dumpster!

Because freedom is fear of the masses!

Freedom is controlling what the people know and playing games with reality. The workers, the oppressed, the economically distressed, people of color, and women are asked to see themselves within the definition delivered to them. The ruled submit, body and mind, to a “natural” and “unchangeable” reality that services the interests of the rulers.

On “our side” produces the nullification of action against the rulers. It produces behavior from the workers, unemployed, economically distressed, people of color and women that is collaborative or cooperative. Most importantly, thought is not only stifled, it isn’t thought! All thinking and action in this society is done in relation to capitalism.

Capitalism is a brutal and inhumane regime imposed on the world by western nations lead by the United States. Capitalism allows for the government and corporations to privatize public resources. How civilized is it for the chemical lobbyists to dictate to the EPA or FDA what will be while oil lobbyists argue for the right to pollute the air and water supply? How civilized is it to allow for the selling for profits of women and children? How civilized is it to train the young to kill or be killed or maimed to establish new headquarters for four oil companies in the Middle East? How civilized is it to continue glorifying liars and thieves and call that progress? Follow the money: There are no lobbyists for the poor!

Freedom as a product of capitalism can only move in one direction: The freedom to purchase your own electronic bracelet!

If you think the “won them over to our side” philosophy applies only to the Taliban, or to the Iraqis, or Chinese, think again. Show-us-the-money Secretary of Treasury Paulson asked and received funds to save the capitalists. The American people have served as laboratory rats in the big experiment: Sedate and manipulate with a narrative hailing the exceptional patriotism of the American people! To a large extent, the experiment has worked. When the constitution and freedom disappeared in the 1950s, the American public went right on, thankful that they were not poor, Black, Guatemalan, African, Indochinese, or Haitian. Halleluiah! Black liberation leaders are hunted down and killed or incarcerated and the American public is relieved. Those angry Blacks with guns are a frightening mass and a threat to the American civilization as we know it! Halleluiah, that’s over! It can be argued that with the success of this homegrown experiment, King George and his court assumed the Iraqi people would drop everything and, in the midst of falling bombs, worship at the feet of U.S. soldiers. They envisioned shouts of halleluiah, freedom at last by masses and masses of Iraqis. The collective halleluiahs of Americans and Iraqis would drown out the cries of burning children and courageous anti-war protesters.

We have now a society in the U.S. where the workers, James Cannon explains, have a right to vote every four years, if they don’t move around too much, but have no say about the control of the shop and the factory; where all the means of mass information and communication are monopolised (sic) by a few - they describe all that as the ideal democracy, for which the workers should gladly fight and die.

Get your guns; shake your store-bought hair; get your face lifted to the high heavens and tuck the stomach; undo the slant of your eyes; buy a three-piece Black suit and stocks and cut the hair; speak the most perfect English to outdo the Ebonics or Korean accent - and it will never matter; it has never mattered. What matters is that the American people capitulated, submitted, bowed in a permanent posture, before the flag, unconditionally. Even while unemployment is the highest since September 11, 2002 and while the ruled scuffle and scrounge up every penny in the children’s banks and under the sofa cushions, the capitalists appeared before Congress and anyone who would have them to shout - Fire! We need the money. They got it! The capitalists exercise “freedom” and call it democracy!

Hear echoes of George Orwell’s Winston: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.”

Workers, the unemployed, the economically distressed, people of color and women are without freedom. Freedom for the once enslaved became acceptance into the capitalist system as another kind of slave. Here - “our side” has been an accumulation of cells in a prison under the control of capitalist rulers!

During the 2008 presidential election, debate about the rights of workers, the exploited, focused on a nightmare for believers in capitalism: We can’t have a “re-distribution of the wealth” in the U.S. The believers shouted to the American people: It would mean taking “well-earned money” from “hard working entrepreneurs.” Re-distribution will put an end to democracy!

As Cannon writes, this game of confusing and misrepresenting [socialism] has been facilitated for the capitalists and aided to a considerable extent by the social democrats and the labour bureaucracy, who are themselves privileged beneficiaries of the American system, and who give a socialist and labour coloring to the defence (sic) of American ‘democracy.’

The American people reject the evidence of its own eyes and ears: there’s a form of socialism - imperialist socialism!

“Socialism,” writes Cannon, was often called the society of the free and equal and democracy was defined as the rule of the people.” There “rule of the people” isn’t Stalin’s idea of “socialism” or the bogey-man-communist coming to take freedom, that is, money, from “hard-working” American people! No one can take what you don’t have! Socialism isn’t socialization for imperialists!

The true socialist movement is the movement of the majority! It represents change that is indeed radical! Revolutionary!

And you would think that after the last forty years Black Americans would once again speak openly about freedom and the “rule of the people.” Rev. Martin Luther King wondered why Black Americans had not joined the Communist Party en-mass.

This month, in Freetown, Sierra Leone, delegates to the first West Africa conference of African Socialist International are talking about what we are afraid to debate. The delegates of the conference, according to Lansana Fofana, called for “reparations to be paid to Africans for 400 years of slavery.”

“Asking for reparations is no favor demanded from the West,” said Ismail Rashid, Sierra Leonean professor of African History at New York’s Vassar College. “It is our right because through slavery, the West stole our labor, dignity and resources. It is repayment for our labor, our looted human resources.”

Please don’t think as programmed: We gave you a “Black” president. We have a BLACK president!

As Carlito Rovira reminds us in African American Reparations and the Struggle for Socialism, “African chattel slavery arose in the 15th century based on the expansion of capitalism.”

The wealth accumulated from slave labor strengthened capitalist industries and commerce. Textile industries, agriculture and shipbuilding prospered as a result of cheaper goods and raw materials obtained by enslaved African labor. The more Black slavery expanded, the more it became an impetus for capitalist economic development - not only in the United States, where slavery was strongest but throughout the world.

In the United States, Rovira writes, the class struggle has always relied on racism. “Reparations for the oppressed [Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, Black Americans, Latino/a Americans - workers] automatically imply the expropriation of the capitalist class.”

The movement of the majority is the concern of socialists and revolutionaries engaged in anti-capitalist struggles!

Any concept of freedom must start from the reality of the ruled, the people denied freedom.

What did Winston say of the Proles:

…[I]f only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength…They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies…[I]f they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning… And yet…!

And yet…!

“Our side” has been historically oppositional, among the majority striving for freedom and the rule by the people! The movement of socialists and revolutionaries is the movement of the majority! Say it again, until you see it and understand.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.

The United States: Orchestrating a Civic Coup in Bolivia

2008-11-18T14:07:00.000-08:00

Bolivian President Evo Morales is visiting the United Nations and the
Organization of American States this week to report on the recent US
coup attempt against his government. He will also meet with members of
Congress to deal with ?the worst diplomatic crisis? in the history of
the two countries, and hopes to open a dialogue to normalize relations
once Pressident-elect Barak Obama takes office.

Below is the story of US efforts over the past three years to topple
Morales.

The United States: Orchestrating a Civic Coup in Bolivia

By Roger Burbach

Evo Morales is the latest democratically-elected Latin American
president to be the target of a US plot to destabilize and overthrow his
government. On September 10, 2008 Morales expelled US Ambassador Philip
Goldberg because ?he is conspiring against democracy and seeking the
division of Bolivia.?

Observers of US-Latin American policy tend to view the crisis in
US-Bolivian relations as due to a policy of neglect and ineptness
towards Latin America because of US involvement in the wars in the
Middle East and Central Asia. In fact, the Bolivia coup attempt was a
conscious policy rooted in US hostility towards Morales, his political
party the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) and the social movements that
are aligned with him.

?The US embassy is historically used to calling the shots in Bolivia,
violating our sovereignty, treating us like a banana republic,? says
Gustavo Guzman, who was expelled as Bolivian ambassador to Washington
following Goldberg?s removal. In 2002, when Morales narrowly lost his
first bid for the presidency, US ambassador Manuel Rocha openly
campaigned against him, threatening, ? if you elect those who want
Bolivia to become a major cocaine exporter again, this will endanger the
future of US assistance to Bolivia.? Because he led the Cocaleros
Federation prior to assuming the presidency, the US State Department
called Morales an ?illegal coca agitator.? Morales advocated ?Coca Yes,
Cocaine No,? and called which for an end to violent U.S.- sponsored coca
eradication raids, and for the right of Bolivian peasants to grow coca
for domestic consumption, medicinal uses and even for export as an herb
in tea and other products.

?When Morales triumphed in the next presidential election,? says Guzman,
?it represented a defeat for the United States.? Shortly after his
inauguration, Morales received a call from George Bush, offering to help
"bring a better life to Bolivians." Morales asked Bush to reduce US
trade barriers for Bolivian products, and suggested that he come for a
visit. Bush did not reply. As Guzman notes, ?the United States was
trying to woo Morales with polite and banal comments to keep him from
aligning with Venezuelan President Hugo Ch?vez.? David Greenlee, the US
ambassador prior to Goldberg, expressed his "preoccupation" with
Bolivia's foreign alliances, while Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
and others at the Pentagon began talking about "security concerns" in
Bolivia.

Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon, the highest ranking US
official to attend Morales? inauguration, declared a willingness to
dialogue with Morales. In fact, what followed were almost three years of
diplomatic wrangling while the U.S. provided direct and covert
assistance to the opposition movement centered in the four eastern
departments of Bolivia known as ?La Media Luna?. Dominated by
agro-industrial interests, the departments began a drive for regional
autonomy soon after Morales, the first Indian president in Bolivian
history took office. (About 55% of the country?s population is Indian.)
Headed by departmental prefects (governors) and large landowners, the
autonomy movement has been determined to stymie Morales? plans for
national agrarian reform, and bent on taking control of the substantial
hydro-carbon resources located in the Media Luna.

The Bush administration has pursued a two-track policy similar to the
strategy the United States employed to overthrow the
democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973.
The diplomatic negotiations initiated by Shannon centered almost
exclusively on differences over drug policies, with the Bush
administration continually threatening to cut or curtail economic
assistance and preferential trade if Bolivia did not abide by the US
policy of coca eradication and criminalization. At the same time, the
United States through its embassy in La Paz and the Agency for
International Development (USAID), funded political forces that opposed
Morales and MAS. The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), with 37
in- country agents, appears to have acted like the CIA in Bolivia,
gathering intelligence and engaging in clandestine political operations
with the opposition.

For the remainder of the article, see:
http://globalalternatives.org/node/95

Ayers Reflects on Election, Future of Change in America

2008-11-10T23:02:00.001-08:00

What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been

Looking back on a surreal campaign season

By Bill Ayers

On the campaign trail, McCain immediately got on message. I became a prop, a cartoon character created to be pummeled

Whew! What was all that mess? I’m still in a daze, sorting it all out, decompressing.

Pass the Vitamin C.

For the past few years, I have gone about my business, hanging out with my kids and, now, my grandchildren, taking care of our elders (they moved in as the kids moved out), going to work, teaching and writing. And every day, I participate in the never-ending effort to build a powerful and irresistible movement for peace and social justice.

In years past, I would now and then—often unpredictably—appear in the newspapers or on TV, sometimes with a reference to Fugitive Days, my 2001 memoir of the exhilarating and difficult years of resistance against the American war in Vietnam. It was a time when the world was in flames, revolution was in the air, and the serial assassinations of black leaders disrupted our utopian dreams.

These media episodes of fleeting notoriety always led to some extravagant and fantastic assertions about what I did, what I might have said and what I probably believe now.

It was always a bit surreal. Then came this political season.

During the primary, the blogosphere was full of chatter about my relationship with President-elect Barack Obama. We had served together on the board of the Woods Foundation and knew one another as neighbors in Chicago’s Hyde Park. In 1996, at a coffee gathering that my wife, Bernardine Dohrn, and I held for him, I made a donation to his campaign for the Illinois State Senate.

Obama’s political rivals and enemies thought they saw an opportunity to deepen a dishonest perception that he is somehow un-American, alien, linked to radical ideas, a closet terrorist who sympathizes with extremism—and they pounced.

Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) campaign provided the script, which included guilt by association, demonization of people Obama knew (or might have known), creepy questions about his background and dark hints about hidden secrets yet to be uncovered.

On March 13, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), apparently in an attempt to reassure the “base,” sat down for an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News. McCain was not yet aware of the narrative Hannity had been spinning for months, and so Hannity filled him in: Ayers is an unrepentant “terrorist,” he explained, “On 9/11, of all days, he had an article where he bragged about bombing our Pentagon, bombing the Capitol and bombing New York City police headquarters. … He said, ‘I regret not doing more.’ “

McCain couldn’t believe it.

Neither could I.

On the campaign trail, McCain immediately got on message. I became a prop, a cartoon character created to be pummeled.

When Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin got hold of it, the attack went viral. At a now-famous Oct. 4 rally, she said Obama was “pallin’ around with terrorists.” (I pictured us sharing a milkshake with two straws.)

The crowd began chanting, “Kill him!” “Kill him!” It was downhill from there.

My voicemail filled up with hate messages. They were mostly from men, all venting and sweating and breathing heavily. A few threats: “Watch out!” and “You deserve to be shot.” And some e-mails, like this one I got from satan@hell.com: “I’m coming to get you and when I do, I’ll water-board you.”

The police lieutenant who came to copy down those threats deadpanned that he hoped the guy who was going to shoot me got there before the guy who was going to water-board me, since it would be most foul to be tortured and then shot. (We have been pals ever since he was first assigned to investigate threats made against me in 1987, after I was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.)

The good news was that every time McCain or Palin mentioned my name, they lost a point or two in the polls. The cartoon invented to hurt Obama was now poking holes in the rapidly sinking McCain-Palin ship.

That ’60s show

On Aug. 28, Stephen Colbert, the faux right-wing commentator from Comedy Central who channels Bill O’Reilly on steroids, observed:

"To this day, when our country holds a presidential election, we judge the candidates through the lens of the 1960s. … We all know Obama is cozy with William Ayers a ’60s radical who planted a bomb in the capital building and then later went on to even more heinous crimes by becoming a college professor. … Let us keep fighting the culture wars of our grandparents. The ’60s are a political gift that keeps on giving."

It was inevitable. McCain would bet the house on a dishonest and largely discredited vision of the ’60s, which was the defining decade for him. He built his political career on being a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

The ’60s—as myth and symbol—is much abused: the downfall ofcivilization in one account, a time of defeat and humiliation in a second, and a perfect moment of righteous opposition, peace and love in a third.

The idea that the 2008 election may be the last time in American political life that the ’60s plays any role whatsoever is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, let’s get over the nostalgia and move on. On the other, the lessons we might have learned from the black freedom movement and from the resistance against the Vietnam War have never been learned. To achieve this would require that we face history fully and honestly, something this nation has never done.

The war in Vietnam was an illegal invasion and occupation, much of it conducted as a war of terror against the civilian population. The U.S. military killed millions of Vietnamese in air raids—like the one conducted by McCain—and entire areas of the country were designated free-fire zones, where American pilots indiscriminately dropped surplus ordinance—an immoral enterprise by any measure.

What is really important

McCain and Palin—or as our late friend Studs Terkel put it, “Joe McCarthy in drag”—would like to bury the ’60s. The ’60s, after all, was a time of rejecting obedience and conformity in favor of initiative and courage. The ’60s pushed us to a deeper appreciation of the humanity of every human being. And that is the threat it poses to the right wing, hence the attacks and all the guilt by association.

McCain and Palin demanded to “know the full extent” of the Obama-Ayers “relationship” so that they can know if Obama, as Palin put it, “is telling the truth to the American people or not.”

This is just plain stupid.

Obama has continually been asked to defend something that ought to be at democracy’s heart: the importance of talking to as many people as possible in this complicated and wildly diverse society, of listening with the possibility of learning something new, and of speaking with the possibility of persuading or influencing others.

The McCain-Palin attacks not only involved guilt by association, they also assumed that one must apply a political litmus test to begin a conversation.

On Oct. 4, Palin described her supporters as those who “see America as the greatest force for good in this world” and as a “beacon of light and hope for others who seek freedom and democracy.” But Obama, she said, “Is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America.” In other words, there are “real” Americans — and then there are the rest of us.

In a robust and sophisticated democracy, political leaders—and all of us—ought to seek ways to talk with many people who hold dissenting, or even radical, ideas. Lacking that simple and yet essential capacity to question authority, we might still be burning witches and enslaving
our fellow human beings today.

Maybe we could welcome our current situation—torn by another illegal war, as it was in the ’60s—as an opportunity to search for the new.

Perhaps we might think of ourselves not as passive consumers of politics but as fully mobilized political actors. Perhaps we might think of our various efforts now, as we did then, as more than a single campaign, but rather as our movement-in-the-making.

We might find hope in the growth of opposition to war and occupation worldwide. Or we might be inspired by the growing movements for reparations and prison abolition, or the rising immigrant rights movement and the stirrings of working people everywhere, or by gay and lesbian and transgender people courageously pressing for full recognition.

Yet hope—my hope, our hope—resides in a simple self-evident truth: the future is unknown, and it is also entirely unknowable.

History is always in the making. It’s up to us. It is up to me and to you. Nothing is predetermined. That makes our moment on this earth both hopeful and all the more urgent—we must find ways to become real actors, to become authentic subjects in our own history.

We may not be able to will a movement into being, but neither can we sit idly for a movement to spring full-grown, as from the head of Zeus.

We have to agitate for democracy and egalitarianism, press harder for human rights, learn to build a new society through our self-transformations and our limited everyday struggles.

At the turn of the last century, Eugene Debs, the great Socialist Party leader from Terre Haute, Ind., told a group of workers in Chicago, “If I could lead you into the Promised Land, I would not do it, because someone else would come along and lead you out.”

In this time of new beginnings and rising expectations, it is even more urgent that we figure out how to become the people we have been waiting to be.

© All Rights Reserved

Bill Ayers
is a Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar
at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of Fugitive Days (Beacon) and co-author, with Bernardine Dohrn, of Race Course: Against White Supremacy (Third World Press).

Statement on the 2008 Presidential Election: Democratic Socialists of America Political Action Committee

2008-11-10T20:11:00.000-08:00

Statement on the 2008 Presidential Election
Democratic Socialists of America Political Action Committee

The November presidential election, now only three months away, will mark the welcome end of the Bush-Cheney regime – one of the worst administrations in U.S. history.
The corporate-dominated media tainted the primary season by once again treating the campaigns as a series of horse races – where voters are encouraged to vote not for the candidate who best represents their interests and values, but rather for the candidate the media says is most likely to win. For the media to judge a candidate as having a “winning trajectory,” he or she must be among those raising the most contributions from corporate-connected individuals.

We have little hope that over the next three months the media will focus on the policy
differences between Senators John McCain and Barack Obama. That is tragic, because there are major differences between the commitments of both candidates and their respective parties that need to be aired and understood, even if these differences are not as great as the democratic Left might like. Obama promises to restore to American workers the right to organize; to renegotiate international trade agreements so they enforce and do not retard labor, environmental, and human rights; to re-regulate the financial sector and end speculative excess; to bring troops home from Iraq and invest the saved funds in domestic needs; and to move toward universal health
care. That’s a program worth electing a president on– or fighting for in the event the president and his party renege.

Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) holds a different view of electoral politics than that of the corporate media or even much of the Left. We see electoral politics as one means in a much broader struggle of grassroots democratic social movements to pressure the state to enact policies that address the needs of their constituencies and a wider public. The democratic reforms of both the New Deal (the Wagner Act, Social Security) and the Great Society (the civil rights acts, Medicare) did not derive from the beneficence of moderate presidents Franklin Roosevelt and
Lyndon Johnson. In the case of FDR, his modest programs were substitutes for more radical policies supported by numerous Congress members but deemed not winnable by the president and congressional leaders. The limited reforms of the New Deal and Great Society were enacted because Congress and the president were forced to respond at least minimally to the demands of the mass social movements of the CIO and the civil rights upsurge.

DSA has long recognized that the corporate, neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party is not an ally for radical democratic change. Its support for NAFTA, similar destructive trade legislation, and cuts in government aid to low-income citizens in the face of growing poverty and income inequality; its fronting for corporate power and “free market” ideology; its resistance to allowing the party to make a systemic critique of the war in Iraq, the “war on terror,” or the corporate stranglehold on civil society put it on the other side of a widening political divide. While Obama’s largest funders come from this wing of the party, the social forces fueling his campaign – people of color, union activists, and anti-war Democrats – have long opposed the neoliberal
stranglehold on the Democratic Party.

Thus, DSA has no illusion that a Democratic presidential victory, combined with bulked-up Democratic majorities in both houses of the Congress, will in itself bring about significant democratic reform. We do believe that such a political landscape would provide the most favorable terrain upon which mobilized, assertive social movements can pressure the government to appoint decent federal judges and agency administrators and enact desperately needed universal health care legislation, labor law reform, and a federally funded Marshall Plan to develop green technologies and green jobs.

Had the U.S. a genuine multiparty system, neoliberal positions would be held by a centrist party, and DSA would be organizing as part of a left electoral force against it. Given the U.S.’s restrictive election laws, the only electoral fight possible against corporate domination has to happen in and around the Democratic Party, on the federal, state, and (allowing for the rare exception) county and city levels.
An Obama presidency will not on its own force legislation facilitating single-payer health care (at least at the federal level) or truly progressive taxation and major cuts in wasteful and unneeded defense spending. But if DSA and other democratic forces can work in the fall elections to increase the ranks of the Congressional Progressive and Black and Latino caucuses, progressive legislation (backed by strong social movement mobilization) might well pass the next Congress.

Senator Barack Obama has attracted considerable support as a presidential candidate who promises to end “politics as usual.” He has invigorated a significant youthful, multiracial cadre of supporters, as well as gained considerable support from liberal activists. The massive outpouring of small contributions in support of his campaign signals the potential power of his message, and his recent call for a windfall profits tax on the oil companies is encouraging.

Yet his campaign has centered more around gestures and symbols than on concrete policy
alternatives; and where he has been concrete, as in health care, his plan falls short of universal coverage. And he often employs pro-market rhetoric to defend his programs and their failure to cover everyone.

While recognizing the critical limitations of the Obama candidacy and the American political system, DSA believes that the possible election of Senator Obama to the presidency in November represents a potential opening for social and labor movements to generate the critical political momentum necessary to implement a progressive political agenda. We know that a proactive and progressive government can come only on the heels of a broad coalition for social justice united against a reactionary Republicanism as well as a Democratic neoliberalism.

Such a movement will also have to fight for a public finance system that can limit the power of corporate fundraising and lobbyists over both major political parties.
Thus, DSA offers its Economic Justice Agenda and its “four pillars” as a framework for such a progressive policy agenda. This program calls for:

1. Restoring progressive taxation to the levels before the Reagan administration and
enacting massive cuts in wasteful defense spending;
2. Enacting single-payer universal health insurance and expanding public initiatives in child
care, elder care and pension security;
3. Passing the Employee Free Choice Act as part of a broader effort to rebuild a powerful
labor movement capable of achieving equity in the labor market; and
4. Implementing a U.S. foreign policy that promotes global institutions that advance labor,
environmental, and human rights and regulate transnational corporations.

True democracy is not about one woman or man promising change for the American public. That takes consistent pressure from below. Who holds the presidency does matter, if only as a more accessible target for pressure. A Democratic presidency and Congress would also create popular expectations that rising inequality and injustice will be curbed. If the Democrats frustrate those hopes (as they did in the early 1960s), mass mobilization is likely to grow rather than subside.

Nor should the Left be so involved in the national presidential campaign that it ignores the fall primaries and general election races for the U.S. House and Senate. We need more progressives in Congress as well as increased Democratic majorities.
The November election can’t be the end of a fight, but its beginning, and connections made on a local and national level leading up to November can position the Left to play a role in struggles to come.

Democratic Socialists of America PAC, 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 505, NY, NY 10038; not approved by any candidate or candidate's committee.

2008-11-10T00:39:00.000-08:00

things to consider against the booth

2008-11-07T23:24:00.000-08:00

Well, now that the position on why voting is worthwhile has been posted, now I felt like it was just fair to defend the other position held by some marxists - that of electoral abstentionism.

The state is a mechanism of class domination, and as such, anyone trying to participate in it, whether the most honest socialist or the worst machiavellian careerist, is going to become integrated to capital. The state is the safeguard of the economy and the foreman of the fiber of society and as such, its only logical modus operandi is to continue protecting the social order it perpetuates.

Some abstentionist theses on the Democrats:

1)The anti-war left suffers a collective amnesia, for their attachment and general support to the Democrats invalidates their general opposition to the war. The democrats under Woodrow Wilson ran under an "anti-war platform" in WWI, and yet under his administration american workers where still sent to murder european workers. Kennedy and Johnson continued to escalate the vietnamese war. Obama voted for the Patriot Act and threatened in national television Pakistan and expressed his interests to continue the "war on terror."

2) The platform of the Republicans, Democrats, and any party integrated to the state are either meaningless or in constant flux, for such platform and positions are expressions of the interests of the different factions of the ruling class at a certain time. This is why the "platform" the democrats and republicans put forward in the electoral spectacle changes dramatically every four years, not only in "strategies" but in the principles themselves. This is why the democrat party is traditionally thought "in the left" yet Obama supported the billions of dollars bailout and has a pro-war platform. Or why, decades ago the old republican party was made up by isolationists and "econonomic nationalists", differing from the new "neo-conservatives". This is also why someone like Warren Buffet would support Obama, while opponents slander the democrat politician as "socialist".

3) Supporting an electoral party in the name of "relevance" is as sound as supporting the left wing of the NSDAP. We as socialists should look for creating independent class organizations that have nothing to do with the state. We should not compaign for the state at all. I wonder how leftists are going to justify their vote when the politician they voted for starts dropping bombs in Afghanistan or Pakistan...... Or the politician they voted for starts attacking the living standards of the general populace. Or the politician they voted for starts sending friends, brothers, and sisters to war.... In short, campaigning for the state is a compromise of one politics and principles.

10 things to consider in the voting booth

2008-11-03T21:46:00.000-08:00

from: PWW

Author: Norman Markowitz
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 11/03/08 15:55

1. The world is quite likely on the brink of a global depression. “Free market” economic policies are the key to understanding this crisis. Barack Obama has rejected these policies. John McCain now blames individuals, greedy Wall Street executives, even Bush, to hide his complicity and support for these policies, while offering the same economic policies Bush pushed for the past eight years. We are early in the crisis. Electing Obama can be like electing Franklin Roosevelt in 1930, not 1932. Electing McCain will be like electing Herbert Hoover in 1930, not 1928, something that no rational electorate would do.

2. Barack Obama has shown modern leadership ability. He works collectively, makes decisions carefully, establishes broad policy outlines and then seeks specific policy solutions that fit the outlines and changing conditions. John McCain is impulsive and reckless, prone to make and then reverse snap judgments, lacking either a broad policy outline or specific policies that are consistent with that outline.

3. Barack Obama has experience working with trade unions, urban community organizations and metropolitan business elites to get things done. John McCain is a senator and former congressman from Arizona, an anti-union-shop “right to work” state. McCain was chosen by and has represented the Arizona elites, the “right to work” business executives, real estate developers and bankers from the beginning of his political career. He has no record of working with and supporting the interests of the trade union movement, the large Latino population or the Native American population of his state.

4. Barack Obama has already shown his leadership ability by choosing Joe Biden, a senator with extensive experience, especially on foreign policy matters, who complements Obama’s abilities, a serious heir apparent to the presidency should that become necessary. McCain has chosen Gov. Sarah Palin not to complement his candidacy or be a realistic heir apparent for the presidency but on the hunch that she would get him female votes and solidify the support of religious right Republicans. Given insurance company actuarial statistics, the chances of Palin succeeding to the presidency through the death of the 72-year-old McCain are much greater than the chances of Biden succeeding to the presidency by the death of the 47-year-old Obama. What a Palin presidency would mean to the U.S. and the world deserves to be a consideration for voters, even if it obviously hasn’t been a consideration for McCain.

5. Barack Obama opposed the Iraq war and occupation as an Illinois state senator even before Bush launched it and has continued as a U.S. senator to seek non-military, multilateral approaches to foreign policy questions. John McCain strongly supported the Iraq war and military occupation and has always sought military solutions first to foreign policy questions.

6. Barack Obama has addressed the people’s economic crisis and has called for public investment in the economy, aid to states and localities, and tax reform that will erase the Bush tax giveaways to corporations and the wealthy. McCain and Palin have called these policies “redistribution of wealth” and “socialism,” name-calling of the kind that right-wing radio talk show hosts who run interference for Republican candidates usually specialize in, not candidates themselves.

7. As president, Barack Obama would almost instantly reverse the extreme decline in U.S. international prestige. He would be seen as a major break with the inter-related history of militarism, racism and support for the rich and privileged throughout the world which has long undermined respect for the U.S. As president, John McCain would be seen globally as another Bush, another cowboy politician irrelevant to either the present global crisis or the aspirations of the people.

8. As president, Barack Obama would, through regulatory revitalization, send a signal to transnational corporations, banking institutions and brokerage houses that the U.S. will act to reverse the “casino capitalism” that has produced trillions in global losses over the last month. This is something capitalists will not publicly praise, but it is something that they know, as they did in the Great Depression, that they need and cannot do for themselves. As president, John McCain would make gestures and look for scapegoats and try to swim with the Bush policies until the economy finds itself under water.

9. As president, Barack Obama, who has already brought millions of new and mostly young people into the political process, would raise the standard of understanding and debate in U.S politics. Through increased popular participation, an Obama administration would make the country a “better democracy” to the benefit of all, including intelligent conservatives, who will be, as they are in other countries, compelled to seriously articulate their views rather than watching passively as others reduce their views to calculated flag-waving and name-calling.

10. If Barack Obama wins the presidency, it will be an enormous victory for all Americans against what has been the single greatest roadblock to progress and unity in U.S. history: the effects of a racism born in slavery, continued through legal segregation, and maintained today overtly in some areas of life, covertly in others. If John McCain wins, given the disastrous Bush policies and the enormous economic crisis the nation and the world faces, it can only be understood at home and abroad as a victory for that racist history, institutions and ideology, sending a message globally that the U.S. electorate prefers to live in and with the prejudices of the past rather than look rationally at the present and face the future.

Norman Markowitz is a history professor at Rutgers University.

Video on the Employee Free Choice Act

2008-11-03T21:44:00.000-08:00

America's workers are struggling to make ends meet. But when workers are free to choose to join a union, our economy can work for everyone again.

That's why we need the Employee Free Choice Act—a bill in Congress that would help level the playing field and give workers the freedom to choose a union.

We’ve teamed up with the award-winning team at Brave New Films on a hilarious new video about why we need more good union jobs. Watch the video, and then sign the petition in support of the Employee Free Choice Act.

Palin: 'I Don't Know' If Abortion Clinic Bombers Are Terrorists

2008-10-28T19:36:00.000-07:00

from: Thinkprogress.org

In her interview with NBC’s Brian Williams, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said that Bill Ayers is “no question” a terrorist because he sought to destroy the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon. Palin, however, refused to apply the same label to abortion clinic bombers:

Q: Is an abortion clinic bomber a terrorist, under this definition, governor?

PALIN: (Sigh). There’s no question that Bill Ayers via his own admittance was one who sought to destroy our U.S. Capitol and our Pentagon. That is a domestic terrorist. There’s no question there. Now, others who would want to engage in harming innocent Americans or facilities that uh, it would be unacceptable. I don’t know if you’re going to use the word terrorist there.

Watch it:

Racism, Domination, and Revolution in Bolivia

2008-09-28T01:16:00.000-07:00

Racism, Domination and Revolution in
Bolivia

Adolfo
Gilly September 26, 2008

Mexico - "The problem in Bolivia is that the country is undergoing a process
of reforms, without abandoning the democratic framework, but both the
opposition and the government act as if they were facing a revolution,"
stated Marco Aurelio Garc?a, a close advisor to Lula in international
affairs, according to an article by Jos? Natanson in the newspaper *Pagina
12*.

Allowing myself to not take this declaration literally, but instead in an
ironic sense, Marco Aurelio Garc?a, an intelligent and well-informed man,
can't help but realize that if the two protagonists of the Bolivian
confrontation believe that they are dealing with a revolution, this belief
is the best confirmation that, in effect, it is. The Vice President, ?lvaro
Garc?a Linera, on the other hand, has said that what is happening is "an
increase in elites, an increase in rights, and a redistribution of wealth.
This, in Bolivia, is a revolution."

He is right: in Bolivia this alone would already be a revolution like the
one in Nicaragua in 1979. But what is happening is something much deeper and
that goes much further than the elites, politics, and the economy. This is a
questioning of the means of the historical domination by those elites, old
and new. It comes from very far below, it is moved by an ancient fury, and
it will not be stopped by the massacres at the hands of fascist groups nor
by the fragile government agreements with the prefects of the *Media Luna*.

The massacre in Pando, with more than 30 campesinos assassinated in cold
blood by the hit men of the white minority, and the horrific scenes of
humiliation, pain and punishment of the indigenous people in the public
plaza of Sucre and in the streets of Santa Cruz de la Sierra at the hands of
gangs of fascist youth, are telling in that this white minority knows
exactly what game it is playing: its power is not negotiable, its lands are
untouchable, its right to despotic rule resides in skin color not in the
votes of citizens. The white minority is not willing to, in a sense,
"extend" said despotic right, supported also by poor white groups whose only
"property" is their skin color that separates them from the Indians. They
are much less willing to redistribute property or wealth.

?

The Bolivian right-wing, the old and not-so-old elites, the owners of land
and of lives, were defeated by the immense indigenous and popular uprising
that began with the Water Wars in the year 2000, culminated with the
rebellion of El Alto in October 2003, and concluded with Evo Morales' entry
into the presidency in January 2005. The new Constitution, even though
subjected to a referendum, and other measures by the Bolivia government,
have been steps to strengthen the new government in judicial, political and
economic terrain.

This process was approved again by a the great majority of the Bolivian
people in the referendum on August 10th; 67 percent of the votes?-more than
two-thirds?- with up to 85 percent approval in the communities of the
Altiplano. The dominant white minority in the eastern region has incited
revolt, and, with brutality and ferociousness, challenges these national
electoral results and threatens secession.

This minority knows well that it is not about simple "democratic
improvements/extensions" but that instead it is about a revolution that
questions the minority's power and its privileges, the "structural
inheritance" of its despotic rule. Therefore a revolution is one of those
culminating moments in which the insurgent movement of the people touches
those exact bases of domination, tries to destroy them, and is able to
fracture the dividing line where that domination passes through the given
society.

It is not about the line that separates the governors from the governed, a
political question, but instead about the line that separates the dominators
from the subaltern. In the classical sense, social revolution refers to the
subversion of that social domination and not just to political or economic
domination.
That dividing line is sharp and deep in Bolivia. It is not only a class
domination, although that does exist. It is above all about a racial
domination that was shaped in the colonial times and reaffirmed in the
ogliarchic Republic from 1825 onwards........rest at
http://boliviarising.blogspot.com/2008/09/racism-domination-and-revolution-in.html

Moratorium NOW! Coalitionto Stop Foreclosures and Evictions

2008-07-21T20:35:00.000-07:00

Why is Countrywide and their law firm Trott & Trott evicting a 72-year-old disabled woman from her home of 45 years, rather than accepting full payment for the house?

Demonstrate to Stop the
Eviction of Rubie Curl-Pinkins!
Tuesday, July 22, 12 Noon at Bank of America
Guardian Building, Congress & Griswold, Detroit
(Bank of America has bought out Countrywide!)

In one of the latest horror stories in the foreclosure epidemic that is devastating the city of Detroit, Countrywide and their law firm Trott & Trott have decided to evict Rubie Curl-Pinkins from her home of 45 years, rather than accept full payment for the home through a reverse mortgage.

Rubie Curl-Pinkins is a 72-year-old woman suffering from numerous physical disabilities. Her doctor has stated that being evicted from her home could have a devastating effect on her health. Her daughter, who also lives in the home on Holden Street, is also disabled, suffering from congestive heart failure and on oxygen to help her breathe.

Like many people in Detroit, when confronted with numerous debts, Ms. Curl-Pinkins was lured into a predatory loan in exchange for a mortgage on her paid-off home. The interest rate exceeds 10%. When her medical bills mounted, she fell behind on her mortgage payments and her home went into foreclosure.

Before the redemption period ended, however, she succeeded in arranging a reverse mortgage that would pay off the debt. But Countrywide delayed in providing a pay-off letter so she could finish the loan, pay off the redemption amount, and keep her home. Once the redemption period ended, rather than work with Ms. Curl-Pinkins, Countrywide and its attorneys Trott & Trott have refused to accept payment for the home and insisted on evicting Ms. Curl-Pinkins. Under pressure, she signed a consent judgment and is scheduled to be evicted on July 25, 2008.

Countrywide and Trott & Trott?s actions epitomize the ruthlessness and illogic of the finance industry, which would rather assert its power to throw people in the streets than accept payment for the homes. The banks and finance companies are destroying our communities, throwing people into the streets, creating thousands of abandoned and vandalized homes, and reducing property values for everyone. (It should be noted that Countrywide has recently been bought by Bank of America. So much for their signs about ?serving Detroit?!)

Just this week, the federal government bailed out the banks and finance industry by guaranteeing $300 billion in taxpayer money to back up their bad loans. What about bailing out the people, the real victims of the foreclosure crisis?

We need a Moratorium on Foreclosures to stop this epidemic and keep people in their homes! Join the growing movement to support SB 1306, a bill introduced by State Senator Hansen Clarke which would halt foreclosures in Michigan for two years to allow the people to survive this crisis.

Stop the Eviction of Rubie Curl-Pinkins! Fight for the passage of SB 1306 to Stop Foreclosures in Michigan! Join the demonstration this Friday.

Moratorium NOW! Coalitionto Stop Foreclosures and Evictions

23 E. Adams, 4th Floor, Detroit, MI 48226 www.moratorium-mi.org (313) 319-0870

American Axle and the 2008 elections

2008-04-27T17:50:00.000-07:00

http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/12940/1/420/

Author: John Rummel

People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/25/08 15:43

Commentary

The workers at American Axle are doing all they can. Their cause is just, they are united in battle and unions from all over are coming to this plant on the Detroit-Hamtramck border to lend support. For seven weeks now, 3,650 workers have been on strike, resisting a very profitable company’s efforts to drastically reduce their wages (by as much as 50 percent) and benefits. However, the balance of forces in this fight is anything but even and they sure could use some help from high places.

Autoworkers are fighting two enemies at once: the company and a far-right Republican government in Washington whose agenda is to make workers suffer and sacrifice for corporate profits. While Democrats are not without blame, the lion’s share of the mess we’re in rests with the Republican Party.

Of all the wrongs to make right in the November elections, those faced by labor should be put on a fast track. For 30 years, the Republican right wing has hit hard at the trade union movement —Reagan’s firing of air traffic controllers was just the beginning.

The scales of justice have been so tilted toward employers they have almost fallen over. Just think about what has taken place: Tax laws that reward companies for moving production out of the country. A National Labor Relations Board that should be called the National Corporate Get-Rid-of-Your-Union Relations Board. An Occupational Safety and Health Administration that has reduced staff and closed its eyes to dangerous work conditions. Free trade agreements that have made it easy for companies to set up production all over the world, worsened poverty and inequality in every country where they have been implemented and led to a massive loss of jobs here in the United States.

In this political climate workers are supposed to feel lucky just to be working and have no right complaining about corporate salaries and the halving of their wages and benefits. “We have the flexibility to source all of our business to other locations around the world and we have the right to do so,” said American Axle CEO Dick Dauch. Work for what I say or I’ll give your job to someone else, he’s saying.

Workers can win under such conditions, but why should it be so difficult? Isn’t it about time to send the Republicans packing?

In addition to the unity and solidarity being shown on the picket line, labor needs a Democratic landslide in the November elections — a landslide that sends a message to the next president and Congress that relief for working people is needed, and a landslide that will give labor the leverage to stop and even reverse the corporate attack.

The AFL-CIO’s “McCain Revealed” campaign shows him to be no friend of labor. His voting record is dismal. He’s voted to block the Employee Free Choice Act, voted to give Bush “fast track” authority on free trade legislation and voted to block a bill to protect overtime rights. McCain continues to be a strong supporter of the Iraq war and there is no way the needs of working people are going to be met while we’re spending three trillion dollars on the war. In other words, a McCain victory will be a continuation of Bush’s policies.

On most issues facing labor, Senators Obama and Clinton have both pledged policies opposite from McCain’s. A huge anti-McCain vote in November will be a defeat for the far-right and at the same time strengthen the hand of labor, the whole working class, women and youth. A big turnout by autoworkers in November will make battles on the picket line a lot easier.

John Rummel (jrummel@pww.org) is a Michigan correspondent for the People’s Weekly World.

May Day 2008

2008-04-27T17:49:00.000-07:00

http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/12942/1/420/

Author: PWW Editorial Board

People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/25/08 16:06

Workers of the world unite! That visionary call, issued 160 years ago, is being answered today in new and powerful ways.

As capital has gone global, using workers around the world as pawns in the transnational corporate profit grab, labor unions are going global too. They are forming unprecedented international alliances to fight the global assault on wages, benefits, living standards and worker rights.

• The United Auto Workers and France’s metalworkers federation (FTM-CGT) are developing a joint strategy for organizing at employers they have in common. They have agreed to share information and assist each other.

UAW Vice President and Organizing Director Terry Thurman said, “We are very pleased to work with our French brothers and sisters. … The corporations cross national borders for their self-interest, and our unions need to do the same thing.”

FTM-CGT includes the shipbuilding, aircraft and rail, electrical and electronic, mechanical equipment, metal, agricultural machinery, jewelry making and automobile industries.

• Earlier this month, the Communications Workers of America and Germany’s largest union, Ver.di, launched the first union ever to represent workers in both the U.S. and Europe. The new union, called T-Union, will support T-Mobile workers trying to win collective bargaining rights in the U.S. and other countries. It will also represent German union members who work for T-Mobile in the U.S.

• Last year, the United Steelworkers signed an agreement with Britain’s largest manufacturing union, Amicus, and the British Transport and General Workers’ Union to move toward a merger. Amicus and the T&G have since joined into one mighty union with 2.1 million members, called, appropriately, Unite.

• The AFL-CIO has just formed a new partnership with Enlace — a network of 21 worker centers, unions and organizing groups representing approximately 300,000 low-wage workers in the U.S. and Mexico — to work together to promote and enforce worker rights in the two countries.

All this indicates that labor is beginning to step onto the global stage as the advocate for the world’s people. It gives every reason for optimism as we celebrate May Day, the international workers’ holiday.

U.S., Korean workers: ‘Free trade’ pact spurs race to bottom

2008-04-27T17:48:00.000-07:00

http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/12938/1/420/

Author: Dan Margolis

People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/25/08 15:36

Despite strong resistance from labor and civic organizations in both the United States and South Korea, President Bush and South Korean President Lee Myung-bak vowed to push through the stalled Korea-United States Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA).

When Lee met with Bush April 18 at Camp David, according to Lee’s spokesperson, the two presidents chatted “like old friends,” and pledged that their countries’ legislatures would ratify the agreement.

Lee’s right-wing Grand National Party now dominates South Korea’s Parliament, so ratification there is likely, though there is a strong upsurge of grassroots protest. But U.S. ratification is much less likely. Contrary to Bush’s statements, Democrats in Congress, including presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, are generally opposed to the agreement.

“The only trade agreements I believe in are ones that put workers first,” Sen. Obama told members of the United Auto Workers in November. “Because trade deals aren’t good for the American people if they aren’t good for working people. That’s why I opposed CAFTA. That’s why I oppose the South Korea Free Trade Agreement.”

Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee, enthusiastically supports the agreement.

A recent statement issued jointly by the AFL-CIO and Change to Win in the U.S. and the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions says, “The KORUS FTA is based on an economic model that has privileged investor rights over workers’ rights, public services and the environment.”

The joint statement continues, “It is clear that this model will permit restructuring and provoke a ‘race to the bottom’ on working standards in both countries, resulting in the deterioration of wages and working standards.”

If passed, KORUS will be the largest free trade agreement signed by the U.S. after NAFTA. Negotiations on it began in February 2006 and concluded last year. Ratification has been stalled by major protests, especially by labor and farmers’ groups, in both countries.

The Korean Alliance against KORUS FTA, which represents more than 300 Korean organizations, including labor, farmers’ groups and nongovernmental organizations, and hundreds of thousands of people, made clear their concerns in a 2007 report to the U.S. Congress.

The report charged the agreement would limit Koreans’ access to medicines and decrease Korean agricultural production by 45 percent, “meaning that roughly half of South Korea’s farmers will lose their livelihoods.” Further, implementation would diminish Korean authority to regulate water use and energy and even education. The alliance also expressed concern about harmful effects on Korean environmental policies.

Many Koreans, including progressives in the south and North Korean leaders, also fear that the agreement is a way for U.S. imperialist interests to strengthen their reach over the whole peninsula.

For American workers, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said in April 2007 when the agreement was concluded, KORUS would “exacerbate and accelerate the loss of good jobs in the U.S. manufacturing sector, especially in autos, apparel and electronics.”

South Korean President Lee represents the ultra-right Grand National Party, which has its roots in the dictatorship that ended in the 1980s. After years of liberal rule, the GNP won the presidential vote last December and the parliamentary vote this April, when it trounced the liberal United Democratic Party. The GNP won a majority of the 299-member legislature, while the UDP won only about 80 seats, in an election that commentators said was characterized, more than anything else, by widespread demoralization.

The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions says the reason for the ascendancy of the GNP was that, while most people agreed with the liberal UDP’s rapprochement with North Korea, the liberals weren’t able to address the growing rich/poor divide in South Korea.

What’s more, former liberal President Roh Moo-hyun was an original drafter of the KORUS agreement.

Consequently, facing a choice between a pro-KORUS liberal party that had lost the support of labor, the ultra-right GNP and a disunited left opposition, most South Koreans sat out the April vote, pushing voter turnout down to 46 percent, the lowest in South Korea’s history.

dmargolis@ pww.org

China and Africa: A Different Relationship?

2008-04-27T17:45:00.000-07:00

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/view/6782/

By Norman Markowitz

click here for related stories: Imperialism/Globalization

4-24-08, 11:23 am

No region of the world was so devastated by both commercial and industrial capitalism and the imperialisms they fostered than Africa. From the 16th to the 19th century, Africa was robbed of tens of millions of its people for the slave trade that European and later North American states used to enrich themselves by developing much of the Western Hemisphere with human chattel. This was followed by colonial empires which looted Africa of its natural resources and also condemned tens of millions of Africans to forced labor in mines and on plantations to pay feudal taxes that were imposed on them.

“Africa Arises," chapter six of Gerald Horne’s fine new book, Blows against Empire, looks at a different relationship between Africa and a new world power, the Peoples Republic of China. Along with a huge rise in trade relations and Chinese investments, China is working with Africans to build roads, to assist Ethiopia in constructing the continent’s largest dam, to aid Nigeria in developing a communications satellite system, and to introduce life saving anti-malarial drugs in Uganda.

While some critics may argue that the Chinese are doing what the European and U.S. colonial powers have done in the past, Chinese investments in projects to facilitate their gathering of resources, clearly aid African development in a direct way.

Horne looks at the positive role that China is playing in the Congo. By contrast, the U.S. through the CIA subverted the anti-colonial peoples revolution led by Patrice Lumumba at the end of the 1950s. CIA operatives and assisted in Lumumba’s murder and installed as its major African “asset” the brutal and corrupt Joseph Mobuto, whose dictatorship lasted three decades and was considered as one of the worst in the world.

Horne is not uncritical of China’s past support in the 1970s of adventurist and elements in Africa as part of its anti-Soviet stance and its subsequent “strategic alliance” with the U.S. But, whereas U.S. and European states hypocritically pose as defenders of “democracy” against governments like that of Zimbabwe (Horne reminds readers that it was China which supported Robert Mugabe in the 1970s against political rivals who had Soviet support), China has continued to develop economic relations with various African states that are helping Africans raise their standards of living and improve their overall quality of life.

The U.S. is not the only nation by any means involved in neo colonial activities in Africa. France. A large colonial power in Africa until the post WWII era, in a more direct way than the U.S. has its firms and “expatriates” working with local “allies” to control oil, bauxite, and other important resources. French military power is also around in a direct way to back up its firms. But Horne suggests that the “relative decline of U.S. imperialism – the locomotive of world imperialism – may be so significant that it will be unable to arrest the rise of Africa in league with China.”

Horne is at his best in this chapter in untangling the complex geopolitical manipulations of U.S. imperialism in Africa, from its continuing attempts to create a dangerous new Africa Command (AFRICOM) for the U.S. military on the continent to advance its imperialist interests, to its struggles to control oil resources to its attempts to undermine Chinese relationships with African nations in a wide variety of ways.

Horne also follows the money, showing how predatory “lenders” including U.S. GOP backers “buy up the debt of impoverished African countries from pennies and then force those countries to “renegotiate” under constitutions which give deepen their poverty and provide the ‘lenders’ with super profits.

He also shows how U.S. based pharmaceuticals have sought to deny HIV and other life saving drugs to poor African nations, where these diseases are epidemics, in order to retain their profit margins in the developed countries. Meanwhile, the World Trade Organization and the IMF continue to put the squeeze on African nations as they do on Latin American and other nations, limiting social sector development in education and other areas in order to foster “free markets” and “fiscal responsibility” (neo colonialism in what is a fairly crude form). Finally, American based big agribusiness firms are exploiting African land and in effect increasing hunger among its peoples.

All of this open plunder should make the critics of Chinese policy in Africa, along with those who selectively criticize the “human rights” abuses of some African states, take pause. Whatever contradictions may exist in China’s policy in Africa(which one might say is clearly one is seeking to develop resources for its own industries) its Communist leadership and revolutionary anti-imperialist traditions have kept it from engaging in the crude forms of exploitation that have characterized the Euro-American states for five centuries.

Horne concludes optimistically that the role of China in Africa along with possible role of India (which has, as a legacy of British imperialism, its own Diaspora on the continent) and the global Diaspora created by slavery and colonialism, especially the large African-American community, offers hope for both African liberation and global victories against U.S. imperialism.

Whether that, “the coming together of progressive Africans transnationally,” which Horne also sees as “a vindication of (W.E.B.) Du Bois vision” will occur remains unclear. But that it can occur and that all anti-imperialists should struggle to make it occur, not only for Africans but for Americans and all the world’s peoples, is clear.