by Billy Wharton
from Dissident Voice
Barack Obama's imagination management representatives were widely deployed on day one of his presidency. Fervent supporters were told to go slow - the NY Times described "sobering challenges," Congressman Dave Obey cautioned against looking for "economic salvation" while an Associated Press article praised Obama's "cold-eyed realism." No matter which analogy is employed, the widening gulf between popular expectations and governmental willingness [or unwillingness] to act is a potential source for a more radical set of politics.

Of course, Obama is no George W. Bush. He knows well how to pick off the low-hanging political fruit in order to forestall decisions which threaten to bring his administration into conflict with organized interest blocs. Moving swiftly to close the moral eyesore that is the detention center in Guantanamo Bay signals a return to the normal operation of US Empire. Equally useful is his enactment of measures furthering governmental transparency. This may sooth lingering doubts about Obama's associations with now-impeached Illinois Governor Rod "Let's Make a Deal" Blagojevich. It would be difficult to discover many speakers - apart from those on the fringe of the radical right - willing to defend either Guantanamo or Presidential secrecy.

More significant resistance will be provided to any serious attempt to end the US occupation of Iraq. Evidence of this was provided during the nightly News Hour program aired on Wednesday January 21st. The segment was entitled "Next Steps for Iraq," and featured the pro-Bush retired General Jack Keane and the Obama-ally retired General Wesley Clark. Both Keane and Clark delivered a clear message - no troop removal anytime soon.

Keane, the military author of Bush's "surge strategy," claimed that Obama's campaign pledge to remove troops by 2010 "rather dramatically increases the risks" in Iraq. He recommended a "minimal force reduction" in order to "protect the political situation." Though a 2010 departure was "a risk that is unacceptable," Keane assured viewers that "Everyone knows that we are going to take our troops out of Iraq."

The Democratic Party's dog in the fight, Wesley Clark had little bite as he agreed with Keane's assesment "it [Obama's troop removal pledge] is risky." "When President Obama made that pledge almost a year ago," Clark claimed, "the context of what combat troops was, was taken from the legislation that was going back and forth through the House and the Senate." He then provided a key qualification, "Distinguishing combat troops from trainers, from counter-insurgency troops or counter-terrorist troops that would go against Al-Quaeda in Iraq and distinguishing them from the logistics troops." "So," Clark concluded, "to say that all combat troops will be out in 2010 in sixteen months doesn't necessarily mean that all troops will be out by 2010."

If this double-speak was not enough, Clark then provided another clear signal that the Obama campaign pledge may fall far short of anything resembling a remotely anti-war position. Clark praised Keane as the architect of the surge policy and "the success that has been achieved through it."

Not surprisingly, Keane agreed with the non-combatative Clark. He "understands the distinction" between combat and other types of troops. Even if some combat troops were removed, Iraq would still require "a significant number of combat troops" to protect the other types of American troops. Clark then introduced a new term to the discussion (any possibility of a debate had long since passed) - "re-deployed." He ended his contributions by highlighting the "the need for troops in Afghanistan."

The Clark-Keane discussion should be quite useful for anti-war activists. It clearly signals that the "surge-consensus" forged by the Bush administration is still fully operative among the military establishment in Washington. Obama's desire for continuity in military strategy, signaled clearly through his re-appointment of Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, should be understood as his acceptance of the positions articulated by Keane and Clark. This presents a sharp challenge to the anti-war movement.

Two tasks are clear. The first is to articulate a clear demand for the complete removal of all US military forces from Iraq. The anti-war movement cannot allow distinctions to be made between combat or counter-insurgency troops, military advisers or technicians. All troops need to be removed immediately. Second, and perhaps even more challenging, is the demand to remove all troops from Afghanistan and to resist any attempt at re-deployment from Iraq. Perhaps a bit of "cold-eye realism," beginning with the fact that more than one million Iraqis have died as a result of the US occupation, should be employed by the anti-war movement as we begin the process of challenging an Obama presidency whose military policy has started off sounding a lot like a re-hashed version of George W. Bush.

A Statement by the NYC Local of the Socialist Party USA
socialistpartynyc@gmail.com

Mass transportation in New York City is more than a public service. Metropolitan Transit Authority buses and subways are vital pathways which stitch together New York City's diverse communities. Eliminating or even limiting service effectively isolates sections of the city from one another. The M8 line - a bus line currently under threat of elimination - in Greenwich Village is a perfect example of the integrative function of transport.

There is currently only one way to travel from the East to West Village - the M8 bus. Each day, thousands of the neighborhood's elderly, schoolchildren and working people rely on this bus. While heading to their destinations these passengers are, mostly unknowingly, contributing to the environmental health of the community by sharing transport instead of employing fleets of carbon-dioxide producing cabs or vans for individual rides. Few of these travelers ever make the entire trip across the Village. Most use the bus as a link to one of the system's more efficient underground subway lines.

Though large in size and in budget, NYC's transport system is still relatively underdeveloped. Much of the new construction dedicated to the expansion and extension of subway lines was suspended during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. Buses have been used as low-cost alternative means to supplement subways as dense urban communities spread beyond the established subway lines. Buses such as the M8 are essential to making the system flow. Their elimination opens the door for the operation of informal vans operated by low wage and non-union workers which will increase the congestion on City streets. The proliferation of van service also threatens the environment as dozens of inefficient vehicles replace one, often green-fueled, bus line. For many, especially the disabled and elderly, cutting the M8 will place serious limitation on their mobility. Community isolation and environmental destruction are the only outcomes of this budget cut.

Since 1998, the office of Socialist Party USA has been located in Greenwich Village . We stand in solidarity with our neighbors and call for the MTA to remove its proposal to eliminate the M8. NYC transportation should be a funding priority. Instead of cut-backs we should be discussing serious proposals to make the system greener and more extensive. In our general statement about the proposed budget cuts, we outline measures which can be implemented immediately to close budget deficits without budget reductions. We understand the struggle to save the M8 as one part of the larger battle to stop the cuts. Working together, activists in the education, healthcare, social services and transport sectors can raise their voices against cutbacks while also beginning to develop alternative progressive visions for New York City in 21st century.

Save the M8!
Stop the Budget Cuts!
Tax the Rich to Clean Up Their Mess!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Come to the Budget Cut Forum:
Saturday February 7th, 3:00pm
St. Mary's Church
521 West 126th Street
(1,A,C,D to 125th Street)
Click here for more info

From the Immigration News Briefs

From Dec. 14 to Dec. 18, ICE agents from three local fugitive operations teams arrested 84 immigrants from Costa Rica, Mexico, Nepal and Nicaragua in the Dallas, Texas metropolitan area. The arrests were made in Argyle, Arlington, Balch Springs, The Colony, Carrollton, Dallas, Denton, Duncanville, Farmers Branch, Fort Worth, Garland, Haltom City, Irving, Kennedale, Mesquite, Plano, Richardson and Rowlett. Of the total 84 people arrested, 64 reportedly had final removal orders; the other 20 were out-of-status immigrants encountered during the course of the raids. Forty of the 84 reportedly had criminal histories. ICE was assisted in the operation by the US Marshals Service, the Texas Department of Public Safety and the police departments of Arlington, Dallas, Fort Worth, Frisco and Grand Prairie. [ICE News Release 12/19/08]

In a five-day operation ending Dec. 23, ICE agents arrested 110 immigrants in the South Florida areas of Miami, Broward, Palm Beach, Orlando and Tampa. ICE said 81 of those arrested were "fugitives" who had failed to comply with deportation orders; the other 29 were out-of-status immigrants encountered during the raids. According to ICE, 24 of the 110 people arrested had criminal histories. Most of the arrests (47) took place in Miami-Dade County; 30 arrests were in Broward County; 15 in Palm Beach County; seven in the Orlando area and 11 in Tampa. Of the total 110 people arrested, 17 were released under the Alternatives to Detention Program because they were verified to be sole caregivers of young children or had medical concerns. The other 93 people were being held in ICE custody. Those arrested came from countries including Guatemala, Haiti, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, El Salvador, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Moldova, Cuba, Bahamas, Nicaragua, Peru, Poland, Jamaica, Bangladesh, Mexico, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Canada and The Gambia. [ICE News Release 12/23/08]

The pre-Christmas raid in South Florida followed similar ICE operations in the same area in November. At a Dec. 9 press conference, several community groups called for an investigation into ICE abuses during a Nov. 19 raid in Homestead. ICE apparently used a human trafficking investigation to obtain warrants for the Nov. 19 operation, in which the agency swept up 77 people, none of whom were charged criminally in connection with the trafficking case. In a complaint sent to R. Alexander Acosta, the US Attorney who helped ICE secure the warrants, community members said ICE agents beat at least six Guatemalan men during the raid; officials at the Broward Transitional Center, where some of those arrested were detained, were so concerned that they called for an official inquiry into the injuries. Jonathan Fried, executive director of the Homestead-based community group WeCount!, said a Guatemalan woman saw agents beat her husband and throw him on the floor in front of their four-year-old daughter. Witnesses also reported several incidents of ICE agents pointing guns to residents' heads, including in front of children; using excessive force in executing search warrants; and using racial profiling to detain bystanders. [News Release from WeCount! & Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center 12/10/08; Miami Herald 12/10/08; South Florida Sun-Sentinel 12/10/08; New York Times 12/9/08] ICE announced in a Nov. 21 news release that it had arrested four "sex traffickers" and "rescued" nine "victims" on Nov. 19 while executing search warrants tied to the investigation of more than a dozen brothels and stash houses in Palm Beach and Broward counties where immigrant women were reportedly forced into prostitution. [ICE News Release 11/21/08] [In a Nov. 25 news release, ICE reported the arrests of 71 people from Nov. 17 to 21 as part of a "fugitive" operation in Miami, Broward, Palm Beach, Orlando and Tampa--see INB 11/30/08.]

ICE spokesperson Nicole Navas announced on Dec. 9 that the ICE agents involved in the Nov. 19 raid on the sex slave ring are under investigation for the alleged abuses. "The ICE Office of Investigations strongly denies all allegations of agent misconduct," said Navas. "However, as is routine protocol, all allegations have been forwarded to the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility for their independent review." Steve Mocsary, special agent in charge of the Office of Professional Responsibility in Plantation, Florida, said the investigation could take months. [Sun-Sentinel 12/10/08] Advocates said the internal probe was insufficient, and called for a robust investigation by the ICE Office of Inspector General or the US Attorney's office in Miami. [NYT 12/9/08]

from Upside Down World
Written by Benjamin Dangl
Saturday, 24 January 2009

On Thursday, January 22, the last day of campaigning for the new constitution before the document is set to a vote on Sunday, January 25th, representatives from Bolivia’s diverse social movements convened in downtown La Paz. The rally, located in the Plaza Murillo, marked the end of over two years of meetings, conflicts and mobilizations to, as President Evo Morales often says in speeches, "constitutionalize" much-needed changes. The following day, Morales nationalized the Chaco oil company.

All of the previous weeks' marches for the constitution seemed to gather in the plaza, along with a culmination of fireworks, cheers and music. At a central stage, acts alternated between speeches from representatives of the various social movements present and musical performances from groups from around the country, including Afro-Bolivian dances and political hip-hop from La Paz. Members of the Bartolina Sisa women’s organization spoke, along with miners, neighborhood council members, retirees, students, and campesino and indigenous leaders.

The presence of such diverse groups underscored the importance of Bolivian social movements’ participation in the process of change carried out in collaboration with the government. As Sacha Llorenti, the Vice Minister of the Coordination of Bolivian Social Movements told TeleSUR, "The structural transformations that the country is going through cannot be understood without recognizing [the role of] the social movements, the popular organizations of this country."

The plaza was packed. People were dancing in the streets, bands played around the area, both on and off stage, pounding drums and blowing into flutes. Just as the crowds and marches from around the city converged, so did the campaign literature – pamphlets, papers, calendars, posters – everything was being passed around, even tossed into the air like confetti. Though Bolivian flags were draped around the plaza, the majority of the flags were the rainbow checkered wiphalas of Bolivia’s indigenous majority. Beer was sold on the sidewalk – a reminder that this was the last legal day to drink alcohol before the vote; drinking, like campaigning for the constitution, was prohibited for the next three days to promote clear-headed voting on Sunday.

Bolivian President Evo Morales arrived around 8pm, after giving a speech in La Paz earlier that day, flying to Cochabamba to close the campaign there, and then returning to the Plaza Murillo for a final push for the constitution. When Morales arrived, someone from the stage began a chant that spread through the crowd: "Evo! Evo! Evo!" The President spoke of the diversity of the crowd, the music and culture present in the plaza. "This is plurinationalism," he said, referring to a key theme in the constitution. "But some [elite] families in Bolivia don’t believe in plurinationalism," he continued, pointing his finger in the air, condemning the new constitution’s critics. He went on to speak of the progressive gains in the new constitution, discussed the victory of his recall vote in August, and the regional support he’s received from other Latin American leaders: "happily, we aren’t alone." After touching on the standard themes from recent speeches, he closed with a "Patria o Muerte" cheer.

The applause that followed was quickly stifled by thundering explosions from fireworks set off in the middle of the plaza. The fireworks blasted off in random directions, dangerously close to the crowd, with bits and pieces of cardboard from the explosions flying everywhere. Besides the hope that many in the crowd were savoring for the moment, what was striking was that just over 50 years ago it was illegal for indigenous people to enter the Plaza Murillo. And on that night, a largely indigenous crowd was celebrating the imminent passage of a new constitution that would grant unprecedented rights to Bolivia’s indigenous majority.

ImageThe next day, Friday, January 23, Morales signed a decree nationalizing all of the shares of the Chaco Petrolera Ltd. Oil Company. The President said employees at the company would keep their jobs, but the directive board would be replaced. The company is managed by Anglo-Argentine Panamerican Energy, and is a subsidiary of the British company BP. Under Morales, the Bolivian government has previously taken over various gas, oil, mining and telecom companies.

After signing the decree in Entre Rios, Morales said, "Little by little, we are taking back our companies, our natural resources." He explained that "oil companies are not respecting Bolivian standards," but that the government "will respect private investment as long as they respect Bolivian norms… We want partners, not bosses."

"The best homage to the country and for those who have given their lives in social struggles is this recuperation [of the gas industry] which belongs to us," Pedro Montes, the executive leader of the Bolivian Workers’ Center (COB), told the Agencia Boliviana de Información. "Evo Morales is not alone because we, the workers, are accompanying him."

From Wikipedia
Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama) is an American political activist and university professor who was associated with the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Davis was also a notable activist during the Civil Rights Movement, and a prominent member and political candidate of the Communist Party USA. In recent years, she no longer identifies as a Communist, but rather a democratic socialist, and is currently a member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

She first achieved nationwide notoriety when a weapon registered in her name was linked to the murder of Judge Harold Haley during an effort to free a black convict who was being tried for the attempted retaliatory murder of a white prison guard who killed three unarmed black inmates. Davis fled underground and was the subject of an intense manhunt. Davis was eventually captured, arrested, tried, and then acquitted in one of the most famous trials in recent U.S. history.

Davis is currently a graduate studies Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California and Presidential Chair at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She works for racial and gender equality, and for gay rights and prison abolition. She is a popular public speaker, nationally and internationally, as well as a founder of the grassroots prison-industrial complex-abolition organization Critical Resistance.

by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
September 18, 1963. Birmingham, Ala.

This afternoon we gather in the quiet of this sanctuary to pay our last tribute of respect to these beautiful children of God. They entered the stage of history just a few years ago, and in the brief years that they were privileged to act on this mortal stage, they played their parts exceedingly well. Now the curtain falls; they move through the exit; the drama of their earthly life comes to a close. They are now committed back to that eternity from which they came.

These children—unoffending, innocent, and beautiful—were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity. Yet they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity.

And so this afternoon in a real sense they have something to say to each of us in their death. They have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows. They have something to say to every politician [Audience:] (Yeah) who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. They have something to say to a federal government that has compromised with the undemocratic practices of southern Dixiecrats (Yeah) and the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing northern Republicans. (Speak) They have something to say to every Negro (Yeah) who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice. They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. (Mmm) They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.
And so my friends, they did not die in vain. (Yeah) God still has a way of wringing good out of evil. (Oh yes) And history has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive. The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as a redemptive force (Yeah) that will bring new light to this dark city. (Yeah. Mmm)

The holy Scripture says, "A little child shall lead them." (Well) The death of these little children may lead our whole Southland (Well) from the low road of man's inhumanity to man to the high road of peace and brotherhood. (Yeah) These tragic deaths may lead our nation to substitute an aristocracy of character for an aristocracy of color. The spilled blood of these innocent girls may cause the whole citizenry of Birmingham (Yeah) to transform the negative extremes of a dark past into the positive extremes of a bright future. (Mmm) Indeed, this tragic event may cause the white South to come to terms with its conscience. (Yeah)

And so I stand here to say this afternoon to all assembled here that in spite of the darkness of this hour, (Well) we must not despair. (Well) We must not become bitter, (Yeah. That’s right) nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence. (Mmm) No, we must not lose faith in our white brothers. (Yeah) Somehow we must believe that the most misguided among them can learn to respect the dignity and the worth of all human personality.

May I now say a word to you, the members of the bereaved families? It is almost impossible to say anything that can console you at this difficult hour and remove the deep clouds of disappointment which are floating in your mental skies. But I hope you can find a little consolation from the universality of this experience. Death comes to every individual. There is an amazing democracy about death. It is not aristocracy for some of the people, but a democracy for all of the people. Kings die and beggars die; rich men and poor men die; old people die and young people die. Death comes to the innocent and it comes to the guilty. Death is the irreducible common denominator of all men.

I hope you can find some consolation from Christianity's affirmation that death is not the end. Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more lofty significance. Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness, but an open door which leads man into life eternal. Let this daring faith, this great invincible surmise, be your sustaining power during these trying days.

Now I say to you in conclusion, life is hard, at times as hard as crucible steel. (Mmm) It has its bleak and difficult moments. Like the ever-flowing waters of the river, life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood. (Yeah) Like the ever-changing cycle of the seasons, life has the soothing warmth of its summers and the piercing chill of its winters. (Yeah) But if one will hold on, he will discover that God walks with him, (Yeah. Well) and that God is able (Yeah) to lift you from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope and transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace. (Mmm)

And so today, you do not walk alone. You gave to this world wonderful children. (Mmm) They didn’t live long lives, but they lived meaningful lives. (Well) Their lives were distressingly small in quantity, but glowingly large in quality. (Yeah) And no greater tribute can be paid to you as parents, and no greater epitaph can come to them as children, than where they died and what they were doing when they died. (Yeah) They did not die in the dives and dens of Birmingham, (Well) nor did they die discussing and listening to filthy jokes. (Yeah) They died between the sacred walls of the church of God (Yeah) and they were discussing the eternal meaning (Yes) of love. This stands out as a beautiful, beautiful thing for all generations. (Yes) Shakespeare had Horatio to say some beautiful words as he stood over the dead body of Hamlet. And today, as I stand over the remains of these beautiful, darling girls, I paraphrase the words of Shakespeare (Well): Good night, sweet princesses. (Mmm) Good night, those who symbolize a new day. (Yeah) And may the flight of angels (That’s right) take thee to thy eternal rest. God bless you.

by Eva Bartlett writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine, 16 January 2009
Electronic Intifada

Where a family's home once stood.

January 15, 2009, 11:02 am

When I'd met the extended Abed Rabu family, before the ground invasion began, they had just had their house bombed by an F-16. Their area has been occupied by Israeli tanks and soldiers since the ground invasion began. Medical workers cannot reach the injured there, and those who have managed to escape testify to imprisonment in their houses, abuse, point-blank shooting (to death), and a number of dead not yet known. It's an area Israel views as strategic, lying just hundreds of meters from the eastern border to Israel, a key entry point for invading troops. Past invasions have meant entire families and neighbors being locked into a room of a house for a day or days. Supposition among journalists and those with two cents here is that Israel's intense bombardment of, and destruction of houses in, the area is to both decimate any resistance and to create an alternate "road" for tanks and troops to roll in on, meaning houses in their path are leveled to the ground.

That day, Abu Mahmoud Abed Rabu had related the events of his house demolition. "A person called me saying he was a spokesperson for the Israeli army and that we had seven minutes to leave the house before it was bombed. I begged for 10, told him seven wasn't enough to collect possessions and get our children out safely. He said seven," Abed Rabu explained. His family made it out in time, avoiding the death sentence that has been given so many here, without warning.

He said he'd just stood away from the house and watched as it was bombed, watched 20 years of his life be erased, with everything inside it. "I'm just a working man, not Fatah, not Hamas. Just a man. Why did they bomb my house?" he asked. "There were four families in here, at least 25 children," he added.

Cooking over burning wood.
We stepped over and around rubble and the bits of house interiors that get melded together in blasts like these, going across the street to a relative's who was then sheltering the family. An elderly woman sat by a wood fire, simmering something in a pot for their meal, no gas to cook over.

We'd continued visiting sites of missile strikes around the Ezbet Abed Rabu area. A yard with two massive craters in it, one from that morning and one from the night before. Looking from a room at the back of a two story house, I noticed the damage the F-16 bombs had done not only to the land but also to the houses around. Glass shattered, window frames blown in, safety to the wind ...

Bombing central Gaza

15 January 2009, 2:01pm

Now that people have streamed out of homes in all the perimeter regions of Gaza, they are streaming out of homes in central Gaza. I went briefly back to an apartment I'd been given by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), to collect some things ... and decided to collect anything I valued, infinitely luckier than the dead or those who are given but five minutes to run for their lives.

But people are running, and the small space that is the Gaza Strip has become a pinpoint, with people crammed into centers and still not feeling safe.

Leila in al-Quds hospital at 8:59 am: "So Al-Quds now has [Israeli] army outside. Snipers next door, 50 hits near us during night and four hits to us. Fire in apartments behind, wounded kids near who we can't collect ..."

Update:

The al-Quds hospital continues to be surrounded by invading Israeli troops, with snipers positioned in the high buildings around the hospital neighborhood. Doctors and those inside report being unable to leave the hospital.

The headquarters of the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) was hit three times by tank shelling, injuring three UN workers. Around 700 Palestinians were seeking shelter in the compound, which is clearly marked as a UN compound.

Israeli forces targeted one of the media buildings housing numerous different stations. At least two journalists were injured in the tank shelling on the building.

And aside from reports on the targeting of key infrastructure here, let me just repeat, people are panicking, given that Gaza City is a central place, the hub of Gaza and where those already having fled Israeli army attacks from eastern and northern regions had hoped for safety. As we've said from the first day of Israel's phenomenally brutal attacks on civilians, there's still is not anywhere anyone can feel safe.

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian human rights advocate and freelancer who spent eight months in 2007 living in West Bank communities and four months in Cairo and at the Rafah crossing. She is currently based in the Gaza Strip after having arrived with the third Free Gaza Movement boat in November. She has been working with the International Solidarity Movement in Gaza, accompanying ambulances while witnessing and documenting the ongoing Israeli air strikes and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip.

Socialist Party of Michigan Statement on the U.S. Automotive Industry Bailout

Adopted Unanimously at the SPMI State Membership Meeting on January 10th 2009 in Detroit

The tenuously averted collapse of the U.S. automotive industry directly follows the arrant exposure of sheer parasitism and insolvency that now characterizes the hegemonic financial sector of advanced capitalism. While coinciding with news of Toyota’s 1.7 billion dollar financial setback and first operating loss in seventy years, the American automotive industry’s looming threat of extinction is no mere consequence of the reverberating effects of the financial crisis, but every bit as much a contributing cause.

Despite compounding efforts, in recent years, to uproot its organized workforce’s most hard-won historic gains, today’s highly mechanized; overproductive, internationally developed automotive industry can no longer encapsulate the same labor value within each individual vehicle it markets, as once was the case. Such endemic losses in the real economy of good and service production present a catalyst not only to the vast financialization of advanced capitalism, but also the increasing detachment and predation of its commanding speculators...

Such realities are no less evident in the markedly divergent responses the owners of the U.S. automotive and banking industries received from U.S. federal government to their requests for bailouts of fourteen and seven-hundred billion taxpayer dollars, respectively. While ultimately the financial sector directly received virtually the whole looting it demanded with approval from both corporate parties in Congress, as well as massive added bonuses from the Fed, the comparative clout of the leading U.S. auto executives was sufficient for access to the federal purse only upon a protracted allocation by the White House following the Senate’s purportedly rejecting deference.

No such political figures, however, were any more inclined to examine the automotive industry through class-neutral lenses. Instead, both opponents and reluctant supporters of the auto bailout in the Senate, many of whom had been most vehement about passing the preceding financial bailout as a “clean bill” free of any executive pay caps, feigned the most fervent of moral indignation against UAW workers’ audacity in their decades of struggle to ultimately retain just under 1/4th of the value that their labor alone contributes to automobile production revenues.

Although, in contrast to the financial sector, the political reach of the automotive industry is not far enough to constitute a compelling force in each such, disproportionately southern, Senator’s state, all such Senators were keenly aware of their own states’ corporate linchpins’ commonly held interest in vanquishing the model gains automotive workers have collectively achieved and sustained, and casting them into forgotten history. In the objective of such Senators, a bailout of such a, now informidable, manufacturing industry could only be tolerated if accompanied by a sweeping assault in the class struggle.

Reflecting the consensus on such a sentiment, among all interested parties, in so far as it pertains to automotive workers alone, the Bush regime, with full support from Obama, attached the auto bailout agreement to the appointment of a “Car Czar” whose function is to dictatorially impose the forms of “restructuring” necessary to ensure the solvency of the industry in accordance with the White House’s established “guidelines.” In addition to massive operations cuts, estimated to result in the rapidly forthcoming elimination of tens of thousands of more Michigan jobs, both inside and outside the automotive industry, the guidelines established for the Car Czar’s implementation and enforcement include further drastic cuts to automotive workers’ wages and supplemental unemployment benefits, the ability of GM to pay half of its already reduced “VEBA” health care obligations in company stock rather than currency, and the declaration that UAW compensation arrangements must be made competitive with non-union ‘transplants’ of Asian and European auto manufactures operating in the United States. Moreover, the Car Czar has final say on any renegotiated labor agreements, holds the power to nullify new and existing contracts by sentencing the companies into bankruptcy, while the UAW, by the same threat under the agreement, is prohibited from going on strike!

The provisions to the automotive bailout and despotic powers granted to the wholly unaccountable “Car Czar” are an unprecedented assault on the most fundamental labor protections and civil liberties of all workers in every industry. Not even did the 1947 Taft Hartley Act present such a danger to the right of working people to organize and struggle collectively at the point of production as this agreement, to which the most numerous and affected grouping involved had no say in its ratification. While the former allows for the President to temporarily order striking workers back to work, this agreement establishes an arrangement and future precedent in which the U.S. President, in collusion with union workers’ corporate bosses, can indefinitely eliminate workers’ right to strike, collectively bargain, or maintain the benefits they had long before already successfully achieved.

The Socialist Party of Michigan calls upon all Big Three automotive workers to militantly organize against this agreement and to strike, occupy plants, and take whatever other action may be necessary to resist any such attack by corporate capitalists or the capitalist state on the most irrevocable rights of every person who works for a living. We further call upon all working people outside of the auto industry to walk off the job at any point automotive workers at any of the Big Three find the need to do the same in defiance of the same capitalist state that asserts its rule over all of us – officially throughout the U.S. and in practice throughout the planet.

As with the entire financial sector, the Socialist Party of Michigan further calls for the immediate socialization of the automotive industry under public ownership, democratically determined macro-economic planning, and workers self-management at the point of production. Such a socialization project should not be limited to automobiles themselves, but should be incorporated into a massive nationally coordinated and community-based transportation utilities program. Such a program would maintain and re-hire the entirety of the existing and laid-off automotive plant and engineering workforce for ecologically attentive projects ranging from the development of electric and renewable-fueled automobiles, major improvements to the efficiency, range, and sustainability of existing public transportation systems, the widespread development of foot and bicycle paths, and the development of nationwide high-speed railway systems ultimately connecting all major cities throughout the United States.

By Mike Ferner, After Downing Street
Printed on January 17, 2009
Alternet

A steady stream of reporters from corporate news media outlets warmed things up at a frigid Camp Hope in Chicago last week, when CNN and the local affiliates of ABC, NBC, FOX, and CBS all called at Drexel Park on day two of the 18-day vigil urging President-elect Obama to make good on his campaign pledges.

Universal, publicly funded health care was the theme, highlighted by a presentation from one of the nation’s top authorities on the subject, Dr. Quentin Young, MD.
For decades, Dr. Young has promoted the benefits of a Canadian-type, “single-payer” system like most of the world’s industrialized nations. Young’s office is in Hyde Park, the same venerable neighborhood where Camp Hope is pitched, a few short blocks from Barack Obama’s home. His partner in the practice has been Barack Obama’s personal physician since the Senator moved into the historic district a few years ago.

Young related that in Obama’s early years in politics, he used to say he was all for single-payer. Then in 2006, the Senator started to say he was still for it, but that it would never happen without a solid Democrat majority in Congress. Then during the presidential campaign, he said that because of America’s rich experience with employment-based insurance that option would be included in the mix of plans he supported.

The white-haired physician paused for a moment and added, “Well I can tell you as someone who has practiced medicine for decades, Americans may have experience with employment-related health benefits but it’s been far from a happy experience.”
Even though health insurance costs in the U.S. add $1200 or more to the price of a car produced here Young said, big employers like General Motors Corp., along with the Chambers of Commerce are opposed to single-payer insurance because “they’re trapped in ideological blinders and unable to see the issues clearly.” However, in Canada, he said, the Big Three automakers and the Canadian Auto Workers Union both say they like the system they have, even admitting when pressed that it gives Canadian industry an advantage.

“The power of corporations is incredibly strong. Take a look at the number of registered lobbyists Big Pharma (the pharmaceutical industry) employs to sell its message to the U.S. House of Representatives: it has 675 registered lobbyists, plus staff, and there are 435 members of the House. ‘Hope and change.’ I like it,” Dr. Young said, “but I’d rather hear us talking about solidarity.”

Discussing some of the health care proposals under discussion, Dr. Young offered, “The ‘incremental’ plans put forth by some activists are idiotic. Every year companies try to off-load more of the cost of health benefits onto workers. I just hope that when Obama gets into office he quickly says ‘The situation is much worse than I thought. We need single-payer insurance now.’ What’s more likely, though,” Dr. Young observed, “is we will start hearing some baloney like, ‘Don’t worry, the public plan is so much better that it will eventually win out over the private one.’”
Referring to past proposals that maintained the central role of insurance companies, Dr. Young pointed to Hillary Clinton’s plan early in her husband’s first term and charged, “The only thing worse than the crushing defeat it got would have been if it was enacted.”

“You know, we hear so much about the wonders of the free market -- that invisible hand with the extended finger…” Young mused, and then took the next question.
Health care costs a total of $2.5 trillion dollars in the U.S., or 1/6 of the country’s entire Gross Domestic Product, Dr. Young said. He briefly described two of the reasons for the high cost: overspecialization and high administrative overhead.
Regarding the rate of doctors going into specialty practices, Dr. Young said the ratio of primary care doctors to specialists is recommended to be about 70-30. “That might be considered just a little high by some, but it should be at least 60-40. In the U.S. right now it’s 50-50 and the percentage of general practitioners is still dropping.”

He used his own Hyde Park office as a good example of high administrative costs, which nationally account for nearly a third of all health care outlays. “We have five doctors and the equivalent of 14 full time employees. Five of those employees do nothing but shuffle paper,” he added ruefully.

Nick Skala, a law school student and intern with Healthcare Illinois who accompanied Dr. Young to the presentation told the 50 attendees that, “People sometimes ask me ‘Can’t we have serious health care reform without taking on the private insurance companies? Obama says his plan will compete with private insurers.’ The thing is, it’s not just insurance companies that people will be competing with, but drug companies, right-wing think tanks, and a massive, ongoing public relations campaign.”
One way to judge the level of dissatisfaction with the current private, for profit system, Skala said, is that 12 to 14 states now have proposed either legislation or citizen initiatives to get a single payer program. “The California legislature twice voted in favor of a single payer plan, only to have it vetoed both times by Governor Schwarzenegger.”

Asked about Obama’s cabinet nominees, Dr. Young said, “One or two of them have souls, but most of them don’t.” He added that one of his partners recently told him what one of his patients said about the President-elect, “So far all he’s given us is hope.”

Camp Hope continues in Drexel Park until January 18.

by Jeff Conant
for Upside Down World

Set in a landscape of dry brown hills and arroyos flooded with dust, Cochabamba, Bolivia's third-largest city, is not rich in water. Seen from the air in early September, at the tail end of the southern winter, the land is brown and barren from the ridgetops to the river valleys. A warm wind blows dust in billowing clouds. Thousands of feet below the soaring, icy peaks of the altiplano to the west, and thousands of feet above the lush coca fields of the Chapare to the east and the Amazon to the north, Cochabamba enjoys the mildest climate in the country, but suffers from what geographers call "water stress," compounded here, as everywhere, by climate change.

Five years ago, Mount Tunari, the wind-sculpted escarpment that reaches to 14,000 feet above Cochabamba's streets, was capped in snow year-round. Today, the mountain -- an important source of water for local agriculture and groundwater recharge -- has snow only three months of the year.

Cochabamba's water struggles were catapulted into international awareness in 2000, when the city's residents, along with their rural and peri-urban neighbors, organized to oust the multinational giant Bechtel, which had privatized the city's water and hiked tariffs far beyond most people's means.

The fight has been recognized as one of the moments that ignited the grassroots water-justice movement that spread throughout the world. Since Cochabamba's water war, the issue has gained attention everywhere, from the halls of the United Nations, where 2005-2015 has been declared the International Decade of Action: Water for Life, to the pages of Fortune magazine, where corporate CEOs tell us that water is "the oil of the 21st century." Is water a human right to be provided by governments through public management, or is it a commodity to be protected by the free market and measured and metered by private business?

As ground zero of the water war, how the issue plays out in post-Bechtel Cochabamba is a barometer of how it may play out elsewhere. In the years since Bechtel left, the gains of the water war have been difficult to consolidate, and Cochabamba has become a shining example of the massive challenges for a dry municipality in a deeply impoverished country to manage its water in a way that is both equitable and efficient. The water-justice movement is clamoring for public control of water, but as Cochabamba is showing, in an era dominated by corporate control and private capital, this is no easy feat.

How the Problems Began
Cochabamba's privatization struggle started in 1996, when the mayor announced that the World Bank would relieve the city's water stress with a $14 million loan. The next year, World Bank offered $600 million in foreign debt relief. But both packages came with the condition that Cochabamba's water utility, widely reputed for corruption and inefficiency, be taken over by a private company. In 1999, the company, SEMAPA (Servicio Municipal de Agua Potable y Alcantarillado), was bought out in a private bid, by Aguas de Tunari, majority controlled by San Francisco-based Bechtel.

Not long after, union leaders, environmental activists and rural-water stewards came together to form a coalition they called La Coordinadora Por la Defensa del Agua y la Vida, or simply La Coordinadora, to wrest back control of the water utility. What ensued -- street riots, hunger strikes, the occupation of the Central Plaza, the government's declaration of a state of siege, many wounded and one youth killed, and the eventual, ecstatic, ejection of Bechtel -- quickly passed into legend. Occurring only months after the Battle of Seattle, Cochabamba's water war became one of the most widely publicized stories of the anti-globalization movement -- a major triumph for the People, United.

When Bechtel was given the boot, SEMAPA passed into public hands, and it's reform became, for a time, a cause célèbre, and an attempt to put direct democracy into practice. Jim Shultz, the lanky, amiable North American director of the Democracy Center, a small nonprofit that supports Bolivia's popular movements, says: "In its first few months, SEMAPA enjoyed a wave of public goodwill. It rolled back rates to their pre-Bechtel levels, and water customers quickly began paying their overdue water bills. Everyone wanted Cochabamba's public company to succeed."

In an effort to develop "social control" in SEMAPA, a team of citizen directors was established, made up of a representative of Bolivia's new Ministry of Water, a representative of the provincial governor's office, the mayor of Cochabamba and four ordinary citizens representing the four major zones of the city, charged with overseeing the budget, ensuring transparency and watching over the company's director.

But, when it came time for the people of Cochabamba to elect SEMAPA's citizen directors, scarcely 4 percent of eligible voters turned out, and nobody seemed to know why. In a move typical of countries where corruption historically filters through all levels of society, the first elected director filled the company with friends and family and was removed from office by popular fiat in 2005. The second director did much the same and was removed two years later. When I asked one SEMAPA worker who had been active in the water war and remains active in the water workers' union what could be done to root out corruption, he said, "We threw out two directors already. If the next director is corrupt, we'll throw him out, too."
SEMAPA continues to suffer from all of the problems that plague public utilities throughout the developing world: unmanageable debt, leakage and infamously poor service. Local researchers now say that, if SEMAPA serves as a model for anything, it's a model of what can go wrong in public water management.

Making Progress
As a spokesman for the forces that ousted Bechtel in 2000, Oscar Olivera has a profound stake in the future of water management in Cochabamba. When I spoke with him in his office at a corner of the Cochabamba's central plaza, he was disarmingly honest.

"The truth is," he said, "I feel a mix of anguish and sorrow at the state of our movement. There's a sense of impotence, that what we've done isn't enough. There are a lot of questions about where to go. Because, essentially there have been two movements. One is a movement to expel the transnationals, a movement that managed to break free of the economic model that wants to privatize everything. The second is a movement to construct a new kind of social action, a new concept of development, a new way to measure well-being. It's a movement to establish a new society, one in balance with nature. I always like to point out that, behind the fight for water lies the struggle for democracy.

"We're in the midst of a struggle to preserve life itself. The problem is, we know how to resist. But we are only now learning how to construct something new."
Waxing hopeful, Olivera spoke of the water committees that had developed spontaneously in the Zona Sur, a sprawling neighborhood at Cochabamba's southern flank.

"The water committees have begun establishing a new kind of social organization, a new kind of conviviality, that, while it's not always optimal in terms of efficiency -- largely because of a lack of financing -- it has a tremendous component of solidarity, of transparency; the participation of these committees opens spaces that are very political, very combative and very clear in their defense of the common good."

That's what led me to visit Angel Hurtado, Education Director for ASICA Sur.
Hurtado met me outside his office, auspiciously located above a Cuban medical clinic in a neighborhood called Primero de Mayo. In a neat button-down shirt, gray wool vest, pleated trousers and gold-rimmed glasses and with his cell phone at his belt, Hurtado looked the part of a midlevel water utility manager. But he proved to be much more than just that.

"When I arrived here, in the '80s," Hurtado told me, "there was no water, no clinics, no schools. We had a spring, up the hill, and two natural wells, and the whole neighborhood drank from these sources. So we began building tanks and taps. From this effort was born, over time, the Association of Community Water Systems of the Southern Zone -- ASICA Sur. There was no one to help us. We had to do everything ourselves." Down the hill a group of men operated a large drill spitting up mud and soil, perforating a new well. "This project, it's taken months to get it going," Hurtado hollered over the shrieking of the drill. "We have our problems. But it's going."

Residents of Primero de Mayo, a sprawl of hilter-kilter concrete houses tumbling down the eroded slopes of the Cochabamba Valley, played a key role in the water war, and Hurtado's voice registered a quiet pride as he shared the story.

"We were militant," he said, "and very unified. We held a general assembly, and three of us were chosen to lead the mobilizations. I was in charge of security and making sure everybody had food and medicine. We marched every day, 14 kilometers into Cochabamba to fight in the streets, and 14 kilometers home at night. We had to fight every day, because the goal of the authorities was to destroy our leadership. But it didn't go so well for them. After months of fighting, we finally won."
Before coming to the Cochabamba Valley, Hurtado was a miner in Oruro, a high, barren province bereft of agriculture but rich in silver, copper, tin and tungsten. Like many others I would talk to over the course of two weeks in Cochabamba, Hurtado traces his history to a turning point in 1985. It was then that the country's New Economic Policy deregulated the mining industry, just as tin prices collapsed on the world market, throwing hundreds of thousands of Bolivian miners out of work. The mass migration that followed, known as the relocalization, produced the sprawling, informal growth that has become Cochabamba's Zona Sur. It also produced a revolutionary underclass that forms the backbone of Bolivia's fierce social movements.

"As miners, we came to Primero de Mayo from different parts of the country. This neighborhood, in my vision, it's a revolutionary neighborhood, a revolutionary army. Whenever there's a social struggle, there we are. But we don't struggle por loco. We struggle because we need to change the political system, the economic system. Ever since the relocalization, this is our function -- to bring about structural change."
Elsewhere in the Zona Sur, Fabian Condori, a weathered Aymara, directs the Asociacion de Produccion y Administracion de Agua y Saneamiento de Sebastian Pagador, or APAAS, the first water committee in the Zona Sur. Like Primero de Mayo, San Sebastian Pagador is a neighborhood made up of relocalized miners and displaced peasant farmers.

"The goal of the water war," Condori told me, "was to retake SEMAPA for the people. And I believe that SEMAPA should serve the people -- all of us. I don't believe we should need small community water services. But SEMAPA isn't doing its job, so we have to do it. We come from the neighborhood, we're self-sufficient, self-managed and autonomous. The cooperatives didn't emerge from an ideological vision, but from a common need."

In his office, Condori showed me a crumbling Styrofoam maquette of the water system he administered: from a deep well, drilled a quarter-century ago in Cochabamba's floodplain, water is pumped to the foothills some miles away. From there, a second pump, powered by a V8 engine still attached to the chassis of the automobile it had once served, lifts the water 200 meters over a mountain pass to a large tank perched atop a ridge. From there, the maquette showed a thin wire, representing the main pipe, running along the ridge to another set of tanks, from where it descends into the neighborhood for domestic use.

"Every Friday," Condori said, "our workers walk the entire line checking for leaks and clandestine connections. Just two workers check the whole line, every week. We have a 6 percent water loss from leaks. Compare that to SEMAPA's 54 percent. Not bad."

APPAS is an autonomous association, like a cooperative, managed by Condori but governed by the neighborhood itself. "We decide everything by assembly," Condori told me. "When there are enough complaints, we organize special assemblies. When 51 percent of the people vote for something, it becomes law. I don't decide for the people. They decide for themselves."

"What if someone can't pay?" I asked.

"If someone can't pay, we don't shut off the water. Not right away. We encourage neighbors to help out, or we allow them time to get the money together. If time passes, and they still don't pay, eventually we have to cut off the service. But we try to make it easy for everyone.

"In our neighborhood, we have 6,000 water users. When we hold an Assembly, 95 percent of them show up. If someone isn't happy with their service, they speak up."

Progress Spreads
Curious to learn more about the cooperatives, I traveled to the city of Santa Cruz, 150 miles and a world away from Cochabamba, to meet with Gregorio Jaldin, director of the Federacion Departamental de Cooperativas de Agua de Santa Cruz, a union of water cooperatives.

"There are cooperatives in Cochabamba, in La Paz, in Tarija, in Santa Cruz, and we're at the beginning of developing a National Federation of Cooperatives," he told me. "Why? Because we've seen that strengthening community water systems is the only way to build unity among the communities. In the area of health, for example, we've created a clinic to provide health services for free, just with the money that comes from water service. There's a solidarity fund to pay for funerals; if someone dies, the cooperative pays for their funeral. It's like a system of social security, but rather than being administered by the state, everything is run by popular assembly.
"I'll give you an example: Many cooperatives, with the few resources they have, can't buy a pump. But the larger cooperatives can lend them the money until they're able to pay back the loan. If they need pipes or tools, they can borrow them. If they need help digging trenches or expanding their water system, the other cooperatives come out to help.

"The cooperative system is so beautiful, because it's a system of mutual aid, always seeking equality among everyone; it's not about profit or personal gain. In my opinion, a National Federation of Cooperatives is really the answer to Bolivia's water problems."

"Does Evo support the cooperatives?" I asked him.

The question brought a smile, brightened yet more by Jaldin's prominent silver tooth. "People think Evo brought about all the changes in our country," he said. "The truth is, Evo is a product of the social movements."

The same was true, he told me, of the Water Ministry itself.

"Before Evo Morales was president, because of the sacrifices of the social movements and La Coordinadora, we got this ministry. It grew out of our demand that the government take our needs seriously."

Bolivia is the first country in the hemisphere to have a Cabinet-level position dedicated to water governance. According to Jaldin, this is one of the most important developments in his country in recent years.

"It sends a message that our little organizations can have a big impact. Now the human right to water is on everybody's mind, throughout Latin America and the world."
Like countries throughout Latin America, Bolivia is undergoing a process of constitutional reform, largely driven by the question of the right to water. In 2004, Uruguay enshrined the right to water in its constitution. In 2008, Ecuador ratified the world's first constitution that recognizes that nature itself has fundamental rights, on which human rights depend, including the right to water. Colombia and El Salvador have strong movements to include the right to water in their constitutions. And Bolivia's new constitution, drafted but not yet approved, declares water to be a right that is fundamentalisimo -- profoundly fundamental. If one wants a testament that water and democracy are linked, as Oscar Oliveria insists, this wave of constitutional reform certainly offers it.

Today's Struggle
During the last week of August 2008, a seminar took place in Cochabamba organized by a coalition of Latin American water rights groups called the Red Vida (whose acronym in Spanish means the Interamerican Network for the Vigilance of Water Rights). The title and theme of the event was, "The Public Management of a Common Good," and people involved in all aspects of water management had come from virtually every country in the Americas to share their experiences.

At long, open meeting sessions the national water workers union of Uruguay told of its solidarity with the deeply impoverished city of Potosi, where they were installing a new water system; a state bureaucrat from Venezuela argued forcefully and in a flurry of rhetoric that the state can meet the needs of the people only after the people take back the state from the oligarchs; a young activist from Ecuador shared tales of water-delivery systems run by rural communities on microcredit; a group of Colombians told how they had recently navigated several of that country's great rivers in their quest to collect a million-and-a-half signatures to reform their constitution; an Italian solidarity group announced a project for an Andean water school to be partially funded by the city of Venice. In short, the Cochabamba meeting was a platform for a tremendous diversity of popular organizations to share the lessons they were learning in forging what many participants referred to as "a new culture of water."

The Red Vida seminar was presided over by the directors of several local water committees -- ad-hoc groups responsible for supplying drinking water and sanitation services in marginal areas where Cochabamba' notoriously inefficient public utility fails to provide. Bolivia's Minister of Water Renee Orellana was present, as was Olivera.

The event opened with words by Eduardo Yssa, the Aymara director of ASICA Sur. With piercing eyes and wearing the traditional bowl-cut of the Aymara, Yssa, who had recently been in a near-fatal auto accident, put aside his crutches, thanked everyone for being present and got straight to the point.

"Compañeros," he said, "if we go much longer failing to recognize that water is life, we will have no life left."

Before a roomful of water managers from up and down the spine of the Americas, all struggling to construct a new politics of water, Yssa invoked his ancestors.
"Before," he said, "when there was no rain in the altiplano, the authorities were obliged to walk up to the springs, up in the mountains, on foot, and to carry a bottle of water back to the altiplano. There they would meet with another authority, who would bring music, autochthonous music. Then, in a special ritual, with the sacrifice of a goat or a llama, they would toss the water to the four winds, the four cardinal points, and they would pray, and then it would rain. They got results. Today, we come to the city like children, and we fail to practice these things. We fail to respect the water."

"Compañeros," he repeated in halting Spanish, "as long as we fail to recognize that water is life, because though you might have money, or gold, or silver, though you might have entire gold mines, you won't have life, until we respect the water, all of life is in danger."

Of course Yssa was right, but what does it mean to respect the water after centuries of plunder have left countries like Bolivia bereft of even the most basic resources, and after decades of dictatorship and crony capitalism have eroded the social fabric to the point where many people must choose between corruption and hunger? How we view the corruption and apparent failure of SEMAPA depends on how we understand the economics of scarcity that came before, and the problem of debt that wracks the country, and the depth of poverty that forces Bolivians, from the rank and file to the halls of government, to make incredibly difficult choices; how we judge the faltering democratic institutions in Bolivia depends on how we view the history of dictatorship, oligarchy and colonization from which these institutions emerge.

What the water war won, after all, is the political space to discuss and develop
real alternatives -- something that hasn't been seen in Bolivia for somewhere in the vicinity of 500 years. Of course, water is always local, and this political space -- let's call it water democracy -- demands diverse means to thrive. One of the problems with water privatization is that it imposes a static, singular economic imperative on a subject that is, by its nature, fluid. The many struggles for water across the Americas reveal that building water democracy means encouraging new models to emerge.

As Olivera told me so eloquently after admitting to the difficulty of constructing something new, "The water war showed us that it's possible to change our lives, collectively; that even if our enemy is very powerful, he's not invincible. We learned that, maybe capitalism can privatize everything, but what it can never privatize is our capacity to dream. And as long as we have the capacity to dream, we have the obligation to keep struggling for a better world."

The Red Vida and other regional water networks are struggling to define what public management and community control of water might look like in the next century; what they are finding is that a diversity of models are needed to respond to a diversity of crises and conditions. At the Cochabamba seminar, this notion was perhaps best summed up by Adriana Marquisio of Uruguay's Comision Nacional en la Defensa del Agua y de la Vida when she said, "Popular control of water is a dream that does not belong solely to technicians and academics, but that is constructed from the accumulated wisdom and experience of all of our communities. To bring about true public management of water, we must get beyond the logic of politics -- fear of acting outside the electoral sphere; we must get beyond the logic of nationalism -- fear of acting beyond the borders of our own countries; and we must get beyond the logic of miracles -- recognizing that things won't change overnight, but at the same time allowing ourselves to imagine a profound and complete change."

As far as the means of the water struggle go, this may have been best captured by Anna Ella Gomez, a Red Vida member from El Salvador: "The water movement must be like water: transparent and always in motion."

Jeff Conant is the International Research and Communications Coordinator for Food and Water Watch.

José Guadalupe Posada (2 February 1852 – 20 January 1913) was a Mexican engraver and illustrator. Largely forgotten by the end of his life, Posada's engravings were brought to a wider audience in the 1920s by the French artist Jean Charlot, who encountered them while visiting Diego Rivera. While Posada died in poverty, his images are well known today as examples of folk art. The muralist José Clemente Orozco knew Posada when he was young, and credited Posada's work as an influence on his own.

From Links - The Journal of Socialist Renewal

January 4, 2009 -- A message from the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions


Sisters and brothers:

The PGFTU has been working at all levels in Palestine and in its international relations to mobilise international support for peace in the region. This is the ultimate goal for our working families in Palestine, who laboured in every way possible to bring about an end to the Israeli occupation of all Palestinian territories. This occupation is the longest and worst in the modern history.

Over the years and even at this moment, these efforts have been met only with terrorism against our people by the Israeli army of occupation, which has indiscriminately destroyed homes and worksites, slaughtered our people, confiscated our land, established and expanded illegal settlements, and limited the movement of workers who are only trying to feed their families. These measures have affected every member of the Palestinian society.

The recent construction of the Apartheid Wall stands as a symbol of the extent of Israel’s brutal aggression against the Palestinian people and denial of their legitimate rights, dignity and human needs.

We call upon all peace-loving people in the world:

You are now witness to the criminal aggression by the Israeli army in its offensive in the Gaza Strip, bringing a new wave of killings and massacres against the Palestinian people by Israel as the occupying state. These are war crimes according to international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions.

As our families in Gaza (the poorest in the Middle East) are being slaughtered nonstop for a week now, many of us are reliving what occurred in the summer of 2006 during the Israeli aggression against the people of Lebanon.

We witnessed then as we experience now waves of support and solidarity and similar anger and energy against this brutal injustice. We cannot afford to let this surge of support pass us by without utilising the moment to build our movement to face future challenges. The most important thing is to be aware and equipped.

We urgently ask you and your sister labour organisations to help us spread the message that “WE ARE ALL GAZA” – that this war is against all poor workers and families of the world. These are not just crimes against the people of Palestine. They are crimes against humanity.

Help us create a strong voice for the working families of Gaza by building coalitions with unions, faith groups, anti-war movements and all social justice organisations.

We join you in the hope that in the election of Barack Obama, he will fulfill his reputation as a pro-union anti-war candidate, and that he understands that the CHANGE he spoke about during the campaign must include a fundamental change in US foreign policy so that “FREE GAZA. …FREE PALESTINE” becomes more than just a slogan.

We support and encourage your Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) efforts against Israel around the world, but especially in Europe and most particularly in the United States as a response to the harsh economic conditions, violations of labour and human rights, and other forms of oppression imposed by the illegal and immoral Israeli Apartheid occupation.

We ask you to stop US aid to Israel. This becomes not only necessary but also a duty of international solidarity among labour unions around the world. It is US government aid that provides Israel with the weapons of oppression and U.S. government support that enables them to use those weapons against our people.

We ask you to be an active player in raising funds to meet the bare necessities of food, medicine and medical supplies for the people of Gaza.

With your solidarity with our struggle for human rights and justice, we can transform this moment of crisis into a turning point for an end to the brutal occupation and a step toward the liberation of the people of Palestine.

With the will and determination of all the people, we can say “FREE PALESTINE … YES WE CAN.

[The Palestine General Federation of Trade Union is an independent democratic trade union federation. It enjoys the full rights according to the valid national legislation. It has been established in 1965 as an extension to the Palestinian labour movement struggle that started in 1921 in “Haifa”, it was known as the Arab Labourers’ Society during the British mandate in Palestine.]

Association of University Teachers in Gaza calls for help

January 4, 2009 -- Bethlehem -- Ma an -- The Palestinian Association of University Teachers in Gaza calls upon all peace-loving, freedom-loving nations, NGOs, universities, intellectuals, cultural and academic institutions, trade unions and syndicates, as well as human rights organisations all over the world to:

1. Immediately impose boycotts, sanctions and divestments on the Apartheid Israeli state.

2. Try the Israeli generals for their ongoing crimes against the Palestinian people.

3. Demand a halt to Israel's savage aggression, end its brutal occupation and lift its suffocating and lethal siege on the Gaza Strip.

4. Implement all UN resolutions related to the inalienable national rights, particularly UN resolution 194 calling for the right of return for the Palestinian refugees to their homes and their property from which they were uprooted by the terrorist Zionist gangs in 1948.

5. Comply with 4th article of the Geneva Convention, the international human rights law, the international humanitarian law, and the universal declaration of human rights as well as all other related agreements.

6. Lift the draconian blockade against Gaza as stipulated by the 1948 Convention on Genocide, and consider anyone participating as a war criminal who must be tried for crimes against humanity.

Israel is a rogue state that is a threat and danger to world peace and security; therefore she must be banished and punished by the international community, before it is too late for the people of Palestine, the people of Israel and the people in the surrounding countries.

UNRWA
by Najwa Sheikh
Letter from Gaza
The sky is still blue as I remember. I haven’t seen it since three days. I almost forgot how beautiful it looks on a sunny day in winter. I wish I could walk on the beach and enjoy some peace.

Three days ago, I moved to the house of my husband's family with him and our children. We left our beach apartment with the wonderful view in order to find a more secure place where the kids cannot hear the loud sounds of explosions and wake up frightened and crying. I cannot give them any assurances that tomorrow will be better for them and that they will be save. They stopped asking us when this going to end and when they can get back to living their normal lives as children.

The images are always the same, except that this time they are more violent and evil. We stopped enjoying anything after the Israeli war against the civilians in Gaza. Neither me nor my children can stand the sound of the continuous bombing of the Israeli war machines. It is worse during the night. The children started to go to bed very early to avoid hearing the sounds of F-16s dropping bombs. You cannot imagine how scary it is to hear the whistling of the missiles before they hit. With every hit you feel that this time you are that targe and you count the seconds before they hit. All what we can do is to thank Allah when we all wake up safe the next morning. We will live another day !

I used to listen to how people talk about hating wars, about all the pain it leaves in their hearts and souls. War is very cruel and we. the Palestinian refugees, have witnessed the cruelty of war more than once. This time, it is the cruelest of all. There is no mercy, no difference between a child, an old man or even an innocent, unborn fetus. All are criminals and deserve to die according to Israel.

I stopped hoping for an end,. My children have stopped feeling after seeing the photos broadcasted on the news. Children, families - are all the victims of the Israeli hate and inhumanity. Life became meaningless not only for us but also for our children. We, therefore, only wait our turn to join the list, as an additional number, nothing more, but just a number.

Our only wish is to die together as one family so no one of us has to live through the bitterness of losing the other.


6/1/2009
Nusierat Camp, Gaza Strip

by Eva Bartlett
writing from the occupied Gaza Strip,
Live from Palestine, 10 January 2009

Electronic Intifada

It's 2:50am and I can't sleep.

Some mornings I wake up from a new explosion and realize I've somehow managed to fall into a sleep despite the blasts. Other mornings, I wake up disoriented, first wondering where I am, as I'm sleeping in some hospital waiting room or ambulance office, or the house of a driver since the Red Crescent office in eastern Jabaliya was first shelled and then made off-limits by the invading Israeli forces in the eastern Jabaliya region... and then in the north, the northwest, the east, the south ...

Yesterday morning I awoke to an eerie near-quiet: for the time there were no bomb blasts, just the Israeli drones continuing to lord over the sky. Then the blasts came. At 8:38am I noted "resumption of loud, reverberating explosions. In the Saraya area again (the former British prison has been hit a number of times already)? 8:59 am: four very loud explosions with deep reverberations."

At 12:15pm I'd noted and photographed the white stream of chemical clouds billowing over large expanses of eastern Gaza. At 1:05 pm: "Since last night until now, 23 persons have been killed, all civilians," reporter Yousef al-Helo told me, adding, "This afternoon, two people -- including women and children -- were killed in a shelling on Beit Lahia."

Yousef read me Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's response to the United Nations Security Council call for an immediate ceasefire: "Israel has acted and will
continue to act according to its calculation in the interest of the security of its citizens and its right to self-defense."

Yousef and I had discussed the violations of Israel's unilaterally-imposed three-hour-ceasefire (which a Lebanese journalist summed up: "How would you like it if I was shooting at you and then told you I'd give you a minute to dance around before I kill you?").

John Ging, director of the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) in the Gaza Strip, sums it up more diplomatically: "For three hours, the people of Gaza
have some safety. That's all it is." During the first day of the supposed ceasefire between 1 and 4pm, Israeli forces killed three sisters (ages two, three and 10), one woman (31), two elderly men (60 and 87), and targeted paramedics, shooting one in the leg, as the explosions continued all over the Gaza Strip. At 6pm, two hours after the "ceasefire," the official killing did indeed continue: a family of five dead in northern Gaza, returning from the bread lines with a prize bag of bread, bombed in their car, including three children aged 10 to 15, a 20-year-old cousin and
45-year-old father. And later, after 9pm, another medic was shot in the leg while trying to perform his duties.

With the medics last night, we'd arrived at the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, to the smoking skeleton of a multi-story, multi-family house, evaporated. Fire trucks were there ahead of us, though we all collectively ran at one point, expecting the second strike that often follows the original destruction.

Later in the night, we kept passing the ruins of buildings bombed in the last days. I've lost track of what was bombed when. We come to a newly-bombed building, a newly-homeless family, the adjacent building facing a similar fate soon enough as it appears the structure has been so badly damaged it will eventually collapse.

3:20 am: I've left the bed and given up on feigning sleep. Am watching the darkness explode with the political hatred that not only kills but silences truth. Hatred in every blast pounding Gaza.

"They will not finish until the martyrs reach 1,000," the nurse predicts, taking a break on his night shift. "They want to make Gaza into Guantanamo," he goes on. "All of this will not break the Palestinian people."

In the hospital room where I tried to sleep between an ambulance shift and morning obligations, the tank shelling and firing is in the room, landing on my pillow.

It's the shells, which crack and blast. The staccato gunfire. The drones' whine, in menacing pitches. The fighter plane's sudden, thundering presence.

The drone ramps up the decibels, a train wreck of disharmony.

And the inevitable whoosh before the explosion, an F-16 launch which erupts a crater where someone's house, or a market, or a mosque once stood. The blast an hour ago was a market, another nurse tells me. "It was a beautiful market, sold everything, everything we need," she says.

Hours later, after the sun finally rises, women are walking onto the hospital premises, large towel-covered platters on their heads. A small electric stove is plugged in, and they take turns baking bread for their families: no gas, no electricity at home. They are lucky to have the flour to bake with, and I guess that a trickle of that little aid comes in has reached them. But it's never enough.

The shelling continuing, I get to see Osama, who I've not seen for weeks, although he lives near the hospital where I spend much time. His family, like most, have taken all the windows out of their house (those not already blown out), and the house is frigid with cold. We talk, ask the same questions that everyone is asking every day, about when it will end, why it must be so, what value a Palestinian life has...

A new series of explosions, we go out to see, the latest strike just a couple of streets away, but that's nothing. Osama's family live in front of a house slated for attack at any time. "What can we do?" they ask, everyone asks.

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian human rights advocate and freelancer who spent eight months in 2007 living in West Bank communities and four months in Cairo and at the Rafah crossing. She is currently based in the Gaza Strip after having arrived with the 3rd Free Gaza Movement boat in November. She has been working with the International Solidarity Movement in Gaza, accompanying ambulances while witnessing and documenting the ongoing Israeli air strikes and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip.