http://transform.eipcp.net/correspondence/1220008997


New Issue of Chto Delat Confiscated and Under Investigation
PETERSBURG, August 29, 2008. On the evening of August 27, the new issue of the
newspaper Chto Delat (No. 19: What Does It Mean to Lose? The Experience of
Perestroika) was confiscated during a militia raid at the printers in
Petersburg.

The raid on the printer's workshop was connected to an earlier incident, when a
Petersburg activist was arrested by Petersburg militia at the gates of the Kirov
Factory for handing out a flyer to workers. The flyer aroused suspicion because
it contained material critical of the Russian-Georgian conflict, and the militia
raided the printer's workshop at which the flyer had been produced, where they
discovered the most recent edition of Chto Delat. They confiscated the entire
edition of 3,000 newspapers and detained Chto Delat editor Dmitry Vilensky for
questioning.

"The situation really did look pretty absurd," says Vilensky. "We produced this
issue for the U-Turn Quadriennial in Copenhagen, and it's one of the most artsy
issues we've made so far; it contains almost no references to the current
political situation." Instead, the issue is dedicated to the problematic of
perestroika, whose hopes and outcome the authors subject to critical enquiry.
The security officials' suspicion was aroused by the "political look" of the
paper and, in particular, by the libretto of a film-opera by the Chto Delat work
group, to be premiered at U-Turn later next week, in which a nationalist, a
democrat, a revolutionary, and a businessman debate the fate of the Soviet Union
and its present outcome. The full text of the screenplay can be found here.

Yesterday, Vilensky was informed by the Petersburg militia that the case had
been handed over to the Kirov district attorney's office to investigate whether
the newspaper is in violation of the Russian constitution, which contains
paragraphs against extremism and the incitement of ethnic and religious hatred.
"The militia - who told me that they 'didn't want blood' - were quite surprised
by this move," Vilensky says. "They told me that the signal came from the FSB
official who was coordinating the raid on the printers." The entire edition is
still in custody, and will not be distributed at U-Turn, where it was meant to
be part of a video-installation.

The printer's workshop Polyarnaya Zvezda [Pole Star] has since been cordoned off
as a crime scene, and all its employees questioned. It was one of the only
remaining places in Petersburg to print opposition leaflets of a wide range,
including the Petersburg issue of National Bolshevik organ Limonka. Its closure
- and the seizure of what is perhaps Chto Delat's most politically innocent
issue - is symptomatic of the new atmosphere of suspicion and fear that has
arisen in Russia.



transform.eipcp.net 2006 | contact@... | www.eipcp.net





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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/30/police_raids/

Saturday Aug. 30, 2008 12:44 EDT
Massive police raids on suspected protestors in Minneapolis
[updated below (with video) - Update II - Update III - Update IV]

Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly
intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30
officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of
those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the
floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers,
journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police
department and the Ramsey County sheriff's department handcuffed, photographed
and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration,
charging them with no crime other than "fire code violations," and early this
morning, the Sheriff's department sent teams of officers into at least four
Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying.

Jane Hamsher and I were at two of those homes this morning -- one which had just
been raided and one which was in the process of being raided. Each of the raided
houses is known by neighbors as a "hippie house," where 5-10 college-aged
individuals live in a communal setting, and everyone we spoke with said that
there had never been any problems of any kind in those houses, that they were
filled with "peaceful kids" who are politically active but entirely
unthreatening and friendly. Posted below is the video of the scene, including
various interviews, which convey a very clear sense of what is actually going on
here.

In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of
roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear,
holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where
they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why
they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a
search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the
officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political
materials kept in the house. One of the individuals renting the house, an
18-year-old woman, was extremely shaken as she and others described how the
officers were deliberately making intimidating statements such as "Do you have
Terminator ready?" as they lay on the floor in handcuffs. The 10 or so
individuals in the house all said that though they found the experience very
jarring, they still intended to protest against the GOP Convention, and several
said that being subjected to raids of that sort made them more emboldened than
ever to do so.

Several of those who were arrested are being represented by Bruce Nestor, the
President of the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers' Guild. Nestor said
that last night's raid involved a meeting of a group calling itself the "RNC
Welcoming Committee", and that this morning's raids appeared to target members
of "Food Not Bombs," which he described as an anti-war, anti-authoritarian
protest group. There was not a single act of violence or illegality that has
taken place, Nestor said. Instead, the raids were purely anticipatory in nature,
and clearly designed to frighten people contemplating taking part in any
unauthorized protests.

Nestor indicated that only 2 or 3 of the 50 individuals who were handcuffed this
morning at the 2 houses were actually arrested and charged with a crime, and the
crime they were charged with is "conspiracy to commit riot." Nestor, who has
practiced law in Minnesota for many years, said that he had never before heard
of that statute being used for anything, and that its parameters are so
self-evidently vague, designed to allow pre-emeptive arrests of those who are
peacefully protesting, that it is almost certainly unconstitutional, though
because it had never been invoked (until now), its constitutionality had not
been tested.

There is clearly an intent on the part of law enforcement authorities here to
engage in extreme and highly intimidating raids against those who are planning
to protest the Convention. The DNC in Denver was the site of several quite ugly
incidents where law enforcement acted on behalf of Democratic Party officials
and the corporate elite that funded the Convention to keep the media and
protesters from doing anything remotely off-script. But the massive and plainly
excessive preemptive police raids in Minnesota are of a different order
altogether. Targeting people with automatic-weapons-carrying SWAT teams and mass
raids in their homes, who are suspected of nothing more than planning dissident
political protests at a political convention and who have engaged in no illegal
activity whatsoever, is about as redolent of the worst tactics of a police state
as can be imagined.

UPDATE: Here is the first of the videos, from the house that had just been
raided:



Jane Hamsher has more here, and The Minnesota Independent has a report on
another one of the raided houses, here.

UPDATE II: Here is the video we took from the second house as the raid was
occurring. We were barred from entering but spoke with neighbors outside as well
as with Bruce Nestor, the President of the Minnesota Lawyer's Guild, regarding
these raids:



Over at FDL, Lindsay Beyerstein spoke with the property owner whose house -- the
fourth one we now know of -- was being raided while the raid was in progress,
and Lindsay has details here ("About an hour and a half ago 20 to 30 heavily
armed police officers surrounded the house. One of my roommates said 'I want to
see a warrant' and she was immediately detained"). Meanwhile, Indy Media of Twin
Cities -- an association of independent journalists in the area -- just told me
that several of their journalists have been detained while trying to cover these
raids. Their site, with ongoing updates, is here.

The Uptake also has several reports of the various raids, including video of the
raid at the property whose owner Bernstein spoke with as the raid occurred. That
video includes an interview with a lawyer from the National Lawyer's Guild who
was detained and put in handcufffs, explaining that the surrounded house is one
where various journalists are staying. Additionally, a photojournalist with
Democracy Now was detained at that house as well. So, both journalists and
lawyers -- in addition to protesters -- have been detained and arrested even
though not a single violent or criminal act has occurred.

UPDATE III: FDL has the transcript of part of my discussion about these raids
with the National Lawyer Guild's Minnesota President -- here.

The Uptake has this amazing video interview with the Democracy Now producer who
was detained today. As the DN producer explains, she was present at a meeting of
a group called "I-Witness" -- which videotaped police behavior at the 2004 GOP
Convention in New York and helped get charges dismissed against hundreds of
protesters who were arrested. The police surrounded the St. Paul house where
they were meeting even though they had no warrant, told them that anyone who
exited the house would be arrested, and then -- even though they finally, after
several hours, obtained a warrant only for the house next door -- basically
broke into the house, pointed weapons at everyone inside, handcuffed them,
searched the house, and then left. Here is a blog post from one of the members
of I-Witness asking for help during the time when they were forced to stay
inside the house (see the second post -- it reads like a note from a hostage
crying out for help). This is truly repugnant, extreme police behavior designed
to intimidate protesters, police critics and others, and it ought to infuriate
anyone and everyone who cares about basic liberties.

UPDATE IV: More here, including on the Federal Government's role in these raids.


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

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at http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=343373

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(http://links.org.au/rss.xml). If you would like us to
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* * *


     Bolivia: Two years of `post-neoliberal' Indigenous nationalism -- a
     balance sheet <http://links.org.au/node/598>

By the Bolpress editorial board, translated by Sean Seymour Jones for
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

State intervention in economic activity -- the nationalisation of
businesses, restrictions on exports and price controls, among other
measures -- doesn't appear to be contributing to the materialisation
of the structural changes postulated by the National Development Plan
(PND) of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS). This is the evaluation of
business leaders, analysts and political leaders from the right-wing
opposition in Bolivia. However, according to the government of President
Evo Morales, the brutal and desperate reaction of the dominant classes
"in relegation" proves that something is changing.

     * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/598>


     Venezuela: Solidarity needed for trade unionists under attack;
     please sign protest letter <http://links.org.au/node/594>

By Federico Fuentes and Kiraz Janicke

August 23, 2008 -- The owner of Fundimeca, an air-conditioning factory
in Valencia, Carabobo, is waging an intense campaign of terror and
intimidation against the factory's workers. Fundimeca's workers has been
fighting to ensure that the company complies with Venezuela's
constitution and labour laws, in particular an order by the labour
inspectorate to rehire nine workers. Fundimeca employs 360 workers, 80%
of whom are women. One worker has been shot in the leg by armed thugs
and 18 workers and three union leaders are currently facing trial in
Carabobo courts, accused of various charges including criminal gang
activity with the threat of jail terms looming over their heads. Among
those standing trial is Stalin Perez Borges, a national coordinator of
the National Union of Workers (UNT) and Venezuela's principal delegate
to this year's International Labor Organisation convention -- where
after seven years, the delegation successfully removed Venezuela from
the list of countries that supposedly violate union freedom.

     * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/594>


     Behind the communal flare-up in Jammu and Kashmir
     <http://links.org.au/node/607>

By the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation

August 18, 2008 -- The communally and politically motivated May 26
decision of the Congress Party-People's Democratic Party (PDP)
government of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir to transfer forest
land [in Muslim-majority Kashmir] to the Hindu Shri Amarnath Shrine
Board (SASB) [for use as a pilgrimage site near a sacred Hindu cave] is
having costly repercussions, with the added danger that it may emerge as
a communal [flashpoint] nationally. The land transfer, taken in the
context of irresponsible official remarks recommending changes in the
demography and "culture" of the region as a "solution" to the Kashmir
"problem", was like a spark to the tinderbox of pent-up resentment in
the Kashmir Valley. Lives were lost when police opened fire on
protesters; the PDP tried to distance itself from its ministers'
decision in favour of the land transfer by pulling out of the
government; and the government on July 1 was belatedly forced to roll
back the land transfer decision.

     * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/607>


     Nationalism, revolution and war in the Caucasus
     <http://links.org.au/node/604>

By Tony Iltis

August 27, 2008 -- Since the European Union-brokered ceasefire brought
the shooting war between Georgia and Russia to an end on August 12,
there has been a war of words between Russia and the West. One point of
contention is the withdrawal of Russian troops from Georgia-proper (that
is, Georgia excluding the de facto independent territories of Abkhazia
and South Ossetia), in particular the towns of Gori, Zugdidi and Senaki
and the port of Poti.

     * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/604>


     Cuban trade unionist: `Workers are key participants in the Cuban
     revolution' <http://links.org.au/node/603>

August 27, 2008 -- Gilda Chacon is the Asia, Oceania, Africa and Middle
East representative of the Cuban Confederation of Trade Unions (CTC) and
an elected delegate of the People's Power Municipal Assembly. Annolies
Truman interviewed her during her August 17-20 visit to Perth,
Australia, to liaise with Western Australian trade unions.

     * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/603>


     Malaysian socialists say Anwar Ibrahim by-election victory a 'marker
     of massive change' <http://links.org.au/node/600>

The landslide victory by Justice Party leader Anwar Ibrahim in the
August 26 Permatang Pauh by-election is welcomed in this commentary by
Dr Jeyakumar Devaraj, the first federal parliamentarian of the Socialist
Party of Malaysia (PSM) <http://www.parti-sosialis.org/>, as a "marker
of the massive change" and another development that will open up
democratic space in Malaysia.

     * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/600>


     Capitalism and social classes in Venezuela: The historic mission of
     the working class <http://links.org.au/node/599>

By Jesús Germán Faría,  Venezuela' vice-minister for social security,
ministry of popular power for labour and social security translated by
Federico Fuentes for Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

Capitalism is a system based on the private ownership of the means of
production. The capitalists, who own these, employ [workers'] labour
power in exchange for a salary to be able to carry out their business.
Obviously, this hiring of workers does not occur because of altruistic
values. The ultimate aim of this decision - like any other under
capitalism - is the possibility of obtaining profits. Moreover, the
workers, who own no means of production, are left with no other option
than to sell their labour power, converting themselves into waged slaves.

     * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/599>


     Slideshow: Ecology against capitalism <http://links.org.au/node/596>

Ecology Against Capitalism by Christopher Pickering
<http://www.slideshare.net/ratbagradio/ecology-against-capitalism-presentation?s\
rc=embed>


     * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/596>


     Debunking the `Tragedy of the Commons' <http://links.org.au/node/595>

By Ian Angus

August 24, 2008 -- Will shared resources always be misused and overused?
Is community ownership of land, forests and fisheries a guaranteed road
to ecological disaster? Is privatisation the only way to protect the
environment and end Third World poverty? Most economists and development
planners will answer "yes" -- and for proof they will point to the most
influential article ever written on those important questions. Since its
publication in Science in December 1968, "The Tragedy of the Commons"
has been anthologised in at least 111 books, making it one of the
most-reprinted articles ever to appear in any scientific journal. It is
also one of the most quoted: a recent Google search found "about
302,000" results for the phrase "tragedy of the commons".

     * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/595>


     Secret CIA prison on Diego Garcia confirmed
     <http://links.org.au/node/593>

By Andy Worthington

August 2008 -- The existence of a secret, CIA-run prison on the island
of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean has long been a leaky secret in the
"War on Terror" and recent revelations in TIME -- based on disclosures
by a "senior American official" (now retired), who was "a frequent
participant in White House Situation Room meetings" after the 9/11
attacks, and who reported that "a CIA counter-terrorism official twice
said that a high-value prisoner or prisoners were being interrogated on
the island" -- will come as no surprise to those who have been studying
the story closely.

     * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/593>


     Argentina: Winners and losers of the agricultural conflict
     <http://links.org.au/node/592>

Continuing Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal's
presentation of various positions in the debate within Argentina's left
around the rural crisis, we publish an exclusive translation of a recent
article by Claudio Katz, an economist, researcher, professor and member
of Economista de Izquierda (EDI -- Left Economists). Translated by Janet
Duckworth.

     * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/592>

* * *

/Links/ seeks to promote the international exchange of information,
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strategy and tactics within the international left. It is a forum for
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-----news flash-----

Amy Goodman arrested, her video team tear gassed, pepper sprayed


   How can this happen in America, and the mainstream media mostly tolerates or
ignores it?

   Well, i think i know. But i hope that other folks will ponder the
implications...





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Amy Goodman, popular host of the DemocracyNow! program that airs on satellite,
cable and other network feeds, including Channel 12 television in Denver, has
been arrested at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota. The
DemocracyNow! team was filming tear gassing, pepper spraying, and firing of
rubber bullets. The DemocracyNow! team was tear gassed and pepper sprayed, then
arrested.

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/09/01/18531782.php

DemocracyNow! website:

http://www.democracynow.org/



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Live video of events in the streets at the RNC:

http://qik.com/theuptake



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Twin Cities Indymedia

http://twincities.indymedia.org/



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Massive police raids on suspected protestors in Minneapolis
"There is clearly an intent on the part of law enforcement authorities here to
engage in extreme and highly intimidating raids against those who are planning
to protest the Convention... Targeting people with automatic-weapons-carrying
SWAT teams and mass raids in their homes, who are suspected of nothing more than
planning dissident political protests at a political convention and who have
engaged in no illegal activity whatsoever, is about as redolent of the worst
tactics of a police state as can be imagined..."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/30/police_raids/

Federal government involved in raids on protesters

More extraordinary than these extreme raids is the fact that they are generating
so little attention and even less outcry.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/31/raids/index.html



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------




richard myers


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Just called the Ramsey County jail where, I hear, most of the RNC protestors are
being held. Asked (very politely) how many people they were holding. Cop said he
couldn't tell me.  I asked, "why? Is it a state secret?". He siad,"Yes."

 
“The possessions of the rich are stolen property.”
-P.J. Proudhon



----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Wythe Holt jr. <wholt@...>
To: blubermax@...; phoebews@...;
Out_Of_The_Frying_Pan@yahoogroups.com; peacetalkbham@yahoogroups.com;
maschwar@...; tuscapeace@yahoogroups.com; lahaynes@...;
SECULARHUMANIST@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, September 2, 2008 8:03:42 AM
Subject: [PeaceTalkBham] Goodman, 2 other Democracy Now! producers released;
will show it all on Democracy Now! today


 
 
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 1, 2008

Contact:
Mike Burke: mike@democracynow. org

**UPDATE**

Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman, Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar
Released After Illegal Arrest at RNC

Goodman Charged with Obstruction; Felony Riot Charges Pending Against
Kouddous and Salazar

ST. PAUL--Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and producers Sharif Abdel
Kouddous and Nicole Salazar have all been released from police custody
in St. Paul following their illegal arrest by Minneapolis Police on
Monday afternoon.

All three were violently manhandled by law enforcement officers. Abdel
Kouddous was slammed against a wall and the ground, leaving his arms
scraped and bloodied. He sustained other injuries to his chest and back.
Salazar's violent arrest by baton-wielding officers, during which she
was slammed to the ground while yelling, "I'm Press! Press!," resulted
in her nose bleeding, as well as causing facial pain. Goodman's arm was
violently yanked by police as she was arrested.

On Tuesday, Democracy Now! will broadcast video of these arrests, as
well as the broader police action. These will also be available on:
www.democracynow. org

Goodman was arrested while questioning police about the unlawful
detention of Kouddous and Salazar who were arrested while they carried
out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the
Republican National Convention. Goodman's crime appears to have been
defending her colleagues and the freedom of the press.

Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher told Democracy Now! that Kouddous and
Salazar were arrested on suspicion of rioting, a felony. While the three
have been released, they all still face charges stemming from their
unlawful arrest. Kouddous and Salazar face pending charges of suspicion
of felony riot, while Goodman has been officially charged with
obstruction of a legal process and interference with a "peace officer."

Democracy Now! forcefully rejects all of these charges as false and an
attempt at intimidation of these journalists. We demand that the charges
be immediately and completely dropped.

Democracy Now! stands by Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar and condemns this
action by Twin Cities' law enforcement as a clear violation of the
freedom of the press and the First Amendment rights of these journalists.

During the demonstration in which the Democracy Now! team was arrested,
law enforcement officers used pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion
grenades and excessive force against protesters and journalists. Several
dozen demonstrators were also arrested during this action, including a
photographer for the Associated Press.

Amy Goodman is one of the most well-known and well-respected journalists
in the United States. She has received journalism's top honors for her
reporting and has a distinguished reputation of bravery and courage. The
arrest of Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar and the subsequent criminal
charges and threat of charges are a transparent attempt to intimidate
journalists.

Democracy Now! is a nationally-syndicat ed public TV and radio program
that airs on over 700 radio and TV stations across the US and the globe.

Video of Amy Goodman's Arrest: http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=oYjyvkR0bGQ

= = = = = = = = =
ABOUT DEMOCRACY NOW!
Democracy Now! airs on over 650 radio and TV stations, including
Pacifica, NPR, community, and college radio stations; on public
access, PBS, satellite TV stations (DISH network: Free Speech TV
ch. 9415 and Link TV ch. 9410; DIRECTV: Link TV ch. 375); on the World
Radio Network's European Service and on the Community Broacasting
Association of Australia service; as a "podcast", automatically
downloaded to your computer or portable audio player; and streams live
M-F at 8am EST at www.democracynow. org
= = = = = = = = =
Now real-time CLOSED CAPTIONED on TV!
You can also view/listen/ read all Democracy Now! shows online:
http://www.democrac ynow.org
To bring Democracy Now! to your community, go to:
http://www.democrac ynow.org/ get_involved/ bring_to_ station



-----Original Message-----
From: Wythe Holt jr. <wholt@.... edu>
To: blubermax@bellsouth .net; phoebews@aol. com; Out_Of_The_Frying_
Pan@yahoogroups. com; peacetalkbham@ yahoogroups. com; maschwar@lib. ua.edu;
tuscapeace@yahoogro ups.com; lahaynes@knology. net; SECULARHUMANIST@
yahoogroups. com; libertyundergroundt alk@yahoogroups. com
Sent: Tue, 2 Sep 2008 7:43 am
Subject: [libertyunderground talk] (C) What is the latest on Amy Goodman's
detention, or that of others, at the fascist RNC? (2 items)


 
 
Hello, my friends.  The arrest of Amy Goodman, below, is old news by now, but I
wanted to send it along in case some of you hadn't heard.  I had one email that
she had already been released, but I do not know of its accuracy, and I do not
know about all the others picked up by the Gestapo and the Brown Shirts at the
Republican National Convention for exercising their supposed First Amendment
rights to free speech and peaceably to petition their government.  If anyone has
further news, I would certainly appreciate their posting it to all.  Thanks.  In
solidarity, Wythe
 
(1)
The word pigs comes to mind: http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=oYjyvkR0bGQ .

________________________________

Amy Goodman, Others Detained Outside RNC
by John Nichols on 09/01/2008 @ 3:28pm

    
Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman was among more than 100 people detained outside
the Republican National Convention here as police clashed with demonstrators on
the streets of St. Paul.

Goodman was arrested in near the XCel Center, where the convention opened
Monday, at approximately 5 p.m. Minnesota time.

According to a statement issued Dennis Moynihan and Mike Burke of Democracy
Now!:

    Goodman was arrested while attempting to free two Democracy Now! producers
who were being unlawfuly detained. They are Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole
Salazar. Kouddous and Salazar were arrested while they carried out their
journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the Republican National
Convention. Goodman's crime appears to have been defending her colleagues and
the freedom of the press.

    Ramsey County Sherrif Bob Fletcher told Democracy Now! that Kouddous and
Salazar were being arrested on suspicion of rioting. They are currently being
held at the Ramsey County jail in St. Paul.

I was with Goodman earlier this afternoon, as she was reporting on the major
anti-war demonstration. She and her crew were, as always, interviewing everyone
they could in the calm, assured manner that has made the daily Democracy Now!
program a widely-watched and well-regarded news programs on radio and cable
television stations across the country.

Moynihan and Burke, in their statement, say that:

    Democracy Now! stands by Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar and condemns this
action by Twin Cities law enforcement as a clear violation of the freedom of the
press and the First Amendment rights of these journalists.

They are urging journalists and concerned citizens to contact the office of St.
Paul Mayor Chris Coleman (651-266-8535) and the Ramsey County Jail
(651-266-9350) and demand the immediate release of Goodman, Kouddous and
Salazar.

The calls are important.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the National Lawyers Guild are also on
the case.





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Hello, does anybody knows if Amy Goodman is an anarchist?


Tetraedrónico



----- Mensaje original ----
De: Dave Williams <daver_123456@...>
Para: anarchy list <smygo@yahoogroups.com>; Marxist List
<marxist@yahoogroups.com>; NC4P@yahoogroups.com
Enviado: martes, 2 de septiembre, 2008 13:53:07
Asunto: [smygo] Goodman aressted at RNC. All to be shown on Democracy Now! today



“The possessions of the rich are stolen property.�
-P.J. Proudhon



----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Wythe Holt jr. <wholt@...>
To: blubermax@...; phoebews@...;
Out_Of_The_Frying_Pan@yahoogroups.com; peacetalkbham@yahoogroups.com;
maschwar@...; tuscapeace@yahoogroups.com; lahaynes@...;
SECULARHUMANIST@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, September 2, 2008 8:03:42 AM
Subject: [PeaceTalkBham] Goodman, 2 other Democracy Now! producers released;
will show it all on Democracy Now! today




FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 1, 2008

Contact:
Mike Burke: mike@democracynow. org

**UPDATE**

Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman, Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar
Released After Illegal Arrest at RNC

Goodman Charged with Obstruction; Felony Riot Charges Pending Against
Kouddous and Salazar

ST. PAUL--Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and producers Sharif Abdel
Kouddous and Nicole Salazar have all been released from police custody
in St. Paul following their illegal arrest by Minneapolis Police on
Monday afternoon.

All three were violently manhandled by law enforcement officers. Abdel
Kouddous was slammed against a wall and the ground, leaving his arms
scraped and bloodied. He sustained other injuries to his chest and back.
Salazar's violent arrest by baton-wielding officers, during which she
was slammed to the ground while yelling, "I'm Press! Press!," resulted
in her nose bleeding, as well as causing facial pain. Goodman's arm was
violently yanked by police as she was arrested.

On Tuesday, Democracy Now! will broadcast video of these arrests, as
well as the broader police action. These will also be available on:
www.democracynow. org

Goodman was arrested while questioning police about the unlawful
detention of Kouddous and Salazar who were arrested while they carried
out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the
Republican National Convention. Goodman's crime appears to have been
defending her colleagues and the freedom of the press.

Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher told Democracy Now! that Kouddous and
Salazar were arrested on suspicion of rioting, a felony. While the three
have been released, they all still face charges stemming from their
unlawful arrest. Kouddous and Salazar face pending charges of suspicion
of felony riot, while Goodman has been officially charged with
obstruction of a legal process and interference with a "peace officer."

Democracy Now! forcefully rejects all of these charges as false and an
attempt at intimidation of these journalists. We demand that the charges
be immediately and completely dropped.

Democracy Now! stands by Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar and condemns this
action by Twin Cities' law enforcement as a clear violation of the
freedom of the press and the First Amendment rights of these journalists.

During the demonstration in which the Democracy Now! team was arrested,
law enforcement officers used pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion
grenades and excessive force against protesters and journalists. Several
dozen demonstrators were also arrested during this action, including a
photographer for the Associated Press.

Amy Goodman is one of the most well-known and well-respected journalists
in the United States. She has received journalism's top honors for her
reporting and has a distinguished reputation of bravery and courage. The
arrest of Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar and the subsequent criminal
charges and threat of charges are a transparent attempt to intimidate
journalists.

Democracy Now! is a nationally-syndicat ed public TV and radio program
that airs on over 700 radio and TV stations across the US and the globe.

Video of Amy Goodman's Arrest: http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=oYjyvkR0bGQ

= = = = = = = = =
ABOUT DEMOCRACY NOW!
Democracy Now! airs on over 650 radio and TV stations, including
Pacifica, NPR, community, and college radio stations; on public
access, PBS, satellite TV stations (DISH network: Free Speech TV
ch. 9415 and Link TV ch. 9410; DIRECTV: Link TV ch. 375); on the World
Radio Network's European Service and on the Community Broacasting
Association of Australia service; as a "podcast", automatically
downloaded to your computer or portable audio player; and streams live
M-F at 8am EST at www.democracynow. org
= = = = = = = = =
Now real-time CLOSED CAPTIONED on TV!
You can also view/listen/ read all Democracy Now! shows online:
http://www.democrac ynow.org
To bring Democracy Now! to your community, go to:
http://www.democrac ynow.org/ get_involved/ bring_to_ station



-----Original Message-----
From: Wythe Holt jr. <wholt@.... edu>
To: blubermax@bellsouth .net; phoebews@aol. com; Out_Of_The_Frying_
Pan@yahoogroups. com; peacetalkbham@ yahoogroups. com; maschwar@lib. ua.edu;
tuscapeace@yahoogro ups.com; lahaynes@knology. net; SECULARHUMANIST@
yahoogroups. com; libertyundergroundt alk@yahoogroups. com
Sent: Tue, 2 Sep 2008 7:43 am
Subject: [libertyunderground talk] (C) What is the latest on Amy Goodman's
detention, or that of others, at the fascist RNC? (2 items)




Hello, my friends.  The arrest of Amy Goodman, below, is old news by now, but I
wanted to send it along in case some of you hadn't heard.  I had one email that
she had already been released, but I do not know of its accuracy, and I do not
know about all the others picked up by the Gestapo and the Brown Shirts at the
Republican National Convention for exercising their supposed First Amendment
rights to free speech and peaceably to petition their government.  If anyone has
further news, I would certainly appreciate their posting it to all.  Thanks.  In
solidarity, Wythe

(1)
The word pigs comes to mind: http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=oYjyvkR0bGQ .

________________________________

Amy Goodman, Others Detained Outside RNC
by John Nichols on 09/01/2008 @ 3:28pm


Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman was among more than 100 people detained outside
the Republican National Convention here as police clashed with demonstrators on
the streets of St. Paul.

Goodman was arrested in near the XCel Center, where the convention opened
Monday, at approximately 5 p.m. Minnesota time.

According to a statement issued Dennis Moynihan and Mike Burke of Democracy
Now!:

     Goodman was arrested while attempting to free two Democracy Now! producers
who were being unlawfuly detained. They are Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole
Salazar. Kouddous and Salazar were arrested while they carried out their
journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the Republican National
Convention. Goodman's crime appears to have been defending her colleagues and
the freedom of the press.

     Ramsey County Sherrif Bob Fletcher told Democracy Now! that Kouddous and
Salazar were being arrested on suspicion of rioting. They are currently being
held at the Ramsey County jail in St. Paul.

I was with Goodman earlier this afternoon, as she was reporting on the major
anti-war demonstration. She and her crew were, as always, interviewing everyone
they could in the calm, assured manner that has made the daily Democracy Now!
program a widely-watched and well-regarded news programs on radio and cable
television stations across the country.

Moynihan and Burke, in their statement, say that:

     Democracy Now! stands by Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar and condemns this
action by Twin Cities law enforcement as a clear violation of the freedom of the
press and the First Amendment rights of these journalists.

They are urging journalists and concerned citizens to contact the office of St.
Paul Mayor Chris Coleman (651-266-8535) and the Ramsey County Jail
(651-266-9350) and demand the immediate release of Goodman, Kouddous and
Salazar.

The calls are important.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the National Lawyers Guild are also on
the case.





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


------------------------------------

Yahoo! Groups Links



__________________________________________________
Correo Yahoo!
Espacio para todos tus mensajes, antivirus y antispam ¡gratis!
Regístrate ya - http://correo.yahoo.com.mx/

She has never hinted or displayed any interest in identifying as an anarchist.
My take is that she avoids political labels so people will focus on her
journalism.

Chuck

--- On Wed, 9/3/08, tetraedronico <tetraedronico@...> wrote:
From: tetraedronico <tetraedronico@...>
Subject: Re: [smygo] Goodman aressted at RNC. All to be shown on Democracy Now!
today
To: smygo@yahoogroups.com
Date: Wednesday, September 3, 2008, 12:00 PM

Hello, does anybody knows if Amy Goodman is an anarchist?


Tetraedrónico






[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

 
“The possessions of the rich are stolen property.”
-P.J. Proudhon



----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Marie Belliveau <mbelliveau2@...>
To: NC4P <NC4P@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, September 4, 2008 8:27:49 AM
Subject: [NC4P] Fw: Bush Regime: Endless War, Endless Repression. CRG
E-Newsletter




----- Original Message -----
From: Globalresearch. ca
To: mbelliveau2@ cogeco.ca
Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2008 7:03 AM
Subject: Bush Regime: Endless War, Endless Repression. CRG E-Newsletter


The Bush Regime's Imperial Affirmation: Endless War, Endless Conquest, Endless
Repression

By Tom Burghardt

URL of this article: www.globalresearch. ca/index. php?context= va&aid=10041

Global Research, September 2, 2008
Antifascist Calling...

While people around the world begin to celebrate George W. Bush's January 20,
2009 departure from the White House, senior administration officials are
crafting legislation, rule changes and executive orders that will make permanent
the worst excesses of this criminal regime.
And in an election year, you can count on a Democratic-controll ed Congress to
continue abdicating their role as a brake on the executive branch, ever-fearful
that far-right attack dogs and their media accomplices will label them "soft on
terror."
In this light, a recent piece in The New York Times outlines the corporatist
trajectory that will cement in place the "friendly fascism" of the Bush
administration, inaugurated by the Republican party on December 12, 2000 when
the U.S. Supreme Court handed a stolen election to the Bush-Cheney cabal.
As Associate Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his bitter dissent to the
Bush v. Gore ruling: "Although we may never know with complete certainty the
identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the
loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an
impartial guardian of the rule of law."
Ponder those words and then consider all that has followed since that infamous
ruling eight long years ago undermined the rule of law and democratic processes
in the United States--and the capitulatory cowardice of the putative
"opposition" party, the Democrats, who sealed the deal.
Eric Lichtblau reports that as the November 4 general election approaches,
"Tucked deep into a recent proposal from the Bush administration is a provision
that has received almost no public attention, yet in many ways captures one of
President Bush's defining legacies: an affirmation that the United States is
still at war with Al Qaeda."
Seven years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by the Afghan-Arab
database of disposable Western intelligence assets known as al-Qaeda, Bush
advisers are demanding that Congress "acknowledge again and explicitly that this
nation remains engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and
associated organizations, who have already proclaimed themselves at war with us
and who are dedicated to the slaughter of Americans."
That al-Qaeda attacks Western targets and visits outrages upon innocent
civilians does not mean it is not also a blunt-edged weapon selectively deployed
by imperialism to stoke ethnic and religious tensions in areas deemed vital to
U.S. geostrategic interests. As investigative journalist Robert Dreyfuss has
documented,
Sixty years earlier, when the United States began its odyssey in the Middle
East, there were other voices who wanted conservative Islam, and early
fundamentalist groups associated with the nascent Islamic right, to do battle
with the secular left, with Nasser, with Arab communists and socialists. Now,
six decades later, the Bush administration is pursuing a strategy in the Middle
East that seems calculated to boost the fortunes of the Islamic right. The
United States is counting on Shiite fundamentalists in Iraq to save its failed
policy in that country, and a major theoretician of that campaign explicitly
calls for the United States to cast its lot in with the ayatollahs and the
Muslim Brotherhood. (Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash
Fundamentalist Islam, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005, p. 342)
Long after the Bush administration has sailed off into the proverbial sunset,
policies launched across the decades by successive Democratic and Republican
governments will continue along the same imperial trajectory: war and covert
operations as the preferred instruments for capitalist resource extraction and
global domination.
Al-Qaeda: Asset and Adversary
One need only review the role played by al-Qaeda in the Balkans during the 1990s
when the United States and their NATO allies, particularly Germany and the
United Kingdom, provided entrée to demobilized Afghan-Arab mujahedin fighters as
the West dismembered the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, culminating
in 1999 with NATO's murderous 78-day bombing campaign of Serbia to "liberate"
Kosovo.
Earlier in the decade, thousands of Islamist fighters flooded
Bosnia-Herzegovina, directly recruited by former Waffen SS Handzar Division foot
soldier and Islamist ideologue, Alia Izetbegovic, the President of Bosnia and
darling of liberal interventionists such as Bernard-Henri Lévy. In calling for
Western intervention, Lévy shamelessly described Izetbegovic' s neofascist
statelet as an exemplar of "modern, secular Islam"! Quite naturally,
Izetbegovic' s Nazi past was covered-up by Western interventionists intent on
smashing multiethnic Yugoslavia into smithereens.
Indeed, intelligence analyst and senior lecturer at the University of Amsterdam,
Cees Wiebes, documents in Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995, how
Western intelligence agencies, including the CIA, MI6 and BND assisted major
arms transshipments into Bosnia despite a UN arms embargo, often in concert with
the reactionary Iranian regime.

Some estimates claim that by 1994, as many as 4,000 mujahedin fighters were
present in Bosnia. Indeed, none other than Osama bin Laden himself visited
Izetbegovic in Sarajevo. As a gesture of appreciation for his support,
Izetbegovic gave bin Laden a Bosnian passport. And, a November 1, 2001 account
in the European edition of The Wall Street Journal claimed that bin Laden
continued to visit the Balkan region as late as 1996.

By 1995 as Wiebes documented, American Hercules C-130 transport planes
accompanied by jet fighters began landing at the Tuzla Air Base in eastern
Bosnia laden with arms, ammunition and communications equipment destined for
Izetbegovic' s Islamist brigades. Similar arms pipelines were opened between
Albania, Bosnia, Croatia and later in the decade Kosovo, where Albanian
narcotrafficking networks rule the roost and continue to wreck havoc across the
region.

As I documented in "Welcome to Kosovo! The World's Newest Narco State,"
beginning in 1998 and perhaps earlier, the London-based cleric Omar Bakri
Mohammed, the "emir" of the al-Qaeda-linked al-Muhajiroun began a recruitment
drive for aspiring mujahedin for the "holy war" in Kosovo at London's notorious
Finsbury Park Mosque.
In 2005, in the wake of the July 7, 2005 terrorist attacks in London, it was
revealed that Bakri, a probable MI6 asset and simultaneously an al-Qaeda
operative, was the "spiritual" force behind the deadly attacks that claimed 52
lives and wounded hundreds of others. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed reported that,

The reluctance to take decisive action against the leadership of the extremist
network in the UK has a long history. According to John Loftus, a former Justice
Department prosecutor, Omar Bakri and Abu Hamza, as well as the suspected
mastermind of the London bombings Haroon Aswat, were all recruited by MI6 in the
mid-1990s to draft up British Muslims to fight in Kosovo. American and French
security sources corroborate the revelation. The MI6 connection raises questions
about Bakri's relationship with British authorities today. Exiled to Lebanon and
outside British jurisdiction, he is effectively immune to prosecution.
("Sources: August terror plot is a 'fiction' underscoring police failures," The
Raw Story, Monday, September 18, 2006)
During NATO's Kosovo aggression, analyst Michel Chossudovsky wrote,
Mercenaries financed by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had been fighting in Bosnia. And
the Bosnian pattern was replicated in Kosovo: Mujahadeen mercenaries from
various Islamic countries are reported to be fighting alongside the KLA in
Kosovo. German, Turkish and Afghan instructors were reported to be training the
KLA in guerrilla and diversion tactics. ... According to a Deutsche
Press-Agenturreport, financial support from Islamic countries to the KLA had
been channelled through the former Albanian chief of the National Information
Service (NIS), Bashkim Gazidede. "Gazidede, reportedly a devout Moslem who fled
Albania in March of last year [1997], is presently [1998] being investigated for
his contacts with Islamic terrorist organizations. " ("Kosovo 'freedom fighters'
financed by organised crime," World Socialist Web Site, 10 April 1999)
As I documented, the Kosovo Liberation Army's links to both narcotrafficking
networks and al-Qaeda was a defining feature of Western intervention in the
former Yugoslavia. Indeed, Hashim Thaci's KLA served as the militarized vanguard
for the Albanian mafia whose "15 Families" control virtually every facet of the
Balkan heroin trade. Thaci is currently Kosovo's Prime Minister. Kosovar
traffickers ship heroin originating exclusively from Asia's Golden Crescent. At
one end lies Afghanistan where poppy is harvested for transshipment through Iran
and Turkey; as morphine base it is then refined into "product" for worldwide
consumption. From there it passes into the hands of the Albanian syndicates who
control the Balkan Route.

U.S. destabilization programs and covert operations rely on far-right
provocateurs and drug lords (often interchangeable players) to facilitate the
dirty work. Throughout its Balkan operations the CIA made liberal use of these
preexisting narcotics networks to arm the KLA and provide them with targets.
Today, similar features are visible for all the world to see as the U.S. warlord
state in Afghanistan battles the Taliban and al-Qaeda for control of the
lucrative opium growing and processing regions of that destroyed nation.
As a sometime Western intelligence asset, al-Qaeda is not simply a puppet of the
United States and NATO as some believe. Such simplifications mask a harder and
crueler reality. In the opinion of this writer, the 9/11 cover-up, rather than
burying the Bush administration' s alleged orchestration of the attacks (the
"inside job" thesis), concealed something far more sinister: U.S. imperialism' s
decades-long collaboration with Islamist extremists to achieve geopolitical
advantage over their capitalist rivals.
As with neo-Nazi networks that were reconstituted by the West for war against
their domestic leftist adversaries during the Cold War, al-Qaeda and related
terror organizations will, at times, share limited tactical goals with the West,
such as the destruction of secular, leftist opponents in the Middle East, or as
a force for destabilization operations in target countries such as Iran, as
investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has reported in The New Yorker.
That al-Qaeda has reconstituted its military-political- mafia structures along
the Afghanistan- Pakistan borderlands and continues to attack targets across the
region at will, is testament to the resilience of the organization and the
appeal of its reactionary ideology. There is a deadly irony here, since its
murderous "tradecraft" was quite literally bequeathed to it by Western
intelligence services and America's preeminent regional allies, Pakistan and
Saudi Arabia.
The Bush Legacy
As far-right Republican party hordes gather in Minneapolis/ St. Paul for the
coronation of their presidential candidates, reactionary Senator John McCain
(R-AZ) and Alaska's Christian fundamentalist governor, Sarah Palin, the Bush
regime's strategy of preemptive war is viciously playing out on the home
front. Salon's Glenn Greenwald reports,
Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly
intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30
officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of
those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the
floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers,
journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police
department and the Ramsey County sheriff's department handcuffed, photographed
and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration,
charging them with no crime other than "fire code violations," and early this
morning, the Sheriff's department sent teams of officers into at least four
Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying. ("Massive Police
Raids on Suspected Protesters in Minneapolis, " Salon, August 30, 2008)
The raids were orchestrated by local law enforcement agencies with major
assistance from various federal spy outfits such as the FBI, NSA and the
Pentagon's own Northern Command (NORTHCOM). The raids are purely an intimidation
tactic designed to squelch peaceful dissent by citizens outraged by Bushist
policies throughout these long years of darkness.
Indeed, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that police and federal agencies
utilized the "services" of informants and provocateurs in their targeting of the
anarchist RNC Welcoming Committee.
Aided by informants planted in protest groups, authorities raided at least six
buildings across St. Paul and Minneapolis to stop an "anarchist" plan to disrupt
this week's Republican National Convention.
From Friday night through Saturday afternoon, officers surrounded houses, broke
down doors, handcuffed scores of people and confiscated suspected tools of civil
disobedience.
The show of force was led by the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office in collaboration
with the FBI, Minneapolis and St. Paul police, the Hennepin County Sheriff's
Office and other agencies. (Heron Marquez Estrada, Bill McAuliffe and Abby
Simons, "Police Raids Enrage Activists, Alarm Others," Minneapolis Star Tribune,
August 31, 2008)
The "preemptive" raids targeted activists, alternative media and lawyers
on-scene. All were handcuffed and forced to lie face-down, while SWAT teams and
federal agents ransacked numerous homes in a quixotic hunt for "weapons."

Greenwald avers, "Targeting people with automatic-weapons- carrying SWAT teams
and mass raids in their homes, who are suspected of nothing more than planning
dissident political protests at a political convention and who have engaged in
no illegal activity whatsoever, is about as redolent of the worst tactics of a
police state as can be imagined."
After nearly eight years of massive surveillance and infiltration operations by
the federal government across a multitude of federal agencies, often acting in
cahoots with reenergized local "red squads" rebranded as Fusion Centers and
Joint Terrorism Task Forces coordinated through the Office of National
Intelligence, the mutant stepchildren of the FBI's COINTELPRO, the CIA's
Operation CHAOS and the NSA's Project SHAMROCK have brought the "war on terror"
home in a big way.
The Minneapolis City Pages reported back in May, that police and the FBI's Joint
Terrorism Task Force were "soliciting" informants to keep tabs on local protest
groups. According to journalist Matt Snyders's account, FBI Special Agent
Maureen A. Mazzola, flanked by a cop, attempted to recruit a University of
Minnesota sophomore as a paid "confidential informant." While the student
declined the feds' "generous offer," the wider issue of recruiting Stasi-like
moles to report "suspicious activities" by citizens exercising their
constitutionally- guaranteed right to say "NO!" cuts to the heart of the role of
dissent in a democracy.
Outraged by the "preemptive policing" on display in Minneapolis, Glenn Greenwald
comments on the virtual blackout by the corporate media, all-too-willing to
criticize the actions of repressive government's thousands of miles away while
silently acquiescing to the police state in full-bloom here at home.
So here we have a massive assault led by Federal Government law enforcement
agencies on left-wing dissidents and protesters who have committed no acts of
violence or illegality whatsoever, preceded by months-long espionage efforts to
track what they do. And as extraordinary as that conduct is, more extraordinary
is the fact that they have received virtually no attention from the national
media and little outcry from anyone. And it's not difficult to see why. As the
recent "overhaul" of the 30-year-old FISA law illustrated- -preceded by the
endless expansion of surveillance state powers, justified first by the War on
Drugs and then the War on Terror--we've essentially decided that we want our
Government to spy on us without limits. There is literally no police power that
the state can exercise that will cause much protest from the political and media
class and, therefore, from the citizenry. ("Federal Government Involved in Raid
on Protesters," Salon,
  August 31, 2008)
As The New York Times reported, Bushist demands on Congress to "affirm" that the
U.S. is at "war" with international terrorism, "carries significant legal and
public policy implications for Mr. Bush, and potentially his successor, to claim
the imprimatur of Congress to use the tools of war, including detention,
interrogation and surveillance, against the enemy," which as we see on a daily
basis, is a war on our freedom to exist as individuals rather than as "soldiers"
in an imperialist charade.
The Bushist proposal will provide the legal framework to assert broad executive
power "during a time of war," an interpretation of the commander in chief's
presumed wartime powers that Justice Department lawyers secretly used to gin-up
the illegal detention and torture of alleged terrorist suspects and the NSA's
driftnet surveillance of Americans outside the rule of law.
As readers no doubt recall, the September 14, 2001 congressional resolution
known as the "Authorization for Use of Military Force," still in effect, became
the pseudo-legal justification for the worst excesses of the Bush regime.

But as former Reagan Justice Department official Bruce Fein told the Times,
Congress should not "give the administration the wartime language it seeks."
"I do not believe that we are in a state of war whatsoever," Mr. Fein said. "We
have an odious opponent that the criminal justice system is able to identify and
indict and convict. They're not a goliath. Don't treat them that way."
The same can be said for the war criminals occupying high-office in the Bush
administration and Congress. I disagree with Mr. Fein on one salient point: we
are indeed "in a state of war." However, it is a one-sided class war waged by a
monstrous system of profit based on the exploitation of our living labor and
ecocidal resource extraction by mafia-like associations known as multinational
corporations.
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly, Love & Rage and Antifa
Forum, he is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil
Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press.


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“The possessions of the rich are stolen property.”
-P.J. Proudhon



----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Wythe Holt jr. <wholt@...>
To: blubermax@...; phoebews@...; peacetalkbham@yahoogroups.com;
maschwar@...; tuscapeace@yahoogroups.com; lahaynes@...;
SECULARHUMANIST@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, September 4, 2008 11:29:30 AM
Subject: [PeaceTalkBham] Two and a half billion people live on less than $2 a
day


World Bank: Two and a half billion people live on less than $2 a day

By David Walsh
2 September 2008


The World Bank reported Tuesday that in 2005 an estimated 1.4 billion people in
the so-called ‘developing world,’ one-fourth of its population, lived on less
than $1.25 a day, the new official poverty line. This figure is 400 million more
than the Bank’s 2004 estimate of 985 million. Another 1.2 billion people live on
between $1.25 and $2 a day.

The report issues from an institution correctly identified by great numbers of
people around the world as a reactionary pillar of the global financial system.
Despite efforts by Bank officials to put the best face on things, that more than
two and a half billion people continue to live in unspeakable poverty in the
first decade of the 21st century is an indictment of the capitalist system.

Martin Ravallion and Shaohua Chen, of the World Bank’s Development Research
Group, in a study entitled, “The Developing World is Poorer than We Thought, But
No Less Successful in the Fight Against Poverty,” note that in 2004, for the
first time, the Bank’s global poverty count had fallen below one billion.
They continue: “Alas the revised estimates reported in the present paper suggest
that our celebrations in finally getting under the one billion mark for the ‘$1
a day’ poverty count were premature. ... We find that the incidence of poverty
in the world is higher than past estimates have suggested.”

The 2005 estimates are based on surveys conducted in 116 countries and
interviews with some 1.23 million households.

The most dire conditions exist in Sub-Saharan Africa. After a quarter-century
(1981-2005) that witnessed the most extraordinary advances in technology, the
percentage of people living in absolute poverty in that region remained
unchanged; some 50 percent of its population subsists on $1.25 a day or less.

The actual number of the extremely poor in Sub-Saharan Africa almost doubled,
from 200 million in 1981 to about 380 million in 2005. “If the trend continues,”
notes a World Bank press release, “a third of the world’s poor will live in
Africa by 2015. Average consumption among poor people in Sub-Saharan Africa
stood at a meager 70 cents a day in 2005.”

Most of the 15 poorest countries in the world—Malawi, Mali, Ethiopia, Sierra
Leone, Niger, Uganda, Gambia, Rwanda, Guinea-Bissau, Tanzania, Tajikistan,
Mozambique, Chad, Nepal and Ghana—are located in Africa.

In South Asia, the percentage of those living below the $1.25 poverty rate has
decreased from 60 to 40 percent over 1981-2005, but the absolute number of
desperately poor people did not decline; there are some 600 million in that
category. In India, extremely uneven economic development reduced the poverty
rate as a share of the total population from 60 percent in 1981 to 42 percent in
2005, but the number of the destitute increased from 420 million in 1981 to 455
million in 2005.

The largest factor in lowering the percentage of extremely poor people in East
Asia has been the explosive industrialization of China. In 1981 East Asia was
the poorest region in the world. In China the number of people surviving on less
than $1.25 a day in 2005 prices dropped from 835 million in 1981 to 207 million
in 2005. A quarter of a century ago, the report states, “China’s incidence of
poverty (measured by the percentage below $1.25 per day) was roughly twice that
for the rest of the developing world; by the mid-1990s, the Chinese poverty rate
had fallen well below average.”

In the former colonial world, outside of China, the progress has been far more
limited; the total number of extremely poor people has remained at about 1.2
billion. The percentage of the ‘developing world’ population living in absolute
poverty has decreased from 40 percent in 1981 to 29 percent in 2005, according
to the Bank. Excluding China, however, the most oppressed countries are not on
track to reach the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the 1990 poverty
rate by 2015.

In Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA), the former Stalinist-ruled countries,
the picture is bleak. “The mean consumption of EECA’s poor has actually fallen
since the 1990s, even though the overall poverty rate was falling.” In passing,
the authors note that social inequality has grown in that region since the
collapse of Stalinism: “The paucity of survey data for EECA in the 1980s should
also be recalled. Thus our estimates are heavily based on extrapolations, which
do not allow for any changes in distribution. One would expect that distribution
was better from the point of view of the poor in EECA in the 1980s, in which
case poverty would have been even lower than we estimate—and the increase over
time even larger.”

The poverty rate in Latin America and the Caribbean has also declined, but not
enough to bring down the number of extremely poor people.

Ravallion and Chen point to two phenomena that tend to undercut even the limited
progress they cite.

First, although hundreds of millions of people have lifted themselves out of
absolute poverty since 1981, the improvement has been very slight for vast
numbers. While the increase in wealth at the other pole of global society,
registered in the number of billionaires and the share of national incomes held
by the top one or five percent of the population, has been explosive, the very
poor have only inched ahead and remain immensely vulnerable.

The study’s authors point to the phenomenon of “bunching up” that has occurred
between $1.25 and $2.00 a day. They observe that the number of people living at
that level “has actually risen sharply over these 25 years, from about 600
million to 1.2 billion. This marked ‘bunching up’ of people just above the $1.25
line suggests that the poverty rate according to that line could rise sharply
with aggregate economic contraction.”

Speaking of the same phenomenon in relation to both East and South Asia, they
note that a total of some 900 million people live on between $1.25 and $2.00 a
day, “roughly equally split between the two sides of Asia. While this points
again to the vulnerability of the poor, by the same token it also suggests that
substantial further impacts on poverty can be expected from economic growth,
provided that it does not come with substantially higher inequality.”

In a press release, the World Bank notes that its estimates “suggest less
progress in getting over the $2 per day hurdle. Indeed, we have seen no change
in the number of people living below $2 per day at around 2.5 billion, between
1981 and 2005.”

In another press release, the Bank is also careful to point out that the new
estimates “do not yet reflect the potentially large adverse effects on poor
people of rising food and fuel prices since 2005.”

Or, as Ravallion and Chen write in their conclusion, “There are a great many
people who have reached the frugal $1.25 standard, but are still very poor, and
clearly vulnerable to downside shocks. One such shock is the steep rise in
international food and fuel prices since 2005. Despite the progress in reducing
the lags in survey data availability, it will probably not be until 2010 that we
can make a reasonably confident assessment of the ex post impacts of the rising
food and fuel prices on the world’s poor. Until then, ex ante assessments will
be required, based on pre-crisis data and economic assumptions. Such assessments
suggest that at least a few years of the progress reported here have been eroded
since 2005.”

See Also:
Global food price rises exacerbate famine in Ethiopia and Somalia
[3 July 2008]
The world food crisis and the capitalist market
[10 June 2008]
Global survey reveals growing anger over social inequality
[20 May 2008]
World Wealth Report: a census of the global oligarchy
[12 July 2007]
The WSWS invites your comments.

________________________________


Copyright 1998-2008
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
http://www.wsws. org/articles/ 2008/sep2008/ pove-s02. shtml


I'll be scared later. Right now I'm too mad. - Bugs Bunny





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

 
“The possessions of the rich are stolen property.”
-P.J. Proudhon



----- Forwarded Message ----
From: hhrivas <hhrivas@...>
To: PeaceTalkBham@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, September 4, 2008 12:30:00 PM
Subject: [PeaceTalkBham] FW: [Ctcfield] Women of Steel to McCain: Palin wrong
choice for workingwomen, families






________________________________
From: ctcfield-bounces@ citizenstrade. org [mailto:ctcfield- bounces@citizens
trade.org] On Behalf Of Ben Plimpton
Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2008 10:05 AM
To: ctcfield@citizenstr ade.org
Subject: [Ctcfield] Women of Steel to McCain: Palin wrong choice for
workingwomen, families


Women of Steel to McCain: Palin wrong choice for working women, families
http://usw.org/ media_center/ releases_ advisories? id=0077
 
The United Steelworkers (USW) Women of Steel today sent a open letter to
Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain expressing disappointment in
his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Pittsburgh - The United
Steelworkers (USW) Women of Steel today sent a open letter to Republican
presidential candidate Sen. John McCain expressing disappointment in his
selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate.
 
The letter praises McCain for again putting a woman on the presidential ticket.
Geraldine Ferraro was the Democrat nominee for vice president in 1984.
 
"You chose a female as your running mate, and we applaud your contribution to
the progress this represents," the letter states. "Unfortunately, you chose the
wrong woman for the wrong job. Governor Palin is a working mother whose
achievements should be respected - but due respect for a budding political
career doesn't mean she is ready to be vice president - a heart beat away from
the presidency. Nor does it change the fact that she's not the best candidate to
improve the lives of women and working families in this country."
 
 The letter points out that Palin does little to change McCain's anti-worker,
anti-woman agenda that, among other things, opposes giving workers the right to
join a union and bargain collectively; erodes the ability of working families to
secure quality health care by taxing their employer -provided coverage for both
active and retired workers, and does nothing to protect or expand family leave
or make it paid.
 
Click here to view the letter in its entirety:
http://assets. usw.org/action_ center/WOSPalinL etter/openletter tomccain-
palin.pdf
 
The USW's Women of Steel are dedicated to increasing working women's activism
through the sharing of information and networking. The goal is to impact issues
affecting all working women and their families, and to recognize women's
leadership development and involvement at work and in the community. Women of
Steel are employed in a diverse cross-section of industries including health
care, manufacturing and public service.
 
The USW represents 850,000 workers in the U.S. and Canada employed in the
industries of metals, rubber, chemicals, paper, oil refining and mining. For
more information: www.usw.org/ .
 
#  #  #
 
 
Andy  Gussert
Director, Citizens Trade Campaign
www.citizenstrade. org
 
WashingtonD.C.Office
Work: 202.778.3313  x313
Cell#:  202.494.8826
Fax#:  202.293.5308
agussert@citizenstr ade.org
 
MadisonWI Office
5542 Riverview Dr
Madison WI 53597
Cell: 608.213.8585
 



   ----------

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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Ron Paul Rally for the Republic- Bigger than the rest of the Republican Party
http://targetfreedom.typepad.com/targetfreedom/2008/09/ron-paul-rally-for-the-re\
public--bigger-than-the-rest-of-the-republican-party.html 
This event was in the biggest convention center in the state, and it was packed!
The rest of the republicans were in a much smaller hall.
Yet the media gave the Ron Paul Rally for the Republic very little coverage.
BUT, WE are now the media. Get this OUT.
Get on the blogs. Get on youtube. Get on Google, etc.
Do your own email distributions.
----------
http://targetfreedom.typepad.com/targetfreedom/2008/09/ron-paul---rally-for-the-\
republic.html
Ron Paul - Rally for the Republic Pt 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGONDUxUxc4 
Ron Paul - Rally for the Republic Pt 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbzdOFhDydc&feature=related 
Ron Paul - Rally for the Republic Pt 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPO9mPCqG70&feature=related
--------------------------
The video of the speech by President of the John Birch Society, John F. McManus,
will be ready tomorrow.
-------------
Jesse Ventura Speech Rally for the Republic 9/02/08
http://targetfreedom.typepad.com/targetfreedom/2008/09/jesse-ventura-speech-rall\
y-for-the-republic-90208.html
Jesse Ventura Speech Rally for the Republic 9/02/08 Pt. 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79eCo6ocBEc&feature=related 
JESSE VENTURA AT RON PAUL MINNESOTA RALLY RNC 9/11 PART 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOd5SB6xXww&feature=related 
-----------------
Morning Joe segment, "News You Can't Use" covering the Rally for the Republic
9/3/08
http://targetfreedom.typepad.com/targetfreedom/2008/09/morning-joe-segment-news-\
you-cant-use-covering-the-rally-for-the-republic-9308.html 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVJQoD1VAh0
===================





St. Paul Cop Dragging Protester Jumped, Sprays Crowd
 
http://www.crooksandliars.com:80/2008/09/03/st-paul-cop-dragging-protester-jumpe\
d-sprays-crowd/ 
 
A St. Paul police officer who was dragging an alleged protester down the
street may now have added the term R3VOLUTION to his spell checker.

Note: In posting this video I am not advocating attacks on police, or violence
of any kind.  Of course that includes violent attacks BY police.
http://targetfreedom.typepad.com/targetfreedom/2008/09/st-paul-cop-dragging-prot\
ester-jumped-sprays-crowd.html
=================================
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/

John McCain is not in St. Paul. 

visit:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/us/politics/01repubs.html?ref=us
Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney announced that they would not attend the
convention as planned on Monday.
Sarah Palin is not in St. Paul. 
Most of the Republicratic big shots are not in St. Paul. 
This is all supposedly because of the pending "national emergency" of Gustav in
the Gulf Coast.
 
Perhaps the real reason is fear of looking so bad, while standing in the shadow
of Ron Paul's Rally for the Republic.
http://www.rallyfortherepublic.com/ 
 
They can fake the polls to make it look as though the people support them. They
can even rig the elections with the voting machines.  But they need an excuse
for why they cannot assemble a good sized crowd of supporters. This is
especially important when Ron Paul DOES assemble a good sized crowd of
supporters in the same town, at the same time.
 
Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early
http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=NF5Kdm4Eu6w&feature=related 
 
Visit the ultimate resource for defending liberty

CLICK HERE:
http://targetfreedom.typepad.com:80/

1. Links to liberty defending organizations
2. Links to liberty defending web pages
3. Links to A MASSIVE assortment of liberty defending videos
4. A stream lined system for contacting legislators with suggested letters
5. Links to liberty defending egroups
6. Links to magazines, literature and other materials
 

Are you looking for a book about defending liberty?
Many rare and out of print books are still available.
Look here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/shops/index.html?ie=UTF8&sellerID=A1AVPSERX4QF0E
 
Then look here:
http://astore.amazon.com/targetfreedom-20?%5Fencoding=UTF8&node=4 
 




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

I don't believe so.

On Sep 3, 2008, at 12:00 PM, tetraedronico wrote:

> Hello, does anybody knows if Amy Goodman is an anarchist?
>
> Tetraedrónico
>
> ----- Mensaje original ----
> De: Dave Williams <daver_123456@...>
> Para: anarchy list <smygo@yahoogroups.com>; Marxist List
> <marxist@yahoogroups.com>; NC4P@yahoogroups.com
> Enviado: martes, 2 de septiembre, 2008 13:53:07
> Asunto: [smygo] Goodman aressted at RNC. All to be shown on
> Democracy Now! today
>
> “The possessions of the rich are stolen property.”
> -P.J. Proudhon
>
> ----- Forwarded Message ----
> From: Wythe Holt jr. <wholt@...>
> To: blubermax@...; phoebews@...;
> Out_Of_The_Frying_Pan@yahoogroups.com;
> peacetalkbham@yahoogroups.com; maschwar@...;
> tuscapeace@yahoogroups.com;
> lahaynes@...;SECULARHUMANIST@yahoogroups.com
> Sent: Tuesday, September 2, 2008 8:03:42 AM
> Subject: [PeaceTalkBham] Goodman, 2 other Democracy Now! producers
> released; will show it all on Democracy Now! today
>
> FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
>
> September 1, 2008
>
> Contact:
> Mike Burke: mike@democracynow. org
>
> **UPDATE**
>
> Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman, Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar
> Released After Illegal Arrest at RNC
>
> Goodman Charged with Obstruction; Felony Riot Charges Pending Against
> Kouddous and Salazar
>
> ST. PAUL--Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and producers Sharif Abdel
> Kouddous and Nicole Salazar have all been released from police custody
> in St. Paul following their illegal arrest by Minneapolis Police on
> Monday afternoon.
>
> All three were violently manhandled by law enforcement officers. Abdel
> Kouddous was slammed against a wall and the ground, leaving his arms
> scraped and bloodied. He sustained other injuries to his chest and
> back.
> Salazar's violent arrest by baton-wielding officers, during which she
> was slammed to the ground while yelling, "I'm Press! Press!," resulted
> in her nose bleeding, as well as causing facial pain. Goodman's arm
> was
> violently yanked by police as she was arrested.
>
> On Tuesday, Democracy Now! will broadcast video of these arrests, as
> well as the broader police action. These will also be available on:
> www.democracynow. org
>
> Goodman was arrested while questioning police about the unlawful
> detention of Kouddous and Salazar who were arrested while they carried
> out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the
> Republican National Convention. Goodman's crime appears to have been
> defending her colleagues and the freedom of the press.
>
> Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher told Democracy Now! that
> Kouddous and
> Salazar were arrested on suspicion of rioting, a felony. While the
> three
> have been released, they all still face charges stemming from their
> unlawful arrest. Kouddous and Salazar face pending charges of
> suspicion
> of felony riot, while Goodman has been officially charged with
> obstruction of a legal process and interference with a "peace
> officer."
>
> Democracy Now! forcefully rejects all of these charges as false and an
> attempt at intimidation of these journalists. We demand that the
> charges
> be immediately and completely dropped.
>
> Democracy Now! stands by Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar and condemns
> this
> action by Twin Cities' law enforcement as a clear violation of the
> freedom of the press and the First Amendment rights of these
> journalists.
>
> During the demonstration in which the Democracy Now! team was
> arrested,
> law enforcement officers used pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion
> grenades and excessive force against protesters and journalists.
> Several
> dozen demonstrators were also arrested during this action, including a
> photographer for the Associated Press.
>
> Amy Goodman is one of the most well-known and well-respected
> journalists
> in the United States. She has received journalism's top honors for her
> reporting and has a distinguished reputation of bravery and
> courage. The
> arrest of Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar and the subsequent criminal
> charges and threat of charges are a transparent attempt to intimidate
> journalists.
>
> Democracy Now! is a nationally-syndicat ed public TV and radio program
> that airs on over 700 radio and TV stations across the US and the
> globe.
>
> Video of Amy Goodman's Arrest: http://www.youtube. com/watch?
> v=oYjyvkR0bGQ
>
> = = = = = = = = =
> ABOUT DEMOCRACY NOW!
> Democracy Now! airs on over 650 radio and TV stations, including
> Pacifica, NPR, community, and college radio stations; on public
> access, PBS, satellite TV stations (DISH network: Free Speech TV
> ch. 9415 and Link TV ch. 9410; DIRECTV: Link TV ch. 375); on the World
> Radio Network's European Service and on the Community Broacasting
> Association of Australia service; as a "podcast", automatically
> downloaded to your computer or portable audio player; and streams live
> M-F at 8am EST at www.democracynow. org
> = = = = = = = = =
> Now real-time CLOSED CAPTIONED on TV!
> You can also view/listen/ read all Democracy Now! shows online:
> http://www.democrac ynow.org
> To bring Democracy Now! to your community, go to:
> http://www.democrac ynow.org/ get_involved/ bring_to_ station
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Wythe Holt jr. <wholt@.... edu>
> To: blubermax@bellsouth .net; phoebews@aol. com; Out_Of_The_Frying_
> Pan@yahoogroups. com; peacetalkbham@ yahoogroups. com;
> maschwar@lib. ua.edu; tuscapeace@yahoogro ups.com;
> lahaynes@knology. net; SECULARHUMANIST@ yahoogroups. com;
> libertyundergroundt alk@yahoogroups. com
> Sent: Tue, 2 Sep 2008 7:43 am
> Subject: [libertyunderground talk] (C) What is the latest on Amy
> Goodman's detention, or that of others, at the fascist RNC? (2 items)
>
> Hello, my friends. The arrest of Amy Goodman, below, is old news by
> now, but I wanted to send it along in case some of you hadn't
> heard. I had one email that she had already been released, but I do
> not know of its accuracy, and I do not know about all the others
> picked up by the Gestapo and the Brown Shirts at the Republican
> National Convention for exercising their supposed First Amendment
> rights to free speech and peaceably to petition their government.
> If anyone has further news, I would certainly appreciate their
> posting it to all. Thanks. In solidarity, Wythe
>
> (1)
> The word pigs comes to mind: http://www.youtube. com/watch?
> v=oYjyvkR0bGQ .
>
> ________________________________
>
> Amy Goodman, Others Detained Outside RNC
> by John Nichols on 09/01/2008 @ 3:28pm
>
> Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman was among more than 100 people
> detained outside the Republican National Convention here as police
> clashed with demonstrators on the streets of St. Paul.
>
> Goodman was arrested in near the XCel Center, where the convention
> opened Monday, at approximately 5 p.m. Minnesota time.
>
> According to a statement issued Dennis Moynihan and Mike Burke of
> Democracy Now!:
>
> Goodman was arrested while attempting to free two Democracy Now!
> producers who were being unlawfuly detained. They are Sharif Abdel
> Kouddous and Nicole Salazar. Kouddous and Salazar were arrested
> while they carried out their journalistic duties in covering street
> demonstrations at the Republican National Convention. Goodman's
> crime appears to have been defending her colleagues and the freedom
> of the press.
>
> Ramsey County Sherrif Bob Fletcher told Democracy Now! that
> Kouddous and Salazar were being arrested on suspicion of rioting.
> They are currently being held at the Ramsey County jail in St. Paul.
>
> I was with Goodman earlier this afternoon, as she was reporting on
> the major anti-war demonstration. She and her crew were, as always,
> interviewing everyone they could in the calm, assured manner that
> has made the daily Democracy Now! program a widely-watched and well-
> regarded news programs on radio and cable television stations
> across the country.
>
> Moynihan and Burke, in their statement, say that:
>
> Democracy Now! stands by Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar and condemns
> this action by Twin Cities law enforcement as a clear violation of
> the freedom of the press and the First Amendment rights of these
> journalists.
>
> They are urging journalists and concerned citizens to contact the
> office of St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman (651-266-8535) and the
> Ramsey County Jail (651-266-9350) and demand the immediate release
> of Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar.
>
> The calls are important.
>
> The American Civil Liberties Union and the National Lawyers Guild
> are also on the case.
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
> __________________________________________________
> Correo Yahoo!
> Espacio para todos tus mensajes, antivirus y antispam ¡gratis!
> Regístrate ya - http://correo.yahoo.com.mx/
>
>



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

http://tinyurl.com/6o59oq
Why We Were Falsely Arrested
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080903_why_we_were_falsely_arrested/
Posted on Sep 3, 2008
By Amy Goodman

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Government crackdowns on journalists are a true
threat to democracy. As the Republican National Convention meets in St.
Paul, Minn., this week, police are systematically targeting journalists.
I was arrested with my two colleagues, "Democracy Now!" producers Sharif
Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar, while reporting on the first day of
the RNC. I have been wrongly charged with a misdemeanor. My co-workers,
who were simply reporting, may be charged with felony riot.

The Democratic and Republican national conventions have become very
expensive and protracted acts of political theater, essentially
four-day-long advertisements for the major presidential candidates.
Outside the fences, they have become major gatherings for grass-roots
movements -- for people to come, amidst the banners, bunting, flags and
confetti, to express the rights enumerated in the Constitution’s First
Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the
freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably
to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Behind all the patriotic hyperbole that accompanies the conventions, and
the thousands of journalists and media workers who arrive to cover the
staged events, there are serious violations of the basic right of
freedom of the press. Here on the streets of St. Paul, the press is free
to report on the official proceedings of the RNC, but not to report on
the police violence and mass arrests directed at those who have come to
petition their government, to protest.

It was Labor Day, and there was an anti-war march, with a huge turnout,
with local families, students, veterans and people from around the
country gathered to oppose the war. The protesters greatly outnumbered
the Republican delegates.

There was a positive, festive feeling, coupled with a growing anxiety
about the course that Hurricane Gustav was taking, and whether New
Orleans would be devastated anew. Later in the day, there was a splinter
march. The police -- clad in full body armor, with helmets, face
shields, batons and canisters of pepper spray -- charged. They forced
marchers, onlookers and working journalists into a nearby parking lot,
then surrounded the people and began handcuffing them.

Nicole was videotaping. Her tape of her own violent arrest is chilling.
Police in riot gear charged her, yelling, "Get down on your face." You
hear her voice, clearly and repeatedly announcing "Press! Press! Where
are we supposed to go?" She was trapped between parked cars. The camera
drops to the pavement amidst Nicole’s screams of pain. Her face was
smashed into the pavement, and she was bleeding from the nose, with the
heavy officer with a boot or knee on her back. Another officer was
pulling on her leg. Sharif was thrown up against the wall and kicked in
the chest, and he was bleeding from his arm.

I was at the Xcel Center on the convention floor, interviewing
delegates. I had just made it to the Minnesota delegation when I got a
call on my cell phone with news that Sharif and Nicole were being bloody
arrested, in every sense. Filmmaker Rick Rowley of Big Noise Films and I
raced on foot to the scene. Out of breath, we arrived at the parking
lot. I went up to the line of riot police and asked to speak to a
commanding officer, saying that they had arrested accredited journalists.

Within seconds, they grabbed me, pulled me behind the police line and
forcibly twisted my arms behind my back and handcuffed me, the rigid
plastic cuffs digging into my wrists. I saw Sharif, his arm bloody, his
credentials hanging from his neck. I repeated we were accredited
journalists, whereupon a Secret Service agent came over and ripped my
convention credential from my neck. I was taken to the St. Paul police
garage where cages were set up for protesters. I was charged with
obstruction of a peace officer. Nicole and Sharif were taken to jail,
facing riot charges.

The attack on and arrest of me and the "Democracy Now!" producers was
not an isolated event. A video group called I-Witness Video was raided
two days earlier. Another video documentary group, the Glass Bead
Collective, was detained, with its computers and video cameras
confiscated. On Wednesday, I-Witness Video was again raided, forced out
of its office location. When I asked St. Paul Police Chief John
Harrington how reporters are to operate in this atmosphere, he
suggested, "By embedding reporters in our mobile field force."

On Monday night, hours after we were arrested, after much public outcry,
Nicole, Sharif and I were released. That was our Labor Day. It’s all in
a day’s work.

Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international
TV/radio news hour airing on more than 700 stations in North America.

Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/

YouTube video of Amy Goodman's arrest:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYjyvkR0bGQ

--
Dan Clore

My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"

tetraedronico wrote:

> Hello, does anybody knows if Amy Goodman is an anarchist?

I don't know, maybe more of a social-democrat but close to a left-anarchist?

In any case, she does an awesome job on Democracy Now!, and also has a
very likable persona. I imagine that the video of her manhandling by
police at the RNC will arouse a lot to make viewers sympathetic to
progressivism and increase opposition to the Republicans. Not that most
viewers won't already feel that way, but I expect that this will
strengthen the feeling.

--
Dan Clore

My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"

In 2004, god told us to vote Republican
http://img518.imageshack.us/my.php?image=notourfaultkt6.gif

In 2008, is God still a Republican?
It's a good thing that God is on our side in the United States and
blesses us.
http://www.markfiore.com/bible_thumper_0

I watched much of the Republican convention and found that the speakers
made many assertions, ignored factual reality, and made fun of their
opposition without regard to any truth.  Like Bush and his faith-based
policies, they ignore any facts which do not support their a priori
conclusions.

Even the media did not provide the fact-checking to put statements in
context.

There was a 15 year old girl who supposedly wrote an essay, which was
put into video form, and she was chosen to lead the pledge of
allegiance.

I noted that she told about the terrorist attack of 9-11, then jumped to
a cousin serving in Iraq.  No one mentioned that Iraq had nothing to do
with 9-11, and was an illegal immoral unnecessary pre-emptive war of
choice, which is a war crime under international law and a violation of
Article VI of the US Constitution.  Starting an illegal war against a
country which had not attacked us and was known to be no threat seems an
important point, and taking our country to an unnecessary war based on
lies demands accountability.  I think that the 15 year old girl did not
understand the facts behind the lack of connection between 9-11 and
Iraq.

And all the speakers called on god to bless our country.  Apparently it
is necessary to appear to share the cultural delusions of our country
and to believe in imaginary supernatural beings.  That seems delusional
to me and makes me question what kind of judgment such people bring to
public policy.

When no evidence is required for belief, can they make reasoned
decisions?

We learned from George W. Bush that faith-based policies ignore or
discard any fact which does not support the conclusions reached in
advance.

Today's gods: Fu Shen  God of luck. Chinese. He is often linked in
iconography with Tsai Shen, God of wealth. and Shou Lao, god of
longevity. Usually depicted with his son, and wearing blue robes, which
signify his official position
http://www.happy-gods.com/happy-gods.html

Flora   Goddess of flowers. Roman. Consort of Zephyrus and chiefly
worshipped by young girls with offerings of  fruit and flowers, Her
major festivals, with strongly sexual overtones but also intensified
with the dead, were celebrated in the spring months from April 28 to
early May and known as Floralia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flora_(goddess)

God: generic term for any of 2,500+ imaginary supernatural beings in
human history.  Note: the majority of voters in the United States
believe in imaginary supernatural beings and expect their elected
leaders to do the same. No agnostics or atheists (god-free rationalists)
need apply. I want my leaders to live in the world of reason where
evidence is required for belief.  In the world of faith, NO evidence is
required for belief in imaginary supernatural beings.
--C Hamilton

McCain...does old age (experience) bring good judgment?
What makes a POW a hero, or competent, when he supported Bush with two
illegal, immoral, unnecessary pre-emptive wars, illegal under
internation law and violations of Article VI of the US Constitution?
http://www.markfiore.com/mccain_iraq_2008_0

Sarah Palin is the poster girl for the failure of abstinence only
  sex education.
http://img168.imageshack.us/my.php?image=abstinanceonlyrg0.gif

The McCain-Palin plan for change?
http://img168.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mccainpalinut3.gif

Needed change involves throwing out all the Republicans
http://img168.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bushyearsuf0.gif

The history of our race, and each individual's experience,
are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to
kill and that a lie told well is immortal.
--Mark Twain (1835 - 1910), Advice to Youth

Friends don't let friends vote Republican
http://img168.imageshack.us/my.php?image=friendsdontletfriendsvofo7.jpg

Bush: god told me to invade Iraq
http://img165.imageshack.us/my.php?image=godtoldmetodoitwo6.jpg

Bush: God told me to invade Iraq
President 'revealed reasons for war in private meeting'
By Rupert Cornwell
7 October 2005
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bush-god-told-me-to-invade-iraq\
-509925.html

President George Bush has claimed he was told by God to invade Iraq and
attack Osama bin Laden's stronghold of Afghanistan as part of a divine
mission to bring peace to the Middle East, security for Israel, and a
state for the Palestinians. <snip>

(Why worry about illegal war, the environment or the future when the
Rapture is near?  Born-again evangelical fundamentalist christians want
to bring on the end days in the middle-east.)

=====================

Palin: troops in Iraq are on a mission from god...
"Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is
right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders,
are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God," she
exhorted the congregants. "That's what we have to make sure that we're
praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/02/palins-church-may-have-sh_n_123205.html

The future is not what it used to be...
http://img168.imageshack.us/my.php?image=futurevq8.jpg

==============

Shared Anti-democratic Ideology of McCain and Palin
by George Lakoff
09/02/2008
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/1728

The Palin Choice
The Reality of the Political Mind

This election matters because of realities-the realities of global
warming, the economy, the Middle East, nuclear proliferation, civil
liberties, species extinction, poverty here and around the world, and on
and on. Such realities are what make this election so very crucial, and
how to deal with them is the substance of the Democratic platform
(http://www.demconvention.com/assets/downloads/2008-Democratic-Platform-by-Cmte-\
08-13-08.pdf

Election campaigns matter because who gets elected can change reality.
But election campaigns are primarily about the realities of voters'
minds, which depend on how the candidates and the external realities are
cognitively framed. They can be framed honestly or deceptively,
effectively or clumsily. And they are always framed from the perspective
of a worldview.

The Obama campaign has learned this. The Republicans have long known it,
and the choice of Sarah Palin as their Vice-Presidential candidate
reflects their expert understanding of the political mind and political
marketing.  Democrats who simply belittle the Palin choice are courting
disaster. It must be taken with the utmost seriousness.

The Democratic responses so far reflect external realities: she is
inexperienced, knowing little or nothing about foreign policy or
national issues; she is really an anti-feminist, wanting the government
to enter women's lives to block abortion, but not wanting the government
to guarantee equal pay for equal work, or provide adequate child health
coverage, or child care, or early childhood education; she shills for
the oil and gas industry on drilling; she denies the scientific truths
of global warming and  evolution; she misuses her political authority;
she opposes sex education and her daughter is pregnant; and, rather than
being a maverick, she is on the whole a radical right-wing ideologue.

All true, so far as we can tell.

But such truths may nonetheless be largely irrelevant to this campaign.
That is the lesson Democrats must learn.  They must learn the reality of
the political mind.

The Obama campaign has done this very well so far. The convention events
and speeches were orchestrated both to cast light on external realities,
traditional political themes, and to focus on values at once classically
American and progressive: empathy, responsibility both for oneself and
others, and aspiration to make things better both for oneself and the
world. Obama did all this masterfully in his nomination speech, while
replying to, and undercutting, the main Republican attacks.

But the Palin nomination changes the game. The initial response has been
to try to keep the focus on external realities, the "issues," and
differences on the issues. But the Palin nomination is not basically
about external realities and what Democrats call "issues," but about the
symbolic mechanisms of the political mind-the worldviews, frames,
metaphors, cultural narratives, and stereotypes.  The Republicans can't
win on realities. Her job is to speak the language of conservatism,
activate the conservative view of the world, and use the advantages that
conservatives have in dominating political discourse.

Our national political dialogue is fundamentally metaphorical, with
family values at the center of our discourse. There is a reason why
Obama and Biden spoke so much about the family, the nurturant family,
with caring fathers and the family values that Obama put front and
center in his Father's day speech: empathy, responsibility and
aspiration. Obama's reference in the nomination speech to "The American
Family" was hardly accidental, nor were the references to the Obama and
Biden families as living and fulfilling the American Dream. Real
nurturance requires strength and toughness, which Obama displayed in
body language and voice in his responses to McCain. The strength of the
Obama campaign has been the seamless marriage of reality and symbolic
thought.

The Republican strength has been mostly symbolic. The McCain campaign is
well aware of how Reagan and W won-running on character: values,
communication, (apparent) authenticity, trust, and identity - not issues
and policies.  That is how campaigns work, and symbolism is central.

Conservative family values are strict and apply via metaphorical thought
to the nation: good vs. evil, authority, the use of force, toughness and
discipline, individual (versus social) responsibility, and tough love.
Hence, social programs are immoral because they violate discipline and
individual responsibility. Guns and the military show force and
discipline. Man is above nature; hence no serious environmentalism. The
market is the ultimate financial authority, requiring market discipline.
In foreign policy, strength is use of the force. In fundamentalist
religion, the Bible is the ultimate authority; hence no gay marriage.
Such values are at the heart of radical conservatism. This is how John
McCain was raised and how he plans to govern. And it is what he shares
with Sarah Palin.

Palin is the mom in the strict father family, upholding conservative
values.  Palin is tough: she shoots, skins, and eats caribou. She is
disciplined: raising five kids with a major career. She lives her
values: she has a Downs-syndrome baby that she refused to abort.  She
has the image of the ideal conservative mom: pretty, perky, feminine,
Bible-toting, and fitting into the ideal conservative family. And she
fits the stereotype of America as small-town America. It is Reagan's
morning-in-America image.  Where Obama thought of capturing the West,
she is running for Sweetheart of the West.

And Palin, a member of Feminism For Life, is at the heart of the
conservative feminist movement, which Ronee Schreiber has written about
in her recent book, Righting Feminism. It is a powerful and growing
movement that Democrats have barely paid attention to.

At the same time, Palin is masterful at the Republican game of taking
the Democrats' language and reframing it-putting conservative frames to
progressive words: Reform, prosperity, peace. She is also masterful at
using the progressive narratives: she's from the working class, working
her way up from hockey mom and the PTA to Mayor, Governor, and VP
candidate. Her husband is a union member. She can say to the
conservative populists that she is one of them-all the things that Obama
and Biden have been saying. Bottom-up, not top-down.

Yes, the McCain-Palin ticket is weak on the major realities. But it is
strong on the symbolic dimension of politics that Republicans are so
good at marketing. Just arguing the realities, the issues, the hard
truths should be enough in times this bad, but the political mind and
its response to symbolism cannot be ignored. The initial Democratic
response to Palin - the response based on realities alone - indicates
that many Democrats have not learned the lessons of the Reagan and Bush
years.

They have not learned the nature of conservative populism. A great many
working-class folks are what I call "bi-conceptual," that is, they are
split between conservative and progressive modes of thought.
Conservative on patriotism and certain social and family issues, which
they have been led to see as "moral", progressive in loving the land,
living in communities of care, and practical kitchen table issues like
mortgages, health care, wages, retirement, and so on.

Conservative theorists won them over in two ways: Inventing and
promulgating the idea of "liberal elite" and focusing campaigns on
social and family issues. They have been doing this for many years and
have changed a lot of brains through repetition. Palin will appeal
strongly to conservative populists, attacking Obama and Biden as
pointy-headed, tax-and-spend, latte liberals.  The tactic is to divert
attention from difficult realities to powerful symbolism.

What Democrats have shied away from is a frontal attack on radical
conservatism itself as an un-American and harmful ideology. I think
Obama is right when he says that America is based on people caring about
each other and working together for a better future-empathy,
responsibility (both personal and social), and aspiration. These lead to
a concept of government based on protection (environmental, consumer,
worker, health care, and retirement protection) and empowerment (through
infrastructure, public education, the banking system, the stock market,
and the courts). Nobody can achieve the American Dream or live an
American lifestyle without protection and empowerment by the government.
The alternative, as Obama said in his nomination speech, is being on
your own, with no one caring for anybody else, with force as a first
resort in foreign affairs, with threatened civil liberties and a
right-wing government making your most important decisions for you. That
is not what American democracy has ever been about.

What is at stake in this election are our ideals and our view of the
future, as well as current realities. The Palin choice brings both front
and center. Democrats, being Democrats, will mostly talk about the
realities nonstop without paying attention to the dimensions of values
and symbolism. Democrats, in addition, need to call an extremist an
extremist: to shine a light on the shared anti-democratic ideology of
McCain and Palin, the same ideology shared by Bush and Cheney.  They
share values antithetical to our democracy. That needs to be said loud
and clear, if not by the Obama campaign itself, then by the rest of us
who share democratic American values.

Our job is to bring external realities together with the reality of the
political mind. Don't ignore the cognitive dimension. It is through
cultural narratives, metaphors, and frames that we understand and
express our ideals.

George Lakoff is the author of The Political Mind: Why You Can't
Understand 20th Century Politics With and 18th Century Brain.

================

Who wants to see Sarah Palin as the next president?
The Republicans are meeting down the hill from my house. What are they
trying to say?
By Garrison Keillor
http://www.salon.com/opinion/keillor/2008/09/03/republican_convention/print.html

Sep. 03, 2008 | The Republicans are meeting down the hill from my house,
helicopters are pounding the air, and there are more suits on the
streets and big black SUVs and a brownish cloud venting from the hockey
arena where the convention is assembled. A large moment for little old
St. Paul, which is more accustomed to visitations by conventions of
morticians and foundation garment salesmen and the Sons of the Desert,
and so we are thrilled. It makes no difference that the city is
Democratic. What matters is that, for a few days, TV will show a few
pictures of the big bend in the Mississippi, the limestone bluffs, the
capitol and cathedral, and a tree-shaded avenue or two, and some of the
world will know that we exist.

Too bad that the Current Occupant and Mr. Cheney canceled their St. Paul
appearances so they could focus on hurricane-threatened New Orleans and
lend their expertise to rescue operations. As it turned out, they
weren't needed, which has been generally true for a long time. Their
reporting for duty now only served to remind everyone of what happened
three years ago. And Mr. McCain, as of this writing, seemed torn between
coming to St. Paul to address the convention and comforting hurricane
victims in Mississippi, if any could be found.

Meanwhile, he posed a stark question for voters to ponder: How much
would you like to see Sarah Palin of Wasilla, Alaska, as the next
president of the United States? And what does the question say about Mr.
McCain's love of the country that she might suddenly need to lead? No
need to discuss these things at length, really. The gentleman played his
card, a two of hearts. Make of it what you will.

The challenge for Republicans is how to change the subject from the
dismal story of Republican triumph the past eight years and get voters
to focus on, say, the old man's war record or Mrs. Palin's perkiness or
the oddity of the skinny guy's last name. If they can succeed there,
they can win this thing.  <snip>

The simple truth is that, while more than 4,000 Americans gave their
lives in the war in Iraq, the war was an enormous financial opportunity
for neocons and their friends, and Sen. Coleman was a passive observer
of one of the biggest heists in history. The cynicism is staggering to
the normal person. He was the cop who busted the hot dog vendor for
obstructing the sidewalk while the McGurks were cleaning out the bank.
This is no joke. A crook is walking around looking for votes. And the
truth is marching on.

(Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday
nights on public radio stations across the country.)

© 2008 by Garrison Keillor.

===============

Top Ten Most Disturbing Facts and Impressions of Sarah Palin
By AlterNet Staff, AlterNet. Posted September 2, 2008.
http://www.alternet.org:80/election08/97198/top_ten_most_disturbing_facts_and_im\
pressions_of_sarah_palin/

===============

Confirmation of the obvious
http://img236.imageshack.us/img236/8/confirmationws8.gif

The best way to support our troops
http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/5821/supporttroopspk6.gif

Senate Committee report and Scott McClellan (former Bush press
secretary) both confirm the obvious---what we already knew: Bush lied
and thousands have died.  It is now time for accountability?  Or should
we allow the Bush administration to pardon themselves and give each
other medals of freedom?

All the reasons given by Bush for the war have proven false or illegal.
Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law, as is war for regime
change. Iraq war was illegal and breached UN charter, (and violated
Article VI of the Constitution) says Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of
the United Nations
September 16, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1305709,00.html

Bush's faith-based policy: ignore or disregard any facts which do not
fit.  Bush response to 9-11: two illegal immoral unnecessary wars

Before the invasion of Iraq, what were the facts on the ground? We knew
that there were no WMD, stockpiles or active weapons programs. The UN
Inspectors had free access to all parts of Iraq for four months, using
all the intelligence furnished by the USA, and reported nothing was to
be found. The inspectors were pulled out so Bush could start his "shock
and awe" bombing campaign. Those who read the classified version of the
National Intelligence Estimate concluded that it did not support the
unclassified version, and that Iraq was no imminent threat. There was NO
evidence that Iraq had any connection to 9-11 or to Al Quaeda in spite
of a massive campaign of lies by the Bush administration which made
those claims. The USA was not authorized to use military force by the
UN, and doing so was a violation of the UN Charter and article VI of the
US Constitution. Pre-emptive war is a war crime and a violation of
international law. The attack on Iraq did not meet the historical
standards of a "just war" and was clearly immoral. The war may end up
costing 3 trillion dollars, all for no valid purpose. A massive waste of
human life, property and loss of world respect. (Documentation is in my
four part research linked below.)  Documentation of hundreds of Bush
lies, plus background on the illegal war on Afghanistan.
http://www.hamiltongirls.com/BushWar.htm
--C Hamilton

Does Barak Obama believe that the Bush administration has broken US and
International laws?  Has Bush violated Article VI of the Constitution
and other US laws?  Does Obama support the impeachment of Bush/Cheney?
Where is the call for accountability for the many Bush administration
crimes?  Can anyone explain why Bush has been allowed to operate above
the law and accountability, especially by the Democratic leadership who
could see that he is impeached based on massive evidence as compiled by
Kucinich and others?

"82 percent of Americans think our country is moving in the wrong
direction. The Bush-McCain Republicans messed up the country in their
first term, and they messed up the world in their second. If they get a
third term, even the solar system won't be safe."
--Paul Begala
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-begala/please-democrats-attack_b_121410.html

Clear record of Bush crimes...So says Constitutional law expert Jonathan
Turley in an interview with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann about Congressman
Dennis Kucinich's 35 Articles of Impeachment against President George W.
Bush - a document that Olbermann calls "a remarkably lengthy and
thorough record of high crimes and misdemeanors.
http://br.youtube.com/watch?v=IgQGSGEa9zI

C Hamilton
a moderator of
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/new-continuum/
adult humor/opinion/pictures

If you want to change what your government is doing,
contact those who are acting in your name:
http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/
http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/misc.html

News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20080905095706562
Rebutting Lies and Misconceptions About Anarchists and the DNC/RNC Protests
DNC / RNC 2008
by Infoshop News and our comrades
September 5, 2008

Over the past two weeks in Denver and St. Paul, thousands of anarchists
and other folks have come together to protest the conventions being held
by the two wings of the Corporate Party. These protests were the
culmination of almost two years of organizing. Organizers arranged not
just protests, but many other events as well. Their efforts were met
with severe and significant police repression, with over 800 people
being violently arrested by the authorities and many others being
violently attacked and terrorized. In response to these events, the
police, the corporate media, and others have said many things about
anarchists involved in these protests. While many of the comments on
numerous Internet discussion boards have been supportive of anarchists
and critical of the police, there have also been many lies and
misconceptions said and written about anarchists. This FAQ is an effort
to address and rebut those anti-anarchist words.

Lie/misconception: The anarchists are a small bunch of outsiders who
came to spoil the protests of others.

In fact, the protests in Denver and St. Paul were mostly organized by
anarchists locally and around the country, a culmination of a year and a
half of planning. Anarchists have been working with non-anarchist
activists and community members to organize the protests and other
events. Like previous anti-convention and anti-summit protests,
anarchists have helped organize logistics for the counter-convention
events including food, housing, communications, first aid, child care,
jail solidarity, and media. Anarchists are not only not outsiders,
they've played an integral role in the organizing of the
counter-convention events.

Lie/misconception: The anarchists and many of the protesters are
outsiders who don't live in St. Paul or Minneapolis or Denver.

The counter-convention protests were organized by local community
members who put more than a year of organizing work into their events.
Many of the protesters come from out-of-town, but then most of the
delegates to the DNC and RNC conventions come from out-of-town! These
political conventions are national and international events, so they
will draw people who want to have their say and protest these violent
political groups which affect their daily lives.

Lie/misconception: Anarchists are violent _________

Anarchists are people, like anybody else. Anarchists themselves have
long disagreed about violence and nonviolence as political tactics.
There are many anarchists who are pacifists and those who adhere to a
strict code of nonviolence. Many anarchists aren't violent people, but
support violence as a tactic, especially when it is used in self-defense
against state violence.

Lie/misconception: Anarchists planned to kidnap delegates at the convention.

This lie was concocted by the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office to justify
their violent raids and to prejudice the public against anarchists. This
is simply ridiculous. Anarchists would never do something like this.

Lie/misconception: Anarchists are smelly hippies who need to take showers.

This accusation is really a giveaway that the person saying this is over
45, since "dirty hippy" is a tired insult from the 1960s. People who say
this don't understand that most anarchists aren't hippies, thus we don't
see this as an insult. Truth be told, many of us may smell during the
protests, but that's because we've been on the road, sleeping on couches
and can't get access to a shower when we are staying at somebody's
house. Anarchists are mostly poor, working class people--we aren't
staying in nice hotels like the convention delegates.

Lie/misconception: The DNC/RNC protests are another example of
"activistism," an example of people who like to protest for the sake of
protest.

We can't pretend to know the motivations of everybody who participates
in protest. There are probably a few people involved who fit this
description--there are these types in every protest. But this accusation
misses the fact that almost everybody protesting the RNC and DNC are
protesting for political reasons. For many, they are rejecting the one
party corporate system that runs the U.S. and much of the world. Many
protesters are concerned about issues of worker rights, social
justice,the environment, capitalism, gentrification, racism, indigenous
rights, prisons and prisoners, and many other issues. Many of the people
involved see the protests as a step towards a movement or situation that
leads to bigger social change, perhaps even a revolution. When the
protests end, many of these people will stay active in various causes
and movements. Most of them will read books, even theory, and will
discuss, argue and analyze the effect of these protests.

Infoshop News invites other anarchists, especially those involved with
the past two weeks of protests, to add to this list or make suggestions.

--
Dan Clore

My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"

News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

http://tinyurl.com/67snl9
Campus Rally Protests Long Haul Police Raid
By Richard Brenneman
Friday September 05, 2008

Protesters—including Free Speech Movement veterans and a Berkeley city
councilmember—gathered in Sproul Plaza Thursday to rally against the
Aug. 24 UC Berkeley police raid on the Long Haul.

Campus police, accompanied by an FBI agent and at least one Alameda
County Sheriff’s deputy, raided the collective at 3124 Shattuck Ave. and
seized every computer and data storage device in the building in a
search for what Assistant UCPD Chief Mitch Celaya called threatening
e-mails.

“This was an illegal search and confiscation,” said Berkeley
councilmember Kriss Worthington. “It’s pretty amazing that the UC Police
Department can continually do things that are so stupid.”

“In 1964, I spoke on top of a police car here,” said attorney Anne Fagan
Ginger, referring to that memorable day Free Speech Movement activists
surrounded a car that contained one of their own who had been arrested
moments.

Ginger said the action against the Long Haul was of a piece with other
university actions, including the continued presence at the law school
of former Bush administration advisor John Yoo, whom Ginger described as
a war criminal. Yoo provided the legal justification for the treatment
of prisoners seized in Iraq and other places in a program that some have
compared to the Night and Fog renditions by the Nazis during World War II.

Another name from the 1960s was also present. Michael Tank has come to
town as an organizer for the newly revitalized Students for a Democratic
Society. Al Haber, the first president of the original SDS, was the
founder of the Long Haul, and Tank helped organize the SDS chapter in
Los Angeles, the first in the state in nearly four decades.

“We need to change this university so that it serves the needs of the
students, not the needs of those in power,” he said.

SDS members protested increased fees during the UC Board of Regents
meeting May 14, leading to the arrests of 16 who temporarily shut down
the session with chants of “Regents, regents, can’t you see? You’re
creating poverty!”

Tank said he will begin organizing a local chapter in the near future.

Some of the speakers were well-known to the half-dozen or so campus
police officers who kept a close eye on the rally from the shade of the
student union building. Many of the activists who have been supporting
the treesitters at Memorial Stadium were on hand, including Zachary
Running Wolf, the first of the treesitters and now a write-in candidate
for mayor.

Ayr, the coordinator of ground support for the treesitters, served as
emcee for Thursday’s rally, introducing the speakers.

The Long Haul serves as a gathering spot for a number of radical and
anarchist groups, ranging from Bread Not Bombs and the East Bay Prisoner
Support to the radical quarterly Slingshot. In addition, the building
housed a computer room that provided unrestricted online access to
anyone who sat down before a keyboard and screen.

“It was the only space that offered free and unlimited access that I
know of in this town,” said Ayr, who lead the crowd in a chant:
“U-C-P-D, give us our computers back!”

Another face from the past was Michael Delacour, one of the founders of
People’s Park, the long-contested piece of university-owned land that
remains a bone of contention struggled over by campus administrators and
local activists.

Delacour described the raid at the Long Haul as emblematic of a new wave
of repression “that scares the living shit out of all of us” and
reminded him of the worst days of the Red Scare of the 1950s.

But the protest also brought a new set of younger faces, many of them
adorned with piercings and tattoo ink and clad in chrome-studs and
black. These were the anarchists who frequent the Long Haul and offer a
cosmopolitan contrast to the tie-dyed and often be-sandaled set who have
been supporting the tree-sitters.

--
Dan Clore

My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"

News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

[Why does the term "COINTELPRO" come to mind?--DC]

http://tinyurl.com/59pfrd
Attorneys for Minnesota Nine call criminal charges ‘outrageous’
By Paul Demko 9/5/08 12:00 PM

In the days leading up to the Republican National Convention, a series
of police raids led by the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office resulted in
the arrest of eight people for allegedly conspiring to disrupt the
political gathering. On Wednesday the individuals were each charged with
a single count of “conspiracy to commit riot in the second degree in
furtherance of terrorism.” The criminal complaint details a far-ranging
plot by members of the RNC Welcoming Committee that included plans to
kidnap delegates, attack cops with urine and molotov cocktails and
ultimately bring the convention to a halt.

The charge carries a maximum penalty of five years imprisonment and a
$10,000 fine. A ninth individual was also arrested earlier this week and
is named in the criminal complaint, but has not yet been charged. All
but the latter suspect have been released on $75,000 bail.

Yesterday afternoon attorneys for the alleged co-conspirators held a
press conference to rebut the charges. They portrayed the allegations as
a trumped-up plot hyped by confidential informants who had a financial
incentive to exaggerate the potential violence. “The most outrageous
allegations made by the authorities are not supported by any evidence
other than the statement of the confidential informants,” said attorney
Bruce Nestor. “They’re not supported by the evidence seized.”

In one instance, for example, officers seized what was purportedly a
police shield and cited it as evidence of the group’s ill intents. “We
have the Sheriff displaying a single plastic item that he claims was a
shield, as if one shield was going to protect demonstrators from 3500
armed riot police who have projectile-tear-gas weapons,” said Nestor.

The trio of lawyers also charged that police are utilizing terrorism
fears to circumvent First Amendment rights. “All they do is they label
people as terrorirsts and anarchists, and at that point what people are
actually saying and the content of their views has no meaning anymore,”
said attorney Jordan Kushner. “What they do is they dehumanize people,
they stigmatize them and in the process cut off what they’re saying.”

Kushner compared the case to the treatment of the Chicago Seven in 1968
-- all of whom were ultimately acquitted of conspiracy charges. “Of
course that made complete fools out of the government,” he said. “When
the evidence comes out in this case it’s going to be the same thing.
It’s going to be about politically opportunistic, abusive, cynical
people in power who are abusing the law to suppress political dissent
and suppress political organizing.”

Three of the defendants -- Luce Guillen-Givins, Robert Joseph Czernik
and Max Jacob Specktor -- were present at the press conference but did
not answer questions from reporters. However, two of the defendants’
parents did comment on the charges.

Mordecai Specktor, father of Max (pictured together) and editor of the
American Jewish World newspaper, stated that his son was held in
solitary confinement for two days before being released on bail. “The
criminal complaint here is farfetched, overblown, outrageous,” he said.
“I encourage all the journalists here to look into the specifics of this
complaint and see where the truth really lies.” Specktor then put his
arm around his son. “This is your domestic terrorist,” he said. “Take a
good look. I don’t believe it at all. Give me a break.”

The other defendants are Nathanael David Secor, Erik Charles Oseland,
Garrett Scott Fitzgerald, Monica Rachel Bicking and Garrett Scott
Fitzgerald.

--
Dan Clore

My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"

http://www.iam751.org/contract08.htm

On Saturday 06 September 2008 12.33.24 am Dan Clore wrote:
>  Lie/misconception: Anarchists are smelly hippies who need to take showers.
>
>  This accusation is really a giveaway that the person saying this is over
>  45, since "dirty hippy" is a tired insult from the 1960s.

Ageist swine! I'm 48!

I really don't know her, I have only watch her a few times I think on Link TV
where they advocate democracy for the middle east, but if she is not an
anarchist, I hope she learns from this episode that the state is only to oppress
the people and everywhere in the world is getting bigger and even more
tyrannical, if she doesn't learn the lesson and personally still endorses
candidates and if she wants to bring "democratic" governments to the middle east
countries, then I guess this will be one of many examples of people being abused
and still endorsing the entity that is the root cause of most of the violence
and misery, I've got to a point in my life when really there is no more empathy
for this kind of people, looks like they're suffering from a bizarre Stockholm
syndrome, where they're being abducted, raped, abused, tortured, threatened on a
daily basis and they still go on voting for the next one in charge for their
misery and we also have to pay for
  this too. I'm getting sick of it.


Tetraedrónico



----- Mensaje original ----
De: Dan Clore <clore@...>
Para: smygo@yahoogroups.com
Enviado: viernes, 5 de septiembre, 2008 22:53:55
Asunto: Re: [smygo] Goodman aressted at RNC. All to be shown on Democracy Now!
today


tetraedronico wrote:

> Hello, does anybody knows if Amy Goodman is an anarchist?

I don't know, maybe more of a social-democrat but close to a left-anarchist?

In any case, she does an awesome job on Democracy Now!, and also has a
very likable persona. I imagine that the video of her manhandling by
police at the RNC will arouse a lot to make viewers sympathetic to
progressivism and increase opposition to the Republicans. Not that most
viewers won't already feel that way, but I expect that this will
strengthen the feeling.

--
Dan Clore

My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://tinyurl. com/2gcoqt
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl. com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups. yahoo.com/ group/smygo

Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"



__________________________________________________
Correo Yahoo!
Espacio para todos tus mensajes, antivirus y antispam ¡gratis!
Regístrate ya - http://correo.yahoo.com.mx/

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

I think you would have to be over +70 to have used the term "dirty hippie" in
its historical context. Tho I am 49, I have seen several of the "crusties"
locally and the name fits.


peace,
 
Jim Davis
Ozark Bioregion, USA

 
Check out my book on the Shia Imami Ismaili Faith:
 
http://www.amazon.com/Shia-Imami-Ismaili-Muslims-Introduction/dp/1430315628/ref=\
pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218913605&sr=8-2


--- On Sat, 9/6/08, Otto <mryamamoto@...> wrote:

From: Otto <mryamamoto@...>
Subject: Re: [smygo] Rebutting Lies & Misconceptions about Anarchists & the
DNC/RNC
To: smygo@yahoogroups.com
Date: Saturday, September 6, 2008, 9:38 AM






On Saturday 06 September 2008 12.33.24 am Dan Clore wrote:
> Lie/misconception: Anarchists are smelly hippies who need to take showers.
>
> This accusation is really a giveaway that the person saying this is over
> 45, since "dirty hippy" is a tired insult from the 1960s.

Ageist swine! I'm 48!














[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

 I don't know what Goodman is politically. But I've never once heard her suggest
that she was an anarchist. Regardless, I think that she does some great
journalism.

-DW
 
“The possessions of the rich are stolen property.”
-P.J. Proudhon



----- Original Message ----
From: tetraedronico <tetraedronico@...>
To: smygo@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Saturday, September 6, 2008 9:28:08 AM
Subject: Re: [smygo] Goodman aressted at RNC. All to be shown on Democracy Now!
today


I really don't know her, I have only watch her a few times I think on Link TV
where they advocate democracy for the middle east, but if she is not an
anarchist, I hope she learns from this episode that the state is only to oppress
the people and everywhere in the world is getting bigger and even more
tyrannical, if she doesn't learn the lesson and personally still endorses
candidates and if she wants to bring "democratic" governments to the middle east
countries, then I guess this will be one of many examples of people being abused
and still endorsing the entity that is the root cause of most of the violence
and misery, I've got to a point in my life when really there is no more empathy
for this kind of people, looks like they're suffering from a bizarre Stockholm
syndrome, where they're being abducted, raped, abused, tortured, threatened on a
daily basis and they still go on voting for the next one in charge for their
misery and we also have to pay for
this too. I'm getting sick of it.

Tetraedrónico

----- Mensaje original ----
De: Dan Clore <clore@columbia- center.org>
Para: smygo@yahoogroups. com
Enviado: viernes, 5 de septiembre, 2008 22:53:55
Asunto: Re: [smygo] Goodman aressted at RNC. All to be shown on Democracy Now!
today

tetraedronico wrote:

> Hello, does anybody knows if Amy Goodman is an anarchist?

I don't know, maybe more of a social-democrat but close to a left-anarchist?

In any case, she does an awesome job on Democracy Now!, and also has a
very likable persona. I imagine that the video of her manhandling by
police at the RNC will arouse a lot to make viewers sympathetic to
progressivism and increase opposition to the Republicans. Not that most
viewers won't already feel that way, but I expect that this will
strengthen the feeling.

--
Dan Clore

My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://tinyurl. com/2gcoqt
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl. com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups. yahoo.com/ group/smygo

Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"

____________ _________ _________ _________ _________ __
Correo Yahoo!
Espacio para todos tus mensajes, antivirus y antispam ¡gratis!
Regístrate ya - http://correo. yahoo.com. mx/

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]






[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

 Last funny vid of the day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF5Kdm4Eu6w
 
“The possessions of the rich are stolen property.”
-P.J. Proudhon




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

 
“The possessions of the rich are stolen property.”
-P.J. Proudhon



----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Wythe Holt jr. <wholt@...>
To: blubermax@...; phoebews@...;
Out_Of_The_Frying_Pan@yahoogroups.com; peacetalkbham@yahoogroups.com;
maschwar@...; tuscapeace@yahoogroups.com; lahaynes@...;
SECULARHUMANIST@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, September 7, 2008 4:15:11 PM
Subject: [tuscapeace] Why the peaceful majority of Muslims are not irrelevant


 

Why the Peaceful Majority of Muslims Are Not Irrelevant
by Sheldon Richman, Posted September 5, 2008
A few years ago, FrontPageMag. com columnist Paul Marek wrote an article titled
“Why the Peaceful Majority Is Irrelevant.” His thesis was that even if the
majority of Muslims abhor violence, it doesn’t matter because “the fanatics rule
Islam at this moment in history.... The hard quantifiable fact is, that the
‘peaceful majority’ is the ‘silent majority’ and it is cowed and extraneous.”

____________ _________ _________ _________ _________ _________ ___
Compete with the big boys. Click here to find products to benefit your business.

For Marek, the upshot is this: “We must pay attention to the only group that
counts: the fanatics who threaten our way of life.”
He’s wrong. No, he’s worse than wrong, because his position could be used to
justify mass murder.
Marek and those who have applauded his column point out that most Germans and
Japanese during World War II were not warmongers, but warmongers controlled
policymaking. The implication is that the United States was right to regard the
peaceful majority as nonexistent. That’s exactly what the Allies did. Under
Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Winston Churchill hundreds of thousands of
German and Japanese civilians were targeted and killed in bombings that had no
direct relationship to military objectives. Most people consider this morally
defensible. It’s regarded as a normal part of war, although it violates
traditional just-war doctrine. But why isn’t it understood to be mass murder?
Marek’s answer would be that, since the peaceful majority did nothing to stop
the warmongering minority, the majority — men, women, and children — were fair
game.
This dubious principle has been applied to the Middle East: If the majority are
peaceful, why don’t its members speak out — and act — against the radical
minority? Since they don’t, “we” have the right to ignore them when “we” devise
strategy and tactics to defend “ourselves.” If they die or otherwise suffer in
the attacks, they have only themselves or the radical minority to blame. This
principle goes beyond chalking up the deaths of innocents to “collateral
damage,” because it suggests that no one is truly innocent.
This is not a new policy for the United States. Since the early 1960s the U.S.
government has maintained an embargo on Cuba that has caused great suffering
among average people there without noticeably harming Cuban dictator Fidel
Castro or his ruling clique.
For more than ten years after the Gulf War of 1991, the U.S. government kept
economic sanctions on the Iraqi people. Since the U.S. Air Force had destroyed
Iraq’s civilian infrastructure in the war, the embargo meant that Iraqis had to
live without clean water, effective sewage disposal, or electricity. As a
result, hundreds of thousand people, mostly children, perished. Like Castro,
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and his Ba’athist elite did not suffer noticeably.
Other examples could be recounted in which U.S. policy killed or harmed
civilians who had nothing to do with government policy. It’s clear from the U.S.
foreign-policy record that civilians have long been regarded as fair game. The
rationale apparently was that those measures would induce them to replace their
governments. If they didn’t do so, the civilians presumably deserved their fate.
The attitude behind this policy seems to be, “Kill ’em all: let God sort ’em
out,” a monstrous slogan mouthed by more than one supporter of George W. Bush’s
invasion and occupation of Iraq.
This pernicious doctrine is gravely mistaken on many levels. First, it doesn’t
work. In World War II, the bombings of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and
other cities did not cause the Germans or Japanese to overthrow their
governments. If anything, they rallied about their rulers.
Embargoes and sanctions did not drive Saddam Hussein or Castro from power. It
took an invasion to topple Saddam, and Castro recently retired in his 80s when
his health went bad.
Even if the policy worked, that would be no recommendation for it. The peaceful
majority of Muslims cannot be irrelevant as long as ideas rule the world. That
last phrase may startle some readers, but it’s true. Contrary to what many
people think, force does not rule the world. Ideas do, says historian and
defense theorist Jeffrey Rogers Hummel of San Jose State University, because
ideas determine the direction in which people point their guns. If we want
peaceful Muslims to prevail over those who use violence against innocents, it
would be helpful if their nonviolence were reinforced.
A half-century of intervention
But more than 50 years of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East have done the
opposite of reinforcing nonviolent methods. U.S. presidents have consistently
supported despotisms (among them, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran up until 1979, and
even Saddam Hussein’s Iraq) and “democratic” oppression (Israeli rule over the
Palestinians) . Peaceful efforts to change U.S. intervention in the region have
gotten exactly nowhere. Moderate opponents of U.S. policy were consistently
ignored — or worse — by American policy-makers. (A moderate Iranian prime
minister was overthrown in 1953 with help from the CIA.) That is why the
militants could ignore them too. As long as the U.S. government pursues its
neo-imperialist policy in the Middle East, the advocates of violence will hold
sway and will become increasingly popular. Most Iraqis think it is good to
attack U.S. forces. No surprise there. The United States is an occupying power.
Mainstream commentators, being little more than mouthpieces for the
establishment “consensus,” have a stake in consigning this fact to the memory
hole. In the March 23 New York Times, for example, Paul Berman of New York
University wrote,
Extremist movements have been growing bigger and wilder for more than three
decades [now. During] that period, America has tried pretty much everything from
a policy point of view. Our presidents have been satanic (Richard Nixon),
angelic (Jimmy Carter), a sleepy idiot savant (Ronald Reagan), a cagey realist
(George H.W. Bush), wonderfully charming (Bill Clinton), and famously otherwise
(George W. Bush). And each president’s Middle Eastern policy has conformed to
his character. [Emphasis added.]
America has tried everything? Is Berman kidding? When was minding its own
business — nonintervention — tried? Clearly, by “everything,” Berman means every
style of imperialism. But why should we imagine that any form of imperialism
will discredit violent radicals? Such patent nonsense as Berman’s is typical of
the U.S.-centric propaganda routinely voiced by obsequious pundits and
politicians, who count on the people to be too complacent or ignorant to
disagree. It goes to show that a government doesn’t need direct control to shape
public opinion. It will do just fine to have an incentive system that rewards
intellectuals for saying the right thing.
Finally, the principle that the United States may murder Muslim innocents
because they have failed to stop the violent elements among them is precisely
the argument Osama bin Laden used in justifying the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks. In a
2002 “Letter to America,” bin Laden catalogued U.S.-government offenses against
Muslims, but anticipated an objection: “You may then dispute that all the above
does not justify aggression against civilians, for crimes they did not commit
and offenses in which they did not partake.”
Here’s how bin Laden responded to that claim:
This argument contradicts your continuous repetition that America is the land of
freedom…. Therefore, the American people are the ones who choose their
government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their
agreement to its policies…. The American people have the ability and choice to
refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.

The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that
bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in
Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets
which ensure the blockade of Iraq…. So the American people are the ones who fund
the attacks against us, and they are the ones who oversee the expenditure of
these monies in the way they wish, through their elected candidates.. ..

The American people are the ones who employ both their men and their women in
the American Forces which attack us.
If bin Laden is wrong, then so are Marek and anyone who agrees with him. But bin
Laden has one point going for him that his U.S. counterparts don’t have: the
American people, at least in theory, could vote the bad policy-makers out of
office.
Beware double-edged policies.
Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation, author of
Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State, and editor of The Freeman
magazine. Visit his blog “Free Association” or send him email.
This article originally appeared in the June 2008 edition of Freedom Daily.
Subscribe to the print or email version of Freedom Daily.





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

 OK....things seem to be working now. Once again, sorry for the inconvenience.

-DW

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/CanadaVotes/News/2008/09/07/6691536-cp.html

PM: the good, the bad and the ugly

By Alexander Panetta, THE CANADIAN PRESS
2008-09-07

Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper holds his Press Secretary's little girl
Georgia Soudas before boarding his campaign plane heading to Quebec City for his
first campaign stop, in Ottawa on Sunday Sept 7, 2008. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Tom
Hanson


  Harper calls election for Oct. 14

  PM ignores fixed-election date law

  Harper won't say 'majority'

  Dion embraces underdog role

  Layton gets inspiration from Obama

OTTAWA - It was a political Kodak moment in which the two sides of Stephen
Harper were on full display - a snapshot of the prime minister at his best and
his worst.
The question of which side of Harper prevails over the 37-day election campaign
will likely impact the result as deeply as it did in the 2004 and 2006
campaigns.
In that moment two years ago he was decisive, bold and fast-moving.
He was also crabby, coarsely partisan and somewhat disingenuous as he blamed the
opposition for his sudden decision to break an election promise.
As part of his pledge to clean up federal politics, the Conservative leader had
said he would create a new appointments commission to help combat political
patronage.
The opposition rejected his first choice to lead the commission, Calgary oilman
and Conservative backer Gwyn Morgan.

So Harper strolled downstairs from his office and in the time it took him to
enter the House of Commons he casually announced that there would be no
commission.
"We won't be able to clean up the (appointments) process in this minority
Parliament," Harper said.
"We'll obviously need a majority government to do that in the future."
The prime minister's fans and foes will find in that episode evidence to support
their differing views of the man.
His instant abandonment of a promised anti-patronage committee was one example
of a leader who makes up his mind and acts quickly.
In 2006, he won plaudits and nourished a reputation for decisiveness by
campaigning on a promise to implement a simple, tightly focused list of five
easy-to-remember priorities.
He has since made a series of sudden, controversial moves that stunned his
opponents: recognizing a Quebecois nation, taxing income trusts and calling a
quick vote to prolong Canada's Afghanistan mission.
Now he's triggered an election despite his own fixed-election law that promised
a campaign in late 2009.
His detractors will draw other conclusions from these events.
They will find evidence of a leader who is prone to petulant outbursts, and is
far better at strategizing against real and perceived enemies than he is at
making friends.
They will find a man who casts himself as a decisive leader while frequently
flip-flopping and breaking his word.
Even the announcements on the Quebecois nation and the Afghanistan vote seemed
inspired more by a desire to embarrass the Liberal party than by conviction.
On Quebec, he had refused for months to describe the province as a nation - but
began singing a new tune the week of a convention where the Liberal party seemed
destined to tear itself up over the issue.
On Afghanistan, he campaigned on a promise to let Parliament vote on all future
military deployments. But just before the Afghan vote he told stunned MPs he'd
simply ignore the result if they voted against the mission.
Some politicians will agree to meet with protesters, either to calm tensions,
learn about an issue or just for the publicity. Not Harper. His reaction to
demonstrators at a Three Amigos summit was to call them "pathetic."
His hostility toward opponents knows no geographic borders. While most leaders
might put domestic trash-talking aside when they're travelling abroad, Harper
revels in it.
Standing near the former site of the Berlin Wall last year, he appeared to draw
parallels between the collapse of communism and the end of 12 years of Liberal
rule in Canada.
One Conservative who has worked closely with Harper on two election campaigns
says he's not the first cut-throat partisan to occupy the prime minister's
chair.
"Chretien was just as bad - and so was Mulroney," said the high-ranking
Conservative source.
"But what they had was the political maturity not to show it. They knew there's
a time and a place to be overtly partisan. Stephen has a bad sense of timing on
that."
An example of that came in the final days of the 2006 campaign.
With a majority government within reach, Harper suggested he would be prevented
from making drastic changes to the country because Liberal senators, judges, and
civil servants would keep him in check.
The final days of the campaign were hampered by what resembled a partisan
broadswipe against tens of thousands of people. That simple musing might have
cost him a majority government.
But that self-inflicted damage was nothing compared with the previous election.
His opponents will hope and pray that Canadians get plenty of chances to see the
side of Harper that dominated the latter stages of the 2004 campaign - the
grumpy side.
The Conservative leader came within a hair's breadth of power and fell short,
perhaps due to an extended temper tantrum during the campaign's final week.
As media coverage got more critical and he became increasingly annoyed with
questions about abortion and same-sex marriage, he retreated to safe Alberta
ridings and stopped holding news conferences.
The cruel irony for Conservatives was that, by going silent, Harper deprived his
party of its most effective salesman.
The prime minister communicates clearly, rarely stumbles while speaking, and is
a quick-witted and clever debater. But in 2004, he picked up his ball and went
home a few days early.
In the meantime a cheerful Paul Martin criss-crossed the country in an energetic
bid to save as many Liberal ridings as possible. Liberal numbers improved in the
final days and Harper remained in opposition.
Conservatives say that after that 2004 debacle, the party's current campaign
chair was among several prominent Conservatives who shared a tough assessment
with Harper.
"'Look Stephen, you cannot do this'," was how one characterized Doug Finley's
message to Harper.
"'You can't sit on a bus and sulk. You can't put yourself in a bubble.
"'If you want to win, this is what you've got to do: You've got to put a smile
on your face, put up with all these people, get out there, get over your
self-centredness, and reach out."
 
“The possessions of the rich are stolen property.”
-P.J. Proudhon




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/09/07-2
Sunday, September 7, 2008
YES! Magazine
Create Your Own Workplace
An agenda that puts people first: Jobs
by Layla Aslani

Maria Rosales always dreamed of owning her own business and had the
know-how to do it. She grew up helping her parents run a restaurant,
market, and farm in Mexico, and later helped her sister with her work at
a banana export business. But when Rosales immigrated to the United
States, she found she lacked the formal education and capital to start
her own business. So she took a job on a Silicon Valley electronics
assembly line.

Life changed for Rosales years later when she learned about Women's
Action to Gain Economic Security, or WAGES, a San Francisco Bay-area
organization that helps low-income women start businesses. The staff of
WAGES invited her to join four other women in starting a cooperative.

Under a cooperative business model, each participant is both a worker
and an owner of the venture, sharing the costs and profits equally.

"Cooperatives give more people access to business ownership," says WAGES
executive director Hilary Abell. And they provide jobs that put workers'
well-being first.

That's more important than ever in today's sluggish economy, when big
companies are downsizing and outsourcing jobs to lower-wage countries.
Unemployment in the United States now stands at 9.9 percent if workers
who have given up looking for jobs and the underemployed are included.
Add in the U.S. prison population, and the rate is 11.3 percent.

For corporate employers, obligations to shareholders means a
never-ending search for lower costs, and that often means employees are
shunted aside.

But that can't happen at a cooperative, because the workers, managers,
and shareholders are the same people. They don't need to make huge
profits for shareholders to stay in business, and there's no pressure to
keep wages low.

Co-ops also have the advantage of needing only modest amounts of capital
to get started. "People can pool their skills and resources," says Abell.

  From the beginning, Rosales and her coworkers made the decisions,
including choosing to run a housecleaning service.

WAGES trained the women to work with safe and natural cleaning products
like vinegar, baking soda, and vegetable-based soaps. The women,
accustomed to using harsh chemicals, were skeptical at first. But they
were won over when the products worked well without causing the rashes
and headaches that had plagued them when they used chemical cleansers.

That was in 1999. Today Rosales works as a general manager for Emma's
Eco-Clean, the company she started with the other women from WAGES. The
increased demand for all things green helped Emma's expand to 25
worker-owners. Meanwhile, WAGES launched two other eco-cleaning
businesses and is planning a fourth.

One of those companies, Natural Home Cleaning Professionals, announced a
year-end profit of more than $90,000 last year. The worker-owners voted
to take 70 percent of that amount in bonuses and put the rest into
growing their business.

Sharing the Wealth While successful in some markets, the cooperative
business model faces challenges. One is that co-ops are just catching on
in the U.S., which means financing new projects is difficult, and
guidance for young cooperatives is scarce. To help fill the void, WAGES
provides advice to those trying to start a co-op. "We don't want other
people to have to learn the hard way," Abell says.

WAGES also shares co-op know-how through local, regional, and national
co-op networks including the United States Federation of Work
Cooperatives, a grassroots organization founded in 2004.

Another challenge is that each co-op worker-owner assumes much more
decision-making responsibility than an employee in a conventional
business. They must be prepared to vote on everything from the annual
budget and hourly rates to whether an under-performing member should be
asked to leave.

"We are like a family," Rosales says, and that helps with decision making.

Also important are the goals co-op members share. These include earning
better wages and benefits than are offered at other jobs available to
these women. "I worked for 11 years, and the most I made per hour was
$11," says Rosales. At Emma's, "everybody is making from $12 to $15 an
hour."

The cooperative model has also payed off for Claudia Zamora, a
worker-owner at Natural Home Cleaning. Like Rosales, Zamora emigrated
from Mexico and worked in the cleaning and restaurant industries before
joining the cooperative. She was scared at first -- she had to
contribute $400 to join, and had to go in with seven other women on a
$14,000 loan. But the benefits were worth it. Zamora was able to
purchase a home, and she can arrange her schedule around the needs of
her two children, ages five and eight.

For Rosales, one of the biggest rewards is working in a job her family
is proud of. Her oldest daughter, a 21-year-old college senior, talks
about her mom to her friends. "She sends me e-mails, and says how much
she admires me and how much she appreciates all the hard work I do,"
says Rosales.

Also important is the empowerment and business knowledge Rosales has
gained. "I feel like I can do any type of business now with the
experience I got here," she said.

As jobs in the corporate economy disappear overseas or fall victim to
downsizing, workers may choose to create their own jobs through
cooperatives that they can control.

Layla Aslani wrote this article as part of Purple America, the Fall 2008
issue of YES! Magazine. Layla is an editorial intern at YES!

Interested?  http://www.wagescooperatives.org

--
Dan Clore

My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"

 
“The possessions of the rich are stolen property.”
-P.J. Proudhon



----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Wythe Holt jr. <wholt@...>
To: blubermax@...; phoebews@...;
Out_OF_The_Frying_Pan@yahoogroups.com; peacetalkbham@yahoogroups.com;
maschwar@...; tuscapeace@yahoogroups.com; lahaynes@...;
SECULARHUMANIST@yahoogroups.com; libertyundergroundtalk@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, September 7, 2008 4:56:55 PM
Subject: [tuscapeace] Recent labor news: Where did Labor Day Go? Why we need
EFCA -- and other stories


(1)  Labor Vanishes

Bill Fletcher
BlackCommentator
September 4, 2008

http://www.blackcommentator.com//289/289_aw_labor_vanishes.html

Organized labor has vanished, as if it were part of the
story line of a science fiction novel. Labor Day 2008
came and went and ...nothing. I searched through the
newspaper... nothing. I looked at the TV schedule...
nothing. It was as if there is not and never was
anything called organized labor.

You may be saying that I am exaggerating this problem.
After all, we just completed the Democratic Party
Convention; we are beginning the Republican Party
Convention; and Hurricane Gustav is terrorizing the
Gulf Coast, therefore, there is too much other news.
Yet, while all of that is true, topical stories are
developed way in advance. TV stations identify, with
plenty of time to spare, which documentaries they will
show, as well as interviews they will hold.

Organized labor seems to have vanished, at least from
mainstream USA.

On one level none of this should be surprising. The
percentage of workers represented by labor unions has
been on the decline since 1955 (35%) down to
approximately 12% today. Unions have been on the
defensive with employers actively undermining the right
of workers to join or form unions, as well as blocking
virtually every effort on their part to raise the
living standards of their members. Successive U.S.
Presidential administrations have been actively hostile
towards labor unions and the rights of workers to join
them. Quite ironically, today's right-wing Republicans
insist that workers MUST choose the union to represent
them by secret ballot without mentioning that free
choice does not exist when employers are permitted to
intimidate workers before they cast their votes.

It would be easy to stop this commentary here and shake
our heads at the anti-worker animus on the part of
employers and governmental authorities. The problem is
that unions themselves allowed this situation to worsen
without sending out a battle cry and retooling
themselves to face mighty corporate opponents. For too
long, the leadership of organized labor believed in the
pendulum theory, i.e., that things were rough, but that
the pendulum would ultimately swing in the other
direction and that success would soon be here. The
problem is that the pendulum seems to have gotten
stuck.

While organized labor needs to do a hell of a lot more
organizing, events since the 2005 split of the AFL-CIO
(the largest labor federation in the USA) have
demonstrated that fancy rhetoric and intense organizing
are not enough. The vision of labor unionism itself
must shift in a way that convinces working class people
that it is a cause with which to unite, irrespective of
whether one happens to currently be in a union or not.
Secret deals with employers in order to secure
bargaining rights; the suppression of dissent in the
name of `unity'; fostering illusions that corporate
America can be appealed to in order to realize the
value of labor unions as partners in the future
economic growth of the USA, are all recipes for
ultimate disillusionment, disorganization and despair.

Labor Day 2008, and this entire period up through the
November 2008 national elections, should actually be a
period for labor union activists to do some reflecting.
This may sound odd since we need to be out there in the
trenches pushing for pro-worker candidates, but I would
say that humans can usually do more than one thing at a
time. Union activists and their supporters need to be
thinking through what steps unions can take to embrace
our allies in other social movements and chart a course
that represents a partnership. No, not a partnership
with corporate America that is interested in
suppressing the rights of workers and their living
standards - rather, a partnership with other
progressive movements that are interested in
significant change in the USA.

During the course of several visits to South Africa I
was struck by how different the union movement was
there compared with the one we have in the USA. In
addition to its leaders being fairly young (tending to
be in their late 20s through early 40s) the movement is
very dynamic. Part of being dynamic was/is grounded in
a vision that the union movement is about changing
society, or at least being part of a larger group that
is actively changing society to the benefit of working
class people. Rather than sitting on the side lines, or
even lobbying and handing out financial contributions,
the union movement in South Africa has focused on both
the needs of its members as well as the steps that need
to be taken to represent the interests of workers more
generally in structurally changing the country.

It seems to me that this is what Labor Day should be
about.
_____

BlackCommentator. com Executive Editor, Bill Fletcher,
Jr., is the Executive Editor of BlackCommentator. com, a
Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies,
the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and
co-author of the book, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis
in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice
(University of California Press), which examines the
crisis of organized labor in the USA. Click here to
contact Mr. Fletcher.

(2)  Yes: Economy's strength hinges on U.S. workers

by MICHAEL HONEY

Tacoma News Tribune August 31st, 2008

Labor Day 2008 marks a moment of crisis for middle- and working-class
Americans. Housing, health care, transportation, education and job needs are
growing acute in an economy that has been run into a ditch.

If you have been paying any attention at all for the last eight years, you
know what I'm talking about. Yet 2008 also may be a time of significant
change. People are fed up, and many are demanding a new direction.

However, really changing the American economy is a long-term project, and it
revolves around improving the conditions of American workers. Furthermore,
whether things get better and incomes go up in the months to come depends a
great deal on whether workers are able to organize unions.

In a recent opinion survey by Peter D. Hart Associates, 65 percent of
Americans supported unions while only 25 percent did not. That is no
surprise: By one research estimate, unionized workers earn 30 percent
higher wages, are 59 percent more likely to have employer-provided health
insurance, and are 400 percent more likely to have pensions than their non-union
counterparts.

Unionized workers have more rights than those without unions, and a union
still remains the best anti-poverty program for a wage earner, as Martin
Luther King Jr. once said.

In Washington, New York and a few other places, nearly 20 percent of workers
belong to unions. But nationally, less than 12 percent do. In the South and
parts of the West, the percentages are much lower. If statistics show that
workers want unions and that unions improve their conditions, why do so many
not have them?

In many work places, employees simply do not have the freedom to choose.
Employers blatantly disregard their workers' First Amendment rights to speak,
associate and organize. The National Labor Relations Board, stacked against
unions by the Bush administration, admits that at least a fifth of those who
try to join a union get fired instead.

The actual percentage is much higher. Amnesty International and Human Rights
Watch designate the land of the brave and the home of the free as one of the
greatest violators of workers' rights. American workers are not free.

This summer, federal agents in Smithfield, N.C., slowed a campaign to
organize a union of African-American, Anglo and Latino packinghouse workers with
deportation raids. Across the land, deportations turned into felony
proceedings, imprisoning workers and smashing union organizing in the
process.

Many of us have seen the full-page ads employer groups place in newspapers
falsely blaming unions for America's huge job losses (half a million in the
last six months). They even mail anti-union literature into the homes of
workers when they try to organize, while employers run union representatives
off job sites. Employers systematically break federal labor laws to put
unions out of business.

This summer, Wal-Mart held captive-audience meetings warning its employees
against voting for Democrats. They said Democrats will support the Employee
Free Choice Act (which they will), and claimed EFCA will force them to join a
union (which it will not). This is blatantly illegal and underlines the
simple fact that we need to strengthen labor laws and their enforcement to stop
corporate bullying of employees.

Last year, EFCA passed in the House of Representatives, but Republicans
prevented a vote in the Senate. It would allow workers to form unions through
majority sign-up rather than through elections procedures that take years and
have become a travesty as employers pressured workers into voting against
unions.

EFCA would shield workers from such practices. It would increase penalties
for illegal employer actions. It would also create mechanisms for binding
arbitration for first collective bargaining contracts when employers
refuse to bargain in good faith or the parties can't reach an agreement.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has made defeat of EFCA in the next Congress
a top legislative priority. In contrast, union supporters are signing
millions of postcards and circulating a national petition to support EFCA
in the next Congress. It is no surprise that unions want to elect Sen. Barack
Obama, who
co-sponsored EFCA, and defeat Sen. John McCain, who voted against it. As they
battle for the presidency, employee freedom of choice hangs in the balance.

Employee free choice and union growth offer the most direct path to reduce
the monstrous economic disparities between the great majority of wage and salary
earners and the top 1 percent of the population, which owns more wealth
than 90 percent of Americans combined.

This Labor Day 2008 is a critical time that holds the possibility for
sweeping political and economic change. Vote like the future of working- and
middle-class America depends upon it, because it does.


Michael Honey is Haley Professor of the Humanities at the University of
Washington Tacoma, and a former holder of the Harry Bridges labor studies
chair at the UW. His recent book, "Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis
Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign,' recently won the Robert F.
Kennedy Book Award. He is president of the national Labor and
Working-Class History Association.
 
(3)  Unions Create Their Own MoveOn
By David Moberg, The Nation. Posted September 1, 2008.
After working thirty-two years as a security officer, Roger Lasch was angry when
Target "downsized" him two years ago, just months before he could collect his
full retirement package. "There were still executives getting bonuses while I
was losing my job," he says. "I found that insulting." So when some young people
from a group promising to fight for good jobs knocked on his door, he signed up.
A political independent from suburban Pittsburgh, Lasch soon became active in
the group, publicly speaking out against corporate abuse of workers and making
phone calls to other members.
Lasch got involved because of "the desire inside myself to initiate some action
to show that a few people can make a difference if you speak up, and some other
people have the same feeling, and they get involved, and that starts the ball
rolling."
The group he joined was Working America, and its ball is rolling. With 2.5
million members, it's the second-largest labor organization in the country
(after the 3.2 million-member National Education Association) . But it's not a
union with members and contracts at their workplaces. The AFL-CIO calls Working
America its "community affiliate."
Working America is one of the brightest new developments for a beleaguered labor
movement -- giving a boost to political work this fall at a time when
traditional union membership has been declining in the long run (despite an
uptick last year). After Labor Day, canvassers for the group will try to contact
every Working America member at the door with a field-tested, two-p
ronged message on behalf of Barack Obama. They'll contrast the positions of
Obama and John McCain on critical issues, especially healthcare, but they'll
also talk personally about why they're working on behalf of Obama. "We will give
people information they're not getting," says Karen Nussbaum, the group's
executive director,"but we also will communicate the way people personally make
their decisions."
The AFL-CIO launched Working America in 2003 as a pilot project in four states
-- Ohio, Missouri, Florida and Washington. (This year it will put over 450
organizers to work in eighteen states and contact active members in four more.)
"There were changes in public consciousness, technological changes, and a
readiness of the labor movement to do things in a big way," says Nussbaum. "That
was combined with a very important election coming up in 2004."
After right-wing political dominance for decades, polls indicated American
workers were increasingly sympathetic to unions, but corporate hostility and
weak legal protections made organizing traditional unions in the workplace
difficult. At the same time, the Internet made it easier and cheaper for an
organization to communicate with supporters.
Individual unions and even the AFL-CIO had previously experimented with
associate members, and independent organizers had formed institutions such as
worker centers or 9 to 5, Nussbaum's earlier working women's group. The results
from these experiments outside typical union bounds were mixed and modest but
intriguing.
Although Working America extensively uses the Internet (as well as telephone,
direct mail, and personal contact), it recruits most members through
door-to-door canvassing, like many community organizations. This effective
recruitment tactic also permits Working America to target membership
geographically for political leverage, unlike purely Internet groups.
Initially Working America recruited mainly non-union households in suburban,
predominately white and working-class neighborhoods that were politically
independent -- places where labor's message could resonate but was missing. But
increasingly they recruit as well in central city or suburban neighborhoods of
African-Americans and Latinos, using bilingual canvassers or, as in Detroit and
Toledo, reaching recruits through networks of churches.
So its members differ from those of many progressive groups: 63 percent have not
graduated from college; 41 percent go to church weekly (one-third are "born
again"); one-third support the National Rifle Association; half are not strong
supporters of either party. Working America, as Nussbaum likes to say, is a mass
organization with a working-class base and a strategy to build power to win.
The group trains and continually briefs canvassers about both political issues
and canvassing techniques (such as maintaining eye contact, keeping it short and
simple, and using emotionally strong but friendly and optimistic language). At
the door they quickly talk to people about a broadly defined issue. Now it's
primarily affordable healthcare, but it can be good jobs, retirement security,
overtime pay or local issues. Then canvassers ask potential recruits to take
action, such as sending a letter supporting expanded funding of children's
health insurance or signing a petition in favor of the Employee Free Choice Act
to ease union organizing. And, of course, joining Working America.
"We had no idea if it would work when we started, whether the AFL-CIO
association would be a problem," says Nussbaum. "We found it was a door opener,
not a closer." Some prospects are anti-union or politically hostile, and others
just aren't joiners, but the pitch works surprisingly well in all parts of the
country.
According to Working America, two-thirds of people it contacts join, an average
of about twenty-eight per canvasser each evening, and 89 percent give their home
phone number. One-third give an e-mail address, 20 percent pledge at the door to
take some action -- writing a letter or making a phone call -- and 95 percent
share information on their occupation.
Most of the time canvassers do not ask for the $5 voluntary dues (although over
15 percent typically do contribute when asked, especially as Working America
tries to renew memberships every year). Half of Working America's $32 million
budget for the two-year election cycle comes from the AFL-CIO and Working
America's own members, and the balance from other donors and reimbursements from
sources such as ballot initiative advocates.
Working America faced skepticism initially from some unions, who did not want it
to compete with their workplace organizing. But election results proved an
eye-opener. Hart Research polling in 2004 showed Working America members voted
69 to 30 percent for John Kerry over George Bush, roughly the same margin as
among union members (and voted far more strongly for Kerry than the general
public, including 44 percent higher for white men).
Polling after the 2006 Congressional balloting and in gubernatorial races in
states like Kentucky and Virginia showed similar results. And tracking polls
showed a shift towards the labor-endorsed candidates in the months before the
election when Working America shifts from recruitment to voter education.
Oregon state AFL-CIO president Tom Chamberlain credits Working America's
canvassing in 2006 with Democrats winning a tough gubernatorial race, control of
the Oregon House of Representatives, and campaigns against several right-wing
ballot measures, as well as critical legislative and budget victories last year.
Now aiming to expand Working America four-fold from 2006, Chamberlain wants to
integrate Working America with the state federation and expand its role in local
politics.
Working America's initial contact with most members may be fleeting and shallow,
but it follows up with both telephone and Internet questions about members'
priorities as well as an economic populist message that many members rarely
encounter elsewhere. Through its website, it sponsors a contest about who has
the worst boss (this year's winner was a particularly abusive operator of a
fleet of defective private ambulances), collects healthcare horror stories and
provides a "job tracker" to identify companies that close work sites and
relocate. It offers an "ask a lawyer" service about workplace rights as well as
a package of credit card, health and legal service discounts. The website
provides new avenues for involvement but also focuses attention on who's causing
workers' problems, such as the fleeing company or bad boss.
"Our contribution is scale, especially among people who have been left out of
the progressive movement," Nussbaum says. "As we mature, we pay more attention
to depth." Increasingly canvassers identify "hot contacts" who may be willing to
tell their stories or go to a meeting, film showing, or rally. In some areas,
Working America members join canvasses and phone banks to reach fellow members
or, as a group of women did in Kentucky, gather to write personal letters
encouraging Working America women to vote. Working America members also sign
petitions or letters supporting unions (such as nurses organizing in St. Paul,
Minnesota) or join labor rallies (such as backing Pittsburgh hotel workers in a
contract dispute or Ohio union members advocating labor law reform).
In a few instances, unions have used the Working America membership lists to
strengthen organizing drives. In Jackson, Mississippi, fifteen Working America
members became the core of a successful Communications Workers campaign to
organize county employees, and both the Teachers and Auto Workers unions found
crucial organizing contacts from Working America.
Inspired by his work with unions in eastern Europe, Central Labor Council
President Tom Lewandowski started Working America in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with
financial support from local unions and union volunteers rather than hired
canvassers. Lewandowski reports great success, even recruiting lower-level
managers and Wal-Mart workers, but the volunteer effort has also re-energized
the local labor movement.
"The unanticipated outcome that's gotten us so excited is not the people we sign
up but the people who sign them up, what it does to them," he says. "The people
in our labor movement get so juiced up. It gives us legitimate hope that more
people out there are like us, and the potential of solidarity is greater than we
thought."
Working America is no substitute for workplace organizing. But the labor
movement has long relied on community support and been organized in ways that
extend beyond the workplace, from the Knights of Labor -- who organized district
assemblies of varied workers -- to the community mobilization that spread
organizing in the 1930s.
"We shouldn't believe that the only way unions can organize is to protect
workers through the collective bargaining contract," argues Harvard professor
Richard Freeman, who thinks that Working America could have the political clout
comparable to AARP, especially if it can find ways to wield influence on
workplace issues.
Working America faces many challenges. Beyond continuing its rapid growth, it
needs to push its nascent efforts to engage members more deeply (and give them
even more of a role in guiding the organization) and to become more financially
self-sufficient. It needs to find more ways to support workplace organizing --
especially if Congress reforms labor laws to ease organizing -- and to wield its
influence in the workplace and against anti-union employers.
But it has already demonstrated its value to people like Roger Lasch. "It just
made me feel better knowing I could say something and be heard and not be just a
voice in the wind," he says. "It's a wonderful feeling having an organization
behind you making you feel you accomplished something. There's big strength in
numbers. When you join an organization like Working America, I think you build a
better future for America and your family."
See more stories tagged with: working america, afl-cio, labor, organizing
David Moberg is a senior editor of In These Times.

(4)  Are Industrial Unions Better than Craft? Not Always.
by Mike Parker
Labor Notes
September 2008

http://labornotes. org/node/ 1898

Which is better-craft unions or industrial unions? The
debate is as old as the labor movement itself, and one
that resists simple answers.

Craft unions organize workers along occupational lines.
Industrial unions join everyone who works for one
employer, or one industry, into one union.

The argument surfaces in the dispute between the
Service Employees and the California Nurses
Association. SEIU asserts that the only way to take on
the giant hospital firms is to have everyone organized
together in one union. CNA says only a union of, by,
and for nurses can give the proper focus to the needs
of nurses.

Similarly, when the Teamsters and the Aircraft
Mechanics Fraternal Association battled recently at
United Airlines, the Teamsters charged that AMFA was a
craft union interested only in mechanics and not
cleaners or baggage handlers.

In cases of competition, like these, other factors
trump the craft versus industrial debate. Which union
is more democratic, which has bargained better
contracts, which has more potential power? Those are
and should be the factors workers use when deciding
between two unions.

Still, looking carefully at the craft versus industrial
question, we find that no one form is best suited to
dealing with all the issues facing workers.

A STEP FORWARD

No one disagrees that in the 1930s, industrial unionism
represented a qualitative step forward for workers. The
CIO shoved aside the hidebound craft unions of the AFL
to organize the mass production industries that were
central to the economy and thus to workers' power.

Then and now, industrial organization stresses the
common interests of workers. It can partially overcome
the racial and gender divisions that are reinforced by
job classifications and hiring discrimination.

In addition, the larger size of industrial unions and
their density in some communities makes mass political
action easier, compared to the lobbying, special-
interest politics that fit with narrow craft interests.

Yet craft unionism was not swept away by industrial
unionism. When the CIO was organizing millions, the AFL
grew by even larger numbers.

CRAFT UNIONS CONTINUE

There were many reasons why craft unions carried on and
continue today. In the 1930s, their conservative
policies made them less of a threat to employers than
the industrial unions, which were demanding sweeping
political change.

In addition, craft unions have used control over
apprenticeships and other procedures to erect barriers
to new workers entering the craft. The resulting
shortage of workers naturally pushes up wages and gives
the union greater leverage. This entry control means
that crafts are riddled with networks of extended
families and systems of mutual obligation.

Control over training also gives the union power over
both the content of jobs and who can do them.

These sources of leverage are two-edged swords.
Training, family connections, and cultural homogeneity
helped when the unions needed to resist attacks from
the Pinkertons and other management spies.

But, more important, these same qualities were also
barriers to Black workers and even to various white
ethnic groups as well as to women. Craft unions,
protecting "their own," have often opposed social
change and social movements.

Control over job content is another two-edged sword: it
has often made unions resistant to absorbing new
technologies. Such technologies then become the
employers' weapon to smash a once powerful union.
Typesetting is an example.

CALLED TO THE WORK

The craft approach persists, however, because for these
workers it more directly addresses the work experience.
Central to the craft union are the specifics of the
work, pride in the job, and a sense of professionalism.

In an auto plant, for example, most production workers
think of their jobs as nothing more than a way to make
decent money. Many skilled tradespeople, though, think
of their job as a profession and take pride in their
skills. Many people become nurses, teachers, mechanics,
electricians, organizers, or actors because they feel a
calling to that work.

Not only are the "professional" issues central to these
workers, their knowledge and skill give them tools in
the battle to control the workplace. Craft unions lend
themselves more naturally to on-the-job organization.
Industrial unions that ignore these issues may see
members leave to form their own craft unions, as
Emergency Medical System workers and electrical
technicians in SEIU did in the Bay Area.

At the same time, focus on craft issues can become a
diversion or obstacle in periods of rapidly expanding
class consciousness and sweeping social movements that
capture the imagination and drive change in the labor
movement as well as in the society at large.

This is not to say that industrial unionism solves any
of these problems automatically. An industrial union,
too, may fight only for its own members rather than for
workers as a whole.

The United Auto Workers (UAW), for example, fought for
decades against fuel-economy standards in order to
defend the Big Three's gas-guzzlers. On the other hand,
the nurses-only CNA fights for single-payer health
care.

DOING IT ALL

Both the craft and industrial models address important
parts of our work experience. Any union movement that
wants to win power for workers needs to address both.

In principle, it shouldn't be so difficult to pay
attention to both kinds of issues. An industrial union
can have subdivisions that address the specific needs
of its craft sectors. Within the UAW, for example,
skilled workers have their own stewards and elect their
own representative to the executive board. People with
technical jobs such as engineers have their own locals.
In West Coast longshore, dockworkers, clerks, and
warehouse workers have their own locals.

Likewise, craft unions can form councils to deal with a
common employer. A bargaining council at a university,
for example, could bring together separate unions for
professors, teaching assistants, lab techs, clerical
workers, and maintenance.

Central labor councils in theory represent the common
class interests of all the workers in an area.

But it turns out that these solutions don't work as
well as they should. Anti-labor laws make it hard to
take solidarity action across union lines. It could be
an unfair labor practice, for example, for a union to
refuse to settle its own contract because other unions
bargaining with the same employer have unresolved
issues.

More important, cross-union bodies, relying primarily
on voluntary participation, are notoriously weak and
underfunded. They usually restrict themselves to the
least common denominator- activities that don't
antagonize any of the constituents. Rarely does a
bargaining or geographic council take on the racial or
gender biases that tend to be reinforced in craft
unionism.

While industrial unions more readily solve some of
these problems, they also pose different ones. As
Detroit labor historian Steve Babson points out,
industrial unions pose special problems in
hierarchically organized workplaces where some workers
have a degree of authority over the work process.

DIVISIONS WITHIN

Nurses typically provide direction for nursing
assistants. RNs themselves often take assignment from
one of their own-a "charge nurse." In almost any kind
of workplace these days, some workers are "team
leaders."

Such power relations can influence work assignments and
scheduling. Being at the top of a work hierarchy can
reinforce arrogance and a sense of power, and if these
workers also dominate within the workers' "industrial"
union, the problem is magnified. Those at the bottom
may feel they need their own union to protect them.

What is needed is unions that pay attention to life on
the job and the advancement of craft skills as well as
to common issues and common mobilization against the
employer-indeed, to the issues common to all workers.

Organizational forms are not magic. There is no single
form that protects against self-serving bureaucracy nor
that guarantees solidarity. These stances come only
from struggle, education, vision, and the continuous
development of new leaders.

Mike Parker is co-author of Democracy Is Power.

(5)  4,000 SEIU Members March Against Stern's Move to
Silence Union Reformers

United Healthcare West
Sept. 6 /PRNewswire- USNewswire/ -- Press Release

http://news. yahoo.com/ s/usnw/20080906/ pl_usnw/4000_ seiu_members_
march_against_ stern_s_move_ to_silence_ union_reformers

SAN JOSE, Calif.

More than 4,000 members of SEIU United Healthcare
Workers-West (UHW) and other SEIU locals marched in
downtown San Jose on Saturday to oppose a planned
takeover by national union officials.

On Aug. 25, national SEIU President Andy Stern and
Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger announced their intent
to put UHW into trusteeship, which would replace
elected rank-and-file UHW leaders with handpicked
appointees accountable only to Stern and Burger. UHW
members, who work in hospitals, nursing homes, and
private homes across California, have been leading an
effort for democratic reform within SEIU and opposing
Stern's efforts to centralize power in Washington, D.C.

A letter to Andy Stern from leading labor scholars and
historians was presented by Cal Winslow, a labor
history fellow at the University of California,
Berkeley. The letter declares that a takeover of UHW
would be "a disaster for the California labor movement
and for SEIU nationally."

"This is a desperate attempt by Stern to distract
attention from the growing scandal involving local
union presidents he appointed and promoted," said Maria
Martinez, an elected shop steward for 15 years at Fifth
Avenue Healthcare Center in San Rafael. "In UHW,
members elect our leaders and they are accountable to
us."

Pat McGinnis, director of California Advocates for
Nursing Home Reform, said that the trusteeship could
lower standards for nursing home care across the state
by limiting caregivers' voice to advocate for
residents.

"The strategy SEIU International and Local 6434 have
pursued with nursing home operators in California
discourages caregivers from speaking out about
dangerous conditions in nursing homes," she said.
"Nursing home workers in UHW have been the leading
voice for union contracts that empower them to stand up
for their residents."

Eloise Reese-Burns, a nursing assistant at Cottonwood
Healthcare Center in Woodland and member of UHW's
executive board, announced two resolutions that were
debated and approved at the local's annual conference
by more than 2,000 elected stewards and member leaders.

One resolution directs the union to protect member
control of UHW by mobilizing the union's 150,000
members to stop the illegal trusteeship. The other
reaffirms UHW's longstanding goal of building one
statewide union that is accountable to healthcare
workers in California instead of union officials in
Washington, D.C.

With more than 150,000 members, SEIU United Healthcare
Workers-West is the fastest-growing healthcare union in
the United States. We represent healthcare workers in
all job classifications and all healthcare settings,
including hospitals, homecare, nursing homes and
clinics. Our mission is to achieve high-quality
healthcare for all.






[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20701.htm
Hypocrisy of this Magnitude has to be Respected.
By William Blum

06/09/08 "ICH" - -- Im sorry to say that I think that John McCain is
going to be the next president of the United States. After the long
night of Bush horror any Democrat should easily win, but the Dems are
screwing it up and McCain has been running more-or-less even with Barack
Obama in the polls. The Democrats should run on the slogan "If you liked
Bush, you'll love McCain", but that would be too outspoken, too direct
for the spineless Nancy Pelosi and her spineless party. Or, "If you
liked Iraq, you'll love Iran." But the Democrat leadership is not on
record as categorically opposing either conflict.

Nor, it seems, do the Democrats have the courage to raise the issue of
McCain not having been born in the United States as the Constitution
requires. Nor questioning him about accusations by his fellow American
prisoners about his considerable collaboration with his Vietnamese
captors. Nor a word about McCain's highly possible role in the brutal
Georgian invasion of South Ossetia on August 7. (More on this last below.)

Obama has lost much of the sizable liberal/progressive vote because of
his move to the center-right (or his exposure as a center-rightist), and
he now may have lost even his selling point of being more strongly
against the war than McCain -- if in fact he actually is -- by
appointing Joe Biden as his running mate. Biden has long been a hawk on
Iraq (as well as the rest of US foreign policy), calling for an invasion
as far back as 1998.[1] In April, 2007, when pressed in an interview
about his vote for the war in 2003, Biden said: "It was a mistake. I
regret my vote. ... because I learned more, like everybody else learned,
about what, in fact, we were told."[2] This has been a common excuse of
war supporters in recent years when the tide of public opinion turned
against them. But why did millions and millions of Americans march
against the war in the fall of 2002 and early 2003, before it began?
What did they know that Joe Biden didn't know? It was clear to the
protesters that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were habitual liars, that
they couldn't care less about the people of Iraq, that the defenseless
people of that ancient civilization were going to be bombed to hell; the
protesters knew something about the bombings of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos,
Panama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan; they knew about napalm, cluster bombs,
depleted uranium. ... Didn't Biden know about any of these things? Those
who marched knew that the impending war was something a moral person
could not support; and that it was totally illegal, a textbook case of a
"war of aggression"; one didn't have to be an expert in international
law to know this. Did Joe Biden think about any of this?

If McCain had a role in the Georgian invasion of breakaway-region
Ossetia it would have been arranged with the help of Randy Scheunemann,
McCain's top foreign policy adviser and until recently Georgia's
principal lobbyist in Washington. As head of the neo-conservative
Committee for the Liberation of Iraq in 2002, Scheunemann was one of
America's leading advocates for invading Iraq. One of McCain's primary
campaign sales pitches has been to emphasize his supposed superior
experience in foreign policy matters, which -- again supposedly -- means
something in this world. McCain consistently leads Obama in the opinion
polls on "readiness to be commander-in-chief", or similar nonsense. The
Georgia-Russia hostilities raise -- in the mass media and the mass mind
-- the issue of the United States needing an experienced foreign policy
person to handle such a "crisis", and, standard in every crisis -- an
enemy bad guy.

Typical of the media was the Chicago Tribune praising McCain for his
statesmanlike views on Iraq and stating: "What Russia's invasion of
Georgia showed was that the world is still a very dangerous place," and
Russia is a "looming threat". In addition to using the expression
"Russia's invasion of Georgia", the Tribune article also referred to
"Russia's invasion of South Ossetia". No mention of Georgia's invasion
of South Ossetia which began the warfare.[3] In a feature story in the
Washington Post on the Georgia events the second sentence was: "The war
had started, Russian jets had just bombed the outskirts of Tbilisi
[Georgian capital]." The article then speaks of "the horror" of "the
Russian invasion". Not the slightest hint of any Georgian military
action can be found in the story.[4] One of course can find a media
report here or there that mentions or at least implies in passing that
an invasion from Georgia is what instigated the mayhem. But I've yet to
come upon one report in the American mass media that actually emphasizes
this point, and certainly none that put it in the headline. The result
is that if a poll were taken amongst Americans today, I'm sure the
majority of those who have any opinion would be convinced that the nasty
Russians began it all.[5]

What we have here in the American media is simply standard operating
procedure for an ODE (Officially Designated Enemy). Almost as soon as
the fighting began, Dick Cheney announced: "Russian aggression must not
go unanswered."[6] The media needed no further instructions. Yes, that's
actually the way it works. (See Cuba, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Iran,
Bolivia, etc., etc.)

The president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, is an American poodle to
an extent that would embarrass Tony Blair. Until their 2,000 troops were
called home for this emergency, the Georgian contingent in Iraq was the
largest after the US and UK. The Georgian president prattles on about
freedom and democracy and the Cold War like George W., declaring that
the current conflict "is not about Georgia anymore. It is about America,
its values,".[7] (I must confess that until Saakashvili pointed it out I
hadn't realized that "American values" were involved in the fighting.)
His government recently ran a full-page ad in the Washington Post. The
entire text, written vertically, was: "Lenin ... Stalin ... Putin ...
Give in? Enough is enough. Support Georgia. ... sosgeorgia.org"[8]

UK prime minister Gordon Brown asserted that Russia's recognition of the
independence of Georgia's two breakaway regions of South Ossetia and
Abkhazia was "dangerous and unacceptable."[9] Earlier this year when
Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence from Serbia, the UK, along
with the US and other allied countries quickly recognized it despite
widespread warnings that legitimating the Kosovo action might lead to a
number of other regions in the world declaring their independence.

Brown's hypocrisy appears as merely the routine stuff of politicians
compared to that of John McCain and George W. re the Georgia fighting:
"I'm interested in good relations between the United States and Russia,
but in the 21st century, nations don't invade other nations," said
McCain [10], the staunch supporter of US invasions of Iraq and
Afghanistan and leading champion of an invasion of Iran.

And here is Mahatma Gandhi Bush meditating on the subject: "Bullying and
intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the
21st century."[11]

Hypocrisy of this magnitude has to be respected. It compares favorably
with the motto on automobile license plates of the state of New
Hampshire made by prisoners: "Live Free or Die".

Our beloved president was also moved to affirm that the Russian
recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia: was an
"irresponsible decision". "Russia's action only exacerbates tensions and
complicates diplomatic negotiations," he said.{12] Belgrade, are you
listening?

It should be noted that linguistically and historically- distinct South
Ossetia and Abkhazia had been autonomous Russian/Soviet protectorates or
regions from early in the 19th century to 1991, when the Georgian
government abolished their autonomy.

So what then was the purpose of the Georgian invasion of Ossetia if not
to serve the electoral campaign of John McCain, a man who might be the
next US president and be thus very obligated to the Georgian president?
Saakashvili could have wanted to overthrow the Ossetian government to
incorporate it back into Georgia, at the same time hopefully advancing
the cause of Georgia's petition to become a member of NATO, which looks
askance upon new members with territories in dispute or with military
facilities belonging to a nonmember state such as Russia. But the nature
of the Georgian invasion does not fit this thesis. The Georgians did
none of the things that those staging a coup have traditionally found
indispensable. They did not take over a TV or radio station, or the
airport, or important government buildings, or military or police
installations. They didn't take into custody key members of the
government. All the US/Israeli-armed and trained Georgia military did
was bomb and kill, civilians and Russian peacekeeper soldiers, the
latter legally there for 16 years under an international agreement. For
what purpose all this if not to incite a Russian intervention?

The only reason the United States did not itself strongly attack the
Russian forces is that it's a pre-eminent principle of American military
interventions to not pick on anyone capable of really defending themselves.

Unreconstructed cold warriors now fret about Russian expansionism,
warning that Ukraine might be next. But of the numerous myths
surrounding the Cold War, "communist expansionism" was certainly one of
the biggest. We have to remember that within the space of 25 years,
Western powers invaded Russia three times -- World War I, the
"intervention" of 1918-20, and World War II, inflicting some 40 million
casualties in the two world wars alone. (The Soviet Union lost
considerably more people to international warfare on its own land than
it did abroad. There are not too many great powers who can say that.) To
carry out these invasions, the West used Eastern Europe as a highway.
Should it be any cause for wonder that after World War II the Soviets
were determined to close down this highway? Minus the Cold War
atmosphere and indoctrination, most people would have no problem in
seeing the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe as an act of self defense.
Neither does the case of Afghanistan support the idea of "expansionism".
Afghanistan lived alongside the Soviet Union for more than 60 years with
no Soviet military intrusion. It's only when the United States
intervened in Afghanistan to replace a government friendly to Moscow
with one militantly anti-communist that the Russians invaded to do
battle with the US-supported Islamic jihadists.

During the Cold War, before undertaking a new military intervention,
American officials usually had to consider how the Soviet Union would
react. That restraint was removed with the dissolution of the Soviet
Union in the early 1990s. We may now, however, be witnessing the
beginning of a new kind of polarization in the world. An increasing
number of countries in the Third World -- with Latin America as a prime
example -- have more fraternal relations with Moscow and/or Beijing than
with Washington. Singapore's former UN ambassador observed: "Most of the
world is bemused by western moralising on Georgia" ... While the western
view is that the world "should support the underdog, Georgia, against
Russia ... most support Russia against the bullying west. The gap
between the western narrative and the rest of the world could not be
clearer."[13] And the Washington Post reported: "Saif al-Islam Gaddafi,
Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi's influential son, echoed the delight
expressed in much of the Arab news media. 'What happened in Georgia is a
good sign, one that means America is no longer the sole world power
setting the rules of the game ... there is a balance in the world now.
Russia is resurging, which is good for us, for the entire Middle East'."[14]

--
Dan Clore

My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"