October
3, 2013, Issue 194
HUDSON VALLEY
ACTIVIST NEWSLETTER
http://activistnewsletter.blogspot.com/
–––––––––––––
CONTENTS:
1. QUOTES OF THE MONTH
2. STATISTICS OF THE MONTH
3. OBAMA WARNED OF MASS PROTESTS
4. U.S., SYRIA, IRAN: WHAT JUST HAPPENED? (Part 1)
5. U.S., SYRIA, IRAN: WHAT JUST HAPPENED? (Part 2)
6. THE PEOPLE INTERVENE
7. ‘MILK COWS, NOT WORKERS’
8. HOUSE OF LABOR NEEDS REPAIRS
9. FIGHT-BACK WOMEN’S RALLY IN NEW PALTZ
10. ‘WAGE
EQUALITY AND VACATIONS, TOO’
11. GOODBYE
‘TRADITIONAL MALE BREADWINNER’
13. IRAQ’S
UNDECLARED WAR
14. SENATE BILL SEEKS TO RESTRAIN NSA
SPYING
15. SURVEILLANCE
NEWS SHORTS
16. RESTORE
HONOR: PARDON EDWARD SNOWDEN
17. CONSERVATIVES
CUT FOOD AID
18. UN REPORT
BACKS SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE
19. WHAT IS A
REVOLUTION? By Tariq Ali
20. U.S.
MILITARY BASES ENCIRCLE CHINA
21. IT’S THE
STAGNANT WAGES
22. WHAT
ECONOMIC PROGRESS?
23. ‘THE JUNGLE,’ UPDATED
24. 20 YEARS
HARD LABOR FOR HALF OUNCE OF POT
25. WE
RECOMMEND…
—————————
1. QUOTES OF THE MONTH
We
dedicate the following two quotes to Edward Snowden, Chelsea (Bradley) Manning,
Julian Assange, other American whistleblowers, the civilly disobedient,
conscientious objectors to imperialist wars, and those who have justly bucked
the unjust actions of the U.S. government.
1. The
Nuremberg Trials (1945-46), that convicted leading Nazis of war crimes:
"Individuals
have international duties which transcend the national obligations of
obedience. Therefore individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws
to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring.”
2.
Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900, from the Irish writer-poet’s 1891 essay, “The Soul of
Man Under Socialism”:
“Disobedience,
in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is humanity’s original virtue. It
is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and
through rebellion.”
–––––––––––––
2. STATISTICS OF THE MONTH
1.
This year’s Forbes magazine listing of the richest 400 Americans, released this
month, has broken a new record in combined wealth — a record $2 trillion,
compared to only 1.7 trillion last year. Image how hard these 400 “job creators”
had to work for a combined wealth greater than that possessed by half of all
Americans. And they sure show up many other countries. For instance, their $2
billion is more than the annual GDP of Italy, Mexico or Canada. Who can doubt
America is number one! The 400 and the rest of the 1% are doing very well these
days, bless ‘em. From 2009 to 2012 their income jumped 31%. The bottom 40%
should learn from these folks. During the same time their income dropped 6%.
Are they shirkers — or what?
2.
Fast food workers usually earn between $8 and $9 an hour with few benefits
under difficult working conditions. This statistic isn’t new. It’s been like
this forever. The new statistic is from the AFL-CIO. It’s about how much CEOs
in the fast food industry earn in one hour, based on a 50-hour workweek.
Wendy’s CEO “earns” $2,226 an hour. The CEO of Yum Brands (KFC, Tacco Bell,
PizzaHut) “earns” $5,449 an hour. The corporate CEO of McDonald’s “earns” $10,669
an hour. In a just society, this level of wage inequality would earn such
exploiters a long term in prison, flipping burgers for the inmates.
–––––––––––––
3. OBAMA WARNED OF MASS PROTESTS
By John
Queally, Common Dreams
Amid
rumors that the Obama administration might try to cut an emissions deal with
Canada in order to justify approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline,
leaders from 25 US environmental groups — backed by millions of members and at
least 75,000 individuals willing to engage in civil disobedience —warned the
president on Sept. 24 that such a deal would be considered nothing less than a
bitter betrayal.
In
a tersely-worded letter signed by 350.org, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth,
NRDC, Sierra Club, and 20 other well-known green groups, the signers welcomed
the idea of Canada finding new ways to reduce its growing rate of carbon
pollution, but were direct in saying that making promises of future reductions
the basis of a deal on Keystone would ignite a serious backlash.
"On
behalf of our millions of members and supporters nationwide," reads the
letter, "we oppose any deal-making in return for the Keystone XL tar sands
pipeline. Our rationale is simple. Building Keystone XL will expand production
in the tar sands, and that reality is not compatible with serious efforts to
battle climate change."
In
an interview
with the Washington Post, president of the League of Conservation Voters Gene
Karpinski — whose group is not often associated with the more activist-oriented
groups like Greenpeace or Rainforest Action Network—said that his
organization's members are among the tens of thousands who have expressed their
willingness to engage in civil disobedience if Obama approves the pipeline.
"The
intensity out there has not diminished one bit," he said. "If
anything, the willingness of people to go to jail over this is expanding."
Karpinski's
reference is to an online pledge
of resistance hosted by Credo Action, and supported by many of the
groups who signed Tuesday's letter, that asks people who are willing to pledge
to "engage in acts of dignified, peaceful civil disobedience that could
result in arrest in order to send the message to President Obama and his
administration that they must reject the Keystone XL pipeline." As of
Tuesday, 75,709 people had signed the pledge.
—
The pledge is at http://act.credoaction.com/sign/kxl_pledge/?rc=homepage.
–––––––––––––
4. U.S., SYRIA, IRAN: WHAT JUST HAPPENED? (Part 1)
 |
KAL, The Economist
|
By Jack A.
Smith, Activist Newsletter
In the last month, the U. S. government has reversed course
on its intention to attack Syria, and conveyed the impression that it wants to
mitigate Washington’s long-term hostility toward Iran. Is a new era of peace
and friendship emanating from the Obama Administration? Or is it, perhaps, a move
to both spare President Obama a rejection of his war plans by Congress and to further
U.S. global interests?
A
few weeks ago, President Obama was determined to attack Syria over President
Assad’s alleged order to his army to use outlawed chemical weapons against
civilians in a suburb of Damascus. Both Syria and its Russian ally deny the regime
ordered the attack, and, despite the UN report, there is no direct evidence
that it did so. There certainly hasn’t been an explanation of why Assad — an
individual who certainly clings to power — would undertake the one action that
would provoke the U.S. to attack.
Obama
was so eager to send his cruise missiles into Syria he said he was
“comfortable” not having approval from the UN, even though it would be illegal
under international treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory. He said he had a
right to commit an act of war against Syria without congressional approval.
Secretary of State John Kerry, who actually seemed to be ranting at times,
evidently provided the maximum evidence for attacking when he said President
Assad “is like Hitler,” so bombs away — but it didn’t happen.
The
unexpected occurred, removing the immediate threat of war when the Damascus
regime agreed to give up its chemical weapons. (See part 2.) Opposition forces
were furious. They were counting on a U.S. bombardment to advance their
struggle. Instead, inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical
Weapons (OPCW) will oversee the destruction of Syria’s chemical arsenal.
Until
recent days, the Obama Administration was regularly increasing its draconian
economic sanctions on Iran unless the Teheran government ended its attempt to
build nuclear weapons.
Now,
Obama is trying to cultivate a less hostile, working relationship with newly
elected President Hassan Rouhani that may in time lead to a reduction in
tensions that have continued without interruption since the hostage crisis of
1979. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is obviously supporting Rouhani’s
efforts.
In
his first UN speech Rouhani said Iran was ready to enter talks regarding the
nuclear question and emphasized Iran desired a reduction in tensions with the
United States. He stated that Iran had a right to enrich uranium for peaceful
purposes. He strongly repeated what Tehran has declared for years — that his
country is not in the process of building a nuclear bomb.
The
Oval Office sought to arrange a “chance” first meeting at the UN between the
two presidents leading to a public handshake. Rouhani demurred; it was too early
for that. Instead, Obama called the Iranian leader by arrangement Sept. 27 and
conversed for 15 minutes about an improvement in relations and
resolving to the nuclear imbroglio.
Some
Iranians reportedly do not approve of the new president’s willingness to
compromise with the U.S., not least because there hasn’t been a hint the sanctions
will be removed. On Sept. 30, Gen. Mohammed Ali Jafari, a commander of Iranian
Revolutionary Guards, said that Rouhani took a "firm and appropriate"
position at the UN General Assembly, but should have refused the telephone
call. Two days later, he received substantial support from parliament, when 230 members signed a statement of support for his efforts to improve relations with the U.S. and only 60 did not.
It
is doubtful that the Obama Administration planned either of these big changes,
especially the Syrian outcome. The White House may have intended an overture to
the “moderate” Rouhani at some point but to do so while bombing or preparing to
bomb Tehran’s principal Arab ally was impractical. The abrupt decision not to
bomb Syria made a talk possible.
It
is extremely doubtful the steps taken by the U.S. in the last few weeks have
anything to do with a new era of peace and friendship. President Obama was
intent on bombing Syria as a show of U.S. power. As we discuss below, he
completely misjudged the views of the American people regarding a new war and
found himself on the precipice of a humiliating defeat. He grasped an
unexpected way out.
Although
he has long advocated and still desires regime change in Syria, Obama did not
intend to topple the Assad regime. This wasn’t for peaceful reasons. Over the
last year he has come to recognize that his efforts to form a “moderate” front
following U.S. orders have failed so far, and that the jihadist sector of the
armed opposition has made huge advances in the last several months. If Assad
fell now there’s no telling who would end up in power controlling the regime’s
chemical weapons of mass destruction.
Toward
Iran, the sanctions remain in place along with the threats. In a Sept. 30
meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, Obama
declared: “We take no options off the table, including military options.” This,
of course, is a threat to use force, which the UN Charter prohibits as well as
“uses” of force, not that the Charter seems to matter any more.
Netanyahu’s
speech was that of man who has learned nothing and forgotten nothing throughout
his political career: “Israel will not allow Iran to get nuclear weapons,” he said.
“If Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone.” Standing alone,
lest we forget, with 200 nuclear weapons, a huge chemical war inventory and
Washington inevitably coming to the rescue. The usually staid Inter-Press
Service described Netanyahu’s diatribe as being “like the proverbial skunk at
the garden party.” Incidentally, Israel belongs to neither the nuclear nor the
chemical weapons treaties.
Obama
has been seeking to bankrupt Iran over the question of nuclear weapons when he
knows full well that a 2007 assessment by the Director of National Intelligence
on behalf of all U.S. spy agencies reported that Iran had abandoned its nuclear
weapons program years earlier — a finding reiterated in 2010 and applicable
today. Actually Iran has several times sought reasonable solutions to the
nuclear issue and improving relations but has been spurned. At the same time
the Obama Administration has and continues to insist upon regime change in
Damascus — without the jihadists —mainly because the Assad government is Iran’s main Arab ally.
The
United States exercises virtual hegemony over nearly the entire Middle East. It
does not want oil-rich Iran to remain an independent major power in the region that won’t bend its knee to Washington, especially if closer unity with neighboring
Iraq is in its cards. America has sought regime change in Iran since its
puppet, the vicious Shah of Iran, was overthrown in 1979. But it doesn’t want a
war because much of the Middle East would blow up. Now it is attempting to
increase its influence by taking advantage of what it considers a more suitable
government in Tehran.
Washington’s
long-range goals, of course, have not changed. Nor have Iran’s.
Obama’s
only strategic contribution to U.S. foreign/military policy — the “pivot,” or
“rebalancing” to Asia, announced with considerable fanfare a couple of years
ago and reiterated last May — envisages toning down Washington’s obsession with
the “global war on terrorism” and reducing America’s military commitment to the
Middle East.
Containing
China remains Washington’s most important geostrategic objective. This includes
strengthening the military encirclement of China, developing stronger ties with
nations in the region which would rather ally with Washington than Beijing, and
forming a free trade association of
nations in the Asia/Pacific sector known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
that the U.S., naturally, would dominate.
The
White House, however, is more unbalanced than ever in the Middle East/North
Africa theater. The administration’s hegemonic foreign/military policy is
attempting to simultaneously manipulate events in Syria, Iran,
Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan, western Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, the
recent fighting in Mali and the terror bombing in Kenya, not to mention the
unexpected growth of al-Qaeda affiliates in the region.
During his uncommonly long address to the UN Sept. 24 —
which focused almost entirely on justifying all aspects of U.S. foreign and
military policy in the Middle East — Obama stressed: “We will be engaged in the region for the
long haul” because “the hard work of forging freedom and democracy is the task
of a generation.”
“The
United States,” he continued, “is prepared to use all elements of our power,
including military force, to secure these core interests in the region.” They
included (1) “external aggression against our allies and partners;” to (2)
“ensure the free flow of energy from the region to the world;” to (3)
“dismantle terrorist networks that threaten our people;” and to (4) prevent “the
development or use of weapons of mass destruction.”
By
“partners” (1) Obama means Israel and Arab countries that serve U.S. interests.
“Free flow of energy” (2) evidently means Washington can cut Tehran’s flow by
50% through the use of sanctions, and by grossly limiting Iraq’s capacity to
sell oil between 1991-2003, then obliging Baghdad to denationalize Iraq’s
petroleum resources. By dismantling terrorist networks (3) — as in Afghanistan
for the last 12 years, or in Syria against al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra
fighting against the Assad government, or against the Islamic State of Iraq and
al-Sham, which is fighting Shia and Shia-related regimes in Iraq and Syria.
Preventing nuclear weapons (4) evidently means concealing that Israel is a
major nuclear power and opposing the idea — put forward by Iraq — of making the
Middle East a nuclear free zone.
[Next — Putin’s intervention changes the game; jihadist forces quickly expand]
——————————
5. U.S., SYRIA, IRAN: WHAT JUST HAPPENED? (Part 2)
 |
| KAL, The Economist |
By Jack A. Smith,
Activist Newsletter
Everything
is still in flux, but it is possible to trace the incredible course of events
that have transpired so far since mid-August, beginning with Syria, then going
on to growth of jihadism and other matters.
Just
as Obama was reaching to pull the trigger of war, two things occurred to stay
his hand:
1.
Obama was demanding to attack Syria because he had publicly established a
so-called “red line” against the use of chemical warfare by Assad. The
president and his more hawkish advisors evidently believed the U.S. would
appear weak if it did not retaliate with violence. As soon as attack plans were
made public, the criticism began — at first mostly from the peace movement,
which staged many protests across the country, but soon became a popular
crescendo throughout the nation.
The
White House tried to turn the tide by arranging for Obama to speak to Congress
Sept. 10 when it returned from vacation but the opposition mounted. Eventually
Kerry — Obama’s passionate public advocate for war — toned down his
inflammatory rhetoric to the point of promising “an unbelievably small” act of
retaliation.
But
the majority of the American people intervened with a loud “No! Another war in
the Middle East was not acceptable, at least now. And for the first time in
decades of America’s wars of choice, Democrats and Republicans in Congress
acted on behalf of the people and let Obama know he may well fail to obtain
congressional approval.
Evidently
with no way out, Obama decided to face Congress anyway in the vague hope that
he could win enough votes from loyalist Democrats and Republican war hawks to
engage in a quick war against Syria. It was an enormous political risk.
2.
At precisely that moment there materialized a deus ex machina in unlikely
personage to extricate the American leader from a serious dilemma of his own
making. In the words of the New York Times: “President Obama awoke up
Monday (Sept. 9) facing a Congressional defeat that many in both parties
believed could hobble his presidency. And by the end of the day, he found
himself in the odd position of relying on his Russian counterpart, Vladimir V.
Putin, of all people, to bail him out.”
A
month earlier Obama aborted a planned summit with Putin "given our lack of
progress” on many issues and "Russia’s disappointing decision to grant
Edward Snowden temporary asylum.” Bloomberg news reported: “From the Russian
perspective, it's a bit of a joke. One freshly minted Russian witticism,
portrayed the U.S. president as a jilted suitor: ‘Obama won't see Putin because
Putin is already seeing Snowden.’” Humor aside, Putin can now mark “paid” to
this debt, whether or not Obama agrees.
The
president grabbed Putin’s offering of the Damascus government’s willingness to
transfer its entire chemical war arsenal to international control and ran with
it. Obama’s biggest worry wasn’t that Assad may use such weapons (which the
Syrian leader kept to ward off a possible Israeli attack) but that they may
fall into the hands of the ever larger jihadist element of the resistance.
Putin
devised a plan based on an offhand non-binding comment from Kerry that Assad
could avoid war if he destroyed his chemical weapons. Then Putin ran with it —
evidently first consulting with Obama at the G20 summit in St. Petersburg on September 5-6, and then dealing with the Syrians.
According
to journalist Robert Fisk in a Sept. 22 article in the Independent (UK), Syrian
Foreign Minister Walid Muallem received an urgent summons to Moscow Sept 7. He
and his delegation met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov the morning
of Sept. 9, evidently not knowing what was up the Kremlin’s sleeve but hoping
it was a reprieve from bombing. Assad appears nonchalant now, but he was
worried about an attack until Obama himself began to minimize the size of the
effort to gain public approval.
 |
|
Bashar al-Assad (L) and Russian FM Sergei Lavrov. |
“Now
Lavrov told Muallem of Putin’s deal: all Syria’s chemical weapons to be
monitored, details handed over within days, all stocks to be under
international control within a year. And the Russians would be most grateful if
Muallem – at a press conference that evening – would be good enough to agree.
Muallem called Damascus. He talked to Assad. He agreed. And so a long-faced,
exhausted Muallem appeared in front of the world’s television cameras – apparently
almost overwhelmed with exhaustion – to “say yes….
“Afterwards,” Fisk wrote, “Muallem told Lavrov that the
agreement took from Syria its ‘No 1’ weapon. And Lavrov replied: ‘Your best
weapon is us.’”
Obama
welcomed the last minute news and changed the text of his speech to Congress
the next day from justifying a bombing campaign to explaining the agreement
Putin had contrived. The last time Obama had spoken to Putin was at the G20
meeting, according to Asia Times correspondent M. K. Bhadrakumar,
who suggested Obama’s “understanding of the resolution probably needed a
clarification by Lavrov on Russian state television the next day.”
The
upshot is that both Obama and Assad got reprieves, thanks to Putin’s
extraordinarily adept deadline diplomacy. He ran the entire show.
Commenting
on Putin’s role, George Friedman of Stratfor Global
Intelligence wrote Sept.17: “The most important outcome globally is that the
Russians sat with the Americans as equals for the first time since the collapse
of the Soviet Union. In fact, the Russians sat as mentors, positioning
themselves as appearing to instruct the immature Americans in crisis
management. To that end, Putin's op-ed in The NewYork Times was brilliant.” (1)
On
Sept. 27, the Security Council voted to approve a resolution requiring Syria to
eliminate its chemical weapons. All 15 members of the U.N. Security Council
voted unanimously to approve the measure, which will impose binding obligations
on the Syrian government to destroy its chemical weapons, but at Russian
insistence it does not threaten military action should anything go wrong.
That would require a separate resolution.
China
usually joins Russia in the UN Security Council on issues pertaining to Syria,
as it does regarding Iran, much to Washington’s chagrin. “China has been
intensely critical of proposed U.S. military action in Syria,” writes David
Cohn in China Brief Sept. 23. “Unlike Russia, China does not appear to believe
that it has any direct interests in the issue, and seems more concerned with
upholding the principle of unlimited sovereignty in internal affairs.”
Meanwhile,
of course, the slaughter goes on in Syria. So far over 100,000 people have been
killed and millions displaced. The media and many opponents of the Syrian
government often accuse Assad of killing 100,000 of his own civilians, but the
situation is bad enough without such exaggerations. According to an article by
Micah Zenko in Foreign Policy Sept. 17, based on figures from the Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), the breakdown for deaths is: Civilians,
40,146; Rebels 21,850; Pro-regime army and government militia, 45,469;
Hezbollah members 171; unidentified, 2,726. Total 110,371.
The
Obama Administration has been calling for the removal of President Assad’s
regime almost from the beginning of the conflict. Regime change in Syria was a
serious consideration for the Bush Administration. It was one of several
countries in the region on President Bush’s hit list after an anticipated quick
victory quick victory in Iraq.
The
U.S. has always objected to the fact that Syria has been close to Russia and
the USSR since the 1950s though Damascus and Moscow have had sharp differences
at times. The two countries cooperate in military, trade and economic matters.
(Russia’s only naval base in the Mediterranean is in Syria’s port city of
Tartus.) Both countries have long been critics of U.S. hegemony and Israel’s
maltreatment of the Palestinians. As if this weren’t enough, the Syrian
government enjoys warm relations with Iran — a coupling some Israeli leaders
identify as an “Axis of Terror.”
Obama
may want Assad out, but more than that he doesn’t want the jihadists in, which
helps explain Washington’s reluctance to seriously intervene until it can
create a united Syrian front subordinate to U.S. interests that can handle the
political and military aspects of regime change in Damascus, including a
successor to Assad.
The
White House has spent the last two years molding the Syrian National Council
(SNC) and “moderate” elements of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) to lead the revolt.
But the SNC, mainly composed of Syrian exiles, is frequently squabbling and has
lost considerable support within the country. The FSA is said to be entirely
composed of Sunni Muslims who are fighting against the largely Alawite
government leadership in Damascus. The Alawites are an offshoot of the Shia
branch of Islam. The jihadists are far less interested in democracy than in removing
the “ungodly” Shi’ites from power.
In
the face of reports that jihadist groups were increasing their strength within
the oppositionist armed forces, Secretary of State Kerry asserted recently that
moderate Syrian opposition groups are growing in influence. Responding to a
comment made at a Senate Foreign Relations committee meeting Sept. 6 Kerry
declared: “I just don't agree that a majority [of opposition forces] are al
Qaeda and the bad guys. That's not true. There are about 70,000 to 100,000 oppositionists...
Maybe 15% to 25% might be in one group or another who are what we would deem to
be bad guys.”
Nearly
a thousand armed groups, most relatively small, are engaged in fighting against
the Syrian government, but not all follow the designated FSA leadership. The
fighters fall roughly into three groups — nationalist secularists (including
many former Syrian soldiers who joined the opposition and who are backed by the
U.S.), nationalist jihadists (primarily the Muslim Brotherhood) and
international jihadists. “International” pertains to (largely Salifist and Wahhabist) groups
such as al-Qaeda that extend the fight for Sunni Islamic supremacy to all
Muslem countries, not in just a single state.
|
Martin
Chulov (Guardian
UK May 30) reported: “The al-Qaeda-aligned groups that
started mustering in Syria from July 2012 onwards have been consolidating in
large swaths of the north and east and spreading out…. Black flags now fly
above many mosques and civic buildings in towns across Syria's north…. and in
Iraq's border towns.”
Various
reports now indicate that jihadist elements are large and swiftly growing. The
conservative Economist declared Sept. 28: “The prospect of overthrowing Bashar
Assad is catnip to jihadists; his Alawite regime is an heretical abomination to
the hyper-orthodox Salafism from which al-Qaeda draws its support. Western
intelligence thinks most of Syria’s effective rebel militias may now be
jihadist, with thousands of fighters from other Muslim countries and hundreds
from Europe, especially Britain, France and the Netherlands…. The Islamic State
of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), related to al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), has recently
pushed into eastern Syria from Iraq, following a resurgence there.” (Regarding
ISIS and the connection to Iraq, see article below, “Iraq’s Undeclared War.”)
On Sept. 25 Reuters
reported: “A group of powerful rebel
units have rejected the authority of the Western-backed Syrian opposition
leadership abroad and called for it to be reorganized under an Islamic
framework, according to a video statement posted on the internet. At least 13
rebel factions were said to have endorsed the statement, including the
al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra (Nusra Front} and the powerful Islamist
battalions Ahrar Asham and the Tawheed Brigade.” ISIS was not among them
because of hostility and rivalry between that organization and the al-Nusra.
 |
Masked
fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham. REX/ZUMA
|
These
groups represent tens of thousands of fighters. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
speculated that "if the coalition holds, it could mean Western powers
would have no influence over what happens on the ground over a large part of the north as well as parts of Homs
and Damascus."
The
Wall Street Journal Reported Sept. 18: “In recent months, ISIS has become a
magnet for foreign jihadists who view the war in Syria not primarily as a means
to overthrow the Assad regime but rather as a historic
battleground for a larger Sunni holy war. According to centuries-old Islamic
prophecy they espouse, they must establish an Islamic state in Syria as a step
to achieving a global one…. The proliferation of the Sunni jihadists and
extremists has brought a new type of terror to the lives of many Syrians who
have endured civil war in the north. Summary executions of Alawites and
Shiites, who are seen as apostates, attacks on Shiite shrines, and kidnappings
and assassinations of pro-Western rebels are on the rise.”
The
Daily Telegraph (UK) reported Sept. 12: “A new study by IHS Jane's, a defense
consultancy, estimates there are around 10,000 jihadists [in Syria] — who would
include foreign fighters — fighting for powerful factions linked to al-Qaeda.
Another 30,000 to 35,000 are hardline Islamists who share much of the outlook
of the jihadists, but are focused purely on the Syrian war rather than a wider
international struggle. There are also at least a further 30,000 moderates
belonging to groups that have an Islamic character, meaning only a small
minority of the rebels are linked to secular or purely nationalist groups.”
The
Syrian rebels have considerable material support from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and
lesser from Turkey and the U.S. Much of NATO, Israel and many of Washington’s
allies back the rebels as well. Russia and China back Syria in the UN. Russia
also supports the Assad government with weapons. Iran also offers support, as
does Hezbollah, the Shia self-defense organization in Lebanon that has sent
fighters to Syria.
Secularists
in the FSA are obviously worried about the rise in jihadist strength.The
Damascus regime is said to welcome negotiations to end the war, which appears
to have become stalemated. The opposition has rejected negotiations before,
demanding that Assad first step down.
Assad
has let it be known that he intends to remain in office and that he has the
right to decide whether to run for reelection next year.
Stratfor’s
Friedman argues: “The United States and Russia both want the Assad regime in
place to block the Sunnis. They both want the civil war to end, the Americans
to reduce the pressure on themselves to aid the Sunnis, the Russians to reduce
the chances of the Assad regime collapsing.”
Robert
Fisk reported Sept. 30 that “Six weeks
ago, a two-civilian delegation from Aleppo, representing elements of the Free
Syrian Army… met (secretly), so I am told, a senior official on the staff of
President Assad. And they carried with them an extraordinary initiative – that
there might be talks between the government and FSA officers who ‘believed in a
Syrian solution’ to the war…. There was no demand – at least at this stage –
for Assad’s departure.” There was a commitment “that all must work for a
democratic Syria.” Fisk said Damascus agreed.
The
Sunni jihadist/Islamist groups will have something to say about possible
negotiations, which they have opposed in the past. No one knows how all this
will turn out but it will come to a head sooner than later.
——————
6. THE PEOPLE INTERVENE
 |
Protests took place throughout the U.S. (Above) ANSWER action at the White House.
|
By Bill Moyers
Let
us now praise common sense. Once again a president was about to plunge us into
the darkest waters of foreign policy where the ruling principle becomes: “When
in doubt, bomb someone.”
Strategists
in the White House, militarists in the think tanks, the powerful pro-Israel
lobby AIPAC, and arm-chair warriors of all stripes — neo-conservatives and
liberal humanitarians alike — were all telling Barack Obama to strike Syria, no
matter the absence of any law or treaty to justify it, no matter the chaos to
follow. Do it, they said, to show you can, or what’s a superpower for?
But
they hadn’t reckoned on public opinion. The people said no! Not this time. Not
after more than 10 years of soldiers coming home broken in body, screaming nightmares
in their brains, their families devastated. Not when our politics is an
egregious fraud, unable to accomplish anything except enable the rich, while
everyday people struggle to make ends meet.
Jeannette
Baskin, who lives on Staten Island not far from the Statue of Liberty, who
describes herself as neither Republican nor Democrat, told the New York Times:
“We invest all this money in foreign countries and fixing their problems, and
this country is falling apart.”
Don’t
think these people callous — those pictures of children gassed in Syria sicken
them. But there are limits to military power when religious rivalries and
secular passions come armed with blowtorches.
A
retired educator named Alice Ridinger in Hanover, Pennsylvania, spoke for multitudes
when she also told the Times that while she finds the use of chemical weapons
“terrible.” She fears the deeper involvement that could follow a military
strike. “I don’t think that would be the end of it,” she said.
Truth
is, no one knows what would happen once the missiles fly. Not the White House
or Pentagon; not the CIA or NSA; not even the all-seeing oracles of cable
television, the editorial writers of The Wall Street Journal, or the seers of
such influential publications as The Economist – hawkish now on Syria despite
having been wrong on Iraq.
In
time, the White House, Congress, and the punditry could all be grateful to a
suddenly attentive and stubborn public. They may have been spared a folly,
thanks to this collective common sense that became so palpable it was a force
in its own right.
Now
politics and diplomacy have a chance. Perhaps only a slight chance — the
Washington Post reports that the CIA has just begun delivering weapons to
rebels in Syria — deepening America's stake in the civil war. But we can’t know
if politics and diplomacy work unless we give them a try. Meanwhile, give a
cheer for common sense.
—
Moyers and Company, weekly public TV broadcast, 9/13/13.
––––––––––––
7. ‘MILK COWS, NOT WORKERS’
By Gretchen
Purser
SYRACUSE,
N.Y. — Inside the gates of the Great New York State Fair in Syracuse, crowds
ogled the butter sculpture and drank from the 25-cent-per-cup milk bar.
Fair
organizers had promoted the August 26 “Dairy Day” as “a way of saying thank you
to all the dairy farmers that provide us with the state’s official beverage,
milk.”
But
outside, activists shook rattles made of empty milk gallons, played cowbells,
and chanted, “Milk cows, not workers!”
New
York’s $8.9 billion dairy industry relies on an invisible and exploited
workforce: an estimated 2,600 undocumented Latino workers, concentrated in
western, central, and northern New York.
“I’m
not sure people understand the situation we live in,” said Enrique Pereida, a
dairy worker on an Onondaga County farm.
Pereida
could not attend the rally — because, as is typical for dairy workers, he works
seven days a week. “With our pay, we hardly cover our needs,” he said.
Like
all farmworkers, dairy workers are excluded from national labor law’s
guarantees of collective bargaining rights and the right to overtime pay.
And
like many other farmworkers, a majority are undocumented. Under persistent
threat of arrest and deportation, and lacking transportation, many rarely leave
the confines of the farms, where they live and work under awful conditions.
Besides isolation, they experience employer intimidation and wage theft.
–––––––––––––
8. HOUSE OF LABOR NEEDS REPAIRS
By Steve Early
As
AFL-CIO leaders packed up to leave their Los Angeles convention Sept. 11, they
basked in the glow of favorable media coverage. A union president told the New
York Times that the federation had finally “put some movement back in the labor
movement.”
Writers
Guild of America-East President Michael Winship claimed he had just witnessed
the “the most radical restructuring of labor since the AFL and CIO merged
nearly 60 years ago.” Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson agreed that the
AFL-CIO had made a “strategic shift.”
 |
| Growing movement of Low Wage workers demanding $15 an hour. |
These
enthusiastic “solidarity partners” — from constituencies younger and more
diverse than the delegate body — got to make “action session” presentations,
hold press conferences and side rallies, and network with unions and foundation
funders. Sometimes, rank-and-filers from “alt-labor” groups like worker centers
even got airtime on the main stage, for moving celebrations of their difficult
organizing work among fellow immigrants.
Who
wouldn’t like to believe that a more exciting convention format prefigures a
turning point for labor? Unfortunately, greater inclusiveness, closer ties with
non-labor allies, and the adoption of pleasingly progressive resolutions only
begin to address the real organizing challenges facing labor, whether “alt” or
traditional.
Missing
from the festivities were strategies for defending and re-energizing labor’s
existing members. Given the extreme attacks both union and non-union workers
are suffering, the convention’s heavy emphasis on conventional political
strategies and growth through diluted forms of membership was not
“transformative” enough to meet the challenges of the day.
The
proceedings did have a progressive buzz and grassroots sheen not seen since
“New Voice” candidate John Sweeney won the federation’s first contested
presidential election in a century, in 1995. Sweeney’s team, which included now
AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka, pledged to promote new organizing and political
initiatives, community-labor alliances, and anti-globalization efforts, while
expanding the role of women, immigrants, and people of color.
Yet,
as former AFL headquarters insider Bill Fletcher reported in his book,
Solidarity Divided, these reform efforts ran out of steam as early as 1998. For
the next decade or more, AFL-CIO restructuring was more rhetorical than real.
Last
week, with two younger-generation staffers (both in their 40s) on Trumka’s new
leadership team, the convention re-adopted New Voice ideas from 20 years ago.
Delegates again embraced the need for community-labor coalitions, greater
independence in politics, and, of course, more members — preferably in the
millions.
It
was taken as given that these additional working Americans can’t be recruited
into traditional bargaining units. The new thinking is that labor can boost its
membership — and political clout —
through closer structural ties to the Sierra Club, NAACP, National Council of
La Raza, or Moms Rising, among others. This would enable the house of labor to
count as members people on those groups’ mailing lists, too.
The
other method is to count as new members anyone ever solicited on their doorstep
by a canvasser from the AFL-CIO’s own, soon-to-be-expanded alt-labor vehicle,
Working America.
This
outfit, set up originally for political action purposes, now claims 3.2 million
“members.” Almost none pay dues or have any workplace connection to each other.
The federation spends more than $10 million a year on Working America, which is
also subsidized by national and local union donations.
To
keep convention messaging on track, AFL headquarters prepared helpful “talking
points.” The most frequently heard refrain was, “This convention will be the
most innovative and diverse in history. It’s an exciting time as we open our
doors and engage with allies and the non-union community as never before.”
Unfortunately
for federation spin-doctors, some avatars of the AFL’s more traditional labor
organizations didn’t stay on message, and their political influence was still
much felt behind the scenes.
For
example, Fire Fighters President Harold Schaitberger warned, in an interview
with The Nation, about the AFL becoming “the American Federation of Progressive
and Liberal Organizations.” Schaitberger didn’t want a labor movement that’s
“an extension of one ideological part of our society.”
Terence
O’Sullivan of the Laborers ranted at length about the Sierra Club’s betrayal of
labor, because it opposes the Keystone XL pipeline favored by the building
trades and the Teamsters.
But
O’Sullivan did make one constructive suggestion: “We came here to talk about a
new movement,” he said. “But let’s not forget about the old movement.”
Trumka
has made his questionable new focus quite explicit. “The labor movement needs
to be not where we’ve been but where workers are most in need,” he told a
conference of labor academics in June.
The
federation’s de-emphasis on union members’ workplace problems was reflected in
what proposed workshops were scheduled (or rejected) at the convention. Judging
by the content of the “action sessions,” dealing with employers in traditional
workplaces is barely on labor’s to-do list at all.
You
could learn much about the health and safety needs of workers in Bangladesh,
but there was no brainstorming about strengthening local safety committees
here. Fighting givebacks and speed-up, organizing strikes, mobilizing members
on the job, creating a “stewards’ army” face to face (as opposed to online)
were all given little play.
Labor’s
most important public sector struggle since the 2011 “Wisconsin Uprising” was
allotted a single presenter on the one panel (out of 50) that dealt with
contract campaigns. Chicago Teachers Union organizer Matt Luskin recounted how
reformers won office, rebuilt their local, and worked with the community as a
precursor to last fall’s successful nine-day strike against Mayor Rahm Emmanuel
and his school board.
As
dissident academic Stanley Aronowitz noted several months ago, “Organized labor
is still more than 15 million strong…. Why not seek reform of the existing unions?”
Encouraging this course of action is, of course, not part of the AFL-CIO
agenda, this year or any year.
One
thing is certain. U.S. unions aren’t going to meet the challenges they face by
further abandoning the workplace terrain still occupied by their own members or
by workers strategic to the future of important industries like telecom.
Generic
“associate member” programs, like Working America, may be useful for building
political mailing lists, conducting voter registration, and doing voter education
and turnout. Maybe next, promoting labor-endorsed insurance plans in the state
insurance exchanges?
But
dumbing down the concept of membership, in the process, is not a “strategic
shift” so much as a shell game. It has little in common with existing serious,
long-term efforts to build workplace organization in the absence of employer
recognition and bargaining rights….
Trumka
had hoped to avoid an embarrassing convention outbreak of public criticism of
Obamacare. But irate labor leaders, mainly from unions with multi-employer
(Taft-Hartley) health plans, insisted on having their say. Delegates passed a
compromise resolution detailing the “fixes” needed in the Affordable Care Act.
Without these changes, union-negotiated health coverage will be “regressed to
the mean,” as one congressional staffer predicted in a meeting with D. Taylor,
president of UNITE-HERE.
Two
days later at the White House, though, Trumka, Taylor, and other labor
officials received an
embarrassing post-convention rebuff. The administration still
intends to deny union members in multi-employer plans the access to
income-based subsidies that will be offered to other lower-income workers
through state insurance exchanges.
The
same AFL-CIO media operation that was going full-blast for five days in Los
Angeles — and for six months before that—suddenly fell silent on Friday. The
AFL-CIO had “no comment” on the White House dismissal of labor’s concerns.
—
From Labor Notes, Sept. 16. As a longtime staffer of the Communications
Workers, author Steve Early assisted CWA-backed alt-labor experiments like the
Massachusetts High Tech Workers Network, the Alliance @ IBM, and WAGE at
General Electric. His new book, Save Our Unions, forthcoming from Monthly
Review Press in November, contains an account of CWA’s ongoing “minority union”
campaign at T-Mobile.
——————
9. FIGHT-BACK WOMEN’S RALLY IN NEW PALTZ
By the Activist
Newsletter
A
spirited rally and march in Defense of Women’s Rights took place in New Paltz,
N.Y., Sept. 7, organized by Mid-Hudson WORD (Women Organized to Resist and
Defend) in recognition of Women’s Equality Day.
A
total of 135 people attended at some point during the rally in Peace Park
before marching with signs and chanting “fight-back” slogans through the
village’s business district, returning to the park for informal discussions
among attendees and speakers.
 |
Speaker Karina Garcia. |
Other
speakers included: Andrea Callan, NY Civil Liberties Union, Statewide Advocacy
Coordinator. Julia Vogt, student member of NP High School Pride organization.
Cait O’Connor, SUNY New Paltz Feminist Collective. Karina Garcia, New York
State WORD organizer, and staff of National Latina Institute for Reproductive
Health. Joanne Myers, Marist professor, head of Women's Studies dept., VP H.V. LGBTQ Center, member Ulster Democratic
Women. Suzanne Kelly, former SUNY NP Adjunct Professor of Women’s Gender and
Sexuality Studies. Pat Lamanna, Dutchess peace and justice activist, who sang.
Organized
by WORD and Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter. It was endorsed by New York
Civil Liberties Union, Hudson Valley Area Labor Federation, Planned Parenthood
Mid-Hudson Valley, Upper Hudson Central Labor Council, Ulster County Democratic
Women, Orange County Democratic Women, Orange County Democratic Alliance,
Orange County Peace and Justice, New Paltz Feminist Collective, N.P. Women in
Black, N.P. Statewide United University Professions (AFL-CIO), Occupy New
Paltz, Dutchess Greens, Dutchess Peace, Latinos Unidos of the Hudson Valley,
H.V. LGBTQ Center, H.V. Progressives, IFCO/Pastors for Peace, Mid-Hudson
ANSWER, Middle East Crisis Response, Party for Socialism and Liberation, Real
Majority Project, Ulster MoveOn Council, WESPAC, Women Against War, Hudson
River Playback Theatre.
—
Information, Mid-Hudson: np@defendwomensrights.org, http://www.defendwomensrights.org.
————————
10. ‘WAGE
EQUALITY AND VACATIONS, TOO’
[The
following talk opened the Sept. 7, 2013, Defend Women’s Rights rally in New Paltz,
N.Y. The speaker is Mid-Hudson organizer for WORD.]
By Donna
Goodman
I
see the faces of some women and men who attended our outdoor rally here last
August and our indoor rally at SUNY this March. Welcome back friends — and
welcome to all whom we are meeting the first time.
Today’s
gathering in Defense of Women’s Rights will discuss such matters as abortion
rights, violence against women, building the women’s movement, low-wage women
workers, and the rights of young women and their struggles.
I
think all of us here today realize women still have important obstacles to
overcome before attaining social equality in America. We mus7 not only stand up
and fight back against the Republican war on women, but the women’s movement
must take the offensive and struggle to attain new victories. That’s why WORD —
Women Organized to Resist and Defend — was formed.
I’m
going to talk today about a subject not frequently discussed in our movement
but it is an important women’s issue just the same. Why do Washington and the
states not do more for women’s rights?
For
example, I’ll refer to one of the biggest issues confronting all women in
America — the shattering incidence of rape and male violence that many millions
have experienced. Our lives are at stake. Why has so little been done to
sharply reduce the frequency of these crimes?
There’s talk but not much preventive action on the state and federal
level.
This
is a serious social crisis that the political system, not simply the Republican
Party, is failing to adequately address.
Another
example of political system failure is the issue of pay inequity. Compared to
the wages or salary of white men in America, white women earn 79 cents to the
dollar, African American women 69 cents and Latinas 60 cents. Can’t a way be
found for the federal government to come up with a plan to equalize this
situation?
True,
business opposes gender wage equality, but why must profit prevail over women
workers? The disproportionately low minimum wage of $7.25 is an important women’s
issue because females constitute 64% of the minimum wage workforce and 59% of
low wage workers generally. This too is a women’s issue.
Perhaps
the most flagrant indicator of political system failure is the paucity of
adequate social services in areas of deep concern to American women. There has
hardly been any significant progress in social legislation since President
Johnson left office over four decades ago.
The
U.S. is the richest country in the world but compared to other developed
capitalist countries in the 35-member Organization
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) it’s near the
bottom in terms of taking care of working people and single working mothers
raising our next generation.
The
money is there for social programs. It’s just hidden away in the bank vaults of
the rich one percent; it’s being given away to the recipients of corporate
welfare; it’s invested in the Pentagon so we can win the next war, and the
next, and the next.
About
half the U.S. population lives in poverty or near poverty. What’s that got to
do with women? Just this: 35% of American women are more likely to be poor than
men. Last July the Associated Press reported that “Four out of five U.S. adults
struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least
parts of their lives.” Apply our 35% disadvantage to this 80% figure and you
can understand why government social programs are so important to women.
Poverty, too, is a women’s issue.
Poverty
exists to one degree or another in all the OECD states. But generous government
support programs go some way toward alleviating the more onerous conditions.
The U.S. provides the least support of all advanced nations — giving 9% of
average household incomes, compared to average OECD allotments of 22%.
Children
represent 24% of the U.S. population, but they comprise 34% of all people in
poverty. Among all children under 18 years of age, 45% live in low-income
families and just over one in every five live in poor families. More than half
the children in the United States today will spend all or part of their
childhood in a single-parent family mainly headed by the mother.
According
to recent report titled, “Worst Off – Single-Parent Families In The United
States,” such families have a higher poverty rate than 16 other high-income
countries. They have the highest percentage without health care coverage. They
face the stingiest income support system. They lack the paid-time-off-from-work
entitlements that make it easier for single parents to balance caregiving and
jobholding. They must wait longer than in the other countries for early
childhood education to begin. They receive lower child support benefits.”
The
Democratic Clinton administration and a Republican Congress scrapped “welfare
as we know it” in the mid-1990s, ultimately replacing it with Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families – a program that is now clearly inadequate to the
needs of single parent families. It is
underfunded, ungenerous and a disgrace compared to the other OECD countries.
The
plight of single-mother American families is so distressing that the OECD
criticized the U.S. because of its paltry spending and reluctance to provide a
national paid parental leave policy.
A
family leave study by researchers from Harvard and McGill Universities, titled
the “Work, Family and Equity Index,” pointed out the U.S. is far behind most
countries in terms of workplace policies that promote family life and
well-being. Out of 173 countries, only four do not provide some form of
government-guaranteed leave with income to women in connection with childbirth:
Liberia, Swaziland, Papua New Guinea and the United States.
The
federal Family and Medical Leave Act in the U.S. provides up to 12 weeks of
unpaid maternity leave for the mother if she is employed by a company with 50
or more employees. This is a travesty compared to other countries. The Harvard
McGill study declared that “66 countries ensure that fathers either receive
paid paternity leave or have a right to paid parental leave; 31 of these
countries offer 14 or more weeks of paid leave to women.“ This is unheard of in
America. The study also noted that “At least 107 countries protect working
women’s right to breastfeed.”
It
is the law in 145 nations that workers must be paid for a certain number of
sick days. America’s Fair Labor Standards Act does not require sick pay. Among food service workers, the great
majority of whom are women, 86% receive no sick pay.
The
federal Fair Labor Standards Act does not require bosses to pay workers for
vacations and holidays. Consequently, the U.S. has the lowest amount of
vacations and holiday time of the 20 top capitalist economies.
Virtually
everything I’ve mentioned —some specifically, like maternity leave and equal
pay, some generally, like sick days and vacations —are women’s issues. Like
Bread and Roses don’t we need wage equality and vacations too?
Stand
up, fight back!
——————
11. GOODBYE
‘TRADITIONAL MALE BREADWINNER’
If
we’re ever going to fix our problems accommodating both work and family in our
lives, we have to stop thinking that the dilemmas we face today stem from the
collapse of the traditional male-breadwinner family. There is no such thing as
the traditional male-breadwinner family. It was a late-arriving, short-lived
aberration in the history of the world, and it’s over. We need to move on.
For
thousands of years, any family that needed to work understood that everyone in
that family needed to work. There was no such term as “male breadwinner.”
Throughout the colonial America era, wives were called “yokemates” or “deputy
husbands.” When men married, they didn’t do it because they had fallen
helplessly in love. They did it because they needed to expand their labor force
or their land holdings, or they needed to make a political or military or
business alliance, or they needed a good infusion of cash, which was why they
were often more interested in the dowry than the daughter. Male breadwinner was
a contradiction in terms — there was no such thing. Males were the bosses of
the family workforce, and women and children were the unpaid employees.
 |
| The male breadwinner —a declining breed. |
Today
in a sense we’ve gone back to the future. We’ve gone back to the two-earner
family but forward to a world where men and women now earn separate incomes and
have equal legal rights. Increasingly, they want equal access to the rewards
and challenges of both paid work and family. Yet many policymakers and business
leaders are still stuck in that blip in time when women were only marginal
members of the workforce and men were only marginal members of the family. The
only major change we’ve made since the 1950s is passing the Work Family Leave
Act, which offers unpaid leave that lasts only 12 weeks and is available to
only half the workers who need it. Our policies are so inadequate and so far
behind the rest of the world that the best claim we can make is that we’re
181st in the world; 180 other countries have better work-family policies than
we do.
We
have to get rid of the embarrassing disconnect between our outdated policies
and the realities of our family lives, where 70% of American children grow up
in homes where all the adults work outside the home. We are now 13 years into
the 21st century. Isn’t it time to stop acting like it’s still the 1950s?
—
Stephanie Coontz is Director of Research and Public Education at the Council on
Contemporary Families and teaches History and Family Studies at The Evergreen
State College in Olympia, WA. This article was adapted from a talk Coontz gave
as part of a work-life video series produced by the Families and Work Institute.
It appears in the Sept. 23, 2013, Time magazine.
——————
12. 100 ARRESTED PROTESTING WALMART FIRINGS
Walmart
workers and their allies marched, rallied, danced, blew horns, and took arrests
in a coordinated day of action in 15 cities Sept. 5. They were protesting the
company’s recent crackdown on worker activists.
Thousands
of people participated in the new protests, according to OUR Walmart, and 100
were arrested — including in Dallas, Chicago, Seattle, Maryland, Orlando, Los
Angeles, and New York. The L.A. action featured breakdancing. Meanwhile in St.
Paul, Minnesota, a band of
union musicians — performers in the local orchestra, which is
locked out — played for a crowd of 50 workers and allies. “
In
Raleigh, North Carolina, an extraordinary in-store demonstration materialized
just after workers and community allies solemnly presented store managers with
a huge binder containing 170,000 signatures — a petition to reinstate the fired
and disciplined workers.
As
the managers give their canned response (they can’t accept the binder, they’ll
talk with “associates” but non-employees have to leave), shouts begin to echo
through the store. A flash mob in yellow “UFCW Local 1208 Steppin’ 4 Justice”
bursts forth to perform an energetic
synchronized routine. (For a fantastic video of the Raleigh flash
mob, see final article, “We Recommend…”)
Last
year Walmart made $16 billion in profit. The majority owners of the company,
the Waltons, are the richest family in the world. Yet many Walmart workers
continue to earn poverty wages of an average $8.81 an hour.
OUR
Walmart formed in 2011 with the support of the United Food and Commercial
Workers (UFCW). Its goals are $13 an hour, adequate hours, respect on the job,
affordable health care, and a way to redress grievances.
——————
13. IRAQ’S UNDECLARED WAR
 |
Iraq, 2013. Murder and mayhem virtually every day in Iraq as Sunni jihadists attack Shi'ites. |
By the Activist
Newsletter
An
undeclared war is taking place in Iraq, primarily against the Shia-led
government and population. For the first nine months of this year, 7,000 Iraqis
— overwhelmingly civilians — have been slaughtered in the violence. The great majority
of the dead are Shia. Sunnis have been slain in far fewer number, evidently in
retaliation.
The
conflict is one more bloody outcome of Washington’s 2003-2011 invasion and
occupation of Iraq. As part of Washington’s divide and conquer tactics the two
communities fought each other for a period during the long occupation.
The
New York Times reported Sept. 28: “The Shiite-dominated central government, led
by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, is battling an increasingly deadly
Sunni insurgency that is morphing into a bloody sectarian fight reminiscent of
the country’s civil war of several years ago.”
Almost
every day there is terrible news from Iraq about bombings and shootings that
kill dozens, scores, and hundreds of innocent civilians. We tallied the deaths
for several days at random this month and here are the figures: On Sept. 22, a suicide bomber slaughtered 16
people and wounded 35 at a funeral in Baghdad. On Sept. 21, at least 109 people were killed and 173 more were
wounded in two suicide attacks. On Sept. 20, 30 Iraqis were killed. On the 19th,
27 were murdered across the country. On the 18th, eight were slain,
and 53 were wounded. On the Sept. 17, 59 were killed and 151 were wounded.
The
main anti-Shia/anti-government fighting force consists of jihadists associated
with al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). This group is connected to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), one of
the strongest rebel groups in neighboring Syria and which is led by Iraqis. (“Sham”
is Arabic for greater Syria, including the Levant.) Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is
said to help direct the AQI and ISIS insurgencies in both countries.
Both groups seek an Islamic state
governed by strict Sharia law. (The ruling Alawites in Damascus are an
offshoot of the Shia branch of Islam and the state is virtually secular in its
treatments of various minorities.)
According
to a report in the Guardian (UK) May 30 by Martin Chulov:
“In towns and villages on the flat lands south towards Baghdad and in the
communities that dot the sprawling desert west towards the border with Syria, militant groups are
imposing their influence with brutal efficiency. Random, savage and relentless
violence is once more a reality in this part of Iraq, with almost daily
bombings and killings stirring ghosts of a time, not long ago, when Anbar
province was almost lost to al-Qaida
and when hopes for a civil and stable country seemed futile.”
The
Shia represent 60-65% of the population of Iraq, and the Sunnis 33-40%. The
non-Arab semi-autonomous Kurds are 17% and most are Sunni, some are Shia and
others have different faiths. The Sunnis traditionally exercised state power
through the Ba’athist Party until it was banned. Elections following the
invasion brought the Shia to power for the first time.
Despite Bush Administration allegations
in 2002-2003 that the Iraqi regime of President Saddam Hussein collaborated
with al-Qaeda in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in Washington and New York, it is
doubtful that even one member of the terror organization had been allowed to
set foot in Iraq before the invasion.
President Saddam Hussein, a secular
Sunni, despised al-Qaeda, and Osama bin-Laden and his organization hated the
Baghdad regime, and hoped it would fall. The ruling Iraqi Ba’athist Party was
staunchly dedicated to secularism while Bin Laden sought a Sunni religious
state. Iraqi women, for instance, had the most legal rights and freedoms in the
Middle East, though their status has fallen since the U.S. invasion.
Washington expected a quick victory in
Iraq, and then intended to use this momentum and its “shock and awe” firepower
to pave the way for regime change in Iran and Syria. But opposition, largely
Sunni-led, but joined by Shia fighting groups turned Washington’s neo-conservative
fantasy of a quick victory into a drawn out stalemate. Al-Qaeda began
infiltrating the country in the chaos of the occupation and joined the battle
against US. forces, usually operated independently, as it does now.
One of Washington’s efforts to secure
victory included setting the country’s three populations — Shia, Sunni and Kurd
— against each other. For the pro-U.S. Kurds this led to virtual autonomy and
safety in the north. But for the other two it led to a virtual civil war. The
religious conflict between Iraqis eventually subsided, but the al-Qaeda element
continued the fighting, which has increased considerably in recent months.
The
U.S. has been mainly involved in Syria to weaken Iran geopolitically by
removing the Assad government in Damascus —Tehran’s principal Arab ally. By so doing
the U.S. also sought to weaken any serious Iraq-Iran alliance, since Baghdad’s
attention would be diverted by both an internal war and possible trouble on its
western border should the rebels win in Syria. In the recent period, however,
the growth of jihadists in the Syrian rebel ranks has dampened U.S. enthusiasm
for dumping Assad at this point.
The
U.S. first generated a living hell for the people of Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War
when the U.S. destroyed much of the civilian infrastructure, and then followed
with a dozen years of killer sanctions that resulted in some million deaths,
according to UN sources. The U.S. then invaded this nearly prostrate country,
directly or indirectly causing nearly a million more Iraqi deaths over the
years. Now it’s the jihadists who are disrupting the country.
Progressive
Americans, at least, recognize the enormous debt the U.S. owes Iraq, a fact
made all the more obvious by the continuing strife afflicting the Iraqi people
as a result of Washington’s long years of imperial intervention in that hapless
society.
The
best way to pay that debt is for the U.S. government to stop intervening and
withdraw all its weapons of war from the region; to pay reparations to Iraq; to
make peace with Iran; to support a Middle East nuclear ban; and to genuinely back
the independence and needs of the Palestinian people.
— J.A.S.
——————
14. SENATE BILL SEEKS TO RESTRAIN NSA
SPYING
By Democracy Now
Four
senators have unveiled a measure to rein in the surveillance powers of the
National Security Agency. The bill from Democratic Senators Ron Wyden (OR),
Mark Udall (CO), and Richard Blumenthal (CN), as well as Republican Sen. Rand
Paul (KY), is the most sweeping congressional response to date since Edward
Snowden exposed widespread NSA spying in June. Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy
(VT) is not one of the bill’s co-sponsors, but has backed calls for similar
reforms.
At
a news conference Sept. 24, Sen. Wyden cited what he called a "sea
change" in public opinion as a result of Snowden’s leaks. Sen. Udall,
meanwhile, said the measures in the Intelligence Oversight and Surveillance
Reform Act would protect Americans from unjustified intrusion into their
private lives, in part by ending the bulk collection of telephone records under
Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act.
The Senate Intelligence Committee began hearings Sept.
26 on proposed NSA reforms. NSA chief Keith Alexander dodged
questions from Wyden about whether the NSA had used cell phone signals to
collect data on the location of U.S. citizens.
During the hearing, Wyden said "the leadership of NSA built an intelligence collection system that repeatedly
deceived the American people."
Alexander also
faced questions from Udall, who asked. "Is it the goal of the NSA to
collect the phone records of all Americans?” The general responded: "I
believe it is in the nation’s best interest to put all the phone records into a
lockbox that we can search when the nation needs to do it, yes.”
15. SURVEILLANCE
NEWS SHORTS
Excerpts from
longer reports by Common Dreams, Democracy Now,
Mother Jones,
Associated Press,Antiwar.com, Reuters and the Guardian (UK)
1. Stung by
public unease about new details of NSA spying, President
Barack Obama selected a panel of advisers he described as “independent experts”
to scrutinize the NSA's surveillance programs to be sure they weren't violating
civil liberties and to restore Americans trust. But with just weeks remaining
before its first deadline to report back to the White House, the review panel
has effectively been operating as an arm of the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA and all other U.S. spy efforts.
The panel's advisers work in offices on loan from the DNI. Interview requests
and press statements from the review panel are carefully coordinated through
the DNI's press office. James Clapper, the intelligence director, exempted the
panel from U.S. rules that require federal committees to conduct their business
and their meetings in ways the public can observe. Its final report, when it's
issued, will be submitted for White House approval before the public can read
it.
2. The New York Times revealed Sept. 29 that the NSA has for the past three years been using its wholesale
data collection from American citizens to construct elaborate maps of “social
connections.” The agency uses metadata, GPS locations and voter records from
ordinary Americans to figure out who is friends with who, and connecting people
indirectly to others of “intelligence interest.”
3. A federal audit last week
revealed the FBI has been operating drones inside the United States since 2006. The
general public, at least, has known nothing about this example of probable
government eavesdropping. In total, the Justice Department has spent nearly $5
million on drones, according to the report that was issued by the agency’s
inspector general. The report urged officials to develop new guidelines to
protect privacy saying drones raise "unique concerns about privacy."
Drones currently operate under the same rules as manned surveillance planes.
4. Amid ongoing
controversy over NSA warrantless spying programs, another legal
battle exposes the Obama Administration's willingness to steamroll civil
liberties in the name of "security." The Obama administration urged
the U.S. Supreme Court to issue a precedent-setting ruling that the 4th
Amendment — which prohibits unreasonable and warrantless searches and seizures
— somehow allows for warrantless searches of personal cell phones, the
Washington Post reports.
The ACLU responded: "Our mobile devices hold our emails, text messages,
social media accounts, and information about our health, finances, and intimate
matters of our lives. That's sensitive information that police shouldn't be
able to get without a warrant…. The Constitution gives us the right to speak
freely and know that police won't have access to private communications in our
cell phones unless there is a good reason."
5. Despite
claims by members of the Senate Intelligence Committee that they are
barred from publicly exposing dragnet surveillance practices at the National
Security Agency, a closer look at Senate rules shows that the group actually
has it in their power to actively push for greater transparency. They have just
opted not to use that power. According to
a new report by McClatchy, "buried in the pages" of the
founding document of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senate
Resolution 400, is a provision that allows the committee to "seek the
declassification of information that he or she thinks is of public interest,
even if the executive branch labels the material top secret," by way of a
majority committee vote. According to the rule, if a majority vote is reached
and the executive branch still refuses to allow the declassification of
materials for public knowledge, the issue can be taken to the Senate floor for
another vote.
7. Since last
June, when Edward Snowden tore the veil off the National Security Agency's vast data
dragnet, Americans have been flocking to ultra-secure email services in the
hopes of keeping the government out of their private business. But even these
services may not be able to protect your email from government prying. That
fact came into stark relief a few weeks ago when Lavabit, the secure email
service used by Snowden, abruptly shut down because
it did not want to be "complicit in crimes against the American
people." Several similar outfits have shut down because they cannot
protect their clients against the surveillance state.
8. At least a
dozen U.S. NSA employees have been caught using secret government surveillance
tools to spy on the emails or phone calls of their current or former spouses
and lovers in the past decade, according to the intelligence agency's internal
watchdog, it was revealed Sept. 27. The practice is known in intelligence world
shorthand as "LOVEINT" and was disclosed by the NSA Office of the
Inspector General in response to a request by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Just
imagine how many weren’t caught.
———————
16. RESTORE
HONOR: PARDON EDWARD SNOWDEN
How
do you justify criminally charging a government contractor for revealing an
alarming truth that the public has every right to know? That is the
contradiction raised by President Obama now that he has, in effect,
acknowledged that Edward Snowden was an indispensable whistle-blower who
significantly raised public awareness about a government threat to our
freedom.
Unfortunately,
the president didn’t have the grace and courage to concede that precise point
and remains committed to imprisoning Snowden instead of thanking him for
serving the public interest. But Julian Assange, no stranger to unrequited
integrity, nailed it. “Today, the president of the United States validated
Edward Snowden’s role as a whistleblower by announcing plans to reform
America’s global surveillance program,” the WikiLeaks founder said in a statement
posted Saturday, the day after Obama’s remarks.
While
boasting, “I called for a review of our surveillance programs,” Obama avoided
the obvious fact that this review was compelled not by a sudden burst of
respect for the safeguards demanded by our Constitution but rather Snowden’s
action in making the public cognizant of the astounding breadth and depth of
the National Security Agency’s spying program.
Once
again, Obama managed to blame not those responsible for government malfeasance,
himself included, but instead the rare insiders driven to do their duty to
inform the American people. “Unfortunately, rather than an orderly and lawful
process to debate these issues and come up with appropriate reforms, repeated
leaks of classified information have initiated the debate in a very passionate
but not always fully informed way,” he said.
How
disingenuous, to put it mildly. Without the leaks, there would be no reforms.
We, the voters, couldn’t initiate a debate about the wisdom of this extensive
spying because the government officials who authorized it, from the president
on down, kept us in the dark.
Those
elected officials who were briefed on these nefarious programs never shared
that information with the public, and most of them, led by California Democrat
Dianne Feinstein, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have branded
Snowden a traitor for exposing their own failure to protect our freedoms.
“I
don’t look at this as being a whistle-blower,” Feinstein said of Snowden in
June. “I think it is an act of treason.” The senator added, “He took an
oath—that oath is important. He violated the oath, he violated the law. It’s an
act of treason in my view.”
What
about Feinstein betraying her oath of allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and
its Fourth Amendment prohibiting “unreasonable searches and seizures”? If she
judged the NSA program to be constitutional, why didn’t she reveal the scope of
the operation to the spied-upon American public to let the voters decide?
Instead, last year, Feinstein joined with the Obama administration in defeating
amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that would have
compelled the NSA to reveal the extent of its spying.
A
decent Democrat, Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, explained why the public needed
the information that Feinstein would deny them. “Citizens generally assume our
government is not spying on them,” he told U.S. News & World Report in
December. “If they had any inkling of how this system really works, the details
of which I cannot discuss, they would be profoundly appalled.”
But
Feinstein’s contempt for the public’s right to know sustained people’s
ignorance until Snowden took the courageous step of letting us in on the
alarming details of this assault on our rights. The president was forced to reverse
course, conceding for the first time that there is a problem, and advanced
initiatives he claimed would better shield our liberties. Suddenly, defending
those freedoms is our patriotic duty, as Obama acknowledged Friday, “because
what makes us different from other countries is not simply our ability to
secure our nation. It’s the way we do it, with open debate and democratic
process.”
Why
did it require the shocking Snowden revelations to get this president to
recognize the danger to that democratic process resulting from the secret
hearings of the FISC in which, as Obama put it, “One of the concerns that
people raise is that a judge reviewing a request from the government to conduct
programmatic surveillance only hears one side of the story, may tilt it too far
in favor of security, may not pay enough attention to liberty.”
No
kidding? But maybe the president now gets the point that the authors of our
Constitution intended, a notion this Harvard-educated constitutional law
professor claimed to understand when he was a senator attempting to rein in the
unbridled power of the NSA. That Obama has been forced by public opinion to
come to his senses on this issue, even in a limited way, is a tribute to the
courage of Snowden, who should be honored as the poster boy for the right of
the citizen to protest government injustice rather than be hunted as a
fugitive.
Absurd
as it sounds in this era of fear mongering, a presidential pardon for Snowden
would bring honor to our country.
—
Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com,
where this article was published 8-13-13.
––––––––––––
17. CONSERVATIVES
CUT FOOD AID
By the Activist
Newsletter
The
conservative House voted 217-210 to pass legislation reducing food stamp spending
by $39 billion over the next decade.
The
measure would eliminate about 3.8 million recipients currently receiving the
stamps, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Approximately 47.7 million Americans now
depend on the program for a minimally nutritious diet. “No program does more than SNAP to
protect children from the effects of deep poverty,” says the Center on Budget
and Policy Priorities (CBPP).
The
House legislation isn't expected to pass the Senate. But if it does, the bill
would spend $725 billion on food stamps over the next 10 years, compared to the
Senate’s $760 billion.
According
to the CBPP, those who would be eliminated from SNAP include to:
·
1.7 million unemployed, childless adults in 2014
who live in areas of high unemployment — a group that has average income of
only 22% of the poverty line (about $2,500 a year for a single individual) and
for whom SNAP is, in most cases, the only government assistance they receive
(this number will average 1 million a year over the coming decade);
·
2.1 million people in 2014, mostly low-income
working families and low-income seniors, who have gross incomes or assets
modestly above the federal SNAP limits but disposable income — the income that
a family actually has available to spend on food and other needs — below the
poverty line in most cases often because of high rent or child care
costs. (This number will average 1.8 million a year over the coming
decade.) In addition, 210,000 children in these families would also lose
free school meals;
·
Other poor, unemployed parents who want to work
but cannot find a job or an opening in a training program — along with their
children, other than infants.
A
total of 15 Republicans joined 195 democrats to come within a few votes of quashing
the legislation. No Democrats voted with the right wing, but five did not vote.
According to the Environmental Working Group Farm Subsidy Database, 10 of the
conservative House members who voted to cut subsidies from low-income
recipients themselves received subsidies from other aspects of agricultural
legislation.
Tea
Party and far right members of Congress virtually accuse hungry Americans of
being slackers. They think cutting the food allowance will force them to go to
work, as though there is work to do. Liberal economist Paul Krugman took a
swipe at this bedraggled thesis in his N.Y. Times column Sept. 23:
“As
Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, puts it, [the SNAP
program is] an example of turning the safety net into 'a hammock
that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and
complacency.’ One answer is, some hammock:
last year, average food stamp benefits were $4.45 a day.
Also, about those ‘able-bodied people’: almost two-thirds of SNAP beneficiaries
are children, the elderly or the disabled, and most of the rest are adults with
children.”
The Agriculture Dept. reported this
month that 17.6 million U.S. households had difficulty feeding their families,
and 7 million of these are suffering from "very low food security"
that forced them to go hungry in 2012. Almost 15% of all U.S. households (49
million people) suffered food insecurity last year — with poor households,
"households with children headed by single women or single men," and
African American and Hispanic households hardest hit.
— J.A.S.
—
A thorough analysis of the farm bill is at
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=4009.
—————————
18. UN REPORT
BACKS SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE
By Andrea
Germanos, Common Dreams, Sept. 23, 2013
The
world needs to "wake up before it is too late" and usher in a
paradigm shift in agriculture that moves away from industrial agriculture in
favor of “mosaics of sustainable regenerative production systems" that
favor small-scale farmers and local food production, a new report
from a UN body states.
However,
the call from the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) flies in the
face of the goals laid out by trade deals now being negotiated including the
secretive Trans Pacific Partnership.
The
report— “Wake up
before it is too late: Make agriculture truly sustainable now for food security
in a changing climate” — was written with contributions from over 60
experts, and finds that "urgent and far-reaching action" is needed to
address the "collective crisis" of "rural poverty, persistent
hunger around the world, growing populations, and mounting environmental
concerns."
The
UNCTAD report was welcomed by groups who have long advocated for agroecological
approaches, including GRAIN, La Via Campesina and the ETC Group.
“Long
before the release of this report, small farmers around the world were already
convinced that we absolutely need a diversified agriculture to guarantee a
balanced local food production, the protection of people's livelihoods and the
respect of nature,” Elizabeth Mpofu, general coordinator of La Via Campesina,
said in a statement.
However,
as the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) points out,
the approaches the report advocates are incompatible with the free trade
agreements like the TPP.
[From
the Activist Newsletter: The U.S.-dominated TPP is focused on the Asia/Pacific
region. Critics charge the TPP “is being written by 600 corporate ‘advisors,’
but Congress and the American public are being kept in the dark. It would allow
corporations to sue nations for anticipated loss of profits, voiding
environmental and labor laws; offshore millions of American jobs; bring unsafe
food and products into the U.S.; increase cost of medicines; strangle internet
privacy and free speech, and much more.” Another objective of the trade pact is
to strengthen the U.S. in the region to “contain” China’s influence.]
In
its contribution to the report, IATP “focused on the effects of trade
liberalization on agriculture systems. We argued that trade liberalization both
at the WTO [World Trade Organization] and in regional deals like the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had increased volatility and corporate
concentration in agriculture markets, while undermining the development of
locally based, agroecological systems that better support farmers.
“The
report’s findings are in stark contrast to the accelerated push for new free
trade agreements, including the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the U.S.-EU
Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which expand a long discredited model
of economic development designed primarily to strengthen the hold of
multinational corporate and financial firms on the global economy. Neither
global climate talks nor other global food security forums reflect the urgency
expressed in the UNCTAD report to transform agriculture.”….
—
The full report is at
http://unctad.org/en/pages/PublicationWebflyer.aspx?publicationid=666
——————
19. WHAT IS A
REVOLUTION?
By Tariq Ali
Ever
since the beginning of the Arab Spring there has been much talk of revolutions.
Not from me. I’ve argued against the position that mass uprisings on their own
constitute a revolution, i.e., a transfer of power from one social class (or
even a layer) to another that leads to fundamental change. The actual size of
the crowd is not a determinant — members of a crowd become a revolution only
when they have, in their majority, a clear set of social and political
aims. If they do not, they will always be outflanked by those who do, or by the
state that will recapture lost ground very rapidly.
Egypt
is the clearest example in recent years. No organs of autonomous power ever
emerged. The Muslim Brotherhood, a conservative social force, one that
belatedly joined the struggle to overthrow Mubarak, emerged as the strongest
political player in the conflict and, as such, won the elections that followed.
The Brotherhood’s factionalism, stupidity, and a desire to reassure both
Washington and the local security apparatuses that it would be business as
usual led it to make several strategic and tactical errors from its own point
of view. New mass mobilizations erupted, even larger than those that had led to
the toppling of Mubarak. Once again they were devoid of politics, seeing the
army as their savior and, in many cases, applauding the military’s brutality
against the Muslim Brothers. The result was obvious. The ancient régime is back
in charge with mass support. If the original was not a revolution, the latter
is hardly a counter-revolution. Simply, the military reasserting its role in
politics. It was they who decided to dump Mubarak and Morsi. Who will dump
them? Another mass mobilization? I doubt it very much. Social movements
incapable of developing an independent politics are fated to disappear.
In
Libya, the old state was destroyed by NATO after a six-month bombing spree.
Nearly two years later, armed tribal gangs of one sort or another still roam
the country, demanding their share of the loot. Hardly a revolution according
to any criteria.
What
of Syria? Here, too, the mass uprising was genuine and reflected a desire for
political change. Had Assad agreed to negotiations during the first six months
and even later, there might have been a constitutional settlement. Instead, he
embarked on a path of repression and the tragically familiar Sunni-Shia
battle-lines were drawn (this divide was a real triumph for the United States
following the occupation of Iraq). Turkey, Qatar and the Saudis poured in
weaponry and volunteers to their side in Syria, and the Iranians and Russians
backed the other with weaponry.
The
notion that the Syrian National Coalition (SNC) is the carrier of a Syrian
revolution is as risible as the idea that the Brotherhood was doing the same in
Egypt. A brutal civil war with atrocities by both sides is currently being
fought. Did the regime use gas or other chemical weapons? We do not know with
certainty. The strikes envisaged by the United States are designed to prevent
Assad’s military advances from defeating the opposition and re-taking the
country. That is what is at stake in Syria.
Outside
the country, the Saudis are desperate for a Sunni takeover to further isolate
Iran, strengthened by the semi-clerical Shia regime in Iraq created by the U.S.
occupation. Israel’s interests are hardly a secret. They want Hezbollah
crushed.
 |
| Fidel and Che.They knew the meaning of revolution. Hasta La Victoria Siempre! |
Most
Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan are only too well aware that U.S. strikes
will not make their country better. Many of the courageous citizens of Syria
who started the uprising are in refugee camps. Those at home fear both sides,
and who can blame them? Meanwhile, back at home, Obama is promising Republicans
that he will facilitate regime change.
[A
few days after this report President Obama pulled back from the precipice of a
war with Syria, at least temporarily.]
—
From Guernica, Sept. 4. Tariq Ali has been a leading figure of the
international left since the 1960s. He is a long-standing editor of the New
Left Review and a political commentator published on every continent. His books
include The Duel:
Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, Pirates of
the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, and The Obama
Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad.
–––––––––––––––
20. U.S.
MILITARY BASES ENCIRCLE CHINA
[The
Pentagon has been gradually encircling China with U.S. military bases for
several decades, but the pace has accelerated since the Obama Administration’s
“pivot” to Asia over two years ago. Here is a recent AP report on the very
latest additions to Washington’s military buildup.]
By John Reed,
the Associated Press
The
U.S. military is encircling China with a chain of air bases and military ports.
The latest link: a small airstrip on the tiny Pacific island of Saipan. The
U.S. Air Force is planning to lease 33 acres of land on the island for the next
50 years to build a "divert airfield" on an old World War II airbase
there. But the residents don't want it. And the Chinese are in no mood to be
surrounded by Americans.
The
Pentagon's big, new strategy for the 21st century is something called Air-Sea
Battle, a concept that's nominally about combining air and naval forces to
punch through the increasingly formidable defenses of nations like China or
Iran. It may sound like an amorphous strategy — and truth be told, a lot of
Air-Sea Battle is still in the conceptual phase. But a very concrete part of
this concept is being put into place in the Pacific. An important but
oft-overlooked part of Air-Sea Battle calls for the military to operate from
small, bare bones bases in the Pacific that its forces can disperse to in case
their main bases are targeted by Chinese ballistic missiles.
Saipan
would be used by American jets in case access to the U.S. superbase at Guam
"or other Western Pacific airfields is limited or denied," reads this
Air Force document discussing the impact building such fields on Saipan and
nearby Tinian would have on the environment there. (Residents of Saipan
actually want the Air Force to use the historic airbases on Tinian that the
U.S. Marines are already refurbishing and flying F/A-18 Hornet fighters out of
on an occasional basis.)
Specifically,
the Air Force wants to expand the existing Saipan International Airport — built
on the skeleton of a World War II base used by Japan, and later the United
States — to accommodate cargo, fighter and tanker aircraft along with up to 700
support personnel for "periodic divert landings, joint military exercises,
and joint and combined humanitarian assistance and disaster relief
efforts," according to Air Force documents on the project.
This
means the service plans to build additional aircraft parking space, hangars,
fuel storage tanks and ammunition storage facilities, in addition to other
improvements to the historic airfield. And it's not the only facility getting
an upgrade.
In
addition to the site on Saipan, the Air Force plans to send aircraft on regular
deployments to bases ranging from Australia to India as part of its bulked up
force in the Pacific. These plans include regular deployments to Royal
Australian Air Force bases at Darwin and Tindal, Changi East air base in
Singapore, Korat air base in Thailand, Trivandrum in India, and possibly bases
at Cubi Point and Puerto Princesa in the Philippines and airfields in Indonesia
and Malaysia, a top U.S. Air Force general revealed last month.
[From
the Activist Newsletter — Since the end of World War II China has been
increasingly
surrounded by U.S. naval, air and troop bases through the region
from small islands dotting the western Pacific to Japan and South Korea in the
northeast to the Philippines in the southeast, to major facilities in
Afghanistan, Singapore and the Indian Ocean in the west. This does not include
air power, long-range missiles, satellite and communications surveillance, and
short, medium and long-range nuclear weapons at the ready. More recently Obama
opened a new Marine base in western Australia and ordered the majority of the
U.S. fleet, from aircraft carriers to nuclear submarines, to move from the
Atlantic to the Pacific.
[Why
does the Obama Administration flaunt the flag and its martial trappings in
Beijing’s face? It is part of Washington’s effort to deny China substantial
authority in its own regional sphere of influence, lest it ever contemplate
undercutting U.S. global hegemony.]
———————
21. IT’S THE STAGNANT WAGES
By Amy Traub
We
probably don’t need to be reminded that the economy is a critical problem. Yet
the nation’s political conversation still founders on the question of what it
is about the nation’s economic performance that is holding back the middle
class and people trying to work their way into it.
Into
the fray steps the Economic Policy Institute, with straight-forward, clarifying
data in a new study
released recently titled “A Decade of Flat Wages.”
In
reality it’s not budget deficits or economic uncertainty or a lack of
innovation and productivity advances that are slowing our economic recovery and
undermining the middle class. It’s the stagnant wages. EPI economists Lawrence
Mishel and Heidi Shierholz offer this summary:
According
to every major data source, the vast majority of U.S. workers — including
white-collar and blue-collar workers and those with and without a college
degree —have endured more than a decade of wage stagnation. Wage growth has
significantly underperformed productivity growth regardless of occupation,
gender, race/ethnicity, or education level.
During
the Great Recession and its aftermath (i.e., between 2007 and 2012), wages fell
for the entire bottom 70% of the wage distribution, despite productivity growth
of 7.7%.
Weak
wage growth predates the Great Recession. Between 2000 and 2007, the median
worker saw wage growth of just 2.6%, despite productivity growth of 16.0%,
while the 20th percentile worker saw wage growth of just 1.0% and the 80th
percentile worker saw wage growth of just 4.6%.
According
to the report: “[T]he vast majority of
wage earners have already experienced a lost decade, one where real wages were
either flat or in decline.” And that lost decade itself was hardly following on
a golden age of broad prosperity. Instead:
This
lost decade for wages follows decades of inadequate wage growth. For virtually
the entire period since 1979 (with the one exception being the strong wage
growth of the late 1990s), wage growth for most workers has been weak. The
median worker saw an increase of just 5.0% between 1979 and 2012, despite
productivity growth of 74.5% — while the 20th percentile worker saw wage
erosion of 0.4% and the 80th percentile worker saw wage growth of just 17.5
Focusing on stagnant wages as a primary obstacle to growing the nation’s middle class enables us to think clearly about the policy choices that contributed to a lost decade for wages as well as the policy decisions that could reverse the trend. Rather than austerity, we need “large-scale ongoing public investments and the reestablishment of state and local public services that were cut in the Great Recession and its aftermath” in order to lower unemployment so that wages can rise
We also need to raise the minimum wage and take other steps to give low- and middle-wage workers more power in the workplace — including labor law reform, immigration reform that empowers working people, and “taking executive action to ensure that federal dollars are not spent employing people in jobs with poverty-level wages.”
In
addition to EPI’s analysis, I would add that we need to be thinking about the
recent strikes of Walmart employees, fast food workers, and other Americans
earning As my colleague Catherine Ruetschlin pointed
out, the $15 an hour fast food strikers are calling for sounds like a far less
radical demand when you remember that the minimum
wage would be $21.72 an hour if it had kept pace with productivity
increases since 1968.
Wage
stagnation for low- and middle-income workers is holding the entire economy
back. The time to focus and take action is past due.
[On
Aug. 29, workers in
nearly 60 cities walked off their fast food restaurant jobs to
protest for better wages and the right to organize unions, the largest number
of such strikes in a day. Organizers and workers hope the strikes marked a
tipping point in a campaign that kicked off last November in New York City. The
strikes have spread rapidly throughout the country: first to northern cities,
then to the Midwest and the south. Fast food workers represent both a huge
potential opportunity to organize workers, with millions of
people who feed tens of millions of Americans every day, and a
compelling economic cause, as their wages have stagnated despite constantly
accelerating profits for fast food companies.]
—
From Demos, 8-21-13. The text and charts of “A Decadec of Flat Wages” are at
http://www.epi.org/publication/a-decade-of-flat-wages-the-key-barrier-to-shared-prosperity-and-a-rising-middle-class/
—————————
22. WHAT
ECONOMIC PROGRESS?
By Heidi Moore
The
president's economic initiatives – food stamps, manufacturing, infrastructure,
raising the debt ceiling, appointing a new chairman of the Federal
Reserve – have mostly ended in either neglect or shambles. After
five years, the Obama Administration's stated intentions to improve the
fortunes of the middle class, boost manufacturing, reduce income inequality,
and promote the recovery of the economy have come up severely short.
Despite
this, the president believes he is negotiating his economic agenda with
Congress from a position of strength, and almost every speech includes some
self-congratulatory note about how far the economy has come.
Most
recently, when answering the withdrawal letter of Larry Summers
the former Treasury Secretary and Harvard president who was an unofficially
named candidate for chairman of the Federal Reserve, the president claimed that
Summers was instrumental to turning the current economy into a land of milk and
honey.
“Larry
was a critical member of my team as we faced down the worst economic crisis
since the Great Depression, and it was in no small part because of his expertise,
wisdom, and leadership that we wrestled the economy back to growth and made the
kind of progress we are seeing today.”
The
kind of progress we are seeing today? The mind boggles: what progress is that?
Here's
the litany of failure: the president has not pushed through any major stimulus
bill since 2009, and most of that was pork-barrel
junk. Manufacturing is weak and
weakening; the employment gap between the rich and the poor is
the widest on
record; the economic recovery is actually more like an extended
stagnation with 12 million people unemployed; the housing
"recovery" will be stalled as long as incomes are
low and house prices are high; and quantitative easing as a
stimulus, while a heroic independent effort by the Federal Reserve, is past its
due date and is no longer improving the country's fortunes beyond the
stock market .
Shall
we continue? We don't have a food stamp bill even though 49 million Americans lack
regular access to food. Goldman Sachs analysts have said the
sequester is taking a toll on stubbornly growing unemployment: "since
sequestration took effect in March, federal job losses have been somewhat more
pronounced," they wrote last week; and another debt ceiling controversy –
the third of Obama's presidency – looms in only a few weeks with the potential
to hurt what meager economic growth we can still cling to.
The
president could not be more wrong or misleading in the way in which he presents
our economic progress. It's time to end the delusion that this White House has
accomplished even a fraction of what it should be doing to help the economy. It
should have been focusing all its efforts on employment, perhaps by boosting
job-retraining programs, providing tax incentives for employers or supporting a
comprehensive infrastructure effort. Instead, the administration is falling
victim to political distractions and lack of follow-through and wasting its
meager political capital on the wrong fights.
The
latest example is the debacle around Larry Summers. The week leading up to
his exit was a rough one, as no fewer than three important Democratic senators
– Jeff Merkley, Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester – openly stated that they would
not vote for Summers when his name came in front of the Senate Banking
Committee. Another Democratic member of
the committee, Elizabeth Warren, was opposed to Summers as well, as were Sens.
Dianne Feinstein and Dick Durbin who signed a letter begging Obama to choose
someone else.
Given
the ferocity of the opposition, the main surprise today is not why Summers is
pulling his name from consideration, but how his candidacy ever got this far.
The usually genteel (or at least passive-aggressive) profession of economics is
not one given to activism. Yet, when Summers' name came up, the White House was
inundated with petitions: 20 senators opposing his
nomination this summer, 300 economists uniting
against him. Wherever the president turned, it would have been
abundantly clear to him that tying his fortunes to Summers would have been akin
to tying two rocks together to see if they float. Instead, Obama listened to
his "trusted
economic advisers," who have again, as they have for years,
failed to read the room correctly.
—
From The Guardian (UK), 9-16-13
————————
23. ‘THE JUNGLE,’ UPDATED
By Lauren Coodley
When
he was just 25 years old in 1904, Upton Sinclair went undercover into a
meatpacking factory in Chicago. He wrote: “I sat at night in the homes of the
workers, foreign born and native, and they told me their stories, one after
one, and I made notes.” Sinclair went to the stockyards in the daytime where
the workers risked their jobs to show him around. He found that by carrying a
dinner pail, he could go anywhere.
When
Sinclair wrote “The Jungle” in
1905, his goal was to educate Americans on the brutal treatment of workers in
the stockyards. Instead he almost singlehandedly brought about the creation of
the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the regulation of food safety. Sinclair
later wrote “I aimed for their hearts but I hit their stomachs.” His passionate
wish that readers would recognize the brutality that the workers endured was
not realized. Americans responded to the book instead with outrage about the
quality of their food. “The Jungle”
was reprinted 67 times over the next 26 years, and 17 translations appeared
within months of its American publication.
Sinclair
continued to press the government for sweeping reforms in the industry. Upton
Sinclair sent his book to President Theodore Roosevelt, who had been getting a
hundred letters a day about it already. Sinclair remembered that Roosevelt
wrote “that he was having the Department of Agriculture investigate the matter,
and I replied that was like asking a burglar to determine his own guilt.”
Sen.
Albert Beveridge introduced a bill on May 22 to begin regulation of the meat
industry. Sinclair worried that it would be killed in the House, so he met with
the editor of the New York Times
and explained that by publicizing the essence of the investigators’ report, he
hoped to force Roosevelt to release the entire report. The story appeared on
the front page of the paper, with descriptions even more shocking than those in
“The Jungle.” Congress passed
the Pure Food and Drug Act along with the Meat Inspection Amendment, on June
30, 1906 -- a law which Sen. Beveridge hailed proudly as “the most pronounced
extension of federal power in every direction ever enacted.”
I
would hate for Upton Sinclair to learn further that right now the USDA is about
to slash regulations for poultry plants. Instead of trained USDA inspectors,
companies will police themselves. Meanwhile, plants will be allowed to speed up
production dramatically. Chickens will spend more time soaking in contaminants
(including pus and feces), and poultry plants are compensating by washing them
in with chlorine.
 |
| Upton Sinclair,as a young man. |
“The
inspectors, whose names were redacted, said they had observed numerous
instances of poultry plant employees allowing birds contaminated with fecal
matter or other substances to pass. And even when the employees try to remove
diseased birds, they face reprimands, the inspectors said. The Agriculture
Department proposal allows poultry plants to speed up their assembly lines to
about 200 birds per minute from 140, hampering any effort to examine birds for
defects. ‘It’s tough enough when you are trying to examine 140 birds per minute
with professional inspectors,’ said Stan Painter, a federal inspector in
Alabama. ‘This proposal makes it impossible.’” The USDA estimates that the
poultry industry stands to make more than $250 million a year from the new
rules.
Of
all the problems that Upton Sinclair battled in his 90 years of life —
corruption in the media, worker rights, free speech, the oil industry and more
— meat and poultry inspection would not
be the one he would expect to persist into the 21st century.
The
only person who can stop the new regulations is President Obama. Like Theodore
Roosevelt, he holds the fate of the nation’s food in his pen. Here is a
petition you can sign to demand regulation for the poultry industry, http://chickenjustice.org/. Upton
Sinclair, if he were here, would be urging us to do at least that.
— Lauren Coodley is the author of “Upton Sinclair: California Socialist, Celebrity
Intellectual,”
published by University of Nebraska Press in September 2013. From HNN, 9-20-13
—————————
24. 20 YEARS
HARD LABOR FOR HALF OUNCE OF POT
By Bill Quigley
While
Colorado and Washington have de-criminalized recreational use of marijuana and
20 states allow use for medical purposes, a Louisiana man was sentenced to 20
years in prison in New Orleans criminal court for possessing 15 grams, about
half an ounce, of marijuana.
Corey
Ladd, 27, had prior drug convictions and was sentenced Sept. 4 as a “multiple
offender to 20 years hard labor at the Department of Corrections.”
Marijuana
use still remains a ticket to jail in most of the country and prohibition is
enforced in a highly racially discriminatory manner. A recent report of
the ACLU, “The War on Marijuana in Black and White,” documents millions of
arrests for marijuana and shows the “staggeringly disproportionate impact on
African Americans.”
Nationwide,
the latest numbers from the FBI report that over 762,000 arrests per year are
for marijuana, almost exactly half of all drug arrests.
Even
though blacks and whites use marijuana at similar rates, black people are 3.73
times more likely to be arrested for possession of marijuana than white people.
For
example, Louisiana arrests about 13,000 people per year for marijuana, 60% of
them African Americans. Over 84 percent were for possession only.
While Louisiana’s population is 32% black, 60% of arrests for marijuana
are African American making it the 9th most discriminatory state
nationwide. In Tangipahoa Parish, blacks are 11.8 times more likely to be
arrested for marijuana than whites and in St. Landry Parish the rate of black
arrests for marijuana is 10.7 times as likely as whites, landing both parishes
in the worst 15 in the country.
In
Louisiana, a person can get up to six months in jail for first marijuana
conviction, up to five years in prison for the second conviction and up to 20
years in prison for the third. In fact, the Louisiana Supreme Court recently
overturned a sentence of five years as too lenient for a fourth possession of
marijuana and ordered the person sentenced to at least 13 years.
Jack
Cole of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) argues that “the “war on
drugs” has been, is, and forever will be, a total and abject failure.
This is not a war on drugs, this is a war on people, our own people, our
children, our parents, ourselves.” LEAP, which is made up of thousands of
current and former members of the law enforcement and criminal justice
communities, has been advocating for the de-criminalization of drugs and
replacing it with regulation and control since 2002.
Arrests
and jail sentences continue even though public opinion has moved against
it. National polling by the Pew Research Center show a majority of people
support legalizing the use of marijuana. Even in Louisiana, a
recent poll by Public Policy Polling found more than half support legalization
and regulation of marijuana.
Karen
O’Keefe, who lived in New Orleans for years and now works as Director of State
Policies at the Marijuana Policy Project, said “A sentence of 20 years in
prison for possessing a substance that is safer that alcohol is out of step
with Louisiana voters, national trends, and basic fairness and justice.
Limited prison space and prosecutors’ time should be spent on violent and
serious crime, not on prosecuting and incarcerating people who use a substance
that nearly half of all adults have used.”
Defense
lawyers are appealing the 20-year sentence for Mr. Ladd, but the hundreds of
thousands of marijuana arrests continue each year. This insanity
must be stopped.
—
From AlterNet Sept. 24.Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and professor at
Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. He is also a member of the legal
collective of School of Americas Watch.
—————————
25. WE
RECOMMEND…
1.
Here’s a great video of Pete Seeger, 94, performing the long version of
"This Land is Your Land" with John Mellencamp, Willie Nelson, Dave
Matthews and Neil Young live at the Farm Aid concert in Saratoga Springs, NY,
Sept. 21, 2013. Pete outdoes himself. He adds an anti-fracking verse near the
end. It’s at http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mt9jWoXmrLw
2. Here’s a fascinating video of the
confrontation that took place in the Raleigh, NC. It’s an extraordinary
in-store demonstration that materialized just after workers and community
allies solemnly presented store managers with a huge binder containing 170,000
signatures on a petition to reinstate the fired and disciplined workers. As the
managers give their canned response (they can’t accept the binder, they’ll talk
with “associates” but non-employees have to leave), shouts begin to echo
through the store. A flash mob in yellow “UFCW Local 1208 Steppin’ 4 Justice”
bursts forth to perform an energetic
synchronized routine. Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuCNH7dqZxg&feature=youtu
3. Tens of thousands of Americans have sent
messages or signed one of several petitions thanking whistle-blower Edward
Snowden for disclosing information about the U.S government’s global secret
surveillance apparatus. The Partnership for Civil Justice in Washington is one
of the groups with a petition. You can sign their “Thank You Edward” petition
at http://www.justiceonline.org/thank-you-edward-snowden/say-thank-you.html.
4.
If you have not seen the Sunday, Sept. 29, New York Times cartoon strip “Meet
Your Health Insurance Exchange,” it’s at
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/the-strip.html#1
—————————
