by Mitchel Cohen

Two decades ago, the garbage barge, the Khian Sea, with no place in the U.S. willing to accept its garbage, left the territorial waters of the United States and began circling the oceans in search of a country willing to accept its cargo: 14,000 tons of toxic incinerator ash. First it went to the Bahamas, then to the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Bermuda, Guinea Bissau and the Netherlands Antilles. Wherever it went, people gathered to protest its arrival. No one wanted the millions of pounds of Philadelphia municipal incinerator ash dumped in their country.

Desperate to unload, the ship's crew lied about their cargo, hoping to catch a government unawares. Sometimes they identified the ash as "construction material"; other times they said it was "road fill," and still others "muddy waste." But environmental experts were generally one step ahead in notifying the recipients; no one would take it. That is, until it got to Haiti. There, U.S.-backed dictator Baby Doc Duvalier issued a permit for the garbage, which was by now being called "fertilizer," and four thousand tons of the ash was dumped onto the beach in the town of Gonaives.

It didn't take long for public outcry to force Haiti's officials to suddenly "realize" they weren't getting fertilizer. They canceled the import permit and ordered the waste returned to the ship. But the Khian Sea slipped away in the night, leaving thousands of tons toxic ash on the beach.

For two years more the Khian Sea chugged from country to country trying to dispose of the remaining 10,000 tons of Philadelphia ash. The crew even painted over the barge's name -- not once, but twice. Still, no one was fooled into taking its toxic cargo. A crew member later testified that the waste was finally dumped into the Indian Ocean.

The activist environmental group, Greenpeace, pressured the U.S. government to test the "fertilizer." The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Greenpeace found it contained 1,800 pounds of arsenic, 4,300 pounds of cadmium, and 435,000 pounds of lead, dioxin and other toxins. But no one would clean it up.

The cost of the cleanup at Gonaives had been estimated to be around $300,000. Philadelphia's $130 million budget surplus would more than cover it, but Philadelphia lawyer Ed Rendell -- then mayor of that city and later Chairman of the Democratic National Committee -- refused to put up the funds. Joseph Paolino, whose company (Joseph Paolino and Sons) had contracted to transport the waste ash aboard the infamous Khian Sea garbage barge owned by Amalgamated Shipping, refused as well.

In July of 1992, the U.S. Justice Department -- under pressure from environmental groups throughout the world -- finally filed indictments against two waste traders who had shipped and dumped the 14,000 tons of Philadelphia incinerator ash. Similar indictments were brought against three individuals and four corporations who illegally exported 3,000 tons of hazardous waste to Bangladesh and Australia, also labeled as "fertilizer." But none of the waste traders were charged with dumping their toxic cargo at sea, nor even with falsely labeling it as fertilizer and abandoning it on the beaches of Haiti, Bangladesh, and Australia. They were charged only with lying to a grand jury. ("Indictments Announced in Philadelphia's Haiti Ash Scandal; Greenpeace Calls for Immediate Cleanup," Greenpeace News, July 14, 1992, and "Philadelphia and U.S. EPA Get Unexpected Ash Packets," Greenpeace Waste Trade Update, March 22, 1991.)

A month earlier, similar watered-down indictments were announced against three individuals and four corporations who illegally exported 3,000 tons of hazardous waste to Bangladesh and Australia, also labelled as "fertilizer." Meanwhile, the government stonewalled, for years; it took more than a decade for the U.S. government to clean up the waste.

U.S. law was interpreted to protect the dumpers, not the dumped on. Unwilling recipients of toxic wastes are offered no recourse. In recent years, much of the waste from industrialized countries is exported openly, under the name of "recycled material." These are touted as "fuel" for incinerators generating energy in poor countries. "Once a waste is designated as 'recyclable' it is exempt from U.S. toxic waste law and can be bought and sold as if it were ice cream. Slags, sludges, and even dusts captured on pollution control filters are being bagged up and shipped abroad," writes Peter Montague in Rachel's Weekly. "These wastes may contain significant quantities of valuable metals, such as zinc, but they also can and do contain significant quantities of toxic by-products such as cadmium, lead and dioxins. The 'recycling' loophole in U.S. toxic waste law is big enough to float a barge through, and many barges are floating through it uncounted."

Every year, thousands of tons of "recycled" waste from the U.S., deceptively labeled as "fertilizer," are plowed into farms, beaches and deserts in Bangladesh, Haiti, Somalia, Brazil and dozens of other countries. The Clinton administration followed former President George Bush's lead in allowing U.S. corporations to mix incinerator ash and other wastes containing high concentrations of lead, cadmium and mercury with agricultural chemicals and are sold to (or dumped in) unsuspecting or uncaring agencies and governments throughout the world. (Greenpeace Toxic Trade Campaign, "United States Blocks Efforts to Prohibit Global Waste Dumping by Industrial States," December 2, 1992.)

These dangerous chemicals are considered "inert," since they play no active role as "fertilizer" -- although they are very active in causing cancers and other diseases. Under U.S. law, ingredients designated as "inert" are not required to be labeled nor reported to the buyer.

President Clinton -- expanding the policies of his ignominious predecessors -- continued to obstruct the rest of the world from regulating the disastrous international trade in hazardous wastes. At a critical March 21-25 1994 international conference in Geneva, the United States stood with only a handful of waste-producing countries against the entire world in opposing a resolution banning the shipment of hazardous wastes to non-industrialized countries.

Shadowy covert operations figures spent the next two decades promoting schemes involving the shipment to Haiti of U.S. toxic wastes.

In November 1993, Time Magazine reported that a former U.S. government operative had detailed "an elaborate plan to tap U.S. aid funds for low-interest loans that would be used to transport New York City garbage to Haiti, where it would be processed into mulch to fertilize plants bioengineered to provide high-quality paper pulp. 'We could collect $38 a ton for the garbage,' claims [Henry] Womack ... who helped oversee construction of the base that the Reagan Administration-backed contras used to stage attacks against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua." Womack has similar dreams for Haiti: "We'd make a bundle, and the government could get enough to pay the whole army's salaries." (Jill Smolowe, "With Friends Like These: A Host of Shadowy Figures is Helping Haiti's Military Rulers Hatch a Plot to Sideline Aristide Permanently," Time Magazine, November 8, 1993.) Womack lived in a South Miami house with a couple: the sister of Michel François, who
headed the death squads in Haiti and served as chief of its national police, and her husband.

Although most agents are not usually as candid as Womack, such plans are common. In August 1991, for example, Almany Enterprises, a company also headquartered in Miami, proposed shipping 30 million tons of incinerator ash from various U.S. cities to Panama over the subsequent four years. Almany would pay the government only $6.50 per ton of toxic waste received in Panama. The ash is believed to be highly contaminated with cadmium, copper, lead and zinc. Almany proposed to landfill the ash in marshlands near the free zone of Colon. Dozens of similar schemes are rampant. Throughout the Caribbean and Central America the devastating health crisis is exacerbated -- if not directly caused -- by international capital's "recycling" of toxic wastes. (Indeed, Haitian women who have emigrated to the U.S. have been found to have double or triple the cervical cancer rates as women born in the U.S.)

Said Ehrl LaFontant of the Haiti Communications Project: "Instead of repatriating Haitian refugees to Haiti, the U.S. government should repatriate this toxic waste back to its own country."

Toxic waste dumping in Haiti was, after all, a lucrative source of income for the Duvalier dictatorship. Former Haitian despot Duvalier profited handsomely in his relationship with the U.S., to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. That relationship included allowing U.S. toxic fertilizer to be dumped in Haiti, at the expense of the Haitian people.

Duvalier's U.S.-based lawyer, Ron Brown, also did well, economically, by their relationship. In the early 1980s, Brown was a partner at the powerful Washington law firm of Patton, Boggs & Blow. Duvalier secured his services by paying him $150,000 as a retainer, and Brown went to work for the brutal dictator on Capitol Hill. Before his death while flying over Yugoslavia and scouting U.S. investment opportunities, Brown had been personally linked to Lillian Madsen, who had married into an extremely wealthy Haitian family with vast holdings in coffee and beer. (She later divorced.) Madsen lived in an expensive Washington townhouse that had been purchased for her in 1992 by the commerce secretary himself and by his son, D.C. lobbyist Michael Brown. The Madsens were major backers of Duvalier and among the main domestic financial backers of the September 1991 coup against elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Brown uttered nary a word to support the return
of Aristide and democracy to Haiti, nor did he protest the U.S.'s toxic practices there.

Brown also represented Fritz Bennett, the brother of Michelle Bennett Duvalier, wife of the deposed dictator, when the brother was arrested in Puerto Rico for trafficking in narcotics. (Michelle Duvalier's touch with reality herself can be somewhat shaky, as when, in exile, she said: "Flee Haiti? Why do you say we were fleeing Haiti? The president and I decided it was time to leave. Nobody can ever say we had to leave Haiti. We wanted to go.")

Brown was also the subject of a scandal involving Vietnamese businessman Nguyen Van Hao, who was the Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Development under the corrupt U.S.-backed Saigon dictatorship in the early 1970s. Hao alleged that Brown agreed to be paid $700,000 in exchange for his help in lifting a trade embargo against Vietnam. Hao, who previously lived in Haiti, and Brown had a mutual Haitian friend, Marc Butch Ashton -- Lillian Madsen's brother-in-law. Ashton was a financial advisor to Baby Doc. A large landholder and owner of Haiti Citrus, a lime exporter, Ashton allegedly used a squad of 40 Tonton Macoutes death squads to guard his properties. Poor farmers who leased their land to Haiti Citrus say they were intimidated and tortured by Ashton's thugs when they tried to get better terms. (Counterpunch, December, 1993)

Brown himself detailed his services to Duvalier in a nine-page memo. Brown's letter, written in French on Patton, Boggs & Blow letterhead, blamed Monsieur Le President's problems on an unfair image created by the U.S. media. As to his efforts on Haiti's behalf, Brown wrote that "We continue to dedicate a considerable amount of time to the improvement of relations between the Republic of Haiti and members of congress and the American government, with the goal of substantially increasing American aid to Haiti. Early success in this regard," crowed Brown, "is essentially the result of our Washington team." (Counterpunch, December 1993)

Brown also informed Duvalier that he was looking after Haiti's long-term interests by maintaining good relations with leading American political figures:

"While we have always enjoyed excellent relations with the government of President Reagan, we have also established personal contacts with almost all the Democratic candidates in order to ensure that we continue to have access to the White House regardless of who wins the presidential election in 1984." Brown boasted that his "leading role in the Democratic National Committee has served us in these efforts, while a certain number of my colleagues in the Republican Party assure the permanence of our access and the excellence of our relations with the government of President Reagan."

Juan Gonzalez, writing in the New York Daily News, continued the story:

    "When Brown wrote his memo, Amnesty International had accused the Duvalier regime of torture, detentions without trial and `disappearances'.

    "Here is some of what Brown reported to Baby Doc:

    " 'Despite the unfair image of Haiti by the American media, and despite the opposition expressed by some members of Congress, it is certain that today ... a growing number of people -- both members of Congress and government officials -- stand ready to defend the interests of Haiti. This ... is essentially due to the work of our Washington team. ...

    " 'We continue to pay a great deal of attention to the Black Caucus and to other liberal members of Congress ... [who] are now, thanks to our efforts, ready to help. Although some of them continue to make negative comments about Haiti, all, without exception, have proved to be cooperative on the issue of aid.' "

Brown was reporting on his success in getting Congress to say one thing but do another. On foreign aid, he proved more than worth his annual retainer. While he represented Haiti, annual U.S. assistance increased from $35 million to $55 million.


Brown offered not a word in the memo about human rights.

Brown went on to serve as President Clinton's Secretary of Commerce, which is one of the agencies that oversees toxic waste shipments and promotes corporate investment in Haiti, particularly in the notorious assembly zones established by the International Monetary Fund's structural adjustment program there. (The assembly zones were populated by the IMF's removal of 1/3rd of the rural population from their lands, now to be used for export crops to the U.S. and elsewhere).

In his confirmation hearings before the Senate, Brown was not asked a single question concerning toxic wastes, nor of his relationship with the Duvalier dictatorship.

Mitchel Cohen hosts "Steal This Radio," a weekly show on , and is the Chair of WBAI radio's (99.5-FM) "Local Station Board". He works with the Brooklyn Greens / Green Party.

by David L. Wilson
from World War 4 Report

David L. Wilson of Weekly News Update on the Americas was in Port-au-Prince with a delegation when the Jan. 12 earthquake struck the city. Because of limited electricity and internet access, he was unable to send this report out until after he got back to New York the morning of Jan. 18.:

PORT-AU-PRINCE — Wednesday night, January 13, the second night after a giant earthquake shattered this city, was filled with strange sounds.

At one point a hundred or more people rushed along the Avenue Henri Christophe in front of the Hotel Oloffson in the southwestern part of the city. They were shouting in Creole: "Dlo! dlo!" ("Water! Water!") and claiming, improbably, that a tsunami was coming from the hills to the southeast. Later a vehicle stopped at the intersection by the hotel so a man could make an announcement over a booming loudspeaker. Apparently he was looking for volunteers for something; a few young men climbed on to the back of his vehicle. All I understood was the phrase "gen yon sitiyasyon difisil," repeated over and over—literally, "there's a difficult situation."

Some of the strange sounds were hopeful. One guest at the Oloffson said she'd heard heavy vehicles, like bulldozers or backhoes, going up the street. Another guest, the Haitian photographer Daniel Morel, heard the rumbling of big transport planes flying into the airport over on the north side of Port-au-Prince. International aid was finally coming in, more than a day after the quake struck.

Through all this, more than a hundred people remained camped out in the intersection by the hotel, calmly praying and singing hymns. [See "Singing and Praying at Night in Port-au-Prince"].

In the Field of Mars
On Thursday morning, Day 3 of the catastrophe, I tagged along with photojournalist Tequila Minsky, who was now under contract with the New York Times, and the paper's Caracas bureau chief, Simón Romero, as they walked to the National Palace and the morgue. The Times was paying for a guide, Jean Lundy, a tall, thin, sad-looking man wearing a green shirt and blue baseball cap; he'd lost his brother in the quake. [See "Morgue Becomes Mountain of Anguish," NYT, Jan. 15]

The morgue and the wreckage of the National Palace, the president's official residence, seemed to be the first two stopping places for all the mainstream journalists now flooding into the city. Tequila, though, was much less interested in the shattered Palace than in the scene across the street in the Champ de Mars park, where thousands of people had constructed a huge tent city.

The disaster seemed very democratic over in the park. The poor and the well-to-do had camped out side by side, improvising tents or awnings out of whatever they had rescued from the ruins of their homes. Mostly they used sheets and blankets strung on clotheslines. The better-off had nice sheets with printed fabric, and some families had pitched actual tents: pup tents or the larger ones US families use for camping.

Whatever their class, the Champ de Mars residents must all have lost their homes, and most had probably lost friends and relatives. Now they sat in the heat in a public park with no sanitation facilities and no sign of any authority supplying food, water, and medicine. Many tent city residents had nothing to do but sit and stare in front of them. There was a bad smell, and it was bound to get worse as the day progressed.

Simón stopped to interview a lower middle-class family. The mother had had a little shop. "Fallen," she said in Creole. What about their home? "Fallen." Tequila asked whether any authorities had told people to assemble in the park. No, the mother answered, as did everyone else we asked.

"It's the Holocaust"
The morgue is just a few blocks from the National Palace, at the city's general hospital, the Hospital of the State University of Haiti (HUEH in French). We'd been told the hospital was badly damaged. I didn't notice any problems as we walked along the tree-lined walkways between buildings, but my attention was focused on the patients lying outdoors waiting for treatment. Unlike the injured we'd seen waiting on sidewalks outside neighborhood clinics, these were generally on gurneys and most had been carefully placed in the shade. They seemed to have received some preliminary medical treatment, but the wait had already been too long for some; now their bodies were waiting to be moved to the morgue.

We turned a corner and walked a little further, covering our noses with scarves or our shirt collars. Tequila looked for moment and then said quietly: "It's the Holocaust."

There was an open space in front of us; in the back was a rather small building with a sign in French identifying it as the morgue. There was no way for the building to hold more than a limited number of bodies, so the dead had been dumped randomly in the open space. I couldn't start to count the number of corpses in the jumbled mass, but I guessed there were at least two hundred in front of us, and more than fifty on one side of the building.

The scene really did look like the old black-and-white photos of stacks of corpses in Nazi concentration camps, except, as Tequila remarked later, the Haitians were better fed. They had been living their everyday lives when the earthquake caught them: at home, at work or school, or going to the market. They had breakfast and lunch on Tuesday, just as I did. There was the same sort of democracy as at the Champ de Mars: people in expensive clothes lay next to people in cheap T-shirts and shorts; some seemed to be wearing rags, but that may have been a result of the quake. Young and old, men and women were all together in the hot sun. While most bodies appeared to have been dumped randomly, others seemed to be arranged in carefully constructed scenes of everyday life—a middle-aged couple apparently stretched out next to each other as if in their bed at home, a young woman with a baby lying on her chest as if the child had just finished nursing.


The living walked around outside the mass of corpses, covering their noses with scarves and trying to make out the features of a friend or a relative. They were a much sadder sight than the bodies. I suddenly looked up: over the pile of bodies you could see, to the southwest, the green, peaceful slopes of the mountain range that rises abruptly from the southern part of the city.

The Belgians arrive
In the evening Tequila and I ran into Alex Toyo at our hotel's front gate. He and his wife own a small restaurant next to the Oloffson grounds. Alex also works in the informal economy, arranging tours in aging vehicles for the few tourists who still come to Haiti.

We asked Alex what he knew about the "difficult situation" from the night before. We'd heard that the man with the loudspeaker had been looking for volunteers to help dig out an earthquake victim. Alex said he'd show us—it wasn't far, just up a street going toward Carrefour, an impoverished suburb west of the capital.

We walked a few blocks in the dark—the power is out for the foreseeable future—with Alex and a couple of the other informal guides he works with. Suddenly we ran into bright lights, a giant, shining new truck, and a group of what seemed to be firefighters, white men and women calling out to each other in French as they loaded equipment into the truck. They were the B-Fast, a Belgian rescue team, one of them told us in English as Tequila took their pictures.

After 50 hours, we'd finally seen some international rescue workers. Up until then, the only visible rescuers had been neighborhood volunteers. [See "Day Two in Port-au-Prince: 'Young men with crowbars'"]

On our right there was a large ruined building in the glare of floodlights; B-Fast members carefully picked their way through the wreckage as about fifty people watched. A man in an orange polo shirt sat by the ruins. He told us in English that this had been an office and apartment complex and that the Belgians were trying to rescue a very popular local man named Carlo Lochard, who had risen to prominence after former president Jean Bertrand Aristide was driven from office in 2004. Lochard had been police chief in both the West and the North departments—in effect, police chief here and in Cap-Haïtien, the second largest city—the man said, and now he was running for a seat in the Chamber of Deputies in the elections scheduled for February. It was clear that Lochard was alive, since he'd talked to his wife on his cell phone; cellular service is operating sporadically.

Robert, one of our informal guides, pulled me aside to say, in a mix of English and Creole, that everyone hated Lochard and that the Belgians were brought to this site just because he was an influential politician. Meanwhile, sixty students were trapped in the collapsed St. Gérard school, a technical institute a few steps away, Robert said, and the Belgians were doing nothing for them.

He took me to see the school. "Etidiyan yo vivan?" I asked him. "Are the students alive?" "Yes, yes," he said.

The Quick and the Dead
A B-Fast member gave us a third account. Their team focuses on pulling out survivors as fast as possible and getting them to a medical facility, he said. They use dogs specially trained to distinguish the living and the dead. Once B-Fast has rescued the survivors, they move on to the next site. In this case, he said, the dogs had only smelled corpses at St. Gérard, while there were a few survivors in Lochard's building. Those had been rescued now and the team was about to leave. Lochard hadn't been identified among the survivors.

The crowd began arguing with the Belgians. There was a lot of talking and shouting in French and Creole, and I couldn't follow in the confusion, but it seemed a large group of young men were demanding that the Belgians search the school, while a massive, self-important middle-aged man was insisting Lochard was alive. "Il y aura une autre équipe"—"There will be another team"—one of the rescue workers kept saying, apparently meaning that others would come for the bodies later.

The Belgians seemed very serious and professional, and I felt certain they wouldn't have left sixty students trapped in a collapsed school so they could rescue one big shot. But who had directed them to come here to Carrefour Feuilles, a middle-class neighborhood all the way across town from the airport where they had landed? Disaster is never truly democratic.

A large number of the collapsed buildings we've seen appear to be modern concrete structures, and a disproportionate number seem to be schools, just as happened in the Chinese earthquake in 2008. You have to think that much of the devastation came from bad engineering, adulterated building materials, and a lack of building inspectors. After all, Haiti has been the Promised Land of minimal government interference. I wonder how the economists who preach the equilibrium of unregulated open markets would feel if their children had been in these schools, if they'd had to go look for the little bodies in the Port-au-Prince morgue.

The earthquake struck a little before 5 PM. I suspect that a lot more elementary school children would have died if the ground had started shaking earlier in the day. The loss of so many schools seems especially criminal in a country where there were already so few.

[After I returned to New York and had adequate internet access, I learned that former police chief Carlo Lochard had been detained in connection with a deadly attack on a soccer match in the Martissant neighborhood in August 2005; he was released later. Lochard has also been accused of a number of other human rights abuses. See "Haiti: Storm of Killing in Neighborhood Has Wide Implications for Nation," IPS, Aug. 2, 2006—DLW]

by Matthew Andrews

The panic among liberals was palpable on the eve of Scott Brown’s insurgent victory to become Massachusetts’ Republican junior senator.  The general election was supposed to be a dull affair after the four way race for the Democratic Party’s nomination.  Yet in the final weeks of a truncated campaign, despite the holidays and wintery weather, Scott Brown surged from a fifteen point deficit in the polls to defeat Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley.

On election day I received a phone call from an acquaintance who urged me to vote, describing Brown as a male version of Sarah Palin.  In my email a subject line read, “VOTE, VOTE, VOTE.”  As I walked down the street in Porter Square, Cambridge, Martha Coakley supporters were not merely holding signs, but pacing up and down the sidewalk, shouting at pedestrians and cars.  Coakley ran an uninspired campaign, ambivalent about Afghanistan and flip-flopping on the anti-abortion provisions proposed in the national healthcare legislation.  Fear-mongering and eleventh hour visits from Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were not enough to reverse the tide.

Kennedy was treated like royalty in Massachusetts.  Like a monarch, he held office until his dying day.  Afterward, the press heaped praise on him and framed the story, “Who will take Kennedy’s seat?”  It seemed like a question of inheritance until the final debate when Scott Brown said “With all due respect, it’s not the Kennedy seat, and it’s not the Democrats’ seat.  It’s the people’s seat.”  In a state where Edward Kennedy held a senate seat for 47 years, Scott Brown captured the populist mantel of “change.”

Elections have the elusive power to energize an otherwise apathetic public.  More than 2.2 million people cast ballots, matching the turnout of the 2006 governor’s race (Boston Globe).  Democrats are now reevaluating their strategy for governance while Republicans gauge their prospects for the mid-term elections in 2010.  Socialists should be the students of elections as well.  But our goal should be to grasp the inspirational power of elections and direct it toward socialist candidates, mass movements, and a systemic critique of the government’s failure to address current crises.

According to Gallup, the electorate of the “bluest state in the nation” is only 35% Democrat, with 49% registered independent of any party affiliation.  Yet nominally “non-partisan” polls constantly compare approval ratings between the Democrats and the Republicans, reinforcing the assumption that the two-party system encompasses all political perspectives.  Their own numbers demonstrate disapproval for both political parties.  Lawrence Lessig of the campaign finance reform advocacy group Change Congress says, “It's because we have a system in Washington that simply does not -- will not -- allow the kind of change we urgently need.”  The opportunity exists for a well organized political movement to capture this popular discontent and steer it toward an anti-capitalist analysis.  If we fail however, Scott Brown may only be the beginning of a more conservative reaction.

An average of polls put together by Real Clear Politics as of January 20th puts Congress’s job approval rating at a dismal 24.5%, with disapproval at 66.3%.  More people supported the British Crown at the time of the American Revolution than support Congress today. (Lawrence Lessig of Change Congress)  Obama is only fairing moderately better, with a 50% approval rating (Gallup).

I recently attended a film screening on Venezuela.  Afterward, several audience members lamented the US corporate media and asked how Chávez succeeded in a similarly harsh media climate.  I suggest however that Chávez’s popularity is not the amazing aberration, but our acquiescence to corporate messaging.  We lack not only independent media, but community spaces, political relationships, and the free time to discuss ideas and formulate our own opinions.  We are the historically unique society which has ceded its popular culture to the hands of giant corporations.  The Venezuelan people simply have not.

Most voters (already a relatively political sub-section of the overall population) do not engage current issues outside of elections.  Those that do are mostly indoctrinated into supporting the perspective of one or another competing element within the ruling class.  Few entertain their own interests outside the framework provided by the political parties and corporate media.  It is this lack of engagement that allows Scott Brown to masquerade as a populist when he is pro-war, anti-civil rights, anti-choice, and anti-healthcare.

The day before the election, twenty of the most committed and principled activists I know joined outside the Park Street train station to protest Obama’s broken promise to close Guantánamo and abolish torture.  Commuters hurried by as we spoke into a megaphone about the Cuban 5, immigrant rights, secret prisons abroad, inner-city prisons at home, and the phony war on terror.  On this Martin Luther King Day the crises of the world seemed to be converging to put new life in his words:

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

by Robert Jensen
from Dissident Voice
January 25th, 2010 - CNN’s star anchor Anderson Cooper narrates a chaotic street scene in Port-au-Prince. A boy is struck in the head by a rock thrown by a looter from a roof. Cooper helps him to the side of the road, and then realizes the boy is disoriented and unable to get away. Laying down his digital camera (but still being filmed by another CNN camera), Cooper picks up the boy and lifts him over a barricade to safety, we hope.

“We don’t know what happened to that little boy,” Cooper says in his report. “All we know now is, there’s blood in the streets.”

This is great television, but it’s not great journalism. In fact, it’s irresponsible journalism.

Cooper goes on to point out there is no widespread looting in the city and that the violence in the scene that viewers have just witnessed appears to be idiosyncratic. The obvious question: If it’s not representative of what’s happening, why did CNN put it on the air? Given that Haitians generally have been organizing themselves into neighborhood committees to take care of each other in the absence a functioning central government, isn’t that violent scene an isolated incident that distorts the larger reality?

Cooper tries to rescue the piece by pointing out that while such violence is not common, if it were to become common, well, that would be bad — “it is a fear of what might come.” But people are more likely to remember the dramatic images than his fumbling attempt to put the images in context.

Unfortunately, CNN and Cooper’s combination of great TV and bad journalism are not idiosyncratic; television news routinely falls into the trap of emphasizing visually compelling and dramatic stories at the expense of important information that is crucial but more complex.

The absence of crucial historical and political context describes the print coverage as well; the facts, analysis, and opinion that U.S. citizens need to understand these events are rarely provided. For example, in the past week we’ve heard journalists repeat endlessly the observation that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Did it ever occur to editors to assign reporters to ask why?

The immediate suffering in Haiti is the result of a natural disaster, but that suffering is compounded by political disasters of the past two centuries, and considerable responsibility for those disasters lies not only with Haitian elites but also with U.S. policymakers.

Journalists have noted that a slave revolt led to the founding of an independent Haiti in 1804 and have made passing reference to how France’s subsequent demand for “reparations” (to compensate the French for their lost property, the slaves) crippled Haiti economically for more than a century. Some journalists have even pointed out that while it was a slave society, the United States backed France in that cruel policy and didn’t recognize Haitian independence until the Civil War. Occasional references also have been made to the 1915 U.S. invasion under the “liberal” Woodrow Wilson and an occupation that lasted until 1934, and to the support the U.S. government gave to the two brutal Duvalier dictatorships (the infamous “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc”) that ravaged the country from 1957-86. But there’s little discussion of how the problems of contemporary Haiti can be traced to those policies.

Even more glaring is the absence of discussion of more recent Haiti-U.S. relations, especially U.S. support for the two coups (1991 and 2004) against a democratically elected president. Jean-Bertrand Aristide won a stunning victory in 1990 by articulating the aspirations of Haiti’s poorest citizens, and his populist economic program irritated both Haitian elites and U.S. policy-makers. The first Bush administration nominally condemned the 1991 military coup but gave tacit support to the generals. President Clinton eventually helped Artistide return to power Haiti in 1994, but not until the Haitian leader had been forced to capitulate to business-friendly economic policies demanded by the United States. When Aristide won another election in 2000 and continued to advocate for ordinary Haitians, the second Bush administration blocked crucial loans to his government and supported the violent reactionary forces attacking Aristide’s party. The sad conclusion to that policy came in 2004, when the U.S. military effectively kidnapped Aristide and flew him out of the country. Aristide today lives in South Africa, blocked by the United States from returning to his country, where he still has many supporters and could help with relief efforts.

How many people watching Cooper’s mass-mediated heroism on CNN know that U.S. policy makers have actively undermined Haitian democracy and opposed that country’s most successful grassroots political movement? During the first days of coverage of the earthquake, it’s understandable that news organizations focused on the immediate crisis. But more than a week later, what excuse do journalists have?

Shouldn’t TV pundits demand that the United States accept responsibility for our contribution to this state of affairs? As politicians express concern about Haitian poverty and bemoan the lack of a competent Haitian government to mobilize during the disaster, shouldn’t journalists ask why they have not supported the Haitian people in the past? When Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are appointed to head up the humanitarian effort, should not journalists ask the obvious, if impolite, questions about those former presidents’ contributions to Haitian suffering?

When mainstream journalists dare to mention this political history, they tend to scrub clean the uglier aspects of U.S. policy, absolving U.S. policymakers of responsibility in “the star-crossed relationship” between the two nations, as a Washington Post reporter put it. When news reporters explain away Haiti’s problems as a result of some kind of intrinsic “political dysfunction,” as the Post reporter termed it, then readers are more likely to accept the overtly reactionary arguments of op/ed writers who blame Haiti’s problems of its “poverty culture” (Jonah Goldberg, Los Angeles Times) or “progress-resistant cultural influences” rooted in voodoo (David Brooks, New York Times).

One can learn more by monitoring the independent media in the United States (Democracy Now, for example, has done extensive reporting) or reading the foreign press (such as this political analysis by Peter Hallward in the British daily The Guardian). When will journalists in the U.S. corporate commercial media provide the same kind of honest accounting?

The news media, of course, have a right to make their own choices about what to cover. But we citizens have a right to expect more.

by Eric Lee

A new weekly presentation of international labour news is being organized on the Internet. 

The audiocast - called Solidarity News - will be available on RadioLabour.net every Monday morning.

RadioLabour is the brainchild of Marc Belanger -- the founder of SoliNet, which was the first trade union online network back in the 1980s.

Solidarity News will focus on union and workers' activities and issues from around the world with special emphasis on emerging market and developing countries.

RadioLabour reporters will provide regular weekly presentations, but a special feature of the audiocast will be reports from unionists who want to report on particular events or publicize an activity of their organization.

Scripts of the audiocasts will be available as aids for unionists who want to learn the use of English as an additional language in the international labour movement.

For more information about RadioLabour, listen to the audiocasts, or provide reports, visit the RadioLabour site.  Or write directly to Marc at m.belanger@radiolabour.org

from Wikipedia

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (German: [ˈvɔlfɡaŋ amaˈdeus ˈmoːtsart], full baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart] (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791), was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers.

Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood in Salzburg. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty; at 17 he was engaged as a court musician in Salzburg, but grew restless and traveled in search of a better position, always composing abundantly. While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in the capital, where he achieved fame but little financial security. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and the Requiem. The circumstances of his early death have been much mythologized. He was survived by his wife Constanze and two sons.

Mozart learned voraciously from others, and developed a brilliance and maturity of style that encompassed the light and graceful along with the dark and passionate—the whole informed by a vision of humanity "redeemed through art, forgiven, and reconciled with nature and the absolute." His influence on subsequent Western art music is profound. Beethoven wrote his own early compositions in the shadow of Mozart, of whom Joseph Haydn wrote that "posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years."

by Billy Wharton

Albert Boutwell’s election as Birmingham, Alabama’s mayor in 1963 might have signaled the end of the modern civil rights movement. As a moderate Democrat, Boutwell promised to temper the harsh repression unleashed by the city’s notorious chief of police and his mayoral opponent Eugene “Bull” Connor. Mainstream leaders of the Black community were told to wait it out – let the storm pass and incremental changes could begin. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. refused to wait. Instead, he launched Plan “C” (confrontation), a large-scale protest campaign that broke the back of Southern segregation.

Today, Barack Obama is held up as the logical outcome of the movement King led. Such a claim avoids a basic fact of American history. Elections do not deliver much in the way of social change. More often they provide sleeping pills – skillfully crafted illusions meant to de-mobilize, to dull the senses and to prevent serious demands for justice from emerging. King understood this process well. One can assume that if King were faced with two active wars, 48 million people without health care and more than 20 million unemployed, he would be able to see through the illusions being offered at the top of the state. The good news is that a new movement for justice need not start from scratch – it can learn the lessons of history. The Civil Rights movement offers nearly all the instincts necessary for movement building - a skepticism about elections, an unquenchable desire for grassroots mobilization and a firm conviction that the movement is operating on
the side of justice.

King’s small essay entitled, “New Day in Birmingham,” should be seen as a blueprint to the pivotal Birmingham campaign. In it, he rails against the request by the white population to accept “polite segregation.” He views the election of Boutwell as less a sympathetic act by white voters, than an expression of how little they understood about the aspirations of the Black community. When the hardcore segregationists dug in and filed a lawsuit to maintain themselves in office, even greater pressure was applied to the Black community to wait. The judicial process was then held up as the ultimate arbiter of justice. A simple formula was offered - the polite segregationists would prevail in court, Connor and his allies would be removed and peace would be restored to Birmingham. According to mainstream commentators, all the established Black leaders needed to do was keep agitators like King out.

Instead of backtracking, King and the movement entered the city and launched sixty-five nightly meetings held at various churches in the Black community. Each was aimed at mobilizing the base of the community and exerting enough moral force to stiffen the will of local leaders. Freedom songs with provocative titles such as “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round,” captured, “the soul of the movement.” All along, King and others understood that, “we possessed the most formidable weapon of all – the conviction that we were right.” Mass meetings were the method to build what King called a “special army” of civil rights protesters armed with soul force not military force. Those unwilling or unable to participate in mass arrests still had a place in the movement, contributing to the organizational structure by answering a phone or running an errand. Community building and movement building were tightly linked.

Despite the energy generated by the mass meetings, King identified two challenges that threatened to stifle Plan C. “The Negro in Birmingham,” he argued, “had been skillfully brainwashed to the point where he accepted the white man’s theory that he, as a Negro, was inferior.” The consciousness of inferiority bred a social paralysis fueled by fear. Authorities from Birmingham to Washington sensed this weakness and used it to market the idea that the proposed demonstrations were “ill-timed” and organized by outside agitators. Critics claimed to agree with the cause of civil rights, but to disagree with the tactics of this movement. This was a time, they proposed, for patient negotiations not impulsive escalation.

King cut through this Gordian knot with a simple, yet powerful argument. “It was ridiculous,” he wrote, “to speak of timing when the clock of history showed that the Negro had already suffered one hundred years of delay.” To the charge of being an outsider, he remarked that any American seeking to enhance the cause of freedom and justice ceased to be an interloper. The pressure to abandon the mobilization, the precarious position of the hardcore segregationists and the increasingly boisterous demands and bold acts from the Black community created a volatile situation. Small-scale sit-ins at white churches and segregated libraries began and a large march accompanied the opening of the voter registration drive.

On April 10, 1963, the final fuse was lit as the segregationists were granted an injunction to prevent the protests from going forward. The movement was faced with a difficult choice. Never before had they violated a court injunction, yet King knew that the segregationists had vowed to employ a “century of litigation” to force an end to the mobilizations. Things became even bleaker two days later as a court stripped the movement’s bondsman’s ability to issue bonds for bail. All bail would have to be paid in cash.

After another round of community consultations, King opted to escalate the campaign into its final phase. Connor responded by unleashing the police armed with dogs and fire hoses, to repress demonstrators, thus producing scenes of brutality that have come to define the Southern part of the Civil Rights movement. King was arrested almost immediately and placed in solitary confinement for more than twenty-four hours. While in jail, King issued his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” now a seminal document in American history. On July 2, 1964 President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.

Such mighty historical moments were made possible by people “more concerned about reaching our righteous aims than about saving our skins.” No compromise would do, no election result could de-mobilize and no judicial decision could reverse the conviction that they, and not the segregationists or Northern liberals who preached patience, were operating in the name of justice on the right side of history.

Today, Americans suffering from the effects of a massive financial crisis would do well to familiarize themselves with the version of Dr. King that appears in the pages of “New Day in Birmingham.” This is no McDonalds “I Have Dream” commercial. This is Martin Luther King Jr. as a militant, a self-described extremist for justice, and a brilliant activist dedicated to community building in the service of social change. What this country needs most right now is a new “Plan C” that confronts the increasingly unbearable problems of lack of healthcare, homelessness and unemployment. The Civil Rights movement is proof positive that no election or any judicial decision, no matter how slick the public relations scheme, can replace the powerful ability of regular people to create movements that change history and society for the better. Eventually, the time for waiting will end.

***
Billy Wharton is the co-chair of the Socialist Party USA and the editor of The Socialist and the Socialist WebZine.

A Socialist Party USA Statement
passed by the National Action Committee, January 13, 2010

The Socialist Party USA stands in solidarity with the people of Haiti after the devastating earthquake that hit the island. Estimates of the dead are more than one hundred thousand and significant parts of the capital city Port-au-Prince’s infrastructure have been destroyed. The full extent of the damage will not be known for days and the country seems certain to be thrust into a humanitarian crisis even more serious than the one that exists on a daily basis.

While this disaster has natural origins, it occurred within a nation that had already been ravaged by capitalism. Haiti is a model case for the failure of the neoliberal economic model and the negative legacies of US militarism in the region.

After coming out of the vicious dictatorship of 'Baby Doc' Duvalier in the late 1980s, the country was saddled by massive debt payments to the IMF and World Bank. When the “people’s priest” Jean Bertran-Aristide was elected to the presidency in 1990 new hopes for change were raised. Aristide promised to move beyond a government of the elites and to challenge the IMF free-market model. His administration was then brought down by a violent military coup backed by the US military. After a direct US military occupation, Aristide returned to office, agreed to implement the IMF plans and was again removed by a military coup. The already weak Haitian economy spiraled, creating mass unemployment and suffering.

As multinational companies exited the country, they left behind ecological and economic devastation. Large swaths of the countryside have been de-forested rendering them useless for cultivation. Even before the earthquake, the urban infrastructure was in decay, suffering from a lack of investment for decades. In a final humiliation, a few months before the earthquake, a group of multinational investors assembled in Port-au-Prince to create a plan to return to exploiting the population.

Despite all of this, the Haitian people have continued to struggle for justice. In their trade unions, cooperatives and women organizations, poor and working Haitians have kept alive the legacy of struggle born in the great Haitian Revolution of the 18th century. Such grassroots democratic struggles offer the best hope for the future of the island.

The Socialist Party USA encourages our members and supporters to get involved with efforts to provide relief to earthquake victims. There are many organizations engaged in this effort including the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund which has supported grassroots democratic struggles in Haiti since 2004. The history of Haiti offers a reminder that democratic socialism must offer a vision that transcends national borders in order to create a global society based on solidarity, compassion and justice.

by David L. Wilson
from Weekly News Update on the Americas

01/15/2010 - PORT-AU-PRINCE -- Several hundred people had gathered to sing, clap, and pray in an intersection here by 9:00 last night, a little more than four hours after the earthquake had devastated much of the Haitian capital. Another group was singing a block away, on the other side of the Hotel Oloffson, where I was camping out.

I couldn't make out many of the words. "Alleluia" was the refrain for some of the hymns the group at the crossroads sang. A minister was preaching to the other group about Bondye ("God") and kretyen ("Christians"). The congregants replied with bursts of song.

There were frequent aftershocks. With each tremor, the singing stopped and the singers wailed; after several minutes the hymns would resume. Many of the people in the streets had lost their homes, but even those whose houses weren't affected sat outdoors for fear of what might happen if they were inside when the aftershocks came.

Wheelbarrows and Planks
A great collective shout had risen from the city around 4:50 PM as the initial earthquake subsided. People ran into the streets here in the southern neighborhood of Carrefour Feuilles, just beginning to understand what had happened to them. Some seemed stunned, but many started walking—presumably they'd been at work and now wanted too get home to see about their families and their houses.

People also began seeking help for the injured. A man was using a wheelbarrow to bring a woman to a car; a group of men were carrying an injured person on planks they had arranged to make a sort of stretcher.

A dead woman or girl lay a few yards from the singers at the intersection; part of the wall around the hotel grounds had fallen on her. At first we thought she was one of the vendors who had been working there in the afternoon, but later we noticed she was carrying a book bag—probably she was a schoolggirl on her way home from school.

By this morning someone had covered her with a colorfully printed sheet. Passersby stopped to lift the sheet to see if she was a friend or a relative. Then they lowered it and went on with their search.

Where was the UN?
Port-au-Prince residents had no choice but to rely on themselves and Bondye.

A Haitian American journalism student told us he'd seen Haitian police and a few of the 9,000 members of MINUSTAH—the United Nations Stabilization Mission inn Haiti—directing traffic and picking up bodies in other areas off the city. But the only organized response the rest of us saw yesterday was what looked like a white MINUSTAH helicopter flying high above the city about an hour after the first shock, apparently surveying the damage.

At about 4:00 this morning I saw a United Nations truck filled with soldiers on the street outside. They only stopped long enough for the singers to open a path for them. After that I saw no sign that there was a Haitian government or an "international peacekeeping force"—no police taking the injured to the few clinics still standing, no MINUSTAH soldiers arranging shelters for the people praying in the streets.

Earlier in the night I was listening to the singing with a young Haitian American at the hotel. "Haitians are different," he said. "People in other countries wouldn't do this," he said, referring to the singing. "It's a sense of community."

They were all remarkably in tune with each other—I never heard a crowd in the United States singing like that. The beautiful music continued through the night.

by Bill Quigley
from Dissident Voice

January 16th, 2010 - Point One: $100 Million – Are You Kidding Me?

President Obama promised $100 million in aid to Haiti on January 14, 2009. A Kentucky couple won $128 million in a Powerball lottery on December 24, 2009. The richest nation in the history of the world is giving Powerball money to a neighbor with tens of thousands of deaths already?

Point Two: Have You Ever Been Without Water?

Hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti have had no access to clean water since the quake hit. Have you ever been in a place that has no water? Have you ever felt the raw fear in the gut when you are not sure where your next drink of water is going to come from? People can live without food for a long time. Without water? A very short time. In hot conditions people can become dehydrated in an hour. Lack of water puts you into shock and starts breaking down the body right away. People can die within hours if they are exposed to heat without water.

Point Three: Half the People in Haiti are Kids and They Were Hungry Before the Quake

Over half the population of Haiti is 15 years old or younger. And they were hungry before the quake. A great friend, Pere Jean-Juste, explained to me that most of the people of Haiti wake every day not knowing how they will eat dinner that day. So there are no reserves, no soup kitchens, no pantries, nothing for most. Hunger started immediately.

Point Four: A Toxic Stew of Death is Brewing

Take hundreds of thousands of people. Shock them with a major earthquake and dozens of aftershocks. Take away their homes and put them out in the open. Take away all water and food and medical care. Sit them out in the open for days with scorching temperatures. Surround them with tens of thousands of decaying bodies. People have to drink. So they are drinking bad water. They are getting sick. There is no place to go. What happens next?

Point Five: Aid is Sitting at the Airport

While millions suffer, humanitarian aid is sitting at the Port au Prince airport. Why? People are afraid to give it out for fear of provoking riots. Which is worse?

Point Six: Haiti is Facing A Crisis Beyond Our Worst Nightmares

“I think it is going to be worse than anyone still understands,” Richard Dubin, vice president of Haiti shipping lines told the New York Times. He is so right. Unless there is a major urgent change in the global response, the world may look back and envy those tens of thousands who died in the quake.

Wake up world!

This article is a response to a previous article by Roy Fischler published in the Socialist Webzine. The original article can be found here.

by Stancel Spencer

The article by comrade Roy Fischler, appearing in the previous issue, on the subject of automation brings up an important subject when it comes to socialism and technology, in fact, perhaps the most relevant form of technology to socialists.

Robots were originally imagined as machines created for the purpose of labor for humanity. Although machines have been present since the Industrial Revolution, the concept of a bipedal robot came to prominence in the 20th century.

Marx outlined three classes, the proletarians (working people), who are forced to by the conditions (often desperately, especially in crises where unemployment is high) to sell their labor to the other two classes, the bourgeoisie (big business corporations) and the petit-bourgeosie (small businesses).

It has been theorized that the capitalists would use robots in order to gain more profits without having to pay for labor. In theory, without the human worker, money normally going to wages would be in the pockets of the capitalist.

As Marshall Brain, founder of How Stuff Works and author of e-book Robotic Nation, told the audience of the Singularity Summit: "In theory, we should all be able to go on a perpetual vacation as robots do all the work. Instead because of the way the economy is structured right now, when robots arrive it will have devastating effects on all of us because there will be so many unemployed people."

What was Brain's solution to this problem? Brain proposed, "Spread the benefit of productivity to everyone by breaking the concentration of wealth, increase pay and reduce the work week." Brain stopped short of calling for workers' ownership of the means of production, the basis upon which socialism would exist. Only this would really solve the problems that robots would create.

People who object to machines replacing human labor should not be viewed as neo-Luddites, because when the Industrial Revolution began and the machines were put on the factory floor, the labor pool still existed, the social conditions in which it existed were just changed. The use of robots as labor causes deep uncertainty now for many people, especially in these sensitive times, as unemployment worsens.

Socialists should champion robotics and automation all the while highlighting its limitations under capitalism. I would venture to say that any approach from capitalists on the issue is likely to be cautious. Are not capitalists dependent on the existence of the workers? If the bourgeoisie abolishes the human proletariat as a class to be employed, making them an unemployable and homeless mass, it would sow the seeds of its own abolition.

Few among the people would be so apathetic to not stand against such barbarism. It should be our hope that if that were to happen, the outrage would not descend into primitivism. Thus, if the capitalists were so shortsighted to prevent wealth from being spent (do robots shop?) and thus transferred to their bank accounts, a revolt for socialism, workers' control of the means of production, could be possible.

Today the iRobot Corporation, and its recent competitor, Evolution Robotics are creating a new and strong market in domestic robots. I think that this will be the main use of robots in the near-future under our capitalist system (aside from uses by the government and military). Domestic labor by the working class is unpaid. Millions of autonomous self-directing robot floor cleaners and lawn mowers have been sold. Anthropomorphic humanoid versions of these are likely to created in the future. But capitalists still need people to buy them. If they replace more and more human workers with robots, there will be less money to be spent.

The Soviet Union under Stalin and the various bureaucratic dictatorships that followed his rule were not socialist, but state capitalist. I wouldn't say their failure has to do with the absence of robots in that level of technological development. Were the efforts of the Socialists of the early 20th century America then futile?

Would people do the necessary work under socialism, voluntarily? This is Fischler's main concern. I think that socialism on this planet would be successful if it simply had the chance to be tried. If we fight for socialism, we know that it is superior to the poverty and barbarism that is capitalism. But it is not a utopia and there may be some problems, but we can work to solve them. The main change in the substance of work under socialism is that it is free. We speak of "free time" when all our time should be free. The substance and form of production under socialism is not exploitative or oppressive, it is not servitude. For this reason, I think most people before the robotic age would have accepted this change, even if it meant they were at least socially compelled to work (I don't like to speak of force, because I don't think a society that forces people to work (the very definition of slavery) is compatible with socialism.

In conclusion, I agree that as robots are now an emerging technology we should use them under socialism to eliminate labor and free the working class from the drudgery of labor. It is indeed a fascinating technology that is upon us.

from Wikipedia

Huddie William Ledbetter (January 1888 – December 6, 1949) was an iconic American folk and blues musician, notable for his strong vocals, his virtuosity on the 12-string guitar, and the songbook of folk standards he introduced.

He is best known as Leadbelly or Lead Belly. Though many releases list him as "Leadbelly," he himself spelled it "Lead Belly."

Although he most commonly played the twelve string, he could also play the piano, mandolin, harmonica, violin, concertina, and accordion. In some of his recordings, such as in one of his versions of the folk ballad "John Hardy", he performs on the accordion instead of the guitar. In other recordings he just sings while clapping his hands or stomping his foot. The topics of Lead Belly's music covered a wide range of subjects, including gospel songs; blues songs about women, liquor and racism; and folk songs about cowboys, prison, work, sailors, cattle herding and dancing. He also wrote songs concerning the newsmakers of the day, such as President Franklin Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Jean Harlow, the Scottsboro Boys, and Howard Hughes.

by Carl Finamore
from Beyondchron.org

Jan. 06‚ 2010 - The San Francisco Hilton is the city’s largest hotel, taking up a square block of prime downtown real estate and boasting 1900 rooms. Celebrity heiress Paris Hilton’s signature phrase, “That’s Hot!” might very well apply to the “stunning million dollar views” advertised by her hotel namesake. But it’s more like “That’s Cold!” when describing the views of the Hilton owners towards their employees.

In fact, the Blackstone Group, which owns the Hilton chain, proposes cutting starting wages for new hires by 25%. According to a union fact sheet, the CEO and part owner of Blackstone was paid $1,385,391,042 in 2008 ... That’s right, one billion dollars plus. The average union hotel worker earned $30,000 in that same year.

This explains why over 800 members of Local 2, UNITE-HERE and 400 supporters staged their impressive rally and civil disobedience action blocking for several hours the main hotel entrance before 140 sit-in protesters were arrested, cited for misdemeanor trespassing and released a short time later.

Arrestees included Richard Trumka, new President of the 13-million member AFL-CIO and John Wilhelm, International President of the 265,000-member UNITE-HERE. Trumka called the attitude of the hotels a “disgrace” while Wilhelm congratulated Local 2 for its “heart, spirit and endurance” which he said “would spread across the country in 2010” as other hotel contracts expire.

The rally attracted city firefighters, nurses, machinists, teachers, engineers, longshore, teamsters, construction workers and letter carriers displaying union emblems of support.

The protest also drew several hundred community supporters organized by Rev. Israel Alvaran, assigned by Clerics and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE) to work exclusively on winning community support for hotel workers.

Refusal to come to an agreement with the modest demands of the union is producing growing public outrage because hotels have been profitable the last few years. In fact, according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, profits soared nationally to over $200 billion in the last decade.

While each of the 61 city hotels has chosen to negotiate separately with the union, the corporations that run many of the largest hotels remain united in demands to shift more health care costs to employees, increase workloads and reduce staffing.

They have rejected Local 2’s minimum one-year contract proposal. In Hilton’s case, the whole package would cost just $550,000 this year or around a 1.5% increase in labor costs.

“We’ve proposed the cheapest contract in the union’s history while the corporations continue to make millions,” said John Elrod, a bartender at the W Hotel. “I think the hotel workers have sacrificed enough. It’s time the hotel corporations realize that we’re not going to give up.”

So far, the union has called three brief strikes, five boycotts, numerous “Sieges” of all-night picketing and two peaceful civil disobedience actions resulting in several hundred arrests.

Bargaining Prospects in 2010

Nonetheless, facing stiff resistance and a lull in the tourist season, Local 2 realizes this dispute will not be settled soon. These major international corporations have enormous financial resources that allow them to absorb indefinitely the costs of ordinary labor disputes.

So, the union has adopted a variety of tactics looking forward to mid-2010 when tourists begin flooding the city. This influx provides an inviting audience for the union’s very effective protests at boycotted hotel entrances with bullhorns blaring. “Years before, We would Cower, Now We have Union Power!” and “Don’t Check-In, Check Out! This is Local 2! Boycott is what we’re all about!”

New negotiating allies are also in the wings as Wilhelm mentioned. At the moment, 9000 hotel workers in San Francisco and another 16,000 in Chicago and Los Angeles are negotiating.

This bargaining leverage will soon substantially increase later this year with the addition of units in Toronto, Minneapolis, Vancouver, BC, Honolulu, Monterey and Washington D.C. In total, over 50,000 Unite-Here members in the hotel industry will be fighting for new contracts in 2010.

In the meantime, Local 2 will be busy planning regular street protests and considering more of their patented surprise strikes while still vigorously enforcing their boycotts.

The union has a history of mobilizing local broad actions and UNITE-HERE nationally has recently adopted very high standards for its boycotts. A most important new feature is that a majority of union members are urged to consider a boycott of their selected hotel before one is announced.

As a result, all current Local 2 boycotts are worker-initiated, minimizing employer attempts to divide employees from boycotters.. There must also be a funded staff and a clear program of active enforcement before any boycott is launched.

This includes regularly scheduled pickets with amped-up sound systems to remind guests there is an ongoing labor dispute. It means organized visits to major clients showing videos of protests and taped interviews with disgruntled guests who endured the stress of strikes, loud picketing and boycotts. It means enlisting the national support of non-profit and socially-conscious conventioneers to join the boycott.

One important endorsement occurred the day the Hilton boycott was announced. Sarah Shaker, Executive Director of the Instituto Laboral de la Raza, issued this January 5 statement, “It is very unfortunate that we have to move our annual awards banquet. Normally, we have over 1,000 people from all over the country attend and we spend close to $100,000 with the Hilton’s banquet department. We now have changed our plans and moved the Event to a solidly Union banquet hall, the United Irish Cultural Center.”

More of the same is sure to come. The SF Examiner estimates the 53-day strike/lockout and two-year boycott in 2004-2006 cost San Francisco hotels around $100 million. Owners made it worse for themselves by locking out workers during that strike, something that turned out to be a major public relations blunder.

Enormous political and community pressure forced hotels to back off, end their lock out and return to negotiations. But the union still continued full-scale boycotts until the hotels finally agreed in 2006 to all the workers’ demands.

Local 2 President Mike Casey considers this victory as validation of the current strategy of staggered, brief strikes, longer boycotts and regularly scheduled mobilizations.

As a result, the union is determined to reinvigorate boycotts as one of their tools, especially useful in an industry dependent on delivering consumers comfort and relaxation uninterrupted by clamorous rallies and periodic strikes.

“We want to bring back boycotts that have the scale and commitment of the Farmworkers’ enormously successful and historic Grape Boycott,” UNITE-HERE boycott organizer Mark Westerberg told me.

While Casey is quick to remind hotels that a city-wide strike is never off the table, the union has shown it has a formidable array of other tactics as well. All of them will be necessary to pry open the pocket books of the powerful owners.

Carl Finamore paid up all his parking tickets before joining the Hilton sit-in. He is a delegate to the San Francisco Labor Council and former President (ret), Local Lodge 1781, IAMAW. He can be reached at local1781@yahoo.com

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / January 10, 2009

MEXICO CITY -- Every hundred years on the tenth year of the century, Mexico seems to explode in social upheaval. In 1810, the war of liberation from the Spanish Crown unleashed a genocidal decade-long conflict. In 1910, the overthrow of dictator Porfirio Diaz triggered a fratricidal bloodbath. In recent months, dire expectations that 2010 would signal similar violence have been running high in this distant neighbor country, mired as it is in a grinding depression where 80% of Mexico's 107,000,000 citizens subsist in and around the poverty line.

It is now the tenth of January 2010 and no new revolution has broken out -- yet.

Nonetheless, the New Year was welcomed in here with a blast of revolutionary fireworks: bank bombings in Mexico City, surrounding Mexico state, and San Luis Potosi in the distant north, blew out a dozen ATM machines. Walls were scorched and windows shattered by firebombs at three auto showrooms in the greater metropolitan area and the government palace in the Mexico City delegation (borough) of Milpa Alta (an explosive device failed to ignite in Ixtapalapa, the capital's most conflictive demarcation).

Incendiary attacks also struck a Telmex branch office, the Mexican phone monopoly owned by Carlos Slim, the richest tycoon in Latin America. A slaughterhouse and a police car were also firebombed. In Tijuana on the northern border, an anarchist group claimed to have machine-gunned three municipal police vehicles and a private security patrol car to welcome in 2010 in addition to "expropriations" at seven OXXO convenience stores during one of which a police officer ("placa") was killed.

"It was either him or us," lamented a communiqué from the purported perpetrators who signed off as "another anonymous anarchist action" in a document posted January 2 on "Conspiracy of Fire," a direct action electronic clearing house.

The spate of bombings by anarchist cells was similar to a string of 15 such incidents in Mexico City and Guadalajara timed to coincide with Mexican Independence Day last September. A student activist at the National Autonomous University was jailed briefly by federal police for several of the fiery assaults in September and released.

Among the groupings that claimed responsibility for the actions that took place between December 31 and January 2 were the Propaganda Of The Deed Brigade which posted a declaration of war on the Conspiracy of Fire page that read in part,

With this document, we declare a war that will not end until all business people, the Bourgeois, militaries, governments, and all kinds of totalitarian power are exterminated.

What has happened today is just a small demonstration that we have lost our fear and our hatred of the system has grown. They can no longer kill or jail us with impunity. We are not afraid. Un Ojo por Un Ojo! ('An Eye for an Eye')."

The document and two other communiqués taking responsibility for the bombings made explicit reference to the exorbitant cost of government celebrations of both the centennial of the revolution and the bi-centennial of independence and noted that "although we do not believe in absolute dates, 2010 will be a year of struggle and a platform of preparation for what is to come..." -- the 1910 uprising led by Francisco Madero was only the opening gong of a series of revolutions that finally fizzled out in 1919 with the assassination of the revolutionary martyr Emiliano Zapata.

Among the heroes lauded in the communiqués were historical anarchist leaders Praxides G. Guerrero and Ricardo Flores Magon, the Great Zapata, the Centaur of the North Francisco Villa, and Lucio Cabanas, the 1970s guerrillero leader of the Party of the Poor. Conspicuously absent from the list was Subcomandante Marcos who 16 years ago this January 1st gave voice to the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas in the very first hour of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Other participants in the New Year's Eve Molotov cocktail party were the Simon Radowisky Brigade, named for a little-known Ukrainian-Argentinean anarchist who died in Mexico in 1956 while at work in a toy factory he was trying to organize, and the "May 25th 1910 Committee of Adjudication" which takes its name from the date that Praxides G. Guerrero fell in Janos, Chihuahua, the first anarchist to give up his life in the Mexican Revolution -- the anarchist-led insurrection in Chihuahua preceded Madero's revolution by six months.

Meanwhile, in Chiapas where mass psychosis that the Zapatistas would rise again January 1 has reigned for months, the Mayan rebels' caracoles, or public centers, were shut down tight for the first time in 15 anniversary markings of that historic rebellion.

But the Zapatista Army of Liberation is hardly the only armed indigenous force for which rebellion in 2010 is an option. The Conspiracy of Fire page features an analysis of revolutionary prospects attributed to the TAGIN or National Indigenous Guerilla Triple Alliance that predicts "the calendar of conflict will spread throughout the country in the next 12 months," claiming that 70 armed organizations have joined forces for concerted action in 2010. The article is illustrated by photos of armed guerilleros taken at a press conference held in Guerrero last summer by "Comandante Ramiro" (Omar Solis) of the ERPI ("Revolutionary Army of The Insurgent People") -- several months later, Ramiro's body was recovered from a clandestine grave in the high sierra of that conflictive state.

While boasts of renewed revolution fly, President Felipe Calderon, now halfway through his calamitous six years in office, sought to put a happy face on the disasters his administration of Mexico has inflicted upon the country. Speaking from sunny Acapulco where the beaches were buckling under the weight of buxom bikini-clad tourists while the rest of the country shivered in the glacial cold, Calderon urged his compatriots to celebrate "this Year of the Patria (Fatherland) with happiness, working together in each home. This year we will write pages of glory and live the flame of our values that make us proud to be Mexicans (sic)."

In what could only have been an effusion of irony, the beaming president wished his bankrupt constituents a "Prosperous New Year." Many observers (this writer was not alone) wondered what country Calderon thought he was addressing.

The COPAMEX, Mexico's most influential business federation, was significantly more guarded in greeting the New Year, warning Mexicans to avoid violence in celebrating the duel centennials.

Despite veiled threats from the business sector, Mexico's working class is in an uproar. A New Year's Day zafarancho (riot) outside a power generating substation in Mexico state between displaced members of the Mexican Electricity Workers Union (SME) trying to prevent scabs from taking their jobs, and heavily armed federal police, left a dozen injured and the nearby pyramids of Teotihuacan, the City of the Gods, wreathed in tear gas fumes.

The confrontation marked the first violence in what has been largely a peaceful resistance movement ever since Calderon shut down the Luz y Fuerza power company last October putting 42,000 workers on the street, and suggests that an increasingly frustrated rank and file is prepared to raise the ante. On January 5 and again on the 6th, bands of SME workers stormed through the old quarter of Mexico City after the explosions of electrical transformers in the neighborhood brought out detachments of federal police.

Sabotage is rumored.

It is not mere coincidence that both the confrontation at Teotihuacan and many of the anarchist bombazos took place in Mexico state, which is governed by Enrique Pena Nieto, the presidential front-runner in 2012. Pena Nieto is a luminary of the resurgent Party of the Institutionalized Revolution (PRI) that ruled Mexico for seven decades until it was displaced from power in 2000 by Calderon's rightist PAN party. The PRI won a landslide majority in the lower house of congress in 2009 mid-term elections and is expected to sweep all 12 governors' races up for grabs in 2010.

In a remarkable reprise of the social unrest that detonated after runaway inflation excited hungry masses to rise up against the Diaz dictatorship 100 years ago, an abrupt jump in gasoline and diesel prices that kicked in on the final day of 2009 has set off a chain reaction of protests in Mexico City and the provinces.

On the first workday of 2010, 2000 truck drivers shut down key national highways for seven hours to protest the hikes -- in Puebla, the drivers were joined by 500 electricistas from nearby Necaxa, the so-called "cradle" of Luz y Fuerza and the SME. The success of the blockade in Puebla, Hidalgo, and Veracruz states has inspired truckers' association director Edmundo Morales to call for a national strike. Participation of the SME at the barricades may well be a precursor of increased worker solidarity in the coming year.

In Tepic, Nayarit, bus drivers protested the increase in fuel prices by parking their vehicles, paralyzing that provincial capital. Massive protests in Mexico City by independent unions and farmers' organizations are expected later in the month.

The price surge viscerally wounds a popular economy that was grievously lacerated in 2009. The Calderon government's annual daily minimum salary increase is less than 5% for 2010 and fails to match 6% inflation. The 2.60 peso a day "raise" does not even buy a ride on the Mexico City Metro that ferries millions of workers to their jobs each day.

On New Year's morning, the leftist Mexico City government of Mayor Marcelo Ebrard raised the heavily subsidized Metro ticket price from two to three pesos a ride. The back of the ticket now reminds riders that the real cost is nine pesos.

A survey of public markets reported by the left daily La Jornada calculates a 30% rise in the basic food basket in the first week of 2010, largely due to fuel and electricity rate increases -- tortillas, the essential nourishment for 26,000,000 Mexicans living in extreme poverty, leaped 10% a kilo throughout central Mexico.

Much like Obamaland, where the President crows about recovery in a jobless economy, Calderon pledged in a nationally-televised New Year's message that 2010 will be a "year of recuperation" for Mexico although his predictions of 3% growth seems delusionally rosy -- in 2009, the Gross National Product contracted 7% and growth was negative.

Unemployment, as measured by the government's obfuscated system, is at a 15 year high of 6.8% -- in the real world 6.8% translates to 40% of the work force not working, according to social economist Julio Boltvinik. 100,000 jobs are reportedly being lost each month (nearly 50,000 went down the tubes in October when Calderon fired the Luz y Fuerza workers.) But there is light at the end of the tunnel: according to the Wall Street Journal, a half million Mexican workers have found employment in the illicit drug industry.

The much-respected Economist Intelligence Unit's yearly ratings of political instability take into account the socio-political dynamic in 165 countries. In 2010, Mexico places in the upper third of nations at risk of violent political upheaval. Whether this is an indicator of resurgent revolution here in 2010 is a story...


To Be Continued

***

During the next three months, John Ross will travel the U.S. from sea to stinking sea with his new cult classic El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City which the New York Post (!) recently recommended as a "gritty, pulsating" read. For suggested venues (particularly in the Chicago and St. Louis areas) write johnross@igc.org.