Confessions of an Economic Hitman; John Perkins interview

King: All Labor Has Dignity

In light of the clash of wills in Wisconsin, we should remember the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. One of King’s slogans that we rarely hear is this one: “all labor has dignity.”

King spoke these words in Memphis on March 18, 1968, in the midst of a strike of 1,200 black sanitation workers that had lasted over a month. After rousing them to a fever pitch, King called for a general strike by all workers to shut the city down on behalf of the sanitation workers.

What was the demand of these workers? Improved wages and benefits, yes, but their key demand was that the City of Memphis grant collective bargaining rights and the collection of union dues, without which they knew they could not maintain their union.

These are the very two items that Wisconsin’s Gov. Scott Walker wants to take away from public employees. He knows, as did Mayor Henry Loeb in Memphis, that if you can kill union bargaining rights and dues collection, you can kill the union.

Also like Loeb, Walker is a fiscal conservative. As he cuts taxes for business he raises costs for workers and says ending union power will benefit the fiscal health of the state. Walker wants to end the right of public employees to bargain collectively, even though the workers have accepted a tripling of their health-care costs and a wage cut to help offset the state’s fiscal crisis.

In nearby Ohio, Gov. John Kasich wants to take away the right to join a union for 14,000 state-financed child-care and home-care workers, among the most overworked and underpaid of public servants. In other states, Republicans want to adopt “right to work” (for less) laws that would take away the requirement that workers in unionized jobs pay union dues. This would undermine the unions while, in King’s words, providing “no rights and no work.”

Even in Midwest states that have been union strongholds, Republicans now have public-employee unions in their cross-hairs. This is the latest and potentially most deadly phase of government assault on unions. Ever since the Reagan counterrevolution, government policies joined with private sector profiteers have vastly worsened racial-economic inequalities, created a gambling casino on Wall Street and paved the way for the current economic crisis.

Conservatives rationalize their attacks on unions by saying unionized public workers are unfairly privileged. But they only look privileged by comparison to the rest of the working class, which is suffering economic catastrophe and has almost entirely lost the benefits of unionization. Yet class envy is an easy means to divide and rule.

Racism is another part of the Republican arsenal of divide and rule. Thanks to the destruction of manufacturing jobs and unions, black and Latino workers in manual occupations have disproportionately suffered high rates of poverty and incarceration as many of their families disintegrate. The one toe-hold many black and minority workers (and especially women among them) still have in the economy is in unionized public employment. Now, the Republicans want to take that away.

Thousands rally for Wisconsin- in Sacramento

Over 6000 union members and supporters rallied at the State Capitol in Sacramento in a candle light vigil to support the working people in Wisconsin in their struggle to defend their  union rights. The financial crisis that began  2007  is an assault on organized  labor, working people, and our democracy.  To date the corporate class is winning. 

While Wall Street has recovered and returned to profitability, working people continue to suffer  15 million unemployed with at least 10 million more under employed.   It is more than a crisis - the reality is that the financial class has looted the U.S. economy.  They took 13 trillion dollars  out of the economy and caused 4 million people to lose their homes and  another 4.5 million to fall into foreclosure.   Now they want you and I to pay for their greed by forcing budget cuts on the states. 

        

Wisconsin "Budget Repair Bill" Protest

Support Wisconsin Workers- Sacramento

Democracy in Egypt- Repression in Puerto Rico

Luisa (a pseudonym) has been receiving Rosenberg Fund for
Children (RFC, www.rfc.org) support since she was 15 years
old. She's now a student at the University of Puerto Rico
(UPR), the largest university in the Caribbean and the
premier Spanish-speaking institution of higher learning
under the control of the United States. Recently she's been
in touch with our staff and a Board Member because the
computer we purchased for her when she entered college three
years ago required repair. When our Board Member called her
last week to get details, he heard screaming in the
background when Luisa answered. Luisa said she couldn't talk
because she was running from pepper spray and police with
night sticks. (She got away....)

Since December hundreds of UPR students have been passively
occupying their campus to protest massive tuition increases
that have made it impossible for almost one third of the
undergraduates (5000 out of 16,000) to re-enroll in classes
this semester. The students have not been destructive, even
organizing brigades to keep the campus clean. But the
government decided to attack them. The parent of another RFC
beneficiary wrote on January 27th: "Levels of violence used
against Puerto Rican non-violent striking students have
risen exponentially. I strongly urge you to open the photos
and videos (available at http://pr.indymedia.org/) of
yesterday's actions, brought to you by the incredible press
people of Puerto Rico, who were also subject to direct
police threats ... [and] were physically attacked, just as
the students were."

Police attacks on the students and journalists echo those
that took place in Cairo, except none of the national
television networks in the United States chose to broadcast
the photos and videos of Puerto Rico that were readily
available to them. Repression in Cairo was headline news,
but similar attacks on non-violent students in our Puerto
Rican colony were swept under the rug. Videos from UPR show
police firing rubber bullets, tear gas, and pepper spray, as
well as applying pressure point holds to the non-resisting
students' necks to cause intense pain. Women's groups joined
the protests after videos were released of police groping a
female student's breasts.

Save Ethnic Studies in Arizona tour2

  March 8.    Foothill Suite 
12 Noon.  University Union.  Sacramento State. 

CFA Latino/Latina Caucus

“Save Ethnic Studies” Tour Background Information

For the past four years, Arizona Superintendent of Public Schools,

Tom Horne, and the Arizona State Legislature have relentlessly attacked the Tucson Unified School District’s (TUSD) Mexican American Studies Department (MASD). Tom Horne and the Arizona State Legislature have accused that Mexican American Studies classes are: “promoting the overthrow of the United States Government; promoting resentment toward a race or class of people; designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group; and advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals ”

This past May 11, 2010, AZ Governor Jan Brewer, signed into law AZ HB 2281, the anti-Ethnic Studies law, which will in effect eliminate TUSD’s MASD on December 31, 2010. A major provision of the law calls for a 10% withholding of the State of Arizona’s monthly allotment to TUSD if MASD continues to teach Chicano Studies classes.  After exhausting our efforts through lobbying, community activism, and public relations, we are left with no other option than to file a federal injunction in the Federal District Court in Arizona to stop AZ HB 2281.

Eleven Critical Raza Educators have formed a campaign “Save Ethnic Studies”.  The Raza Studies educators will serve, independently from TUSD, as a collective of plaintiffs in filing an injunction in Federal District Court to stop AZ HB 2281 from going into effect. This legal effort will require an enormous amount of financial and human resources in order to be effective in legally challenging AZ HB 2281. As a consequence, we will be embarking on a national fundraising campaign to raise consciousness and resources for our “Save Ethnic Studies” Defense Fund to defeat AZ HB 2281.

Farmworkers suffer from Chile crisis

Perhaps no image captures New Mexico better than the chile pepper. Declared the state vegetable, celebrated in song and story and projected the world over in everything from glitzy photos to tourism brochures, the chile pepper in its myriad forms symbolizes the historical legacy and cultural essence of the New Mexican people.

For centuries the chile trade bound together the remote Hispano villages of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, provided the culinary glue for fall family get-togethers and gave linguistic flavor to countless conversations on the topic of chile across the state.

In the late 20th Century, a large commercial chile industry boomed in the southern part of the state near the Mexican border, drawing in thousands of immigrant farmworkers who earned a seasonal if precarious living from hand-picking the spicy pods that delighted connoisuers everywhere.

Nowadays, the fortunes of New Mexico’s cherished chile crop are on the downside. Just ask Jose Rocha. A veteran farmworker with nearly four decades of experience in the fields of New Mexico and the US, Rocha says he once worked “first class fields” in a wide swath of the borderland chile-growing belt.

Today’s  farm is very different than the one before, according to Rocha. “Sometimes the land gives, sometimes it doesn’t,” the Mexico-born worker says. “There are bad (chile) rows and and good rows.” Nowadays, Rocha encounters slimmer pickings, job-killing machines that methodically pluck rows of ripe chile where humans once treaded and fewer dollars in his pocket.

Global trade and investment patterns, coupled with mechanization, are at the root of the troubles of Jose Rocha and his fellow workers.

Support Democracy in Egypt

Hany Khalil, who wrote the op-ed piece below, is a founding member of the War Times organizing crew. He wrote this piece especially for folks who may not be deeply informed about recent Egyptian history. If you've got friends and acquaintances who might get something from this view from an Egyptian American schoolteacher, please forward Hany's piece on to them.

 

To Support Democracy in Egypt, Suspend U.S. Military Aid

 

By Hany Khalil

(Photos of San Francisco Demonstration by Neal Cassidy)

 

As an Egyptian American, I welcome the Egyptian people’s call for President Mubarak to go. So should all of us, for democracy will be good for Egyptians and Americans both.

 

For thirty years Mubarak’s authoritarian government has held down the Egyptian people with an iron fist. Under emergency laws imposed in 1981, Egypt’s hated security police routinely violate basic civil liberties guaranteed in our own Bill of Rights. Freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, the right to a speedy and fair trial – none are protected in Egypt. Dissent is rewarded with indefinite detention without charge, beatings, and torture.

 

For decades Mubarak’s party, the NDP, has rigged elections. In last fall’s elections, the NDP used restrictions on public campaigning, arbitrary arrests, violence, and ballot stuffing to push the opposition out of parliament. The result: The opposition’s share of seats in parliament dropped from 25% to 3%.

 

Until recently, President Mubarak had planned to hand over the reins of the government to his son Gamal, as if he were the head of a Pharaonic dynasty rather than an elected president.

 

Under Mubarak, connections and bribery decide who gets jobs, permits, contracts, and favorable treatment by government officials.

Sacramento Home Depot attack followed by Mexican cellmate's slaying

 afurillo@sacbee.com  PUBLISHED SUNDAY, FEB. 06, 2011

Richard Russell Harden chased the woman down at the Home Depot on Folsom Boulevard and bashed her three times with a hammer, sending her to the hospital with injuries to her back, neck and shoulder, according to prosecutors.

When the store's security team tackled him to the ground, according to court testimony, Harden indicated race was the motive behind his hammer-wielding assault on Feb. 16, 2009.

"You should let me go," Harden said after his attack on Geraldine Leon-Guerrero, according to testimony at his Sacramento Superior Court preliminary hearing. "They come over the border and take all of our jobs."

Following the attack, Sacramento police escorted Harden to the downtown jail, where sheriff's deputies put him in a cell with an illegal immigrant from Mexico.

While the fast-acting Home Depot security team minimized the damage in the hammer assault, nobody was around to take Harden down the next day when, according to authorities, he beat his Mexican cellmate to death and strangled him with a T-shirt.

Building a Left in the USA

Building a powerful Left in the U.S.  It is an interesting program on how a left should/could organize.
 The first speaker is Dolores Huerta, a DSA Honorary Chair. She argues for weaving various movements together.

The first episode can be downloaded here: 
> 
> http://archive.kpfk.org/parchive/mp3/kpfk_110131_160030special.MP3


Save Ethnic Studies in Arizona tour

CFA Latino/Latina Caucus

“Save Ethnic Studies” Tour Background Information

For the past four years, Arizona Superintendent of Public Schools,

Tom Horne, and the Arizona State Legislature have relentlessly attacked the Tucson Unified School District’s (TUSD) Mexican American Studies Department (MASD). Tom Horne and the Arizona State Legislature have accused that Mexican American Studies classes are: “promoting the overthrow of the United States Government; promoting resentment toward a race or class of people; designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group; and advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals ”

This past May 11, 2010, AZ Governor Jan Brewer, signed into law AZ HB 2281, the anti-Ethnic Studies law, which will in effect eliminate TUSD’s MASD on December 31, 2010. A major provision of the law calls for a 10% withholding of the State of Arizona’s monthly allotment to TUSD if MASD continues to teach Chicano Studies classes.  After exhausting our efforts through lobbying, community activism, and public relations, we are left with no other option than to file a federal injunction in the Federal District Court in Arizona to stop AZ HB 2281.

Eleven Critical Raza Educators have formed a campaign “Save Ethnic Studies”.  The Raza Studies educators will serve, independently from TUSD, as a collective of plaintiffs in filing an injunction in Federal District Court to stop AZ HB 2281 from going into effect. This legal effort will require an enormous amount of financial and human resources in order to be effective in legally challenging AZ HB 2281. As a consequence, we will be embarking on a national fundraising campaign to raise consciousness and resources for our “Save Ethnic Studies” Defense Fund to defeat AZ HB 2281.