People Before Profit blog

Holiday message: The unemployed need you!

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 13:22:00 +0000

We would have liked to print a happy message in this space, filled with good news and wishes for all of you to have a fantastic holiday season.

What better time is there than the end of the year to look back and reflect on everything that has been accomplished over the last 12 months?

What better time than the final week of December to get a good rest and recharge our batteries so we can jump into next year's struggles, ready and rarin' to go?

Unfortunately, these final days of 2011 are no time to rest. While House Republicans are at home merry making, eating and drinking, many of our brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, friends and neighbors are suffering.

Millions are losing their only lifeline: unemployment insurance benefits.

On top of that, 160 million will, starting in January, get smaller paychecks.

We urge everyone to get on the phone and call Republican House Speaker Boehner's office at 202 225 0600.

Republicans, after declaring their latest act of war against the 99 percent, flew out of the Capitol like bats out of hell. It is not certain, therefore, exactly who will answer the phone. So tell whomever it is that Speaker Boehner has become a national disgrace.

Tell whoever picks up that phone that Boehner must bring the lawmakers back and extend unemployment insurance immediately.

Tell whoever picks up that phone that the payroll tax cut for 160 million must also be extended.

Tell whoever picks up that phone that protecting millionaires from paying taxes, raising taxes on the middle class and cutting people off of their unemployment lifelines, the three things Republicans are best at, are not the things the people wanted them to do when they got to Washington.

Every one of the 229 House members who voted Tuesday to cut off unemployment benefits were Republicans. They are a disgrace to a great nation, and need to hear that from you. If millions tie up those phone lines the voice of the jobless will be amplified and heard. The voice of the middle class taxpayers will be heard. The criminal Republicans, beginning with Boehner, will be on notice that their days in office are numbered.

Tell whoever picks up that phone that Boehner must bring the lawmakers back and extend unemployment insurance and payroll tax cut immediately and stop protecting billionaires!

Tell whoever picks up that phone that the payroll tax cut for 160 million must also be extended.

Photo: Culminating of a week of protests and actions calling on Congress to create good jobs, stop cutting public services, make big corporations and the rich pay their fair share and extend unemployment benefits, a crowd of thousands marched to Speaker John Boehner's Washington office and attempted to meet with the speaker to make sure that he hears from the 99%, not just the 1%. (SEIU/David Sachs)

Spending just got even easier

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:13:00 +0000

The cashless society is almost at hand, some claim. It's possible today, with the right phone and app, to visit retailers and just grab what you want and go. You'll be purchasing consumer goods without even getting out your wallet!

This is merely the next act in an epoch that began with the use of credit cards for increasingly smaller purchases many years ago, and the success of the debit card more recently. Pushing us farther into a world where spending money is even more remote from those quaint pieces of legal tender such as coins or dollar bills. Retail consumption seems on the verge of becoming nearly automatic.

I remember my surprise at seeing credit cards accepted at fast food restaurants years ago. It surely was a benchmark in the use of these financial devices. When I was a child a credit card was used only for certain things - serious things, important things. The credit cards in our family were treated almost like loaded guns, and in a way they were just that: they could provide comfort and protection, or they could inflict great harm. There was the notion that they must be handled with care.

By the time I was an adult, credit cards were far more widespread in their use (and, let's be honest, misuse). I sadly disregarded the caution my parents practiced with credit cards, and I was hardly alone. But the spendthrift days of youth and impulse buying are long since past. Later, I also used credit cards the way a lot of those my age did - to patch over the cost of living for my family that my salary didn't quite cover. Again, I had plenty of company. If one looks at the stagnation of salaries and the upswing in the use of credit you'll notice an alarming but explicable symmetry. The uncomfortable place we find ourselves in is built upon our entire society making suspect choices. Working people have often victimized themselves to maintain a middle class existence, and financial industries stoked their consumption, re-purposing the credit card to function for everything from a happy meal to a vacation. The debit card, the more reasonable counterpart to a credit card, did its part to grease the wheels of making spending speedy.

A recent NPR broadcast breezed through several smartphone apps now in use that attach even less effort to spending than ever before. Apps such as CardCase, Dwolla and Google Wallet endeavor to make transactions free of even the effort to remove your wallet from your purse or pocket. It's with a bit of trepidation one hears the enthusiasm that greets these new ways to make spending "painless." If this is progress, what does it move us towards?

I'm not a Luddite. The convenience of these innovations can't be overlooked, nor the many obvious benefits. On a basic level they could serve to empower us in important ways. But the same could be said of earlier innovations. The problems arise within our perception of what we do with what we earn and why. When I lost my job I suddenly felt a lot more intimately aware of every transaction. It was humbling and frightening, but (surprisingly) very empowering. It made me far more cautious, and I doubt I will return to the carefree relationship I had with money in my youth. I have embraced frugality and feel the better for it. Spending now is always a conscious act.

How painless should spending be? Presumably the pain is merely removed from the front end, for surely the results of all these invisible movements of money from one place to another will have consequences, since most of us are dealing with having less prosperity than before. And is the need to lift out your wallet and slide a card really really a pressing dilemma in need of solving? Yes, we lead busy lives, but do any of the people developing these things stop to think that accelerating this process is hardly part of an imaginative solution?

There's also the fact that no, not everyone has a smartphone. I don't. I have resisted the smartphone and several other innovations of recent years, mostly out of necessity, but also because I'm a bit disenchanted with the consumerist treadmill after years of unending upgrading. Will the emergence of transaction apps end up marginalizing those without smartphones?

Some theorize that we are on the verge of a technological singularity, something that will produce a greater-than-human intelligence, the sort of new age that renders the future and our place in it uncertain. But more probably we will devote the real effort to grubby little ideas like these easy transaction apps, the sort of things that merely seek to increase the profits of smartphone manufacturers and sellers, "allowing" us to indulge in conveniences we might be better off without. We may be reaching into our pockets less often, but those who want us to empty them will be all the happier.

GOP holiday message to America: Drop dead!

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:06:00 +0000

Last Sunday a bipartisan compromise that would extend unemployment insurance for long-term jobless workers and a payroll tax cut for 160 million workers passed the Senate 89-10 with 39 Republican votes. Before the vote, Republican House Speaker John Boehner assured GOP senators that he supported the compromise.

Only hours after the Senate vote, when the Republican tea party gang expressed their opposition, Boehner started singing a different song and announced he was opposing the compromise. He blocked an up for down vote and 229 House Republicans voted, in effect, to kill the Senate compromise through parliamentary trickery.

Like bats out of hell, the Republicans then fled the nation's capital and headed home to celebrate Christmas and the coming of the New Year.

As the GOP lawmakers fled home for the holidays, the nightmares they have been causing for Americans turned into rock hard reality.

In a little more than a week, 160 million employees will start receiving smaller paychecks. Over the year 2012 they will, on average, take home $1,000 less than they did in 2011. And that's if they are lucky enough to be working at all.

In just 11 days, 1.8 million people will lose their only lifeline - their unemployment checks. For many, homes will be lost. Others will go without food, heat, lights or new clothing for the children. The smaller paychecks for those who are working and no checks for the long-term jobless will also result in the entire economy shrinking even further. The result: An economy even more blighted with additional businesses closing down and even more people out of work.

The Republican House cabal explained away their crime of not even allowing a vote on the Senate compromise bill by saying the House passed a bill, and now the thing to do is go to committee to iron out the differences between the two.

Sending it to a joint committee is just a ploy. Thirty-nine Republican senators voted for the Senate bill, which is considered the real compromise.

But if it did go to committee what did the House pass that the Senate didn't? For starters, the House voted to cut the unemployment benefits extension by more than half.

They voted to extend the payroll tax cut, but rather than financing it with a small tax on millionaires, it slashes federal workers' pay! How do you compromise with that? You can't.

Supporting the House attack on the "middle class" was the Republican frontrunner for the presidency, Mitt Romney. But in typical Repub-speak Romney twisted the facts to continue his party's class war on the 99%.

"Obama goes after insurance company executives, Wall Street, all these bad people he finds out there. Look, Americans are not going to be a powerful and vibrant economic engine with a powerful middle class if we attack one another," he said.

Oh really? The president gets attacked for making speeches. But here's a whole lot of actual class war action being waged by the Republicans.

This Republican crime should not be allowed to stand. We know, however, the Constitution does not allow the people to do what would be morally justified: Hauling back to Washington the 229 Republicans who are at home celebrating while the nation suffers and demanding that they vote up or down on the Senate extension bill.

The Constitution does allow the people, however, to utilize the year 2012 to remove from office every last one of the GOP "lawmakers" who were party to this crime. There is no better time than now, as the New Year approaches, for everyone to resolve that 2012 is the year every single one of them will be kicked out of office.

Only then can the American people even have a chance at fixing this dysfunctional situation, and constructing a government of, by and for the people.

Photo: A one-arm homeless man looks down on a tattered Christmas tree as first sun hits the loading dock where he and half-dozen other homeless people live. (Sal Veder/AP)

Gingrich, The Times and doomsday

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 11:15:00 +0000

In a recent New York Times article the newspaper's senior science writer, William J. Broad, takes a dig at Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich's obsession with the possibility of a "nightmarish of doomsday scenarios: a nuclear blast high above the United States that would instantly throw the United States in a dark age."

The phenomenon that Gingrich refers to is an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), one side effect of a nuclear explosion. EMPs can destroy or disrupt virtually anything electrical, from computers to power grids. As the Times points out, Gingrich has used this potential threat to advocate bombing Iran and North Korea. "I favor taking out the Iranian and North Korean missiles on their sites," he told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in 2009. Gingrich has also talked up the EMP "threat" on the campaign trail.

Broad dismisses EMPs as "a poorly understood phenomenon of the nuclear age" and quotes Missile Defense Agency spokesman Richard Lehner poo-pooing the damage from an EMP attack as "pretty theoretical."

While the Times is correct in dismissing any Iranian or North Korean threat-neither country has missiles capable of reaching the U.S., Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons, and both have never demonstrated a desire to commit national suicide-what Broad does not mention is that the effects of EMP are hardly "poorly understood": the U.S. has an "E-bomb" in its arsenal.

More than that, the Pentagon considered using it during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Asked directly if the U.S. was considering using an EMP weapon, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld answered, "You never know."

The U.S. has known about the effects of EMPs since 1958, when a series of nuclear tests in the Pacific knocked out streetlights in Hawaii and radio reception in Australia for 18 hours. In large enough doses, EMPs can fry every electrical circuit in range, many of them permanently. One would essentially go from the 21^st century to the 19^th century in a few nanoseconds.

The U.S. began researching how to use EMPs as weapons shortly after the Pacific tests, and, while the details are classified, the Livermore and Los Alamos national labs have apparently come up with a working version of an "E-bomb."

The principle is simple enough: a tube filled with explosives, wrapped with copper wire, encased in a metal shell. The copper wire is used to create a powerful magnetic field and when the explosives are fired, they compress the magnetic field to produce a powerful burst of electromagnetic energy called the "Compton effect."

A large enough device can generate up to two billion watts, about what Hoover Dam turns out in a day.

The weapon is attached to a cruise missile. Any piloted craft would run the risk of frying its own electronics, because EMP waves can bounce off objects, like the ground, and be reflected back at the attack craft.

Britain's Matra Bae Dynamics has produced an artillery shell that generates an EMP wave and is capable of knocking out electrical systems for several square miles.

The idea behind the "E-bomb" is that it would blind and disable any military force, but not inflict casualties (except if you are wearing a pacemaker or have electrical implants). "The electromagnetic pulse generator is emerging as one of the strongest contenders...to find effective weapons to defeat an enemy without causing loss of life," writes David Fulghum, an EMP expert.

But EMP waves would also paralyze ambulances, hospitals, power plants and water pumping systems, a specific violation of the Geneva Conventions. Article 54, for instance, explicitly forbids rendering "useless" any "drinking water installations."

There are ways to shield devices from EMPs, but they are expensive. So-called Faraday Cages intercept EMPs and redirect them into the ground, much like lightning rod.

While the exact details of the U.S. "E-bomb" are classified, its existence is hardly a secret. Nor is the U.S. the only nation currently researching the uses of EMPs. Any country with a nuclear weapon-Great Britain, France, Russia, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea-is undoubtedly aware of its capabilities.

The fact that the effects of EMPs are well known, and that the U.S.-and apparently a number of other nations-has weaponized the phenomena, make it all the more curious that the Times treated the issue so lightly and failed to mention the U.S. program. Indeed, Broad says, "many scientists consider it yesteryear's concern."

That would certainly come as a surprise to the Livermore and Los Alamos National labs and the U.S. Air Force's Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force base in New Mexico. There is also a test lab in Virginia.

Any such weapon should certainly be illegal under the strictures of the Geneva Conventions. Like poison gas, EMPs do not distinguish between military and civilian and, as such, are illegal under Article 48 requiring that warring parties "shall at all times distinguish between civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operation only against military objectives."

Gingrich's apocalyptic views on EMPs are longstanding, but he also uses them as raw meat for the "bomb Teheran and Pyongyang" crowd, a cynical election ploy from one of the more cynical politicians to grace the current U.S. stage.

But the "E-bomb" is real, and the general rule is, if you give the military a new toy, eventually they will want to test it in the real world. That world is filled with civilians- so-called "collaterals"- who will end up absorbing the brunt of this weapon.

Isn't that worth reporting?

This article originally appeared in Dispatches from the Edge.

Occupy protests spur music explosion

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 10:08:00 +0000

Every social movement has inspired artists to enlist their talents to create cultural expressions that in turn stir the masses and broaden the cause. Artists can bring their own social credibility to the movement, further legitimizing the struggle. For example, the nation-changing social movements of the 1960s - the antiwar and civil rights movements - came with their own soundtracks, including the music activism of artists like Nina Simone, Phil Ochs and Pete Seeger. These movements also drew in stars who previously weren't identified as "political," like John Lennon, whose celebrity in turn drew attention from audiences who may not have otherwise become engaged in controversial issues.

Similarly, the Occupy movement has provided an opportunity for musicians and performers of all styles and genres to speak up on behalf of the "99 percent," and draw in the involvement of people who may not camp out in front of City Hall or identify as "activists."

Music is a big component of the Occupy movement. One reason for this may be the large youth contingents involved. Another may be because the form of the protests themselves - Occupy Wall Street was originally ignited by the radical anti-consumerist arts and culture magazine AdBusters - is conducive to creativity and cultural expression.

The images evoked by Occupy (the 99 percent versus the 1 percent, injustice, police brutality, feelings of loss, despair and alienation) are definitely fodder for protest anthems. Some performers have been offering up existing songs from their catalogs; others have been writing new ones specifically for the occasion.

Of course, given the explosion of the sheer numbers of songs on YouTube, the quality of the efforts varies greatly. Musical novices provide endless acoustic guitar ballads over Ken Burns-style montages of protest scenes. Few and far between are the songs with extraordinary political incisiveness, passion and inventiveness. Still, that's to be expected from a movement that's grown like a mushroom. At least participants are energized and wanting to inspire others to join the cause, so it's hard to be too critical. Here's a roundup of some of the more noteworthy performances.

At over 250,000 views, Hawaiian singer Makana's video of his song "We are the Many" is the most popular Occupy song on YouTube. Makana, of Occupy with Aloha, "crashed" the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) dinner in November by performing this song. Some wondered how he "got away with it," but Makana's melodious slack-key guitar technique and placid delivery are eminently inoffensive. Makana's playing and singing are nice, but the lyrics leave something to be desired:

From underneath the vestiture of law
the lobbyists at Washington do gnaw
at liberty, the bureaucrats guffaw
and until they are purged, we won't withdraw

Makana "We are the Many" video

Beyond the awkward syntax and clumsy rhyme schemes, with a few tweaks the politically generic lyrical content could easily be that of a tea party protest song.

One of the heartening side effects of the Occupy music explosion is a resurgence of political rap. An outstanding example is Boots Riley of The Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club. For his performance at Occupy Oakland, he didn't have Occupy-specific raps, but he didn't need to. Boots did well enough just to recycle an a cappella version of his "Underdogs," written during the Clinton administration:

Work six days a week, can't sleep Saturday though
muscles tremblin' like a pager when the batteries low
and you just don't know where the years went
although every long shift feel like a year spent

Boots Riley performing "Underdogs" at Occupy Oakland

Preternaturally angry rapper Immortal Technique popped up at Zuccotti Park with a blistering impromptu excerpt from his "Toast to the Dead." Emerging hip hop acts brought fresher beats and rhymes. Occupation Freedom, Ground Zero and the Global Block Collective collaborated on "Occupy Wall St. Hip Hop Anthem." Occupy Denver's Hip Hop collective featuring Mane Rok, Bravo One, Dyalekt, Aja Black, Jonny 5 (of The Flobots), and T Minus Katlyn delivered "The 99th Problem." This diverse collective contradicts the image of Occupy as a homogenous, white middle class movement. Iraq veteran rapper Sgt Dunson, a crossover voice from the antiwar movement, took the occasion to pen "We are the 99 percent."

One of the odder entries is "Mic Check! This is what Democracy Looks Like!" by Steve Bricks and Garret John, who helped start Occupy Boston. This techno club mix-type song breaks the typical protest song format, but relies a bit much on Auto Tune.

Alternative rockers also contributed protest jams. Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine, Night Watchman, Street Sweeper Social Club) performed Woody Guthrie's sing-along favorite "This Land is Your Land" and his own "World Wide Rebel Song" in an improvised street concert at Occupy Wall Street.

Tom Morello performing "This Land is Your Land" at Liberty Park

Amanda Palmer (of Dresden Dolls) contributed the quirky "The Ukulele Anthem," an unexpected take on the energy fueling the Occupy movement. Punk rockers NOFX invited cops to join the movement and arrest crooked bankers via their "Occupy L.A."

NOFX performing "Occupy LA"

For fans of a more mellow sound, there's the Reggae groove of "Finally Here" by The Roaring (featuring Ari Herstand), the catchy-as-hell hook of "Occupy Wall Street" by Spencer Livingston, and "Smile," by Jay Samel, a laid-back Jack Johnson-ish jam.

Also effective is Chloe Cornelius' song parody "I'll Occupy" (to the tune of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive"):

I first was pepper sprayed
just standing on the side
but it took me being blinded
to open up my eyes

To sum up, the wide variety of the music represented in the Occupy movement indicates the diversity of its participants, as well as the deep impact the movement has had on the broader culture.

Photo: Tom Morello at Occupy Wall Street. Chris Elliott/PW

GOP blackmail: a view from West Virginia

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:30:00 +0000

It beats me what is really going through the minds of the House Republicans. I am inclined to conclude it's sewage. Some of them say it's because they want a year-long extension to both unemployment insurance and the payroll tax cut, not two months. However, I am doubtful of their truthiness on this. The refusal of Senate Republicans to tax the rich "to pay for" these benefits, and their demands that the pollution-expanding Tar Sands Pipeline from Canada to Texas ignore rulings and warnings from the EPA, are what caused the two-month compromise in the Senate to start with.

We're also stuck there because these same House Republicans injected a bottle of poison pills into their so-called year-long bill, including up to 40 fewer weeks of unemployment benefits, drug testing and educational requirements for recipients, delaying environmental standards, whacking federal workers and cutting implementation funds for the Affordable Care Act. Its more likely they could care less about the year versus two months timeline and want to torture the unemployed and working class with their "hungry dog hunts harder" philosophy, and are just looking for cover to keep from being run out of office by their unemployed, underemployed constituents.

I am aware - especially living in West Virginia - that confronting the carbon pollution blackmail from the Republicans on the Tar Sands Pipeline issue may seem like a second tier issue to some. And I understand jobs are so scarce in many areas that an offer to build gallows on which we will be hanged could begin to look attractive, but if we don't rethink this global warming question pretty soon, Noah is going to start getting calls from God to build another ark, and numbers I do not want to contemplate will perish.
A news flash indicates the House has now defeated the Senate Bill. The Senate is already adjourned and homeward bound for Christmas. As Jared Bernstein writes, "all America can see right now is an unbelievably feckless Congress underperforming expectations that are already abysmally low."

There's a rising likelihood now that the unemployment insurance extensions and payroll tax cut expire. Some fools are saying, "Hey, it won't be so bad if we rush back in January and pass them ... We can make them retroactive." I can't even imagine the levels of panic and apprehension that will grip working-class families over the holiday contemplating such hogwash.

Almost 2 million unemployment recipients could be dropped from the rolls. And most of them have been jobless for at least half a year, so it's unlikely they've got resources to fall back on. In my hometown, public and charity food programs are receiving fourfold more requests for help over last year.

Also, businesses will have to have to adjust payrolls to plug back in the 2 percent payroll tax cut that expires at the end of this year.

Dysfunction, thy name is the 112th Congress. Maybe the right name is "nullification," like the Southern fire-breathers who used similar tactics to defy federal authority over slave states.

Six reasons to oppose Keystone pipeline

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:59:00 +0000

There are many reasons to oppose the building of an oil pipeline from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to the refineries off the shores of Texas in the Gulf of Mexico.

One: The employment impact of this Keystone XL pipeline will be far less than advertised. The GOP leadership says the pipeline "would create over 100,000 jobs," but this is a gross inflation. According to the State Department, it will provide about 6,000 temporary jobs for construction workers. But even this number may be a significant overestimation. As for permanent jobs, the number will be far fewer, somewhere in the hundreds, according to TransCanada Corp., the company that will build the pipeline if it is approved.

Two: Meanwhile the project will put at risk a quarter million ranches and farms that provide real jobs in the Great Plains states.

Three: The environmental impact of the pipeline is potentially huge. It will cross more than 2,000 waterways, including the Yellowstone River in Montana, threatening rivers, lakes and streams with the same kind of pipeline accidents that have occurred elsewhere.

Four: Alberta's tar sands produce bitumen, a low-grade crude oil, through a very dirty process that is destroying Canada's boreal forest. In doing so it is putting at risk woodlands, watersheds, animals, plants, and an entire way of life for native peoples living there. The current mining moonscape is the size of Chicago, but pales in comparison with the future size of the mining operation if the pipeline is built.

Five: Oil from the tar sands won't reduce dependence on Middle Eastern oil as claimed. Most of the oil will be refined and then exported to other countries.

Six: The extraction of oil from the tar sands produces three to four times more pollution than is caused by the conventional production of North American crude oil. This is not to defend the latter (we need energy alternatives to the burning of fossil fuels), but only to give some sense of the scale of the emissions of carbon into the atmosphere from the mining of tar sands.

Nothing could be more shortsighted and destructive, according to James Hansen, the foremost climate change expert in the U.S. The intensive production of tar sands oil, he says, is akin to setting off a fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.

In other words, it is no exaggeration to say that the further heating up of the earth that will come from tar sands mining and other forms of fossil fuel extraction and use constitutes a civilizational crisis - a crisis that threatens humanity's future.

And yet we continue to dump heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. At some point the various changes associated with global warming become unstoppable even if we take drastic measures to curb emissions of greenhouse gases.

So why are we doing it?

The simple answer is that the energy industrial complex and its political supporters on the right use their enormous power to shape our energy discourse and energy policy. If we could remove them from the equation (and we must) there is little reason to think that the pipeline and the extraction of oil from tar sands mining would go ahead.

But a full answer would also include the insufficient urgency attached to this existential threat by the American people. That is slowly changing, but the clock is ticking and approaching midnight, when global warming and its catastrophic consequences - extreme weather events, rising water levels, resource wars, loss of major agricultural areas and low-lying tracts of land, urban crises, food shortages, economic crises, and so forth - can't be reversed.

The recently concluded climate change talks in Durban, South Africa, are illustrative of the problem we face.

Even though those negotiations were of critical importance to humanity's future, the American people were bystanders to the talks. We read or heard about the Durban talks - more or less buried among other news - when we should have weighed in on what happened there. As a consequence, countries that are major polluters - cumulatively and currently - left Durban with no legally binding agreement to reduce emissions. The only result was a promise to (hopefully) negotiate a protocol by 2015 that will take effect in 2020.

This must change. The buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere must become a clarion call to Americans to up the ante at the local, national and international levels. Global warming must become an election issue next year. In the meantime, people from all walks of life must insist that the president do the right thing and cancel the Keystone XL pipeline project.

Of course, such actions will meet fierce resistance from the energy industrial complex and its right-wing supporters in government, but they can be defeated.

What is needed is unity and a many-sided plan to tackle global warming. The time for such a plan is now. The window of opportunity is narrow and closing. We owe it to future generations to act.

Photo: Demonstrators against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline in Norfolk, Neb., Oct. 11. (Nati Harnik/AP)

Bipartisan fetish will kill Medicare

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:39:00 +0000

The Washington Post recently hailed the latest congressional scheme to "heal" Medicare, known by the names of its sponsoring lawmakers as the Ryan-Wyden plan.

Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, a runner up for Time's Person of the Year, who lost to The Protestor, is the lead Republican sponsor. Fresh from a bruising political pummeling from his first attempt to gut Medicare by replacing it with the voucher system, Ryan found a second wind with the help of Oregon Democrat, Sen. Ron Wyden.

The Washington Post loved the whole bipartisan thing. "In the maelstrom of dysfunction and partisanship better known as the 112^th Congress it is always surprising and gratifying when lawmakers from opposing parties manage to work together."

Really? Even if that "working together" means throwing aging parents and grandparents, neighbors and co-workers to the wolves - the for-profit market forces?

Whether it's some kind of high stakes election tactical maneuver on the Democrats part to win independents, or just good old-fashioned two parties of the 1%, it doesn't really matter. Because the result will be the same - Medicare will be dead.

Medicare, from its inception, has been under attack by the private, profit-hungry insurance industry and the political far right who believe no government (for the people) is good government (for the corporations - the "other" people). Politicians bemoan the rising cost of health care as a budget buster. So instead of cracking down on the source of rising costs - a for-profit health care system - they go after whatever public system is in place.

The Ryan-Wyden scheme introduces vouchers and "competition" between Medicare and for-profit insurance companies. Been there. Done that. Remember Medicare Advantage? Medicare recipients can get their coverage through private plans with Medicare Advantage. Cost savings? Nope. Medicare Advantage costs were 13 percent higher than regular Medicare.

According to The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn, the debate is not "simply" over whether public sector insurance is more efficient than private sector, or whether "competition" lowers costs versus regulations. Cohn says it goes to "whether our society should make a solemn guarantee to seniors" that "they will get a comprehensive set of health benefits that will be within their financial means."

In other words, will the richest country in the world, one that spends hundreds of billions on war and tax loopholes for billionaires, figure out how to guarantee some modicum of affordable health care benefits? Or will this tremendous nation of ours turn its back on the aging and ask, as Ebenezer Scrooge did, "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?"

The Obama administration was right to come out against the Ryan-Wyden plan, saying it would "end Medicare as we know it for millions of seniors."

Those who make a fetish of bipartisanship in order to get something done should know that it would not stop the free fall of public opinion towards Congress. As a sarcastic note, the Washington Post recently published a graph showing that communism in the United States was more popular than Congress.

While the esteemed editors of the Post were obviously lampooning both Communists and Congress, maybe there is something to reflect on. Maybe the idea of sharing resources for the benefit of the whole population is more popular than the dysfunction of lawmakers trying to put the onus of the Wall Street-caused financial crisis on the backs of seniors and the most vulnerable.

You really want to lower health care costs? Provide a Medicare for All option! Open it up for people of all ages to buy into. That's real competition that would lower costs. And, if private insurance companies can't compete, so be it.

Photo: Ohioans celebrate health care programs Medicare and Medicaid. (Progress Ohio/CC)

Finding Joe Hill in new biography

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:19:00 +0000

Book Review

"The Man Who Never Died. The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon."

By William M. Adler

Bloomsbury, 2011, hardcover $30, also available in e-book format

"I never died," said he.

Nowhere is the romance of the Industrial Workers of the World more beautifully told than in the life and songs of its greatest troubadour, Joe Hill. The new book carefully catalogues everything that is known about his life and death, but adds much more. The spirit of the labor's battles 1901-1915, especially in the West, is examined and exalted. The contribution of IWW volunteers to the Mexican revolution in Baja California is included. The author takes great pains to settle the question that previous biographies and one movie skirted, "Was Joe Hill guilty of the murder for which he was executed?"

Adler asserts that Hill was no murderer. He goes over the prosecution's circumstantial case, carefully explains the errors made by the defense (particularly Hill's own cavalier mindset), catalogues the tricks and outrights lies circulated by the capitalist media, and then goes much further. He demonstrates that a much stronger circumstantial case could have been made against another likely suspect, a career criminal who had been in the area of the crime and may have had the motive for murder that Joe Hill clearly lacked.

For this reader, such painstaking arguments were not really necessary. I would have been convinced by one sentence on page 340, "Hill's body had yet to be cremated, in fact his pulse was barely gone, when [Utah} Governor Spry formally and unambiguously declared class war on the Industrial Workers of the World." Adler goes on to talk about the nationwide witch-hunt, formally joined by President Wilson and the federal government as World War I began, that effectively suppressed labor's most robust organization.

Some readers may take issue with William M. Adler's total advocacy of his subject and the Industrial Workers of the World. Those who might accept the view that the IWW was and is perfect might be cautioned to study strategies and tactics more carefully, but no one ever can take away from the sheer honest bravery that Joe Hill and his organization did and does exemplify. Just as the song says,

"From San Diego, up to Maine

In every mine and mill

Where working folks defend their rights

It's there you'll find Joe Hill. It's there you'll find Joe Hill."

Photo: http://themanwhoneverdied.com/

The Iraq war is not over for my son

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:49:00 +0000

I finally got the call I had been waiting for since President Obama announced that our troops will be home for the holidays . My son will be returning from Iraq and will be landing Tuesday evening at 6:30 p.m. My body begins to swell with emotions - it is not one single emotion, they are many, twisting around my heart almost to the point where I feel as though I am suffocating.

Joy, pain, disgust, anger, anxiety, concern, a notch of happiness that he will be in the States now, worry worry and more worry. Oddly, I question: Why don't I feel that relief of "Finally we will all be all right and we will live happily ever after." Why don't I feel this even though I have seen it in so many movies and news reports of soldiers coming home to their loved ones? They led me to believe that this is what I should feel, but I don't. Instead I am gasping for air. This is what many of us mothers and fathers are feeling these days.

Yes, my son will be home but he is not out of danger. I know that, and that is why I feel this way and not how it has been portrayed in the movies and news reports.

When he came home after his first deployment we clearly saw the effects war had on him, the nightmares, the flashbacks, the drinking, the instability of his marriage. He was physically home, but he was still at war.

It changed our family too. The simple things we enjoyed, we could no longer do. For example, on holidays we used to have fun throwing crumpled gift wrapping at each other. But no more: my son was easily frightened by anything coming at him. New Year's Eve and 4^th of July were no longer family celebrations, they were days of concern: Would the noise trigger a flashback? These are the things those movies and news stories don't ever tell you. These are the things the cause such a turmoil of emotions in me and in many of us whose loved ones have experienced such trauma.

What will this, the end of his third deployment, bring? The end of the Iraq war for our country may bring up images of happy homecomings, husbands and wives embracing, children running up to their fathers or mothers. Tears of joy on everyone's face. But what we as parents, as spouses and children of combat troops, experience mostly is the feeling of uncertainty. How has our loved one changed? How much suffering have they experienced and how will it manifest itself?

I was comforted to hear President Obama in his speech to the troops at Fort Bragg say "We will help our wounded warriors heal, and we will stand by those who've suffered the unseen wounds of war." I believe that as Americans we bear the responsibility for all our troops and what they have experienced in Iraq. We allowed this to happen, with our silence, our ignorance of the facts and our complacency. We must do all that we can now to end the war for our troops, our fellow citizens, our nieces and nephews, our sons and daughters.

It is something many people don't understand, or fail to see: The war does not end for our troops when they return, it goes on until they can get the kind of help that will heal all the wounds that war has left them. Wounds from those frightful nights of being shot at to seeing death before their eyes, to the guilt they now carry as they reflect on their time there. We need to help them see that we acknowledge all that they went through, that we do not judge them, for we were not in their shoes. That they have a right to go on with their lives as we who allowed them to be sent there go on with our lives.

Do not be fooled by those happily-ever-after images, the war is not over, it continues and we need your help.

Photo: U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Elama Palemene is kissed by his wife, Annaden, right, and children Ko' Elani, left, and Pe' Ela during an early morning welcome home ceremony for about 300 U.S. Army 1st Cavalry 2nd Brigade soldiers returning home from deployment in Iraq, at Fort Hood, Texas, Dec. 18. (Erich Schlegel/AP)

The 2012 elections are critical to defeating the 1%

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:10:00 +0000

With the 2012 elections less than a year away, the entire right wing is amassing great sums of money in order to win. They want to take over the White House and the both houses of Congress.

This election has the highest priority for the 1% and their main political surrogates: the ultra right.

With control of all three branches of government they will be in position to push their policies of austerity for working people and expansion of the power and privileges of the richest 1%.

If they are successful, racism, sexism and homophobia will be much more rampant and working people will suffer even more.

One can be sure that the policies the GOP is pushing in Wisconsin, Ohio and other states will continued with a vengeance across the country. As a result more sections of people who consider themselves middle class will be pushed into deep poverty. All of these measures will have the sharpest impact on people of color.

November 6, 2012, promises to be one of the great turning points politically for the country. If next fall's turning point is to be in a positive direction the election has to be the highest priority for all progressive forces.

I think defeating the extreme right is a no brainer for left and progressive people. One wishes there were more left and party candidates running, but we are not at that point yet. What are folks supposed to do?

Can democratic minded people, progressives, and the revolutionary minded folk be neutral or indifferent or just protest from the sidelines? That would be a big mistake.

The approach taken by labor, civil rights, immigrant rights, youth, student, women's, environmental and peace forces shows the way out. They are putting their maximum efforts in building movements around the issues that the 99% are most concerned with.

In this way they are pushing the election debate to the left and bringing pressure to bear on and confronting the extreme right.

The Occupy Wall St. movement is part of this phase of the struggle.

The American Jobs Act is an example of the administration responding to left pressure when pushed. There are many more of such examples.

All of this mass protest coming from the left has also put the muzzle on the tea party, at least for now.

The vast majority of these democratic forces understand that the right danger is the main danger.

They are preparing to be fully involved in the elections and will work to elect Obama and a Democratic majority in Congress. Their tactics show a high level of political independence both inside and outside of the two major parties.

It's clear to me that you cannot defeat the 1% without defeating the Republicans at the polls next November and beyond.

Republican policies are not identical to Obama's. Obama clearly believes in capitalism, but it is not the extreme right wing form of capitalism that most Republicans believe in.

The right wing's hatred of Obama is fueled by high-octane racism. They will never forgive the president for passing the health care bill and the economic stimulus and for advocating public works jobs.

Nor will they forgive the Oval Office for wanting to place new taxes on the rich. Even though they agreed with his policy in Libya they will never forgive him for actually withdrawing troops from Iraq and for pushing negotiation over military confrontation. All these measures fly in the face of the basic ideological beliefs of the right.

But perhaps above all they will never forgive this black president for winning in the first place. Their fear and hatred of Obama is so deep that they are willing risk the consequences of bringing the country to ruin in order to defeat the White House.

Obama's election helped awaken a new belief that racial change -- which is a basic part of democratic change -- is possible in this country and worldwide.

In 2008, 70 million people voted for Obama. Many of these voters where attracted to him because he spoke of American democracy in egalitarian, pro-working class terms. If these mass ideological trends prevail the right's political goose is cooked.

Right-winger, Pat Buchannan's new book warns of the pending collapses of the GOP in about 30 years when whites become a racial minority. But there will also be a tipping point coming for working-class voters as their class-consciousness continues to rise.

The interest of the vast numbers of working-class families, racial minorities, women and youth -- all those concerned about the social well being of the American people -- is at stake in the 2012 election. This struggle is and always has been bigger than Obama. It involves the fundamental question of real, people's national interest.

Obama in the White House gives the people the possibility of changing the political landscape, of moving politics in this country in a profoundly more progressive direction. Whether it happens or not doesn't depend on Obama standing up alone. It depends even more fundamentally on the people's movement continuing to stand up in the pre and post election period.

I understand and identify with disappointment and disagreements with Obama.

The president has been under extreme right-wing pressure since the day he took office. Under the circumstances he has done some courageous things.

I say this not because I agree whole-heartedly with the president. I do not. My starting point is a strong belief in the ultimate ability of the majority of American people to see through the crap and find the best option presented to them.

And I think we must fight for the most favorable conditions possible for that to happen.

I repeat, if you want to bring about a major defeat for the 1%, help defeat the GOP in November 2012.

"Young Adult": You can't go home again to Kilimanjaro

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:06:00 +0000

Movie Review

Young Adult

Directed by Jason Reitman

Cast: Charlize Theron, Patrick Wilson, Patton Oswalt, Elizabeth Reaser, J.K. Simmons

Rated R , 94 minutes

Mavis Gary, 37 and alcoholic, wants to go back to her old hometown and her old home boyfriend. After all, she was a minor celebrity in high school. She snarls her contempt for everyone in the hometown; they mostly return the favor, and the movie audience will mostly take the townspeoples' side.

Don't let them sell it to you as "dark humor." It isn't deep enough to be dark and there's no humor anywhere.

So what does that have to do with the snows of Kilimanjaro? Well, Ernest Hemingway wrote a short story in 1936 and a movie was made of it in 1952 with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Susan Hayward. It shows on TV every now and again.

In the movie, Gregory Peck lies dying of gangrene within sight of beautiful Mount Kilimanjaro. He had been a hunter in Africa during happier times. The dying man stops arguing with his long-suffering wife long enough to tell her about a leopard that was found dead in the snows at the top of the peak. Why would a jungle animal die at the top of a mountain? Why would Gregory Peck rot to death in a remote part of Africa? As the movie agonizes on, Peck's character explains that the leopard must have been trying to return to the last place where his life seemed to make sense. The leopard is the metaphor for the whole movie.

I've seen it several times and, despite the fact that I didn't enjoy it at all, it's always bothered me. So that's two similarities with Jason Reitman's movie. They both bothered me and I didn't like either one.

The fact that Peck's character and Charlize Theron's character in "Young Adults" are both writers is another similarity. Stories about writers seem more likely to be true and are uncomfortably personal. That's a third similarity.

It also bothers me that the actual snows of Mount Kilimanjaro are gone. They fell casualty to global warming. That bothers me more than either movie. In "Young Adults," Charlize Theron's character, adolescent in everything but looks, has a habit of pulling out her own blonde hair.

The only uplifting thing in the movie was the IATSE union bug in the last frame.

But Charlize Theron is an amazing actress. Easily one of the most beautiful women ever on screen, she takes on impossibly rough roles of horrible women. She won an academy award as a homicidal truck stop prostitute in "Monster." Even that serial killer was more likeable than the drunken and petty Mavis Gary. Theron has to play all the layers of such a woman as she vamps, tricks, cheats, lies to, and tramples the feelings of everybody else in the film. It is an excellent turn of acting, just in time for Academy nominations. If Theron hadn't been so wonderfully convincing, the movie wouldn't have been so pathetically hard to watch.

Photo: Film still

"We're unemployed and we are united!" at Take Back the Capitol

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 11:52:00 +0000

WASHINGTON -- Those in Congress who are arrogantly playing politics with the lives of four million workers on extended unemployment compensation will not have a quiet moment until Congress comes to their senses and agrees to continue benefits. Such a continuation should be routine, especially with the high rate of unemployment stalking the land.

That message was brought directly to the offices of House Speaker John Boehner and 99 members of Congress in early December during the Take Back the Capitol encampment.

It was a rainy week and the camp on the National Mall, in the shadow of the Washington Monument, was a mud slide. But the out-of-work machinists, carpenters, steelworkers, teachers, health care workers and more, fortified by their union sisters and brothers, many public sector workers under attack, were up to the challenge.

It was thrilling to make fast friends in no time with folks from all over the country who were fighting mad and ready to stand up together for their rights. Some had been through the battles of Wisconsin and Ohio for workers' rights earlier this year.

It is not a joke to enter into the cold winter and the holiday season under threat of having your income cut off. Unemployment compensation is not a gift; it is earned on the job.

After practicing how to tell our stories and how to express our pain and determination in poetry, we were ready for the daily marches and chants through the streets surrounding the Capitol.

We could feel the power of the unemployed from Portland, Oregon, to Houston, Texas, and from Miami, Florida, on up to New England as we sang and marched on our way to visit Speaker of the House John Boehner.

The 99 unemployed folks, symbolic of the 99 percent in our country who are being screwed by the super richest one percent, never got to meet the Speaker. We were stopped short at the locked door to his office in the Longworth Office Building. The Office of the Speaker of the House was shut tight.

"I'm sure he knows we are in town," said a constituent from Dayton, Ohio, on his 23^rd month of unemployment. "We even went to his house this morning, and no one answered the door bell," he said.

Now, you would expect that being the Speaker, his office should be open to the public at all times. Not so. Not even for an unemployed constituent who traveled all the way to Washington, D.C.

"One: we're unemployed. Two: we are united. Three: tell the speaker we're not leaving!" we chanted for about five minutes before the Capitol police came with megaphones to inform us that if we didn't suspend the protest we would be under arrest.

We left to join the swelling crowd outside who had come from the AFL-CIO rally and prayer vigil to show solidarity and support.

Rep. Boehner and the tea party Republicans are making a mockery of the democratic process. Their arrogance, racism and greed are astounding and frightening as they set their first priority not on the needs of their constituents but on bringing down Barack Obama, the President of the United States.

What they did not count on is that the resolve of the 99 percent to stand up for our democratic rights is getting deeper and stronger. There on the National Mall, several thousand working people, Black, Latino, Asian, Native American and white, young and older, women and men all said, "we shall not be moved."

"You are continuing the campaign that Martin Luther King, Jr. was organizing at the time he was killed," Rev. Jesse Jackson told us when he visited the crowded food tent at lunchtime. "Rebuild America. Keep hope alive."

Yes, protected by giant tents and buoyed by talk, song and mutual resolve, we were gathered in the spirit of Rev. King's Poor People's Campaign.

"There is no reason that anyone should go hungry or without a decent job in our country," Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, told us.

The struggles of the unemployed and the struggles of the 99 percent are patriotic struggles for basic democratic rights. They represent a giant, progressive independent political force in our country and around the world. This force is the hope of the future, and the foundation for defeating the dangerous, cruel hearted tea party Republicans in 2012.

As one of the young people I traveled with said, "this was a life experience."

Call your Representative and your Senator today. Let them know that it is unacceptable to cut off the unemployed from benefits. Let them know that you will be talking to your family, friends and neighbors over the holidays and in the New Year to make sure they register and vote.

Joelle Fishman is chair of the Political Action Commission of the Communist Party, USA.

Photo: 99 unemployed workers bring their message to office of House Speaker John Boehner on December 8 during "take back the Capitol" week. People's World.

"Why Marx Was Right": lively challenge to 10 myths

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:44:00 +0000

Book Review

Why Marx Was Right

By Terry Eagleton

Yale University Press, 2011, 272 pages

Paperback, $16.00 (also available in hardcover and e-book reader editions)

While appreciating the work of Karl Marx, it is often that one encounters difficulties in sharing your views with others. We often try to explain and relate, only to find we must first defend. Because so much has been done in the name of Marxism over the decades, to say that being an enthusiastic Marxist carries a lot of baggage is being charitable.

It's not always an easy task to liberate the useful and vital ideas from beneath the weight of things like the "tyranny of Stalin," the "Chinese Cultural Revolution," and so on. Yes, one can argue that these phenomena had much or little or nothing to do with what Karl Marx worked away at, back before the turn of the last century, but the skills of many readers, however enthusiastic, are usually inadequate.

Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right is a real gift to those requiring both encouragement and inspiration. Eagleton's bright, witty book marches forward into the usual stumbling blocks erected over the decades in the environment of popular ideology and topples them. The language is marvelously contemporary and quite easy for any reader to enjoy.

The purpose of the book is clearly to challenge the conventional wisdom, but the amount of enthusiasm in the writing provides a rollicking momentum. It's a very personal sort of work, filled with an engaging and witty style. Some of the many amusing passages brought to mind the late Douglas Adams.

Eagleton defines the ten chief misconceptions about Marx's work and purpose. The common assumptions Eagleton challenges are:

That Marxism reduces everything to the economic
That Marxism is no longer relevant, a relic of past history
That as theory Marxism is fine, but it fails in practice
That Marx sees people as mere tools of history, stripping them of individuality
That Marxism is a dream of Utopia
That Marx was a materialist who had no interest in the spiritual aspects of humanity
That its obsession with class makes Marxism irrelevant to today's world
That Marxists are invariably advocates of violence
That Marxism promotes an all-powerful state
That all the interesting radical movements of recent history came from outside of Marxism

The vigor with which Eagleton tackles these arguments is considerable, but often the style of his language is less confrontational than one would expect. Though occasionally fiery, Eagleton is more often warm. I found his focus on the human dimension very commendable and immensely valuable. He is also relentless in his mission to keep the discussion contemporary, and this delivers Marx to the reader free of the dust and rubble of history.

The Marx that Eagleton stands before us in this book is one who " had a passionate faith in the individual, ... did not dream of a future in which we all wear boiler suits with our National Insurance numbers stamped on our backs."

The text reveals Marx as, if anything, more relevant than ever. Eagleton details many ways Marx was startlingly forward in his thinking, someone who "paid such unflagging attention to the economic, it was in order to diminish its power over humanity." In Eagleton's book, Marx -- and anyone who has found his writings inspirational -- have acquired a potent advocate.

Upon finishing the book I felt rather like one of those people who long appreciated a work of art but then sees it after a careful, thoughtful and respectful restoration -- the sort where details previously obscured suddenly capture one's attention.

Mr. Gingrich: Are there no Palestinians?

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:45:00 +0000

To Mr. Newt Gingrich, Republican candidate for president, who says there are no Palestinians:

"There are no Palestinians. There are Arabs who inhabit the State of Israel." These are your words, Mr. Gingrich.

So said the 19th century slave master who declared of captive Africans brought to the U.S., they had "no history," no culture, no identity, but were good enough to serve the interests of their white masters.

So the Palestinian stands as a nonentity in your distorted view.

Let us ask the Palestinian people whose existence you disclaim as "nonexistent," an "invented" entity. Let us ask the Palestinian mother living in the Occupied Territories, whose home is demolished by the Israeli Defense Force on the presumption that her son is a terrorist who lived there. Ask a thousand more Palestinian mothers who have known the same oppression: "Is there such a thing as a Palestinian, other than an Arab inhabitant of the State of Israel?"

You call yourself a Christian. Ask then that Great Teacher who Himself emanated from Palestine-Judea, who declared liberation and justice with these words: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me ... to preach the gospel to the poor ... to preach deliverance to the captive ... to set at liberty those who are bruised." (Luke 4:18) Words that preceded the modern Palestinian revolutionary struggle for a homeland, for justice, for both Christian and Muslim Palestinians.

Palestinian is what I am - Ana Falestini in Arabic - in the words of the late poet Mahmoud Darwish. My soul-brother poet, Palestinian Arab, has no existence for you.

The 1948 expulsion of the Palestinian people, both Christian and Muslim, from their traditional homes, to be replaced by Israeli settlements; the Deir Al Yasin massacre of Palestinian women, children and men by Israeli terrorists of the Jewish Ir-Gun brigades - this, too, has no existence for you.

The words of Yasser Arafat, calling for an independent state of Palestine for his people, the Palestinian people, represented by the Palestine Liberation Organization - that, too, is a fiction for you!

What do you say to Professor Hanan Ashrawi when she speaks of "al miftah," the key to their former homes many Palestinian families keep as a memento of their heritage as a people - homes to which they hope to return? Dr. Ashrawi has a website; you can present your argument there for the "nonexistence of the Palestinian people."

The Palestinian people are my Arab brothers and sisters, they very much do exist, carrying in their blood just as I do, strains of Arab, Ethiopic, Moor, Armenian and Byzantine - strains carried by diverse peoples of the Middle East, Christian and Muslim.

I will repeat the words of the Palestinian Liberation Organization's motto: "Faleshtin Tah'rir al-Hurriya!" Palestine will be Free!

Palestine will be free despite your lies that serve the ruling class of this nation! I dare you to repeat your disclaimer words in the face of a Palestinian man, woman or child, refugees in their own land, in the Occupied Territories of Israel!

Through the bars of my prison cell," wrote the poet Mahmoud Darwish,

All I possess is the presence of death,Is pride and fury
...
O homeland, Palestine!
We were born and raised in your wound.

Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry, University of California Press, 1974

...And the success of the Cause itself, the alteration of men and women on a mass scale, an alteration which can only take place in a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class (and read here also occupying colonial power) cannot be overthrown in any other way but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.

Karl Marx, The German Ideology

Sotere Torregian is a poet associated with the French Surrealist Group, visiting lecturer in Third World Studies at the University of the Pacific, Stockton, Calif. Photo: Palestinian school children in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. Susan Webb/PW

Michigan warning: Republican extremism goes too far

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 10:44:00 +0000

DETROIT - The attack on workers rights and democracy in Michigan is a warning for the nation.

In the 2010 mid-term elections in Michigan, voter turnout declined and Republicans captured a veto-proof majority in the state Senate and a large majority in the state House. In addition, Republicans won races for governor, secretary of state and attorney general, and a majority on the state Supreme Court.

They have unleashed a brutal attack. Almost 90 bills curtailing the rights of labor and many more attacking democratic rights have been introduced.

With the current extremist crowd running the Republican Party, give them control of all three branches of government and they will go hog wild. The lesson of Michigan is clear: the far-right cannot be given the power to govern on the state or national level.

The Republican overreach is activating labor and democratic forces here that are determined to retake the state legislature. But as the following examples show, the damage from the bills they have rammed through will have a deep impact.

Attack on the unemployed, poor, working people and seniors

With double-digit unemployment, losing more manufacturing jobs than any other state and new jobs almost non-existent, the state legislature passed a retroactive 48-month lifetime limit on welfare cash assistance. Almost 40,000 people, the majority children, have been cut off. In addition, unemployment benefits have been cut from 26 week to 20 weeks. Other legislation will cut the amount jobless workers are eligible to collect.

One of the first acts of Republican Gov. Rick Snyder was to lower the corporate tax rate by almost $2 billion. The loss in revenue was made up by taxing seniors' pensions, slashing the earned income tax credit for low-income workers and cutting funding of public schools.

Suppression of the right to vote

While there is no evidence of voter fraud in Michigan elections, Senate Bill 754, part of an 11-bill legislative package unveiled by Republican Secretary of State Ruth Johnson called the "Secure and Fair Elections initiative," places new hurdles on voting and voter registration campaigns. Individuals and organizations like the League of Women Voters, who have been registering voters for 90 years, would have to be trained and certified by the secretary of state before registering voters. Other provisions require completed registration forms to be submitted within 24 hours. Photo identification requirements for absentee ballots would make voting more difficult for seniors, the disabled and others.

From teachers to the police, public workers are under fire

Another bill, SB 636, prohibits public school systems from collecting union dues or service fees from wages of public school employees.

Legislation removing all caps and limits of all types on charter schools will open the floodgates for the privatization of education.

SB 729, a "right-to-work" (for less) bill for school workers, was introduced in October. Another bill, which calls for the forced privatization of non-instructional workers in public school districts, passed the House and is on its third reading in the Senate.

Already passed are bills requiring public employees to pay no less than 20% of their health care, a total that will run into thousands of dollars for these workers; one that prohibits paid time off for union officials for conducting union business; and another that adds new restrictions on police officer and fire fighter arbitration rights.

A bill that drastically undermines workers' compensation benefits was just passed.

Other measures will do away with prevailing wage requirements and remove the current requirement of employers to notify striking unions when they are hiring replacement workers.

Workers' safety at risk

While Michigan Republicans work to delay the creation of the health care exchanges required in the president's Affordable Health Care Act, a bill passed the state House prohibiting the Michigan Occupational Health and Safety Administraton from developing rules more stringent than federal ones. An separate bill that prohibits creating ergonomic rules in the workplace has passed both houses.

And despite the dangers of mercury to public health, Republican Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations reducing mercury emissions from power plants.

Democracy under attack

Michigan's "emergency manager" law has resulted in such managers appointed in Benton Harbor, Flint, Pontiac and Ecorse, all majority African American cities, and Detroit is now threatened. Emergency mangers can terminate collective bargaining agreements, remove elected officials from office and ban them from running for office for six years, dissolve political structures such as councils, commissions and school boards, and force consolidation of services in schools, townships, cities and counties.

Other legislation prevents public employers from offering medical benefits to domestic partners. Another turns an anti-bullying measure into its opposite by justifying bullying if the victims are gay or transgendered.

English-only legislation and bills requiring temporary work agencies and public employers and their contractors to use the mistake-ridden E-verify database to match Social Security numbers have been introduced.

There are more, many more, bills passed or still in committee that will negatively impact democracy, labor rights and the life of those living in this state.

Southfield Mayor Brenda Lawrence, during a recent press conference denouncing the Emergency Manager legislation, referred to the 2010 electoral debacle by saying "elections do matter."

The question for 2012 is will what happened in Michigan take place in the nation as a whole?

Photo: Workers rally against Republican agenda, at the state Capitol in Lansing, March 8. John Rummel/PW

Leo Fichtenbaum, lifelong drum major for justice, dies

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:34:00 +0000

Leonard Joseph Fichtenbaum (Leo), lifelong drum major for justice, born on June 7, 1924, the son of Helen and Jack Fichtenbaum, died on Nov. 27.

As a teenager and a member of the Young Communist League, he was active in the struggle to free the Scottsboro Boys and helped to organize the fur workers.

He fought to end fascism during World War II. As an infantryman he landed on Omaha Beach in Normandy on June 7, 1944, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, then liberating a concentration camp. He was then appointed mayor of a city in occupied Germany and remained in the Army until his honorable discharge at the end of the war.

Under the GI Bill, he attended City College of New York (CCNY) graduating with a degree in history. While at CCNY he was active in a variety of struggles for social justice including the fight to free Willie McGee. He worked as a machinist until he was blacklisted during the McCarthy period.

He returned to school getting an MSW from the University of Connecticut. After graduation he was employed as psychiatric social worker at the Clifford Beers Child Guidance Clinic. Later he worked as a social worker and community organizer at the Connecticut Mental Health Center, while earning a master's in public health from Yale.

He was very active in many civil rights campaigns and was part of the antiwar movement, protesting the war in Vietnam. As a community organizer he spearheaded the fight to prevent lead poisoning, committing civil disobedience to bring attention to the problem in young children, particularly in the African American community.

He was also active in leading the movement to desegregate the public schools in New Haven. He helped found the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and was active in the movement to Free Angela Davis, and the Reverend Ben Chavis and the Wilmington 10.

In 1970, he moved to St. Louis where he worked for two neighborhood health centers, Yeatmann and Union Sara, and was an assistant professor in the Department of Community Medicine at St. Louis University until his retirement in 1986.

In St. Louis, he fought against police brutality in the African American community and against the closing of Homer G. Phillips Hospital. He campaigned for the release of prisoners unjustly jailed and for justice in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

For more than 50 years, he was a member of the Communist Party and was an ardent fighter for labor rights, social justice, peace and human rights.

Wherever he went he touched the lives of others. He was a courageous man who fought like hell to make the world a better place for his family, friends and all of humanity.

He cared deeply for his loving wife Myrna, who was his lifelong partner, and he was a fierce defender of his family taking great pride in their achievements.

He is survived by wife Myrna, his three children, Rudy (Bonnie), Heidi (Antonio) and Carl (Mary Beth), and grandchildren Nicholas, Alexis, Andres, Eric, Diego, Walter, Jeremy and Adrienne.

He was a generous man, always willing to share what he had with others. He had a great sense of humor and his laughter was contagious. Throughout his lifetime, he raised his voice for the concern of others and stood fast to his ideals and left the world a better place.

Although he is gone his legacy remains.

2011: People Said NO to union busting, greed and war

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:31:00 +0000

WASHINGTON - 2011 will be remembered as the year workers occupied the capitals of Wisconsin and Ohio to defend union rights and the jobs of millions of public workers. It was a movement that spread across the nation as the labor movement rallied in all 50 state capitals to protest the layoffs, budget cuts and union busting.

2011 was the year protesters occupied Wall Street, disgusted by policies and practices that fleece the "99 percent" of the people to fatten the profits of the the wealthy "one percent," a grassroots rebellion that spread like wildfire across the nation.

It was the year Van Jones launched a "Rebuild the American Dream" movement uniting the AFL-CIO, MoveOn, USAction and scores of other progressive organizations, which staged rallies, mass meetings and house parties across the nation demanding that the federal government approve public works programs to create millions of "good green jobs."

It was the year the nation's mayors meeting in Baltimore voted unanimously to "bring the troops, bring the war dollars home" from Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world and use the trillion dollars in savings to create jobs and rebuild the cities.

These movements were united in protesting federal, state, and local budget cutbacks that slashed or terminated vital social services and forced the layoff of hundreds of thousands of public employees in the name of "deficit reduction" and "balancing the budget."

They spoke with one voice in denouncing Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's bill that strips public employees of union bargaining rights. Walker now faces a labor-led drive to recall him from office with petitioners already collecting hundreds of thousands of voters' signatures for a special election in the spring.

One of 2011's highpoints was the Nov. 8 off-year election when Ohio voters overwhelmingly voted to repeal Gov. John Kasich's SB-5, the nation's most draconian anti-labor law. Even in rock-rib Republican rural Ohio voters voted to kill the law drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a far right outfit bankrolled by the Kansas oil billionaires Charles and David Koch. ALEC, together with lobbyists of giant banks and corporations, secretly drafted 800 "model" rightwing bills many introduced and passed in state legislatures across the country. Also in the 2011 elections, Arizona voters cast their ballot to remove from office the racist Repubican Arizona Senator, Russell Pearce, author of a venomous immigant-bashing racial profiling law also drafted by ALEC. Mississippi voters killed in a landslide an ALEC ballot initiative that defined a fetus as a person, the most extreme anti-abortion scheme yet.

Until these progressive, anti-corporate movements erupted in the streets, the Republican right's arguments dominated the airwaves and the nation's political discourse. The Tea Party Republican gang blamed "socialistic"and "liberal" benefit programs like Food Stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, Pell Grants, and Social Security for the deficits (even though Social Security doesn't add a dime to deficits).

The Obama Administration and Democrats on Capitol Hill charged that the aim of the Republican right is to force poor people, children, the unemployed, students, veterans, the elderly, and the disabled, to bear the burden of deficit reduction while a trillion dollars in Bush-era tax breaks for the wealthy are preserved.

The radical right GOP-run Michigan legislature pioneered a new right wing approach to killing democracy. Signed by the state's governor, it empowers the state to take over "failing" local governments. State "overseers" can privatize services, fire workers, tear up union contracts and more. To no one's surprise, the first bodies to fall under the state axe were a majority African-American, most, if not all with union contracts. Detroit, Benton Harbor and Flint were three examples.

The GOP-run Minnesota legislature shut down the state for three weeks, throwing more than 20,000 out odf work, because it refused to close a budget gap by raising taxes on the 1 percent. As Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton demanded. In the end, the state reopened, but not without deep cuts in education.

The House GOP attacked workers rights on the national level, too by trying to emasculate the National Labor Relations Board. It passed two anti-NLRB bills on party-line votes. One banned changes in union election rules and the other removed the board's power to punish firms who close up shop in retaliation against their unionized workers, the so called "Boeing Bill."

The Supreme Court got in on the attack on workers when it ruled that Wal-Mart's women workers could not sue as a class against the monster retailer's sexual discrimination on the job.

The Republican right is shredding the safety net, blocking even an extension of unemployment compensation, throwing tens of millions of poor and unemployed "under the bus" with a message to the needy and the sick, "you're on your own," Democrats on Capitol Hill charged.

But until the grassroots movement started generating "street heat" these charges gained little traction. Now with slogans like "We Are the 99 Percent" and "Tax the Rich" and "Jobs Not Cuts" the accusations have become demands supported by a vast majority of the people.

This past year was marked by deep changes in mass thought patterns, a shift that reached across the partisan divide. The Koch-funded Tea Party went into eclipse. Of Ohio's 82 counties, 80 voted to repeal SB-5. This is Taft country, where the Republicans have always had a powerful base. The same shift was on display in Arizona, Mississippi, and Kentucky, all considered GOP territory.

A question looms for the coming year: Will the grassroots upsurge that swept the nation take advantage of the shifts, put feet on the ground to counter the ocean of corporate cash and the voter suppression tactics the Republicans are using to steal the 2012 elections?

A worthy New Year's Resolution might be: "I will work for a powerful get-out-the-vote effort next November to defeat the Republican power grab?" It would be a mighty victory of "Main Street" and open the way for federal programs to create jobs, health care for all, funding for public education, more generous Pell Grants and an end to the mortgage foreclosure nightmare.

Photo: PW stock photo of demonstration earlier this year.

The Iraq war is over - or is it?

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:16:00 +0000

With almost all U.S. troops leaving Iraq by year's end, a most painful chapter in American military adventurism is closing. Families and friends of the returning troops, and everyone in our country, will have extra reason to celebrate this holiday season.

"We knew this day would come. We have known it for some time now," President Obama told troops arriving at Fort Bragg, N. C. Dec. 15. "But still, there is something profound about the end of a war that has lasted so long."

And, we might add, didn't even have a credible pretext.

President Obama deserves praise for fulfilling his promise to end a war he opposed before he even started campaigning for the presidency.

But many question whether that promise has been completely realized.

Some have wondered whether, with the world's biggest embassy in Baghdad and an acknowledged 16,000 diplomatic personnel around the country, Washington is trading a military presence for a State Department one.

Nor is the drastic cut in military forces necessarily the end of the story.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said he expects some 40,000 U.S. troops to be stationed around the Middle East after troops leave Iraq. Negotiations were underway this fall for more U.S. troops in Kuwait. The Pentagon and State Department are said to envision a multilateral security alliance linking the U.S. with the six-nation, Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council.

U.S. arms sales to Iraq have been escalating for several years , including jet fighters, transport aircraft, missile-armed helicopters and tanks.

And talks for more U.S. troops in Iraq could resume after the first of the year.

What have been the results of this nearly nine-year war? Nearly 4,500 U.S. troops, and at least 100,000 Iraqis, have died. Over 32,000 U.S. troops, and countless Iraqis, have been wounded. Costs to the U.S. may reach $3 trillion. Iraq's economy and infrastructure have been savaged, its population uprooted and many exiled.

Undoubtedly many soldiers will end up in Afghanistan, or elsewhere around the world. Others will return to a country where large numbers of vets are jobless and/or homeless, and needed medical treatment is hard to come by.

As we welcome the troops' departure from Iraq, we call on the president and Congress to bring all U.S. troops home, to assure them job training, jobs and the all-around care they need to return to civilian life.

And most importantly, to once and for all change our country's foreign policy to one of peace and cooperation around the world.

Photo: U.S. Army Sgt. Alma Santiago, 25, from Worcester, Mass., with 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, waits at Baghdad International Airport as her unit begins their journey to the United States, July 13, 2010, as part of the first wave of troop withdrawal. (AP/Maya Alleruzzo)

President Obama should veto the National Defense Authorization Act

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:55:00 +0000

The White House signalled on Wednesday that President Obama will not veto the National Defense Authorization Act recently approved by the House and Senate.

The defense spending bill includes a provision allowing for the indefinite detention without trial of al-Qaida suspects and their "allies." Allies as defined in the bill could include U.S. citizens.

The president had previously threatened to veto the bill, but an amendment softening the language - giving the White House authority to issues waivers - apparently won over reluctant Senate Democrats and alleviated the Oval Office's concerns.

The fears of civil liberties groups however have not been allayed. Human Rights Watch said, "By signing this defense spending bill, President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in U.S. law. In the past, Obama has lauded the importance of being on the right side of history, but today he is definitely on the wrong side."

The ACLU, which had been leading a campaign against the legislation, concurred, saying, "If President Obama signs this bill, it will damage both his legacy and America's reputation for upholding the rule of law,"

They are correct. Make no mistake, the president's approval of the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens is another dangerous step in the wrong direction.

Recall that just a few months ago U.S. citizens were placed on the CIA's targeted assassination list.

In light of the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, without trial, assurances that a Democratic president would not abuse the privilege ring hollow. And even if abuse would not be an issue under President Obama, there would no such "guarantee" should a Republican win the White House.

Remember that not so long ago, patriots of South Africa's African National Congress were called terrorists by Republican administrations - and not just the ANC.

In the fight against terrorism the rule of law should not be thrown out the window. Indeed, even the terrorists of the Nazi high command were tried and convicted by an international court of law.

And for good reason: arbitrariness and selective persecution of enemies real and imagined could easily result in aggravation of the very problems they were attempting to resolve, as the McCarthy period demonstrated.

Call President Obama. Tell him to veto the National Defense Authorization Act.

Photo: Steve Rhodes // CC 2.0