Pottawatomie Creek

You got that, Asshole: Standing in solidarity with my fellow university employees

2007-07-03T09:46:00.000-04:00

Below is a reprint from Fight Back! News, the paper printed by the folks at the http://www.frso.org Freedom Road. My personal allegiances aside, it points to a problem that's all too familiar to University employees.

Neo-liberalism has brought budget cuts and corporate style governance that continually reinforces austerity in terms of staffing, supplies and pay in the daily lives of hourly employees. It causalizes the professoriate by increasing the prevalence of adjunct faculty; workers paid barely $7.00 an hour, teaching between 1 and 5 classes with no job security beyond the semester they are contracted for. All the while, allowing for massive opulence at the top. Administrative salaries nation wide approach the $500,000 per year mark (with notably higher exceptions). Usually these pay packages also include public funded mansions in the local ruling class neighborhood, 5 figure expense accounts, cars, yearly 6 to 7 figure bonus packages, and even private airplanes.

Here's hoping that U of M gets reminder that these folks are "hard working tax paying people" who "don't take shit from no one."

U of M Workers Standing Up for Standard of Living (originally at Fight Back! news)
By Brad Sigal

Minneapolis, MN - Workers at the University of Minnesota are fighting for a wage increase. On June 13, members of U of M AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) packed the room and testified at the University on Minnesota Board of Regents public hearing on the budget. They told the regents that union members’ salaries have lost about 5% of their value compared to inflation since 1994. Meanwhile, the university president’s salary has gained almost 80% in value above the rate of inflation, and all other high-end administrators have also gained salary increases well over the rate of inflation.

AFSCME members and supporters then rallied on June 27 outside the Board of Regents meeting where the budget was voted on. They demanded that the regents allocate money for a serious wage increase for clerical, technical and health care workers, to reverse the trend of low-paid workers falling behind inflation while top administrators continue to get larger and larger increases.

Members of AFSCME began contract negotiations in late May. Clerical, technical and health care workers at the university are negotiating together in a unified negotiating committee for the first time. This unity is also visible in the workplace, where hundreds of workers from the various unions have come together in a series of lunchtime meetings to hear the union’s presentation on wage disparity at the University and to organize to change the situation.

Sign the Iraq Moratorium Pledge!

2007-06-27T11:34:00.001-04:00

Sign the Pledge!

IRAQ MORATORIUM

September 21 and every Third Friday thereafter

Today the Iraq Moratorium project steps onto the public stage!

Over 60% of Americans want this war over--and they want it over yesterday. The political process is moving glacially, at best, to make that happen. It's got to stop! We've got to stop it!

The idea is simple. On September 21 and on every subsequent Third Friday, millions of Americans will break with their daily routine to take some concrete step to demand an end to the war and the return home of the troops.

The hallmark will be the wearing of black ribbons and armbands, in mourning for all of those who have died in this senseless adventure--Iraqis, American and other coalition troops, and others. All of us who want this war ended can decide what steps we will take, individually or with others, on September 21. Together, acting where we live, work and study, we will create a mighty shout so loud that the media won't be able to white it out and the politicians won't be able to ignore it.

The Iraq Moratorium is not an organization. It was initiated by a small group of anti-war activists from very diverse backgrounds. We see it as a project that will strengthen the work of existing anti-war groups. Even more important, the clear and simple message, the local focus and the variety of activities it can encompass will bring into motion great numbers who have not yet taken any action against the war.

It is a 21st century project: the reach of the Internet and the Web will help get word of the Moratorium to tens of millions. Please help by forwarding this message widely.

To learn more, to pledge to take part in the Iraq Moratorium, and to get involved, please go to the website

Iraq Moratorium Committee

June 19, 2007

Chris Hannah: Worst Canadian!!!

2007-05-31T08:01:00.000-04:00

Busy, busy, busy. On Saturday night I took time out to drive 4 hours and 15 minutes with my little brother to watch Propaghandi play. Needless to say, it was amazing. Finally getting to see a band you have loved since you were 15 - wow.

Anyways at the show it was brought to everyone's attention that the band's lead singer and lyrical mastermind Chris Hannah has actually made it into the Canadian popular history magazine The Beaver's 10 Worst Canadian poll. He currently appears to be ahead of both Celine Dion and Bryan Adams.

Naturally, my request is a simple one. Take five minutes, head to The Beaver's poll here, and vote for Chris Hannah 3 times (surveymonkey is kinda dumb, so if you have multiple IP-unique machines around you can maybe vote 15 times or something). Do your part!

"We're fuckin' AFSCME"

2007-03-20T14:05:00.001-04:00

A needed pick-me up on this most wonderful of aniversaries.

Sinn Féin Cheers Trade Union Leader

2007-03-12T09:07:00.000-04:00

Jack O'Connor, General President, SIFTU, speaking at the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, March 2, 2007

I would like to begin by congratulating Sinn on the progress it has made, and the courage of its leadership in working towards a just and lasting settlement of the issues that have divided the people of this island for so long.

In more ways than one we are living through a remarkable period in our history, one which is laden with potential for good but one in which danger lurks as well. We have unprecedented levels of prosperity but are also experiencing the most sustained assault on the gains made by working people here, and across Europe, since 1945.

This offensive is carried forward under the banner of market liberalisation, exploiting millions of vulnerable people who have no alternative but to work for half nothing. This assault is conducted with the assistance of a neo-liberal creed that depicts the world as locked in a battle between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys. The Good Guys are consumers and the Bad Guys are producers. The Good Guys are champions of free choice and competition, while the Bad Guys are protectors of selfish vested interests in this virtual universe. Naturally workers are among the Bad Guys.

We all know of course that this is a completely artificial division of humanity because workers and consumers are the same people. Like designers of video games, the neo-liberals have to erase certain realities to make this paradigm work. The most important of these is the inalienable right of every citizen in a democracy to a fair opportunity of experiencing a full, free and happy life.

Despite our prosperity and being spoilt for choice as consumers, this is becoming increasingly difficult. The reality is that many things people took for granted in less prosperous times such as occupational pensions, the 39 hour week, security of employment and being paid the rate for the job, are being systematically dismantled.

Now, in a world that confuses cheapness with value for money and wage cuts with competitiveness, we are witnessing a dramatic casualisation of jobs through bogus self-employment in some industries and the outsourcing of jobs in others to employment agencies who compete with each other in a relentless race to the bottom - driving down and undermining terms and conditions of employment.

Last week I saw a contract of employment in one of our premier industries, aviation, where a worker with an employment agency was paid the princely sum of ¤9.21 an hour. In return they were obliged to work a shift roster which had no regard whatsoever for any entitlement to rest, relaxation or participation in family life.

Indeed, if you look at CSO figures on trends in average pay across industries such as construction, hotels and catering, you will see they are only half the rates provided for in 'Towards 2016' and also substantially less than inflation. It is ironic that this is happening as we approach the centenary decade for the critical years in the founding of the modern Irish state, including the formation of the first of the unions that eventually gave birth to SIPTU, the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union. In fact it is exactly 100 years this week from the day when Jim Larkin addressed his first meeting of workers from the Belfast docks and events were set in train for the 1907 general strike in the city, which not alone united catholic and protestant workers, but picketers and policemen in a demand for better pay and conditions!

I am very conscious therefore of the significance this decade has for Sinn Fein and of your dedicated commitment to the aspiration of a free and independent Ireland. But I want to remind you of what Connolly wrote, not 100 years ago but over 110 years ago, 'The struggle for Irish freedom has two aspects; it is national and it is social. ... Nationalism without Socialism - without a reorganisation of society on the basis of a broader and more developed formŠ is only national recreancy'.

Present day patriots who violate the rights of ordinary working people are certainly recreants by Connolly's definition. For them the Tricolour is nothing more than a flag of convenience.

Along with the battle for independence in the political arena there is an equally important struggle underway in the workplace, the outcome of which will determine whether working people in this country, who constitute the vast majority, will have any say at all in determining the shape of the future. Otherwise it will be shaped exclusively by those whose only preoccupation is the accumulation of profit to the exclusion of every other social and human consideration. In their vision of the world everything should be decided by what happens in the supermarket and the stock exchange, rather than through the democracy of the ballot box.

It is an unequal battle in which those endowed with wealth and privilege enjoy enormous advantage, but I know I am speaking to people who are not overawed by long odds, and they are not as long as some would have you believe. Despite all the negative criticism from the right wing press there are actually more people in trade unions on this island now than there have ever been before, and this reflects a passion for justice and fair play that is deeply embedded in the history of our society.

It is this sense of justice and fair play that has seen Irish people stand up for the rights of migrant workers. As internationalists we have actively sought to recruit them and non-Irish nationals now comprise ten per cent of SIPTU. As you will recall from the Irish Ferries dispute we insisted on taking the issue of workers' rights to the top of the agenda in negotiations on a new national agreement and secured significant improvements in employment legislation, as well as better enforcement of existing regulations. Our whole policy in this area has been determined by the principle that every member of the workforce is entitled to the same rights, to be treated with dignity and respect in the workplace, irrespective of their country of origin.

I want to conclude by thanking the Ard Comhairle for the opportunity of speaking here today and to wish you every success with your conference. I look forward to the participation of Sinn Féin activists in the trade union movement, in encouraging people to organise in unions and to have the confidence to stand together in solidarity in the fight for a better future for all.

Repost: Take Five--Points Toward a Summation of the 1st Annual Blogging Against White Supremacy Day

2007-01-21T13:11:00.000-05:00

My good friend Jimmy Higgins reminded us that simply doing is never enough without summation of what was done. So I have reposted his thoughtful summation of the first Blogging Against White-Supremacy Day (to borrow from comrade Lauren). So for your reading pleasure:

Take Five--Points Toward a Summation of the 1st Annual Blogging Against White Supremacy Day

[Take Five. Every Friday, Fire on the Mountain picks a category and lists five cool things in it. It's up to you, dear reader, to add your own in the Comments section. Just click on the word "comments" at the bottom of the piece and you're off to the races.]

Okay, so this is kind of low road. I didn’t have a topic (like political James Brown tunes a few weeks ago) conveniently thrust before me by the world, and I wasn't having much luck casting about for ideas—five kinds of dental floss? five cool episodes of My Mother The Car?

At the same time I have been feeling a little unsettled that the first annual Blogging Against White Supremacy Day came and went without any summation. This is, I know, in keeping with the short shelf life of stuff on the Internet but I get old school about this sort of thing. When a project of some political importance is undertaken, there should be some summation. What follows is not that summation, but one guy’s ideas about what happened and how to look at it. Others should please chip in. (The most complete set of links to participating blogs is at Pottawatomie Creek, the blog where the original call went up.)

TAKE FIVE

1. Quantitatively, I count twelve or thirteen bloggers who put up something privilege–related between the 14 and the 17th. (A few who signed up to do it don’t seem to have actually posted at the time.) In addition there were a bunch of interesting comments, especially on the better-established blogs. While I knew most of those who participated, there were a couple of gratifying discoveries, and I trust others had that experience.

2. Most of the posts can be slotted (or forced) into a few broad groupings (leaving out Lauren’s inspired choice of an Audre Lorde poem and CelticFire’s graphic).

Historic documents: Haisanlu, LeftSpot and me

Reflections on Dr. King’s role and his holiday: Bolivariano Roja, the indefatigable LeftSpot, EightOneUnderRedStar

Aspects of white supremacy today: Yolanda (twice). Lefty Henry, John, Modern Pitung

Personal reflections: Jesse on hipness and white supremacy in Santa Cruz and Nelson H on having a White Citizens Council skeleton in the family closet.

[I personally found these last the most interesting and most thoughtful. They were also the most in the diary spirit which blogging still carries from its origins, a spirit which is more personal and less instrumental that most political blogging.]

3. Ya gotta organize. As Mao says, without a general call the broad masses cannot be mobilized. Nelson H issued such a call. But Mao goes on to call for going deeply into the work in a few places to make breakthroughs. As above, this isn’t how Teh Internets work in general, but we aren’t average netizens; we are, most of us, revolutionary socialists, and we know a few things about organizing which may be applicable in situations like this.

For example, uniting with the advanced to win over the intermediate. Two places where more effort, I would argue, would have been richly repaid occur to me immediately. One is Stan Goff’s interesting and well-trafficked Feral Scholar. Even more important, I would argue is the young feminist/womanist of color patch of the blogosphere. Folks like Yolanda and Zooey are steady blogging about white (and male) privilege and the intersectionality of oppressions, never mind a particular day, and coming up with some really interesting stuff.

4. Overall, I thought the first Day of Blogging Against White Supremacy went pretty good and I hope folks are primed to keep addressing these issues over the coming year. Keep your eyes open to develop links and ties with others you come across over the next 12 months who address these questions, so we can start the 2008 BAWS push with a cohort at least triple what we wound up with this time.

5. As I’ve been mentioning every chance I get, The Cost of Privilege: Taking on the System of White Supremacy and Racism, the fantastic new book by Chip Smith and a small research and writing team, will be out within weeks. Along with it will come a new website for the book, which promises to deliver some “value added” for folks who visit it. Right now, I’d like to ask each person who blogged on BAWS Day for permission to add a link to their contribution. If you say “yes,” it’ll spare me chasing you down one-on-one to solicit you.

(Okay, so 5 is not a point of summation. Sue me.)

Fighting to Lose What White Folks Have

2007-01-15T12:01:00.000-05:00

Today is recognized as a day of remembrance for Martin Luther King, Jr. This man's whole life, the life of his wife and family and the many twists and turn that the Black Liberation Movement (BLM) went through during the course of some thirteen years becomes "history." Branded for mass-consumption. Cleansed of dangerous politics. Reduced to trite snippets about peace and non-violence in the most ultra-personal of ways.

Dr. King was a complex human being, to be sure, full of infinitely greater depth and detail than any 45 minute television special with plenty of room for commercials can ever do justice. He was one of the greatest mass leaders the U.S. has ever known. He was on the right side when it came to the majority of society's pressing questions in his time. And yet he was often on what most of the readers of this blog ought to consider the wrong side of any number of disputes within the Black Liberation Movement.

Blogging on the anniversary of his birth, attempting to respond to my own general call that we as radicals, socialists, activists and Marxist-Leninists collectively take up issues of white supremacy as our topics for the day, I was thoroughly reminded of Dr. King's complexity. The initial post I had begun last week was much in the vein of what LeftSpot posted yesterday, entitled MLK, the Black Sanitation Workers Struggle in Memphis, and the Ongoing Struggle. I am a Tennessee public sector worker engaged in struggle to win the same rights that brought Dr. King to Memphis in 1968. A day after marching with striking sanitation workers, this trip would ultimately end in Dr. King's assassination. The T.V. specials will leave a large "gap" in King's life and politics that stretches from the 1964 March on Washington to King's death in 1968. They will only briefly mention his work to end the U.S. imperialist war in Vietnam and his work against institutional poverty in the U.S. These aspects of who Dr. King was are consistently excluded when his life is presented as "history." And with my personal connection with the trip that fatefully brought him to my home state of Tennessee, understanding and helping others to recognize this gap has always held special importance for me. But LeftSpot's piece is better written and better researched than what I had planned on posting, so on to plan B.

"Just Fighting to Keep What Little Bit They Had Left"
So although I took a couple of hundred words to introduce the King holiday and Dr. King's story as one of complexities, intentional "gaps" and struggle, this is not really a post about Dr. King. Instead it is one dedicated to him and to the work of those who made him what he was. History, as the Gang of Four lyric goes, is not made of great men. History is the aggregate of millions of lives, each filled with her or his own complexities, struggles and gaps. Together these lives form the narratives of nations, classes, peoples and families during certain historical periods. The story I want to tell is one concerning my own family, and the complexities, struggles and gaps I associate with my great-grandfather.

This past summer my wife and I were staying with one of my uncles. We were up playing cards and talking. The conversations had focused on aspects of family history me and my cousins did not know. Stories about my uncle who died when he was 16, drama between my grandmother and her sisters, and how my dad got kicked out and sent to live with my great-grandparents when he was in his mid-teens. When the subject of my great-grandparents came up, my partner posed the $10,000 question. Was it true, she asked, that my great-grandfather was in the greater Nashville White Citizens’ Council?

She may have felt emboldened by her new status our recent marriage had given her within my family, she may have just been a little drunk. Whatever the reason for her asking, her question (and the negative connotation so obviously associated with the way she asked it) stopped the conversation dead in its tracks. Well, at least momentarily. After the folks in the room had a second to catch their thoughts, and my cousin had begun trying to change the conversation my uncle went into a half-drunken tirade. He was shocked by her "crazy" question, my great-grandfather was a good man, “a man of his community.” (Crazy being the an adjective most women reading this will be all to familiar with being labled after asking blunt, truth seeking questions). He even accused her of participating in some great "liberal" conspiracy to make up so-called white hate groups and denied that the White Citizens’ Council even existed.

Ultimately, my uncle conceded that my great-grandfather's politics were atleast sympathetic to the White Citizens' Council, couching his admission within a thick layer of "he just did what was right for people of his race at the time" bullshit. As far as my unlce was concerned, the familial patriarch and other white folks at the time had simply beem "fighting to keep what little bit they had left."

We were to believe that my great-grandfather wasn't a racist bigot who made tons of money by evicting Black sharecroppers and then selling off land that had been part of his mother’s family’s plantation. He wasn’t a Klan sympathizer, even if his own class status demanded that he engage in more cultured forms of repression against Middle Tennessee's Civil Rights Movement. He was not to be remembered for having a banker friend deny my parents a car loan because my Catholic succubus of a mother had corrupted his grandson by living with him prior to being married. He wasn't the one who refused to attend my baptism because he did not attend papist churches. He was, according to my uncle, a good man.

Drawing Lessons
So why share such a story? My intention is certainly not to perpetuate the argument that racism is a personal evil that each of us must overcome on our own. Recent polling shows how bankrupt such notions are. I share it because where there are complexities there are lessons.

My great-grandfather was in several ways what my uncle tried to describe him as - a good man. He deeply cared for his family as best as he knew how; in time he even came to like my mother most among the women and men that his grandchildren married. He was a man of profound moral conviction, although the definitions he used in determining what was moral were truly horrible. Like his moral convictions, my great-grandfather was a deeply damaged man. He was unable to see humanity is others, and unable to really love others as a result. This is the deceit at the heart of what white privilege offers, the ability to be considered "a person" in our society at the cost of white folks' very humanity.

The reason I was able to make it through college with next to no debt is entirely a result of the money my parents inherited upon his death and the lessons about how to generate wealth he taught my father during the 4 years my dad lived with his grandparents. The field of Wealth Studies has produced mountains of research that shows how society distributes both wealth in terms of inheritance and the skills to develop and manage wealth. Studies like United for a Fair Economy's The Color Of Wealth show how white supremacy as a system shapes these phenomena.

And certainly the vigor with which my uncle felt he had to defend his grandfather's actions reeks of sort of response necessary whenever privilege is challenged. Systems of power and privilege are naturalized to such an extreme that an organization used by wealthy white men to conspire against supporters of the Civil Rights movement by denying them home and business loans, foreclosing on their debts, and cheating them out of wages seemed justified to my uncle. Attacking the economic welfare of a community engaged in struggle for its very survival is nothing more or less than "fighting to keep what little bit [white folks] had left."

Mao challenged us to seek out the general in the particular, and radical feminists have argued that we must see the personal as political for nearly as long. I share this story because more than any other personal experience that I can think of, this exchange between my partner, cousins, uncle and I illustrates several of the key theoretical aspects I have come to associate with the study and understanding of, as well as the struggle against white supremacy.

As the five second memorials to Dr. King are made on day-time talks shows, mid-day news casts and prime-time public service announcements, I will ponder my great-grandfather's life, with all his sins, complexities, failures and successes. And by knowing where my family comes from, I hope I can draw strength that sustains me in the on-going struggle I and other white people must wage in order to destroy this most horrible of systems. That will be my tribute to the life and struggle of Dr. King. That will be my homage to the millions of freedom fighters whose contributions gave us this holiday.

Blog Against White Supremacy, a General Call

2007-01-09T08:23:00.000-05:00

Even with my calendar sitting in its obligatory spot on the left corner of my desk, I can barely believe that we are already into the second week of January. In less than a week we will celebrate the Martin Luther King Holiday, one of the few "people's holidays" we have to celebrate in this country.

In the coming weeks I'm challenging myself to take on questions of white supremacy and white privilege as a central focus in all forthcoming posts. I extend this challenge to others in our corner of the blogosphere. I remember Villa Villekula's call for bloggers to make "classim" the topic en vogue this past Labor Day; and in this vein I propose a very specific form of the aforementioned challenge.

Let's take the MLK holiday as an opportunity to blog against white supremacy.

A broad topic indeed, but one that is so foundational to any other conversation we might have, whether we are talking about patriarchy, capitalism and class structure, popular culture. Plus many, many folks already do this daily. But the idea is a more coordinated effort to flex out collective muscles. If others agree with this idea, spread the call far and wide. Everyone has a solid 6 days to get a story worked out. At the very least transcribe a good theory piece and put together a decent intro. Get friends who don't blog involved. I'm always amazed at the shear number of folks on MySpace - get friends to post something there in the blog section or even as a bulletin. It doesn't matter, just lean on them to do it.

Drop a comment on this post if you are up for it, and I will start to keep a list on the side-bar along with a post early next Monday with a lists of blogs to follow that day. And another shout out to Villa Villekula, since she ultimately serves as my inspiration for this idea.

[White Supremacy] [MLK] [Martin Luther King] [holiday] [King holiday] [MLK Holiday] [racism] [MySpace] [anti-racist]

Arnold as America's Tommy Douglas ?

2007-01-08T17:12:00.000-05:00

I intentionally avoided the use of the cliché mixture of exclamation points and question marks in the title to the post, but it took some self-discipline to be sure. In California's newspaper from the San Francisco Chronicle to the LA Times and beyond in the so-called paper of record, the New York Times, the media is abuzz with Schwarzenegger's called for a state-wide single payer health insurance program that would cover every last Californian (up-to and including undocumented children - whether or not undocumented adults would be covered remains unclear to me).

Although the California Nurses Association did have a press release stating that their President Deborah Burger would be available for comment, while pointing out that the Governator already vetoed a bill that would have created just the sort of program he now claims to promote. Many have long pointed to the experience of our northern neighbors as tome from which lessons ought to be drawn in our own countries struggle for just healthcare. The life of Tommy Douglass offers some starting point when attempting to do so.

I certainly plan to follow this story in the coming weeks to see what sort of twists and turns it will inevitably take.

United Campus Workers - CWA local 3865's Holiday Banquet

2007-01-05T15:58:00.000-05:00

On December 19, 2006 United Campus Workers - Communications Workers of America (UCW-CWA) local 3865 had its annual Holiday Banquet and Employee Celebration. This year, the local had several cosponsors: East Tennessee Jobs with Justice, CWA local 3805 (at BellSouth) and that local’s retirees association, as well as the Newspaper Guild-CWA and Mailers-CWA locals in town. Additionally, as a result of some outside of the box thinking on the part of UCW leaders, CWA International President Larry Cohen was in town to give the key-note and strategize with UCW-CWA activists. Close to 300 people showed up; a good time was had by all.

The following snippet even made its way into the Thursday's CWA e-newsletter:

Knoxville Locals Strategize with CWA Leaders

December 22, 2006

In Knoxville, Tenn., about 300 CWA members from various sectors spent a lively evening talking union with CWA President Larry Cohen and other leaders at an "Employee Celebration" sponsored by four CWA locals on Dec. 18.

From bargaining rights to organizing to building the Stewards Army, CWAers talked about how to build union power and make gains for working families in this so-called "right to work" state with no public worker bargaining law.

Sponsoring the event were CWA Locals 3865, United Campus Workers, representing 460 employees at the University of Tennessee; Local 3805, representing telecom members; Local 33076, representing newspaper workers at the Knoxville News Sentinel, and Local 14351, representing mailers at the newspaper. Joining the crowd of 300 were CWA District 3 Vice President Noah Savant and D3 staff members, plus members of Jobs with Justice, the Teamsters, UNITE HERE and other unions.

The United Campus Workers local, which gained 160 new members this year, is organizing and mobilizing members to press the state legislature for gains and improvements.

The newspaper workers and mailers locals are fighting back against management's demand to eliminate cost of living increases and substitute an unfair merit pay system, and the telecom local is battling "force adjustments" and other assaults on jobs.

By building the Stewards Army and working to build our bargaining power, CWA can achieve our critical goals of quality jobs, health care, retirement security and bargaining rights, Cohen said.

Not bad at all for an organizing project that was suppose to fail in 2 years...

Nearest Book Tag from Elaina

2006-12-13T08:26:00.000-05:00

Elaina over at Trash Talks Back tagged me with a unique take on the whole blog-tagging phenomena. Here are the rules as laid out on 'Laina's blog: 1. Go to the nearest book in your reach and turn to page 123. 2. Go to the fifth sentence of the book. 3. Copy the next three sentences, then tag someone else.

Gregoire penned a pamphlet, Lettre au citoyens de couleur (Letter to the citizens of color), which was circulated throughout Saint Domingue and, many claimed, fomented the rebellion. Shortly after, as the French Revolution descended into the Terror, Gregoire played a key role in relations between Saint Domingue's revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture and the French government. Gregoire proposed the return of Catholic missionaries to the island; Toussaint, fearful that a threatened British invasion would result in the reenslavement of his followers, wrote Gregoire regularly for advice.

Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895 From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass, Volume 2 (I work in a library, what'd you expect. It was either that or the Uniform Building Code, Volume 3)

Tagged: Jimmy Higgins, Modern Pitung, and Left Spot.

Repost: 3000 Dead by Christmas? Help People Take a Stand

2006-12-12T08:40:00.000-05:00

I'm going to follow Sankofa Meets the Future author Ajamu's lead and repost an article from Jimmy Higgins Fire on the Mountain blog. Enjoy.

In the first week of December, 31 US troops died in Iraq, bringing the total to around 2,920. At the current rate, the 3,000 death will be reported sometime between Christmas and New Year's Eve. If not, it will happen in January for a certainty.

Suddenly the US death toll will be back on the front page and back on the evening news, however briefly, fueling the deep and growing anti-war sentiment among the people of this country. The Associated Press reported December 8 that its latest poll shows 71% of the country disapproving of Bush's handling of Iraq and 60% in favor of getting the troops out within six months!

The anti-war movement must develop and hone ways of tapping and harnessing this sentiment. Bush refuses point blank to listen to anyone but his "gut." The new Democratic majority in Congress, far from providing the leadership people elected them to give, shows nary a sign of fighting for an immediate end to the occupation.

That's the point of this post: armbands or pin-on ribbons, black for mourning with the number 3000 in white, will be a powerful statement of sorrow and of protest in the days after that grim milestone is reached.

If activists make these in the coming weeks, not just for their own use, but in quantity to distribute to everyday folks--in shopping districts, on campuses, in front of government buildings, at busy mass transit stops, wherever there are people in motion--many will be moved to have an armband or ribbon pinned on them. As they go about their daily routines, they will bear silent witness to the anger so many feel.

Across this country, small local groups have stood up bravely for the last four years to oppose the war, holding weekly vigils, showing anti-war films in living rooms, firehouses and church basements, writing letters to the editor, lobbying elected officials, supporting anti-war candidates. Now is a good time for them to expand that work among their neighbors, co-workers, fellow students.

Making and handing out ribbons or armbands to mourn the 3000th death is a model for the kind of outreach work that needs doing. Many who agree with us will never carry a picket sign, let alone get on a bus to DC or San Francisco. The activists among us need to develop activities they can engage in with a low threshold of entry, and often that small first step--voting in a local referendum around the war, signing a postcard to a Congressman, or wearing a black ribbon--will help folks think about themselves and their responsibility to help end the occupation in a different way.

If big coalitions and groups like United For Peace and Justice, US Labor Against the War and Peace Action, progressive Internet-based forces like MoveOn.org and others get behind this push in coming days, the impact could be substantial.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome.

Scissors PSA

2006-12-05T11:27:00.000-05:00

I am starting to worry that US educators may have stop teaching children how to properly hand someone scissors in Kindergarten. My job forces me to interact with college-aged women and men, and out of the 3 or 4 dozen times I have handed students scissors this year not ONCE have they been given back to me handle-side-first. I'm only in my early-mid 20s, and I vividly remember being scolded for not employing proper scissor handling techniques!

Loyalties

2006-12-04T15:46:00.000-05:00

John beat me in congratulating Hugo Chavez for his sizable lead in voting returns for the Venezuelan presidential race (rougly 2 to 1) with the timely usage of what might just be the most fun chant I know of - "¡Uh, ah, Chavez no se va!"

US media coverage of the election is as unbiased as anyone would expect. Maintaining high levels of journalistic integrety, CNN lead their story with an apt describtion of Chavez as the "anti-American socialist Hugo Chavez." Jingoistic yellow journalism at its finest.

To quote Anti-Flag, "Remember, in times of conflict all for-profit media repeats the ruling party's information. Therefore all for-profit media becomes state-run."

[2006 Elections] [Venezuela] [Hugo Chavez] [the devil] [socialism] [media bias] [CNN] ["Communist News Network"]

When it rains...

2006-12-01T14:51:00.000-05:00

Another new-ish blog of note has got to be Sankofa Meets the Future. Adding two new links under the Compañer@s // Other Blogs heading in one day, I'm euphoric!

New blog on the scene

2006-12-01T14:00:00.000-05:00

We have a new edition to the M-L corner of the blogosphere. Comradely greetings are extended to Jimmy Higgins over at Fire on the Mountain. Nice literary reference for the blog's title and everything. Although I cannot lay claim to having read the book (if anyone wants to send me a copy for a christmas present you'll find no complaints on my end), based on what I understand of the book's premise I think that this blog will have a special place amongst my favorites.

New FRSO/OSCL Statement: Reflections on the November Elections

2006-11-28T13:41:00.002-05:00

by National Executive Committee
Wednesday, 22 November 2006

Though many activists on the Left, including those who want nothing to do with the Democratic Party, were thrilled that the Republicans were trounced on November 7th, it is critical that we think through the implications of what unfolded.

The election results clearly demonstrate fury with the Bush administration's policies on Iraq, but they also reflect (at least according to the polls) disgust with Republican corruption. According to a CNN exit poll on Election Day, 57% of voters disapprove of the war in Iraq and a Newsweek poll showed that 53% of Americans want impeachment to be on the agenda.

Both of these tendencies are something upon which progressive and Left forces can build. It is also interesting to note that more than 1/3 of the electorate saw themselves as explicitly voting against President Bush.

Clearly there is an indication of some cracks in the strong hold of the right wing. An interesting development is the growing divide between the Christian Right and the Republicans. Top Republican strategists are now calling their grassroots religious base “nuts”, and as a result much of the grassroots Right simply didn’t show up at the polls. Following the losses in Congress, many Christian Right leaders are moving away from the Republican Party and are looking at a base-building non-partisan approach. This could indicate a rupture in the right wing of the ruling class in the future.

While the Republicans largely lost, the Democrats, to a great extent, won by default. In other words, they did not win because they had a coherent, alternative program particularly but not limited to the Iraq War. Yet the growing anti-war/anti-corruption sentiment among the people was channeled through the Democrats. The 'mandate' of the Democrats can come undone, fairly easily as a matter of fact.

We do not wish to look a gift horse in the mouth, so to speak, but there are immense dangers and possibilities in the current moment. The greatest danger is that of demobilization. One need only think back to the Clinton years and the manner in which his presidency effectively demobilized social movements, as well as liberal and progressive forces generally. The fear of criticizing Clinton because it might fuel the Republicans (at least that is the way that the rhetoric went) led to nearly complete silence while welfare was repealed, the anti-terrorism act was passed, more people were incarcerated in the U.S. than under any president, Yugoslavia was bombed, Iraq was being strangled...and the list could go on and on.

It is fairly clear, that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have a strategy for pullout from Iraq. This—plus the fact that the Democrats represent ruling-class interests, simply different bourgeois interests—will cause them to drag the war out. Most likely the Democrats will not pursue the goal of pullout and a call for the impeachment of Bush, but rather maintain a “safe” position and a bi-partisan relationship with the Republicans in Congress if left to their own devices. As always, “power concedes nothing without a demand.” Given the popular support and the “mandate” to end the war, the Left can play a strategic role in advancing the role of organizers beyond elections, escalating tactics and ultimately forcing the issue to an immediate end to the war.

At this moment we would suggest three basic points:

1. The need for strong social movement mobilization: Including but not limited to the anti-war movement, social movements need to advance challenges and put forward demands. United For Peace & Justice, as we understand, is planning on a major mobilization for January 2007 and this is precisely what must be done. In addition, we must consider upping the ante and escalating tactics focused on Congress and the Bush administration. The Left should propose its own demands for pullout including reparations, front ending what both the Democrats and Republicans refuse to talk about in concrete terms.

In addition, ecological consciousness, largely as a result of environmental and environmental justice movements is compelling millions to recognize the dangers to the great planet Earth that are unfolding. Katrina should remain our watch-word for the near genocidal treatment of the survivors and evacuees, as well as the domestic display of neo-liberalism at its swinest. We must keep the pressure on the politicians of both parties and not accept rhetoric and fine words in the place of deeds.

2. We need an organized force in the electoral arena that can challenge the Republicans and conservative Democrats: We do not believe that the material conditions exist at present to form a 3rd electoral party, but we do believe that at the local and national level there is a need for an electoral force(s) to advance a progressive agenda; an electoral force grounded among working people, oppressed nationalities, queers, and women and prepared to run candidates for office on the basis of its ties to progressive social movements. Noting that, initiatives against abortion and gay marriage continue to be used to mobilize right wing bases. These initiatives not only fuel homophobia and sexism, but they are a tool used to divide the working class, and therefore must be countered. Such a force needs to think in terms of promoting a progressive alternative at the level of program and action.

3. The Left needs greater coherence: Particularly at times like these when people are looking for answers, the moment is here to put on the table the major structural reforms that are necessary to meet the immediate and long-term material needs of the mass of people. Putting these proposals forward means, in fact, that we have to also be willing to speak to the need to move beyond capitalism. Both the global and domestic mess of capitalism demonstrates that it has no answers for the bulk of humanity. The Democrats and Republicans, as they fumble through one crisis after another, offer little in the political realm. We on the Left must seize the moment and build on the excitement that is present and the deep desire for substantive change. In order to position ourselves for the future, we should work together to strengthen Left theory, program, strategy and revolutionary organization. No time to hope for change; time to bring about change through struggle and organization!

[2006 Elections] [demobilization] [Democrats] [Republicans] [FRSO/OSCL]

¡Harvey Milk, presente!

2006-11-28T08:54:00.001-05:00

My first Wikipedia article...

2006-11-22T15:47:00.000-05:00

Since I know for a fact that several people who read this blog are either better writers than I am, or are at least more knowledgable about STORM's history, politics and work, consider this a call to friends to help improve a somewhat shitty Wikipedia entry (which is none-the-less superior to non-existant one). Namely, if you know how to index Wikipedia entries please do so.
Peace,
Nelson H.

Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM)

Formed by young activists in September 1994, Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement(STORM) was a revolutionary cadre organization based in the Bay Area. During its existence STORM's membership was always more than 60 percent women and 75 percent people of color, and most of STORM's membership had never previously been in revolutionary organizations. STORM officially dissolved in December 2002.

A collective summation entitled Reclaiming Revolution: History, Summation, and Lessons from the Work of Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM) was written by former STORM cadre, collectively endorsed by a majority of the organization's former membership and published in Spring 2004.

"Sisters at the Center"

Throughout its history, STROM was committed to maintaining itself as a majority women, majority people of color organization. This commitment certainly extended to the areas of mass work in which STORM members collectively worked. Growing out of theoretical frameworks inherited from revolutionary, third wave and Black feminisms members of STORM developed the "Sisters at the Center" slogan early on in their organization's history. Application of this slogan meant a conscious emphasis to keep women of color and working class women at the center of the organizations analysis, program and practice.

External links

Reclaiming Revolution: History, Summation, and Lessons from the Work of Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM) - STORM's Spring 2004 Self Critical Summation.

Back in the Early 1990s - An article written by Elizabeth Martinez for Z Magazine

People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER)

[STORM] [Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement] [cadre] [Revolutionary Organizations] [US Left]

I never thought he was funny anyways.

2006-11-20T11:47:00.000-05:00

Disclaimer: Michael Richards said some racist shit, I reprint what he said with real words with one exception. This isn't out of any fear of the word; I just don't see the need for me, as a white person (non-Black person generally, actually) to use it while making the below points.

Comedic hack Michael Richards (best known as Cramer on Seinfeld) resorted to the use of racial hate-speech during a show Friday night at Laugh Factory in Los Angles after being interrupted by an unnamed number of "loud" black people. The former co-star of yet another TV sitcom with an all-white cast set in a fictional all-white New York paradise had choice words for the African Americans in the audience. Some gems from the routine:

"Shut up! Fifty years ago we'd have you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass."

"You can talk, you can talk, you're brave now motherfucker. Throw his ass out. He's a n----r!"

"N----r! N----r! N----r!"

As shocking as the statements are, the fact that the above was uttered by a white stand-up comedian is far from surprising. Racism, even the over the top, expletive slinging kind that Richards engaged in is anything but new when it comes to mainstream comedy. It's beyond even being par for the course, it's a fundamental, a constant. Flip on Comedy Central any hour of the day and you will be greeted with bigoted jokes about immigrants, women, gays and oppressed nationality folks. The Laugh Factory certainly wasn't deterred; they had him back on-stage not even 24 hours later.

If anyone knows of a good piece on the role played by hegemonic ideas in comedy, I would love to read it. My general sense is that humor, unlike most other forms of culture, is much more difficult to use in constructing counter-hegemonic thought. Comedy can certainly take aim at power, and at points this is help enough in spurring on an already developing crisis of legitimacy. But I have real doubts of comedy's ability to surpass the point when ridicule and satire must be replaced with the purposeful introduction of new counter-hegemonic ideas. The role of this system's "common-sense" is just too great for the medium to surpass. All that's to say I hope that this incident can be seen for what it is - one note in the overall composition - instead of the "woeful exception" that systems of white-supremacist capitalism and patriarchy love so much.

On a somewhat contradictory note (given my emphasis on systems of oppression as opposed to individualistic interpretations of reality), here's to hoping that Mr. Richards is the oh-so-unfortunate victim of a random act of "kindness."

[Michael Richards] [racism] [white supremacy][comedy] [Laugh Factory] [hegemony] [counter hegemonic thought]

And so it begins

2006-11-14T15:18:00.000-05:00

So it's been a month since this blog was updated. It has been a busy time for certain, but I'm feeling some much-needed new found energy. I hope that this will translate into more frequent posts. Right now I'm aiming for a minimum of one per week.

LeftSpot made a request that I provide some analysis of the controversial Tennessee Senate race. I still have some homework to do before I'm really ready to weigh in on the particulars of the elections here in the state.

Despite my lack of preparedness for offering analysis on the elections, be it locally or in the broader national context, the Democrats seem prepared to give anti-war end of their electoral base (which by all accounts appears to be its overwhelming majority) an early "fuck you." Today, Harry Reid and company made it clear that they have no plans of actually slowing down the Bush agenda vis-à-vis Iraq. Using the rhetorical shield of "get[ting] rid of Rumsfeld" they have signed on to confirm the war criminal and Iran-Contra participant Robert Gates.

I am interested in hearing thoughts from other folks about how we on the anti-capitalist left should react to the Senate Dems first volley in what I expect to be an on-going campaign of selling-out last Tuesday's referendum on the country's war against Iraq. Do we hold-off talking about this stuff for now to avoid being labeled shrills and wack-jobs? Or do we press them from the get-go?

My sense is to agitate the hell out of the advanced, but let things slide with the intermediate unless asked directly. Give the Dems a few months, and then work like hell to exploit the mass feelings of betrayal and disillusionment.

Coup in Boliva?!

2006-10-14T23:10:00.000-04:00

I first head about this earlier today. Does anyone else know more?!

Coup d'etat in Bolivia planned for Wednesday, October 11, 2006
By Heinz Dieterich in La Paz, Bolivia.

Translated by John Manning
Oct 11, 2006, 15:55

High level government sources requesting anonymity have revealed that the first coup d´etat against the government of democratically elected President Evo Morales is under way. Wednesday, October 11, is the crucial date. Driving forces are police officers and the Air Force. The army is divided. Chilean military officers, at the rank of generals, are participating with the conspirators.

1. Looking for Pinochets

A few weeks ago, officers of the Bolivian police approached generals of the Armed Forces of Bolivia (FAB) investigating their disposition for organizing a coup d' etat of both forces. One of the key military officers for the success of the coup refused to participate, and notified the President. The preparations are now proceeding without him. And the radio broadcasts continue which eulogize the "patriotic army which killed Che Guevara and the subversives".

The military never undertakes a coup in a social vacuum, my friend General Alberto Mueller Rojas, today a member of the Presidential General Staff of Hugo Chavez, told me seven years ago. It is this logic which can be seen developing at present in Bolivia. An extensive conspirational network, composed of different social and state forces is accelerating its preparations, to finish the government of President Evo Morales by force.

2. The institutional conspirators

The prefects (governors) of the separatist and energy states, Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz de la Sierra and Tarija, are promoting the formation of the so-called "Civil Committees", which are the spear points of visible political subversion. The prefects, like the civil committes have entered into frank rebellion against the constitutional government of Evo Morales, in declaring that they "will not respect the Political Constitution of the State emerging from the Constituent Assembly if it is not approved in all its articles by two thirds of the votes of the constituents”. They warn that they will advance "departmental autonomies" if this condition of theirs is not complied with.

They can certainly count on the support of the National Supreme Court of Justice - as reactionary and corrupt as its bourgeois counterparts in the rest of the world - that will provide the conspirators with the apology for the planned overthrow of the government.

On the recent declaration of the Constituent Assembly that it considered itself as "original, plenipotential and functional", that is, not restricted in its constitution of the new State by the existing norms, the magistrates sustained the position of the prefects. They dictated that according to constitutional law, the power of this Constituent Assembly is not "original-foundational", but "derivative-reformist" and therefore, subject to the existing legislation which requires a two thirds vote on all articles.

3. The social conspiracy

The "civil committees" count on the financing of employer sectors and the collaboration of high officials of the police, colonels, for example. Their actions are inflated and promoted by the private media of communication, often with the patterns of fascist propaganda that have been used against President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Some of the most important media are in the hands of capitalist magnates with big agricultural investments in the separatist provinces and who fear the land reform of the government.

The associations of heads of families, which are generally reactionary and controlled by the Church, in Latin America, in alliance with educational sectors of private colleges and universities promote strikes, blockades and demonstrations against the government. Enterprises of the energy-retail market are generating shortages of diesel fuel and gasoline, supplying the black markets in the higher priced neighboring countries, producing resentment among the population.

4. The Chilean model

The same as in Chile during Salvador Allende, the transport sector has been assigned the function of breaking the economy and the public peace with a national stoppage, called for next Wednesday, with the intention of bringing all the anti-government sectors to join together in a great destabilizing front. Referring explicitly to the subversive strike of Chilean transporters against Salvador Allende, (1972), financed by the CIA, Evo Morales last week characterized the planned entrepreneurial transport strike as an "ideological" strike: "It is the struggle for power", said the popular leader, and made clear what is at stake: "Either the gamonal (elite) groups, or the people's movements".

The Bolivian President´s comment is right on target, as show the Church Committee documents (1976) and the recently published (February, 2006) memoirs of the military leader of the fascist Chilean organization "Patria y Libertad", Roberto Thieme, in which he details how his organization, the Chilean Navy and the transport sector cooperated subversively in order to destroy the legitimate Allende government.

5. The political costs of the Huanuni massacre

The armed confrontation between cooperativist and salaried miners in Huanuni, Department of Oruro, which has left some fifteen dead and more than a hundred wounded has pushed the Bolivian Labor Central (COB) and the Regional Labor Union (COR) in El Alto, which historically have been dissociated with Evo Morales and his peasant-popular MAS-movement, towards a more confrontational position against the government.

The conflict in Huanuni is of economic origin. It was brought about by the intent of some four thousand cooperative miners organized in the FENCOMIN, that is the social base of the Minister of Mines Walter Villarroel, to take over exploitation of the richest tin mine of Bolivia, Posokoni, expelling in a violent manner some thousand salaried miners of the State enterprise COMIBOL.

Although the state had knowledge of the conflict and tried more than a dozen times to deactivate the “social time bomb”, it was taken by surprise by the violent operation. Faced with the dilemma of killing miners with the Armed Forces, on one hand, and of being accused of "negligence” and “absence of the State" on the other, 24 hours went by which were converted into a propaganda and political gold mine by the Right. This was used to the maximum with their hegemony of the media and, very much like the media manipulation during the days of the coup in Venezuela (2002), has been brought to bear incessantly on the government.

6. The international Falange

In Bolivia the United States manual of antidemocratic subversion is being followed meticulously. The factional machine is lubricated with money, propaganda experts and policy programming by the US governent, which since September 11, 2001, had put Evo Morales on its list of possible terrorists which the security forces of the U.S use to track down security risks.

The accomplices in the European Union and the energy transnationals fill out the subversive falange. "BP Tony", British Prime Minister and political agent of British Petroleum, has suggested to the energy enterprises of the United Kingdom not to invest in Bolivia's gas.

This is the policy which Petrobas, the Brazilian-International transnational guided by Wall Street and the City in London, practices and whose predatory and neocolonial attitude toward Bolivia and the other Latin American countries makes the behavior of other Western transnationals look pale: A neocolonial policy which requires urgently the organization of a boycott of all its products in all Latin America to break its chauvinistic technocracy, the same as that of PDVSA before the Bolivarian government.

7. Stop the coup d´etat in Bolivia

They all want to remove the "Indian" Evo, who disturbs business, the same as the “Negro" Chávez, in Venezuela. For Chavez, after the failure of the military coup, the medium of "removal" selected is poison or accident. In Bolivia, the elite and its imperial godfathers coincide in that a military coup d' etat could be the adequate medium. Only that a military coup, as friend Mueller Rojas says, can not be done in a social vacuum. What we are seeing in Bolivia is the intent of the world Right to fill the vacuum.

The exit of a military coup, as much as a bank assault, depends on the moment of surprise. That moment has been taken away from the conspirators. The world wide discussion of their plot makes it impossible for them to proceed as planned.

Thus, for now, they have been defeated. But, as in Chile, they will come back with a vengeance, if the government doesn't crush their conspiracy completely.

Today, more than ever, The Bolivarian Revolution needs our world solidarity.

© Copyright 2006 by AxisofLogic.com
(This report is an abbreviated version of the one published in Spanish elsewhere on the Internet.)

URGENT SOLIDARITY CALL FOR OAXACA

2006-10-04T08:21:00.000-04:00

Dear friends,
As most of you know, Oaxaca is experiencing difficult times. The information that is out on the national and international news is generally far from reality. I know you all dont believe everything you read...please don´t in this case. Oaxacans are trying to end years and years of repression and horrid human rights violations. I just spoke to friends in Oaxaca and they have asked that we all call or e-mail the Mexican Consulate and demand a peaceful solution.

The Federales ARE camped out around the outskirts of town. Town is tense. The protests have been non violent, but the supporters and paid thugs of the dictator, Ulyses Ruiz, have used night time raids, shootings etc upon the protesters. The following link is fairly accurate in it´s description of what is happening.http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20060930085453418

PLEASE read the following, and if you are willing to send an email or call your nearest Mexican Consulate, it will help tremendously. Pass this on to your friends who might be willing to give a few minutes of their time, as well.
Thank you so much.

URGENT SOLIDARITY CALL FOR OAXACA

At the federal level in Mexico, the current discourse signals an imminent arrival of Federal Police Forces in Oaxaca. The feds claim that, if federal forces are sent to Oaxaca, they will only maintain a presence on the outskirts of the city, to "ensure civilian safety." However, it is widely known that local PRI-sympathizing groups can be mobilized to provoke a confrontation with the sectors of civil society partiapting in the popular movement, which would justify the entrance of the federal police.

If the federal police enter Oaxaca, it will be a blood bath...

Please call or send faxes and emails to President Fox and to Secretary of Interior Affairs, Carlos Abascal, demanding the immediate withdrawal of threats to send police forces into Oaxaca, and the immediate resignation of Oaxacan governor, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. Write in Spanish. Write in English. Just write, or call, or both.

Get down to your local Mexican consulate or embassy. Make a lot of noise. Spend the night out front if you have to.

President Vicente Fox:
Email: vicente.fox.quesadda [at] presidencia.gob.mx
Fax: 011-52-55-52-77-23-76
Phone: 011-52-55-27-89-11-00

Sec. of Internal Affairs, Carlos Abascal
Tel: 011-52-55-50-93-34-00

Email: cabascal [at] segob.gob.mx

[Mexico] [Oaxaca] [Oaxaca Teachers] [Strike] [Dual Power] [Potential Massacre] [Solidarity] [Social Movements] [AMLO] [Andrés Manuel López Obrador]

A Politics of Nothingness: "Trade-unionists" and Phil Bredesen

2006-10-03T21:26:00.000-04:00

As the November elections approach, electoral politics, especially Democratic Party Politics asserts itself rather strongly in left circles. One helpful way to discuss which candidates to vote for, or more often against is to compare platforms and political track-records. Nothing special about that, folks from every political tendency do it. So to better inform potential voters out there, here's one such scorecard:

Workers Comp Benefit: Changes administrative rules to force workers to non-binding arbitration with employer prior to involving the courts. Cut the "multiplier" nearly in half - meaning that were you to lose a hand, thumb, finger, leg, arm, foot, etc. the amount of money you receive is roughly half of what it was prior to the "reforms." Used bought-off former State-Fed (AFL-CIO) President as axe-man for the whole thing.

State Medicare: Cut state Medicare program with no alternative in place, depriving thousands of state residents from their only health insurance ultimately resulting in hundreds if not thousands of deaths. Pushed through a cobbled-together cluster of bullshit stop-gap measures calling them a successful program.

Immigration: Further criminalized immigrant workers, promptly sending over-deployed National Guard troops to defend "the border," bragging about both in campaign commercials.

Continued One-sided Class Warfare Via the State's Tax-System: Forced through massive cuts in social services to "prove that we can balance our budgets without a state income tax," while working to kill legislation that would cut the nearly 10 percent sales-tax on food.

Support for Company Unions and Labor Aristocracy: Gave tens of millions in TennCare savings blood-money to the state employee's company-union. The only union cause he is known to have championed was a wage dispute between the Carpenters and the Department of Energy - and at a time when the Carpenters were actively bashing the immigrants rights movement.

Gave Higher Education Workers Raise "Left-overs": While giving the company union for state-agency employees a fully funded 3 percent raise and $21.1 million to address pay compression, he provided NO funding in his budget for state higher education workers, despite the fact that over 40 percent of the hourly higher education workers currently make poverty level wages.

LGBTQ Rights, the Marriage Question: Publicly promises to vote for and encourages supporters to vote for fascist, anti-LGBTQ, anti-people Constitutional Amendment on November ballot

And this agent of the employing class is up by 30 points in the recent polls. You might think that the man being described is a Republican, but all these great deeds were carried out by the Democratic Governor of Tennessee, Phil Bredesen. If ever there was a governor's race that deserved an election boycott, or at least an abstention on the part of labor when endorsement time rolled around, this is it. But did the above list give the State-Fed even a moment of pause? Did the litany of this bastard's evil, anti-worker policies provoke some debate in the Knoxville-Oak Ridge CLC? Were these issues even discussed, mentioned, footnoted, alluded to? Not a chance in hell. Yellow-dog to their core, craft-unionists and labor aristocrats gave this champion of our class enemy sounding endorsements; they even handed them out early!

Yesterday, members of my union the United Campus Workers - Communications Workers of America local 3865 turned out at the first debate between Bredesen and his far distant opponent. We were there to hand out a flyer asking for the Governor to include funding for a real, cost of living raise for all workers at state-sponsored higher education institutions in his next budget. Next budget...he's not going to have one of those before the November election. What's the implication? If you asked me, the flyer operates from the assumption that he's gonna win. In fact, this is beyond question.

Did the flyer advocate for his opponent? Nope. Did it call him a lying, blood-sucking scum-bag? Nope. Did it call him a murderer, maimer of working women and men, health care executive parasite? Nope. No call for class revolt in our workplaces, schools and streets. No calls for sit-ins at the Capital, or picket-lines at his residence.

It simply told the truth. The truth that a plurality, a near-fucking-majority of us higher education workers make poverty level wages. It demanded fairness. No more two-tier raises where some well paid state agency employees see 7+ percent raises while we struggle to by bread and milk with 2 percent or $600 raise, whichever is greater. No more "merit" increases at the expense of across the board raises, policy decisions that translate to many university lecturers and adjunct faculty receiving criminally low raises of $250-$400 in a year when the increase in the Consumer Price Index was 4.2 percent.

Our members were met with jeers, shouts, taunts and threats. Not from Bredesen's staff. Not from nameless Democratic Party hacks. But from so-called local "trade-unionists," namely members of the Carpenters and Laborers. The most right-wing, anti-immigrant members of the remaining craft union labor aristocracy. Among the most vicious of the attackers was one Harold Woods, the lesser (his father, Harold Woods, and his mother have both been main-stayers in the EastTN craft-union movement for decades). This blow-hard sits on the Knoxville-Oak Ridge CLC's Executive Council, a position which apperently gives him the power to tell other union workers to stand-down with any criticism of their CEO (the Governor serves as Chair of the UT Board of Trustees).

These are the instances that in aggregate form create politics of nothingness that our trade-union "movement" clings to. Phil Bredesen isn't a John Kerry that needs us to sell part of our souls to get him elected. He's polling at 60 percent of likely voters with nearly 20 percent undecieded and his opponent barely topping 22 percent! Any work to convince union members in this state that they should, let alone need to vote for him is out-and-out deception. It feeds our members the worse kind of misinformation, buttressing the worse kind of "faith-based politics."

Phil Bredesen, Nail Him UP!

[Democratic Party] [Phil Bredesen] [Labor Movement] [Carpenters] [TennCare] [Workers Comp] [Jim Bryson] [Harold Woods] [Immigration] [Elections] [Living Wage] [Income Tax] [Sales Tax] [Central Labor Councils] [Knoxville] [Tennessee]

Republicans Pick Twin Cities for 2008 Convention

2006-09-27T17:16:00.000-04:00

I know that several readers of this blog call Minnesota home. Well heads up folks. You have just under two years to muster the forces needed for kicking some GOP ass.

[Republican Party] [GOP] [Twin Cities] [Minnesota ]

Too Important Not to Note

2006-09-09T12:08:00.000-04:00

Although my trade union work is kicking my ass right now, I felt that the following two events were too important to pass up mentioning. Firstly, today marks the 35th anniversary of the first day of the Attica Prision uprising. I'll post a more substantive piece later in the week to commeorate the 29 heroes who were murdered when the pigs retook the prision 4 days later.

Secondly, today is the 30th anniversary of Chairman Mao Tse-tung's death. Also, was I the only one who didn't know that Mike Tyson has a Mao tattoo?

[Mike Tyson] [Attica Prision] [Mao Tse-Tung] [Communist Party of China] [Tattoo]

Single Spark Collective, New U.S. Maoist Organization, Published Organizational Documents

2006-09-07T14:20:00.000-04:00

About a month ago I came across a link for the Single Spark Collective on LeftSpot's blog. Since then I've been waiting with some level of enthusasism for them to post unity documents or some sort of basic political statement. They did one better, and posted one of each. So for your reading pleasure: What We Beleive Statement (basic points of unity) and the Basic Political Statement of the Single Spark Collective.

On defining the vision for an oppressed peoples' movement

2006-09-04T23:52:00.000-04:00

You might think that a Labor Day post would be a no-brainer for a rank and file trade union activist. Well it wasn't. So instead of something new and insightful I'll stick to echoing views already made by minds far greater than my own.

We need a working people's movement with a real political vision, this is obvious. In a fundamental way this vision must start from the point of recognition that the rule of an employing class is the enemey. It's not just bad bosses or those corporations "still run by the 1950s Organization Man." Our vision must recognize that struggles against patriarchy and white-supremacist national oppression are not supplementary, they are leading fronts in the great narrative of human liberation (and yes, it has best to recognize that there are still great narratives).

This political vision must have the creation of an oppressed peoples' movement as its primary goal. Essentially such a movement must be one of labor and its coalition partners. But here's the rub, those of us who have currently defined "labor" have got a number of things all ass-backwards. We don't need a narrow trade union movement any more than we need a return to economic relations that accompanied the days when +30 percent union density meant millions of white patriarchs in AFL-CIO bargaining units enjoying all the benefits of "cheap bear and overtime."

We also need workers' centers, community coalitions and proletarian control of school boards. We need spaces that advance the leadership of working class people of color while placing "sisters at the center." We need a real labor movement whose vision is defined by folks who don't just look like me.

The New SDS: Somewhere Between Moderate Disinterest and Fuck "the Possibilities"

2006-09-01T09:20:00.000-04:00

Disclaimer: What follows is an articulation of a singular rather than collective position. I don't pretend to speak for anyone else and nor am I articulating the line of any organization. That said, my views have been largely shaped by a number of friends and comrades, so where props should be due consider them given. By the same token, where mistakes (factual, logical or political) occur, they are my own. Finally, this is NOT my primary area of political work. So if you disagree, flame away but don't expect swift responses to any criticisms or disagreements.

Introduction: Several folks around our ML corner of the blogosphere have taken up discussing the reemergence of SDS as a force in the predominantly white student movement. Comments on a post from back in February recently saw a major revival in the lead-up to and following the group's "founding" convention over at the burningman's Red Flags blog. FRSO/Fight Back! supporter ComradeZero quickly posted a must read report of his first-hand impressions of the conference. Just this past Sunday El Camino posted a write-up from FRSO/OSCL's webmaster Eric Odell containing his own take on the group, its founding convention and its "possibilities."

As many have noted, I've been kinda out of touch lately when it comes to regular blog posting. No apologies, though. Life and current political work have commanded the bulk of my attention. But as a former student activist who worked in and has continued to relate to one sector of the predominately white student movement for over half a decade, I wanted to throw my 2 cents into the mix.

Since the goal of this post is less about winning-over current SDS boosters within our corner of the US left, and more about making an early attempt at a sharper articulation of a position that I know other reds out there share, I'm going to cut to the chase. The current reinvention of SDS suffers from many, if not most of the worst traits of the primarily white student movement, and in light of this, we should abandon this talk of SDS's supposed "possibilities" in favor of a more balanced and materialist approach to work with and within this dingy reincarnation of a once great student organization. This seems expressly true since there is no shortage of already existing national student organizations engaged in solid mass work, such as United Student Against Sweatshops (USAS) or the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition.

In my summation the new SDS's problems can be grouped in four distinct categories:

Failure to understand the centrality of race/white supremacist national oppression.

Priority on issues and tactics that put the subjective conditions as experienced by a tiny cross-section of the population in the driver's seat, at the expense of tactical and/or political flexibility that might better respond to actual conditions.

A most unprincipled exclusion of organized left and specifically red or ML forces, especially those who have proven track records of playing nice with others.

Standing issues of student autonomy and control of the group's collective process - the old fogies contradiction.

Failure to understand the centrality of race/white supremacist national oppression: Generally speaking the predominately white sector of the student movement has suffered, is suffering, and will likely continue to suffer from a white blind-spot. Of course this shortcoming is anything but static, and it prevalence can and does fluctuate from group to group and within all groups over time. From my limited vantage point, the new SDS seems to suffer from this affliction in truly intense ways.

The fact that only 5 to 10 percent of the participants were people of color/oppressed nationality is but a symptom of a much larger problem. A problem that is rooted in the issues and tactics that the new group's base is focused on, and a problem that a group dominated by the type of anarchists that appear to be setting the political tenor is largely unequipped to deal with. Compare these facts with similar stats for, say, United Students Against Sweatshops and SDS's deficiencies shine through all the brighter.

USAS has been repeatedly dissed on by many leftists I know, and the line of argument often flows from USAS's perceived whiteness. And yet their February 2006 conference was at or near majority people of color in terms of attendance. This too is symptomatic of attempts to include work and attitudes of student of color at all levels of the organization.

Despite the continued relative whiteness of USAS's base, and the former pervasiveness of an imperialist "save the brown-people" ideology, the group has put years of effort into fostering a real anti-racist consciousness. As part and parcel of this work, USAS has poured considerable amounts of effort into forging ongoing relationships with several MEChA chapters, and supporting the development of multi-issue student groups at HBCUs. It has intentionally adopted a politics of direct solidarity juxtaposed to one of charity. Even the mission statement like quote that crowns the back of every USAS t-shirt printed embodies this political perspective: "If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time; but if you've come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together." - Lila Watson

As far as conference culture goes, USAS has long since abandoned the overtly patriarchal, white-supremacist practice of "stacking caucuses" - as in placing caucuses against each other so that a Black working-class lesbian gets to pick which aspect of her lived-experience is primary on that given day, or worse yet holding caucuses concurrent with major decision making sessions (which at least based on a causal glance at the convention's schedule and Eric's summation is what appears to have happened at the recent SDS gathering). It bases travel subsidies largely on the gender, nationality, class and sexuality of the proposed conference delegations from member groups, and USAS national organizers take the job of focusing leadership development energies of emerging oppressed nationality chapter leaders very seriously.

USAS has robust and active caucuses that meet, plan and conduct on-going work outside of its two yearly conferences. These caucuses all have standing representation on USAS's board (which is made up entirely of current students).

If people have examples of the new SDS doing any of the following, share them. 'Cause at present I haven't heard a peep about anything coming out of SDS that could hold a candle to USAS's aforementioned efforts.

Subjective Feelings / Material Reality: Although I would certainly list the issue of white-supremacy and the group's white-blindspot as the central contradiction facing SDS's internal functioning and general sustainability, the issue of white-guy adventurism (which is obviously related) is one of similar importance vis-à-vis their politics and methods of work.

Speaking of the type of student work with which I am most familiar for a story in Freedom Road Magazine Issue #3, one student organizer involved with UTK's Progressive Student Alliance described the following contradiction: "Sometimes students want [the campaign] to go a certain way, to integrate a radical tendency that the workers may not be ready for in the beginning. I think the best way to overcome that is to be deeply involved with the union as opposed to just acting—to get in there and get to know the people, and to meet them where they are at...Some students only have a short period of time to be campus activists, and they want to contribute something. But patience is key if working folks are to lead their own struggle.”

This quote is obviously referring to class-contradictions that naturally arise in student-labor coalitions, but I feel that the principle can and should see a larger application within the predominately white segment of the U.S. student movement.

Fundamentally the beauty of student work is two fold: 1) students have the ability to go through a radicalizing process at a much faster pace than possibly any other segment of the U.S. population - thus allowing waves of youth to embrace radical politics and intense, militant forms of struggle; 2) this subjective reality can, when the objective conditions allow for it, greatly influence the subjective conditions of other strata of society. This dialectic is the heart of student work, but it has to be respected if you don't want shitty student work that is utterly isolated from the world outside of the campus.

The revamped SDS does not appear to have any real analysis of what the material conditions facing society as a whole currently are outside of ultra-left sloganeering. Yet these material conditions are the necessary precondition for students to be able to influence or jump-start qualitative leaps in the consciousness of other segments of the populace) . Instead the subjective realities as experience by a few mostly white dudes is given priority to set the organization's direction, leading to extremely militant action that, if it impacts other people at all, has the effect of turning broader parts of the population off to struggle.

Shouting down Bill Clinton is great; UTK's Progressive Student Alliance received international coverage after a similar disruption at a Dick Cheney event here in Knoxville. But that doesn't build a group's base. Likewise, must of the students who we need to be entering student work at a time like now are not ready to shout down Cheney, Bill Clinton, or even Bush right now. And that says nothing for how few students are willing to get the shit kicked out of the by cops while trying to delay troop deployments to Iraq by 8 days.

Although I said that the principle of coalition building with other strata that softens student militancy should be adopted by more than just student-labor activists, I don't mean to make completely universal claims here. Many solid activists and organizers have done amazingly militant work and not fallen victim to these pitfalls. I'm thinking specifically of SLAM here. But that said, some white kids choosing to blockade a port while facing state-power with fists a-swinging two days after a group's first meeting ain't like several years of base-building and political education that wins large waves of oppressed nationality and white youth over to a perspective that taking militant action in the streets is the only means to win what they know they need. It seems more like the early 1995 mistakes that former Love and Rage members reference in the Fire by Night Organizing Committee's self-reflective "After Winter Must Come Spring" (Also, check out the pamphlet re-do put out by the FRSO/OSCL for more discussions of FbN's problems with SLAM members that help contributed to the NYC chapter's dissolution).

Exclusion of Party Left Forces: Much has been said of this on Red Flags and elsewhere. Suffice it to say that such positions draw the completely wrong lessons from SDS 1.0 while betraying the aspect of the original SDS's politics that made it possible for a small student group to be propelled to an international stage. Also, it seems a little coincidence that a group whose political outlook is so heavily influenced by the idealism and individualist adventurism of the RYM1/Weathermen is so openly disdainful for left organizations created in large part by non-SDS oppressed nationality students and RYM2 partisans. The Weather Underground abandoned party building (any attempt at broadly based organization for that matter) from the outset, and this legacy fits extremely well within the white, petit bourgeois intellectual paradigm employed by many of the so-called anarchists that appear to be finding a new home inside this reanimated SDS. Through the total lack of accountability of SDS's left-liberal graduates and you have the perfect stew for some nasty anti-communist sectarianism.

Old Fogies: It's rather weird when the sum-up of a student conference and more than half the pictures from said conference are being written by and are show-casing old people. I love me so old people, don't get me wrong. Locally I feel like some of my work's biggest handicaps flow from a lack of veteran fighters I can really relate to. But I don't think that 30-something folks should be setting the tone of student work - let alone senior citizens! It's creepy, and it does not bode well for the group's long term sustainability. And that's all I've got to say about it.

Conclusion: My basic position is as simple as this post's title. Both my personal feelings, those of others I know, and my recommendations to the broader left is to maintain something like moderate disinterest in the new SDS. I agree with Eric Odell's general impression that this group has not yet figured out how to translate their web success into a non-virtual organization. Emails and websites won't end the wars; neither will ultra-personal decisions to blockade Washington state ports for a week and a half. The group's current white blind-spot is already huge, and threatens to utterly eclipse any ability to engage in effective summation of actual conditions.

The world certainly cries out for things to be done, but that does not mean that we need a new multi-issue student organization, especially not one with as many deficiencies as people seem willing to acknowledge the new SDS has.

At the end of the day we must at least be honest with ourselves, and fundamentally this means recognizing that just because we desperately want the possibilities of a new upsurge of kick-ass student activist to exist doesn't mean that it's there. And it certainly doesn't mean that this SDS is the fount from which such an upsurge will flow, because in fact it's far from it. Imagined possibilities are the U.S. left's most useless creation, and when it comes to the fictitious possibilities embodied by the new SDS I say fuck 'em.

New Solidarity Website

2006-08-31T15:52:00.000-04:00

Solidarity has lunched a new website. It looks good...but did y'all steal my colors?
(just kidding, kinda)

War Profiteers are Profiteering from Wars

2006-08-30T13:40:00.000-04:00

Merely restating the obvious, right? However, in a new report United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies have provided us with actual figures. And they're striking (read: the kind of figures with lots of zeros).

Since 9/11 CEO pay at 34 publicly traded U.S. corporations where defense contracts make up more than 10 percent of revenues has practically doubled. At the same time, the salaries of CEOs of other publicly traded corporations that aren't heavily involved in military-industrial spending rose only 6 percent. Oil Barrons are making out super nice also.

UFE spokesperson Betsy Leondar-Wright, quoted by Fox News explained the problem succinctly enough: "Why not say that if it's a contract with taxpayer dollars, they can't go to excessive CEO pay...In past wars, there were efforts to limit war profiteering. We're having the reverse here. We're having people treating it as their own little bonanza."

Questions Concerning the Israeli/Lebenese Casus Belli

2006-08-16T08:32:00.000-04:00

I am not one for conspiracy theories, and I like CounterPunch less and less for their insistence on running stories that promote various "alternate explanations." It is wacky and ultra-left; and does much more to hurt the left's intellectual reputation than help it.

That said, if there is anything of truth in this piece by Trish Schuh it needs to be in the realm of "known-knowns" and leftists and revolutionaries have an obligation to introduce these may-be facts to our friends, co-workers, class-mates and larger communities.

One little excerpt:

AP also ran changed versions. On July 12, at 5:41AM Joseph Panossian wrote: "The militant group Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers during clashes Wednesday across the border in southern Lebanon, prompting a swift reaction from Israel, which sent ground forces into its neighbor to look for them."

At 7:09 AM, Panossian had altered his report: "The Hezbollah militant group captured two Israeli soldiers during clashes along the Lebanese border on Wednesday."

By late afternoon, at 4:13 PM, AP's Panossian had completely shifted location: "Hezbollah militants crossed into Israel on Wednesday and captured two Israeli soldiers. Israel responded in southern Lebanon with warplanes, tanks and gunboats, and said eight of its soldiers had been killed in the violence."

Again, the full article can be found on CounterPunch's website here.

Good Writer, Good Friend Ceases Blog

2006-08-15T08:41:00.000-04:00

As I'm sure everyone who might happen to come by my blog already knows, our comrade CelticFire has chosen to cease writing on his blog (http://celticfire.blogspot.com/) in favor of devoting more time to other political endeavors. Although I didn't make it onto his list of shout-outs (*sniffle* just kidding), his perspective and thoughtful commentary will be certainly missed in my day to day internet browsing.

I would also like to commend him for 1) putting other political work outside of the blogsphere at the front and center of his political attention; and 2) for having the discipline to focus his energies in order to do some things very well instead of many things at a level that he seems to feel was unsatisfactory and/or unsustainable. As someone who has a very hard time focusing on one or two key areas of work, and who is coincidentally posting for basically the first time in a month, this is an example that perhaps others of us should look at more closely.

CelticFire, thank you for you comradely friendship, your principled debate and you earnest commitment to study, debate AND action in building a real movement for social transformation.
Loves, Nelson H.

Israel OUT of Arab lands

2006-07-19T08:38:00.000-04:00

Israel continued committing more warcrimes today, killing innocent civilians in Palestine and Lebanon. MRzine posted statements from the Lebenese Communist Party and the Populat Front for the Libreration of Palestine yesterday. Both are certainly worth the read.

Finally, I include the above picture not because I enjoy seeing or enabling others to see Israeli imperialist violence against Arab peoples, but becase of the caption this AP photo had on Yahoo News, cited below. What surprised me was the location, which is neither Gaza nor Lebanon, but rather the West Bank, and not once in the CNN.com, or NYTimes, etc. had I heard mention of Israeli attacks in the West Bank.

Israeli soldiers detain Palestinian security men during a military operation in the West Bank city of Nablus July 19, 2006. Troops backed by armoured vehicles surrounded a Palestinian security compound in the city of Nablus and killed three gunmen of Abbas's Fatah faction, medics said. REUTERS/Abed Omar Qusini (PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES)

Eerie ...

2006-06-27T09:08:00.000-04:00

I work in an office, and I am member of what some might call cybertariat. Anyways, work sucks in a lot of ways, but it has upshots. One of these being my ability to listen to music all day. When I arrived at work today I opened my email, my Outlook calendar and my media player.

My media player is set to randomly play songs I like from a collection of hundreds of hours of music. The first song it cues up is Pslam for the Elks Lodge Last-call by the Weakerthans. An eerily appropriate song given this morning's news of the Elks Lodge building which collapsed last night in which the club's President died.

"...let the glasses that you broke, form a picture of our leader with a halo made of smoke..."

CPN(M) agrees to join Nepal's Government

2006-06-16T17:36:00.000-04:00

The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has brokered a deal to enter Nepal's government which appears to include their central demand for a constituent assembly. Stay tuned...

Re-introduction of "traditionalist" language in Catholic Mass part of larger assult

2006-06-16T09:07:00.000-04:00

Growing up under eight years of Clinton rather thoroughly destroyed many of my social democratic leanings. Likewise, growing up Catholic, and under the iron first of Karol Wojtila (aka John Paul II) deeply scared my spirituality.

Needless to say, I am not a Sunday regular anymore. Refusing to name and pray for fictitious, as-yet un-conceived fetuses began me on the path that the COINTELPROesque persecutions Wojtila and his head of the Inquisition Karl Ratzinger visited upon radicals especially in the global South effectively closed off. Ratzinger continues Wojtila's assault on post-Vatican II reforms, much like Bush is allowed to further gut social programs thanks to eight years of Clintonite neo-liberalism. Today's New York Times reports on one such major victory for Catholic "traditionalists" in the so-called "liturgy wars."

I have said before that growing up Catholic was in many ways the most politicizing force in my life. The Church has never been an enlightening institution, but during mid-highschool years, while I refused to participate in the "mini-nationalisms" of high school sports spectating, my religious dogma was of extreme personal importance. I rejected many aspects of family life, and since they made me go to Mass, Mass sucked. But this had little or nothing to do with respect for God, and certainly not for the Church.

I should further clarify what I mean by "most politicizing." When I was in the 11th grade, I was exposed to Liberation Theology. It blew my mind. Without it my current political outlook could have never been cultivated. I was as Propogandhi called it, a pre-teen McCarthyist all the way. Somewhere there is a very poorly written anti-communist diatribe I did for my 10th grade world history class.

But the writings, homilies, lives and deaths of Gustavo Gutierrez, Camilo Torres (¡presente!) and Óscar Romero (¡presente!) fundamentally changed this. As I struggled through translated academic theology I felt moved, inspired and ultimately won-over to a mission of justice. I read Howard Zinn's a People's History of the U.S. that same year and I knew without a doubt that I was a radical, that there was an enemy, and that it had a name.

When my novice CCD (Catholic Sunday School) instructor couldn't win theological arguements with me, and I began convincing some fellow CCD students to read a ragged 1984 copy of Gutierrez's We Drink From Our Own Wells another CCD instructor (and Opus Dei member) met with me to explain this books "Marxist message." That was the first time I ever considered that I might be a Marxist.

The more research I did on the subject, the more open I found myself to ideas of armed struggle and Marxism (Marxism-Leninism in particular). Seeing this OSPAAAL poster (and in the process seeing hundreds of other examples of Cuban made solidarity art) solidified this outlook. Religious dogma, like all class ideas, represent the views of a certain class defined by certain historical experiences. To fully understand the decision to re-install even more out of touch language into the Catholic Mass can only be correctly understood in such a context.

Now listen, you who are rich, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming upon you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived in luxury upon the earth and have gone in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered innocents, who were not opposing you.
James 5:1-6

Celebrate a Great Aniversary for the People's Struggle

2006-05-24T13:38:00.000-04:00

Tonight will be the 150th anniversary of an important event in the history of People's Struggle in the United States, an anniversary with special importance for white revolutionaries committed to the destruction of this white-supremacist system. Tonight we celebrate the needed reprisal John Brown, his sons and their comrades visited upon reactionaries aligned with the Slave Power in the Kansas territory. This event has come to be called the Pottawatomie Killings or the Pottawatomie Massacre given the proximity of the killings and the Kansas territory's Pottawatomie Creek. This event also happens to serve as the nominal inspiration for this blog.

To be clear, Brown's actions didn't take place in a vacuum, and certainly weren't the first time that opponents of slavery in the Americas and more importantly freed Africans and slaves themselves had resorted to violent resistance. The Americas had seen slave revolts since the first African captives were forced to cut sugar cane. In what would become the United States brave African men and women had sounded Spartacus's call at Stono in 1739 and again inside New York City just two years later. African women and men lived in maroon colonies throughout the hemisphere as free people, and at the turn of the nineteenth century Haitian heroes established the first and only slave republic in history. During the first half of the nineteenth century in the U.S. Blacks had insisted upon their freedom by participating in or planning full-scale revolts at least a half dozen times, from Gabriel's Rebellion in 1800 to Deslandes's in 1811 to Nat Turner's in 1839.

In response to the pro-slavery raid on the Lawrence settlement, Brown and his compatriots justly killed Slave Power proponents James, William and Drury Doyle and William Sherman. The intense aftermath that followed, known historically as Bleeding or Bloody Kansas, was an early volley in the growing conflict for freedom and real democracy below the Mason-Dixon line. Three years later, Brown and two dozen other brave souls would assault the Harper's Ferry armory prior to being suppressed by the great Southern darling Robert E. Lee. Mere months later millions of Blacks and their white allies would join the thousands of others already engaged in struggle, and for the next quarter century continue to come into struggle in greater numbers than ever before. These fighters would go on to fight for and win some if not the most radical victories in U.S. history.

Repression certainly breeds resistance and single great (white) men do not drive history; as such it seems unfair to claim to much of Brown's role in the period. Conversely we do ourselves no favors by simply ignoring our heroes. The actions taken by Old Ossawatomie and his comrades upon Kansas's grasslands 150 years ago tonight epitomize Mao's famous maxim that a single spark can indeed spark a prairie fire in a more literal way than any other historical example I know of.

¡John Brown, presente!

National Call-in Day for Martin Lee Anderson

2006-05-18T09:30:00.000-04:00

I have posted twice on this blog about the murder of Martin Lee Anderson at the hands of white-supremacist cops. Student in Florida have designated today as a national call in day demanding justice for the boy, his family and the pigs that killed him. It only takes five minutes.

JUSTICE DELAYED IS JUSTICE DENIED! HELP ENSURE THAT JUSTICE IS DONE!

TAKE FIVE MINUTES AND BE APART OF THE NATIONAL CALL IN DAY FOR JUSTICE FOR MARTIN LEE ANDERSON!

It has been 131 days since the death of Martin Lee Anderson (below you'll find a timeline of events surrounding the case), the young boy brutally beaten to death in a Florida boot camp, and still no arrests have been made. There have been slow steps toward justice, but not without the citizens of Florida biting at the heels of our government to take action.

Florida Governor Jeb Bush has sent a letter to Bay County Sheriff Frank McKeithen requesting that former Bay County boot camp supervisor Captain Mike Thompson, who is still employed by Mckeithen's office, be dismissed for his knowledge and approval of the use of ammonia within the Bay county boot camp, which would eventually result in the death Martin Lee Anderson. McKeithen refused! The time has come again to take action. We firmly believe that any and every individual involved in the brutal death of young Martin Anderson should be held accountable. This is only one of the first steps to be taken since the release of the final autopsy findings, and already there is resistance.

Do not sit idly by and allow the injustice to continue. On May 18th 2006, The Student Coalition for Justice will be having a national call-in day! Take this opportunity to express to Sheriff McKeithen your concern for his refusal to act upon the governor's request! This is one small step to show that the citizens of this country are still watching and we will not be complacent! We must do everything we can to ensure that these individuals are not afforded the opportunity to do this to another child.

Please Call and Ask for Sheriff Frank McKeithan at: 850-747-7500
Bay County Sheriffs office - (850) 747-4700

Suggested script:
Hello,
My name is (Insert Name Here) and I am a student at (Insert School Here). I am greatly concern about your refusal to dismiss, former Bay County Boot camp supervisor Captain Mike Thompson, at the Governors request. Captain Thompson lied about the events surrounding the death of Martin Lee Anderson and authorized the use of ammonia tablets in the boot camp that ultimately led to the death of the young boy. Please heed the Governors recommendation, and dismiss Captain Mike Thompson.

Comments on "Hispanic Quebec" Makes Its Entrance by Pierre Dubuc

2006-05-09T09:01:00.000-04:00

Yesterday morning I ran across this article on MRZine. Very good, it wrongly identifies the Chican@ nation in the US south-west as the first instance of "ethnic" concentration in a specific region, but still very good. Below is the comment I posted on MRZine.

Comment posted on MRZine:
Bonjour Pierre, and thank you for this very important article. Questions of nationality and national rights (something more than "race" or "ethnicity") is an area of political work, both theoretical and in practice, that the organized left in the US (which is so overwhelmingly white) rarely takes up with any kind of vigor. The perspective you bring as an oppressed nationality comrade in this hemisphere, but from a people (le Québécois) that many folks in the US seem to easily forget, is so very refreshing.

I think that most of your conclusions are right on. I draw one major difference with your insistence that Latin@s in the Southwest constitute the first "ethnic" group to be concentrated in one region of the US. This point, coupled as you did with the role of US aggression and outright land-theft, is very important. But we must not forget about the south's Black Belt which stretches from southern Virginia and North Carolina to eastern Texas, including South Carolina, portions of Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.

The Black Belt south was home to the vast majority of Africans in America for nearly 300 years prior to the great migrations north. Even then, many southern counties still had Black majorities or near majorities inside white-defined county boarders. And this is after 30 decades of post-Reconstruction intense class struggle, lynching, bulldozing and other forms of Klan terror. A must read work, in my opinion perhaps the seminal presentation of this regions unique political economy and the importance of the Black National question, is Harry Haywood’s 1948 work Negro Liberation. In recent years the Black population density in many of these same states and counties is rising as grandchildren and great-grandchildren of former migrants return to their families’ form communities.

(To see this illustrated with maps and charts, the US Census’s American FactFinder and the Historical Census Browser are great sources for data)

That said, again I think that your article is very sharp, and should be read by anyone who wishes to better understand this movement in its own words, on its own terms and in its proper historical context.

Also, to the author of the previous comment: this class reductionism nonsense hasn't helped our movement yet. So can we please just drop it? Our movement must realize that without a strategic alliance between oppressed nationalities inside the US (Blacks and Chican@s, and other minority nationalities) and the US multi-national working class we're doomed to fight the same defensive battles in perpetuity. Lacking such an alliance, the use of words like "solidarity" in the above context aren't just trite, they are actively white-supremacist in form and content.

¡Se ve, se siente, Latinos estan presente!

"Rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg"

2006-05-06T17:24:00.000-04:00

Much ado has been made about Steven Colbert's recent flogging of President Bush and the Washington Press Corps at the recent White House Correspondents’ Dinner. (the entire dinner is available here on CSPAN's website). When I sat down and watched Colbert's how stick with my little brother this weekend I was speechless. Damn, much more than I would have expected from any liberal.

But the comment, perhaps one of the sharpest of the evening, that has received not nearly enough attention is the following:

"The greatest thing about this man [Bush] is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never will."

Many people may not make this connection right off the bat, so follow along and we'll get there. During my first semester in college the University Libraries' study room was sold to UT Dining Services, which is privatized out to Aramark. Several of us, especially anarco-types on campus (of which I was one at the time), started a failure of a campaign to "boot Starbucks." Our tactics were tired from the beginning, free coffee every Tuesday and occasional street theatre involving folks in bear-suits and life-size Monopoly in the cafe.

And this leads us back to Colbert. My first semester was Fall 2001, and on one of those Tuesdays (those days between Monday and Wednesday), early on in the campaign as we stood out in an unusually cold September day handing out coffee, US imperial hubris was smashed into by two commercial airliners.

So to repeat, damn. This guy, especially for a liberal, wasn't pulling punches, even if he was "boxing with a glacier."

May Day Is the Workers' Day!by the National Executive Committee, FRSO/OSCL

2006-04-28T15:08:00.000-04:00

May Day Is the Workers' Day! This is no mere slogan. It is a battle cry and it has rung out across the globe in countless languages for 120 years.

May 1, 1886. May Day, the international working class holiday, was born in an eruption of struggle as desperate, determined working men and women in the United States, many of them immigrants, struck and rallied, demanding the 8-hour workday.

May 1, 2006. The United States is once again being shaken to its core by the power of working people. A sudden, massive upsurge based among immigrant workers has set the stage for a day of protest that reclaims the spirit of that original May Day. Over the last two months as many as five million immigrants, some undocumented, some with papers and some citizens, have taken to the streets.

In 1886, workers were demanding to be treated as human beings rather than machines, and rejecting being forced to work 12, 14, 16 hours a day, seven days a week: "8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for what we will!"

In 2006, immigrant workers are demanding to be treated like human beings, instead of being defined as felons, denied basic human rights, kept from their loved ones, subjected to grinding exploitation and treated with racist contempt by employers, government and media alike: "Ningun Ser Humano Es Ilegal."

Today's upsurge has a dual character. Immigrants are oppressed as immigrants, as people of color in a white-supremacist society. This upsurge is based in oppressed-nationality communities. Many of the upsurge's early leaders have been businesspeople, media figures, community organizers and religious leaders from the Mexicana/o community and other immigrant groups.

But the vast armies of people who have taken to the streets, who have dared firing and deportation to demand justice, are workers and the school-age daughters and sons of workers. Their demands, simple calls for justice and equality, challenge this system to its racist core. As this new movement forges unity with the Black Liberation Struggle, which has shaped US history for 400 years, powerful new blows can be dealt to our common enemy.

Driven here by the rape of the economies in their home countries at the hands of the World Bank and giant multinational corporations, immigrants now find themselves fighting for survival in the very belly of the beast. And it is here that they have taken a giant step into the unknown, throwing forward overnight a powerful new front in the long global battle against the rule of the US imperialist ruling class and their almighty yanqui dollar.

May Day, 2006. Workers across the planet today are celebrating the eclipse of pro-US lackey governments across Latin America, the advance of the people of Nepal against their feudal monarchy on the way to a people's republic, the general strike that defeated anti-labor laws in France, the growing resistance to all-out government assault on unions and other popular movements in the Philippines, the train wreck that the criminal US occupation of Iraq has become, and scores of other victories, large and small. Today we share those triumphs with our working class sisters and brothers around the world, and we can be proud that today they draw heart and strength from what immigrant workers are doing right here, right now.

National Executive Committee,
Freedom Road Socialist Organization /
Organización Socialista del Camino para la Libertad

¡Sanjulo Ber, presente!

2006-04-27T08:33:00.000-04:00

I rarely post entire tributes to fallen comrades, opting to instead link to the amazing statements that others make. But this striking piece written by Jamala Rogers is too powerful, too moving, and too beautiful to simply point at. So here, in its entirety is a tribute to an amazing brother who is no longer with us in body. ¡Sanjulo Ber, presente!

by Jamala Rogers
Sanjulo and me. Our political histories were very similar. Our political paths were both parallel and intersecting.

Our first serious involvement came as black students from working-class neighborhoods. We were searching for our cultural and political identity and our place in the continuum of African liberation.

I first met Sanjulo as a Kawaida Advocate in the Congress of African People in the early '70s. I was in St. Louis building a CAP chapter there, while Sanjulo did the same in Pittsburgh. So when Art Young recalls that Sanjulo "did the jobs that others would not: going door to door and hanging posters," it was a reflection of the revolutionary work ethic that we had learned in CAP. We proudly worked to be real servants of the people.

When CAP embraced a Marxist-Leninist ideology, we became the Revolutionary Communist League. RCL eventually merged with the League for Revolutionary Struggle (M-L). Our political journey led us to embrace socialism as system that valued humanity and met the needs of all people. It was a vision for the reconstruction of a society free of all forms of exploitation and oppression. Ultimately, we found our ideological home with Freedom Road Socialist Organization / Organización Socialista del Camino para la Libertad. Sanjulo was a member of FRSO/OSCL at his death.

As organizers in the Black Liberation Movement, we sought political forms to advance that agenda. We were founding members of the National Black United Front, the Black Radical Congress and other formations. We worked locally in various groups over the years which shared our commitment to justice, equality and peace.

Sanjulo was a working class leader and dedicated soldier in the war against capitalism and globalism. Whether organizing workers at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass factory or working with youth, Sanjulo worked tirelessly to empower those at the bottom of the social and economic ladder. He was a familiar and respected figure in the Hill District of Pittsburgh.

Sanjulo brought the same fighting attitude about the human rights struggle to his medical condition. As his health started to deteriorate, he would still push forward -- just slower -- in doing the tasks he thought were important. During this time of tenuous health, anyone who worked with Sanjulo had a story to tell about his amazing perseverance.

I vividly recall attending a national FRSO/OSCL meeting and was shocked to see Sanjulo there. Why? Because he had just had an organ transplant a couple of weeks prior and I just knew he would be home recuperating. Another time, he had to be hospitalized for pneumonia when he had pushed himself to participate in a gathering in Boston. He seemed unstoppable.

Sanjulo had been active in Black Voices for Peace and forceful in his views against the war and Bush's military policies. He insisted on participating in the local activities marking the third anniversary of the US attack on the Iraqi people. Poor health forced him to ride in the march but he was there.

Sanjulo died on April 8. A year ago, almost to the date, the Pittsburgh community held a fundraiser to cover the continuing expenses of his transplants. I remember being touched by the words on the benefit announcement: "…we are one house bound together by devotion, love, happiness and productivity… we are forever one family."

I got the word earlier this year that Sanjulo's body systems were failing and the doctors had conceded to his fate. Final arrangements were being made by family and friends as Sanjulo checked into a hospice. Before the sad news could truly set in, I was told that Sanjulo was sent home -- not exactly spunky, but definitely not fitting the criteria for the hospice residents. No doubt, the facility's staff heard and saw him continue to organize from his hospice room.

Happily, I called him. "San," I teased, "I heard you got thrown out of hospice for kickin' it up!" He chuckled. "Yeah." I think I detected a little smugness in his voice that once again he did a slam-dunk in the face of death.

Brother Sanjulo's tenacity and triumph over his medical hurdles gave many of us the false illusion that he would continue to beat the odds. That he would continue to be there with us, for us.

However, the time came that Sanjulo's body couldn't keep up with his indomitable spirit. He was inspiring in death and he was in life, always fighting the good fight.

Sanjulo stands apart from wanna-be heroes in our struggle. He dedicated his entire life to the liberation struggle. He now takes his deserving place, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the many revolutionaries who chose a life of sacrifice and service. He truly lived up to the meaning of his name -- finest. Sanjulo represented the finest of humanity and the best of our most valiant fighters.

Sanjulo Ber, my friend, my comrade, I am proud to have known you and will continue to be inspired by your life's work. ¡Presente!

April 2006

Pre-Marital Counseling in Southern Appalachia

2006-04-26T12:34:00.000-04:00

A good friend of mine laughted out loud for several moments when she first heard that I was getting married. I guess my facial reaction wasn't what she had expected, because she quickly followed with a "you're not kidding are you?! Holy shit."

In order for two people in a heterosexual relationship to get a marriage license in Tennessee you have to pay a $130 fee. However, if you can survive a half-dozen hours of pre-marital counseling, the fee is reduced to $30. Naturally, I called up the University of Tennessee Benefits Office, and using my Employee Assist Program asked for them to set us up with a counselor.

So imagine my surprise when my partner informed me on the way to our first session that she thought that our counseling center was affiliated with the Church of Christ. Well she was slightly mistaken, the counseling center is affiliated with the Johnson Bible College, where our counselor happens to teach, which is in turn affiliated with "the Independent Christian Churches/Churches of Christ whose heritage is rooted in the Restoration Movement (also known as the Stone-Campbell Movement)."

By the time we got to the makeshift counseling center, there was not doubt about its faith-based status. The front window housed what appeared from the street to be a stained-glass depiction of Noah's arc. One of the two cars in the parking lot had a "W the President" bumper sticker, which we deduced belonged to the counselor after the folks in the session immediately before ours left in the other car.

The waiting room, which was more like a living room since the whole center was in a converted house, had not one or two depictions of the “great arc,” but twenty-three! Yes, you read correctly, 23 as in one short of two dozen in a single room. They were on the walls, there were Noah and the Arc pillows, children's books, a throw over the back of the couch, and weirdest of all little animal toys next to a cast-rubber bearded man all surrounding an arc made of pop-sickle-stick like wood (for several of the animals, including the kangaroo and lion there was only one present, which could set off some major theological arguments...).

At this point we seriously considered leaving. But it had taken three weeks to get this appointment, and with the wedding date fast approaching, we decided to stick it out to see just how bad it got. After all, our combined income for 4-6 hours isn't much more than $100 and maybe we'd learn something useful.

We then spent 35 minutes filling out forms asking about our physical and mental health histories, about significant events in our life, etc; and we finally begin the counseling session.

There were certainly low points, but they were more comical than frightening, like when she asked if we were sexually active or had ever been (ha!) or if we'd like to spend the last session focused on what scripture says about our proper roles as man and wife. We were both raised in the Catholic Church, so perhaps we laugh stuff off that would really freak other folks out. In all, the counselor was not nearly as bad as I thought that she would be.

It probably goes without saying, but earlier this week UT Benefits received a strongly worded letter from me concerning our EAP provider's policies, specifically arranging counseling with faith-based providers for government employees without any discussion of the employee's personal preferences.

One session down, three to go...

Latest Statement from the Central Committee, CPN(M)

2006-04-25T11:51:00.000-04:00

The CPN(M)'s central committee has put out a new statement rejecting the king's weak attempt to buy more time. The International Nepal Solidarity Network has a whole run-down on the Maoists' position here.

It also appears that the Maoists are leading another wave of nation-wide protests demanding the institution of the Constituent Assembly and warning the SPA not to accept further compromises that betray the demands of the 12 point agreement. News of this here.

I haven't been able to find an English translation of this latest statement yet, but has the following was posted in the comments section on the International Nepal Solidarity Network's website:

General points in English:

The Maoists reject the offer of the King and they think the SPA is making a historical mistake by accepting the offer. They are also disappointed that the SPA has not consulted them before

The movement of the Maoists will not be stopped until it is sure that the sovereignty of the people is ensured by calling a constituent assembly.

The Maoists at the same time expressed their commitment to the 12-point agreement between MBs and SPA and they especially urge the parties to act in accordance with the agreement.

The Maoists announce some programmes: Countrywide peoples’ mobilisation and demonstration/gatherings. Physical action be taken against the elements who are still against the movement or who suppress the movement. Blockage of Kathmandu and district capitals until unconditional elections for a constituent assembly is announced.

"Killer Sound" on Highland Ave.

2006-04-24T16:47:00.000-04:00

For folks who haven't seen Kevin Sites's series In the Hot Zone, you might want to grab yourself a basin before you head over to his site. In an attempt to put a more humanitarian face on embedded journalism (because, as Propaghandi so pointedly notes, all interventions should be humanitarian in nature), Sites is spending a whole year of his lily-assed life in "conflict zones." You heard me right, he's going to do it for one whole year. *gasp*

His latest venture takes him to Columbia. But instead of focusing on the actual good done by the FARC-EP and ELN in liberated areas, or the real limitations and major fuck-ups associated with trying to build a revolution upon a narco-capitalist export orientation strategy, or the heroic unionization efforts of William Mendoza and others, his topic this week focuses on Bogota's Battalion of Immediate Artistic Reaction.

This liberal attempt to "end the violence" by turning obsolete rifles into guitars has all the makings of a perfect bourgeois human interest story: a lone, young white dude with an idea so powerful that...

See, I told you to bring along that basin.

Maybe this "oh so cool" display of music-inspired, hipster street-theatre wouldn't set my gag reflex off so much if Knoxville's "alternative weekly" hadn't run this story on the recently renamed "biscoteque" (formerly named "bagel") house in the UT area's Fort Sanders neighborhood and the tribe of "trusta-farians"* that live there.

And maybe still, if the ever "alternative" Metro-Pulse hadn't decided to run this piece of ultra-individualist shit not two weeks after chiding UTK's Progressive Student Alliance in this most reactionary of diatribes.

But who needs actual mass work that tries to engage actual people by meeting them where they are actual at when privileged white folks can make stupid-ass, racist movies that poke-fun at the genocide of entire indigenous nations?

*Trusta-farian: Bourgeois white kid with dreads. See Also: WASPafarian; Cultural Appropriation; White-Supremacy.

The Hammer Falls?

2006-04-20T10:22:00.000-04:00

This article on CNN.com* is pretty disturbing. Hopefully, this will be one isolated incident; but based on the I.C.E. official's statements and with the May Day demonstrations just around the corner we could very likely see a real increase of this type of repression over the next couple weeks.

Here in Knoxville these fears really came out when a county sheriff detained two vehicles of a large caravan of folks from upper East TN who were on their way to the April 10th demo here in town.

FRSO [Fight Back]'s decent into revisionism?

2006-04-18T14:23:00.000-04:00

Note: The following post has been revised since it first appeared on this blog. I hope that this rendition will allow for some comradely debate and real exploration of some important questions. At no point is it my intention to seem flip, argumentative or sectarian. I try to give props where they are due, and I do have a great amount of respect for much of FRSO(Fightback)'s work that I am aware of. For the purpose of the following discussion I will refer to the larger Freedom Road as FRSO/OSCL or simply Freedom Road and the smaller group (located primarily in Chicago and Minnesota) as FRSO [Fight Back].

In 1999 Freedom Road Socialist Organization suffered a split. At the time of the split many on the left posed questions concerning the future of both FRSOs (both of splitting groups continue to use the same name). The FRSO was an entity created by the union of several New Communist Movement remnants, and upon seeing its demise some claimed that split signified the closing of another chapter in US anti-revisionist, and specifically (post)Maoist, struggle in defeat. Many others had more basic questions like: Could the two groupings continue to stand as separate organizations? Was the split permanent, and if not how long would it last? How would each organization address the critiques of their former comrades in future line and practice.

Several years later, FRSO/OSCL and FRSO [Fight Back] both continue to exist. Although I'm not personally familiar with the FRSO [Fight Back] folks, I do have several friends who are members of the FRSO/OSCL, but as best as I can tell they both continue to grow. Based on public documents and summation that I have read, they both continue to do advanced work, more grounded in actual day to day mass struggles than many, probably most other revolutionary organizations in the U.S.

Yet, from my vantage point the political differences between the two groups, and between FRSO [Fight Back] and much of the anti-revisionist trend that produced it, continue to grow. The fiftieth anniversary of the anti-revisionist movement, as well as recent discussions by some on the left concerning this movement's present tasks, has renewed my interest in the general direction of FRSO [Fight Back]'s line concerning these issues. Since I know that some comrades in or around the FRSO [Fight Back] check this blog somewhat regularly I would like to share the conclusions that I have drawn, pose some questions for deeper exploration and hope that some conversation will take place around these issues.

I was aware that following the split, Fightback rejected the existence of anything like an international crisis of socialism, or even widespread failures in formerly socialist societies. This rejection included the dropping of the (pre-split)FRSO document On the Crisis of Socialism, which had been adopted at the organization's 1991 congress and reaffirmed in 1997 (despite some steep opposition from the trend that would go on to create the Fight Back! FRSO), and the line expressed in both the "Introduction" and "We Stand For Socialism" sections of the FRSO/SON Unity Document.

Further investigation of recent Fightback documents shows the extent to which shift in orientation has progressed. Organizational documents elevate "Democratic Korea" (the North Korean monarchichal dictatorship) to a "socialist countr[y] where the working people rule society." In the same and other documents the organization maintains an insistence on wishing into being current-day Chinese socialism even as evidence to the contrary continues to mount. The only mention of "counter-revolution" within China references the 1989 Tiananmen Square student uprising and general strike, but concludes that this was merely an attempt - leading one to believe that China still has functioning socialism?! My understanding of the ever so convoluted history of NCM splits and line struggles is not as strong as it might be, but do I draw an incorrect conclusion in seeing the bad line concerning the Gang of Four and the triumph of capitalist roaders after Mao's death (taken by the RWHq) followed to an even more indefensible extreme here?

Perhaps most strikingly divergent from anti-revisionism's basic orientation, they appear to have concluded that the Soviet Union had functioning socialism up until its 1991 collapse.

The adoption, wholesale, of the Anybody But Bush line by the organization is also a truly interesting development, and not because I disagree with it. To the contrary, I felt like this line was the correct one. I know that its correct use by UTK's Progressive Student Alliance brought in a large number of new fighters, many of whom have since been won over to socialism. Instead I found it interesting that Fightback, which had until that point positioned itself as the ML, anti-social democratic wing within the pre-split FRSO would take a line that many on the left (both hard-line MLM enthusiasts and nearly all Trotskists) labeled as nothing more than social democratic idealism. Given the organization's position that we need something more than the Democratic Party, I wonder how it's members now respond to the critique pushed by their former comrades who supported and continue to support the theoretical framework of Left Refoundation. Are there other methods for Party Building that differ greatly from the perspective that the self-identified socialist left cannot itself constitute the vanguard of anything?

The ABB line choice also underlined another growing phenomena concerning FRSO [Fight Back]'s rhetoric: increasing teleological posturing. Following the election, an official statement by the organization claimed that "victory [over the Bush agenda] was certain"! This sentiment was echoed again in the 20th Anniversary statement last December in which the organization claimed that "time is always on the side of the oppressed - and time is an enemy of all systems heading for extinction." History and stugrgle are not Rolling Stones songs. Such rhetoric is not grounded in any empirical evidence, and certainly not in dialectical materialism. Sure, we need revolutionary optimism, but not determinist predications of the future.

I lay these criticisms out there, because, as I said earlier, I have a tremendous amount of respect for FRSO [Fight Back]'s work. I don't want to see them descend into all out revisionism or start making Avakian like claims of armed struggle in 8 years, 2 months and 14 days. Yet, taken as a whole, these shifts appear to show a rather complete ideological break with anti-revisionism fundamental critique of Soviet "socialism." Class struggle does continue under socialism, socialism can be defeated by new ruling classes that grow out of these struggles, and we have seen this in the USSR after Lenin/Stalin's death, post-Mao China, and the vast majoirty of the once socialist world.

So what am I missing? Is there internal debate and disagreement around these line changes? Do these changes represent the views of organizational leadership with control over publications more than the general mood of the group's rank-and-file?

Comrades in FRSO [Fight Back] appear to have congresses every three years, and if the pattern holds they will hold their next one in May 2007. Are rank-and-file comrades currently demanding changes in line, strategy and, if need be, leadership to ensure that actual lessons are learned from 20th Century socialism, and that a wholesale adoption of revisionist thinking by the organization does not take place?

Developments in Nepal, India, South America, the Philippines and the recent upsurge of Bolivarian solidarity here in the U.S. offer up exciting possibilities in the coming years. Now is the time for refined revolutionary theory and advanced practice, not tried and failed dogmatism.

"Tectonic Shift" in Subjective Conditions: Nepal is on the brink of liberation

2006-04-17T10:14:00.000-04:00

One truly amazing thing about dialectics is that despite the best efforts made to discredit this methodology's ability to correctly interpret and thus learn from actual lived history, its effects cannot be denied even by bourgeois standard-bearers or "papers of record."

This article, printed in Sunday's NYTimes, describes the mounting shift in the subjective element of revolutionary activity in Nepal. Despite being openly hostile to the driving-edge of this contradiction the Maoist insurgency, the general direction in which this process is heading is undeniable. The Maoists may not win in the coming months, but they are qualitatively closer than they were mere weeks ago.

Very Important Piece by Joaquin Bustelo on the Ongoing Immigrant Upsurge

2006-04-15T20:58:00.000-04:00

This is one of, if not the most insightful articles I've seen written about the current (mostly Latino/a) immigrant upsurge that brought hundreds of thousands (and perhaps more) into the streets last Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. I think that it is a post to a list-serv, perhaps the Marxism list-serv, but I know that it has already been put out there by Stan Goff and others in the left-wing of the "blogsphere." Regardless of origin, the brother lays out critiques and challenges that are must reads for all of us on the US left working on, thinking and/or writing about these recent happenings. It's longish, but so is alot of stuff worth reading. So read it!

by Joaquín Bustel
It's very interesting seeing that comrades who often seem to have all the answers for Latinos everywhere else in this continent have so little of substance to say in analyzing the biggest mass movement in many decades when it explodes onto the political stage of their home turf.

I say the biggest in many decades, but just by demonstration size alone, you'd have to say the biggest mass movement the United States has seen. EVER.

When was there ever a demonstration of a million people in Los Angeles? One of half a million in Dallas? Of nearly 100,000 in Atlanta? When was there ever a series of scores of protests in one month like we have seen since mid-March when Chicago broke the dam?

One would have hoped that it would have provoked a more thoughtful response than whipping up leaflets calling for a $15 minimum wage that one of the non-Latino sectarians on the Marxism list proudly boasted about having distributed at a Los Angeles demonstration. (That's what I love about ultralefts: millions of immigrants stage marches for dignity and these comrades immediately reduce things to bourgeois economist trade-unionism, imagining that by adding one or two zeros to be bureaucracy's nickel-and-dime demands, that have somehow taken it to a higher level and imbued it with revolutionary content).

Because the situation cries out for applying the tools of Marxist analysis to orient ourselves. And this is what I believe flows from such an analysis:

There is no task more urgent than drawing together WITHIN the Latino movement a militant, uncompromising, legalization for all left wing. And on the terms of the issues posed by this movement itself, not with demands parachuted in via ultraleft leafletters, whether of the $15/hour minimum wage or the "drive out the Bush regime" variety, which I saw here in Atlanta huddled at the edge of the Monday rally intensely discussing whether or not they should hand out their leaflets and circulate their petitions, because a couple of the younger women comrades were telling an older male that they just didn't feel comfortable doing that there.

Trying to recruit to overwhelmingly white, or even strongly multinational left groups can easily become a DIVERSION from and an obstacle to the immediate, urgent task of cohering a left wing within this movement. It is a secondary priority that should take a back seat, and if you're unsure on just how to do it right, wait. Because seeing a movement like this develop and immediately trying to recruit out of it, without being able to offer those you seem to attract any real analysis, understanding or perspective for this concrete struggle is, in my view, opportunism.

And even the groups that have tried to engage with the movement on its own terms seem unable to really understand even fairly basic things. For example, I saw at one of the protests on TV that there were quite a few printed placards calling for "Amnesty" signed by, if I remember right, ANSWER.

Amnesty is not a word much of the movement is putting forward, it hasn't caught on, and for a very simple reason. Amnesty implies you've done something wrong. And Latino immigrants don't feel they've done anything wrong. It isn't something that's been a big discussion in the movement, it's just a word that hasn't caught on because it doesn't express the sentiments people have. It doesn't "feel" quite right. Legalization, full rights, that's the sort of way people in the movement tend to speak about this.

The enemies of the immigrant rights movement have tried to frame the issue in terms of "amnesty," and if for no other reason it is sometimes also used. But for them, it is a part of their very conscious campaign to frame the issue in terms of what to do with these millions of "criminals," these "illegals."

So while I appreciate the sentiments of the radical group that put out the amnesty placards, I would urge them to stop. I suspect they don't understand the character of the movement or the feelings of its participants.

Why is "Sí se puede" the most commonly heard chant on these demonstrations? It isn't a demand, and on its face, it could mean anything. Yet it obviously means something very important to the MILLIONS that have now awakened to political life and struggle. Try to *understand* the actual movement just as it is.

Then there's the Troops Out Now Coalition, which appears to have unilaterally issued a call for a May 1 rally in Union Square in New York. If that is the case, then this must be rejected as rank opportunism. This is the sort of arrogance that has had such disastrous results in the antiwar movement. And when dealing with a Latino movement, this idea that a non-Latino group should be calling rallies and controlling the stage undermines the very core character of the movement itself. Whatever the intentions, it is a direct attack and challenge to the integrity of the movement.

I'm sure there are all sorts of problems in the Latino immigrant rights movement in New York. We have them here in Atlanta, despite having had a better start in cohering a genuine left wing of the movement than many other areas. Mostly white or even strongly multinational left groups should get it out of their heads that they can somehow "intervene" and solve the problems of leadership of this movement. They can't. And their trying to do so will only complicate things further. The movement as a whole, and especially its radical wing, needs solid reliable allies, not attempts by outside forces to substitute themselves for the leadership that must emerge from within the community. All such attempts are not only doomed to fail, but run the risk of undercutting the process of the formation of a leadership from within the movement itself.

These sorts of issues highlight the importance of having a solid, grounded class analysis and Marxist understanding of what is going on. An understanding especially of the *national* character of the movement and the *nationalist* sentiments that drive it is essential--and there seems to be a fair bit of NOT even seeing this going around--, but that is not enough. You have to understand the actualsocial forces, class forces that find expression in and through this upsurge in the community and how they interact with broader forces.

The absolutely all-encompassing character of this movement in the Latino communities is the result of a confluence of class forces that is not likely to last.

You have the overall neoliberal drive for world domination, redoubled with a vengeance after 9/11, which breeds and emboldens white supremacist forces; and from that, the aggressiveness and inroads and victories scored by the nativist wing of the Republican Party, the offensiveness of racist hatemongers like CNN's Lou Dobbs and so on.

But you also have the divisions within the Republicans between the more mainstream corporatists (Bush-Cheney) and right wing demagogues (Sensenbrenner-Dobbs-Tancredo), the pusillanimous continuous caving in by the "liberal" democrats and the stampede for cover from the "mainstream" DLC Democrats (with honorable exceptions, and more from the Congressional Black Caucus than the "Hispanic" Caucus, it must be admitted); and within it all the ACTUAL ruling class expressing its class interests by hiring and sheltering undocumented workers by the MILLIONS.

And you have this mass of Latino immigrants, both documented and un-, but especially the undocumented, pushed out of their own countries by the same neoliberal offensive that is attacking them here, who for years have been beat up and denigrated as "illegals," as job-stealing, welfare-cheating, diseased-carrying, school-budget-busting, terrorist sub-humans. Who are hired to build roads and then denied the right to have drivers licenses. Who prepare the food served on airplane but are not allowed to board them.

But within the Latino community, you have something else, you have middle-class and even some small capitalist layers. Usually subservient to their master's voice, THIS layer has moved, partly as a result from their own status as Latinos --including having been undocumented (in Atlanta we have a couple of ex-"illegal" millionaires), partly from the pressure from below, from their own workers, friends, and family, but also and very importantly from their own *class* interests.

Stalin says in the famous 1913 Bolshevik pamphlet on the national question that the heart and soul of the nationalism of the bourgeoisie is their home market. That is the same here, even though it manifests in ways which the Bolsheviks couldn't have imagined (and even though I disagree with the Bolshevik 1913 position of reducing the national question to just the interests of the bourgeois forces).

What has made this a MASS movement is the media, and most of all the radio. And what made it possible for all these DJ's and radio personalities to go all-out for the movement is that despite their middle class status, they are also, almost to a person, immigrants, and immigrants who came here as adults (very few people can work in Spanish-language media at a professional level, just from a language point of view, unless they were educated in Latin America: otherwise their Spanish is too "foreign," too corrupted by English). But also, because their bosses did NOT tell them to lay off, on the contrary, they egged them on. And their advertisers ALSO didn't complain, but said "right on" to the brothers. (And overwhelmingly they are "brothers" -- there are very few women DJ's).

Frankly, what Nativo Lopez of MAPA told Lou Dobbs is the God's honest truth: if you had to name one person who was responsible for uniting the Latino community, that would be Sensenbrenner. The vicious, racist "Latinos have no rights the white man is bound to respect" bill he pushed through the House in December convinced bourgeois Latinos and middle layers that their trust in the fundamental capitalist rationality of U.S. politics was misplaced in this case. And if youlook at the bill, it is simply the legal framework for a pogrom.

In desperation, these traditionally "moderate" forces have turned to the Latino working class, and to the tactics associated historically with the working class movement, marches and rallies, economic boycotts and –in essence-- strikes.

And in doing so they have unleashed a proletariat worthy of the name. One that realizes that it must not "permit itself to be treated as rabble," one that instinctively feels that it "needs its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread." One that calls its events marches for dignity, not marches for amnesty.

The interactions of this Latino proletariat with the other social classes isn't as straightforward as people might think. This is not exactly "class against class," it is much more *complicated.*

One of the untold stories --there must be thousands of them by now nationwide-- of the Latino movement here in Atlanta is that when we held the day without immigrants protest here on March 24, a lot of the union members at a big commercial laundry walked out from the plant and crippled production. I know the head of that plant's local. She is undocumented, a mother who is supporting children she left with their grandparents back in Mexico that she hasn't seen for years because the
border crossing has become too dangerous and she can't risk her job.

A higher up in her union went to bat for the workers, and got them all off with a verbal warning. They were also negotiating significant participation by workers from that plant in the Monday protest, although I don't know the outcome of that.

You would think the reaction of the plant management would have been to immediately fire everyone involved in what was in essence a wildcat but you would be wrong. The plant management and company involved have been more lenient because, of course it's in their interests not just to keep their workers relatively happy, but more fundamentally, because it's in their interests to keep their workers period. And what the laundry capitalists see as their right to exploit this labor is under attack, and from their point of view the action of these workers in defending their staying in this country is a defense also of the right of the laundry bosses to exploit them.

I suspect the compañeras who led and took part this action did not necessarily think this through in such explicit terms to figure out whether they could get away with it. They acted on instinct but mostly driven by the attacks against them from the politicians, which as they see it, leave them no choice but to fight back, and now that the opportunity to do so has presented itself, they are willing to take risks to do so.

It is important to *understand* the various class forces and interests in play to orient yourself in this movement. There is on the organized socialist left very little understanding, and in what's being
reported, there is quite a bit of arrogance.

* * *

The movement that has erupted is clearly and beyond any possible confusion a *national* movement, a multi-class movement by oppressed people against their oppression as a people. Very significantly, it is a NEW movement. There has never been a generically Latino movement before. This is a product of the evolution of the last 30 or 40 years, the huge continuing immigration and the development of a "national" (meaning Latino, as opposed to nationwide) media in Spanish. I went over some of the factors leading to the development of a generically "Latino" (as distinct from a specifically Cuban, Puerto Rican, Mexican or Chicano) national identity several months ago in a paper I think I posted to this list (as well as others) and can send to anyone who is interested.

But this "Latino" movement is also an expression of the national movement of Latin America as a whole, of the collection of Balkanized nations that are slowly waking up to the reality that they must become a single nation because that is the only way to deal with the problem they all share, U.S. imperialism.

I don't mean to imply by this that there hasn't also been a rise in specifically Chicano (or Mexican, or Mexican-American) nationalist sentiment as a result. Quite the contrary, the signs are everywhere of
a big upsurge in nationalist sentiment of the main immigrant nationality groupings. But as comrade Evo Morales and the Bolivian indigenous movement teaches, the nationalism of the oppressed is fundamentally *different* from the nationalism of the oppressor in this regard. "No es excluyente" – it doesn't exclude. You can be indigenous, and Guatemalan, and Mesoamerican, and Latin American, and a part of the Third World, a person of color.

Being white (Anglo) in the "American" sense is completely different. That is an exclusive identity, that's the whole point to whiteness, white supremacy. As Malcolm X put it, in the United States "white means boss."

And because it IS a national movement, the right approach is to support the national-revolutionary forces, the coalescence of a left wing in the movement that can become over time a proletarian wing of the movement, especially as it vies for leadership with bourgeois and reformist forces.

Now, in a direct sense this is NOT a job for Anglo comrades, except insofar as it affects their general political stance in terms of propaganda and alliances. Comrades from other oppressed nationalities can perhaps play more of a role, but even then, overwhelmingly, this can only really be done by Latino militants and activists. That is the real challenge, to cohere the left wing that ALREADY exists as scattered activists in this movement, and especially the fresh forces coming forward.

It is a pressing, urgent task. The conditions of this upsurge cannot last for a long time. The *class* interests of the Latino proletariat and other forces coincide only in part, and most strongly in the negative: against criminalization of immigrants, against the Sensenbrenner bill.

But when it comes to what people are for, or at least willing to settle for, it is a different matter.

All sorts of forces were willing to support the phony "compromise" cooked up by that gusano Mel Martinez a week ago and accepted by Kennedy and the Democrats that would have divided the undocumented between those who could PROVE they'd been here more than five years and the rest that couldn't and had to go back to Mexico and get "legally" readmitted.

This is the most important dividing line between the emerging revolutionary-national forces, proletarian in all but name, and the bourgeois forces: legalization for all or for some.

Another very important issue intimately tied up with this is the guest worker program. The revolutionary national forces are all for letting "guest workers" into the United States -- provided they get the same rights everyone else gets when they move here, specifically, permanent residency and U.S. citizenship under the same conditions and timetables as, say, a Rupert Murdoch.

We *reject* a new Bracero program. Latino bourgeois forces especially are basically okay with a new bracero program, which is essentially an attempt at a continuation of what has been the real U.S. immigration policy --letting immigrants in, but with second class status, as "illegals"-- in a more controlled way and under a new name (what the Latino capitalists object to in the whole drive by the ultrarightists is moving Latino undocumented immigrants from second class status to no status whatsoever, and possibly driving them out of the country. Latino bourgeois forces object because it undercuts the markets many of them rely on as well as increases their legal risks for exploiting this labor).

I should make clear here that when referring to Latino capitalists, I'm referring mostly not to the odd individual like the Hispanic head of microprocessor company AMD, but rather to those whose businesses revolve around the community, at least to a large extent. This includes, in a sense, even some large Anglo-owned businesses, who, for example, own community media, but whose Latino executives in charge of a radio or newspaper have been given sufficient autonomy to respond to this situation. And those executives would be among those who I'm referring to).

Nor is this strictly speaking just small capitalists, it involves some significant forces in the bourgeois world, such as the Mexican and Venezuelan TV monopolies behind Univision.

From this it should be clear why grouping together a broad left current within the immigrant rights movement around a few essential points is the central strategic priority TODAY. Because the multi-class alliance with these bourgeois forces is unlikely to last. There will either be a new rotten compromise cooked up when Congress reconvenes in a couple of weeks, OR the Democrats will decide this is a great club to beat the Republicans over the head with, reject all compromises, and seek to divert the movement into purely bourgeois electoralism, urging us to compromise our demands THAT way, by subordinating them to getting "friends" elected.

That electoralist line is one that *excludes* the overwhelming majority of participants in the movement, not just the undocumented but legal immigrants also who don't have the right to vote. On average, it takes about two decades for half of the immigrants admitted in a given year to become citizens, and many never do. So it will be harder to divert this movement into electoralism. But you could already see the effort being made, especially in the speeches at the Washington, D.C. rally.

The left instead will want to keep the heat on for legalization for everyone, and for expanded working class immigrants in the future being treated the same as bourgeois immigrants, in other words, for Latino immigrants being treated the same as white immigrants.

There is a need for the most conscious working class Latino fighters to IMMEDIATELY fuse with --not multinational revolutionary groups--but the most advanced and grass-roots-based and oriented wing of the ACTUAL movement in their localities, and to start coordinating and building ties between those forces in different localities.

Four points can serve as an initial platform or program for this left wing.

A) Legalization for all; a "road to citizenship" on the same conditions as all other immigrants.

B) Yes to massively expanded normal immigration from Latin America on the same conditions as all other immigrants; no to a new Bracero program;

C) The Latino community and especially the immigrants must own and run this movement; YES to support from Black and white and non-profit and trade union and political party (even Republican) allies, NO to non-Latino control over our destiny and our movement.

D) For continuing with the campaign of massive public protests.

In the medium term (in this case, months, not days or weeks) the revolutionary left needs to do a lot of hard thinking. Historically, the idea of recruitment to left groups out of these sorts of movements has not resulted in building strong revolutionary organizations in the United States but rather to isolate and fragment the leadership of the social movements. The kind of political movement that needs to be built is one that is more like the MAS, that serves to bring together the leading militant of the social movements rather than scattering them into a half dozen narrow sects.

There is a need for a new political space where leading activists can begin to discuss and think through the strategic challenges that are posed as the actual movements develop. There is no chance the currently existing organized socialist groups can be that space, there is no room in them, neither socially, culturally nor politically. The discussion (or lack of it) within this list and I believe also within the organized groups shows that the tendency of the socialist left is to have way too many answers and way too few questions.

Of particular importance is that this new space make possible the REAL leading participation of militants from the oppressed nationalities and especially women. If you go to myspace.com, and look at the videos of the student high school walkouts from all over the country that have been posted there, the very strong impression you get is that the majority of the leadership and participants in the movement are young women. And that is certainly true of the overall immigrant rights movement in my area, where women are the central core of leaders and activists.

The traditional Left has a very serious problem of reproducing the patterns of power and privilege from broader society. The forms of the meetings, the style of discourse and debate, the emphasis on the production of literature accessible really only to a very few in a movement like this, all of that needs to be re-examined in a self-critical spirit. And the practice of left groups that are overwhelmingly not Latino coming into this movement with their own sectarian leaflets and agendas with which to mold and shape the actual movement needs to be self-critically examined from this angle also.

Joaquín

New Communist Movement archive grows

2006-04-14T10:25:00.000-04:00

Revolutionary organizer, writer and leftist historian Max Elbaum has recently donated his vast archive of NCM documents, interviews used in researching and writing "Revolution in the Air" to the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research. These materials will be combined with the already established Mike Conan (¡presente!) collection. Although I don't really see eye-to-eye with Max on much of his summation concerning the failures of the NCM, especially his whole-sale rejection of any contribution made by committed Maoist organizations, the importance of this now expanded archive in self-evident. Below is Max's announcement of the donation.

Friends,
I have donated the extensive archives used in researching and writing "Revolution in the Air" to the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research. The donated material consists of 40 boxes of books, journals, newspapers, pamphlets and internal documents from the late-1960s revolutionary upsurge and then the 1970s-80s "new communist movement."

This archive will be added to the Library's existing "Mike Conan Collection" of new communist movement materials. Mike was a dear comrade and friend - you can read an appreciation of his life and activism at http://freedomroad.org/content/view/22/64/ Before Mike died of cancer in 1994 he arranged for his large archive to be made available to researchers and activists in this way. Now, with these new documents added, the Library has perhaps the country's most comprehensive collection of materials on this section of the U.S. left.

The Library, located in Los Angeles, offers unique and accessible collections and community programs, and is devoted to engaging people across generations in using history to advance social justice. For full information go to http://www.socallib.org/ So, if you are engaged in a research project, or are just interested in looking at primary source materials from the late '60s radical movements and one strand of the left that grew out of them, check out the Mike Conan Collection. I also urge your support for the Southern California Library and similar institutions, which are so important for preserving records of radical movements and providing continuity from one generation of activists and scholars to the next.

Last, if you haven't checked out http://www.revolutionintheair.com in awhile, consider taking a look. There's at least one new review of the book posted in 2006, plus an extensive bibliography, a chronology of events 1954-1992 and other items.
Peace,
Max

April 10, 2006: Knoxville, TN

2006-04-11T09:49:00.000-04:00

Close to 2,500 people turned out for the largest demonstration Knoxville has seen in decades yesterday. I helped with peace-keeping, which gave me an amazing opportunity to view the march from a relatively stationary location. The demo marched around the block housing Senator Frisk's office for something like 2 hours; when the end of the march came around the corner it wasn't but 10 feet ahead of the beginning. Yeah, folks completely surrounding the entire building!

A little background, 200 people turn-out to something in town and it is a BIG deal. Interestingly enough, I wouldn't say that there were many more than 200 non-Latino/as present, and these folks were almost entirely the usual social justice suspects. The event's turn-out was something like quadruple that of the March 13 demo. Here are some more pictures.

¡El Gigante Durmiente Se Despierta!

French victory provides much needed inspiration

2006-04-10T08:12:00.000-04:00

Been absent for a bit. Basic run-down goes something like: student-labor alliances have the potential to be as precarious as any strategic alliance actively engaged in struggle during the current period, especially in locales that haven't seen major upsurges in 70+ years. Students get militant and outstrip fledgling worker organization. Workers remain overly cautious and act in ways that tokenize the students. In the end, an improperly constructed relationship between student allies and workers fails to function, students face burnout and disillusionment, workers feel alienation from former allies, and the real people involved feel super stressed out.

But today's news out of France shows why building something as complicated, stressful and involved as a worker-student alliance is ultimately so vital. My hat is off to these brave women and men. I feel inspired at a point in time when I desperately need some inspiration.

Follow-up on "It was a natural death": should have know, part ii

2006-03-15T09:35:00.000-05:00

Celticfire has posted the latest information about the murder of Martin Lee Anderson. A second autopsy, appearntly preformed by someone who can tell the difference between massive internal hemorraging and sickle cell trait, has ruled that in fact Mr. Anderson's death wasn't so natural after all.

In response to his post, a regular commenter offered the following, to which I responded. Both are posted below:

Jack said...
I was initially saddened by the video footage but even more so now with the news of these reports. Obviously the kid had issues, but whatever they were, this is awful. Physical action should not have been taken whatsoever.

Nelson H. said...
Obviously the kid had issues"...

I'm interested in hear just what exactly the kid's "issues" are, and the analysis behind this assertion.

Specifically, I am wondering if you draw any conclusions from Celticfire's on target inclusion of the growing rate of Black incarceration, the fact that he had already been relegated to a prison-like setting (at 14), that 2 other Black youths have been murdered in Florida boot campus in recent history, and the hideously long history of Black enslavement and brutal treatment by white (and other Black) "guards."

Finally, I'd like to deepen the analysis, juxtaposing my comments against the Douglass quote (possibly my all time favorite work by him - outside of the "As goes the South" maxim, of course). The murder of Martin Lee Anderson is but one of the latest examples of Black national oppression.

First, Fredrick Douglass. As a historical subject his is quite a complicated one; standing to the left of many, yet knowingly to the right of some very important freedom fighters (Tubman, J. Brown, D. Walker, etc). Despite understanding much of the Irish question (specifically with regards to self-rule), he was never able to place the plight of his own people in a proper historical context (of colonialism and national oppression). This became most manifest as he built a huge, plantation style mansion for himself and his white wife outside DC, while urging Black sharecroppers feeling the brunt of Klan repression in the Black Belt to "stick it out" rather than emigrate to Kansas (or make any land demands for that matter - again completely misunderstanding the key demands in semi-feudal contexts).

It becomes very difficult to draw correct lessons from Martin Lee Anderson’s murder without first recognizing the deep relationships between the former slave-patrols, who later became bull-dozers, who later joined the Klan, who still work in "law-enforcement" (here I think of Celticfire's point in an earlier post concerning socialist democracy: "for who, and to do what?"), and the correct point Douglass makes in his “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July” – namely that the Fourth of July means nothing to individuals who are defined as “other” in the process of imagining American national identity.

So we return to the “issues” some claim the young, murdered Mr. Anderson had, and the environment (presented in its proper historical materialist context of Panama City’s relative closeness to the heart of Black America in the Black Belt, and the great Black urban migrations as a result of semi-feudal pauperism) in which he was raised. He may very well have had some “issues,” and I am not proposing that we disregard them. Quite to the contrary, I uphold the eloquent demands of Amilcar Cabral that all oppressed people face our shortcomings, do so fulling recognizing the context of purposeful underdevelopment and the effects of institutional violence on people, nations and culture, and share our struggle to overcome these shotcomings with our comrades and the people. But we must not allow ourselves to offer half justifications for police killings, even if we have no intention of doing so, and especially not when said killings are put of a 400 year campaign of forced labor, cultural genocide, and national oppression.

Interfaith Worker Justice Calls-Out McDonalds

2006-03-14T15:39:00.000-05:00

The Chicago based Interfaith Worker Justice has issued the following statement to McDonalds. Phase two of the Collation of Immokaleee Workers' struggle for justice in the fields is picking up steam. The full statement is below:

IWJ calls on McDonald's to Give Tomato pickers a Raise

As God worked to create the world, our religious traditions value those who do the world's work. The work of tomato pickers is among the most undervalued in our society: In South Florida, tomato pickers live in extreme poverty, and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) continues to document cases of slavery in the fields.

Taco Bell and its parent company Yum! Brands nearly doubled wages for workers who pick their tomatoes by entering into an historic agreement with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Under this agreement, Taco Bell pays one penny more per pound for their tomatoes, all of which is passed directly to workers. Interfaith Worker Justice calls on McDonald's and other fast food chains to follow Taco Bell's lead and work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to ensure tomato pickers in their supply chain receive fair wages and enjoy human rights in the fields.

Interfaith Worker Justice envisions a nation where all workers enjoy the rights to:

* Wages, health care and pensions that allow workers to raise families and retire with dignity;

* Safe working conditions;

* Organize and bargain collectively without harassment, intimidation or retaliation;

* Equal protection under labor law - regardless of immigration status - and an end to the practice of pitting immigrant and U.S. born workers against one another;

* Fair and just participation in the global economy that promotes the welfare of both domestic and foreign workers.

The CIW organizes tomato pickers to win these basic rights. The CIW is led by tomato pickers and is internationally recognized for its groundbreaking work to end slavery in the fields and help workers' win better wages and conditions. CIW is working successfully with Yum Brands to raise workers' wages significantly and quickly. Any "solution" that leaves out the CIW, which speaks for the organized tomato pickers in the Immokalee region, is inadequate. Workers should be part of shaping any solution that affects their lives and their livelihoods.

Instead of partnering with the worker-led CIW, McDonald's is partnering with Socially Accountable Farm Employers (SAFE) to monitor conditions in the fields. SAFE is a grower-led organization that merely pledges to follow existing labor laws, laws that allow workers to toil in extreme poverty and unsafe conditions. No worker-led organizations are partners in this initiative. Close examination of SAFE's website reveals that the organization purported to represent the interests of tomato pickers is the Redlands Christian Migrant Association (RCMA), a child-care agency that receives regular and generous donations from the growers association.

Instead of trusting growers to monitor themselves, McDonald's should move quickly to partner with the worker-led CIW in a proven process to improve wages and conditions for tomato pickers. McDonald's recent
decision to serve fair trade coffee is commendable, and IWJ calls on McDonald's to extend their support of fair trade to include just wages for tomato pickers via a partnership with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

END

Celticfire's "What About Stalin?"

2006-03-10T17:21:00.000-05:00

Celticfire runs a pretty good blog I've started reading (found it through the Burningman's Red Flags). Earlier in the week he posed a question: should revolutionary socialists uphold the Stalin period and if so what parts? Very important questions for those of us coming out or currently invovled in organizations that came out of the anti-revisionist (and specifically M-L-M vein) trend. Before I posted the comments had focused on the CPUSA and it's revisionist errors. What follows are some comments I made; the whole thread is here.

I'm very taken with thomas lb post concerning CPUSA given the content of the thread. It really connects to one of my main thoughts about the Stalin period concerning the growth of Soviet and international revisionism, which ultra-orthodox folks have always placed on solely Khrushchev while absolving Stalin of any role.

I feel like such a position stems from major misunderstandings of the Stalin period, the connections between socialist defeat/capitalist restoration and growing authoritarian state apparatuses, and the crisis of socialism. While I reject the bourgeois historical reductionism that claims of the "all systems (/except capitalism) produce monstrous dictators," I don't think that we should uphold a man who in many ways a new tsar.

I don't really buy Avakian's recent claim that a cause of capitalist restoration is because "most of the time, most communists are not communists." I especially reject this view with regards to the upsurge of Soviet revisionism and the first consolidation within a once socialist country of capitalist-roader power. The reason why many in the CPSU (and by extension much of the international communist movement) bought into Khrushchev’s revisionism is that his critique of Stalin was grounded in a lot of truth. A very good piece on Maoism as an attempted response to these failures was published in Freedom Road magazine a couple years back in the issue on Revolution In the Air.

Does this deny the incorrectness of their line, or their anti-revolutionary practice and outlook? Absolutely not! Does this mean that some, perhaps even many in the party fell victim to the sort of ideological outlook Avakian describes, most certainly. But pretending that Stalin wasn't a crazy, paranoid autocrat doesn't mean that we are ceding a major front of struggle to the enemy. Instead, it’s correctly applying Cabral’s revolutionary maxim to “hide no difficulties.” Our movement fucked-up under Stalin, in really bad ways. And like all forms of liberalism, a refusal to recognize this is a slippery slope to telling proverbial lies and claiming proverbial easy victories.

Two questions that I would pose that are helpful for me in evaluating the Stalin period are:

1) In the realm of anti-revolutionary actions, was Khrushchev’s pact with the West any worse than Stalin's alliance with the cutting edge of world fascism (especially given the CPUSA and other revolutionary forces in the 30's and early 40's correct line on the united front against fascism that included an alliance with the same ruling classes that Khrushchev was selling out to)?

And

2) If Stalin had not built such a police state in the USSR and consolidated such an iron grip on the ComIntern, would capitalist restoration been possible in Russia without a civil war and would Khrushchev’s revisionism been able to so greatly influence the international communist movement?

On 1) I would say no, Stalin's alliance with Hitler was no better than Khrushchev’s revisionism. And while I am a committed anti-revisionist (and this opinion is not really based on anything other than my gut reaction), I find Stalin's alliance more disgusting. I think that this is important because it shows (imo) a real beginning for socialist betrayal that is more grounded than the "since they expelled Trotsky" non-sense. FRSO [Fight Back]'s slip into revisionism, grounded in their refusal to accept in any way the crisis of socialism, is yet another real world example of how a "culture of appreciation" for Stalin can lead to really bad line.

Also, in the realm of interacting with real people here, I was involved in a major argument last week with leaders in my union (informal all friends kind of conversation) over whether Stalin was “less bad” than Hitler. Whatever limited theoretical gains can be made from studying Stalinist thought pale in comparison to the political suicide upholding the “5 heads.” We cannot fight on all fronts and expect to win on any.

on 2) I would answer flatly, No. After capitalist restoration in China there was armed struggle and an underground Maoist movement that has lasted going on forty years. (The fact that some hard-line Stalin supporters like Fight Back's publishers write this movement and the Tiananmen Square demonstrations/general strike off as anti-revolutionary is another example of the point I'm trying to make with question 1). There was some struggle in the Soviet Union, but the ability to engage in anything like real struggle within the Soviet police state was greatly different from post-Cultural Revolution China. Look at Prague. Likewise, had there been anything like open debate and exchange within the ComIntern, rather than Soviet domination and first-among-equals bullshit, the spread of revisionism would likely have been much more limited.

In the end, the Stalin period drives home key questions about the need for democracy and ideological hegemony that is not simply militaristic red-fascism during socialist transition. A failure to get this has lead to myriad failures on other fronts, especially around issues of gender, national oppression and sexuality. It shows that state power can make real advances (like Celticfire points out in his initial post). Similarly, a strong ideological center in the international movement can work to address major contradictions within certain countries’ parties and produce real positive improvements in those parties’ line (ComIntern’s role in rectifying the CPUSA’s line on the Black national question is primary in my mind here). Yet most importantly it shows that if we are not struggling to build people power (and not simply consolidating the state power we have won), we will fail. Perhaps not immediately, but at some point we will fail.

And I don't want to hear another word about Moses!

Joining a Church

2006-03-10T08:52:00.000-05:00

Being raised Catholic was, by far, the most politicizing expierence of my life. Much of what I see in my mind's eye when words like community, justice, and conversely patriarchy, authoritarian and decadent is drawn from early expierence interacting with the small amount of good and the increasing amount of evil to be found in Holy Mother Church.

Yet for the past two months I have been attending a Church (scandal!), which while not Catholic is quite similar in liturgey and theology. This piece on CounterPunch earlier this week sums up my decision to begin attending Church again with a clairity I have been wanting for the uncomfortable silence that follows "what did you do this weekend" type small talk in my left circles.

¡Anne Braden, presente!

2006-03-08T09:08:00.000-05:00

We have lost a long time freedom fighter and a true people's hero. ¡Anne Braden, presente!

Noam Chomsky on Latin America

2006-03-08T08:28:00.000-05:00

Let me preface by saying that while I do not identify with academics, like bell hooks and others I am a fierce supporter of intellectuals and the important roles they can play in social change and an ardent opponent to narrow anti-intellectualism in all forms. That said I've never been able to get into Chomsky. His stuff is just to dense and stiff; much more academic than intellectual if you accept the contradiction as hooks and others have presented it. This is in large part why I have never understood the so-called "cult of Chomsky."

So imagine my surprise finding this Chomsky credited piece on CounterPunch that is not only (relatively) short but also very approachable. Interviews are often the easiest way to interact with academy types. That is certainly the case for this short piece packed full of important insights on key questions facing both the Latin American left and by extension the US left (e.g. the necessity of overcoming the disconnect between the party and social movement lefts, the need for 21st century socialism to synthesize the lesson of 20th century socialism and see democracy, elections, etc. as central to revolutionary society, the centrality of minority nationalisms be they indigenous First Nations, Blacks and Chican@s within US borders, or pan-nationalist sentiments in Africa, the Arab world or Latin America, etc.).

"How movements rise and then dissolve, melted by our shallow breath"

2006-02-20T14:20:00.000-05:00

As the post-split AFL-CIO faces the likelihood of further defections, the trade union movement's siege mentality ushers in new lows in the internecine chaos. I guess it isn't enough to construct chimerical debates and let the bosses kick our asses; evidentially we have to beat one another to death. A glimmer of hope comes from the news that the NEA is allowing locals to join the AFL-CIO. Maybe this thawing of relations can translate into a NEA-AFT merger at some point in the next quarter century, but I don't plan on holding my breath.

"Sing 'Oh what force on earth could be weaker than the feeble strength of one' like me remembering the way it could have been. Help me with this barricade. No surrender. No defeat. A spectre's haunting Albert Street. I am your pamphleteer."

"It was a natural death": should have know, part ii

2006-02-17T14:43:00.000-05:00

Several months ago I posted a snippet on Kevin Francois's suspension for refusing to end a call from his mom (who happened to be actively deployed in Iraq at the time) while at school. The post focused on the ridiculous nature of the news coverage and the very important omission of the boy's race in light of certain statements made about his behavior ("very belligerent and very threatening").

Now we come to this story on CNN.com (*NOTE* this story is currently developing, and the posted link is dynamic - so later versions of the story are different from the one I am responding to). The family of a 14-year-old west Florida boy claims that Bay County sheriffs brutally beat their son, Martin Lee Anderson, to death while he was at a local juvenile boot camp. The coroner’s office claims that he died from complications arising from a blood disorder. The article completely omits any mention of Anderson's race/nationality. Ten paragraphs into the fifteen paragraph story, the boy's "blood disorder" is finally names: sickle cell anemia. Legions of authors have written on white-supremacy's complicated, layered structure, facts demonstrated so very clearly in this instance. A major evolutionary advancement is reduced to a "blood disorder;" the prison-military-industrial complex is reduced to four words: "juvenile detention boot camp"; and the neo-colonial killing of a fourteen-year-old is presented as "a natural death."

Music

2005-09-14T08:08:00.000-04:00

Propagandhi has a new CD coming out on October 18th. An mp3 for track 6 (Die Jugend Marschiert) is available here. And track 10 (Name And Address Withheld) is here.

Damn.

New Orleans

2005-09-06T09:46:00.000-04:00

Music can have far reaching and at times utterly bizarre impacts on the human mind. Songs are often times some of the strongest touchstones for many people, experiences that can magically transform a horrible day into a few minutes of peace that was unimaginable only moments before. In similar fashion certain songs can smash even the most well constructed facade of strength in the face of horror that is utterly beyond human conception.

One such song for me is Left and Leaving, the title track to former punk rock guitarist par excellence John Samson's Canadian rock band The Weakerthans' 2000 LP. This song will always remind me of the day I went with friends to see Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream. Driving home afterwards I had to park the car for close to half and hour and attempt to process the flood of emotion the movie's ending and this song had forced into the open. A good friend of mine had just been raped, and I hadn't given my feelings on the matter anything close to enough attention. The whole time I sat there I could not stop myself from listening to that song over and over agian.

Following 9/11 I read several blog posts that cited lyrics from that very song and couldn't help feeling the power of its painfully simple cords and lyrics. As I sit here at work trying to think of anything but the crime against humanity that was allowed to happen in southern Mississippi and southeastern Louisiana, this song comes ringing from my office computer, unexpected and as emotionally powerful as any picture of flood waters, children chanting "help" or the seething hatred I feel every time Bush has another goddamn press conference has been. In an eerie way, its words and sounds explain my feelings of loss and sorrow for a city I've never visited and a people that this government has proven without a shadow of a doubt that due to class and white privilege I have never been in full communion with.

Demands for self-determination for this Black-belt nation ring truer now than at any point in my short lifetime. I can't hope to make it through the day and be abe to provide any analysis more robust than this right now. There are plenty of good pieces out there, one I would point folks at is Stan Goff's full piece of the devastation available here on his blog.

Why send Ginger Ale through one of the most advanced distribution...

2005-08-16T09:51:00.000-04:00

So gas prices are up. No news there, right? It's summer, gas prices have been on a steady incline for most of the year, global supply of oil has or is in the process of peaking, etc. These developments haven't been lost on anyone, whether we're talking about the local rock station's DJ predicting riots if the price of gas doesn't drop, or "and I thought [Bush's] war was suppose to make gas cheaper" commonsensical proto-rejection of the war a fellow motorist shared with the Sunday night. Anyone including the "our products traveled over 100 miles from the nearest Walmart distribution center" behemoth.

While the public is feeling the pinch, those of us on the left must see to it that we don't miss a major opportunity to get the real message out there: there is a fundamental connection between the local economic destruction Walmart has been visiting upon our communities, the war in Iraq, the price of gas and a system the goes into crisis mode not when businesses stop being profitable but rather when they stop becoming more profitable.

Coke's Propaganda Campaign

2005-08-04T13:50:00.000-04:00

In response to the increasingly effective Killer Coke and coke off campus campaigns, the multi-national spreader of terror and tooth decay has launched a propagandist public relations campaign found here.

In an act of subterfuge on par with the all but transparent attempt to counter Coke's well documented record of human rights abuses, the site is using the ".org" domain designation.

Should have known

2005-05-09T16:05:00.000-04:00

Kevin Francois found himself in the national spotlight last week when he was suspended for ten days after "he became very belligerent and very threatening to [a teacher]" after she demanded that he stop speaking with his mother, who happens to be a soldier serving in Iraq. The outcry was immediate, and rightly so. However, when I initially read about Kevin's story something smelled strangely familiar.

Luckily for Mr. Francois, the media attention his story drew has persuaded the school administration to "commute his sentence" to the two days he has already served. A photograph of Kevin Francois was included in CNN's follow-up story, and I was immediately reminded of the strangely familiar stench I had smelled last week. Kevin Francois is a teenage Black male. In light of this fact phrases such as "very belligerent," "threatening" and "behavior expectations" have incredibly loaded meanings. The race of the teacher is unclear, but it doesn't really matter either way. The people of this country ought to be outraged at what has happened to Kevin Francois, but for reasons that go much deeper than the immediate "his momma is in Iraq" line used by reactionaries of all stripes to drum up myths of anti-military bias. Folk should be outraged that we live under a regime that handcuffs little girls who try to hug their teachers and compels mothers to risk their lives "defending" a system that systematically dehumanizes their children.

Lavinia Gelineau Presente!

2005-04-08T13:29:00.000-04:00

If the American public really cared about stories of family dysfunction that touch on the real issues we face as human beings, we'd be hearing a lot more about Lavinia Gelineau. Instead we got Terri Shiavo. One life teaches lessons of the power of human love and the strength to challenge the butchers that steal young lovers, sons, daughters, mother and fathers from their families. The other teaches us that if you're going to make yourself puke all the time at least have the foresight to drink some damn water and write a fucking will.

And as a recovering Catholic who knows that the Church will never be what it ought to be thanks in no small part to Karol Wojtila, the world is better off with this serial killer* dead.

*AIDS kills people - in case there was any question about this fact.

"This mask has fallen to the floor shattered by reality."

2005-03-17T08:35:00.000-05:00

-Hugo Chavez referring to his previous attempts at creating capitalism with a human face, in effect "[giving] the monster a mask."

George Bush has nominated neo-conservative par-excellence Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank. If any doubt remained as to the fate of rational capitalism, we should consider it effectively nullified.

The White House thinks secretly taping phone conversations is wrong...kinda

2005-02-24T11:26:00.000-05:00

Many folks have probably seen or heard about this story in Sunday's New York Times. So yeah, Doug Wead an advisor to then Governor Bush secretly recorded their phone conversations because he thought that Bush was a "historic figure." On the tapes, Bush trash talked John McCain and admitted to smoking marijuana. But no worries, Mr. Wead has seen the err of his ways, is canceling interviews, donating revenues from his book sales to charity and is going to give Bush the tapes. Most recently, Ms. Bush has joined with White House spokesmen to condemn the betrayal of trust. The quote of the day comes from her: "I think it's very odd and awkward, to be perfectly frank, to tape someone while you're talking to them on the phone, and they don't know it, and then come out with the tapes later." Now seems as good a time as any to remind people of the little 1000 page USA PATRIOT ACT.

USA PATRIOT ACT:
Section 216(a)(1): ATTORNEY FOR THE GOVERNMENT- Upon an application made under section 3122(a)(1), the court shall enter an ex parte order authorizing the installation and use of a pen register or trap and trace device anywhere within the United States, if the court finds that the attorney for the Government has certified to the court that the information likely to be obtained by such installation and use is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation. The order, upon service of that order, shall apply to any person or entity providing wire or electronic communication service in the United States whose assistance may facilitate the execution of the order. Whenever such an order is served on any person or entity not specifically named in the order, upon request of such person or entity, the attorney for the Government or law enforcement or investigative officer that is serving the order shall provide written or electronic certification that the order applies to the person or entity being served. [emphasis added]

The Power of Lasagna

2005-02-21T08:00:00.000-05:00

I spent this past weekend in Nashville with my family. My cousin, his girlfriend and their baby came into town and we all got together for dinner at my grandmother's house. It was an interesting experience, during which I realized just how insulated from everyday persons my life can be. But more interesting than any developed limitations I may have when talking with people I don't see everyday about "non-political" subjects like babies, video games and food, was how open to a left wing analysis of things these same people where when they raised political issues.

There are few things I find as enjoyable as having my cousin, a voice previously absent from the usual political back and forth I engage in at such sit-downs, incorporate terms like peak oil and dollar hegemony into dinner conversation.

Democrats Try On the Banner of Fiscal Responsiblity

2005-02-20T10:28:00.000-05:00

After 4 years of slash and spend budgets, the Democrats appear to be realizing that a balanced budget and programs to help people may not be amoung the Bush administration's legislative priorities (gasp!). South Carolina Representative John Spratt's recent comments during his party's weekly radio address is sure to be only one is a stream of Democratic criticisms. While we should welcome such criticism, the left has an obligation to situation the discussion in its proper context of imperialism, the looming global collapse of financial capital and wholesale ecological devastation.

If we aren't making clear demands that any response to the situation we find ourselves in must "merely begin with dumping half the so-called service sector jobs in the entire economy, beginning with prisons and working up, into a massive jobs training program, draconian progressive taxation that limits personal income to $100,000 a year, a minimum wage of $20 an hour with imposed price controls, free universal health care, the expropriation of agribusiness and systematic abandonment of capitalist agriculture, the strict rationing of electricity, and the construction of a nationwide public transportation network as a first step to dramatically reducing dependence on fossil fuel," than we have failed in a way far greater than liberals are capable of doing. Sure, we must meet people where they're at, but the mass line is meaningless if we aren't exposing the masses to the idea of socialism as an alternative to the problems they so intimately understand.

Goff's Weblog

2005-02-19T16:50:00.000-05:00

Stan Goff, writer, organizer, and revolutionary par excellence, has a blog!

The Steady Decline of Wages

2005-02-18T10:10:00.000-05:00

CNN/Money is running the following headline: "Inflation posts the biggest jump in 6 years."

The long and short is, core producer prices jumped for January at a rate not seen since the end of 1998 - the time period routinely pointed out by Bush regime hacks as stage one of their inherited recession. Given the sum total of such economic indicators on both the produce and consumer sides of the equations, working Americans (and those of us who fight to better the conditions we face as a class) should be prepared for a continuation of the steady decline in real wages we have been seeing since the 1970s (not to downplay to boom of service sector jobs in the mid and late 1990s - I'm reminded of that famous labor cartoon which goes something like "Mr. Clinton says the economy created X million new jobs this year" - "Yeah, and I've got two of them!")

While the immediate impact this jump in producer prices for cars, cigarettes and aspects of other the BLS's core index (which excludes more "volatile" food and energy prices) will be sizable jumps in the CPI, a look into the elite's response to January's figures provides a more telling, and frankly more alarming picture. In response to the PPI news, bond prices - specifically US treasury bonds - plunged. The study of dialectics makes it clear that small adjustments have the capability of producing far reaching changes when these continual quantitative shifts reach a tipping point. Given recent tends towards dollar instability in global currency markets, peak-oil, a mammoth and growing US trade deficit, the quagmire in Southwest-Asia and the real possibility of massive changes in the South-Asian status quo (not to mention China's role in funding Uncle Sam's current financial adventurism), every new hiccup has the potential of being the proverbial last straw.

To bring this matter closer to home (for me anyways) - this is why a 1% raise and a 1% (one-time) bonus for state and higher-education workers doesn't mean ass (despite what the company-sponsored employee "association" says).

*

2005-02-16T08:41:00.000-05:00

On this day in 1959 Fidel Castro became prime minister of the Republic of Cuba. ¡Viva!

Black History Month Induced Nausea

2005-02-16T07:53:00.000-05:00

For the past week I've felt pummeled by Black History Month opportunism on the part of radio stations (I'm sorry, but Independent Women notwithstanding, Destiny's Child or worse yet Nelly doesn't conjure up images of the 500 year struggle for Black freedom), Bestbuy's movies department (again, the impetus for American progressive social change and Soul Plane, I'm just not making the connection) and any treatment of the subject whatsoever by Fox News Sunday. But all of this I could handle. I am sure that my girlfriend is more than fed-up with hearing inane cultural criticism from my lily-white-ass. But like old-school cough medicine, thus far I have been able to get it down - even if substantial gagging was involved.

No more. This one has pushed me over the edge. As I attempted to obtain my daily dose of history - via the History Channel's "This Day In History"* - I was attacked by a banner of the most offensive nature. Apparently the CIA wants to help celebrate Black history month, too. On the left hand sidebar of my browser appeared a montage with Harriet Tubman, Robert Smalls and Mary Bowser, the CIA emblem and the following words: "We are proud to acknowledge the countless African-Americans who have contributed to intelligence operations throughout history." At the very bottom of the depraved cooptation was the slogan: "The Work of a Nation. The Center of Intelligence."

I will put up with pop radio stations who promote "diversity" to a hodge-podge soundtrack of Nelly, Destiny's Child, Usher, Ludacris and Lil' John. I can handle, although not quietly, corporate pimps pushing the unrated version of Soul Plane at reduced prices during the month of February. I'll even try to refrain from throwing my chair at the Television when Chris Wallace starts talking about Black history (praying all the while to my non-existent god that Bill Kristol and Brit Hume keep their fucking mouths closed). But I'm gonna get hella pissed when the CIA tries laying claim to Moses, Smalls (Gideon Jackson), and (to a lesser-degree) Bowser.

Bill Fletcher on the Passing of Ossie Davis

2005-02-11T09:53:00.000-05:00

February 8, 2005
Saying good-bye to Ossie Davis
By Bill Fletcher, Jr., on behalf of TransAfrica Forum
The most appropriate response to the news of Ossie Davis' passing was voiced by my wife: “There are certain people who are just not supposed to die.”

The loss of Ossie Davis is a loss to innumerable communities, and to the global community as a whole. One of the most eloquent of orators, his career, and that of his wife and partner Ruby Dee, spanned more than fifty years. So much has and will continue to be said about Ossie Davis' career in the entertainment world. Introduced to multiple generations, and being relevant to each, Ossie Davis came to represent the consummate actor, always carrying himself—irrespective of the part that he played—with the utmost professionalism and dignity.

The Ossie Davis that I will miss the most, however, was the Ossie Davis who read the eulogy at the funeral of Malcolm X; the Ossie Davis who was an outspoken opponent of the apartheid regime in South Africa; the Ossie Davis who stood with workers and their unions in their struggles for social and economic justice; the Ossie Davis who refused to let the red-baiters and the blacklisters silence his voice for freedom, peace, and justice.

I saw Ossie Davis in the flesh on one VERY cold day—February 15, 2003—at the massive anti-war rally in New York City. I was on stage helping with coordination and, as if out of nowhere, appeared Ossie Davis to express his solidarity with the demonstrators and his outrage with an administration that, in lying to the U.S. public, was preparing to plunge us into an illegal, immoral war. Ossie Davis refused to remain silent.

I will miss the reassurance that came in listening to Ossie Davis speak. I will miss the courage that he radiated, willing to take such great risks, standing in the face of oppression. I will miss the generosity that came from him and Ruby Dee, a generosity much deeper than about money alone, but a generosity that flowed from their commitment to social movements, and fundamentally, from a commitment to people.

Indeed, there are certain people who are not supposed to leave us. I actually think that he never will.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is President of TransAfrica Forum
Bill Fletcher, Jr. can be reached at bfletcher@transafricaforum.org

¡Ossie Davis, Presente!

2005-02-04T15:31:00.000-05:00

An offensive like Tet

2005-01-31T08:10:00.000-05:00

This weekend marked the 37th anniversary of the Tet Offensive. This campaign effectively crippled the underground Vietcong organization, accomplished not one of its strategic objectives, inflicted just over 1/10th as many US and comprador casualties as suffered by liberation forces, but managed to complete destabilize the Johnson regime and remind the American public en masse that decolonization was here to stay.

Living in a period when the American left lacks any semblance of a mass base, organized labor faces a looming crisis (from both the material conditions we face, and internal threats to rule or ruin the only national grouping currently available to working people), fascist dictatorship seems like a firm possibility, and national liberation movements worldwide lack the dynamism and direction so obviously present less than half a century ago, I find a strange sort of comfort in the experience of the 50,000 Vietnamese patriots that gave their lives fighting for freedom over those two months.

Go Eagles

2005-01-28T14:32:00.000-05:00

In nine days from now the Philadelphia Eagles will take on the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XXXIX. For many of us, this came will serve as a continuation of last week's game which culminated in the long elusive NFC Championship title. I will be watching the game, decked out in Eagles fanfare and chowing down on pizza and union made beer. But on such days of raucous celebration, let us not forget this game's blaring significance. For the first time in NFL history, one of the "field generals" will be a Black man, and one of the most amazing and if anything under-rated quarter-backs in the history of this fine game.

So fuck you, Rush. Go Eagles!

Easier than winning the lottery

2005-01-19T10:56:00.000-05:00

In a sickening turn of events, the American judicial system has now decieded that the assult of Black youths by white cops is so laudable as to entitle the police officers involved to finanical payments. $1.6 million dollars to be more precise. David Horowitz and his fellow "anti-preference" activists will be going ape-shit over this decision for years. Now if you will excuse me, I have to wipe the vomit from around my mouth.

Condoms!

2005-01-19T08:46:00.000-05:00

In a move which promises to be at least as controversial as whether or not gays and lesbians are fully human, Catholic Church officials in Spain have set Canon law aside to unite with science and common sense. Following a meeting with Spain's Health Minister on Tuesday, a spokesman for the the Spanish Bischops Conference stated that "condoms have a place in the global prevention of AIDS." It's always nice when the Church is only 30 years behind the times. Catholics (I talking to you mom!) still trying to figure out just what "policy of non-involvement in the Holocaust" means should rejoice.

We Won't Go

2005-01-19T07:37:00.000-05:00

So I haven't made a post in over a week; and in completely unrelated news, the UT Progressive Student Alliance has just launched WeWontGo.Org. Designed as a pledge of personal conscience meant to put the Congress and this Administration on notice, the students hope to fill a needed niche in the anti-war movement. Much more work, especially in the area of php coding needs to be done, but the start of something just happened.

War Times/Tiempo de Guerras

2005-01-11T09:11:00.000-05:00

The War Times/Tiempo de Guerras Organizing Committee has released a summation of their efforts to build and maintain an Anti-War newspaper that focused on the connection between racism and war, provided up-to-date information and analysis and really served as a useful tool for organizers both in bringing new people into movement and moving those folks already in our ranks towards a more coherent (anti-imperialist) politics.

Pope calls for Solidarity, Proposes Solutions to end War

2005-01-11T07:54:00.000-05:00

"His Holiness," John Paul II recently delivered his "State of the World" address including this address to the Holy See's diplomatic Corps. I have to confess that every time I come in contact with this moth-eaten monarchy and the vassals that cling so strongly to thier anachronism, I cannot help but feeling the sense of outright terror I will always associate with Sunday School (or as wel Catholics call it, CCD).

That said, it's nice to see issues like underdevelopment and war still in the forefront of the Vatican's agenda. For some reason the words "utter disapointment" can't quite capture my hatred for this Pope's reduction of issues as complex as late-imperialism to the "building block" levels of gay marriage, stem cell research and condoms.

"There's only one sure bet with security: practice good OPSEC: remain vigilant."

2005-01-05T10:05:00.000-05:00

So for folks that didn't know, my work mostly consists of processing documents that come from the Government Printing Office (GPO) as part of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP).

So today, as I was working through pages of printed diagnostics on the most recent additions to our online catalog, I came across the "Security Aware" poster series put out by the Security and Counterintelligence Directorate, Defense Threat Reduction Agency in 2003. At first glance I could have sworn that they were simply World War II reprints, but quotes by George W. Bush in later items of the series put any doubts I might have had to rest. My library unfortunately never received these pieces, but the titles alone gave me goose bumps.

Some of my favorites were "Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom: security is a team effort." and "We stand in strength, and we will not yield" with graphic of President George W. Bush. At least some of these were in fact reprints of actual World War II posters. I was unable to find most of these using the ever trusty Google (or Google [Uncle Sam] for that matter), but I did come across An Operational Security (OPSEC) Primer put out by the Department of Energy that has one of the reprinted posters for all to see. It's nice to see the state churning out some next-generation, Grade A propaganda.

For people who may want to check and see if their local FDLP participating library has the pieces in question, their Item number is 0379-B-14, the SuDoc class is D 15.15:cutter.

“Bombard the Headquarters!”

2005-01-04T10:10:00.000-05:00

Continuing its consistently upstanding coverage of the on-going class struggle in China, the Monthly Review added this commentary following the trial of 4 Maoist late last month. Worth a read for any and all attempting to get their heads around this developing part of international socialism's continuing crisis (and our duty to find our bearings and overcome this difficultly). The included leaflet Comrade Zhang Zhengyao was arrested for distributing (translated and abridged) is especially profound.

When discussing political repression in post-Mao China, it's always worth remembering that the patriots of Tiananmen Square sang the Internationale not western pop songs.

Why my family went to Midnight Mass without me

2005-01-03T15:02:00.000-05:00

Parents are demanding that Saint John the Baptist, a Catholic parochial school in Orange County, expel the children of gay and lesbian couples.

On a personal note, the first thing that came to mind upon reading this was a story my mom once shared with me. Her mother's father had been a good-for-nothing-piece-of-shit, and after leaving his wife and thier four children, my great-grandmother remarried. But since the Church didn't recognize court sponsored divorce and refused to extend the sacrament of marriage to my great-grandmother and her new husband, my grandmother and her siblings were expelled from their parochial school. I guess I ought to give the Church credit for being so consistent when it comes to playing the role of the crotchetiest reactionaries around.

Pride in my local

2005-01-03T10:05:00.000-05:00

January's issue of Labor Notes contains this article written by United Campus Workers - Communications Workers of America local 3865 president Elizabeth Gentry.

¡Jose Gilberto Soto, presente!

2004-12-22T14:49:00.000-05:00

Early last month Teamster organizer Jose Gilberto Soto was assassinated outside of his mother's house in El Salvador. In typical form, the Associated Press reported on the story yesterday.

Having not posted on this sad event myself, I'll use the AP article as a prompt (read:cover) for this post. A biography of this man, including his long time sympathy with the FMLN and his ongoing work to support the people of El Salvador (information not mentioned in the AP story), can be found here on the Teamster's webpage; news articles on the ongoing push by the Teamsters and others for a thorough investigation into the cause(s) of Soto's death, family vendetta being far to simple a motive for the murder of a man working to unite many of Central America's unions into some sort of regional alliance, can be found here.

Grinch of the Year

2004-12-22T11:40:00.000-05:00

Members of Jobs with Justice have elected Wal-mart 2004's "Grinch of the Year." The yearly contest spotlights companies and individuals whose "actions... lead to social and economic injustices, including stomping on our rights to organize or other wrongs that cause harm to our community." Past winners include George W. Bush (2003), General Electric (2002) and C. Michael Armstrong, CEO of AT&T (2001).

So now all the Whos in Whoville need to salt the fuck out of Wal-mart.

¡Cuba sí, yankees no!

2004-12-20T15:25:00.000-05:00

Last Wednesday Yahoo news ran this story on the latest bout of US interventionist poppy-cock aimed against that people and their revolution. The AP slide-show attached to the story sets it apart from the usual babble seen concerning such subjects. The billboards went up during the largest military exercise the island nation had performed in two decades. Harking back to my previous post, it always wonderful to see the torch-bearer of the last round of socialist experiments still as ready and willing as ever to spit in Rome's eye.

And for those struggling on some campus wasteland in the US, just remember that this is what student activism ought to/can look like.

"From a long-term point of view, it is not the reactionaries but the people who are powerful"

2004-12-19T20:58:00.000-05:00

Today marks the anniversary of the Viet Mihn's first military operation in the long struggle for Vietnamese national liberation. Nearly sixty years later a new wave of anti-imperialist struggle is surging across the global south. Maoist forces in Nepal control some 80% of that nation. The festering wounds in Southwest Asia and the direct affronts to Arab humanity seen in the occupied territories and in the halls of Abu Graib are met by the vigilance of a people determined to fight, by any and all means necessary, to preserve their humanity and exercise the right to determine their own destiny. In the Philippines, New People's Army forces continue to triumph so completely as to force that nation's ruling class to resort mass violence in order to simply maintain their ever-more-limited state power.

Unfortunately, this sort of barbarism will only increase as NPA forces (and other freedom fighters) liberate larger areas of that country (the south as a whole). Thus is the nature of popular resistance to really existing capitalism. The choices facing young Columbians who wish for peace and freedom in their country may not be clear cut, and the tactics employed by the FARC-EP may be sloppy at best. But any evil (real or perceived) caused by IRA bombs in Belfast, the pain caused by the (truly) innocent deaths in that struggle for peace and freedom pales in comparison to the hundreds of years of systematic rape, murder and theft visited upon the Irish people by British occupation.

In the spirit of struggle so embodied by millions of ordinary Vietnamese who would come to fight with Uncle Ho, I would like to highlight what is probably old news to most folks reading this. Recognizing the inherent connection between the insurrection of Dessalines two centuries ago and the ongoing turmoil in post-Aristide Haiti, the Dessalinien Army of National Liberation (ADLN) has opened a new front in the global Intifada. A communique announcing the group's demands and an accompanying article can be found at Haiti Progress.

"[A]ll military bases of the United States on foreign soil are so many nooses round the neck of U.S. imperialism. The nooses have been fashioned by the Americans themselves and by nobody else, and it is they themselves who have put these nooses round their own necks, handing the ends of the ropes to the Chinese people, the peoples of the Arab countries and all the peoples of the world who love peace and oppose aggression. The longer the U.S. aggressors remain in those places, the tighter the nooses round their necks will become."
-Mao Tse-Tung

We Will Reclaim Our Armed Forces! (Stan Goff)

2004-12-16T07:28:00.001-05:00

Speech by Stan Goff at the December 11 Public Meeting and Speak Out in New York City

I want to thank the organizers for this very important defibrillation of the anti-war and anti-empire work that was put on hold by the recent elections. I want to thank my fellow speakers and presenters, and I want to thank everyone who is here for your tireless and stubborn refusal to confuse setbacks with defeats.

I tend to think of resistance politics these days as if they were a Charles Dickens novel. There is always a happy ending in the last chapter, but every chapter leading up to that ending… is sad.

I'm extremely honored to be here with Christian Parenti, whose book Lockdown America I consider canonical in many ways, and which should be required reading prior to entrance into any university. I quoted Mr. Parenti extensively in a long analytical piece I did in From The Wilderness that attempts to show how utterly connected the incarceration industry in the United States is with the entire system of late imperialism, and in particular why these most direct and brutal forms of social control - including prison rape and sexual humiliation, which are secretly sanctioned by the state - draw a straight line from a place like Pelican Bay maximum security to Abu Ghraib in Baghdad.

There is another book I want to recommend, while I'm at it, that is not about Kabul or Baghdad, but about Southern California. It is written by radical urban theorist Mike Davis, and it is entitled Ecology of Fear. In it, Davis describes, among many other things, how the development of high-end residential housing enclaves in the suburban foothills of LA spread into the habitats of mountain lions. Now, from time to time, explains Davis, a mountain lion - described as a rogue, of course - eats Fluffy the Cocker Spaniel, or encounters and attacks one of the yuppie joggers, demonstrating how the feline diet can be diversified to include spandex.

This is extremely interesting, because these encounters are referred to by the press and by members of these communities as… a mountain lion problem.

Obviously, the mountain lions are not getting equal time on the nightly news at these Young Republican settlements, or the mountain lions might explain that they were there first, and that from where they stand, there is a people problem.

But the mountain lions don't have equal time, and this phrase - mountain lion problem - this phrase and this concept stick, because it is repeated over and over again until it is incorporated effortlessly into casual conversation and folded into descriptive lists until it becomes a single signifier. There is no longer a problem between people and mountain lions. The mountain lions are the problem.

This is how the standpoint of selfish, clueless yuppies is enshrined as an axiomatic premise that is out of reach of any critique, because we simply breathe that premise like the air, and like the air, we take it for granted.

This is one reason we are important to the movement not just against the war, but the movement to overthrow a system that breeds war, why veterans and military families and dissident soldiers are so important in this crucial period. In this period when the old tricks no longer work, and the depredations of this global system have once again consumed the very bases of that system - its subordinated people and its wrecked environment - the essence of that system, its true essence, the gun and the bomb and the rape and the prison, are being unmasked by the necessity to use these colonizers' tools openly to preserve power.

George Bush didn't start this war. This war was waiting at the end of a road that we stepped onto decades ago, and by continuing to walk down that road we have inevitably encountered what is at its end. How many Iraqis did Bill Clinton kill? Why did we not want to hear during this last electoral folly that the anti-Bush candidate selected for us by Wall Street and the DLC did not promise to end the war, but to expand it?

The communities of the military are in a unique position - they have a special standpoint - to say we were there. We were not on CNN. We were not in the New York Times. We were there when you rained dioxin on us 35 years ago as you killed 3 million Southeast Asians, and we were there in our family hothouses when we carried the dioxin and the death back into our living rooms, into our relationships, in to our children who were the hostages of our pathologies. We weren't in the swimming pool communities in the LA foothills. We are the mountain lions, and now you have a veteran problem. Now you have a military family problem. Now you have an I'm-awake-and-I'm pissed-off-soldier problem.

Only we are not mountain lions, consigned by our own natural limitations to helplessly watch our own destruction by this system.

We were there! We are there! We have a special capacity and a special pedagogical responsibility to stop others from taking the air for granted, because that air is contaminated. It is poisoned by the criminality at the very genetic core of this whole system, that needs Agent Orange and Depleted Uranium to enforce its will on those it would dominate and those who refuse to surrender their own humanity to this criminality.

Who we call statesmen are often as not thieves. Who we call statesmen are often as not vandals. Who we call statesmen are often as not mass murderers, and who better to out them for what they are than those of us who have been held closest to their criminal hearts in their time of need.

Our demands have a special force, and so we have a special responsibility.

The movement demanded that we not invade Afghanistan to kill 4,000 civilians as vengeance for the 2,800 killed on September 11th. The movement demanded that we not invade Iraq - where our government had already overseen the destruction of over a million human beings, half of them not having reached the age of majority… and Iraq has never been any kind of threat to the United States.

Veterans for Peace and Military Families Speak Out held out in the face of feint-hearted anti-Bush resistance and never listened to the siren call of compromise and chauvinism that led many of our allies to tell us to drop the word NOW from our campaign to Bring Them Home NOW. We were clear about the system, and we knew that the vandal that destroys your home is not the right person to decide who will rebuild it.

We stuck to our demand, and time is proving us grimly correct. We were correct to demand that this criminal class cease and desist. Now the elections that put a mask of legitimacy on this system are past, and we have to reiterate that demand.

Now we all know that demands are the glue that holds movements together, whether or not the powerful meet them. One of our pedagogical tasks in the next period, I think, is to educate the public about the difference between a demand and an assertive request.

I already have my post-election bumper stickers to impeach. But I also know that these little provocations, like that bumper sticker, which is intended to be provocative, are useful mostly to further polarize our society - which I think is a good thing, because as long as we stay polite we never seem get to the point. A Congress of the criminal class is not going to impeach a fellow criminal, unless a scandal is so out of control that it threatens the whole structure.

One thing I agree with Christian Parenti on is that I oppose the criminal justice system as it is, but I think we will need prisons for a long time.

I say that because while my bumper sticker says impeach, what I really want to see - for these people who are presiding over yet another generation of our kids being sent abroad to do their criminal wet work - what I really want to see is George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin and Condoleeza I-forgot-who-I-am, Paul Wolfowitz, and cabinet members old and new… slammed up against a wall, searched as roughly as an Iraqi detainee, put in handcuffs, and their sorry asses thrown into a cell at Guantanamo Bay… after we give it back to Cuba.

Our job is not to be conciliatory. We are not diplomats. Our job is not to comfort the comfortable by reinforcing their denial. Our job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Because we were there. We know what these people have sent our children to do, and what they have sent our children to become.

And I'm not whining about that. I'm not going to cry about what was done to me, because the upside to it is that I'm grateful to the dominant class for my military career. I'm grateful for my education. I'm grateful to be a soldier… I'm just not their soldier any more.

On my 19th birthday, I left McCord Air Force Base to begin my international studies program in northern Bin Dinh Province. My professors were a Black buck sergeant named Eaves, a professional con-man named Westmorland, and the courageous and patriotic soldiers of the NLF and NVA who taught me what it looks like to say NO. I learned that a person can put one foot in front of the other for a long time. I learned that mosquito clouds and thirst and sleeping in the mud won't kill you. I learned to accept my own mortality. I learned that what most of suburban America thinks is extreme and exceptional hardship is the daily reality of most of the world… and I began the process of learning that the comfort of those suburbs comes at a price often paid by those we never see and whose hardship we cannot comprehend.

What the Bushes and the Rumsfelds have failed to understand about soldiers, old soldiers and new soldiers, and the families of soldiers who learn these things from and with us, is that when we learn that there are different experiences in the world, and when we learn to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and when we learn that we can survive extreme hardship, and when we learn to accept our own mortality, and when we learn to recognize con-men, and when and if we finally learn that everything they say is a lie, and every mission is vandalism and murder, then what is left behind is still a soldier, but he or she is not THEIR soldier any more.

Those troops are OUR armed forces, and we have to reclaim them no matter the cost.

Movements start with those who are not afraid, and they grow with those who are only a little afraid. The veteran just back from Iraq, and the veterans of past conflicts, who have snatched their humanity back from this system are not going to fall for every bullshit story. We are not going to fall for their appeals to criminality cloaked in patriotism. We are not going to be intimidated by their with-us-or-with-the-terrorists rhetoric.

I hope they are listening, and I expect they are.

George and Dick and Don, you are not going to shut up these veterans, and these families, and these soldiers by shaking your Patriot Act in our faces. Some of us worked pretty hard and risked everything to fight for lies. Don't you know that we will fight harder against you now that we know the truth?

Those troops are OUR armed forces, and we have to reclaim them no matter the cost.

Patriot Act! We are the ones who have the responsibility to teach the rest that the patriotism of someone defending their home is not the same as the patriotism deployed to take our children away from home. The patriotism of the invader is not the same as the patriotism of the invaded.

We can teach that, because we went then, and we are going to witness now.

Man, they hate witnesses, don't they? They hate witnesses the way all criminals do.

And I've got something to say to those soldiers and veterans who are not with us yet, but who are wandering in the wilderness of post-combat shock. Witnessing will heal you. PTSD is not the outcome of violence. PTSD is the recognition that you have been betrayed and that you were helpless when it happened, because you couldn't do any better or you didn't know any better. Do people know what the single most common cause of PTSD in the United States is?

Rape.

Rape victims report that confronting their attackers - and not just in court where the system tries to rape women again - but confronting one's attacker with a support group and outing that attacker are highly therapeutic. It is a way to recapture that lost agency from a former state of helplessness and standing back up in the world.

For combat veterans, we have a group right here for you, and we will stand beside you when you out the authors of the crime by describing what it really looked like. We know that some cling to denial, that some are broken in body and spirit, that some rage, and that some turn their anger in on themselves and crawl into a needle or a bottle or the chamber of a pistol. But there's a way out of that wilderness, and it's the path of the witness.

Imperialism has staked a claim on our children in uniform, and that's why we will never relinquish our claim on them. We will never surrender in the struggle for the souls of this and future generations. Never.

Those troops are OUR armed forces, and we have to reclaim them no matter the cost.

I'm a grandfather now. Those of you who are grandparents know what I mean when I say, Dick Cheney don't put yourself between me and my grandbaby and expect me to retreat.

We're not only not going anywhere, we are coming after all of them. The veterans of this war are already organizing against it. Troops in Iraq write to us. The whistleblowers are emerging from within the service. The MFSO family list is growing. The number of conscientious objectors is growing. The mutinies have already begun. We are going to court with stop-loss suits, and to defend military refugees in Canada. Soldiers in theater are setting up blogs that bypass the Centcom censors. There is a Camilo Mejia or a Mike Hoffman or a Kelly Dougherty in every squad waiting for us to invite them into the light.

George Bush, we are going to fight you for every last one of them.

Those troops are OUR armed forces, and we have to reclaim them no matter the cost.

To those troops who are not yet ready, we'll be there when you are. We don't go away. We put one foot in front of the other. We will never stop. When you decide that its time to see what's on the other side of all those taboos, its us you'll find there. Veterans and military families.

I made that Dantean journey you are on for two decades, separated from the very people who most wanted to confirm my humanity when I thought I had abandoned it along the road through eight conflict areas as a servant of this Ivy League mafia. But when I made the leap, they were there to catch me, and they catch me when I fall to this day. This movement is your family, and the door to that home will always be open.

If we're not home, look for us in the street.

That's where we're headed now. One foot in front of the other, until we get where we gotta go, because those troops are OUR armed forces, and we have to reclaim them no matter the cost. And those people in Iraq are not our enemies, and they have to reclaim their children no matter the cost, and we are reclaiming them from the same criminal clique.

Look for us in the street, and don't think we are making requests any more.

We are going to delegitimate this war and this system. And if that's not enough, we will disobey. And if disobedience is not enough, we will disrupt that system. We slept in the mud and did their dirty work, and we brought their wars back into our homes to be the burdens of our families. They made us soldiers, so that's how we are going to act. We are not afraid of poverty. We are not afraid of prison. We are not afraid of death. So now what are they gonna do? Without our fear, they have no power, and in movements, those who are not afraid will show those who are a little afraid the way.

We are not making a request. We are making a demand.

That demand is to let the Iraqis be the architects of their own future, and bring the troops home now. You want a compromise, turn on Judge Judy. You want a retreat, go book a cabana in Hawaii. You want a surrender, go visit Appomattox and read the plaques.

We ain't goin' nowhere.

Yet another reason why metal detectors should be removed from America's public schools

2004-12-15T07:11:00.000-05:00

Party girl Jenna Bush has decided to give something back to America's urban proletariat. According to her mother's spokesman, the twenty-two year old will live in Washington D.C. and teach some of the city's "low-income" children. Just thinking of the various photo ops makes me want to vomit.

Union Happenings

2004-12-13T11:47:00.000-05:00

Well, I hope that my 8 readers will continue to frequent my blog depsite my recent dry spell. I've been busy, what can I say. Anyways. I thought that I would write a quick something on the work that has been consuming a large chunk of my time.

Starting this fall the United Campus Workers - Communications Workers of America began a push for a flat, across the board, permant salary increase of $1200 for the 2005-2006 fiscal year. This pay raise would apply to all employees of Higher-Education institutions in the State a Tennessee, including full, part time and term staff and faculty, and those graduate or other employees involved in the teaching and research aspects of these universities. It should be prorated based on the percent of time worked. If more monies are availble, than the flat dollar amount should increase accordingly, but there is not to be a split flat dollar, percentage raise (as was the case last year where everyone making below $25,000 recieved $750 while everyone above $25,000 recieved a 3% salary increase).

Additionally, the union is lobbing for the right to exist as a dues collecting entity. Currently state law allows only "wholly domestic employee organization[s] which is not a part of a multi-state employee organization which controls it or has any right of control" - which more or less denies this right to any AFL union.

Unite to Win

2004-12-07T14:29:00.000-05:00

Andy Stern's lovechild, Unite to Win, recently posted a proposal purportedly given by Larry Cohen (executive VP of the Communications Workers of America and co-founder of JwJ) on behalf of the Communications Workers of America at last weekend's Labor at the Crossroads conference in New York. The plan laid out by Cohen is short and to the point. It most focuses on collective bargaining as the cornerstone to any labor movement of tomorrow. Some would argue that collective bargaining is substituted here for Andy Stern's organize or die motto, however I am less than willing to take the bait. This speech, delivered by Cohen last month, appears at first glance to elaborate on this line of arguement. More on this thread soon...

Oh, and before I forget. Steve Early, please keep on keeping on. Please.

One step forward

2004-12-06T09:07:00.000-05:00

Today is the one-hundred and thirty-ninth anniversary of the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution by the state of Georgia. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880 ought to be compulsory reading for any leftist who is the least bit squeamish when the subject of state power (read:dictatorship) comes up.

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

"Defend the ever stagnate great?"

2004-12-01T09:01:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, the Supreme Court considered whether or not retaliation against indirect victims of gender discrimination, such as teachers and coaches, violates Title XI. Although the actual proceedings clearly illustrated the ideological split within the court, the Bush administration has filed briefs supporting the plaintiff.

"Why does capitalism have developmental potential when its relationships already exist in fully-fledged form? One of the most important reasons is that full capitalist relations exist alongside a range of other social relationships, including "racial" and gender divisions...This gives capitalism room to manoeuvre, both to find new forms of exploitation and to prevent radical forces linking up." -Robert Biel, The New Imperialism

Party of Financial Responsibility

2004-11-30T12:25:00.000-05:00

So Senate Majority Leader (and senior Senator from the glorious state of Tennessee) Bill Frist is having some money problems. No, I'm not talking about HCA; the Chairman simply owes U.S. Bank close to $350,000. The initial loan of $360,000 was due back in August, at which point Frist had paid little more than $10,000, barely 3% of his balance.

No worries though, according to Frist's financial consultant Linus Catignani U.S. Bank has rolled over the loan. It is now due in early 2007 and will easily be covered by interest earnings from Frist's other holdings. However, the Bush economic recovery done little to help Frist's stock-holdings; the Senator's portfolio has dropped by over half a million dollars since the 2000 election. So with Medicare fraud off the table, one has to wonder where the money will be coming from. Perhaps the older, male relative of mine (who shall remain nameless), who told me not to worry about the budget deficits, defended tax cuts during war-time and called the GOP "the party of financial responsibility" has answer. I'm certainly waiting for one.

Victory for Tax Reform?

2004-11-28T10:42:00.000-05:00

Although I have qualms about claiming half steps as victories in most instances, it appears that the struggle for sustainable taxation in Tennessee (i.e. state monies not based on funds stolen from working families trying to buy food) may have cleared another hurdle. I hesitate to call it a victory outright, seeing as how Tennesseans for Fair Taxation has yet to post an opinion on their website; but based on this story in the Tennessean, the second option being considered by the state's Tax Structure Study Commission seems promising.

Now if we could only figure out this whole health insurance for poor kids question...