by Andrea Pason and Billy Wharton, co-chairs Socialist Party USA -

July 28, 2010 - The recent disclosure of thousands of top-secret documents by Wikileaks and the Washington Post media project “Top Secret America,” makes one point perfectly clear – the American people need to act now to stop the US military and the growing security state. With hundreds of bases worldwide and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military constitutes the greatest threat to peace in the world. Simultaneously, a growing security state threatens to shred any semblance of civil liberties and personal freedom at home and abroad.

The Wikileaks documents that were bravely secured by Bradley Manning and published by Julian Assange reveal a US military operation in Afghanistan that has violated nearly every tenet of international human rights. Presidents George Bush and Barack Obama both openly lied to the American people about the conduct of the military and the status of the wars. The use of CIA-trained death squads, the manipulation of the puppet government of Afghanistan and the consistent use of drone bombers all reveal a war that cannot be won being carried out by a military willing to commit acts of aggression against a defenseless civilian population. These documents prove decisively that the truth is indeed the first casualty of war.

The “Top Secret America” report reveals a growing security state that is as active domestically as it is internationally. This security apparatus constitutes the single greatest threat to civil liberties throughout the world. The post-9/11 US security state is responsible for torture, extraordinary renditions, false imprisonment, racial profiling and covert assassinations. All of this has been done secretly, in the name of the American people.

It is, therefore, the responsibility of the American people themselves to put an end to the military and security apparatus’ ability to operate. Building a mass movement that both demands the end of the current wars and reclaims civil liberties would be a first step in that direction. As democratic socialists, we believe that any non-violent action that seeks to disable or derail the US military machine is a just act.

Such a movement should also push for a permanent end to militarism by calling for an immediate 50% reduction in military spending as well as the closing of all American military bases abroad. The resulting “peace dividend” could be shared between necessary domestic social services and in repairing the global damage done by the US military. Once in motion, such a movement would find widespread support from peace loving people throughout the world. Only then, after the US is well along the road to disarmament, can serious discussions about global peace and reconciliation begin.

Now is the time to summon the courage of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. To protect them against the repression of the US government. To demand an immediate end to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And, to put our bodies on the line in support of a vision of the future that moves beyond capitalism and the wars it fuels.

by Socialist Party of Michigan -

LANSING - The Socialist Party of Michigan (SPMI), MI state party affiliate of the Socialist Party USA, filed the State-prescribed candidate nomination and acceptance certificates for seven party candidates for federal and state office on Monday, following its official selection of such candidates at its 2010 state nominating convention held in Ann Arbor last Saturday.

Though decades have passed since the last time the Michigan Secretary of State’s office formally recognized the Socialist Party’s qualification to nominate candidates for any partisan elections in the state , the Party formally filed its nomination certificates with the Secretary of State's Bureau of Elections office this year in order to concord with a lawsuit the Party filed in the state’s 30th Circuit Court (Ingham County) last Wednesday against Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land, in her official capacity; challenging the constitutionality of the present Michigan statute governing political party ballot access (M.C.L. § 168.685) and seeking a court order requiring the Secretary of State’s office to once again provide a properly labeled party column on the Michigan ballot listing the Socialist Party’s nominees. The case, Socialist Party of Michigan, et al. v. Land (#10-867-CZ) is currently pending an August hearing before the court’s chief judge, Hon. William E. Collette.

Having last held Michigan ballot access in 1977, following its subsumptive merger with the then Michigan ballot-qualified “(Socialist) Human Rights Party, “the Party has continued to run candidates in recent general elections, while having to rely on qualifying its candidate slate each election year through various disparately labeled combinations of secondary candidate nominations from the Green or Natural Law parties, independent “no party affiliation” qualifying petitions, and certified write-in status. While prohibiting parties from qualifying at any local or regional level, Michigan is also among a minority of U.S. states which prohibit the candidates of any non-qualified party from listing their party label on the ballot, even when satisfying all the requirements to independently qualify their candidacies. .

While challenging the present Michigan statute on multiple different constitutional grounds, the Socialist Party’s case draws particular attention to the Michigan Constitution’s “Purity of Elections” clause, which the Michigan Supreme Court found to prohibit the state from imposing a higher standard of voter support on “new” parties seeking to qualify for the ballot than returning parties seeking to automatically return to the ballot (Socialist Workers Party v. Secretary of State, 412 Mich. 571 [1982]). The Party notes that since the time of that case, the legislature has twice amended the law to both drastically raise the voter support threshold for “new” parties to qualify, and greatly decrease the comparative access burdens for returning parties.

Consequently, while the number of votes that a party’s principal (i.e. highest vote grossing) candidate must receive in order retain his/her party’s ballot access has remained relatively stable since the MI Supreme Court’s 1982 Socialist Workers Party ruling - having risen by no more than 14%, - the signature burden for a “new” party seeking to qualify has since risen by over 107%. Moreover although Michigan’s 1978 General Election was the state’s only general election held between the original 1954 enactment of the present state election code and the close of the 20th Century, in which no “new” parties successfully became qualified, not a single new party has thus far qualified for the Michigan ballot in any of the past four state general elections; a period over which the signature threshold has now further skyrocketed by another 25%.

In addition to the tremendously uneven voter support thresholds now in place for “new” and returning parties, the case additionally challenges the ambiguous and frequently signature-chilling wording that the present MI statute requires to be printed on each sheet of any “petition to form [a] new political party,” as well as the lack of narrow tailoring or rational relation of Michigan’s present party access restrictions to any compelling or legitimate state interest, under the criteria outlined in prior opinions from both the federal and state courts. Correspondingly, the Socialist Party’s case charges that the presently applied ballot access statute only truly functions to test the scale of a “new” party’s financial resources, with respect to whether or not it's capable of raising and spending the many tens of thousands of dollars necessary to mount a successful petition drive within the statute’s 180 day time-window.

“By no means has the Socialist Party been alone highlighting the fact that Michigan’s present party access scheme measures nothing other than a ‘new’ party’s ability to make large scale financial expenditures,” said Socialist Party of Michigan Chair Matt Erard. “This is a point that has been officially affirmed and emphasized by every organizationally operative political party in the state, from across the political spectrum; except for the two thoroughly corporate-financed major parties, which correspondingly hold the exclusive power to legislatively formulate the state’s ballot access requirements for any “new” party that seeks to challenge them before the state electorate,” Erard said.

“The purely financial nature of the state’s presently formulated litmus test for party ballot access is further exemplified by the fact that the first and only party to hold the potential capability of breaking through Michigan’s decade-long freeze on successful new party petitioning campaigns, is a sham pseudo-party whose entire existence is owed to the mendacious bankrolling of one major party seeking to splinter off votes from the other,” Erard said in reference to the recently filed petitions to qualify a new “Tea Party” for the Michigan ballot, at the widely reported estimated expense of well over $100,000.

Further citing the fact that the Socialist Party of Michigan’s “principal candidates” have received between 3.5 and 4.5 times the number of votes required for subsequent party access in each of the past three state general elections, as well as a 2002 amendment to Michigan’s party ballot access statute, within which the state legislature removed the prior wording that had required that a party’s “principal candidate” must necessarily be listed in the party column of his/her principally associated party on the ballot, the Party’s court-filed complaint and summary disposition brief also provide an extensively grounded argument that the Socialist Party of Michigan has already satisfied the statute’s facial wording, even amidst the present statute’s constitutionally infirm level of discrimination and restriction. Accordingly, the Socialist Party is individually joined by Co-Plaintiff Dwain Reynolds in the suit, whose grounds for challenging the SPMI’s denial of ballot access stem from both his status as an SPMI-supporting voter and as Party’s “principal candidate” in the preceding general election of 2008.

Referencing both the federal district court’s restoration of the Socialist Party of Ohio’s ballot-access following the lawsuit it filed against the state of Ohio in 2008 after more than a half-century of Ohio ballot-exclusion, as well as the state of Wisconsin’s overwhelmingly more surmountable requirements for qualifying the Party’s candidates, Erard further contended that “Socialist voters in Michigan have every bit as much of a fundamental right to equal treatment and political expression at the ballot box as their politically aligned counterparts directly across our state's boundary lines.”

“As the oldest among Michigan’s present-day minor parties, the Socialist Party stands equally as committed to providing Michigan voters with a socialist alternative in the 2010 general election, as it did in Michigan elections held more a century ago – an alternative that speaks more immediately to present conditions and discourse in our state today than at virtually any time in our state’s history,” Erard added.

Serving collectively as the Socialist Party of Michigan’s nominated and certified 2010 electoral slate are the candidacies of Dwain Reynolds III of Middleville for the State Bd. of Education; Diana Demers of Westland for University of Michigan Bd. of Regents; Michael Crawford of Flint for Michigan State University Bd. Of Trustees; James Arnoldi of Willis for Wayne State University Bd. of Governors; John Longhurst of Alpena for 1st district Representative in Congress; Matt Erard of Detroit for 13th district Representative in Congress; and Michael Treacy of Marquette for 109th district State Representative.

Here is a video on ballot access laws in Oklahoma:

On Tuesday July 27th, the National Organization for Marriage “Summer of Marriage Tour" came to Mad-Town (Madison, WI) for a rally at the Capitol to spew their hatred for the LGBT Community and to say that Gays have no rights and can never have any rights to be joined in a civil union, and to speak of the sanctity of Straight Only Matrimony. In opposition protesters Gay, BI, Transgender, and their "Straight Allies" from all across the state turned out by the hundreds to show their support for full equality. Among them was the Socialist Party of South Central Wisconsin.

The march began at 11:45 and the protesters reached the Madison Capitol building where the N.O.M. rally had just started. The protesters were stopped at the sidewalk by protest organizers. A few protesters didn't stop at the sidewalk they went straight up the capitol steps to confront N.O.M. Sam Klepfer of the Socialist Party of So. Central Wisconsin and member of the SP-WI State executive committee motioned for the protesters to come to the top of the stairs and they did it was at this time that the organizers lost control of the rally. 466 protesters stormed the capitol steps and surrounded N.O.M. who were safely surrounded by yellow police line tape and only a hand full of police. The protesters started screaming, "We have Rights". Members of the local Anarchist Black Bloc were also there and were reaching across the yellow tape and giving "free hugs" as a peaceful message that one Anarchist said to a NOM supporter We are all one people and we are all equal should be able to hug each other" to the NOM supporters some welcomed the hugs and others didn't. Matty O'Dea Secretary of the SP-So. Central Wisconsin and Vice Chair to the State got into a verbal conflict with one N.O.M. supporter who called Matty a "F@$#ing Faggot" after Matty yelled "You cant spell Revolt without Love."

One organizer made it known that the Capitol Police had stated that the organizers need to get the crowd under control because they didn't want a riot on they're hands and that The Capitol Police were starting to get nervous. This came about after one LGBT Protester yelled out "REMEMBER STONEWALL 1969" The protest ended in peace no arrests were made and the protesters feel that their voice was heard by the N.O.M. bigots.

from Socialist Party of South Central Wisconsin

by World War 4 Report -

Amid the thousands of pages of classified US military documents released July 25 by the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks are details of nearly 200 incidents that involve Task Force 373, an elite Special Forces unit tasked with hunting down and killing enemy combatants in Afghanistan. Documents indicate the unit has also been responsible for the deaths of numerous civilians, Afghan police officers, and, in one particularly bloody raid, seven children.

The documents indicate that in June 2007, Task Force 373 in search of Taliban commander Qari Ur-Rahman, engaged in a night firefight with suspected insurgents, and called in a helicopter gunship to take out the enemy. Only later did they realize that seven of those killed and four of the wounded were Afghan National Police. The incident was labeled a misunderstanding.

In another mission, members of Task Force 373 conducted a secret raid, hoping to capture al-Qaida commander Abu Laith al-Libi. Five rockets were launched into a group of buildings, but when forces moved into the destroyed area they found six dead insurgents—and seven dead children. Al-Libi was not among the dead.

The summary of the incident says initial checks showed no indications that children would be there. And it quotes an Afghan governor later saying that while the residents there were in shock, they "understand it was caused ultimately by the presence of hoodlums—the people think it is good that bad men were killed."

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who organized the release of the documents, said he believes these are among "thousands" of US attacks in Afghanistan that could be investigated for evidence of war crimes.

US Special Operations missions in Afghanistan have been criticized by human rights groups. “You have people going in with a kill list and the public accountability simply doesn't exist,” said Sarah Knuckey, director of the Project on Extrajudicial Executions at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law. She went to Afghanistan in 2008 to interview dozens of civilians who had complained of indiscriminate military attacks.

"We didn’t hear specifically the name 373, but it's clear, judging by what’s been on WikiLeaks—if [WikiLeaks'] information is correct—that what civilians told us is true," she told CNN (Raw Story, July 27; CNN, July 26)

July 27, 2010 – At 4PM EST on July 27, the Bradley Manning Support Network will begin accepting online donations for the legal defense of Private First Class Bradley Manning.

The Network, a grassroots initiative formed to defend and support accused whistleblower Pfc. Bradley Manning, has partnered with Courage to Resist, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting military objectors.

Manning, a 22 year old intelligence analyst stationed in Iraq, stands accused of disclosing a classified video depicting American troops shooting civilians from an Apache helicopter in 2007. Eleven adults are killed in the video, including two Reuters employees, and two children critically injured. The video, available at www.collateralmurder.com, was published by WikiLeaks on April 5, 2010. No charges have been filed against the soldiers in the video.

Bradley Manning faces up to 52 years in prison if convicted of the charges against him.

While news sources have speculated about Manning’s involvement in a new leak of over 90,000 secret documents (collectively known as the Afghanistan “war logs”) made public by WikiLeaks on Sunday, no charges regarding this recent breach have been filed.

As of this writing, Manning has not yet chosen a civilian attorney to defend him in the expected trial. While several news sources had previously indicated that funding for Manning’s legal counsel was already arranged, the Bradley Manning Support Network states that there is an immediate need for donations to his legal defense.

Legal defense in this case will be particularly expensive because any legal team will most likely need a background in military law and the flexibility to travel overseas for the trial as well as secret security clearance.

“We have heard from the family and the military lawyers assigned to Bradley that the cost of his defense will be significant,” said Mike Gogulski, an online activist and founder of the Bradley Manning Support Network. “We are also concerned that Bradley may choose his legal counsel based on his available funds. If he fears his family will absorb the cost of the trial, he might choose a less experienced, less expensive attorney. We’re very concerned about the ramifications of such a decision.”

The Bradley Manning Support Network passed a resolution on July 12, 2010 to begin fundraising for Manning’s legal defense. At this time, the Network estimates between $50,000 and $200,000 in legal fees and expenses will be needed to mount a vigorous defense on behalf of Manning. They have also indicated that WikiLeaks, who published and promoted the Collateral Murder video, has promised a significant donation to Manning’s defense.

“If Manning is the source of the video, then he did what he had to do to expose a possible war crime. So regardless, he’s wrongly imprisoned and we want to do everything possible to support him,” said Jeff Paterson, Project Director of Courage to Resist. “I know from past experience working with military objectors that public support and the right civilian defense team can be the difference between an administrative separation and years in the stockade.”

***
For more information visit Help Bradley Manning

by Jamie Way -

July 28, 2010 - The Costa Rican Supreme Court last week agreed to take a case challenging the constitutionality of a US-Costa Rican agreement that would allow for a massive US military presence. The agreement cannot go into effect until the Supreme Court rules, thus postponing the arrival of US forces.

On July 1, Costa Rica’s unicameral Legislative Assembly, with 31 votes out of 57, approved the US Embassy’s request to open the country to 46 US warships, 7,000 US soldiers, 200 helicopters and two aircraft carriers. This permission was granted through at least Dec. 31 of this year, officially justified by the necessity of fighting drug-traffickers, providing humanitarian services and providing a place for US ships to dock and refuel. While most reports have put a Dec. 31 expiration date on the agreement, the Nicaraguan media last week reported that Costa Rican Foreign Minister Rene Castro, in a meeting with Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Samuel Santos, said that the agreement is for five years.

Prior Joint Patrol bilateral agreements between the countries allowed only US Coast Guard presence with Costa Rican law enforcement aboard. The US Coast Guard was permitted to follow vessels into Costa Rican waters while in pursuit and awaiting Costa Rican officials. Thus, the new agreement represents a substantial increase in the allowance of US military presence in Costa Rica, a country that abolished its army in 1948 and has a policy of neutrality.

The legislature’s approval of the bilateral agreement has not gone unchallenged. A substantial legislative opposition has formed, including representatives from the Broad Front, Citizen Action Party and the United Social Christian Parties. The opposition has challenged the constitutionality of the agreement, citing Article 12 of the Costa Rican constitution. Article 12 restricts the reasons that military forces may form and states that they must always remain under Costa Rican civilian control. Last week, the Costa Rican Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. This is encouraging news for the opposition regardless of the outcome, because the agreement cannot go into effect until the Court issues a ruling on the constitutional question. There is no indication about when the Court may issue a ruling.

Civil society as well is organizing to oppose the US military presence in its waters and on its soil. Distrust of US motives is widespread in light of the tacit US government support for the Honduran coup, the agreement with Colombia to use seven bases there, and tensions between Colombia and Venezuela in which Venezuelan forces are on high alert in preparation for a possible attack from Colombia. Costa Ricans have reacted by holding forums and protests. Student groups as young as high school have started to form in opposition to the US military presence. Some have created Facebook pages and posted YouTube messages representing civil society’s desire for a peaceful and sovereign nation, like this one:

While Costa Rican officials and civil society have proven themselves to be a formidable force in opposition to the spread of US militarism, it is vital that we in the United States make our voices heard in support of our Costa Rican sisters and brothers.

from Narco News

The following is an excerpt of an interview from the New Left Project with historian Norman Finkelstein. For the full version please click here

A recent article by Peter Beinart in the NYRB, which has got everyone talking…

Yeah, he took my whole book.

Yeah, basically just copied your whole thing. You wrote that the Goldstone Report signalled the “implosion of that unstable alloy – some would say oxymoron – called liberal Zionism’. He argues that:

“For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.”

We’re now a year and a half since the Gaza massacre. What’s your sense of the current intellectual climate in the US? Have the trends that you discussed in your book intensified?

The flotilla accelerated all the trends I wrote about. The title of the book was ‘This Time We Went Too Far’ – one of my editors, the day after the flotilla bloodbath, wrote to me: ‘This Time They Really Went Too Far’. So it was an acceleration of the lunacy and the craziness and also the disaffection by Jews for Israel. On the eve of and then right after the flotilla bloodbath there was a large outpouring of real hostile Jewish sentiment saying, ‘we’re not going to have anything more to do with this’. Following in Beinart’s footsteps, you saw quite a lot of it.

I thought the reaction to Beinart’s piece was interesting, in that it confirmed his diagnosis. The response was mostly positive, with the exception of a few increasingly isolated islands of criticism. So you had Jeffrey Goldberg, for example, describing a “claustrophobic feeling” that occurs when one is “locked in a small room (decorated, ambivalently, in blue and white) with Peter Beinart and Jon Chait and… well, that’s the point, isn’t it?” (He managed to name Tom Friedman and Leon Wieseltier – the latter of whom was surprisingly critical about the flotilla attack).

Right. It’s becoming a heroic cause to defend Israel now. It puts you in some really unsavory company. Who’s left now? Alan Dershowitz and Abraham Foxman. The ranks are dwindling.

So do you think there has been a sea change in how the conflict is discussed?

Oh yes, definitely. You saw it in even in the editorials the day after the flotilla bloodbath. The New York Times editorial said, [paraphrasing] ‘the siege has got to go’ – that was very unusual: ‘period, it’s got to go, it’s indefensible’.

What do you think the Netanyahu government’s objectives are with respect to Palestine?

I think one has to be careful: it’s not ‘Netanyahu’, its Netanyahu and Barak. Barak is the Defense Minister. It’s a Labor-Likud government. And Peres is certainly not outside the consensus – he’s the President, and he’s actually the most lunatic of all. Or ‘Sir Shimon’, since you people knighted him.

I am sorry about that.

Apology not accepted. You know Sir Shimon said that the reason the naval commandos were attacked on the boat was because they were so humane. *laughs*

I thought it was interesting that the recent revelations about his role in trying to sell nuclear weapons to the South African apartheid regime, praising their shared “values” and “hatred of injustice”, don’t seem to have dented his ‘man of peace’ image much.

Nothing he says dents his image! That’s one of the things about power: nothing sticks. Everything he says – he calls Goldstone a “small man” with “no real understanding of jurisprudence”, he says the naval commandos were attacked because they were so humane…it doesn’t make any difference. He gets knighted, he gets peace prizes, nobody cares.

Would you say there are any alternatives within the Israeli mainstream?

No.

Tzipi Livni?

She’s the one who said Israel “demonstrated real hooliganism” in Gaza because “I demanded it” and I’m “proud” of it. She’s awful.

You have to make a strategic decision about where you’re going to focus your energies and your efforts and I think it’s a waste of time to be looking at power. We have no control over them except to the extent that we can mobilize our own forces to try to impose our agenda. The kind of politics that some elements of the left get involved in, this reading of tea leaves – ‘what is Barack Obama thinking?’, ‘what is Tzipi Livni thinking?’ – is a show of impotence. People who have their own power don’t care what the other ‘side’ is thinking; they concentrate on how to force them to think what we want them to think. That’s why, for example, Gandhi never cared about what the British were thinking. Gandhi was concerned about organizing the Indians. He only went to negotiate with the British once – in London in 1932. That’s all. His roots were in India and he was trying to organize and muster all the forces he could in India, and that should be our approach. It is misguided to focus on elections, and on Obama, and on Livni – they are fairly stable elements of power except when popular resistance or objective circumstances cause them to change course, and then there are modifications in their policies. I don’t think we should squander time and energy on those sorts of developments, none of which we have any control over except to the extent that we organize ourselves.

Switching topics somewhat - Hamas: an obstacle to peace?

Well, you know, Hamas has said it’s willing to accept a resolution of the conflict on the June 1967 borders and that’s all they’re required to do. All this talk about recognizing Israel and recognizing Israel as a ‘Jewish state’ is totally ridiculous.

And on the issue of the Palestinian refugees?

Hamas’s position on the refugees is that of international law. I’m not dogmatic, but on the other hand I have no right – neither do you, neither does anybody – to tell Palestinians to forego their rights. The right of return of the Palestinian refugees and succeeding generations that have maintained genuine links with the land – that’s the official formulation – is embodied in international law, it’s the position of mainstream human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, it’s the position of all the members of the UN except for the US, Israel and a handful of south sea islands, so we have no right to tell them to relinquish or to forego that right. What you can do is say three things.

First, we can ask how many people really want to exercise their right to return. Sometimes Palestinian fundamentalists talk about 6 million Palestinian refugees going back to Israel. I don’t think 6 million want to, I don’t think 6 million will, I don’t think 6 million are so possessive of that right. Realistically speaking the main issue, leaving aside the refugees in Gaza and the West Bank, is the 200,000 Palestinians in Lebanon. So the first thing we can do is to avoid creating a sense of panic about what implementation of this right means.

Secondly, we should say that if you’re serious about wanting to implement the right of return, it becomes a question of how much force we can muster to gain its implementation. In my opinion it will require more force to implement than to implement a full Israeli withdrawal, where there is what you could call a ‘strong’ international consensus, as opposed to a ‘weak’ international consensus in favour of a right of return. There’s an international consensus on both issues, but it’s weaker on the issue of the return of the refugees. To turn a ‘weak’ international consensus into a ‘strong’ one requires mustering force, and I don’t know how much force can be mustered.

The third thing to say is that Palestinians are reasonable, and you have to present them with a reasonable offer and then see how they react to it. You can’t tell them to give up a right, but you can say, ‘this is the maximum amount of force we think we can muster, this is the offer that’s being made, do you want to accept it?’

You were in Gaza last year and you met with Hamas figures. What sense did you get of their thinking?

I couldn’t tell anything. They listened to me but they didn’t maintain contact with me. I doubt they trusted me and there’s no reason why they should – they don’t know me. People I talked to seemed reasonable, but I have to emphasise ‘seemed’, because I don’t know them.

The current situation in Gaza doesn’t look particularly stable. Do you think there’s another major round of violence on the horizon?

No, I don’t think Israel is prepared now for major violence. It’s going to have to think through what it’s doing. After a succession of blundered operations, they’re going to have to really think about how to proceed. So I don’t see a war in the short-term. The biggest loser, obviously, has been the Palestinian Authority – so-called “Palestinian”, so-called “Authority” – which will probably agree to some sort of national unity government because it’s going down the tubes. And Hamas will be able, pretty much, to call the terms of the national unity government.

Is the PA and the Fatah leadership, as some of its critics have charged, “collaborating” with the occupation, and if so, why?

They’re collaborators. First of all, there’s an odd thing: people seem to think collaborators go around shouting ‘I’m a collaborator’, but in fact collaborators never formally proclaim themselves to be collaborators. Even if you look at people like Chief Matanzima of Transkei, when Transkei was one of the first Bantustans to be formally recognized as a state by South Africa, he used to give every once in a while these fiery speeches denouncing South Africa and saying that he would liberate all of South Africa. That was even more true of Chief Buthelezi, the head of Inkatha. So it’s the same thing: every once in a while this character named Saeb Erekat, every month he says ‘we’re going to have a state in three months’. He’s such a preposterous idiot! In fact what they do is police the West Bank for Israel. People aren’t as harsh on Fayyad – my friend Mouin Rabbani, whose judgement I respect, says he is a nationalist. Mouin says his strategy won’t get anywhere, but it’s not like he’s doing it because he’s corrupt. I’ll defer to Mouin’s judgement – he knows Fayyad, he’s been there. Abbas, on the other hand, is brain-dead. The peak of his intellectual performance was when he wrote his doctoral dissertation denying the Nazi Holocaust, and since then it’s been downhill. *laughs*

You suggested after the flotilla debacle that the Israeli state is entering a “lunatic” phase. What do you mean by this?

I think that they wanted, with the flotilla, to recreate an Entebbe-like commando raid. But Entebbe was a hijacked plane, this was a humanitarian convoy. The whole idea of launching a dead-of-night armed commando raid on a humanitarian convoy was just completely insane. They thought they were going to be able to boast that ‘we’re still what we were’, because it was their elite force, their naval commandos. And both Barak and Netanyahu come from a commando background: Barak was Netanyahu’s commander - when they were in the commando team together in the early ‘70s they did a couple of operations, like in ’72 - and Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother was the one who led the raid on Entebbe and was the only one killed. Barak has his own famous story, when he dressed as a woman to kill senior members of the PLO in Lebanon. So they thought, after all the bungled up operations, climaxing at that point in the Dubai mess, that they were going to refurbish Israel’s image with this commando raid. But it was totally nuts. Not to mention that it was bungled yet again.

Over a year on from the Gaza massacre, what’s the current status of the Goldstone Report?

It’s dead. It’s been replaced by the flotilla. The big loser of the flotilla bloodbath was the Palestinian Authority, and the big victor was Richard Goldstone – his burden has been lifted! It is funny, because for the past year and a half Israel has been saying ‘we’ve got to get rid of the Goldstone Report!’, and now they’ve got rid of it but not quite the way they wanted. If Netanyahu had any brains he would say, “what do you mean ‘no achievements’? I got rid of the Goldstone report!”

Finally, are there any projects that you’re working on these days that you’d love to share with us?

No, I’m not going to prove e=mc…quadrupled…*laughs* I have my little things I work on, very modest projects, just trying to set the facts straight and get the truth right in one tiny tiny tiny corner of the world.

from the New Left Project

by Lawrence Rockwood -
A Dictionary of 20th-Century Communism, Silvio Pon and Robert Service (eds): (New Jersey: Princeton, 2010).

A Dictionary of 20th-Century Communism is an encyclopedic reference of “actually existing socialism” dominated by the historical experience of the Soviet Union and its European satellites. There is certainly a European flavor to the work as evidenced by the fact that the more than 400 entries are authored by 160 academics, 120 of whom are associated with European academic institutions. However, for socialists, this base of knowledge of the historical legacy of the most important revolutionary event in the 20th century, the Russian Revolution of 1917, is indispensable. The editors credit the opening of archives in former communist states and the subsequent new materials available to scholars for the first time as the inspiration for their project.

Some of the more interesting observations of the contributors include: a depiction of Lavrentiy Beria as a professionalizer of the Soviet security apparatus and, therefore, mitigating its excesses; argument for the continuity, rather than discontinuity, of the policies of Trotsky toward an evolution of Leninism toward Stalinism; the early manifestation of authoritarian centralism in the evolution of Lenin’s life work; and the intellectual contribution of Stalin in transforming the ideas of Marx and Lenin into the so-called positive sciences of dialectical and historical materialism.

Nevertheless, this collection is far from being an example of post-Cold War anti-Soviet triumphalism. This is a needed work for socialists who are open to the lessons of actually existing socialism in all its successes and failures. The Great Soviet Famine of 1932-33 and the Chinese Great Leap Forward of 1958-61 are not depicted as deliberate genocides, but systemic mistakes. The vast majority of deaths in the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s are not presented as the direct outcome of Leninist authoritarianism, but the policies of ethnic cleansing of a leader whose ideas on nationalism displayed striking similarities to those of Nazi Germany.

Someone strictly in the social democratic traditions can dismiss the inconvenient history of Communism in the 20th century as being of a different, unrelated political movement. This is not an option for those of use who call ourselves socialists; this is an enigma that will always perch itself on our shoulders and no amount of platitudes about revolutionary leaders will absolve us from having to address it. This work offers an opportunity for a critical confrontation.

The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 which created a "controlled" abolition of slavery in the British Empire went into effect on 1 August 1834 and had two important precedents. Mass rebellions of slaves in the British colonies of Demerara, Barbados and Jamaica preceded the legislation. The Jamaican revolt of 1832-33, known as the Baptist War, led to a loss of control over much of the Western part of island for almost a month. Simultaneously, anti-slavery advocates in Britain organized mass campaigns to demand an end to slavery. Thousands of everyday citizens participated in marches, sugar boycotts and signed petitions.

In practical terms, however, only slaves below the age of six were freed as all slaves over the age of six were redesignated as "apprentices". Apprentices would continue to serve their former owners for a period of time after the abolition of slavery, though the length of time they served depended on which of the three classes of apprentice they were.

The first class of apprentices were former slaves who "in their State of Slavery were usually employed in Agriculture, or in the Manufacture of Colonial Produce or otherwise, upon Lands belonging to their Owners". The second class of apprentices were former slaves who "in their State of Slavery were usually employed in Agriculture, or in the Manufacture of Colonial Produce or otherwise, upon Lands not belonging to their Owners". The third class of apprentices was composed of all former slaves "not included within either of the Two preceding Classes". Apprentices within the third class were released from their apprenticeships on 1 August 1838. The remaining apprentices within the first and second classes were released from their apprenticeships on 1 August 1840.

The Act also included the right of compensation for slave-owners who would be losing their property. The amount of money to be spent on the compensation claims was set at "the Sum of Twenty Millions Pounds Sterling". Under the terms of the Act the British government raised £20 million to pay out in compensation for the loss of the slaves as business assets to the registered owners of the freed slaves. The names listed in the returns for slave compensation show that ownership was spread over many hundreds of British families, many of them of high social standing. For example, Henry Phillpotts (the then Bishop of Exeter), in a partnership with three business colleagues, received £12,700 for 665 slaves. The majority of men and women who were awarded compensation under the 1833 Abolition Act are listed in a Parliamentary Return, entitled Slavery Abolition Act, which is an account of all sums of money awarded by the Commissioners of Slave Compensation in the Parliamentary Papers 1837-8 Vol. 48.

In all, the government paid out £20 million over 40,000 separate awards, which was equivalent to 40% of the government's total annual expenditure.

As a notable exception to the rest of the British Empire, the Act did not "extend to any of the Territories in the Possession of the East India Company, or to the Island of Ceylon, or to the Island of Saint Helena."

On 1 August 1834, an unarmed group of mainly elderly Negroes being addressed by the Governor at Government House in Port of Spain, Trinidad, about the new laws, began chanting: "Pas de six ans. Point de six ans" ("Not six years. No six years"), drowning out the voice of the Governor. Peaceful protests continued until a resolution to abolish apprenticeship was passed and de facto freedom was achieved. Full emancipation for all was legally granted ahead of schedule on 1 August 1838, making Trinidad the first British colony with slaves to completely abolish slavery.

from Wikipedia

Cindy Sheehan is the most recognizable anti-war activist in the US today. Since her son Casey's death in Iraq in 2004, she has thrown herself into anti-war organizing. One high point of her protests came in 2005 as she set up a Camp Casey across from the vacation ranch of then President George W. Bush to demand an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Following the election of Barack Obama the anti-war movement has gone into a tailspin, unable to mount serious national marches, stem the tide of military recruits or hold Obama to his deadlines. On the eve of a major Anti-war Conference in Albany, NY, Cindy Sheehan shares her thoughts on the future of the movement, the Democratic Party and the need for principled opposition to the war.

Billy Wharton - I understand that you were acquitted of the charges against you from the March 20th demonstration. Your attorney Mark Goldstone called it a win for free speech. Tell us more about the case.

Cindy Sheehan - On March 20, 2010 there was a mobilization called for in Washington D.C. by the ANSWER coalition and I was already having my campout with Peace of the Action on the lawn of the Washington Monument so we participated in the rally. I didn’t participate in the march. I’m against marching in front of empty buildings on a Saturday. So, I went back to my camp while they were marching. We were going back to the front of the White House, because we heard that all of the Democrats were coming to meet with Obama. They were rushing the Democrats to the White House. We went there to tell them, as loudly as we could, that we wanted the wars to end, that we want the corporate giveaways to the healthcare companies to end. That was when they were debating, not really debating, getting ready to vote for that horrible healthcare legislation.

When I got back, I heard all this commotion going on. I saw people, two of my friends, Elaine Brower from Military Families Speak Out and Matthis Chiroux of the Iraq Veterans Against the War. They were lying on the sidewalk in front of the White House and there were some coffins next to them and they were asking, literally begging, people to join them. I wanted to join them, even though I wasn’t planning on it, because it’s really sad that there were thousands of people there and four people lying on the sidewalk. I wanted to be in solidarity with all the people killed, even my own son.

They had set up some barriers that looked like bike racks. When I tried to get over them the bike rack fell down, so I crossed it. I was immediately body slammed. You see on the tape, two police officers pushed me, one handcuffed me and yanked my arms behind me and the person in charge literally hit me in the chest with a bullhorn. There were four of us arrested for crossing a police line, which was the barricades they set up, and four people were arrested for disobeying a lawful order and those were the people who were lying on the sidewalk.

We had a trial last Monday and the people who went to trial for crossing the police line were acquitted and the people who went for disobeying a lawful order were convicted. I am not so sure that that was a victory for free speech, even though Mark said that. Basically, we got off on a technicality. I’m hoping that the people who were convicted are going to appeal and then we can really bring up the 1st amendment issues.

I don’t want to be acquitted on a technicality. I don’t want to be arrested. I want the police in this country to protect me and my right to free speech. Not to oppress it like they have been steadily doing and getting worse since 9/11. That’s what we keep fighting for. We keep fighting for our rights to be protected not taken away from us.

BW – I had the very same feeling in an interview I did with Kathy Kelly. She spoke about having the charges against her from an action in the Capitol Building dropped. She really encouraged people to go into the courts and not be afraid to express your rights in the courts and become an activist in the courts. They ran a political case from the start and they didn’t want to get off on a technically. They also understood the larger political implications of their action.

CS - Yes, that’s the thing. Sometimes when I’ve been arrested, instead of trial I just paid the fine out of convenience. I didn’t want to go back to Washington D.C. and face a trial because I didn’t have the time or had other plans. I have been arrested there 13 or 14 times. I agree with her. I think we should be very Gandhi-like in our discipline and say that we don’t believe in these unjust laws or the unjust application and enforcement and arbitrary enforcement of them, then give me the maximum penalty. Or, if you don’t, then let me go. But, it is going to take a lot more than just a handful of people who are willing to sacrifice.

I had some guy tell me today, “Cindy, I don’t know how to help you, do you want me to come sit in jail with you? I don’t know how that is helping.” And I said, I don’t like to go to jail. I don’t like to go back to DC for trial. But, sometimes if you have morals and principles, it’s just the thing you feel compelled to do. I don’t want to say that you have to do it because there are always options and choices, but it is a thing you feel compelled to do. I was in jail for 52 hours after that arrest. In that whole 52 hours, I was given three bologna and cheese sandwiches, and I am a gluten-free vegan. I don’t eat bologna. I don’t eat cheese. I don’t eat bread. It’s freezing in jail. You have to lie on a cold cement floor. The boredom will get to you faster than the physical discomforts of it. I don’t like doing that. But, we actually feel like we have to make a principled stand.

BW - We are preparing for a big anti-war conference in Albany next week. Tell us what you are hoping to have come out of his meeting?

CS - I’m really distressed about the so-called anti-war movement right now. I actually just wrote a piece called “Requiem for the Anti-war Movement.” I think it’s done. I totally think that when the Democrats took power, back in 2007 and they continued to fund the wars and they continued to protect the Bush Administration from any kind of accountability, which Obama and his justice department are still doing. And, of course, the Democratic Party controlled Congress and the White House are still fully prosecuting, funding, expanding the wars and you hear hardly a peep out of the so-called movement.

So, when the Democrats took power back in 2007, they started to put the so-called movement on life support and Obama’s election has really killed it. It’s just really a shame that even though the policies continue, that people don’t have the same kind of ardor or commitment. It just makes me feel like for all those years we had an anti-Bush movement and not an anti-war movement.

This whole summer all these so-called peace groups or anti-war groups, have been doing their own conventions, their own meetings and if they would put all that aside, if they really wanted the wars to be over, instead of calling people from all corners of this huge nation to come to the convention where you just pass resolutions and get together, get drunk, get high, you know… I can say because it is a peace movement. Instead of doing that if people would have come to Washington, D.C. with us these last two weeks and went to Lafayette Park and brought their drums and their bullhorns and their guitars and their pots and pans, just to make a noise and say we’re not leaving until you end the wars. I think that would be more effective than all of these national conventions. Our protest dollar is shrinking a lot, along with every other dollar. We can’t be expected to go all over the country to go to all these different conventions. I wonder if our efforts, our energy is being misspent.

What I would hope comes out of Albany, would be if the movement is dead, then we have to just figure out new ways of doing things and be aggressive - instead of putting all of our efforts into the Democratic Party and electing Democrats. Partisan politics and being partisan is one of the reasons the movement was killed. We need a movement that is non-partisan and is principled around issues.

So many peace people supported Obama, I don’t even want to say peace people because Obama wasn’t a peace candidate, but so many of these so-called anti-war groups supported Obama even when he promised to send more troops to Afghanistan, even when he promised not to totally withdraw troops from Iraq.

BW - I think he was quite clear on all of those issues. There was not subtlety or hidden message. He was really straightforward about escalating.

CS - Absolutely. Yet these so-called anti-war groups supported him. I think that really deligitimized the movement. And there are just a few of us out there that didn’t. It’s just getting really hard to tow that principled line on policy and on what’s going on, without support and without a movement behind us. The National Assembly is very labor based and organized labor has also sold-out to the Democratic Party. We need a non-partisan worker’s movement. A worker’s movement that is based on principled policies and if we could build that in a really grassroots way into a political movement, that would be the best way. We really have to start organizing around issues and not around partisan politics.

BW - Let me ask you a couple of questions about tactics. I did read your essay “Requiem for an Anti-war movement.” I really sympathize with your position against the mass marches going into the empty cities on the weekends. I’ve done it so many times and it is a tremendously dis-heartening experience. I wonder though, is small-scale civil disobedience the answer? Also, does not supporting the Democrats mean abstention from electoral politics or does it mean voting and campaigning for 3rd parties?

CS - Civil disobedience, I think, whether we do it with our bodies on the streets or whether we do it with national strikes or boycotts or other collective actions. I think that is the only way we can change things and I don’t think we do it on the small-scale. If we do it with our bodies it has to be a lot of people, but it doesn’t have to be as many people if we do something like a tax boycott. But if we do a general strike that has to be millions of people to be effective.

As far as electoral politics, I think that there are different tactics you can use for that. You can say that we’re going to boycott federal elections and so we are going to go to the polls, but we are only going to vote for state and local candidates or measures. That sends the message that no this is not apathy, so don’t even try to spin it as the voters are apathetic. We care very deeply about what is going on in this country. We care very deeply about what’s going on in our communities, but we are also sophisticated and we know that federal politics is a rigged game. The elections, the candidates and the politicians are owned by the corporations. They don’t get their instructions from the people that they govern. If we go and vote, I think we’re giving them legitimacy for their crimes. That’s what they can say.

If we want to work for a third party or independent candidates that we feel match our own belief system, we have to know, if we do this, that there is not going to be any success. Your candidate is not going to win. So, you have to do it in a way that is very issue and policy based and just try and get your message out as best as you can despite having this compliant establishment media we have.

I travel all over this country. I’ve talked to thousands and thousands of people since Camp Casey in the Summer of 2005 and I can guarantee you that most of the people that I’ve talked to their beliefs and what they talk about match more closely with Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney. But, the politicians that they vote for – they don’t match what they care about at all. Trust me, I know how hard it is to run a campaign. I ran against Nancy Pelosi in 2008. It’s really hard to run a principled issue-based campaign - not on superficial fluff or personality. I even had name recognition and I couldn’t get my message out. It’s almost like we have to start taking back this country, this nation one community at a time and start doing it in a very local committed way.

BW - The Socialist Party presents candidates every four years. We managed to get on the ballot in about 12 states. The ballot access laws are so –rigged against third parties.

CS - Oh, God. Tell me about it. When I ran for Congress against Pelosi, I was running as an Independent and the laws are just completely stacked against independents. California is one of the hardest states in the nation to get on the ballot. It is very very hard. They own the system. And people keep trying to beat them at their own game and it’s their game. We have to figure out a different game if we want any actual progressive peaceful change in this country.


BW - In your article "Requiem for an Anti-War Movement” you also spoke about some of the personal changes you have gone through. I personally identified with a lot of what you wrote about simplifying your life. You mentioned reducing your belongings to one u-haul. Tell us about what kind of road you have traveled personally.

CS - Before Casey was killed we were a working class family, struggling. At one point, I had three jobs so that we could keep our insurance. My ex-husband had his full-time job and I was working my three jobs. We struggled with having four kids – college, putting food on the table and health insurance. But, for a long time, even before Casey was killed, I really yearned for a simpler life where we really didn’t have to work that hard and have so many possessions.

After Casey was killed, it really put a lot of things into perspective. Just the other day I thought I lost something he gave me and I was just so upset and my daughter said, “Mom, it’s not Casey, It’s not your memory of Casey, it’s not your love for Casey. It’s just a thing. You’ll never forget Casey. You’ll never forget that gesture he made in giving that to you.” But, it turns out I didn’t lose it, so I felt a lot better.

Your things just tie you down. Thoreau pointed out that mortgage is French for “death pledge.” If you have a mortgage and you have a house, you need to keep the house up, if you go away, you have to get someone to watch your house and watch your things or water your plants or feed your animals… It’s almost like being shackled to something.

I just have cut back dramatically on my personal possessions and the space that I need to have my personal possessions in. No car, so that means that I don’t have to have that car insurance. It takes more planning to live this way, especially if you live in a city, but it’s also very liberating to pare your life down. Then you don’t have an excuse like I can’t make it that protest because I have to pay my car payment or I have to make my mortgage payment. I think the least amount of the phony monopoly money that we use as currency in this country that you have to live on, it makes you freer. This society worships possessions, it worships wealth, even when that wealth is concentrated in so few people and is sucking the rest of us dry. People need to re-arrange their priorities and think that if you don’t have three cars and five TV’s it doesn’t make you a bad person. You don’t have to yearn for possessions. It literally drives people to the brink of death. What was I doing working three jobs? What kind of life is that? If you make your life simper, you actually have a life!

BW - I have to let you know that there are many of us out there who share similar sentiments. You are not alone. Many of us have simplified out lives in order to engage in politics.

CS - I have been writing since before Camp Casey that if we don’t make voluntary sacrifices and, you know, this is not a sacrifice. I don’t have one TV. I don’t have one car. I have a few books that I like. I have a few mementos and pictures of my kids. And, it is not a sacrifice – giving up things is not a sacrifice. When you lose a child, that’s a sacrifice, not giving up this consumer crap. The establishment makes us think that we have to have these things or we’re not a whole human being.

I’ve never felt more whole than I do right now. Even with missing a child, personally I feel freer and less shackled than I did before. If I want to go somewhere, I can go somewhere. I don’t care about my stuff. It’s just stuff. It’s very liberating to live this way. I wish I could live simpler as a matter of fact. I wish I didn’t have to live so close to an airport. I wish I could not take so many airplanes that really bothers me that I have to fly so much. But, I feel right now, I have to do what I can while I can still do it. Maybe a far simpler life is a decade down the road for me. I don’t yearn for more and more things or more and more money, I live with less and less. It’s almost a fun game to play. What can you re-use? I like to use things now until they fall apart. Then I try to mend them. And I’m a horrible mender. It’s not about being cheap, it’s about being responsible.

BW - Let me ask the question that is on the minds of all of our readers. What about socialism? It seems like capitalism is hooked on war.

CS - I’m a big fan of socialism. I’m a big fan of communism – with a small “c,” not state Communism. I’ve been in socialist countries and I think they are extremely healthy. One of my favorite countries is Cuba, with their simple lifestyle. Nobody there is fabulously wealthy, but everybody has a roof over their head, everybody has a chance to go to university for free, healthcare, food…. As human rights not as privileges for the elite class. I think as long as socialism doesn’t become oppressive statism, it is very valuable.

I don’t pay my Federal income taxes because they mostly go for war – paying for old wars and future wars. But, if we had a healthy society that gave healthcare, education, housing, jobs, healthy foods as rights and not privileges then I would gladly pay my taxes to a state like that. I’ve seen socialism work. There’s never a completely perfect society, but I’ve seen a lot of happiness and health in socialism. And, we have socialism in the United States. Our libraries, our police, our fire department, our parks. Our military even. These are all state-sponsored services.

I would think that we could move, especially in these trying times, towards socialism and away from capitalism, corporate-fascism, whatever you want to call it. I always say I’m against capitalism and all the free market people attack me and say, “This isn’t capitalism, this is crony capitalism, this is corporatism.” I say, if you have a system that degenerates so quickly and seamlessly into fascism, then it’s not healthy. There’s no such thing as a free market. All capitalism is crony. All capitalism is profit over people. I am 1000% people over profit. I’m 1000% for workers controlling the means of production and workers running their companies in a very democratic way. In a perfect society, I think that that’s what we would have.

BW - Democracy, participation and human rights.

CS - And no wars!

BW - At a meeting, someone mentioned that perhaps the World Cup could be a substitute for war.

CS - Put Barack Obama in the ring with Ahmadinejad. Just no more of these wars for profit. These capitalist wars. That’s what they are.

***
Cindy Sheehan will be a featured speaker at the Socialist Party's 2010 National Organizing Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. For more information CLICK HERE

Joint Statement of the Socialist Party of Central Virginia and the Richmond Industrial Workers of the World


The members of both the Socialist Party of Central Virginia and the Richmond Industrial Workers of the World would like to extend their deepest congratulations to the announcers of WTJU and the community of Charlottesville for their recent victories in retaining democratically selected programming at the radio station, and we share in your your celebration!

We wholeheartedly recognize, and respect, that this struggle was waged by the dedicated volunteers at WTJU and the listeners that support them, we are happy to have been able to contribute in some way to that effort!

Additionally, we wholeheartedly recognize, and respect, that this struggle is far from over. We stand prepared to remain in solidarity with the announcers and community supporters as they continue to ensure that WTJU remains a place where culture and education is in the capable hands of people who are intrinsically aware of the delicate and important place community run radio holds worldwide.

It is our belief that the arts are an integral part of daily life, that music treated as a commodity, produced or dispersed purely for financial gain is antithetical to true artistry, and that attempts to make educational, cultural, and musical institutions more competitive in a commercial market is folly to the highest degree. In short, we hope you might agree that art should be produced and disseminated not for profit, but for the bettering of our lives. We acknowledge that WTJU may be the last of it's kind in resisting musical hegemony, and com-modification of the arts, and we applaud your hard fought battle as being a part of a larger, worldwide, struggle to promote the arts and arts education as something being worthwhile, a necessity for a better life for all.

Furthermore, we are inspired when we see workers, yes volunteers are workers too, gathering in unity to better their situations and workplaces. Even more inspiring is when workers are not only exerting their authority and expertise over their own workplaces, but actively struggling for a better community and world. The announcers of WTJU have done an incredible service to musical and educational culture. Not for profit, but to better the world. Your efforts are a testament to the natural desire of humanity to live in peace and prosperity despite what their bosses want.

We urge you to continue to struggle to make this victory a long lasting one. We highly encourage you remain in solidarity with one another and to organize into some kind of organization, be it an IWW union, or simply an organization of volunteers. We also encourage you to remember this fight whenever you see workers engaged in efforts to better their lot in life. Remember all of the people who took action to support your efforts, and remember to return the favor to your fellow workers involved in struggles everywhere. Please recognize that activism and worker solidarity are worthwhile efforts and bring about changes that not only affect individual workplaces, but also better humanity and our world.

You don't have to be a union member or a socialist to enjoy the benefits of organizing, but please recognize that your struggle is a grand example of the type of organizing our two groups believe are the most important, that is that workers and communities should hold the ultimate authority over their workplaces and communities, not bosses, not corporations, not profits.

In Celebration, Unity, and Solidarity
Richmond Industrial Workers of the World
Socialist Party of Central Virginia

by Doug Henwood

May 17, 2010 - For a long time, I’ve been critical of the left-wing penchant for economic crisis. Many radicals have fantasized that a serious recession—or depression—would lead to mass radicalization, as scales simultaneously fell from millions of pairs of eyes and the imperative of transcending capitalism became self-evidently obvious. I’ve long thought that was nonsense, and now there’s empirical support for my position.

In his column on May 17, Paul Krugman cites research by Markus Brückner and Hans Peter Grüner showing that recessions boost the vote for extreme right-wing and nationalist parties. As Krugman argues, this helps explain the rise of the Tea Partiers and other strange life forms on the right. Of course, such critters are never far from the surface in American political life—but they do seem more salient these days.

Krugman’s little summary was tantalizing, so I tracked down the original. (The paper is here; a summary, here.) Brückner and Grüner looked at 16 European countries (Krugman wrongly implies that they also looked at the U.S., but they didn’t) from 1970 to 2002. They found that for every percentage point decline in GDP growth over two quarters, support for the far right rises by 0.136 percentage points. Though the finding is statistically significant, it’s not electorally so—that’s a pretty small effect. From their work, Brückner and Grüner estimate that even a sustained three-point decline in the growth rate might produce no more than a three-point gain in the far right’s electoral share.

The original paper said nothing about far left parties, so I wrote the authors to ask them if they’d looked into that angle. Grüner responded by sending an updated version of the paper that did. (It’s not up on the web yet, but should be very soon. I’ll post the link here when it is.) They find no significant effect of a growth slowdown on the vote share of communist parties. Brückner and Grüner speculate that a major selling point of far-right parties is “nontraditional” redistribution—not so much from rich to poor, but away from ethnic, occupational, or regional minorities. They don’t say why the appeal of “traditional” redistribution—from rich to poor—might not reflect the business cycle.

Whatever the reason, recessions are not good for the left and are good for the right. A major exception, of course, was the U.S. in the 1930s, but that one took the unemployment rate up to 25%. And that Great Depression didn’t do much for the left in Europe. So please, let’s put this one away and stop hoping for the worst.

from LBO Notes

from Democracy Now!


AMY GOODMAN: We continue with Goldman Sachs.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, while Goldman Sachs agreed Thursday to pay $550 million to resolve a civil fraud lawsuit filed by the SEC, Goldman has not been held accountable for many of its other questionable investment practices. A new article in Harper’s Magazine examines the role Goldman played in the food crisis of 2008, when the ranks of the world’s hungry increased by 250 million. The article is titled "The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It."

AMY GOODMAN: The author of the article, Frederick Kaufman, joins us now. He’s a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine.

Well, explain. We’re talking about Goldman Sachs today, this—they call it a landmark settlement, but they made more after-hours in trading last night than they will have to pay. So let’s look at Goldman Sachs and its record overall.

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Yeah, this is really—it’s really outrageous. And on a certain level, this reform bill is really a sham, because it does not cover, in any way, shape or form, what Goldman Sachs—and really, let’s be honest here, it wasn’t just Goldman; it was Goldman, and it was Bear, and it was AIG, and it was Lehman, it was Deutsche, it was all across the board, JPMorgan Chase—what these banks were able to do in commodity markets, really which reached its peak from 2005 to 2008, in what is now known as the food bubble. And as Juan points out, this is unconscionable what happened, in the sense that their speculation and their restructuring of these commodity markets pushed 250 million new people into food insecurity and starving, and brought the world total up to over a billion people. This is the most abysmal total in the history of the world.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, what were these commodities markets like before the Wall Street firms got involved? And you have a haunting picture, especially of the Minneapolis Exchange, what it was before, what it was like. Could you talk about how things operated and then what Goldman Sachs did precisely?

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: The wheat markets, in particular, in this country are the outcome of a process of development of over 150 years. And that is why, from about 1903 to 2003, the real price of wheat in this country has gone down. And this was one of the great reasons for America’s great twentieth century, the fact that we had cheap food, we had cheap bread. And Goldman, in 1991, came up with a new idea and a new product, which, as I said before, completely restructured this market and completely threw it out of whack.

But before we go there, we just have to maybe review for a second a little bit about how these markets worked and what kept that wheat price stabilized. And Juan, you mentioned the Minneapolis Grain Exchange, this kind of obscure syndicate in the Midwest, which is where the price of this particular kind of wheat, hard red spring wheat, which is the most widely traded wheat in the world, and it’s the most widely exported wheat from the American continent—we kind of set the world price on this wheat. This is where it happens. What’s the history of that price being stabilized is you have, traditionally, in the wheat futures market, two kinds of players: one of the farmers and the millers and the warehousemen—right? And this, of course, includes players like Domino’s Pizza and Sara Lee and General Mills, very large business, capitalist stakes are in this wheat market, right? And they are called bona fide hedgers, because they’re actually buying
and selling real wheat. As the price fluctuates in the futures markets, you also traditionally have speculators in this market, people who don’t want wheat, who wouldn’t have any place to put it if they bought it, but they’re making money off buy orders and sell orders, as the price fluctuates each day, and hopefully they’re bringing in some money for themselves every day. That’s the idea.

Now, the key here is that both the bona fide hedgers and the speculators, every time they buy, they’re also selling, and every time they sell, they eventually buy. So their positions are cleared off at the end of the day, OK? Goldman, we have to understand, and a lot of these banks, are not interested in the particular structure of any of these markets. I think it’s a lot of mistake people make when they think about how these bankers are working. We think that they’re actually interested in the markets. We think that they’re—no. What they’re after are very large pools of cash for themselves. They’re after accumulating huge pools of money that they can do with whatever they like on a day-to-day basis. Right? And so, Goldman, in 1991, came up with this idea of the commodity index fund, which really was a way for them to accumulate huge piles of cash for themselves. It wasn’t really about the markets, anyway. The market was just an excuse.
And so, the fact that they threw these wheat markets out of whack didn’t really matter to them.

How did this work? Instead of a buy-and-sell order, like everybody does in these markets, they just started buying. It’s called "going long." They started going long on wheat futures. OK? And every time one of these contracts came due, they would do something called "rolling it over" into the next contract. So they would take all those buy promises they had made and say, "OK, we still—we’re just going to—we’ll buy more later. And plus we’re going to buy more now." And they kept on buying and buying and buying and buying and accumulating this unprecedented, this historically unprecedented pile of long-only wheat futures. And this accumulation created a very odd phenomenon in the market. It’s called a "demand shock." Usually prices go up because supply is low, right? That’s the idea. There’s not a lot of supply, so the price goes up. In this case, Goldman and the other banks had introduced this completely unnatural and artificial demand
to buy wheat, and that then set the price up. Now, a lot of people are saying, "Oh, it was biofuel production. It was drought in Australia. It was floods in Kazakhstan." Let me tell you, hard red wheat generally trades between $3 and $6 per sixty-pound bushel. It went up to $12, then $15, then $18. Then it broke $20. And on February 25th, 2008, hard red spring futures settled at $25 per bushel. This is completely beyond the pale, particularly at a—

JUAN GONZALEZ: Almost ten times its historic price.

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Yeah. It was just completely out of control. And, of course, the irony here is that in 2008, it was the greatest wheat-producing year in world history. The world produced more wheat in 2008 than ever before.

And here’s the other outrage of it, which is that at the time that Goldman and these other banks are completely messing up the structure of this market, they’ve protected themselves outside the market, through this really almost diabolical idea called "replication," which is what I discovered when I was looking into how they had structured this. What they do—let’s say, Juan, you want me to invest for you in the wheat market. You give me a hundred bucks, OK? Well, what I should be doing is putting a hundred bucks in the wheat markets. But I don’t have to do that. All I have to do is put $5 in. Good-faith promise. And with that $5, I can hold your hundred-dollar position. Well, now I got ninety-five of your dollars. What am I going to do with them? Well, what Goldman did with hundreds of billions of dollars, and what all these banks did with hundreds of billions of dollars, is they put them in the most conservative—no fools, they—they put
them in the most conservative investments conceivable. They put it in T-bills. And then what did they do? Well, now that you have hundreds of billions of dollars in T-bills, you can leverage that into trillions of dollars. This is what I’m talking about, large pools of cash for themselves. And then they take that trillion dollars, they give it to their day traders, and they say, "Go at it, guys. Do whatever is most lucrative today." And so, as billions of people starve, they use that money to make billions of dollars for themselves.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the result was, as the price went up, that there were food riots around the world.

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Yeah.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And what about the human dislocation that occurred?

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Yeah, in 2008, there were food riots in more than thirty countries. The global price of food rose over 80 percent. This had an effect not only on wheat, but on corn, on soy, on cooking oil, on rice. You know, people talk about globalization. "We don’t need to set prices or have tariffs, because we’re globalized. You know, people can buy their wheat, anyway." Well, gee, guess what happened. When the price of wheat started to go through the roof, something new, which was something old, came up, called "nationalism," and people said, "OK, sorry, we’re closing our wheat, and we’re setting up tariffs." And you had—you had riots. You had hunger. You had a disaster. You had a global disaster, because, remember, in America, we’re spending maybe 15 percent of our weekly paycheck on food, right? I mean, maybe you remember, a couple years ago, why was that dozen eggs so expensive? Why was that milk so expensive? Why was that meat so
expensive? That’s 15 percent. For most people on the earth, they’re spending more than 50 percent of their daily income on their daily bread. And when their daily bread moves up 80 percent, they’ve just moved right into the ranks of the food insecure. And it was not only in Burkina Faso. This was in America. You had 49 million hungry families in America. You had one out of five children in America at soup kitchens. You had a million hungry people in Los Angeles.

So, I mean, it is unconscionable that Wall Street has completely lost touch with the reality. They’ve forgotten that there is their mathematical formula, there’s virtuality, on the one hand—"Gee, I can make a lot of money by making a formula"—and on the other hand, there’s reality. There are real things that they are affecting, and they’ve completely forgotten about it, to devastating effect.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think needs to be done?

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Well, the solution is interesting, and it certainly is not going to be solved by the financial reform bill we’ve just seen, because, of course, the people I talk to at the Minneapolis Grain Exchange and all over, they’re already prepared for every single trade being exchange-traded. The people at the Minneapolis Grain Exchange have already prepared 50,000 exchange-traded slots for anything that people want to trade. Now, when I was talking to the hedge fund guys and the traders and all my contacts on this, and I said, you know, "What if Wall Street—I’m sorry, what if the federal government regulates you?" they just laugh. They literally laugh. They scoff at federal regulators, because they’re like, "By the time they get around, they figure out what we’re doing, we’re so far beyond it." And in fact, the commodity index funds, the long-only commodity index funds that I looked at now, they’re already dinosaurs. They’re
onto second-, third- and fourth-generation reiterations of this. There’s no way the federal government is going to be on top of them, because they’re so far ahead.

So, what’s the other possibility? The other possibility is simply outlaw it, say, if you’re a bank, you’re not allowed a stake, you’re not allowed a stake in actual commodity markets. And I said to these guys, you know, "What if they just outlaw you?" And once again, rather unsurprisingly, their reaction is outright laughter, because it takes them about ten seconds to get over that problem. Either they make a phone call to London and do all their trading out of the London Exchange, or they do an over-the-counter swap with a Cargill or a Nestlé or a bona fide hedger, and it’s taken care of.

So what’s the solution? I think the best solution that’s been floated around in Washington in the groups I’ve been close to is an actual international or national grain reserve. I mean, we actually in this country, before this kind of mania of deregulation, had a farmer-owned grain reserve under the Clinton administration, real grain held back, so that in times of a bubble like this, regulators can say, "Look, you know, we have plenty of real wheat. Here’s a hundred million bushels of wheat. We can bring it to the market. We can bring that price back into a stable band." And this is, I think, in some ways, the best solution: real wheat to counter virtual madness.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, yet, as you were saying, that the Wall Street firms are always able to devise new ways to get around regulation. I was reading in today’s paper on the new bill, the financial regulation bill, that the banks have already devised new methods. For instance, that they are no longer able to charge such exorbitant interest rates on credit cards, so now they’re going to begin imposing fees on checking accounts. And they just come up with an immediate new solution to keep making huge amounts of money and getting around the regulators. So, even with this reserve situation that you raise about creating grain reserve, are there potentials for the Wall Street firms to figure out a new way to continue to control and make money off the food supply?

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Well, I think the theory behind what you’re saying, Juan, is called "market capture," in the sense that whenever you have a group of people, be they in the auto business or in the healthcare business, whenever they fear regulation from the government, this group is, of course, the most at-risk group. They are the ones who put more of their resources into understanding this regulation than anybody else, more of their lobbyists, more of their money into understanding what’s going on, and therefore, they’re the ones who ultimately—the people whose interest it touches most intrinsically are the ones who then capture that reform, market capture. So what I like about the grain reserve is that it’s actually outside of the purview, outside of the financial purview. As I said before, it’s no longer in the realm of the virtual; it’s no longer in the realm of the numbers. It’s actual real wheat, and you can actually bring it to
bear. You can bring it to markets. There was a complete madness for hard red spring wheat in 2008, when you had international orders coming in from Nigeria, from all over the world, and there literally was the perception that there was no wheat out there. And so this thing, as you say, goes up and up and up and up and up. If there is actually somebody who can say, who can bring real wheat and calm these markets, you’re going to save lives. It’s not just that you’re going to save mortgages or that you’re going to save, you know, finances; it is that, literally, you no longer have those outrageous numbers of starving people on earth, most of them women and children.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there. I want to thank you very much for being with us. "The Food Bubble" is Frederick Kaufman’s piece in Harper’s Magazine, "How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It." We’ll link to it at democracynow.org.