James Baldwin in London from George Dickson on Vimeo.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Global Plans to Replace the Dollar
Sources:
Chris Hedges, “The American Empire Is Bankrupt,” Truthdig, June 15, 2009, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090614_the_american_empire_is_bankrupt/.
Michael Hudson, “De-Dollarization: Dismantling America’s Financial-Military Empire: The Yekaterinburg Turning Point,” Global Research, June 13, 2009, http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=13969.
Fred Weir, “Iran and Russia Nip at US Global Dominance” Christian Science Monitor, June 16, 2009, http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0616/p06s12-woeu.html.
Lyubov Pronina, “Medvedev Shows Off Sample Coin of New ‘World Currency’ at G-8,” Bloomberg, July 10, 2009, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087 &sid=aeFVNYQpByU4.
Edmund Conway, “UN Wants New Global Currency to Replace Dollar,” Telegraph (UK), September 7, 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/currency/6152204/UN-wants-new-global-currency-to-replace-dollar.html.
Jose Arturo Cardenas, “Latin American Leftists Tackle Dollar with New Currency,” Agence France-Presse, October 16, 2009, http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ ALeqM5jisHEg79Cz8uRtYfZR6WK4JmWsIg.
Student Researchers:
Nicole Fletcher (Sonoma State University)
Krystal Alexander (Indian River State College)
Bridgette Grillo (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluators:
Ronald Lopez (Sonoma State University)
Elliot D. Cohen (Indian River State College)
Mickey Huff (Diablo Valley College)
Nations have reached their limit in subsidizing the United States’ military adventures. During meetings in June 2009 in Yekaterinburg, Russia, world leaders such as China’s President Hu Jintao, Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev, and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organisation took the first formal step to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The United States was denied admission to the meetings. If the world leaders succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value; the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket; and interest rates will climb.
Foreigners see the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) as Washington surrogates in a financial system backed by US military bases and aircraft carriers encircling the globe. But this military domination is a vestige of an American empire no longer able to rule by economic strength. US military power is muscle-bound, based more on atomic weaponry and long-distance air strikes than on ground operations, which have become too politically unpopular to mount on any large scale.
As Chris Hedges wrote in June 2009, “The architects of this new global exchange realize that if they break the dollar they also break America’s military domination. US military spending cannot be sustained without this cycle of heavy borrowing. The official US defense budget for fiscal year 2008 was $623 billion. The next closest national military budget was China’s, at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.”
To fund the permanent war economy, the US has been flooding the world with dollars. The foreign recipients turn the dollars over to their central banks for local currency. The central banks then have a problem. If a central bank does not spend the money in the United States, then the exchange rate against the dollar increases, penalizing exporters. This has allowed the US to print money without restraint, to buy imports and foreign companies, to fund military expansion, and to ensure that foreign nations like China continue to buy American treasury bonds.
In July 2009, President Medvedev illustrated his call for a supranational currency to replace the dollar by pulling from his pocket a sample coin of a “united future world currency.” The coin, which bears the words “Unity in Diversity,” was minted in Belgium and presented to the heads of G8 delegations.
In September 2009, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development proposed creating a new artificial currency that would replace the dollar as reserve currency. The UN wants to redesign the Bretton Woods system of international exchange. Formation of this currency would be the largest monetary overhaul since World War II. China is involved in deals with Brazil and Malaysia to denominate their trade in China’s yuan, while Russia promises to begin trading in the ruble and local currencies.
Additionally, nine Latin American countries have agreed on the creation of a regional currency, the sucre, aimed at scaling back the use of the US dollar. The countries, members of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), a leftist bloc conceived by Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez, met in Bolivia where they vowed to press ahead with a new currency for intraregional trade. The sucre would be rolled out beginning in 2010 in a nonpaper form. ALBA’s member states are Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Dominica, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Antigua and Barbuda.
The cycle supporting a permanent US war economy appears to be almost over. Once the dollar cannot flood central banks and no one buys US treasury bonds, the American global military empire collapses. The impact on daily living for the US population could be severe.
Our authors predict that in addition to increased costs, states and cities will see their pension funds drained. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. People will be increasingly charged for privatized utilities that were once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless.
Update by Michael Hudson
Foreign countries are presently seeking to create an international monetary system in which central bank savings do not fund the United States’ military deficit. At present, foreign “dollar holdings” take the form of US treasury bonds, used to finance the (largely military) US domestic budget deficit, a deficit that is largely due to military spending.
Russia, China, India, and Brazil have taken the lead in seeking an alternative system. But almost no information about such a system was available in the US or even the European press, except for a shorter version of my “De-Dollarization” article that I published as an op-ed in the Financial Times of London.
Discussions about creating an alternative monetary system have not been public. I was invited to China to discuss my views with officials there and to lecture at three universities, and was subsequently asked to write up my proposals for Premier Wen Jiabao, pending another visit just prior to this year’s meetings between China, Russia, India, and Brazil, with Iran attending with visitor status. All of this signals that other countries are seeking an alternative. Now that the euro has collapsed, there’s currently little alternative to the dollar as a reserve currency. This implies that there is no national currency that is a stable store of value for international savings.
Meanwhile, US money managers are leading the flight from the dollar to Brazil, China, and other “emerging market” countries. As matters stand, these countries are selling their resources and companies for free—as the dollars being spent to buy them end up in their central banks, to be recycled into US treasury bonds, or to be used to purchase euro debt that is plunging in international value.
The result of this conundrum is the pressure to end the postwar era of “free capital movements” and to introduce capital controls.
There has been almost no press discussion of my story or indeed of the issue itself. US and European media have successfully ignored the proposal of an alternative to the existing state of affairs.
Update by Fred Weir
This story illustrates one aspect of post–Soviet Russia’s search for a place in the US-led global order—a position that would reflect that country’s own distinct geopolitical interests and how it differs from the West in terms of history, culture, and level of economic development. Russia inherited from the former Soviet Union close relations with many countries that the US regards as “rogue states,” including Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela. There continues to be a lot of official, public sympathy for those countries and their opposition to the US global system, even though Moscow no longer has any grand sense of anti-Western ideology or even any practical goal of mobilizing toward an “alliance” that would serve Russia’s ends.
Under the George W. Bush administration, Moscow felt itself under pressure from what it viewed as Western encroachments into the post-Soviet space, what Russians term the “near abroad.” This took the form of “colored revolutions,” or what the Western media referred to as “pro-democracy uprisings” in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, which removed corrupt but Moscow-friendly regimes and brought to power much more outspoken and active pro-Western ones. The Kremlin, rightly or wrongly, interpreted these upheavals as US-sponsored and orchestrated attempts to reengineer the political loyalties of neighboring states with which Russia has deep historical ties. Two of those new leaders, Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili and Ukraine’s Viktor Yushchenko, sought to put their countries on a fast track to membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a prospect that Russia viewed with alarm bordering on panic. Another Bush-era initiative that engendered deep hostility in Moscow was a plan to station strategic antimissile interceptors in neighboring Poland, with associated radars in the Czech Republic. Russian military experts argued these deployments were the beginning of a strategic process that might eventually undermine Russia’s own aging, Soviet-era nuclear deterrent, which is the main priority of Russia’s national defense.
In response to these perceived threats, Russia seemed to sometimes go out of its way to cultivate relationships with other countries that were at odds with the US, which is the subject of this story. The Russians also held war games with the Venezuelan navy in the Caribbean, resumed cold war–era nuclear bomber patrols along the North American coast, and talked about revitalizing former Soviet air bases in Cuba.
In the past year, with substantially changed foreign policy priorities brought in by President Barack Obama, Moscow’s attitude has relaxed somewhat. Obama shelved the controversial plan to station antimissile weapons in Poland, and implicitly removed from the agenda any question of inducting Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. The so-called Obama “reset” of relations between Moscow and Washington seems to be improving prospects for cooperation, even on such thorny issues as Iran, though it may be too early to draw any firm conclusions.
See below for further references to articles I have written on this topic.
Stories on Russia’s overtures to Cuba and Venezuela:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2009/0910/p06s11-woam.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2009/0315/a-new-cuban-missile-crisis-russia-eyes-bomber-bases-in-latin-america
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2008/1125/p01s01-woam.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2008/0908/p01s06-woeu.html
Stories on Russia’s relations with Iran:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2010/0521/Russia-sanctions-unlikely-to-delay-Iran-nuclear-power-plant
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2009/0921/secret-israeli-deal-to-stop-russian-s-300-missile-sale-to-iran
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2009/0323/p06s01-woeu.html
Stories on US–Russian relations:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2010/0513/Leaked-Russian-document-Could-Medvedev-era-tilt-more-pro-West
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2010/0504/NPT-Obama-reveals-size-of-US-nuclear-weapons-arsenal.-Will-Russia-respondhttp://www.csmonitor.com/World/
Europe/2009/1028/p06s14-woeu.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2010/0513/Leaked-Russian-document-Could-Medvedev-era-tilt-more-pro-West
Chris Hedges, “The American Empire Is Bankrupt,” Truthdig, June 15, 2009, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090614_the_american_empire_is_bankrupt/.
Michael Hudson, “De-Dollarization: Dismantling America’s Financial-Military Empire: The Yekaterinburg Turning Point,” Global Research, June 13, 2009, http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=13969.
Fred Weir, “Iran and Russia Nip at US Global Dominance” Christian Science Monitor, June 16, 2009, http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0616/p06s12-woeu.html.
Lyubov Pronina, “Medvedev Shows Off Sample Coin of New ‘World Currency’ at G-8,” Bloomberg, July 10, 2009, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087 &sid=aeFVNYQpByU4.
Edmund Conway, “UN Wants New Global Currency to Replace Dollar,” Telegraph (UK), September 7, 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/currency/6152204/UN-wants-new-global-currency-to-replace-dollar.html.
Jose Arturo Cardenas, “Latin American Leftists Tackle Dollar with New Currency,” Agence France-Presse, October 16, 2009, http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ ALeqM5jisHEg79Cz8uRtYfZR6WK4JmWsIg.
Student Researchers:
Nicole Fletcher (Sonoma State University)
Krystal Alexander (Indian River State College)
Bridgette Grillo (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluators:
Ronald Lopez (Sonoma State University)
Elliot D. Cohen (Indian River State College)
Mickey Huff (Diablo Valley College)
Nations have reached their limit in subsidizing the United States’ military adventures. During meetings in June 2009 in Yekaterinburg, Russia, world leaders such as China’s President Hu Jintao, Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev, and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organisation took the first formal step to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The United States was denied admission to the meetings. If the world leaders succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value; the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket; and interest rates will climb.
Foreigners see the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) as Washington surrogates in a financial system backed by US military bases and aircraft carriers encircling the globe. But this military domination is a vestige of an American empire no longer able to rule by economic strength. US military power is muscle-bound, based more on atomic weaponry and long-distance air strikes than on ground operations, which have become too politically unpopular to mount on any large scale.
As Chris Hedges wrote in June 2009, “The architects of this new global exchange realize that if they break the dollar they also break America’s military domination. US military spending cannot be sustained without this cycle of heavy borrowing. The official US defense budget for fiscal year 2008 was $623 billion. The next closest national military budget was China’s, at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.”
To fund the permanent war economy, the US has been flooding the world with dollars. The foreign recipients turn the dollars over to their central banks for local currency. The central banks then have a problem. If a central bank does not spend the money in the United States, then the exchange rate against the dollar increases, penalizing exporters. This has allowed the US to print money without restraint, to buy imports and foreign companies, to fund military expansion, and to ensure that foreign nations like China continue to buy American treasury bonds.
In July 2009, President Medvedev illustrated his call for a supranational currency to replace the dollar by pulling from his pocket a sample coin of a “united future world currency.” The coin, which bears the words “Unity in Diversity,” was minted in Belgium and presented to the heads of G8 delegations.
In September 2009, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development proposed creating a new artificial currency that would replace the dollar as reserve currency. The UN wants to redesign the Bretton Woods system of international exchange. Formation of this currency would be the largest monetary overhaul since World War II. China is involved in deals with Brazil and Malaysia to denominate their trade in China’s yuan, while Russia promises to begin trading in the ruble and local currencies.
Additionally, nine Latin American countries have agreed on the creation of a regional currency, the sucre, aimed at scaling back the use of the US dollar. The countries, members of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), a leftist bloc conceived by Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez, met in Bolivia where they vowed to press ahead with a new currency for intraregional trade. The sucre would be rolled out beginning in 2010 in a nonpaper form. ALBA’s member states are Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Dominica, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Antigua and Barbuda.
The cycle supporting a permanent US war economy appears to be almost over. Once the dollar cannot flood central banks and no one buys US treasury bonds, the American global military empire collapses. The impact on daily living for the US population could be severe.
Our authors predict that in addition to increased costs, states and cities will see their pension funds drained. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. People will be increasingly charged for privatized utilities that were once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless.
Update by Michael Hudson
Foreign countries are presently seeking to create an international monetary system in which central bank savings do not fund the United States’ military deficit. At present, foreign “dollar holdings” take the form of US treasury bonds, used to finance the (largely military) US domestic budget deficit, a deficit that is largely due to military spending.
Russia, China, India, and Brazil have taken the lead in seeking an alternative system. But almost no information about such a system was available in the US or even the European press, except for a shorter version of my “De-Dollarization” article that I published as an op-ed in the Financial Times of London.
Discussions about creating an alternative monetary system have not been public. I was invited to China to discuss my views with officials there and to lecture at three universities, and was subsequently asked to write up my proposals for Premier Wen Jiabao, pending another visit just prior to this year’s meetings between China, Russia, India, and Brazil, with Iran attending with visitor status. All of this signals that other countries are seeking an alternative. Now that the euro has collapsed, there’s currently little alternative to the dollar as a reserve currency. This implies that there is no national currency that is a stable store of value for international savings.
Meanwhile, US money managers are leading the flight from the dollar to Brazil, China, and other “emerging market” countries. As matters stand, these countries are selling their resources and companies for free—as the dollars being spent to buy them end up in their central banks, to be recycled into US treasury bonds, or to be used to purchase euro debt that is plunging in international value.
The result of this conundrum is the pressure to end the postwar era of “free capital movements” and to introduce capital controls.
There has been almost no press discussion of my story or indeed of the issue itself. US and European media have successfully ignored the proposal of an alternative to the existing state of affairs.
Update by Fred Weir
This story illustrates one aspect of post–Soviet Russia’s search for a place in the US-led global order—a position that would reflect that country’s own distinct geopolitical interests and how it differs from the West in terms of history, culture, and level of economic development. Russia inherited from the former Soviet Union close relations with many countries that the US regards as “rogue states,” including Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela. There continues to be a lot of official, public sympathy for those countries and their opposition to the US global system, even though Moscow no longer has any grand sense of anti-Western ideology or even any practical goal of mobilizing toward an “alliance” that would serve Russia’s ends.
Under the George W. Bush administration, Moscow felt itself under pressure from what it viewed as Western encroachments into the post-Soviet space, what Russians term the “near abroad.” This took the form of “colored revolutions,” or what the Western media referred to as “pro-democracy uprisings” in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, which removed corrupt but Moscow-friendly regimes and brought to power much more outspoken and active pro-Western ones. The Kremlin, rightly or wrongly, interpreted these upheavals as US-sponsored and orchestrated attempts to reengineer the political loyalties of neighboring states with which Russia has deep historical ties. Two of those new leaders, Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili and Ukraine’s Viktor Yushchenko, sought to put their countries on a fast track to membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a prospect that Russia viewed with alarm bordering on panic. Another Bush-era initiative that engendered deep hostility in Moscow was a plan to station strategic antimissile interceptors in neighboring Poland, with associated radars in the Czech Republic. Russian military experts argued these deployments were the beginning of a strategic process that might eventually undermine Russia’s own aging, Soviet-era nuclear deterrent, which is the main priority of Russia’s national defense.
In response to these perceived threats, Russia seemed to sometimes go out of its way to cultivate relationships with other countries that were at odds with the US, which is the subject of this story. The Russians also held war games with the Venezuelan navy in the Caribbean, resumed cold war–era nuclear bomber patrols along the North American coast, and talked about revitalizing former Soviet air bases in Cuba.
In the past year, with substantially changed foreign policy priorities brought in by President Barack Obama, Moscow’s attitude has relaxed somewhat. Obama shelved the controversial plan to station antimissile weapons in Poland, and implicitly removed from the agenda any question of inducting Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. The so-called Obama “reset” of relations between Moscow and Washington seems to be improving prospects for cooperation, even on such thorny issues as Iran, though it may be too early to draw any firm conclusions.
See below for further references to articles I have written on this topic.
Stories on Russia’s overtures to Cuba and Venezuela:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2009/0910/p06s11-woam.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2009/0315/a-new-cuban-missile-crisis-russia-eyes-bomber-bases-in-latin-america
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2008/1125/p01s01-woam.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2008/0908/p01s06-woeu.html
Stories on Russia’s relations with Iran:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2010/0521/Russia-sanctions-unlikely-to-delay-Iran-nuclear-power-plant
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2009/0921/secret-israeli-deal-to-stop-russian-s-300-missile-sale-to-iran
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2009/0323/p06s01-woeu.html
Stories on US–Russian relations:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2010/0513/Leaked-Russian-document-Could-Medvedev-era-tilt-more-pro-West
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2010/0504/NPT-Obama-reveals-size-of-US-nuclear-weapons-arsenal.-Will-Russia-respondhttp://www.csmonitor.com/World/
Europe/2009/1028/p06s14-woeu.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2010/0513/Leaked-Russian-document-Could-Medvedev-era-tilt-more-pro-West
Friday, October 22, 2010
What Muslims Wear
A.R. Rahman, Oscar Winning Composer for Slumdog Millionaire
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Founder of Pakistan
Sania Mirza, Tennis Player
Andre Carson, Congressman
Mos Def, Rapper
Iman, International Supermodel
Muhammad Ali
Rasheed Wallace, Athlete
For More See Link Above
Thursday, October 21, 2010
NPR Fires Juan Williams
The age where bigotry can simply walk through the mainstream is over. I am glad they made an example of him.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Sunday, October 17, 2010
PROGRESSIVES NEED TO KNOW THAT HISTORY IS COMPLICATED
Saturday, October 16, 2010
PROGRESSIVES NEED TO KNOW THAT HISTORY IS COMPLICATED
Harry Targ
I became a radical in the 1960s. I kept putting off being active until the late 60s but I slowly involved myself in the anti-war movement. When I started teaching around this time I noticed that many students became instant radicals; 19 year-old- kids going from lack of political awareness to militancy in a matter of weeks.
The Southern movement was inspiring; young people and their elders were transforming the system of Jim Crow. College campuses were bursting with energy, demanding “student rights” and “relevant” courses. Then the anti-war mobilizations grew bigger and bigger. Each massive mobilization in D.C., in New York, in Chicago, in San Francisco challenged organizers to produce larger and larger crowds and for a time the crowds did get bigger.
Many of us began to see the achievement of peace and justice as just around the corner. We were on the verge of building a new world, not unlike the world of altruism and love envisioned by Che` Guevara.
But then everything seemed to fall apart. The New Left split. African Americans sought to build their own movements. Women and gays began to argue that human liberation should be for them as well.
Nixon was elected. Vietnamization did not end the war but shifted the U.S. role from ground to massive air strikes across all of Vietnam. The Xmas bombing destroyed virtually all of North and South Vietnam. Black Panthers were targeted for assassination by the federal government and local authorities. Students were murdered at Kent State and Jackson State.
The youthful energy, the visions of socialism dissipated. Particularly the young became disillusioned. I remember one student telling me in the early 70s: “I tried the political thing and it didn’t work.”
The seeming victories of the 60s and 70s were followed by the brutal Reagan “low intensity” conflicts of the 80s: leading to death and destruction in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola, Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Afghanistan. And Reagan trumpeted the shift from welfare state capitalism to neoliberal globalization: privatization, de-regulation, and shifting all human activities from the public sector to the market. Then the last large-scale check on the globalization of capitalism and imperialism, the Soviet Union, collapsed.
This brief history reflects my own intellectual immaturity. Along with hundreds of thousands of others I was caught up in the emotion of the times. Not informed about the subtleties and complexities of history, I assumed that the path to victory, the path to peace and justice, would be smooth and linear. I did not expect major setbacks. I assumed that once we demonstrated our passion, our ability to mobilize large numbers of people, then the job was done.
But as I read Marx, involved myself in the labor movement and Central American solidarity, I began to realize that history does not work in simple and linear ways. Struggle must continue. Those who oppose us will continue to defend their privileges and their position. Patience is as critical to our work as is passion. And, these lessons of history are more likely to be understood by workers, by marginalized peoples, by most of the citizens of the globe who may not have been the beneficiaries of the short-term victories of social movements.
I also thought more about the lessons embedded in the music of my youth and the deep philosophical meaning of the simple verses of the songs of folk singers such as Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger and the Weavers.
I remember Woody’s son Arlo Guthrie describing his own connection to the progressive folk music tradition:
“One of the great things that I learned from both my mother and my dad and from some of these folks here is that this kind of wanting to make the world a better place is not something that started with the Weavers….they recognized and continued a tradition that’s probably been going on for as long as people have been around. And that is a wonderful thing for a young person to discover; he or she is not the beginning of a thing but somewhere in the middle of a long line of people who are concerned about making the world a better place to be.
It gives you the ability to not get so anxiety-prone over what’s going on from moment to moment but to take a little longer look and know that you don’t have to finish a job within the span of a lifetime. All you have to do is link up to the future. That’s the job of being a human. It’s to make the connection to the future and hold on to the connection to the past”(album notes from HARP, Redwood Records).
In addition, I would often think about Pete Seeger singing in “Quite Early Morning” that it is “darkest before the dawn.”
Some say that humankind won't long endure
But what makes them so doggone sure?
I know that you who hear my singing
Could make those freedom bells go ringing
I know that you who hear my singing
Could make those freedom bells go ringing
And so keep on while we live
Until we have no, no more to give
And when these fingers can strum no longer
Hand the old banjo to young ones stronger
And when these fingers can strum no longer
Hand the old banjo to young ones stronger
So though it's darkest before the dawn
These thoughts keep us moving on
Through all this world of joy and sorrow
We still can have singing tomorrows
Through all this world of joy and sorrow
We still can have singing tomorrows
[ Quite Early Morning lyrics on http://www.lyricsmania.com/ ]
So let’s get back to work
Please visit my blog:
www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com
PROGRESSIVES NEED TO KNOW THAT HISTORY IS COMPLICATED
Harry Targ
I became a radical in the 1960s. I kept putting off being active until the late 60s but I slowly involved myself in the anti-war movement. When I started teaching around this time I noticed that many students became instant radicals; 19 year-old- kids going from lack of political awareness to militancy in a matter of weeks.
The Southern movement was inspiring; young people and their elders were transforming the system of Jim Crow. College campuses were bursting with energy, demanding “student rights” and “relevant” courses. Then the anti-war mobilizations grew bigger and bigger. Each massive mobilization in D.C., in New York, in Chicago, in San Francisco challenged organizers to produce larger and larger crowds and for a time the crowds did get bigger.
Many of us began to see the achievement of peace and justice as just around the corner. We were on the verge of building a new world, not unlike the world of altruism and love envisioned by Che` Guevara.
But then everything seemed to fall apart. The New Left split. African Americans sought to build their own movements. Women and gays began to argue that human liberation should be for them as well.
Nixon was elected. Vietnamization did not end the war but shifted the U.S. role from ground to massive air strikes across all of Vietnam. The Xmas bombing destroyed virtually all of North and South Vietnam. Black Panthers were targeted for assassination by the federal government and local authorities. Students were murdered at Kent State and Jackson State.
The youthful energy, the visions of socialism dissipated. Particularly the young became disillusioned. I remember one student telling me in the early 70s: “I tried the political thing and it didn’t work.”
The seeming victories of the 60s and 70s were followed by the brutal Reagan “low intensity” conflicts of the 80s: leading to death and destruction in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola, Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Afghanistan. And Reagan trumpeted the shift from welfare state capitalism to neoliberal globalization: privatization, de-regulation, and shifting all human activities from the public sector to the market. Then the last large-scale check on the globalization of capitalism and imperialism, the Soviet Union, collapsed.
This brief history reflects my own intellectual immaturity. Along with hundreds of thousands of others I was caught up in the emotion of the times. Not informed about the subtleties and complexities of history, I assumed that the path to victory, the path to peace and justice, would be smooth and linear. I did not expect major setbacks. I assumed that once we demonstrated our passion, our ability to mobilize large numbers of people, then the job was done.
But as I read Marx, involved myself in the labor movement and Central American solidarity, I began to realize that history does not work in simple and linear ways. Struggle must continue. Those who oppose us will continue to defend their privileges and their position. Patience is as critical to our work as is passion. And, these lessons of history are more likely to be understood by workers, by marginalized peoples, by most of the citizens of the globe who may not have been the beneficiaries of the short-term victories of social movements.
I also thought more about the lessons embedded in the music of my youth and the deep philosophical meaning of the simple verses of the songs of folk singers such as Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger and the Weavers.
I remember Woody’s son Arlo Guthrie describing his own connection to the progressive folk music tradition:
“One of the great things that I learned from both my mother and my dad and from some of these folks here is that this kind of wanting to make the world a better place is not something that started with the Weavers….they recognized and continued a tradition that’s probably been going on for as long as people have been around. And that is a wonderful thing for a young person to discover; he or she is not the beginning of a thing but somewhere in the middle of a long line of people who are concerned about making the world a better place to be.
It gives you the ability to not get so anxiety-prone over what’s going on from moment to moment but to take a little longer look and know that you don’t have to finish a job within the span of a lifetime. All you have to do is link up to the future. That’s the job of being a human. It’s to make the connection to the future and hold on to the connection to the past”(album notes from HARP, Redwood Records).
In addition, I would often think about Pete Seeger singing in “Quite Early Morning” that it is “darkest before the dawn.”
Some say that humankind won't long endure
But what makes them so doggone sure?
I know that you who hear my singing
Could make those freedom bells go ringing
I know that you who hear my singing
Could make those freedom bells go ringing
And so keep on while we live
Until we have no, no more to give
And when these fingers can strum no longer
Hand the old banjo to young ones stronger
And when these fingers can strum no longer
Hand the old banjo to young ones stronger
So though it's darkest before the dawn
These thoughts keep us moving on
Through all this world of joy and sorrow
We still can have singing tomorrows
Through all this world of joy and sorrow
We still can have singing tomorrows
[ Quite Early Morning lyrics on http://www.lyricsmania.com/ ]
So let’s get back to work
Please visit my blog:
www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com
Friday, October 15, 2010
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Interview With Jess Sundin
On the morning of September 26, 2010, the FBI raided Jess Sundin's home in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The FBI ransacked her home in order to search for possible connections between her activism and alleged terrorist organizations in Columbia and Palestine. Similar raids were carried out at the same time in the homes of other activists in both Minneapolis and Chicago. All of the targeted activists did work around issues of peace and justice in Palestine and Columbia. After the invasion of their homes, Sundin and the other targeted activists were subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in Chicago. They stood accused of "giving material aid to foreign terrorist organizations." The actions of the FBI have sparked outrage throughout progressive circles and have resulted in thousands of people across the country expressing their solidarity with the targeted activists and calling for the Obama administration to adhere to the restraints of the U.S. Constitution. A few days ago, I contacted Jess Sundin and asked if I could interview her for JuliusSpeaks. Conducting this interview by email, the following is what transpired.
1. Where are you located and what is your occupation?
I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I have been a clerical worker at the University of Minnesota for eleven years.
2. How long have you been an activist?
I became active in high school, protesting the 1991 Gulf War. It’s been nearly 20 years, all of my adult life.
3. Tell us about the organizations you are involved with? What are the issues you work around?
I am most active with the Anti-War Committee, which I helped found in 1998. I have also done work around economic justice, especially with my Union, AFSCME 3800. I’m a lesbian mom, and have participated in local actions to defend the rights of families like mine. My anti-war activism is most focused around Iraq and Afghanistan, but I also have worked in solidarity with Colombia and Palestine, two places where U.S. military aid has funded repressive regimes which violently target their own people.
4. Before the FBI raid on your house, did you have any inclination that you were under surveillance?
No.
5. Would you agree that the raid on your home along with other incidents that have occurred since the passage of the Patriot Act signal that COINTELPRO has been legalized and is officially sanctioned?
I don’t know whether a new, formal and secret program like COINTELPRO has been reestablished, but I share the concern that these actions signal that the so-called war on terror has been turned on activists here at home. The early sign of this was the repression of Arab and Muslim communities, or here in Minneapolis, the Somali community. The coordinated raids on homes and office in Minneapolis and Chicago, the grand jury subpeonas for all those raided, and several others, including in Michigan, and FBI attempts to question others from North Carolina to California, all of this was a massive undertaking, and was certainly approved at the highest levels of government. This operation shows a blatant disregard for our constitutional rights to speak and associate freely, to voice opposition to government policies, and to support humanitarian causes abroad. All of this should be a concern for anyone actively working for progressive social change.
6. Explain what happened when the FBI came to your home.
At 7am, I woke to the sound of a bang at my door. My partner and daughter were already awake. By the time I joined them downstairs, 7 federal agents were beginning to go through all of our belongings. They showed a search warrant authorizing them to search and sieze anything related to my anti-war organizing or international travel, which might be evidence of “material support to foreign terrorist organizations.” We were told that we were not being detained, but were not allowed to make or receive phonecalls. We demanded the right to make one call to an attorney, and we stayed at our house to have some sense of what they were doing to our home.
Agents spent the next five hours going through every room of my home. They went through my daughter’s toys, the personal archives of my grandfather who died earlier this year, everything. They left my home with several crates full of papers, books, CDs, computers, my cell phone, photographs, notes and paper files, financial records and checkbooks, my passport… and they gave me no indication of when my property might be returned.
Before they left, they gave both myself and my partner subpeonas to appear before a federal grand jury in Chicago.
7. How do you plan to fight against these violations of your constitutional rights?
Our greatest defense is a broad, public campaign to denounce the FBI repression, and call off the grand jury. Each of us caught up in this investigation is well-known in our communities, and we’ve received an outpouring of support. Before the FBI left my home, supporters had already started to gather on my front lawn. Later that afternoon, a hundred people joined myself and others raided for a press conference in front of my home. That evening, more than 200 people gathered at a nearby church where we began making plans to protest these actions, and support the folks called before the grand jury. Activists in Chicago had the same kind of support.
The following week, protests were organzied at more than 60 FBI offices and federal buildings around the country. Thousands of calls have been made on our behalf, to President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. We’ve received more than 100 statements of solidarity from organizations – from Minnesota’s statewide AFSCME council, to an indigenous community in Colombia. These demonstrations and messages give us a lot of strength, while putting pressure on those with the power to call off the FBI and the grand jury.
While we will continue to speak publicly in our own defense, and also continue our very public work opposing US wars and militarism abroad, we will not speak to a secret grand jury. We also appreciate that several of our friends and associates have not cooperated when the FBI has come to their homes or workplaces to ask about us. (More about this on a later question.)
8. What have been the ramifications of these raids on your life? Have there been threats to your employment or have any other civil or criminal actions been threatened?
The most difficult personal impact has been on my role as a parent. As I explain later, there is a very real possibility that investigation could result in both myself and my partner being imprisoned for our political work. We have made arrangements and signed legal papers authorizing someone else to look after our daughter if we are jailed. That decision, and talking to her about it, are the hardest things we’ve ever had to do. I cannot imagine being separated from her, and I hate that a 6-year old has to worry that she may lose her mothers this way.
I am currently on a medical leave from my job, though several of us are University of Minnesota employees. The University’s central administration, when asked to comment on our case, said that while they have no comment now, in the case of an indictment, they would look at this again. Some of our folks are teachers, and while not out of work, certainly face more scrutiny every day at work.
The stress of this situation, and the huge commitment of time and energy that we’ve made to defend ourselves, creates a great deal of stress. As someone with chronic health problems, all of this is taking a heavy personal toll.
9. What has been the community response there in Minneapolis to these raids?
As I mentioned before, we have had a huge outpouring of support. Even the local news stations, were shocked. When first reporting on the raids, they pointed out that Minnesotans know us. We are outspoken community activists, doing our anti-war and social justice work in the most-public ways, never believing there was anything to hide. Parents and teachers from my daughter’s school have gone out of their way to extend their support to us. As much as people want to believe that the government wouldn’t attack us just for speaking our minds, this case has called all of that into question for our co-workers, neighbors, friends and families.
10. What are the charges that have been filed against you?
No charges have been filed against any of us. Isn’t it incredible that you can have your home searched, your property seized, and be ordered to testify in court, when there’s no charge against you? The grand jury process happens in secret, and neither the FBI nor the prosecutor have indicated who they hope to catch on this fishing expedition.
11. I've heard that you don't plan to cooperate with this subpoena. What do you plan to do as a course of action?
We have a team of attorneys from the National Lawyers Guild helping us through this process. All 14 of those subpeonaed have, through our attorneys, informed the prosecutor that we will exercise our 5th amendment right not to testify. So far none of us has been offered immunity, and instead the prosecutor has left us on hold. (Immunity is a legal procedure where you are compelled to testify, in exchange for a promise that what you say cannot be used against you. It does not necessarily mean that you will not be prosecuted based on the testimony of others. If you still refuse to testify, you can be held in contempt and sent to jail.)
Of course this is just a guess, but I believe they are waiting for the FBI to finish going through all the things they took from our homes, and attempting to interview anyone else that might help them make a case against someone. After that, I believe that all 14 of us could be indicted, or called before the grand jury again, and forced to choose between testifying and jail time. Some people believe that will happen after the November elections, but we really have no way of knowing – it could be weeks, months or even years.
It is our hope that public pressure will force them to shut down this grand jury with no indictments. We believe that none of us has done anything wrong, and that all of our activities should have the protection of constitutional and international law.
12. How do you think this period compares to the 1960s and 1970s and the harassment of such groups as the Black Panthers? Do you see your situation as comparable to progressives in that era and what they experienced?
As you might imagine, I’ve been reading a lot about that period in our history. Not only the case of the Panthers, but in Minnesota, I think of the American Indian Movement that was targeted, and our Chicago friends remember the campaign against the Puerto Rican independence movement. Clyde Bellecourt, an AIM leader, spoke at the first demonstration we had in Minneapolis. He told us that we are today’s Indians. There’s some wisdom in that, though I don’t want to be misunderstood as saying that our situation is equivalent. It is not.
Our leaders have not been assassinated, or framed up on murder charges. Not one bullet has been fired on us, and of course, for now, none of us has been imprisoned, or forced to live in exile. For now, our case is on a much smaller scale, though we are certainly the targets of the same forces that terrorized the liberation movements of the 60s and 70s, as well as white progressives, socialists or communists of that era, before and since. We are humbled, as we stand on the shoulders of giants. And we have a great deal to learn.
I believe our situation is a test – not only for the forces of repression, but also for progressive forces. For them, they want to see how far the public will let them go, how far they can stretch existing laws, to sweep away resistance to US wars. For us, we have to stand up to this, and prove that people will not be silenced by the scare tactics. Instead, this will make us stand up twice as strong, twice as loud, and 100% determined to defend our democratic rights. I believe that they have over stepped their authority, and that we can unite with enough strength to push them back. We have to.
13. Do you think the United States now has a repressive government?
Well, if I didn’t before, I certainly do now!
Of course, as an anti-war activist, I have witnessed the violence carried out by our government in other countries, I’ve opposed our government’s support of the worlds most-repressive regimes. With bedfellows like Colombia and Israel, the U.S. cannot be understood as a government that embraces democratic values. Of course, we are taught from a very young age that we do have democratic rights, including the right to dissent. And so, most Americans believe in democracy. Many believe that our government guarantees that. I believe that our government acts mainly in the interests of the rich and powerful, and when democracy poses a risk to the powerful, then repression is a tool they will use without hesitation.
14. Any other comments you'd like to make?
Thank you for your interest in our case. While this situation is something I would never have wished for, I welcome the opportunity it gives us. It is important that we stand up to defend the people whose homes were raided, the 14 who’ve been subpeonaed and the several who’ve been harassed by the FBI in relation to this case. But not just those of us directly touched by this witch hunt, we must stand to defend all of us, and defend space for political opposition, our rights to speak freely, to travel and associate with whoever we wish, our right to extend our solidarity to political movements of people just like ourselves, struggling for progressive social change in other countries. We welcome any venue where we can speak about our case (invite us!), messages of support and solidarity, and financial support to help us pay for our defense. People who want to get more involved can follow our case on-line at www.stopfbi.net.
In solidarity,
Jess Sundin
1. Where are you located and what is your occupation?
I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I have been a clerical worker at the University of Minnesota for eleven years.
2. How long have you been an activist?
I became active in high school, protesting the 1991 Gulf War. It’s been nearly 20 years, all of my adult life.
3. Tell us about the organizations you are involved with? What are the issues you work around?
I am most active with the Anti-War Committee, which I helped found in 1998. I have also done work around economic justice, especially with my Union, AFSCME 3800. I’m a lesbian mom, and have participated in local actions to defend the rights of families like mine. My anti-war activism is most focused around Iraq and Afghanistan, but I also have worked in solidarity with Colombia and Palestine, two places where U.S. military aid has funded repressive regimes which violently target their own people.
4. Before the FBI raid on your house, did you have any inclination that you were under surveillance?
No.
5. Would you agree that the raid on your home along with other incidents that have occurred since the passage of the Patriot Act signal that COINTELPRO has been legalized and is officially sanctioned?
I don’t know whether a new, formal and secret program like COINTELPRO has been reestablished, but I share the concern that these actions signal that the so-called war on terror has been turned on activists here at home. The early sign of this was the repression of Arab and Muslim communities, or here in Minneapolis, the Somali community. The coordinated raids on homes and office in Minneapolis and Chicago, the grand jury subpeonas for all those raided, and several others, including in Michigan, and FBI attempts to question others from North Carolina to California, all of this was a massive undertaking, and was certainly approved at the highest levels of government. This operation shows a blatant disregard for our constitutional rights to speak and associate freely, to voice opposition to government policies, and to support humanitarian causes abroad. All of this should be a concern for anyone actively working for progressive social change.
6. Explain what happened when the FBI came to your home.
At 7am, I woke to the sound of a bang at my door. My partner and daughter were already awake. By the time I joined them downstairs, 7 federal agents were beginning to go through all of our belongings. They showed a search warrant authorizing them to search and sieze anything related to my anti-war organizing or international travel, which might be evidence of “material support to foreign terrorist organizations.” We were told that we were not being detained, but were not allowed to make or receive phonecalls. We demanded the right to make one call to an attorney, and we stayed at our house to have some sense of what they were doing to our home.
Agents spent the next five hours going through every room of my home. They went through my daughter’s toys, the personal archives of my grandfather who died earlier this year, everything. They left my home with several crates full of papers, books, CDs, computers, my cell phone, photographs, notes and paper files, financial records and checkbooks, my passport… and they gave me no indication of when my property might be returned.
Before they left, they gave both myself and my partner subpeonas to appear before a federal grand jury in Chicago.
7. How do you plan to fight against these violations of your constitutional rights?
Our greatest defense is a broad, public campaign to denounce the FBI repression, and call off the grand jury. Each of us caught up in this investigation is well-known in our communities, and we’ve received an outpouring of support. Before the FBI left my home, supporters had already started to gather on my front lawn. Later that afternoon, a hundred people joined myself and others raided for a press conference in front of my home. That evening, more than 200 people gathered at a nearby church where we began making plans to protest these actions, and support the folks called before the grand jury. Activists in Chicago had the same kind of support.
The following week, protests were organzied at more than 60 FBI offices and federal buildings around the country. Thousands of calls have been made on our behalf, to President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. We’ve received more than 100 statements of solidarity from organizations – from Minnesota’s statewide AFSCME council, to an indigenous community in Colombia. These demonstrations and messages give us a lot of strength, while putting pressure on those with the power to call off the FBI and the grand jury.
While we will continue to speak publicly in our own defense, and also continue our very public work opposing US wars and militarism abroad, we will not speak to a secret grand jury. We also appreciate that several of our friends and associates have not cooperated when the FBI has come to their homes or workplaces to ask about us. (More about this on a later question.)
8. What have been the ramifications of these raids on your life? Have there been threats to your employment or have any other civil or criminal actions been threatened?
The most difficult personal impact has been on my role as a parent. As I explain later, there is a very real possibility that investigation could result in both myself and my partner being imprisoned for our political work. We have made arrangements and signed legal papers authorizing someone else to look after our daughter if we are jailed. That decision, and talking to her about it, are the hardest things we’ve ever had to do. I cannot imagine being separated from her, and I hate that a 6-year old has to worry that she may lose her mothers this way.
I am currently on a medical leave from my job, though several of us are University of Minnesota employees. The University’s central administration, when asked to comment on our case, said that while they have no comment now, in the case of an indictment, they would look at this again. Some of our folks are teachers, and while not out of work, certainly face more scrutiny every day at work.
The stress of this situation, and the huge commitment of time and energy that we’ve made to defend ourselves, creates a great deal of stress. As someone with chronic health problems, all of this is taking a heavy personal toll.
9. What has been the community response there in Minneapolis to these raids?
As I mentioned before, we have had a huge outpouring of support. Even the local news stations, were shocked. When first reporting on the raids, they pointed out that Minnesotans know us. We are outspoken community activists, doing our anti-war and social justice work in the most-public ways, never believing there was anything to hide. Parents and teachers from my daughter’s school have gone out of their way to extend their support to us. As much as people want to believe that the government wouldn’t attack us just for speaking our minds, this case has called all of that into question for our co-workers, neighbors, friends and families.
10. What are the charges that have been filed against you?
No charges have been filed against any of us. Isn’t it incredible that you can have your home searched, your property seized, and be ordered to testify in court, when there’s no charge against you? The grand jury process happens in secret, and neither the FBI nor the prosecutor have indicated who they hope to catch on this fishing expedition.
11. I've heard that you don't plan to cooperate with this subpoena. What do you plan to do as a course of action?
We have a team of attorneys from the National Lawyers Guild helping us through this process. All 14 of those subpeonaed have, through our attorneys, informed the prosecutor that we will exercise our 5th amendment right not to testify. So far none of us has been offered immunity, and instead the prosecutor has left us on hold. (Immunity is a legal procedure where you are compelled to testify, in exchange for a promise that what you say cannot be used against you. It does not necessarily mean that you will not be prosecuted based on the testimony of others. If you still refuse to testify, you can be held in contempt and sent to jail.)
Of course this is just a guess, but I believe they are waiting for the FBI to finish going through all the things they took from our homes, and attempting to interview anyone else that might help them make a case against someone. After that, I believe that all 14 of us could be indicted, or called before the grand jury again, and forced to choose between testifying and jail time. Some people believe that will happen after the November elections, but we really have no way of knowing – it could be weeks, months or even years.
It is our hope that public pressure will force them to shut down this grand jury with no indictments. We believe that none of us has done anything wrong, and that all of our activities should have the protection of constitutional and international law.
12. How do you think this period compares to the 1960s and 1970s and the harassment of such groups as the Black Panthers? Do you see your situation as comparable to progressives in that era and what they experienced?
As you might imagine, I’ve been reading a lot about that period in our history. Not only the case of the Panthers, but in Minnesota, I think of the American Indian Movement that was targeted, and our Chicago friends remember the campaign against the Puerto Rican independence movement. Clyde Bellecourt, an AIM leader, spoke at the first demonstration we had in Minneapolis. He told us that we are today’s Indians. There’s some wisdom in that, though I don’t want to be misunderstood as saying that our situation is equivalent. It is not.
Our leaders have not been assassinated, or framed up on murder charges. Not one bullet has been fired on us, and of course, for now, none of us has been imprisoned, or forced to live in exile. For now, our case is on a much smaller scale, though we are certainly the targets of the same forces that terrorized the liberation movements of the 60s and 70s, as well as white progressives, socialists or communists of that era, before and since. We are humbled, as we stand on the shoulders of giants. And we have a great deal to learn.
I believe our situation is a test – not only for the forces of repression, but also for progressive forces. For them, they want to see how far the public will let them go, how far they can stretch existing laws, to sweep away resistance to US wars. For us, we have to stand up to this, and prove that people will not be silenced by the scare tactics. Instead, this will make us stand up twice as strong, twice as loud, and 100% determined to defend our democratic rights. I believe that they have over stepped their authority, and that we can unite with enough strength to push them back. We have to.
13. Do you think the United States now has a repressive government?
Well, if I didn’t before, I certainly do now!
Of course, as an anti-war activist, I have witnessed the violence carried out by our government in other countries, I’ve opposed our government’s support of the worlds most-repressive regimes. With bedfellows like Colombia and Israel, the U.S. cannot be understood as a government that embraces democratic values. Of course, we are taught from a very young age that we do have democratic rights, including the right to dissent. And so, most Americans believe in democracy. Many believe that our government guarantees that. I believe that our government acts mainly in the interests of the rich and powerful, and when democracy poses a risk to the powerful, then repression is a tool they will use without hesitation.
14. Any other comments you'd like to make?
Thank you for your interest in our case. While this situation is something I would never have wished for, I welcome the opportunity it gives us. It is important that we stand up to defend the people whose homes were raided, the 14 who’ve been subpeonaed and the several who’ve been harassed by the FBI in relation to this case. But not just those of us directly touched by this witch hunt, we must stand to defend all of us, and defend space for political opposition, our rights to speak freely, to travel and associate with whoever we wish, our right to extend our solidarity to political movements of people just like ourselves, struggling for progressive social change in other countries. We welcome any venue where we can speak about our case (invite us!), messages of support and solidarity, and financial support to help us pay for our defense. People who want to get more involved can follow our case on-line at www.stopfbi.net.
In solidarity,
Jess Sundin
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Saturday, October 09, 2010
Monday, October 04, 2010
PROBLEMS CONTINUE FOR JENA SIX: DRUG BUST OR RACISM?
While Sheriff Scott Franklin of Jena, Louisiana says he is trying to rid his jurisdiction of drugs, critics say he has a vendetta against the town's black community for the local civil rights protests that won freedom for six black high school students who had been charged with attempted murder for a schoolyard brawl in 2009.
As reported in Race-Talk on July 9, 2009, over 150 officers from 10 agencies met and mobilized "Operation Third Option" with the goal of fighting drugs. Despite the fact that Sheriff Franklin spent massive resources for an investigation that lasted nearly two years, officers have yet to seize any contraband. Working with District Attorney Reed Walters, Sheriff Franklin has been seeking maximum penalties for minor offenses in a town that is 85% white with only 300 black residents. Thus far, their efforts have almost exclusively targeted African Americans.
Catrina Wallace, the sister of Robert Bailey, one of the "Jena Six," was a leader in the initiative to free the accused youth and organized protests and meetings for months. She and her children were awakened with guns pointed to their heads and were held on a $150,000 cash-only bond although officers found no drugs or contraband in her home. Furthermore, despite a lack of evidence, her car was also taken by police and never returned.
Samuel Howard was sleeping nude when police raided his home at 5:00 a.m. and tasered him three times. They took him out of his house to a baseball field while he was still nude, where he spent another hour without any clothes, standing among other arrestees. Howard said "The sheriff knows me. We went to school together. He knows I'm not a violent person." Howard's home was badly burned during the raid as a result of flares that police used inside.
Many of Jena's black residents claim that the DA, Sheriff, and editor of the local newspaper want revenge against black people who stood up and fought against unjust charges. The owner, editor, and publisher of the Jena Times, the town's only newspaper, is Sammy Franklin, father of Sheriff Franklin. A white-owned store near the courthouse sells T-shirts commemorating "Operation Third Option" with a design of a person behind bars. Black residents of Jena say that an earlier version of the shirt featured a monkey.
Marcus Jones, father of one of the Jena Six, has called for a federal investigation of the Sheriff's department and District Attorney's office. He said "This is racially motivated. It's revenge. Wouldn't none of this be going on if justice had been done the way it was supposed to have been."
IN THE COURTS
As reported in Race-Talk on July 9, 2009, over 150 officers from 10 agencies met and mobilized "Operation Third Option" with the goal of fighting drugs. Despite the fact that Sheriff Franklin spent massive resources for an investigation that lasted nearly two years, officers have yet to seize any contraband. Working with District Attorney Reed Walters, Sheriff Franklin has been seeking maximum penalties for minor offenses in a town that is 85% white with only 300 black residents. Thus far, their efforts have almost exclusively targeted African Americans.
Catrina Wallace, the sister of Robert Bailey, one of the "Jena Six," was a leader in the initiative to free the accused youth and organized protests and meetings for months. She and her children were awakened with guns pointed to their heads and were held on a $150,000 cash-only bond although officers found no drugs or contraband in her home. Furthermore, despite a lack of evidence, her car was also taken by police and never returned.
Samuel Howard was sleeping nude when police raided his home at 5:00 a.m. and tasered him three times. They took him out of his house to a baseball field while he was still nude, where he spent another hour without any clothes, standing among other arrestees. Howard said "The sheriff knows me. We went to school together. He knows I'm not a violent person." Howard's home was badly burned during the raid as a result of flares that police used inside.
Many of Jena's black residents claim that the DA, Sheriff, and editor of the local newspaper want revenge against black people who stood up and fought against unjust charges. The owner, editor, and publisher of the Jena Times, the town's only newspaper, is Sammy Franklin, father of Sheriff Franklin. A white-owned store near the courthouse sells T-shirts commemorating "Operation Third Option" with a design of a person behind bars. Black residents of Jena say that an earlier version of the shirt featured a monkey.
Marcus Jones, father of one of the Jena Six, has called for a federal investigation of the Sheriff's department and District Attorney's office. He said "This is racially motivated. It's revenge. Wouldn't none of this be going on if justice had been done the way it was supposed to have been."
IN THE COURTS
Sunday, October 03, 2010
MR ZINE
Attempted Coup in Ecuador Fails, But Threat Remains
by Mark Weisbrot
01.10.10
In June of last year, when the Honduran military overthrew the social democratic government of Manuel Zelaya, President Rafael Correa of Ecuador took it personally. "We have intelligence reports that say that after Zelaya, I'm next," said Correa.
Yesterday it turned out to be true. Some analysts are still insisting that what happened was just a police protest over possible benefit cuts that got out of hand. But to anyone who watched the prolonged, pitched gun battle on TV last night, when the armed forces finally rescued President Correa from the hospital where he was trapped by the police, this did not look like a protest. It was an attempt to overthrow the government.
The coordinated actions in various cities, the takeover of Quito's airport by a section of the armed forces -- all of this indicated a planned coup attempt. And although it failed, at various points during the day it was not so clear what the outcome would be.
The government pointed a finger at former president and army Colonel Lucio Gutierrez, and he was on television yesterday calling for the ouster of Correa. He accused the president of everything from supporting the FARC (the guerrilla group fighting Colombia's government) to wrecking the economy.
The coup might have had a chance if Correa were not so popular. Despite his enemies in high places, the president's approval rating was 67 percent in Quito a couple of weeks ago. His government has doubled spending on health care, significantly increased other social spending, and successfully defaulted on $3.2 billion of foreign debt that was found to be illegitimately contracted. Ecuador managed to squeak through 2009 without a recession and is projected to grow about 2.5 percent this year. Correa, an economist, has had to use heterodox and creative methods to keep the economy growing in the face of external shocks because the country does not have its own currency. It adopted the dollar in 2000, which means that it can do little in the way of monetary policy and has no control over its exchange rate.
Correa had warned that he might try to temporarily dissolve the Congress in order to break an impasse in the legislature, something that he has the right to request under the new constitution -- it would have to be approved by the Constitutional Court. This probably gave the pro-coup forces something they saw as a pretext. It is reminiscent of the coup in Honduras, when Zelaya's support for a non-binding referendum on a constituent assembly was falsely reported by the media -- both Honduran and international -- as a bid to extend his presidency.
Media manipulation has a big role in Ecuador too, with most of the media controlled by right-wing interests opposed to the government. This has helped build a base of people -- analogous to those who get all of their information from Fox News in the United States, but proportionately larger -- who believe that Correa is a dictator trying to turn his country into a communist Cuba.
The U.S. State Department issued a two-sentence statement from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton late yesterday afternoon that urged "all Ecuadoreans to come together and to work within the framework of Ecuador's democratic institutions to reach a rapid and peaceful restoration of order." Unlike the White House statement in response to the Honduran coup last year, it also expressed "full support" for the elected president. This is an improvement; although it is unlikely that it reflects a change in Washington's policy towards Latin America.
The Obama Administration did everything it could to support the coup government in Honduras last year, and in fact is still trying to convince the South American governments -- including Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, and the collective organization of UNASUR -- to recognize the government there. South America refuses to recognize the Lobo government because it was elected under a dictatorship that did not allow for a free or fair contest. The rest of the hemisphere also wants some guarantees that would stop the killing of journalists and political activists there, which has continued and even become worse under the "elected" government.
As the South American governments feared, Washington's support for the coup government in Honduras over the last year has encouraged and increased the likelihood of right-wing coups against democratic left governments in the region. This attempt in Ecuador has failed, but there will likely be more threats in the months and years ahead.
Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He has written numerous research papers on economic policy, especially on Latin America and international economic policy. He is also co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2000) and president of Just Foreign Policy. This article was first published in the Guardianon 1 October 2010 and republished by CEPR under a Creative Commons license. Comments (0) | Print
MR
Please visit my blog:
www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com
Attempted Coup in Ecuador Fails, But Threat Remains
by Mark Weisbrot
01.10.10
In June of last year, when the Honduran military overthrew the social democratic government of Manuel Zelaya, President Rafael Correa of Ecuador took it personally. "We have intelligence reports that say that after Zelaya, I'm next," said Correa.
Yesterday it turned out to be true. Some analysts are still insisting that what happened was just a police protest over possible benefit cuts that got out of hand. But to anyone who watched the prolonged, pitched gun battle on TV last night, when the armed forces finally rescued President Correa from the hospital where he was trapped by the police, this did not look like a protest. It was an attempt to overthrow the government.
The coordinated actions in various cities, the takeover of Quito's airport by a section of the armed forces -- all of this indicated a planned coup attempt. And although it failed, at various points during the day it was not so clear what the outcome would be.
The government pointed a finger at former president and army Colonel Lucio Gutierrez, and he was on television yesterday calling for the ouster of Correa. He accused the president of everything from supporting the FARC (the guerrilla group fighting Colombia's government) to wrecking the economy.
The coup might have had a chance if Correa were not so popular. Despite his enemies in high places, the president's approval rating was 67 percent in Quito a couple of weeks ago. His government has doubled spending on health care, significantly increased other social spending, and successfully defaulted on $3.2 billion of foreign debt that was found to be illegitimately contracted. Ecuador managed to squeak through 2009 without a recession and is projected to grow about 2.5 percent this year. Correa, an economist, has had to use heterodox and creative methods to keep the economy growing in the face of external shocks because the country does not have its own currency. It adopted the dollar in 2000, which means that it can do little in the way of monetary policy and has no control over its exchange rate.
Correa had warned that he might try to temporarily dissolve the Congress in order to break an impasse in the legislature, something that he has the right to request under the new constitution -- it would have to be approved by the Constitutional Court. This probably gave the pro-coup forces something they saw as a pretext. It is reminiscent of the coup in Honduras, when Zelaya's support for a non-binding referendum on a constituent assembly was falsely reported by the media -- both Honduran and international -- as a bid to extend his presidency.
Media manipulation has a big role in Ecuador too, with most of the media controlled by right-wing interests opposed to the government. This has helped build a base of people -- analogous to those who get all of their information from Fox News in the United States, but proportionately larger -- who believe that Correa is a dictator trying to turn his country into a communist Cuba.
The U.S. State Department issued a two-sentence statement from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton late yesterday afternoon that urged "all Ecuadoreans to come together and to work within the framework of Ecuador's democratic institutions to reach a rapid and peaceful restoration of order." Unlike the White House statement in response to the Honduran coup last year, it also expressed "full support" for the elected president. This is an improvement; although it is unlikely that it reflects a change in Washington's policy towards Latin America.
The Obama Administration did everything it could to support the coup government in Honduras last year, and in fact is still trying to convince the South American governments -- including Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, and the collective organization of UNASUR -- to recognize the government there. South America refuses to recognize the Lobo government because it was elected under a dictatorship that did not allow for a free or fair contest. The rest of the hemisphere also wants some guarantees that would stop the killing of journalists and political activists there, which has continued and even become worse under the "elected" government.
As the South American governments feared, Washington's support for the coup government in Honduras over the last year has encouraged and increased the likelihood of right-wing coups against democratic left governments in the region. This attempt in Ecuador has failed, but there will likely be more threats in the months and years ahead.
Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He has written numerous research papers on economic policy, especially on Latin America and international economic policy. He is also co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2000) and president of Just Foreign Policy. This article was first published in the Guardianon 1 October 2010 and republished by CEPR under a Creative Commons license. Comments (0) | Print
MR
Please visit my blog:
www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Sunday, September 12, 2010
1 in 7 in the U.S. Lives in Poverty
The Huffington Post is reporting on the expected government report on poverty in America. In 2009, one in seven lived in poverty. The rate of poverty is expected to rise this year to fifteen percent. Read the article above.
Friday, September 10, 2010
The Politics of Hitting on Straight Men
One thing I find absolutely intriguing is the response I recieve whenever I take the notion to hit on a straight male. The responses range from a flattered "I'm not interested" to flaming red hostility, but overlaid over all of that is a belief that straight men some how must be, should be, and are exempt from being hit on by gay men. I don't buy this coda and have broken it so many times its not even standing anymore really. As I think back though, I have had some interesting experiences in this regard. Once, in Indiana, I was sitting on a bench outside of the hotel on campus waiting for a cab and I hit on this boy, a very cute half Arab, half Black boy who worked on campus. To my advances he quickly responded "isn't that illegal?!!" I was like, no..um...Lawrence vs. Texas was a few years ago..and even still...and then of course there are the instances where the advances are accepted, however interestingly they fit into the context of a certain poem by Nikki Giovanni....
Thursday, September 09, 2010
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