People Before Profit blog

Movie Review: Debate not, just go see it!

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 09:26:00 +0000

“The Great Debaters” Directed by Denzel Washington Written by Robert Eisele

Of all the year-end, Academy-Award-contesting movies, “The Great Debaters” wins the prize. It's one of those rare movies where audiences stay to applaud during the credits. The credits include the IATSE union bug.

Our American treasure, Denzel Washington, as star and director, may get most of the credit, but the story woven together from historical events by Robert Eisele should take a large share.

During the Great Depression, an amazing sequence of events took place at tiny Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. The college and town remain today so far in deep East Texas that they are almost in Louisiana. Students of civil rights history will recognize the town as one of those singled out by the early NAACP as the worst lynch towns in America. NAACP publicized the fact that the KKK didn't just hang African Americans, but actually preferred burning them alive. On a map of East Texas, one can find that Jasper, where an African American man was dragged to death just a few years ago, is only a short drive from Marshall.

Students of labor history will also confirm the film’s depiction of early efforts to organize Southern tenant farmers, including the reference to the “Elaine Massacre.”

It is also worth noting, though not in the film, that the U.S. Congressman from East Texas during the depression was the notorious red-baiter, Martin Dies of “Dies Committee” fame. A more recent, but just as shameful, East Texas Congressman “Champagne Charley” Wilson is currently being romanticized in a different movie. Moviegoers may choose which version of East Texas is the more relevant.

At the center of the events at the historically black Wiley College was Professor Melvin B. Tolson, who actually led the depression-era college debating team to astonishing heights. Tolson is a historical giant from the period and from the area. After Wiley, he went on to international recognition as a poet in the tradition of Langston Hughes. To have an actor with the power of Denzel Washington portraying such a champion of civil rights under the most difficult of circumstances is a breathtaking opportunity for moviegoers.

At Wiley, the real Tolson mentored both James Farmer Jr, who started the Congress on Racial Equality and is depicted in the film, and Heman Sweatt, who won Texas’ most famous civil rights lawsuit to integrate the University of Texas.

“The Great Debaters” goes much further than its gut-wrenching depiction of racism in East Texas. Through example, dialog, and the speeches of the debate team, it also reviews options for struggle at both the individual and the national level. The issues portrayed as important in 1935 are the same issues we have yet to overcome today, including the debilitating effect of red-baiting within the progressive movement.

V.I. Lenin and others have pointed out the importance of cinema on the public consciousness. A film that rings as true and powerful as “The Great Debaters” may have an effect on 2008 election primaries. One of the producers, TV’s preeminent talk show host Oprah Winfrey, is currently promoting the movie and also campaigning openly for her presidential choice. The film, which opened on Christmas Day, is sure to run through most of the primaries and will undoubtedly attract several Academy Award nominations.

Will it have a noticeable effect on voters? Whether we see “The Great Debaters” as a force in elections, a wonderful historical tribute to anti-racist survivors, a profound art experience, or just a rousing good two hours in a dark theater, it’s still outstanding. No debate necessary!

Jim Lane writes from Dallas, Texas.

Progressive cinema: From dramas to race and culture, more unique films seen at Toronto

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 09:23:00 +0000

In the amazing wealth of great cinema premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, there are shining examples of humanism and progressive content. There are some touching and powerful stories among the dramatic feature films.

At a time when Mideast enemies are nose to nose, and the future seems bleak, “The Band’s Visit” tells a warm, good natured story that could only have taken place years ago in Israel.

An 8 piece Egyptian military band arrives in a small desert city invited for a musical performance. The hosts fail to arrive to greet the band and they are stranded with no money or transportation.

The local Jewish townspeople save the day by providing rooms and entertainment, and memorable experiences that will not soon be forgotten. This award winning film has won the hearts of many viewers, and will remain long in your memory, presenting a totally different perspective of that troubled region.

A stunning cast featuring classic actors Max von Sydow and Christopher Plummer, and brilliant performances by Susan Sarandon and Gabriel Byrne, tell yet another tragic tale of the effects from the brutal war against the Nazis in World War II.

Three young friends separated during the Nazi occupation of Paris end up together in a Quebec countryside estate decades later. They are dealing with severe emotional scars that resulted from their budding love triangle that was subverted in their youth by the Nazis.

Sarandon is a woman driven to document the numbers of victims, obsessed and overcome by the tragedies of war, while Plummer and von Sydow lend heavy moral weight to the emotional trials the three are forced to confront.

“Emotional Arithmetic,” directed by Canadian Paolo Barzman, is a deeply written and acted film about the profound issues of emotional healing.

Two films of distinction from Mexico deserve mentioning. “Under the Same Moon” is a tragic tale of a mother’s love for a son. Divorced Rosaria is forced up North to make money for her mother who is entrusted with raising her son who she leaves behind in a small Mexican border town.

While working as a nanny in Los Angeles, she loses contact with her family. Her mother dies back home and the 10-year-old Carlito is forced on a journey to find his mother.

The sweet undying love he has for his mother drives him through dramatic encounters with conmen and saviors, as he heads for California. This poignant tale deals with the emotional aspects of immigration.

“La Zona” deals with the growing class divisions in Mexico between the rich and poor. The phenomenon is engulfing many Latin American countries.

Gated communities protecting the rich, while pitting family members against each other, are the new way of life. In this film, some young teenage burglars become entrapped in the enclosed community and it’s frightening to see how far the town police and vigilantes will go to protect their property and privileged way of life. The gritty drama by first time Uruguayan director, Rodrigo Pla, hits hard at problems facing people in Latin America.

John Sayles has told stories of the South before. He excels in storytelling in films like “Passion Fish,” “Men With Guns” and “Lone Star.”

His newest offering, “Honeydripper,” is a meditation of the deep South in the 1950s.The Honeydripper Lounge’s owner, Tyrone Purvis (Danny Glover) is going to lose his little bar if he doesn’t come up with a plan to pay the bills.

His scheme to bring to his club a famous guitar player, Guitar Sam, backfires. With competition from another bar that uses a jukebox to attract customers, pressure from the local white sheriff, and frustrations when he realizes Guitar Sam isn’t going to come to save the day, Tyrone comes up with an alternate plan that makes this movie one of the most entertaining, socially-conscious and well told stories from one of America’s greatest directors.

Films address race and cultural differences

Many of the films in the 2007 Toronto Festival addressed the issues of racial and cultural conflict.

“The Visitor” is a touching story centered on the problem of racial profiling. In a remarkably understated performance by Richard Jenkins (Six Feet Under) as a widowed professor, Walter Vale returns to his apartment in the heart of New York after a long absence.

He finds a young multi-racial couple has been occupying it for several months. They are as surprised as he is and start packing their bags to leave as soon as possible.

Walter senses the difficult situation they have been put into, with their bags out on the street. He tracks them down and offers to let them stay with him until they can find a secure place to live.

He befriends the young couple, an African woman who makes jewelry and a Syrian man who plays drums. Walter begins learning drums from Tarek and once finds himself jamming with a large group of Third world drummers in an outdoor park.

This straight, white, aged professor drumming along with the friendly group of musicians offers an amazing symbol of cross-cultural possibilities. The story then takes a drastic turn when Tarek is arrested for jumping the subway turnstile, which had actually been broken. He immediately is sent to a deportation center and the professor learns quickly the new immigration laws of the land. His actions become a symbol for the awakening of resistance to the brutal effects of the war on terror.

One of the most prolific actors in the progressive community, Danny Glover adds yet another great portrayal to his long list of outstanding performances, as a boxing trainer and father of a young boy who is permanently damaged from a horrific racial beating.

Glover, emotionally scarred and fed up with violence, carefully deals with the pain by training the young man who almost killed his son, for a fight that will hopefully end the cycle of violence.

“Poor Boy’s Game” lifts African-Canadian director, Clement Virgo to new heights, with a tight script and terrific acting.

“Dans La Vie” tells another heartwarming tale of two women, one Jewish, one Arab, who seemingly would be at odds but eventually find common ground.

A son employs a housekeeper to watch his elderly Jewish mother while he’s away for a month on business from his Paris home. The fact that the housekeeper is an Algerian Muslim woman with totally different customs and beliefs concerns him a bit, but after he leaves, the two women gradually discover their commonalities.

His mother, ironically, is a French Algerian Jew with similar memories of her homeland and who has sensitivities towards Arabs. By the time the son returns, the Jewish woman has moved into the housekeepers Muslim home with her large family, enjoying the rare opportunity of learning each other’s cultures. The film provides a joyous view of how people with differing cultures can live together.

One of the world’s most class-conscious filmmaker’s, Ken Loach, offers his new study of the immigration problem in England. Uniquely, “It’s A Free World” tells the story from the exploiters side.

Angie, a young unemployed worker discovers she can make a lucrative income by taking advantage of the desperate plight of illegal immigrants searching for work. Her and her flatmate Rose set up a recruitment center in the shady world of cheap labor.

It isn’t long though before her cheap laborers are asking for the bare necessities in order to survive, and she can’t supply it. The law catches up with her and troubles begin.

This fine drama is yet another in a long line of realistic films from Loach that examine the cruelties of the capitalist system, and present them in heartrending stories.

More unique Films at Toronto film fest

Progressives can find films of interest in all styles. The animated fantasy film, “Terra” addresses the issues of environment and peace for the whole family.

“Terra” is an ideal planet where its inhabitants live in peace and harmony. Along come some alien ships filled will survivors from another planet whose resources have been totally exhausted.

These aliens also exhausted three other planets and are looking for yet another planet to invade. Guess where they are from? Well, these Earthlings discover with the use of a Terraformer they can make Terra’s atmosphere inhabitable for them, but will destroy it for the Terrians.

The film focuses on the survival tactics of the Terrians and how they preserve peace and their environment despite all the aliens attempts to takeover the planet.

One of the most unique films shown at the Toronto Film Festival was another animated tale, this time of a young woman growing up in Iran. Iranian-born Marjane Satrapi, has written an award-winning series of graphic novels that forms the basis for this film, “Persepolis,” winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes.

Told in stark black and white animation, the movie tells the story of a young woman growing up in Iran during the turbulent years of the revolution. Many of the Communists in her family who fought to remove the Shah ended up being persecuted worse by the Islamists. Personal stories of Marjane’s struggles with being a woman, dealing with religious and political repression and simply trying to be a teenager, make this a unique and telling film about life in Iran.

The German/Austrian production, “Reclaim Your Brain,” is an angry film on steroids, which makes “Network” look like “Alice in Wonderland.”

Totally disturbed by the downward spiral of television fodder, Rainer decides to destroy one of the most popular gutter TV shows and it’s producer. Realizing that the corporate funding for such televised tripe is based on ratings taken from select viewers with home rating machines, Rainer develops an ingenious method to sabotage the boxes.

A no-holds-barred storyline, directed at a dizzying fast pace, “Reclaim Your Brain” offers a drastic solution for reclaiming the television media for the people, and doesn’t allow your brain to rest for a minute.

An experimental film, “The Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind” by New Yorker John Gianvito offers a fresh and minimalist tribute to the revolutionary names that are well known to progressives.

Visiting cemeteries, touring landmarks and viewing historical markers, the film with no narration and little music, mesmerizingly revives the memories of many great political figures of the Left.

And finally, for music enthusiasts, three unique films appeared at Toronto that might be of interest.

Already playing in US theaters, “Across The Universe” offers yet another fascinating interpretation of The Beatles music. But this time it’s by the progressive director of “Frida,” Julie Taymor.

Vibrant colors in creative settings bring the music back to the days of hippies and the anti-war fervor of the 1960s. It’s a feast for the eyes, visually imaginative, with a strong message of love and peace.

“Glass: A Portrait of Phillip in Twelve Parts” is a fascinating documentary that tells the intimate story of the revolutionary composer who turned the music world around.

His minimalist, repetitive style of writing, appealing to a growing number of listeners, has brought him to opera stages, coffeehouses and theaters around the world.

His film scores include “The Thin Blue Line” and “Fog of War.” His opera subjects range from “Nixon” to “Gandhi” to “Einstein on the Beach.” He writes challenging and thought-provoking music and the film lives up to the subject.

“Fados” is a new music film from the classic Spanish director, Carlos Saura, who has authored many films about Spanish culture.

Here he introduces the Portuguese music style of Fados to the world. The sad, melancholy strains of guitars and singers marks the unique sound of a music steeped in history and longing. The screening in Toronto not only brought the director, but the vocalist Maritza, one of the better-known exponents of the emotionally powerful style. The audience was mesmerized by the unaccompanied, impromptu performance during the Q&A.

The Toronto International Film Festival is more than a film experience. Directors and actors are there to participate with the audience in a social discourse about filmmaking, history and the arts.

In conclusion, this series of reviews of roughly over 35 films just touched the surface of what this festival and many others have to offer.

Bill Meyer writes from Detroit and reviews films at the Toronto International Film Festival for the People’s Weekly World/Nuestro Mundo.

Movie Review: Inside the heart and mind of lies

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 09:16:00 +0000

Movie Review Redacted Directed by Brian De Palma Magnolia Pictures, 2007 Rated R, 90 minutes

It doesn’t take very long in Brian DePalma’s film, “Redacted” for us to get fairly deep inside the collective heads of seven or eight members of a US Marine squad that is in an overextended tour stationed in Samara, Iraq. Their daily job is to hold down a checkpoint.

Once we hear “Sand-n******” for about the fifth time spoken freely by some of the squad but never rebuked by any, we can just about anticipate the problems that will be forthcoming (it doesn’t seem a far stretch that those who use the word Sand-n***** might be some of the same people who think that the noose is a new fashion statement).

When the movie opens we learn that squad member Angel Salazar (played by Izzy Diaz), nicknamed “Sally” by his squad, has a goal to use his video camera to document the war and occupation so that he can get into USC film school when he returns.

He reminds you of Mars Blackman, the character that film director Spike Lee played in “She’s Gotta Have It.” He’s sharp and personable. And he’s continually in the face of the squad members, asking questions, and later viewers will understand the political and moral position he takes when he shoots the event that the film is about.

In 2004, a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl was raped. She and her whole family were murdered, and members of a marine squad in Samara burned down, their house.

The marines tried to cover it up by blaming it on insurgents. Roger Ebert’s review of the film is the only one I saw that was decent enough to name the fourteen-year-old girl.

The movie does two things.

It fictionalizes the events surrounding the actual incident, and it tells us the story by use of “videos,” shot by various groups that all have a particular interest, slant, and spin.

While we see the different videos, De Palma’s trick is that the movie is beautifully shot. We’re not stretching our neck or grounding our teeth at grainy videos. We have the freedom to focus on the one, simple, clear point that DePalma is making.

The other videos include a French documentary that we assume will be a one-hour French TV special about the occupation. We hear French with English subtitles. Next on screen, we look at a Jihad website which acts as a recruiting video by showing insurgent attacks on US soldiers. It’s a weighted scene to play on where our loyalties lie.

Even stranger than the Jihad website is Iraqi local television’s 5:30 news broadcast, which except for the Arabic, could be our local news, with the same tones and inflections.

Then there’s the camp security camera, which sits above the razor wire recreation area just outside the barracks. It reminds you of the recreation area at Guantanamo Bay. It points out the thorny issue of just who the prisoners might be.

The squad checkpoint looks down on rocky, flat land where Iraqi children are continually playing soccer. Are they also feeding information to the insurgents?

The details of the film have been omitted, so we can stew in the prevailing wind and realities on the ground.

The lush movie acts as a counterpoint to the dreary, hot, day-to-day, nerve-wracking tension, which may have lasting effects on those who signed up for the promise of post-Army college and benefits. Some might return as black-water mercenaries, killers for hire, with a much higher paycheck. But what they get is a quagmire, not far from Mei Lei, sweats and nightmares in the long shadow of being a potential Timothy McVeigh.

International solidarity helps Bakery Workers win at Dannon

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 09:08:00 +0000

MINSTER, Ohio (PAI)—International union solidarity—enlisting 56,000 unionized Dannon yogurt’s workers in Europe—was the last missing piece that produced a Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers win in Dannon’s biggest U.S. plant, in the rural, GOP-dominated area of Minster, Ohio, the union’s organizing director says.

In an interview during the AFL-CIO-sponsored conference of international organizers, which drew 200 activists from 63 nations—everywhere from Albania and Azerbaijan to Fiji, Hong Kong, Togo and Venezuela—BCTGM Organizing Director David Durkee explained in detail how international solidarity led to the 161-119 win on Dec. 6.

The win will bring union representation to the 350-worker facility, the largest of Dannon’s four U.S. plants. Others are in West Jordan, Utah, Londonderry, N.H., and Fort Worth.

“Within this global economy, this was an overwhelming show of global solidarity,” BCTGM President Frank Hurt said in the Ohio victory announcement.

The AFL-CIO called the conference to brainstorm on ways to link unions together for organizing and joint campaigns. As speaker after speaker said, with the world economy increasingly dominated by multi-national corporations—6 of the 10 biggest economic entities worldwide—unions have to become multi-national, too, to combat them successfully. Every union there, including Change to Win unions, agreed.

That’s what BCTGM did after its campaign began in Minster, Durkee said. But becoming multi-national in an union context did not mean a merger. It meant enlisting the aid of sister unions that represented Dannon workers in Germany, Belgium, Spain, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland—Solidarnosc—and the Czech Republic, all contacted through the international federation of food workers’ unions that BCTGM is in.

The campaign started, Durkee said, over the Internet—which is how BCTGM contacts all potential members these days. Key issues “weren’t wages. These were the best-paid people in their area.” Instead, the problem was management’s drastic changes to round-the-clock seven-days-a-week work—and arbitrary transfer of workers from one shift to another, without consultation or regard for family needs. And seniority was ignored, he added.

“The workers always felt they were part of the company, and all of a sudden they felt like drones,” he said. So they contacted BCTGM through its website. But soon after the organizing drive began in January, management got wind of it.

Dannon, which is French-owned, long ago signed pacts sponsored by international union federations, respecting the workers’ right to organize. But Dannon’s U.S. managers reacted as other U.S. corporations do to union drives: with hostility.

BCTGM responded with one-to-one house-calling—and more. “We also had a fairly sophisticated group of workers and they established their own web site and web pages” to counteract company tactics and anti-union propaganda, Durkee explained. “They could also read about the union in the privacy of their own homes, not be seen taking a pamphlet” just outside the plant, under the eyes of supervisors, he noted.

But even with all that, the company’s U.S. managers intimidated the workers, despite the French corporate management’s pro-union stand, which it has implemented in Europe. So BCTGM turned to the international confederation of food workers’ unions to turn the situation at Dannon in Ohio around.

The workers in the European unions made clear to Dannon management there that unless there was progress, rather than intransigence, in the U.S., protests would arise at Dannon’s European plants. The result was a meeting in Geneva, earlier this year, between the U.S. unionists—including Durkee—and Dannon’s CEO. The unionists made the point that Dannon signed the convention recognizing its workers’ rights and that its U.S. management was engaging in anti-union tactics that would never be allowed either under that pact or in the European plants.

“He listened a lot and I don’t think he was very happy about the situation, but things didn’t change that much,” Durkee added. So the campaign continued, and the U.S. management finally moved after a group of 60 workers marched into the Minster corporate office with a majority of signed union authorization cards—and after BCTGM told its union colleagues in France about the updated situation and resistance.

The French unionists “didn’t understand why a secret ballot election in the U.S. doesn’t work” for unionists here, Durkee said. He referred them to the famous Human Rights Watch report on weak U.S. labor law and pro-management campaigns and terrorizing of unionists, issued seven years ago.

They raised pressure on Dannon in France, which in turn told its U.S. managers to stop the anti-union tactics and let the NLRB-run election proceed. BCTGM won.

“It wouldn’t be possible without those unions that stood up for us” overseas, Durkee says. The change was so quick that “we’ll have our bargaining proposal meeting, and our stewards and negotiating committee elected by Christmas.”

And Dannon’s other two U.S. plants are in BCTGM’s plans. The objective: make it 100 percent union.

Too many police shootings: more than a few bad apples

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 08:54:00 +0000

The problem of fatal police shootings in America goes beyond a few bad apples. It points to persistent and systemic problems that lead to ongoing tragedies for communities of color.

Between 1980 and 2005, close to 9,600 people were killed by police in America — an average of about one fatal shooting every day. However, the real number may be higher due to underreporting by some departments to the federal government. For example, the Los Angeles Police Department responded to a Freedom of Information Act request by claiming there were 79 fatal police shootings from 2000 to 2005. Yet only 38 fatal shootings were reported to the federal government for the same period.

While the precise number may not be clear, it is apparent that fatal shootings are not inevitable. Washington, D.C., had the nation’s highest rate during the ’90s. But a combination of firearms training for all and true accountability for misbehaving officers led to a dramatic drop in the number of fatal shootings.

It’s also clear that shootings are not distributed evenly throughout the population. In Chicago, for example, more than two-thirds of the shootings happened in Black and Latino neighborhoods, and the majority of the incidents occurred in poor neighborhoods.

African Americans are particularly at risk of being killed by police. Black people were overrepresented among victims in each of America’s 10 largest cities. This contrast was particularly glaring in New York, Las Vegas and San Diego, where the percentage of Black people killed was at least double their share of the general population.

“There is a crisis of perception where African American males and females take their lives in their hands just walking out the door,” said Delores Jones-Brown, interim director of the Center on Race, Crime and Justice at John Jay College in New York. “There is a notion they will be perceived as armed and dangerous. It’s clear that it’s not a local problem.”

The shootings may be explained in part by implicit bias on the part of police officers, according to research by University of Chicago professor Joshua Correll. In New York, connecting negative stereotypes with racial identity was considered a factor in the 1999 fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo and the 2006 shooting of Sean Bell — both of which involved Black male victims being killed by more than 40 shots fired by officers.

Another key part of the equation: a disturbing lack of internal accountability from local police departments.

In Chicago, nearly half of the officers sued in those shootings had been sued for previous violations. Most had been sued at least twice. Although being sued does not mean an officer is guilty, multiple lawsuits against the same officer should draw the department’s attention.

Yet little seems to happen to these and other officers accused of killing residents. Chicago’s initial “roundtable” investigations of 85 officers cleared all but one of them — and that officer got a promotion two years later. (Police officials said they did find fault among other officers but could not provide any statistics.)

A similar situation exists in Phoenix, which had the highest rate of fatal police shootings among the nation’s 10 largest cities. Although there were more than 100 incidents of officer-involved shootings in the city during the past five years, and numerous shootings in neighboring jurisdictions, only one shooting in the county has resulted in criminal charges being filed against the officer who fired — and that was for the fatal shooting of a white woman.

This broken system hurts everyone. It lowers public confidence in police. It casts a shadow over the thousands of officers who do the right thing. And it drains city coffers by millions, both in lawyers’ fees and payouts to victims’ families.

Any fix must tackle the whole department, starting at the top. The combination of training and accountability taken by the D.C. department is an important element. So is finding ways to protect officers who are doing their jobs and who are willing speak up about their colleagues who are not.

Many people know that police have a very challenging and stressful job in which the stakes are remarkably high — often requiring officers to choose between their own or someone else’s survival. But the concentration of shootings in specific neighborhoods and the general lack of accountability diminish police credibility in any particular police verdict.

Ignoring the problem is no longer an option. It’s time to look beyond the apples and deal with the barrel.

Rinku Sen is executive director and publisher of ColorLines magazine. Alysia Tate is editor and publisher of The Chicago Reporter.

The murder of Benazir Bhutto and Charlie Wilsons War

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 08:11:00 +0000

From PoliticalAffairsEditorsBlog,

I had written an angry satirical article about the new film “Charlie Wilson’s War,” which I have not seen yet, except for extensive excerpts on a History Channel documentary. It purported to be the “real” story of the late Rep. Charlie Wilson, and had him chortling, “I love it” as the right-wing Muslim guerrillas whom he and the Reagan administration massively funded through Pakistan and hailed as “freedom fighters” were about to triumph over the “evil Soviet empire.”

I was advised to keep my review on tap until I had seen the film, which is reasonable advice.

Yet, Benazir Bhutto was murdered in Pakistan yesterday and the murder, as I see it, has a direct relationship to the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the subject of “Charlie Wilson’s War.”

Afghanistan’s history from the late 1970s to the present is very complicated. The country itself was one of the poorest in the world, divided along ethnic “tribal lines” and long a battleground among great powers, for example, in the 19th century between the British and czarist Russian empires.

Afghanistan bordered the Soviet Union, and ethnic groups who also were part of the Soviet Union were minority populations in Afghanistan. The Soviets had helped to educate a significant number of Afghanis and an influential Communist Party existed in the city of Kabul. Feudal and prefeudal nomadic elites were predominant in much of the country and the Muslim religion was the primary unifying force.

Afghani Communists took power in Kabul in 1978, faced with threats from the newly established brutal military dictatorship in Pakistan, and also hoping to advance a social revolution, bringing mass education, land reform and other vital social reforms to the people.

The Pakistani military dictator General Zia had publicly executed Muhammad Ali Bhutto, the civilian prime minister whom he overthrew (father of Benazir Bhutto). Zia wasn’t the first Pakistani military dictator but he was the worst. His regime turned more and more to rightist clerical elements as a base of support and also worked with Saudis to establish right-wing religious primary schools in a country where large sections of the population, including a large majority of the female population, were totally illiterate.

Afghani Communists, tragically, were unable to achieve the unity that is a prerequisite for all communist parties everywhere to keep a coalition together and make pro-people gains. They were divided into rival factions which fought each other fiercely over policy. Despite all the gains made, there were disastrous errors in seeking to advance the revolution into the countryside, great ineptitude in the land reform policy among cadre with a limited understanding of agriculture, and an aggressive self-defeating anti-clericalism in response to the clerical opposition to the revolution.

With the Pakistani military dictatorship under Zia aiding right-wing Muslim guerrillas, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski defeated Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and gained Carter’s support to use the CIA to provide aid to the guerrillas. Brzezinski saw this aid as creating an “Afghan trap” for the Soviets, manipulating them into a military intervention which, he hoped, would be their “Vietnam.”

The Soviets did intervene at the end of 1979 to both save the Kabul government, an ally, and advance a social revolution against fiercely reactionary clerically based forces. For the Soviets, the intervention was both a protection of their own borders and also a reassertion of “proletarian internationalist” aid for people seeking to make a social revolution against the forces of internal reaction and foreign imperialism.

CIA aid to the Afghan “freedom fighters” was picking up under the Reagan administration, which used the advertising term “Evil Empire,” before the real Charlie Wilson got into the act, although Wilson did play the role of a political fixer, using his position on the House Intelligence Committee to get more and more money and military aid to the “freedom fighters” while he ran around Afghanistan for many colorful photo ops.

Large numbers of refugees were created by the Afghan war and great atrocities, as there are in all modern wars. In the U.S. and capitalist media, the Soviets were blamed for these atrocities and large sections of the Euro-American left pretty much went along with the view that this was a battle between David and Goliath in which the social issues were unimportant compared to the Soviet “bad guys” and the Afghani “anti-imperialist” good guys.

However, Indian media particularly, along with other non-Soviet sources, emphasized the fanaticism and crimes committed by the guerillas, including the atrocities that they committed against Soviet military personnel, their families, and those Afghani people whom they saw as collaborators — women seeking to go to schools that the Communist government had established, people seeking to free themselves from the domination of CIA-supported gunmen who might beat them brutally if their beards weren't long enough.

While the real Charlie Wilson was running around with U.S. congressmen, General Zia and Afghan “mujahedeen,” the CIA was recruiting tens of thousands of foreign fighters from Muslim countries and training them in the Afghan-Pakistan border areas to attack Afghanistan. Money for this war was not only raised from the U.S. appropriations but from heroin traffic that led Pakistan in the 1990s to have the highest per capita number of heroin addicts in the world.

Benazir Bhutto became prime minister briefly after General Zia’s death and the restoration of civilian rule. She returned as prime minister in the mid 1990s. The people of Pakistan, less directly than the people of Afghanistan but more so than any other people, suffered from the counter-revolutionary guerrilla war that Reagan and Zia carried forward against Afghanistan.

As Mikhail Gorbachev began a policy of Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in the late 1980s, Al Qaeda, or “the Base,” was founded in 1988 under the leadership of Osama bin Laden, leader of the Saudi Arabian contingent of anti-Communist fighters in Afghanistan, scion of one of the wealthiest capitalist families in the region, and both fundraiser and major logistical man for the guerrillas, much admired at the time by the CIA with whom he had worked for many years.

The Communist-led government in Kabul was eventually destroyed. In Afghanistan, a warlord terror regime was followed by the ultra-right clerical Taliban regime, whose attempts to terrorize its own people into accepting universal female illiteracy, the primacy of a literalist interpretation of religious law and misery and poverty in this life as a necessity for the next shocked the people throughout the world.

With the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, Osama bin Laden, who, regardless of his CIA friends, had long seen the U.S. and the “West” as both a sink of sin and a legion of Christian Crusaders and Jewish Zionists seeking to conquer Islam, substituted the U.S. for the Soviet Union as his main enemy, and, setting himself up in Afghanistan with the wholehearted support of the Taliban government that he and the CIA had largely created, began to launch the attacks that led eventually to the destruction of the World Trade Center.

By then, the CIA was much more interested in covering up its long-term relationship with bin Laden than really doing much about him. Its Pakistani intelligence “allies” were heavily compromised and infiltrated with Al Qaeda and Taliban supporters, and bin Laden family money was around. So U.S. authorities weren’t that keen on investigating the activities of the bin Laden black sheep Osama.

Today, Al Qaeda and Taliban forces attack the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan from the base areas that the CIA and the Pakistani ISI used to attack the Soviet-supported Communist government over 20 years ago.

Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, has been murdered under the regime of the present military dictator, who imprisoned and held her husband in jail for years without formal charges, along with many other opponents of the dictatorship, just as her father was in effect murdered by the previous military dictator.

And of course, Pakistan does have “weapons of mass destruction,” nuclear weapons, which it has developed as part of its ongoing conflict with India.

I said at the beginning that I wasn't going to write a review of “Charlie Wilson’s War” until I see the film, but I think this final comment on its advertising is merited. In the commercials for the film, a narrator says with a straight face that without Charlie Wilson “history would have been sadly different.” Different perhaps, but — unless one is a sadist, a masochist, or a reactionary who loves war and destruction for the hell of it, whether it is the destruction of the World Trade Center or the invasion of Iraq — happily, not sadly, different.

Norman Markowitz is a professor of history at Rutgers University.

Regarding the murder of Benazir Bhutto, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) issued the following statement:

The Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) expresses its deep shock and outrage at the dastardly assassination of Ms. Benazir Bhutto.

The CPI(M) strongly condemns this attack. Clearly there are forces who are seeking to destabilize Pakistan and not allow the transition to democracy to succeed. These efforts must be thwarted.

The PB of CPI(M) conveys its heartfelt condolences to Ms. Benazir Bhutto’s family, People’s Party of Pakistan and to the people of Pakistan.

Also, on Brutal Assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the Central Secretariat of the Communist Party of India has issued the following statement to the press:

The Central Secretariat of the Communist Party of India is deeply shocked and perturbed over the dastardly assassination of former Prime Minister of Pakistan Ms. Benazir Bhutto. It is a serious set back to the ongoing process of revival of democracy in Pakistan.

The tragic event has taken place at Rawalpindi that is like a fortress and also houses the Army headquarters. It shows that how far the terrorist outfits have penetrated in Pakistan. It poses a serious threat for the entire region.

The CPI sends heart felt condolences to the bereaved family, workers and supporters of democracy in general and the PPP in particular and hopes that the people of Pakistan will overcome this crisis and continue their struggle for restoration of democracy.

Calif. healthcare reform: A winding road

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 09:11:00 +0000

The year 2007 has seen continual back-and-forth between California’s Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the heads of the Democrat-led state legislature over what to do about nearly 7 million Californians who lack health coverage at least part of the year.

The latest version, now called AB x1 1, is a compromise that has both backers and detractors among labor unions, insurers, providers, professional associations and the business community. Meanwhile, two-thirds of the state’s registered voters support it ― most, the pollsters said, because the current system is so broken.

Commentator Frank Russo, writing on californiaprogressreport.org, recently likened predicting the reform’s future course to driving along a winding mountain road: “As one rounds each bend there is ever-changing scenery.”

Twists and turns Having declared 2007 “the year of health care reform,” the governor outlined his proposal in January, waited until October to present specific legislative language, and still could not find a legislator of either party to introduce it as a bill.

Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez and Senate President Pro-Tem Don Perata proposed separate measures with similar features, later combined into one bill which Schwarzenegger vetoed.

All three proposals were based on the existing insurance framework, as is the new compromise. A fourth proposal, Sen. Sheila Kuehl’s single-payer bill, passed the legislature in 2006 but was vetoed by Schwarzenegger. It passed the Senate in 2007 but was withdrawn before it could be vetoed again.

Are you dizzy yet? A new turn was rounded on Dec. 17, as the Assembly, on a party-line 46-31 vote, passed the compromise bill. It must still go to the Senate; more on that later.

The Health Access coalition of over 200 organizations, which backs the measure, says it would expand public programs to all children below 300 percent of poverty, expand coverage to parents and childless adults up to 250 percent of poverty, let every Californian buy health coverage regardless of “pre-existing conditions,” and require all Californians to have coverage unless they successfully appeal that the cost would cause financial hardship. Tax credits would help early retirees and families between 250 and 400 percent of poverty so that premiums do not cost more than 5.5 percent of income.

Employers would have to spend between 1 and 6.5 percent of payroll on health coverage, either buying coverage themselves or paying into a state purchasing pool.

Insurers would have to spend 85 cents of every premium dollar on patient health services. They would also have to reveal providers’ cost and quality information, buy prescription drugs in bulk, provide preventive care and use electronic health records. A public insurer would be created to compete with private health plans.

Because California is one of the few states requiring a 60 percent majority to pass new taxes, and Republican legislators see some of the proposed funding as “taxes,” money for AB x1 1 would depend on passing a ballot measure next November.

Odd bedfellows Supporters of the compromise are odd bedfellows. Helping celebrate its passage in Sacramento Dec. 17 were insurers like Blue Shield and providers like Sutter Health, some health professionals’ associations, small business groups, giant corporations like Safeway, at least one head of a regional Chamber of Commerce, and labor unions like SEIU and AFSCME.

In a statement, SEIU’s California State Council called the bill “a solid foundation for fixing our healthcare,” with Sal Rosselli, president of SEIU’s United Healthcare Workers West, saying AB x1 1 is the most significant” health care reform effort since Medicare and Medicaid. (But in a Dec. 19 KPFA interview, Rosselli called the support a tactical step to keep the measure alive, and pointed to several needed changes.)

The opponents are also strange bedfellows. Among them are unions including the Teamsters, Machinists, United Food and Commercial Workers and the California Nurses Association, as well as the state Chamber of Commerce, National Federation of Independent Businesses, and the state’s largest insurer, Blue Cross.

Zenei Cortez, a member of CNA’s Council of Presidents, called the bill “a deeply flawed, patched-together package that will leave the insurance companies in control of our health with millions of California families struggling to pay their medical bills.” CNA has long backed single-payer.

The California Labor Federation said it would back the measure if it is amended, but raised a number of concerns, including failure to state what the required “minimum” insurance policy would cover, too low a cutoff point for family subsidies, and need for a mechanism to increase employers’ contributions as health care costs rise. All year the federation has insisted any measure it would support must ensure affordability and quality of care.

Before AB x1 1 can go further, the Senate needs to pass it. But with the state budget facing a possible $14 billion shortfall in 2008, Senate leader Perata has asked the non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office to say how the bill would affect the general fund. Observers expect it to come to the Senate early in the new year.

Keep your eyes on the road.

mbechtel at pww.org

A day of work at UPS

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 08:52:00 +0000

Pages from workers’ lives

I am one of the many young people who work at UPS. As you probably all know, UPS is one of the world’s largest package delivery companies, delivering 15 million packages a day to 6.1 million customers, spanning over 200 countries. It is notorious for being gruesome, fast-paced, backbreaking work, and UPS has a history of exploitative labor practices. It seems to specifically target youth, such as myself, who are looking for some help to pay for schooling.

I am what they call a loader. My day usually starts with loathing at having to work at such a place. You walk in there and it is literally this great big machine. The minute you step into the place, the mechanical monster is roaring and all the workers are preparing for a cold (or hot, depending on what season it is), sweaty day of work. You sweat no matter what season it is.

I usually stroll down to the break room a half hour before start time so I can have a couple laughs and engage in conversation with one of my many co-workers. We usually talk about all the usual topics and it is usually jump-started by the fact that none of us want to be there. Sports, the news, or one of the numerous 'People’s Court'-type shows, are the recurring programs that set the tone for the break room. Sometimes we’ll play cards and make fun of all the supervisors running around with their clipboards doing God knows what. They always remind me of that little puppy dog with its tail between its legs, contrary to us merciless cast of characters who just don’t give a shit. But of course it is a job, so we do have to take shit sooner or later.

As I said before, I am a loader. A loader is basically someone who loads the trucks with packages that are being delivered to various destinations. Most of the time we are loading two, three trucks at a time and are getting moved around constantly. They encourage you to be as fast as possible, sometimes to have superhuman speed the likes of which no person has ever seen. Often I am loading a truck that is flowing 1,500 packages an hour — that is a pretty large amount. I for the most part can handle it, but the question is, do I want to? No, of course I don’t! I only get paid $9.50 an hour. I’m overworking as far as I’m concerned.

The way I see it, if you think I’m worth $9.50 an hour, then I am going to give you what I think $9.50 an hour’s worth of work looks like. This doesn’t make management too happy, when you are working only a fraction of your body’s physical capability. But they told us when we started that the minimum work pace is 300 packages an hour and we always remember that.

When I am not feeling my usually alpha-male self, just kidding, and loading 1,500 packages becomes a hassle, the supervisors usually send a co-worker in there to help me, and I think to myself, 'Finally someone to talk to!' Not that we can’t talk otherwise, but as soon as a supervisor sees us, it’s back to work. Sometimes when we are short-staffed, the supervisors are tempted to come help us load, which is a bad idea, especially if I see them. I don’t mind if they load as long as they realize that I make $9.50 an hour and will be more than happy to write their ass up.

Grievances are high at our dock as you can imagine, due primarily to understaffing. Unfortunately, a lot of my fellow young workers do not know the contract too well because of lack of outreach from the union. I always do my part in letting my co-workers know what’s up. We are even trying to organize a watchdog group on our dock to let management know that we are watching their supervisors.

It is a tough job to load. It is loud and dirty and I have to worry about my safety and well-being at all times. We are even tested monthly about the proper procedures on how to load boxes and also how to keep ourselves in good health.

Though I don’t plan on working there the rest of my life, it is a decent part-time job that will last me through college and will help me pay for it. Most of us young people can’t wait to get out of there and a lot of them have a second job just so they can make ends meet. I myself can’t stand it there. It is a five-hour fight for freedom, with the memory of what my bed must feel like that keeps me calm through the roar of machines.

Benny James is a college student, musician and union activist.

Unionists brainstorm on international organizing

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 08:42:00 +0000

SILVER SPRING, Md. (PAI) —More than 200 union activists from 63 nations worldwide—everywhere from Azerbaijan to Britain, Fiji, Russia, the U.S. and Venezuela—brainstormed for two days on ways of international organizing and cooperation. And when they weren’t discussing joint activism at their sessions at the George National Labor College in Silver Spring, Md., on Dec. 10-11 they headed for Capitol Hill to show the importance to the entire world of stronger U.S. labor law and unions.

There they discussed the worldwide impact of passing the Employee Free Choice Act, which would level the playing field between U.S. workers and bosses in organizing and bargaining. They picked up the support of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Labor Committee Chairman Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

The AFL-CIO-convened meeting featured discussions of joint operating strategies and wins. They included the Bakery Workers’ (BCTGM) victory the prior week at Dannon Yogurt’s biggest U.S. plant, aided by pressure from 56,000 European unionized Dannon workers, mobilized by the federation of food workers’ unions that includes BCTGM.

But delegates also admitted the confab is only a start. Unions must build multi-national alliances to counter, international union leader Guy Ryder noted, multi-national corporations, which are now some of the biggest economic entities on the globe.

“There’s no greater challenge than making it possible for all workers from all nations to form unions and lift themselves with collective bargaining,” AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney said in opening the conference.

Besides international activists, a large group of U.S. union presidents joined the conference. Among them: Leo Gerard of the Steel Workers, Larry Cohen of the Communications Workers—and his predecessor, Morton Bahr—Linda Foley of The Newspaper Guild/CWA, Joe Hansen of the United Food and Commercial Workers, Pat Friend of AFA/CWA and Greg Junemann of the Professional and Technical Employees.

Also attending were Andy Stern of SEIU, Ed McElroy of the Teachers, Bill Burrus of APWU, Tom Buffenbarger of IAM and Bob Kingsley of the United Electrical Workers. Paul Almeida of the Department for Professional and Technical Employees joined the sessions, as did retired AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson. Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka moderated part of the Capitol Hill session.

Much of the discussion in Silver Spring focused on joint organizing campaigns, where union federations worldwide could link individual national unions together to help battle the conglomerates. Besides the BCTGM’s success at Dannon, other such wins included the Graphic Communications Conference/IBT win at Quebecor, North America’s second-largest printer, and SEIU’s drive to unionize security guards.

But the international cooperation also extended to politics, as Cohen and several other delegates pointed out. They cited the recent Labor Party win—ousting a 12-year-long right-wing government in Australia. A key to the win Down Under was Australian unions’ 2-1/2-year campaign against the right-wing government’s draconian anti-labor law and how it affected not just workers but their families and standards of living.

“We have to be clear about building a political movement around bargaining rights,” said CWA’s Cohen, chair of the AFL-CIO Organizing Committee. That’s what happened in Australia, he noted. “When we have the ability to establish collective bargaining rights, the other issues” such as rising wages, universal health care and protected pensions “will take care of themselves,” he declared.

“The key shift is to focus on collective bargaining coverage” worldwide, Cohen said. “The national labor movements as well as the 10 global unions will be focused more and more on this crisis,” he added. Collective bargaining coverage has been declining in many developed nations, not just in the U.S., but rising in several developing nations, such as Brazil, South Africa and Uruguay.

Brendan Barber of the British Trades Union Congress warned politics would not solve everything. “Electing labor governments is not, in and of itself, the sole answer to this challenge” workers and unions face from multi-national corporate power, he said.

“We have to have a statutory right to trade union recognition”—writing into law automatic recognition of unions when they receive majorities. “But that still hasn’t responded to changing shares of the economy. For example, 25 years ago, we had 7 million manufacturing workers and now we have 3 million. There are huge challenges in reaching out to the private sector” in services “and organizing them.”

The delegates, in computerized tallies in response to 23 questions conference organizers posed, agreed on some ways to work across national boundaries. For example, 55 percent said “national plans aligned with global unions and principles will support the sustainability of the labor movement globally.” Another 23 percent said unions could do so by “building local coalitions in support of coordinated strategies.”

The Capitol Hill session focused on the legislative solution, and its importance, that Barber mentioned, specifically on the Employee Free Choice Act. It passed the Democratic-run House earlier this year but a GOP Senate filibuster killed it.

“This era of globalization must be judged not just by growing profit margins and rising gross domestic product, but by how we treat the workers who create that,” Kennedy said.

Civil liberties, civil rights most censored in 2007

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 08:24:00 +0000

The U.S. corporate media like to think of themselves as providing the official most accurate news reporting of the day. The New York Times motto of “all the news that’s fit to print” is a clear example of this perspective. However, with corporate media coverage that increasingly focuses on a narrow range of celebrity updates, news from “official” government sources and sensationalized crimes and disasters, the self-justification of being the most fit is no longer valid. We need to broaden our understanding of censorship in this country. The dictionary definition of censorship as direct government control of news is no longer adequate. The private corporate media in the U.S. significantly under-covers and/or deliberately censors numerous important news stories every year. The common theme of the most censored stories over the past year is the systemic erosion of human rights and civil liberties both in the U.S. and the world at large. The corporate media ignored the fact that habeas corpus can now be suspended for anyone by order of the president. With the approval of Congress, the Military Commissions Act (MCA) of 2006, signed by Bush on Oct. 17, 2006, allows for the suspension of habeas corpus for U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike. While media, including a lead editorial in The New York Times on Oct. 19, 2006, have given false comfort that American citizens will not be the victims of the measures legalized by this Act, the law is quite clear that “any person” can be targeted. The text in the MCA allows for the institution of a military alternative to the constitutional justice system for “any person” regardless of American citizenship. The MCA effectively does away with habeas corpus rights for all people living in the U.S. deemed by the president to be enemy combatants. A law enacted last year allowing the government to institute martial law more easily is another civil liberties story ignored by the corporate media in 2007. The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 allows the president to station military troops anywhere in the United States and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to “suppress public disorder.” In effect, the law repealed the Posse Comitatus Act, which had placed strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement in the U.S. since just after the Civil War. Additionally, under the code-name Operation FALCON (Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally) three federally coordinated mass arrests occurred between April 2005 and October 2006. In an unprecedented move, more than 30,000 “fugitives” were arrested in the largest dragnets in the nation’s history. The operations, coordinated by the Justice Department and Homeland Security, directly involved over 960 agencies (state, local and federal) and are the first time in U.S. history that all of the domestic police agencies have been put under the direct control of the federal government. Finally, the term “terrorism” has been dangerously expanded to include any acts that interfere or promote interference with the operations of animal enterprises. The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA), signed into law on Nov. 27, 2006 expands the definition of an “animal enterprise” to any business that “uses or sells animals or animal products.” The law essentially defines protesters, boycotters or picketers of businesses in the U.S. as terrorists. Most people in our country believe in our Bill of Rights and value personal freedoms. Yet, our corporate media in the past year failed to adequately inform us about important changes in our civil rights and liberties. Despite our busy lives, we want to be informed about serious decisions made by the powerful, and we rely on the corporate media to keep us abreast of significant changes. When the media fails to cover these issues, what else can we call it but censorship? A broader definition of censorship in America today needs to include any interference, deliberate or not, with the free flow of vital news information to the American people. With the size of the major media giants in the U.S., there is no excuse for consistently missing major news stories that affect all our lives. Peter Phillips is a professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and Director of Project Censored. His latest book, Censored 2008, from Seven Stories Press is available in bookstores nationwide or at www.projectcensored.org.

Help get stamps for Mother Jones and Eugene Debs

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 08:14:00 +0000

The West Virginia Labor History Association board urges you to support a nationwide campaign petitioning the U.S. Postal Service to create commemorate stamps in honor of two American labor leaders, Mother Jones and Eugene Debs.

The board joins this campaign in collaboration with Sanford Berman, an activist librarian who successfully petitioned the Library of Congress to create West Virginia-related subject headings including “mountaintop removal mining,” “West Virginia Mine Wars, 1897-1921” and “The Battle of Blair Mountain, 1921.”

Please send a letter or postcard requesting that stamps be printed in honor of Mother Jones and Eugene Debs to:

Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee Stamp Development U.S. Postal Service 1735 North Lynn St. Rm. 5013 Arlington, VA 22209-6432

Please send a copy of your communication to: Sanford Berman 4400 Morningside Road Edina, MN 55416

Immigrant farmworkers take on Exploitation King

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 09:47:00 +0000

“We no longer have own our slaves we can just rent them.”

These words, told to CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow back in November 1960 by a grower in Florida, still hold true today. Farmworkers in Immokalee, Fla., need to pick two tons of tomatoes to earn $56 for a day’s work. For almost all the workers, it takes 10 to 12 hours to pick those two tons.

Twelve years ago, a group of Immokalee workers, mostly Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants, formed a coalition to combat abuse by the growers. The Coalition Of Immokalee Workers, CIW, has grown into a movement with allies all over the world. They have been successful in exposing their mistreatment by the growers, including physical abuse and horrific living conditions, amounting to modern-day slavery.

But most important, they have been successful in getting two major buyers of tomatoes, Yum Brands (owner of KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and other major chains) and McDonald’s, to pay an extra penny per pound for the tomatoes that are picked by the coalition’s workers and to commit to respect for basic workers’ rights in the fields. This has increased the workers’ pay from 45 cents to 77 cents per 32 pound bucket, and minimized abuse in the fields of growers selling to McDonald’s and Yum.

After McDonald’s and the complete Yum family (Taco Bell had agreed to sign on first two years ago) entered into an agreement in April of this year, the CIW focused on Burger King. However, Burger King was not as cooperative as their biggest competitor, McDonald’s. Instead, Burger King has launched a very aggressive campaign, not only aiming to keep BK out of any agreement, but also teaming up with the tomato growers to undermine the Yum Brands and McDonald’s agreements.

On Nov. 30, 600-plus people gathered in front of the offices of Goldman Sachs (a major holder of Burger King stock) in downtown Miami to begin a nine-mile march to BK headquarters in west Miami. This was the CIW’s biggest action to date on Burger King.

After a dozen speakers, the voice on the sound truck gave the word, “Whose streets? Our streets!” — a reminder to all that this was same location as the famous protest against the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), almost exactly four years ago.

Five hours and 9 miles later the march grew to over 1,000, and it turned into a rally at the BK headquarters, it grew even bigger. The CIW saw this event as a huge success. Participants came from all over the country and carried the message back with them.

That message is that Burger King and the tomato growers of southwest Florida need to give up their plantation mentality and come to terms with the fact that slavery was outlawed in this country over 150 years ago. BK could well afford the $250,000 it says the penny a pound would cost it. Many see it as the same old capitalist story — greed and the power to control other people’s lives: two things the growers and Burger King do not want to give up, but in the end will have to.

To follow this unfolding story and learn how to support the CIW in your community, go to www.ciw-online.org.

Urgent appeal from Katrina Information Network

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 11:45:00 +0000

NEW ORLEANS — New Orleans Public Housing residents and affordable housing advocates are being locked out of the New Orleans City Council (public meeting) proceedings and being harassed by multiple law enforcement agencies as they attempt to conduct a peaceful show of support for a halt to the immoral and untimely demolition of the four largest housing developments during an unprecedented housing crisis in this city.

Approximately 500 participants who attended an opening press conference preceding City Council's regularly scheduled session this morning, Dec. 20, were met with a show of force from several law enforcement agencies. Since 10 a.m., people have been pepper-sprayed and locked out of the proceedings. Twenty-four have been arrested.

Organizers on the ground in New Orleans are asking for supporters in the struggle for affordable, decent housing and the right for all those displaced by Hurricane Katrina and the policies which hold blatant disregard for low-income and poor people to send out a call to:

Get on the phone. Call your representative and senators, urging them to support the passage of SB 1668, the New Orleans Housing Recovery Act, currently awaiting a vote in the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. There is a list of phone numbers here: www.katrinaaction.org/node/293.

Send out mail and make calls. Send word to New Orleans elected officials that their way of working with recovery issues is inhumane. Tell them that, until the broad constituency they were elected to represent are treated with the respect they deserve and represented in the process of redeveloping their city, their plans will only harm the very people that make this city the unique and special place that it is.

Council members:

Arnie Fielkow (President) City Hall, Room 2W40 1300 Perdido Street New Orleans, LA 70112 Phone: (504) 658-1060 Fax: (504) 658-1068 E-mail:

Jacquelyn Brechtel Clarkson (Vice President) City Hall, Room 2W50 1300 Perdido Street New Orleans, LA 70112 Phone: (504) 658-1070 Fax: (504) 658-1077 Shelley Midura District A City Hall, Room 2W80 1300 Perdido Street New Orleans, LA 70112 Phone: (504) 658-1010 Fax: (504) 658-1016

Stacy S. Head District B City Hall, Room 2W10 1300 Perdido Street New Orleans, LA 70112 Phone: (504) 658 -1020 Fax: (504) 658-1025

James Carter District C City Hall, Room 2W70 1300 Perdido Street New Orleans, LA 70112 Phone: (504) 658-1030 Fax: (504) 658-1037

Cynthia Hedge-Morrell District D City Hall, Room 2W20 1300 Perdido Street New Orleans, Louisiana 70112 Phone: (504) 658-1040 Fax: (504) 658-1048 Cynthia Willard-Lewis District E City Hall, Room 2W60 1300 Perdido Street New Orleans, LA 70112 Phone: (504) 658-1050 Fax: (504) 658-1058 Mayor Ray Nagin New Orleans City Hall 1300 Perdido Street New Orleans, LA 70112 City Hall Operator: (504) 658-4000

Spread the Word via e-mail. Get the word out to your network of family members, friends and co-workers. The attack on low-income and poor families is not limited to New Orleans. If we allow affordable housing to disappear during a critical time in this city’s recovery, there will be less chance for it's survival throughout the U.S.

HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson has helped to procure lucrative contracts for hundreds of thousands of dollars for friends and associates who went to work at HUD-controlled housing authorities in New Orleans and the Virgin Islands. He is now holding up the threat of ending funds for all redevelopment in his sector over the head of this city, if demolitions do not go forward. There is valid reason to be suspicious of the type of contract work that will be done for millions of dollars that destroy sound structures rather than redeveloping communities with the input of its residents. Act now to support a full and just recovery for all of those so devastated in the Gulf south.

For more information visit www.defendneworleanspublichousing.org.

N.Y. transit union leader speaks in Bali on climate change

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 11:43:00 +0000

A special labor report from UN Conference on Global Warming

BALI, Indonesia — Transport Workers Union Local 100 President Roger Toussaint became the first ever U.S. trade union leader to address the main meeting of the UN’s climate change negotiations.

Toussaint, speaking for the International Trade Union Confederation, which represents 365 labor federations in 150 countries, spoke in the debate on adaptation to climate change. The N.Y. transit union leader told the body, “As trade unions, we recognize that the best way to create the conditions for adaptation to climate change is to address poverty by creating a decent living standard for people, which includes fair wages and benefits.”

Countries in the global South are feeling the effects of climate change in ways that are both immediate and deadly, as seen in the recent cyclone in Bangladesh that killed 10,000 people.

The trade unions in Bali have called on rich countries to honor their commitments to poor countries made under the Kyoto Protocol. The developed world is responsible for the much of the global warming that's occurring, but it's the poor countries who are paying the biggest price.

Toussaint urged national governments to fully fund the Nairobi work program adopted at the 2006 negotiations in Kenya. “The program is crucial because the poor are the most vulnerable. They lack the resources to respond to climate change,” said Toussaint.

The Nairobi work program commits resources for adaptation infrastructure such as flood defenses. However, the resources have been slow to materialize. According to the UN’s Development Program, just $26 million has been spent on adaptation in the poor countries, compared to billions of dollars spent on adaptation measures in countries like Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and the United States.

The nine-day climate change meeting was held in Nusa Dua, near Bali, Indonesia, and concluded Dec. 15. The objective of the talks was to lay down a roadmap for a global response the climate change. Toussaint was part of a 20-person delegation from the U.S. labor movement. For more information about the delegation, visit http://tinyurl.com/39xq7x.

Sean Sweeney is director of the Cornell Global Labor Institute.

Notes on a short trip to China

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 11:41:00 +0000

A two-week tour of China does not an expert make. I do not speak or read Chinese. Immodesty is my main credential for voicing any opinion whatsoever on People’s China. But here goes.

The June 2007 study tour, organized by the U.S. journal Nature, Society and Thought, began with a conference in Beijing on the theoretical aspects of China’s “socialist market economy.”

There were representatives from the Chinese Academy of Social Science and the Academy of Marxism and other Chinese social research institutes. The non-Chinese participants came mostly from the United States but also from Ireland, Canada, Germany, Turkey, Greece, Australia, Britain and Israel.

We visited Beijing, Guilin, Lijiang (the Naxi Territory), Shanghai and Zhongdian (the fabled Shangri-La) in Tibet.

At the Beijing conference on the socialist market economy that began the tour the Chinese scholars seemed divided on it too. A few (the left) are sharply critical. A few (the right) love the socialist market economy and want to go further and faster down the capitalist road. The center forces, the largest and dominant group, see positives and negatives.

What, then, is one to make of the socialist market economy? Signs of Western and Japanese transnational corporations are in evidence all over Beijing and Shanghai.

Is this socialism? Is this capitalist restoration? Is it the new, correct (if longer) path to 21st-century socialism, as its proponents claim, after the alleged blunders of 20th-century socialism?

Presumably Marxists should turn to history to answer such questions. Some believe it’s all a rerun of the USSR’s New Economic Policy (NEP), the 1921-28 period when the Bolsheviks turned to market forces and private ownership to help their ruined economy get back on its feet.

An Italian Marxist scholar has observed: “The social order that in China is currently considered valid presents itself as a kind of gigantic and expanded NEP.” There is indeed a resemblance between NEP and the socialist market economy.

But the main lesson, I believe, is that this resemblance explains why the socialist market economy is a strange mixture of success and crisis, not that it would have been smiled upon by Lenin.

The night before our briefing at the Shanghai Party Institute of the Communist Party of China (which trains top party officials and state administrators; it used to be run by Jiang Zemin) we cruised on a tourist vessel up and down the river separating the Shanghai and Pudong skylines.

Symbol of the new wealth created in China, Pudong is brilliantly lit up, evoking a mega-Las Vegas. The whole country is bustling with construction as the 2008 Olympics loom.

The party educators at the SPI spoke of their expanded new program of Marxist education for the 70-million-plus party members. The Chinese Communist Party educators declare that it will counter the ideological effects of expanding capitalist relations of production.

The key question posed from the floor at the Shanghai party briefing was: Who will win? Isn’t the socialist market economy much more powerful than party education can ever be? Doesn’t it affect the consciousness of 1.3 billion people every day, promoting a buildup of classes objectively hostile to socialism and instilling such values as greed, selfishness, individualism and a taste for Western luxury goods “every day and on a mass scale”?

The Chinese rejected the notion that their new education program is not enough. They think skeptics underestimate the scale and quality of the new education work.

There are plenty of things going wrong in today’s China: violations of labor rights in the Special Economic Zones, inequality, peasant riots when land is seized for factory expansions, party corruption, lax regulation of industry, major environmental degradation, bad treatment of rural immigrants to the cities. Reasonable people can and do differ on their scope.

Against this we must weigh the country’s genuine achievements. Overcoming the mad zigzags of the 20 years before 1978 (the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution), China enjoys steady and rapid economic growth.

Since 1978, real wages have doubled every 10 years. To be sure, wealth is poorly distributed, but almost everyone has benefited somewhat. Hundred of millions have escaped grinding poverty. The rural health care system that collapsed in 1978 when the communes were privatized is being restored on a new basis, albeit slowly.

The Hu Jintao leadership, inaugurated in 2002, disturbed by negative signs, is fighting harder against the free market’s harmful consequences. President Hu is seen as a leading campaigner against corruption.

This is popular. From what one can glean from the English language service on Chinese television (where there is plenty of lively debate: I watched a spirited exchange on what happens if the wobbly U.S. economy starts to drag down the Chinese economy), there is a democratic spirit in civil society, which is reflected in the media. It is a far cry from the debased and willfully idiotic “infotainment” of American cable television.

An anthropologist in our group, an expert on Native Americans, concluded that China’s national minorities fare infinitely better than U.S. indigenous peoples. A trade unionist noted that in the Special Economic Zones the Chinese are building up adversarial trade unionism, familiar to us but new to them, to take on the transnational corporations resisting unions and workers’ rights.

True, China is not leading a “socialist camp” and confronting imperialism consistently, the way the USSR did from 1917 to 1985, but China’s foreign policy is much better than before. The most terrible crimes — the invasion of Vietnam and the support for Pol Pot, Chile’s Pinochet, and the mujahideen in Afghanistan — are, thank goodness, things of the past.

Today China is helping socialist Cuba. China has defused the U.S. military pressure on North Korea. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is an important initiative that could develop in interesting ways. China’s growing trade with much of the world objectively weakens the hegemony of the imperialist states.

Since 1978 China has made dramatic gains in output by extending capitalist relations of production.

Is it not reasonable to think that a long delay in reversing course — back to the plan and public ownership — will exact an immense price if it is deferred for “100 years,” as some in China advocate? Is there another path for People’s China that offers an equal or even a faster rate of development?

The USSR in the first five-year plan achieved growth rates of about 13 percent, little different from China’s growth rates today.

Economic storm-clouds are forming over imperialism’s financial centers. How much longer can the boom last? What follows it? Voices on Wall Street fear a crash.

China’s integration in the capitalist system is advanced. Central planners in Beijing have yielded much power to the spontaneity of the market, or have devolved powers to provincial or city bodies. Is the state’s capacity to stabilize the roaring economy and blunt the impact of external shocks now in question?

What about the regressive political impact on 800 million Chinese peasants of de-collectivization and a return to private ownership?

Will imperialism acquiesce in “China’s peaceful rise,” as the Chinese hope? Imperialism does not take kindly to adverse shifts in the balance of forces. Imperialist Britain did not acquiesce in Germany’s “peaceful rise” in 1870-1914; imperialist America did not acquiesce in the USSR’s “peaceful rise” in 1945-1991.

Imperialism hates China’s independence, its socialism, and its desire for a peaceful rise. China will have to straggle for all three.

I came home with such questions, still worried but not despairing.

One crucial difference between the PRC and the USSR is that the reforms did not liquidate the Communist Party, as Gorbachev did in 1987-1991. The top CPC leaders seem to do everything by consensus, i.e. after pilot programs and after provincial experiments.

The Communist Party of China seems almost a popular front, not a monolithic party.

I concluded that, first, everything depends on what happens in (and to) the CPC: the healthy forces in the Chinese party are the key. Second, the best solidarity we can give to the working people of China is to take an honest look at their country and call it as we see it.

Thomas Kenny is a U.S. economist.

The Tree: a poem

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 11:35:00 +0000

Dear Editor,

I’m writing in response to the poem titled “Two Trees” by Seymour Joseph. Please allow me to submit this poem about a third tree. The Jena Tree and many others have been martyred to conceal the hypocrisy that persists in society. This deforestation must end.

Yours truly, Edgar Pitts U.S. Penitentiary Florence CO

The Tree

The old tree in the prison yard blocked the view of the guard in the gun tower. The prisoner saw it and took advantage of the hour. He jumped up and fell back down, He got up and tried again, but the wall just kept getting taller so he couldn’t get over.

A weak prisoner saw his attempt and happily went to inform the guards. The guards came like a stampede of wildebeests and subdued the freedom fighter And took him away. What a shame. Now he’s isolated to a cell behind many steel doors and bars in the segregation housing unit, better know as the hole. This is a cold world.

In the meantime the guards needed someone to blame for the prisoner’s attempted escape, But the tree was the only one standing around. So they did their estimation and with no hesitation came to their diabolical conclusion. “The tree must do.” The tree an enemy to captivity and a friend to liberty must go. The tree that gave calming shade to the prisoners must go. The tree that was the house to varieties of pretty birds must go, The only diversity without violence that the prisoners know.

The birds can’t serenade the prisoners anymore. The tree must go. The birds must relocate, what a terrible state, But the tree of life must go on.

So limb by limb they cut the tree down.

Write to the Cuban 5

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 10:11:00 +0000

We suggest to our readers that to mark the end of this year, the ninth year in prison for the Cuban Five, you write letters of solidarity to five Cuban men unjustly persecuted for combating U.S. terrorist attacks against the Cuban people. Below are their prison addresses.

Additionally, we suggest you observe the onset of a new year by resolving to keep on writing them and involving yourself more deeply in the worldwide campaign to free them. For more information, visit or .

Antonio Guerrero Rodríguez No. 58741-004 USP Florence PO Box 7500 5880 State Hwy. 67 South Florence CO 81226

Fernando González Llort (to write to Fernando González, the envelope should say Rubén Campa, but the letter itself may be addressed to Fernando) Rubén Campa #58733-004 F.C.I. Terre Haute PO Box 33 Terre Haute IN 47808;

Gerardo Hernández Nordelo (Manuel Viramontes) No. 58739-004 U.S.P. Victorville PO Box 5400 13777 Air Expressway Road Adelanto CA 92394;

Ramon Labañino Salazar (to write to Ramón Labañino, the envelope should say Luis Medina, but the letter itself may be addressed to Ramón) Luis Medina U.S.P. Beaumont PO Box 26030 Beaumont TX 77720-6035;

René González Sehwerert No. 58738-004 FCI Marianna 3625 FCI Road Marianna FL 32446.

Cuba and UN together on human rights

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 09:56:00 +0000

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque took the occasion of World Human Rights Day, Dec. 10, to announce that early next year Cuba will sign the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and a similar treaty on civil and political rights. The day marked the 59th anniversary of the UN General Assembly’s proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Perez Roque told reporters that Cuba was acting only because last year the United Nations ended its Commission on Human Rights, which Cuba had viewed as a venue for the U.S. government to stage a yearly “inquisitorial tribunal” to persecute countries opting out of imperial domination. Cuba is pleased, he asserted, to work with the commission’s successor, the UN Council on Human Rights, to which Cuba was elected earlier this year by a two-thirds vote.

The Cuban foreign minister insisted that “Cuba never has and never will act through imposed pressures,” but rather in response to considerations of “our national sovereignty and the right of the Cuban people to self-determination.”

In fact, Cuba’s commitment to the deepening of human rights is long-standing, according to Perez Roque, and will be exercised wholeheartedly within the UN context as long as Cuba is not unjustly singled out for special political conditions. As token of a new spirit of cooperation, he cited the recent visit to Cuba by the UN rapporteur on the right of food adequacy and Cuba’s intention to provide data and to cooperate with a UN human rights review scheduled for Cuba in 2009.

Perez Roque took the occasion to demand an end to the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba, a halt to torture at its Guantanamo naval base in Cuba, U.S. departure from Guantanamo, either a trial for terrorist Luis Posada or his extradition, as requested, to Venezuela, and, lastly, freedom for five unjustly imprisoned Cuban men — and until then, visiting rights for two of their wives, denied for nine years.

The foreign minister noted that the 300-member Cuban medical brigade in Nicaragua recently received that nation’s National Human Rights Prize. He observed that 37,000 Cuban health professionals, 18,000 of them physicians, are working in 79 countries, that almost 1 million people from 32 nations have received sight-restoring eye operations from Cuban health workers, that 32,000 students from 121 countries, almost all from poor families, are studying in Cuba, and that 23,000 of them are preparing to be medical doctors.

He added that 35,000 African students have graduated from Cuban educational centers and that almost 3 million people in 22 countries have gained literacy skills recently through Cuban methods.

Also on Human Rights Day, Susan McDade, representative in Cuba of the UN Development Program, congratulated the Cuban people on their respect for human rights. She particularly recognized the universal availability of health care in Cuba and equal access to education at all levels. In addition, she cited Cuba’s commitment to adequate nutrition for its entire population.

atwhit@megalink.net

Running out of gas: peak oil is here

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 09:53:00 +0000

DVD REVIEW

A Crude Awakening:

The Oil Crash

Directed by Basil Gelpke, Ray McCormack and Reto Caduff

Lava Productions, 2007

90 minutes

Are believers in “peak oil” a lunatic fringe? Not according to the compelling and disturbing documentary “A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash.” This newly released DVD provides further evidence that we are depleting the world’s oil supplies at an unsustainable rate.

According to energy experts and scientists interviewed, the world’s major oil fields are in decline. Matt Simmons, an energy adviser to George W. Bush, said supply is diminishing while world demand is skyrocketing. Many developing countries such as India and China, where car ownership is surging, want to emulate U.S. consumption patterns.

Collin Campbell, a geologist for Exxon Mobil, Shell and others, said there are no new large oil fields to be discovered to make up for declining supplies. Cutting edge technology has speeded up depletion, acting like “a giant straw sucking up the last sources of easy oil,” Simmons said.

Simmons cited the United States as a prime example of what is occurring throughout the world. “No one thought we would ever peak,” he observed. For a century the United States was the world’s major producer of oil. Production reached 10.2 million barrels in July 1970 and then dropped, despite a wave of exploration during which four-and-a-half times more wells were drilled. Now the U.S. imports two-thirds of its supplies.

These experts warn that the era of cheap oil is coming to an end, and there will be disastrous consequences if governments do not take action. As the “bloodstream of the world economy,” oil has fueled population and economic growth over the last 150 years. For instance, world population has grown to 6 billion because of large increases in food production using oil-based fertilizers. Campbell proposes that every country cut oil use by a small percentage every year to reflect the diminishing supply of oil, something we need to be doing anyway to halt global warming.

“A Crude Awakening” also explores what new sources of energy can replace oil. Wind-generated electricity can never be a major source because of wind’s intermittent nature. Scientists say solar power holds the most promise.

But problems in harnessing and harvesting solar power have yet to be solved. For instance, to generate the amount of energy the U.S. uses daily, a territory half the size of California would need to be covered with solar panels.

Check out this movie to learn about these issues and more.

tpelzer @shaw.ca

Demolishing myths about todays Iran

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 09:51:00 +0000

BOOK REVIEW

Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran

By Fatemeh Keshavarz

University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2007

Hardcover, 192 pp., $24.95

As the Bush administration continues to prepare for a possible military attack on Iran (despite the recent National Intelligence Estimate stating that Iran has no nuclear weapons program), it is important that we get more than the mainstream media’s parroting of the official line. We need a balanced, objective perspective on Iran, a perspective that provides nuanced depth and humanity. “Jasmine and Stars,” a new book by Fatemeh Keshavarz, provides that perspective.

While the book doesn’t directly deal with the mainstream media and its depiction of Iran, it accomplishes three very important and related goals: first, it defines what Keshavarz calls the “New Orientalist Narrative” (a Western interpretation of Muslims as “the Other”); second, it critiques “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books” by Azar Nafisi, which exemplifies this narrative; and third, it humanizes the people of Iran through the personal musings of someone who grew up there.

“Jasmine and Stars” analyzes how the new Orientalism of some Western intellectuals distorts reality and lays the groundwork for worsening relations with Iran, which could be used to help justify war. According to Keshavarz, the narrative “simplifies its subject” and claims that “Muslim men’s submission to God and Muslim women’s submission to men” is at the root of the crisis in the Middle East.

As a result, she writes, the new narrative also displays a “strong current of superiority and of impatience with the locals, who are often portrayed as uncomplicated.” While “the new narrative does not necessarily support overt colonial ambitions,” it does have a “clear preference for a Western political and cultural takeover.”

Most importantly, this narrative “replicates the totalizing — and silencing — tendencies of the old Orientalist by virtue of erasing, through un-nuanced narration, the complexity and richness in the local culture.”

Keshavarz, in a step-by-step process, dissects Nafisi’s “Reading Lolita in Tehran” (RLT) and exposes its narrative misconceptions, contradictions and factual errors.

In the chapter titled “The Good, the Missing, and the Faceless,” Keshavarz writes, “Lack of confidence and self-respect is typical of the majority of Iranians portrayed in RLT. The female students are often portrayed as feeling envious of the courage displayed by Western fictional figures. ... They have a confused image of themselves.”

She continues: “The bleakness of the human landscape is such that if you have not been to Iran, it is hard to avoid pity and disdain for its people.” Obviously, according to Keshavarz, RLT is trying to paint a certain type of picture, one that portrays Iranians, especially Iranian women, as “backward, subhuman and ready to surrender to authority.”

According to Keshavarz, in Nafisi’s RLT, Iranian men are also a caricature, a stereotype, somehow less than human. RLT tries to convince us that Iranian “men are cruel and heartless to their female relatives, which has something to do with their religious convictions.”

Her harshest words are reserved for the Nafisi’s mischaracterization of those of the Islamic faith. According to Keshavarz, “Although unflattering literature on Islam is not hard to find these days, it is difficult to find a fuller Islamization of wickedness than the one configured by RLT.”

“Jasmine and Stars” accomplishes its third, most important goal — the humanizing of the Iranian people — in grand literary fashion. Woven throughout the book are Keshavarz’s stories about growing up, reciting poetry with her father, going to school and visiting her uncle, who was “gentle, extremely polite, humorous, subtle, and yet impatient with mediocrity and corruption.”

In fact, Keshavarz is at her best when she’s telling us these stories. The simple day-to-day truths of our personal relationships, and what they mean to us — this is Keshavarz’s gift. By describing the humanity in her upbringing, in her family, and in her relations with other Iranians, she reassures us that, though we are half a world away, we aren’t that different.

While she criticizes the current Iranian government, especially in regard to women’s rights, she makes the point that it does not have a monopoly on civil and human rights violations. She also makes a clear distinction between the Iranian people, who want progressive reform, and their government.

To Keshavarz, “In the faint voices that reach us from across the globe, there is recognition of our shared humanity. In laughing at the same joke, feeling the same pain, or admiring each other’s work of art, there is an empowering flash of recognition,” a recognition that the new Orientalism distorts and mystifies.

The book succeeds in what is clearly one of the author’s primary goals: to build bridges, to tear down walls, and to shed light on the darkness that, if left to its own devices, may facilitate war.

On top of all that, “Jasmine and Stars” is a great read.

tonypec @cpusa.org