Howard Nema
continues the interview with Barbara Hartwell and I on the subject of the Nazi
infiltration of the patriot movement. The show will air today at 5pm ET at
www.ProjectFreedom.ws.
Janet Phelan




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----- Forwarded Message -----
From: NYC LPDOC <nyclpdoc@...>
To:
Sent: Sunday, June 3, 2012 6:44 PM
Subject: JUNE 10 SUNDAY EVENT Readings from Leonard Peltier's "My Life is My
Sundance: Prison Writings"




READINGS FROM LEONARD PELTIER'S
 
PRISON WRITINGS: MY LIFE IS MY SUNDANCE
edited by Harvey Arden
 
SUNDAY, JUNE 10, 2012
4 p.m. - 6 p.m.
Presented by Red Harlem Readers
Indian Café, Broadway & 108th Street
New York City
 
Free and Open to the Public
Seating is Limited

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

The Popular Education Project to Free the Cuban 5
www.freethecuban5.com
freethecuban5@...
Free the Cuban 5 Hotline: 718-601-4751
 
 
FORWARD OUT TO ALL YOUR CONTACTS!
 
Cuban 5 Father's Day Call-in Week!
 
 
The Popular Education Project to Free the Cuban 5 is asking all freedom loving
people to call President Obama the week of Father’s Day to ask him to free the
Cuban 5; five U.S. held political prisoners incarcerated for 13 years for
fighting against terrorism in Cuba and the United States.
 
Remind President Obama that for the past 13 years these
innocent men have been separated from their families and friends. Tell him that
he has the power to reunite these men with their loved ones!
 Call every day! Ask your friends and family members to call in as well!
Thousands of messages will let President Obama know that there is a mass
movement calling for the freedom of these five men!
  Make your call the week of Mon. June 11th through
Sun. June 17th, (FATHER’S DAY)!
 
Call President Obama at 202-456-1111!
 
 Sample Script (optional):
 
This message is for President Obama, I ask that you use your
executive power to free the Cuban 5. For 13 years, the Cuban 5 have been
unjustly incarcerated for protecting their homeland Cuba and the United States
from terrorist actions.
 
They have the support of various reputable actors, academics and civil rights
leaders, such as: Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte, Cindy Sheehan and Angela Davis.
As well as the support of thousands of people throughout the United States and
the world.
 
Only you have the power to set these men free! Please end this long standing
injustice by sending these men home.
 
Thank you!

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

A demonstration will take place at noon on Thursday, June 21, in front of San
Bernardino Courthouse, located at 351 N. Arrowhead in San Bernardino,
California.
 
This action is planned to draw attention to the breakdown of the rule of law in
the courtroom of Judge Michael Welch, probate judge for SB County. The action is
timed to coincide with a hearing in the Conservatorship of Lois Risse, wherein
the conservator is seeking to overturn a twenty- eight year old deed of sale in
order to return the property into the conservatorship, so that the conservator
can get a reverse mortgage to pay for her services.


 

Clearly, if a deed of sale, executed decades ago and duly recorded, can be
overturned because the seller is now under a conservatorship and the conservator
wishes access to the property value for her own enrichment, then no property,
anywhere, is safe and no deed of sale can be considered final.
 
All concerned about the breakdown of rule of law and also issues relevant to the
economy and property are invited to attend. Bring your picket sign! Tell your
friends! The hearing on petition to determine title will take place at 1:30 in
Department  S16P.  Demonstrators are encouraged to attend the hearing.
 
For further information, please call Janet at 541 708-3534.



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

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

http://c4ss.org/content/10602
Inequality as a Revolt Against Nature
by Kevin Carson
Jun 5, 2012

The core of my philosophy, as a market anarchist, is the belief that
equal exchange is mutually beneficial. Economic exploitation can only
result from unequal exchange, which requires coercive interference in
the normal process of market exchange. Many people find this dubious. So
let’s take the argument for why this is so, and break it down into
simple steps.

Equal exchange normally results in egalitarian outcomes because humans
are utility maximizers. Adam Smith argued that exchange of goods and
services tends to occur at a ratio reflecting the effort of producing
them. If it takes a day’s work to trap three beaver or hunt two deer,
the market price will tend toward an equilibrium of three beavers = two
deer. The reason is that, if the deer is priced above three beavers, it
will become more economical to hunt deer than to exchange beavers for
them. The price premium on deer over beavers will cause labor, over
time, to shift from trapping to hunting, bringing the price back toward
its natural level.

So long as competition is free, people respond to unequal exchange by
seeking more equal terms. And so long as no barriers to market entry
exist, prices above the cost of production (including the disutility of
labor) provide an incentive to enter the market at a lower price. So as
Franz Oppenheimer argued, the market always tends toward an equilibrium
at which goods exchange at a ratio that reflects the subjective
disutilities of the producers.

This is the natural tendency, obtaining so long as the actors in a
market are equal and power doesn’t enter into the equation. The only way
to sell goods and services at prices greater than the production cost
and subjective disutility entailed in producing them, in the long run,
is through the use of force to suppress competition from cheaper providers.

Privilege is the use of direct or indirect force to suppress
competition, to control the terms on which others work to procure
consumption goods, so that they must work to support the holder of
privilege as a condition for being allowed to work to support themselves.

Enforcing privilege is what states do. The classic example, which
Oppenheimer set forth in “The State,” is artificial property in land.
Exploitative wage labor is impossible so long as employers are subject
to unfettered competition from self-employment.

In predominantly agrarian countries, this means specifically that so
long as conveniently located vacant land is available for cultivation,
competition from subsistence farming will push up wages and drive down
profits. In agrarian countries, the state acts in collusion with
landlords and employers to appropriate the land by political means. The
landed oligarchy uses artificial property titles either to exclude
producers from vacant land, or to extract rents from those who are the
rightful owners by virtue of cultivation.

The same basic principle applies to all situations in which a privileged
class interposes itself between production and consumption, charging a
toll for the right to transform one’s own labor into subsistence. It
takes the form of artificial property rights like patent and copyright,
regulatory cartels that restrict price competition or artificially raise
capital outlays and overhead required for production, and subsidies that
conceal monopoly prices under the guise of tax bills.

For example, the 95% or more of the price of Nike sneakers that comes
from the brand-name markup, over and above the cost of production, is an
artificial property rent to the Nike corporation. Likewise the enormous
“intellectual property” markup on a CD of Microsoft Windows or Office,
or a drug under patent. Likewise the majority of the price of electronic
goods that results from embedded rents on patents rather than actual
parts and labor.

As Robert Anton Wilson argued in the Illuminatus! trilogy, whenever you
see exchange systematically resulting in gain for one party and loss for
another, you know it’s really not “free market” exchange at all. The
game is rigged. Big Bill Haywood, one of the founders of the I.W.W. or
“Wobblies,” put it this way: “For every man who gets a dollar he didn’t
work for, there’s a man who worked for a dollar he didn’t get.”

Soccer mom liberals like to talk about people who “work hard and play by
the rules,” yet don’t get ahead. Well, duh! Is anyone surprised when
they play by the rules, in Vegas, and the house wins? Despite the “free
market” rhetoric used by our plutocratic elite of billionaires,
banksters and Fortune 500 CEOs, this is not a free market. It’s a rigged
game in which the house always wins.


--
Dan Clore

New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/3tyj9cq
Lord We˙rdgliffe & 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://www.zcommunications.org/chomsky-on-iops-by-noam-chomsky
Chomsky On IOPS
June 04, 2012
By Noam Chomsky
and Antti Jauhiainen
and Anders Sandstrom
and David Marty

Noam, over the years you have seen all kinds of projects come and go.
Recently you became a member of the new effort called International
Organization for Participatory Society, or IOPS whose web site is at
http://www.iopsociety.org/ . You had this to say about IOPS:

"Hardly a day goes by when I do not hear appeals - often laments - from
people deeply concerned about the travails of human existence and the
fate of the world, desperately eager to do something about what they
rightly perceive to be intolerable and ominous, feeling helpless because
each individual effort, however dedicated, seems to merely chip away at
a mountain, placing band-aids on a cancer, never reaching to the sources
of needless suffering and the threats of much worse. It's an
understandable reaction, and can too often lead to despair and
resignation. We all know the only answer, driven home by experience and
history, and by simple reflection on the realities of the world: join
together to construct and clarify long-term visions and goals, along
with direct engagement and activism shaped by these guidelines and
contributing to a deepening our understanding of what we hope to
achieve. But the formula, while accurate enough, does not respond to the
pleas. What is missing is concrete proposals as to how to proceed. IOPS
strikes the right chords, and if the opportunities it opens are pursued
with sufficient energy and participation, could carry us a long way
towards unifying the many initiatives here and around the world and
molding them into a powerful and effective force."

We would like to ask you some questions about IOPS and social change
more generally.

1. First, have you ever before been in a revolutionary organization? Can
you briefly describe why, in the earlier cases? Or if you haven't been,
was it that you felt there were no good options, or for some other reason?

I've never been much of a "joiner," but I have taken part in a number of
organizations over the years, and even helped initiate some. I've never
felt that the US had reached a revolutionary period, and therefore never
regarded these as revolutionary organizations, except with regard to
long-term goals. But it's also worth always keeping in mind Bakunin's
observation that we can try to build some of the components of a future
society within the present one. That's true now as it's always been.
There are many quite feasible actions - some in fact being undertaken -
that have revolutionary import if they can be sustained and
significantly extended in depth and scale.

2. Setting aside IOPS, for a moment, why have an organization at all,
rather than people separately pursuing various campaigns like for peace,
or immigrant rights, or economic redistribution, or broader efforts like
the recent Occupy projects and actions?

Individual initiatives are fine, but mutual support, and articulation of
common goals, can considerably enhance their impact.

3. IOPS seeks to become a federation of national branches which are in
turn a federation of state, county, and otherwise regional and city
chapters. You join IOPS and you are in a local, say your city, but also
in a national and an international. Does being national or international
add anything, in your view? Or is it a debit?

Depends on how real it is. Every labor union calls itself an
"international." If this extends to real international solidarity - it
sometimes does, but much too rarely - it can be very meaningful.
Otherwise it's just words. Same in this case.

4. IOPS focuses priority attention on race, gender, power, class,
ecology, and also international relations. It says each has to be
understood in its own right and as they entwine, and also that an
organization needs to have vision and program for each if it is to
appeal to and empower important constituencies. Do you think we need
this multiple focus to build a better world?

Perhaps we might put the matter differently. It would be a better world
if any one of these concerns can be successfully addressed. And a still
better world if several or even all of them are. Furthermore they are
not independent. There are plenty of interactions, and progress in one
dimension can enhance opportunities in others. To the extent that a
long-term vision with practical implications can be developed, and
accepted at least as guidelines, it can only improve these efforts.

5. Another way IOPS is different than many other organizational efforts
is that regarding economy it wants to eliminate private ownership so
there aren't capitalists ruling over workers, but IOPS also wants to
eliminate the monopoly that some actors have on empowering work,
systematically ruling over workers. Many in IOPS call the group
monopolizing empowering work a ‘coordinator class’. IOPS wants not only
to get rid of private ownership and thus capitalist rule, but also to
get rid of the corporate division of labor and other bases for
coordinator rule. In these ways IOPS seems to take seriously warnings
from Bakunin and other anarchists that weren't just about political
dangers, but were also about economic ones. Was this prioritization of
all sources of class rule an attractive feature of IOPS for you?

Sure. It's always seemed to me a core element of the struggle for
freedom and justice, including the constructive elements in the (often
intersecting) anarchist and socialist traditions. With much deeper
roots, of course, and many varied ones. Makes good sense to be as
explicit as possible about these matters.

6. IOPS has no specific action program yet because it feels program
needs to emerge from deliberations by many more members. Do you agree
with this approach to recruiting more support before having specific
campaigns. Or do you think it would be smarter for the few initial folks
to establish some campaigns, so that there would be more specificity for
potential new members to consider as a basis for joining?

I don't see why there has to be a fixed answer. There's no reason to
refrain from campaigns on specific issues - I suspect that virtually all
of those who join IOPS are already engaged in them - and if pursuing
them within an IOPS rubric contributes to the campaigns themselves, and
to the growth of the organization, why not?

7. There is some debate in IOPS about its name. One option is
International Organization for Participatory Society. Another option,
still alive and being used! by some - with a decision to come only at a
founding convention - is International Organization for Participatory
Socialism. Which name do you favor?

I'd somewhat prefer "Society," primarily because the term "socialism,"
like virtually every term of political discourse, has been so vulgarized
by political warfare.

8. Keeping the two name preferences alive is part of IOPS methodology,
it seems. Indeed, IOPS claims to welcome tactical and strategic
differences and dissent, including preserving minority positions and
when possible experimenting with them alongside more widely supported
approaches. For example, the IOPS definition says that IOPS "guarantees
members rights to organize currents and guarantees currents full rights
of democratic debate." People can of course differ about lots of issue,
as you no doubt do with various IOPS positions, and yet function
together well. Of course it remains to be seen if this will persist once
IOPS has program, but it is certainly emphasized. Was this part of why
you are a member?

I think it's a sensible stand.

9. You are not a Leninist and have been very critical of Leninist
approaches to social change. How do you see IOPS being different from
Leninism?

It's not a vanguardist party. It doesn't aim to take state power "in the
name of the proletariat," with all of the repression and oppressive
hierarchy (and worse) that follows almost as night follows day.

10. You often call yourself an anarchist. In what sense to you think
IOPS is anarchist?

"Anarchism" means many different things to different people. I've always
understood its central core to be the principle that structures of
authority and domination, at an level from personal relations to
international affairs, are not self-justifying: they carry a burden of
proof, and unless that can be met (which is rare), they should be
dismantled in favor of others more conducive to basic human values. I
think that is a guiding component of IOPS.

11. IOPS seeks not only win a new world, but also to better the lives of
citizens in the present. Partly this refers to winning improvements in
society now, but partly it refers to developing community within IOPS
itself. For example IOPS "seeks to develop mechanisms that provide
financial, legal, employment, and emotional support to its members" and
to "improve the life situations of its members, including aiding their
feelings of self worth, their knowledge, skills, and confidence, their
mental, physical, sexual, and spiritual health, and even their social
ties and engagements and leisure enjoyments." Was this desire to create
community internally part of what you found attractive about IOPS?

It's highly important, "in the present," particularly in a highly
atomized society like ours. One of the primary achievements of the
Occupy movements, I think, was the spontaneous development of
communities of support and solidarity, with direct participation and
open spaces for discussion and interchange, and mutual aid in many
dimensions. That creates bonds and associations, and changes
consciousness, and could spark really significant and positive changes
in the society at large. IOPS can aspire to carrying such achievements
far beyond.

13. Finally, when you say in your comment offered in support of IOPS,
that we quoted earlier, that we need to "join together to construct and
clarify long-term visions and goals, along with direct engagement and
activism shaped by these guidelines and contributing to a deepening of
our understanding of what we hope to achieve," we wonder what you think
obstructs people doing this that IOPS can help overcome. Many places,
even most places, it isn't repression that stops people. And it isn't
the complexity of the issues, either. So what is it? The label often
used for this problem is skepticism, fatalism, or doubt about the
possibility of a better world or about the possibility of attaining it.
You refer to IOPS helping to overcome "despair and resignation." But
specifically how do you think IOPS can help overcome this type obstacle
to people seriously seeking change?

First of all, the call has simply reached very few people. And they tend
to be a select group, most of whom are already engaged in activist
pursuits that are high priorities for them. They may not want to divert
energy and effort elsewhere. There are others who remain to be convinced
that IOPS programs and associations address the often very serious
problems that they face in their lives - lack of employment, a decent
place to live, and much else -- and that human society faces, some of
them truly awesome, like the possibility of devastating ecological
catastrophe for the first time in human history. And individuals have
their own reasons. The way to overcome doubts is to show what can be
achieved.


--
Dan Clore

New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/3tyj9cq
Lord We˙rdgliffe & 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://www.zcommunications.org/somebody-else-s-atrocities-ideal-illusions-how-th\
e-u-s-gov-t-co-opted-human-rights-by-noam-chomsky
Somebody Else’s Atrocities, “Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Gov’t
Co-Opted Human Rights”
June 05, 2012
By Noam Chomsky
Source: The New York Times Syndicate

In his penetrating study “Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government
Co-Opted Human Rights,” international affairs scholar James Peck
observes, “In the history of human rights, the worst atrocities are
always committed by somebody else, never us” – whoever “us” is.

Almost any moment in history yields innumerable illustrations. Let’s
keep to the past few weeks.

On May 10, the Summer Olympics were inaugurated at the Greek birthplace
of the ancient games. A few days before, virtually unnoticed, the
government of Vietnam addressed a letter to the International Olympic
Committee expressing the “profound concerns of the Government and people
of Viet Nam about the decision of IOC to accept the Dow Chemical Company
as a global partner sponsoring the Olympic Movement.”

Dow provided the chemicals that Washington used from 1961 onward to
destroy crops and forests in South Vietnam, drenching the country with
Agent Orange.

These poisons contain dioxin, one of the most lethal carcinogens known,
affecting millions of Vietnamese and many U.S. soldiers. To this day in
Vietnam, aborted fetuses and deformed infants are very likely the
effects of these crimes – though, in light of Washington’s refusal to
investigate, we have only the studies of Vietnamese scientists and
independent analysts.

Joining the Vietnamese appeal against Dow are the government of India,
the Indian Olympic Association, and the survivors of the horrendous 1984
Bhopal gas leak, one of history’s worst industrial disasters, which
killed thousands and injured more than half a million.

Union Carbide, the corporation responsible for the disaster, was taken
over by Dow, for whom the matter is of no slight concern. In February,
Wikileaks revealed that Dow hired the U.S. private investigative agency
Stratfor to monitor activists seeking compensation for the victims and
prosecution of those responsible.

Another major crime with very serious persisting effects is the Marine
assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in November 2004.

Women and children were permitted to escape if they could. After several
weeks of bombing, the attack opened with a carefully planned war crime:
invasion of the Fallujah General Hospital, where patients and staff were
ordered to the floor, their hands tied. Soon the bonds were loosened;
the compound was secure.

The official justification was that the hospital was reporting civilian
casualties, and therefore was considered a propaganda weapon.

Much of the city was left in “smoking ruins,” the press reported while
the Marines sought out insurgents in their “warrens.” The invaders
barred entry to the Red Crescent relief organization. Absent an official
inquiry, the scale of the crimes is unknown.

If the Fallujah events are reminiscent of the events that took place in
the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica, now again in the news with the
genocide trial of Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic, there’s
a good reason. An honest comparison would be instructive, but there’s no
fear of that: One is an atrocity, the other not, by definition.

As in Vietnam, independent investigators are reporting long-term effects
of the Fallujah assault.

Medical researchers have found dramatic increases in infant mortality,
cancer and leukemia, even higher than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Uranium
levels in hair and soil samples are far beyond comparable cases.

One of the rare investigators from the invading countries is Dr. Kypros
Nicolaides, director of the fetal-medicine research center at London’s
King’s College Hospital. “I’m sure the Americans used weapons that
caused these deformities,” Nicolaides says.

The lingering effects of a vastly greater nonatrocity were reported last
month by U.S. law professor James Anaya, the U.N. rapporteur on the
rights of indigenous peoples.

Anaya dared to tread on forbidden territory by investigating the
shocking conditions among the remnants of the Native American population
in the U.S. – “poverty, poor health conditions, lack of attainment of
formal education (and) social ills at rates that far exceed those of
other segments of the American population,” Anaya reported. No member of
Congress was willing to meet him. Press coverage was minimal.

Dissidents have been much in the news after the dramatic rescue of the
blind Chinese civil-rights activist Chen Guangcheng.

“The international commotion,” Samuel Moyn wrote in The New York Times
last month, “aroused memories of earlier dissidents like Andrei D.
Sakharov and Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the Eastern bloc heroes of
another age who first made ‘international human rights’ a rallying cry
for activists across the globe and a high-profile item on Western
governments’ agendas.”

Moyn is the author of “The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History,”
released in 2010. In The New York Times Book Review, Belinda Cooper
questioned Moyn’s tracing the contemporary prominence of these ideals to
“(President Jimmy) Carter’s abortive steps to inject human rights into
foreign policy and the 1975 Helsinki accords with the Soviet Union,”
focusing on abuses in the Soviet sphere. She finds Moyn’s thesis
unpersuasive because “an alternative history to his own is far too easy
to construct.”

True enough: The obvious alternative is the one that James Peck
provides, which the mainstream can hardly consider, though the relevant
facts are strikingly clear and known at least to scholarship.

Thus in the “Cambridge History of the Cold War,” John Coatsworth recalls
that from 1960 to “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political
prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political
dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union
and its East European satellites.” But being nonatrocities, these
crimes, substantially traceable to U.S. intervention, didn’t inspire a
human-rights crusade.

Also inspired by the Chen rescue, New York Times columnist Bill Keller
writes that “Dissidents are heroic,” but they can be “irritants to
American diplomats who have important business to transact with
countries that don’t share our values.” Keller criticizes Washington for
sometimes failing to live up to our values with prompt action when
others commit crimes.

There is no shortage of heroic dissidents within the domains of U.S.
influence and power, but they are as invisible as the Latin American
victims. Looking almost at random around the world, we find Abdulhadi
al-Khawaja, co-founder of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, an
Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, now facing death in prison
from a long hunger strike.

And Father Mun Jeong-hyeon, the elderly Korean priest who was severely
injured while holding mass as part of the protest against the
construction of a U.S. naval base on Jeju Island, named an Island of
Peace, now occupied by security forces for the first time since the 1948
massacres by the U.S.-imposed South Korean government.

And Turkish scholar Ismail Besikci, facing trial again for defending the
rights of Kurds. He already has spent much of his life in prison on the
same charge, including the 1990s, when the Clinton administration was
providing Turkey with huge quantities of military aid – at a time when
the Turkish military perpetrated some of the period’s worst atrocities.

But these instances are all nonexistent, on standard principles, along
with others too numerous to mention.

--
Dan Clore

New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/3tyj9cq
Lord We˙rdgliffe & 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"

Jun-08-2012 13:46

Taking the Temperature of the Department of Consumer Affairs--Diagnosis:
DEADLYJanet Phelan Salem-News.comThe record of the DCA in prosecuting complaints
speaks for itself.

(SACRAMENTO, CA) - Reichel Everhart, the Deputy Director of the California
Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA), has declined to respond Reichel
Everhartto questions as to the functioning of the Professional Fiduciaries
Bureau, which is housed in the DCA. Nor will she respond to written requests to
direct the Bureau to respond to public records act requests in a manner which
would be considered legal. The two records requests in question, one made to the
PFB in January of 2012 and the other made in April of 2012, produced email
responses which were highly problematic.The proper format to respond to a public
records act request is by letter, as emails may not be considered legal tender.
In fact, if there were a legal challenge to the content of the responses, the
emails might not be admissible in a court of law.In an email dated January 27,
2012, DCA Press Officer Russ Heimerich replied to a public records act request
for the policies and procedures
  manual in use by the PFB, admitting there were no such written records.
Clearly, for a government agency to be operating in a vacuum of written
guidelines is unheard of. The terminology used for such an absence of written
procedures is “underground guidelines,” which, according to attorney Bruce
Ebert, are simply illegal.The request
  was made due to the mounting evidence that the PFB has gone rogue. Top of the
list of concerns is the fact that the agency is closing complaints with no legal
basis to do so. The tiny PFB, staffed by only one analyst, Angela Bigelow, and a
part-time bureau chief, Gil DeLuna, serves the critical function of overseeing
and licensing professional conservators and fiduciaries. The complaints which
have been closed by the Bureau include allegations of theft, embezzlement and
profound physical and medical abuse. A number of the complaints have alleged
that the abuse of the elderly or disabled person resulted in death. Queries made
as to the reason for complaint closure have met with silence.Guardianship abuse
is admittedly a hot button item. The abuses being committed against these
vulnerable citizens has reached a critical point and grassroots groups have
  sprung up across the country in an effort to address this. Activists, such as
Bonnie Reiter and Dr. Robert Sarhan, each of whom allege that a conservator
caused the untimely death of a parent, have visited D.C., met with Congressmen,
written letters to the media, made reports to the FBI, all with no ostensible
results.Another public records request tendered in April asked for interagency
memos advising the Bureau that they would be protected for failing to
investigate or prosecute claims of conservator crimes. PFB Chief Gil Deluna
replied—via email-- that there were no such records. DeLuna was repeatedly
contacted asking if he would put his reply in the form of a letter and has not
replied.The record of the DCA in prosecuting complaints speaks for
  itself. The most recent available annual report—for 2010-- lists, under the
Conviction/Arrest notification category, that there were zero arrests made, zero
pending and zero referred for investigation. Zero inspections were conducted and
zero citations were issued. There were zero referrals for criminal action made
and zero for civil. The report states that, in terms of cost recovery to
complainants, zero dollars had been ordered and zero dollars had been
collected.In a conversation several months ago, DCA Deputy Director Reichel
Everhart sounded shocked to learn that the PFB had no written guidelines. She
promised to speak with PFB Chief DeLuna and get back to this reporter promptly.
Since then, Everhart has been unavailable for comment and has not fulfilled her
promise.The Bureau appears to be operating under a cloak of secrecy and provides
little transparency as to its functioning. Issues of concern include that
agency’s negligence in advising
  complainants that their complaints were closed. Several complainants, including
Joe Quattrochi and Gina Rilke, were surprised to learn that their complaints
were closed over a year ago as they were never so informed. Nor will the agency
provide the file of the complaint, including any scrap of work product, to the
complainant upon request. It’s all hush-hush.The Professional Fiduciaries
Bureau was created by an act of the Legislature in 2006, following an
investigative series into conservatorship abuse, published in the Los Angeles
Times. The abuses detailed in the series, “Guardians for Profit—When a
Family Matter becomes a Business,”
  produced a public outcry and the Legislature swung into action, passing the
Omnibus Conservatorship Reform Act of 2006.The Bureau’s funding was
subsequently line item vetoed for two years in a row by Governor Schwarzenegger,
and thus only opened its doors for business in late 2008.The Bureau is tasked
with holding public meetings four times a year. Per its own website, there have
been no public meetings in eight months, since October of last year. Activists
and conservatorship abuse victims became interested in these public meetings and
started to attend them last year. The meetings were then apparently
discontinued.Former Assemblyman Dave Jones was a primary author of the
legislation which created the Bureau. Jones, now California Insurance
  Commissioner, has declined to reply to questions as to what has happened to his
brainchild. Speaking under conditions of anonymity, Jones’ staffer angrily
suggested that such questions were
inappropriate._________________________________Janet Phelan is an investigative
journalist whose articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The San
Bernardino County Sentinel, The Santa Monica Daily Press, The Long Beach Press
Telegram, Oui Magazine and other regional and national publications. Janet
addresses the heated subject of adult conservatorship,
  revealing shocking information about the relationships between courts and shady
financial consultants. She also covers issues relating to international nuclear
weapon treaties. Her poetry has been published in Gambit, Libera, Applezaba
Review, Nausea One and other magazines. Her first book, The Hitler Poems, was
published in 2005. She currently resides abroad.You may browse through her
articles (and poetry) at janetphelan.com


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Vinny Eastwood tackles Jew-bashing on American Freedom Radio. 












http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMsvcf_Qo7c
 
Barbara Hartwell and Janet Phelan guest. 

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AayTjRRiqTY

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

http://reason.com/archives/2012/06/09/bans-on-feeding-homeless-have-always-bee

Bans on Feeding the Homeless Are Discriminatory and Unconstitutional
In parks around the world, people are free to feed themselves, pigeons,
squirrels, and even rats. So why are local governments increasingly
preventing them from feeding other people?

Baylen Linnekin | June 9, 2012

In 1921, in Boston, an activist named Urbain Ledoux—going by the moniker
Mr. Zero—happened on an idea to help unemployed veterans and their
families. Ledoux, leader of what he called the "Church of the
Unemployed," would "auction" off the veterans in public parks. He hoped
that the stark image of such auctions—which brought to mind horrific
slave auctions that some still alive at the time would have witnessed in
person—would galvanize the public and help find people work.

In Boston, where one such auction took place on the Common over several
days, Ledoux and the veterans were overwhelmed by public support:

      Small sums of cash were given daily; free food was delivered by
restaurants and bakeries; an experienced cobbler set up shop to repair
the shoes of the jobless; several women volunteered to sew and clean the
bed linens; furniture was donated; a local dentist announced that he
would take care of any toothaches that occurred among the unemployed;
and.... scores, perhaps hundreds, of Ledoux's followers obtained jobs as
a result of the auctions.

Ledoux and his supporters met a different fate in New York City—at least
initially. City police refused to let Ledoux's group serve food. When
his supporters served food in Bryant Park, police moved in and beat
"forty jobless men who had gathered about six elderly women distributing
sandwiches, cakes and crullers in the park." The American Civil
Liberties Union launched a complaint.

And, though Ledoux stepped into the spotlight from time to time, this
was largely the end of his auctioneering days.

Ninety years later, however, the issues raised by Ledoux are again
making headlines and prompting litigation, even if the tactics of
volunteers, police, and regulators may be a bit less stark.

Starting in about 2006, several cities began arresting, fining, and
otherwise oppressing private individuals and nonprofits that feed the
homeless and less fortunate. A 2006 NPR report referred to a Las Vegas
ban on feeding the homeless—a ban challenged by the Nevada state ACLU
chapter—as "among the first of its kind in the country."

The suit went on for four years. As the Nevada ACLU recounted in
announcing a pending settlement between the group and the city in 2010:

      The City began ticketing good Samaritans who shared food with more
than 24 people, under the belief that giving food to people already in
the public park violated statutes requiring permits for gatherings of 25
or more people. When the ACLU of Nevada took issue with this
interpretation of permit laws, the City took a more direct approach: it
explicitly outlawed the sharing of food with anyone who looked poor.

Terms of the Las Vegas settlement require that police may no longer ban
and ticket those feeding or being fed "unless there is evidence of
unlawful activity, and in those cases a valid arrest must be made or a
citation issued." Which is as it should be.

Still, in spite of the suit and settlement, feeding bans like the one
initiated in Las Vegas appear to be growing in number around the country.

I blogged at Hit & Run last summer about a ban in Orlando—the first of
the most recent spate of such big-city laws. In that case, members of
the anti-war group Food Not Bombs had been arrested for feeding the
homeless in Orlando city parks.

Since then, other cities have followed suit. In New York City, for
example, Mayor Michael Bloomberg banned food donations to the homeless
earlier this year "because the city can’t assess their salt, fat and
fiber content." Those familiar with Mayor Bloomberg are likely only
surprised here that Hizzoner missed adding sugar to the list of terribles.

In a March 2011 piece on a proposed ban on feeding the homeless in
Houston, Take Part writer Clare Leschin-Hoar noted that the city's ban
would have added a panoply of requirements for feeding the homeless
there, including limiting food service to three city parks and forcing
groups to "register with the city; complete food handlers training
courses; prepare food in licensed kitchens; and require a cleanup plan
following food service." The ordinance ultimately passed by Houston is a
slightly less onerous (though still terrible) one that simply "requires
permission from the city government before serving food in city parks."

As it was in Mr. Zero's day, choosing to crack down on those who
volunteer to feed the homeless is a bad idea. It's an even worse idea to
seize on at a time when lots of people are hungry (see here, here, or
here), food pantries are stretched beyond the breaking point, and
increasing numbers of Americans are subsisting on food stamps.

Thankfully, the latest ban to take effect—Philadelphia's, which the
aptly named Mayor Michael Nutter implemented just last week—has drawn a
legal challenge.

As the Nevada ACLU did in Las Vegas—and the national ACLU did in New
York City in the case of the police beating of Ledoux's supporters—the
Pennsylvania ACLU chapter finds itself challenging "burdensome
restrictions on outdoor feeding programs."

While Mayor Nutter claims the purpose of the ban is to push all
"homeless feedings indoors where it is supposedly safer," the state ACLU
counters that the ban was put in place "not to protect the health of the
homeless but instead to protect the city's image in a tourist area."

The suit claims the ban violates the Free Exercise and Free Speech
Clauses of the First Amendment and Pennsylvania's Religious Freedom
Protection Act. While no doubt true, to those claims I would add that
the ban violates the Freedom of Assembly, a First Amendment right that
my own research has demonstrated is inextricably intertwined with the
provision of food and drink (a fact I noted when quoted in the Leschin
piece).

A religious group may have separate First Amendment rights to feed the
homeless as part of its protected religious mission, just as a group
like Food Not Bombs may have separate free-speech rights if feeding the
homeless is part of a larger "bake sales versus bombers" protest. But
every American enjoys assembly rights separate and distinct from any
religious or speech rights—something the Pennsylvania ACLU should make
clear here. After all, the U.S. Constitution guarentees the right to
assemble peaceably for any reason, while the Pennsylvania Declaration of
Rights guarantees that "citizens have a right in a peaceable manner to
assemble together for their common good."

Restrictions on feeding the homeless are unconstitutional,
discriminatory, and wrongheaded. Courts should force cities to
acknowldge that members of civil society have a right to help those in
need, and that those in need have a right to obtain assistance outside
of government channels.

Baylen J. Linnekin, a lawyer, is executive director of Keep Food Legal,
a Washington, D.C. nonprofit that advocates in favor of food freedom—the
right to grow, raise, produce, buy, sell, cook, eat, and drink the foods
of our own choosing.



--
Dan Clore

New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/3tyj9cq
Lord We˙rdgliffe & 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 Popular Education Project to Free the Cuban 5
www.freethecuban5.com
freethecuban5@...
Free the Cuban 5 Hotline: 718-601-4751
 


FORWARD OUT TO ALL YOUR CONTACTS!
 
Cuban 5 Father's Day Call-in Week!
 
 
The Popular Education Project to Free the Cuban 5 is asking all freedom loving
people to call President Obama the week of Father’s Day to ask him to free the
Cuban 5; five U.S. held political prisoners incarcerated for 13 years for
fighting against terrorism in Cuba and the United States.
 
Remind President Obama that for the past 13 years these
innocent men have been separated from their families and friends. Tell him that
he has the power to reunite these men with their loved ones!
 Call every day! Ask your friends and family members to call in as well!
Thousands of messages will let President Obama know that there is a mass
movement calling for the freedom of these five men!
 Make your call the week of Mon. June 11th through
Sun. June 17th(FATHER’S DAY)!  
Call President Obama at 202-456-1111!
 Sample Script (optional):
This message is for President Obama, I ask that you use your
executive power to free the Cuban 5. For 13 years, the Cuban 5 have been
unjustly incarcerated for protecting their homeland Cuba and the United States
from terrorist actions.
They have the support of various reputable actors, academics and civil rights
leaders, such as: Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte, Cindy Sheehan and Angela Davis.
As well as the support of thousands of people throughout the United States and
the world.
Only you have the power to set these men free! Please end this long standing
injustice by sending these men home.
Thank you!

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

SUPPORT THE VENCEREMOS BRIGADE!

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

A demonstration will take place at noon on Thursday, June 21, in
  front of San Bernardino Courthouse, located at 351 N. Arrowhead in San
Bernardino, California. This action is planned to draw attention to the
breakdown of the rule of law in the courtroom
  of Judge Michael Welch, probate judge for SB County. The action is timed to
coincide with a hearing in the Conservatorship of Lois Risse, wherein the
conservator is seeking to overturn a twenty- eight year old deed of sale in
order to return the property into the conservatorship, so that the conservator
can get a reverse mortgage to pay for her services.
Clearly, if a deed of sale, executed decades ago and duly recorded, can be
overturned because the seller is now under a conservatorship and the conservator
wishes access to the property value for her own enrichment, then no property,
anywhere, is safe and no deed of sale can be considered final.All concerned
about the breakdown of rule of law and also issues relevant to the economy and
property are invited to attend. Bring your picket sign! Tell your friends! The
hearing on petition to determine title will take place at 1:30 in
Department  S16P.  Demonstrators are encouraged to attend the hearing.
For further information, please call Janet at 541 708-3534.

ReplyReply AllMove...


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

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

http://c4ss.org/content/10683
New Rules, High Costs and Big Business
by David S. D'Amato
Jun 18, 2012

Surveying the new JOBS Act, legislation with the ostensible purpose of
aiding “emerging growth companies,” the Washington Post’s Rob Kaplan and
Tom Voekler contend that the act’s biggest impact will be on the
formation of “small and mid-sized business capital.”

Observing an important difference between “the largest companies” and
“Main Street” businesses, the Post writers contend that historically,
“for a host of reasons related to expenses and regulatory burdens,” only
Big Business could access Wall Street. The importance and extent of
their argument is seldom fully appreciated in political and economic
discourse.

The impact of the “regulatory burdens” they allude to on the shape and
character of the American economy is tremendous and probably isn’t what
most people think it is. Correspondingly, the free market isn’t actually
the glistering Holy Grail of Big Business daydreams.

Rather, freed markets — made up of voluntary trades and associations —
represent the ideal mechanism for ensuring both that workers are
rewarded in just proportion to their labor, and that big business’s
costs aren’t shifted onto the people at large. Market anarchists are
thus pro-market without necessarily being pro-business, distinguishing
between the coercive privilege-saturated capitalism of today and a
genuine state of economic freedom.

One of the best ways for big business to employ the power of the total
state to destroy competition (aside from outright theft of land and raw
materials) is to raise the overall cost of doing business. Though it is
perhaps counterintuitive given the widespread myth that corporations
only ever want to avoid government regulation, they very often welcome
it as a way to cleanse the market of competition from below.

In The Search for Order, historian Robert H. Wiebe noted the belief of
“private leaders” “that they could not function without the assistance
of the government.” With the more blatant forms of bribery and payola no
longer viable, Wiebe argues, big business now “wanted a powerful
government, but one whose authority stood at their disposal.” The result
is a “mutual dependence” between capital and the state, one that defines
what passes for “reform” in the United States.

Since giant, multinational corporations have the money and resources to
negotiate the flexuous passes of Washington bureaucracies, new legal and
regulatory burdens frequently function to bar competition, both actual
and potential.

The politically powerful represent the same ruling class as do the
economically powerful. They are, as a general rule and overall, not
rivalrous or antagonistic, but symbiotic, bound together by historical
and cultural factors as well as common interests.

Forms of competition that exist (or would exist) outside of the
formalized, corporate economy and that would allow people to do for
themselves what they now have to pay powerful companies to do for them
are fundamentally dangerous to the dominion of the ruling class.

These alternatives must therefore be legislated away as out of step with
“consumer safety” concerns, an untenable scare tactic if ever there was
one given the regular catastrophes of the present economic paradigm.
Everything from building your own home to starting a small business out
of it using knowledge and things you already have is treated as a threat
to the economic structure of dispossession falsely associated with a
free market.

Reducing corporate dominance within contemporary society is not and
cannot be a matter of adding new rules to an already convoluted tangle
of statutes and regulations. Instead it requires abolishing the
pervasive privilege that characterizes today’s system, enabling free
people to engage in whatever peaceful activities they choose within
their own sphere of sovereignty and discretion.

--
Dan Clore

New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/3tyj9cq
Lord We˙rdgliffe & 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://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/06/18-10
Monday, June 18, 2012 by CEPR.net
Republicans Love Big Government (So Long as It Serves Big Business)
by Dean Baker

Last week Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent picked up on a blogpost
from Democracy editor Michael Tomasky about how liberals should be
touting the merits of "government." That is a great idea, if the point
is to advance the conservatives' agenda.

It is astounding how happy liberals are to work for the right by
implying that conservatives somehow just want to leave markets to
themselves whereas the liberals want to bring in the pointy-headed
bureaucrats to tell people what they should do. This view is, of course,
nonsense. Pick an issue, any issue, and you will almost invariably find
the right actively pushing for a big role for government.

However, for conservatives the goal is not ensuring a decent standard of
living for the bulk of the population. Rather the goal is ensuring that
money is redistributed upward. And, of course, the conservatives are
smart enough not to own up to their use of the government.

Just to take a few easy ones, why would any market-oriented opponent of
big government support the existence of too-big-to-fail banks (TBTF)?
These TBTF banks operate with an implicit subsidy from the government.
Lenders expect the government to step in to back up these banks debt if
they fail, as happened on a massive basis in 2008. As a result, TBTF
banks can borrow money at lower interest rates than would be possible in
a free market.

The amount of money at stake is substantial, possibly more than $60
billion a year. This is more money than is at issue with the Bush tax
cuts to the wealthy. This $60 billion is money that is redistributed
from the rest of us to the biggest banks in the country, their top
executives and their shareholders, all courtesy of big government.

To take another easy example, drug patents raise the price of
prescription drugs by close to $270 billion a year above their free
market price. This is roughly five Bush tax cuts to the wealthy.

Patents are government-granted monopolies. Since prescription drugs
often are necessary for a person's health or even life, people will pay
almost anything for a drug if they can afford it or can get their
insurance to pick up the tab.

Patents imply very big government since the government will imprison
anyone who produces a drug without the patent holder's consent. In
recent years the big government has been actively working to extend
Pfizer and Merck's patent monopolies to the rest of the world through
NAFTA, CAFTA and other recent trade deals.

"...the conservatives are smart enough not to own up to their use of the
government."

Patents are currently used as a mechanism to finance prescription drug
research. But there are other more efficient mechanisms, such as the
prize system suggested by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz.
Alternatively, we could simply increase and redirect the $30 billion in
public money that goes to support biomedical research each year through
the National Institutes of Health.

To take one other example of big government that conservatives support,
highly paid professionals (e.g. doctors, dentists and lawyers) use
licensing restrictions to limit both foreign and domestic competition.
While the government has been using the banner of "free trade" to drive
down the wages of manufacturing workers, it has simultaneously been
increasing the protection afforded doctors in order to prevent any
similar downward pressure on their wages.

If doctors in the United States were paid the same as doctors in Western
Europe, it would save us more than $80 billion a year. The big
government subsidy to doctors alone is close to two times the money
involved in Bush's tax cuts to the wealthy.

It is not difficult to find other examples where conservatives want a
big role for the government. Of course conservatives are opposed to big
government social programs. That is because their goal is redistributed
income upward rather than ensuring a decent standard of living for the
whole population. It's very good politics for the right to equate big
government with big government social programs, and incredibly foolish
for progressives to help them.

The issue here is not in any real sense the size of government or its
impact on the economy. A government that diverts an extra $270 billion a
year to the pharmaceutical industry by enforcing patent monopolies on
prescription drugs is every bit as "big" as a government that taxes an
additional $270 billion a year and hands it to the drug industry.

It is totally understandable that the right would try to conceal the
massive extent to which it relies on government to redistribute income
upward. It is very hard to figure out why the country's leading
progressive thinkers want to help them.
© 2012 Center for Economic & Policy Research
Dean Baker

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy
Research (CEPR). He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How
the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer and the more
recently published Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of The Bubble
Economy. He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the
media's coverage of economic issues.

--
Dan Clore

New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/3tyj9cq
Lord We˙rdgliffe & 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

[Title changed from "Noam Chomsky on the 'Kill List'".--DC]

http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/noam-chomsky-on-the-kill-list/
Noam Chomsky Comments on the “Kill List”
June 14, 2012

Noam Chomsky's thoughts on politics that are stranger than fiction and
too dark for parody.

By Ed Winstead

Guernica Editor in Chief Joel Whitney tracked down Noam Chomsky to get
his opinion on the President’s recently revealed “kill list.”

“The kill list and associated antics are too much for me. I’ll have to
fall back on Mark Twain’s frustration when he tried to satirize the
much-lauded war criminal General Funston. He gave up. He said that
Funston is satire incarnated,” said Chomsky.

You heard it here first: Nothing says Funston like killing an American
citizen with a drone.

Ed Winstead is an editorial intern at Guernica.


--
Dan Clore

New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/3tyj9cq
Lord We˙rdgliffe & 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"

Jim Fetzer hosts The Real Deal at 6 pm ET. I will be his guest, discussing the
meaning and impetus behind the 2001 anthrax attacks.
Go to revereradio.net to listen live.
Janet Phelan

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

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

https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/06/25-4
Monday, June 25, 2012 by The Guardian/UK
Yes, There Is an Alternative to Capitalism: Mondragon Shows the Way
Why are we told a broken system that creates vast inequality is the only
choice? Spain's amazing co-op is living proof otherwise
by Richard Wolff

There is no alternative ("Tina") to capitalism?Dani Martinez, innovation
director at Orbea bicycles, part of Mondragon Co-operative Corporation,
in Mallabia, 2011. (Photograph: Vincent West/Westphoto for the Guardian)

Really? We are to believe, with Margaret Thatcher, that an economic
system with endlessly repeated cycles, costly bailouts for financiers
and now austerity for most people is the best human beings can do?
Capitalism's recurring tendencies toward extreme and deepening
inequalities of income, wealth, and political and cultural power require
resignation and acceptance – because there is no alternative?

I understand why such a system's leaders would like us to believe in
Tina. But why would others?

Of course, alternatives exist; they always do. Every society chooses –
consciously or not, democratically or not – among alternative ways to
organize the production and distribution of the goods and services that
make individual and social life possible.

Modern societies have mostly chosen a capitalist organization of
production. In capitalism, private owners establish enterprises and
select their directors who decide what, how and where to produce and
what to do with the net revenues from selling the output. This small
handful of people makes all those economic decisions for the majority of
people – who do most of the actual productive work. The majority must
accept and live with the results of all the directorial decisions made
by the major shareholders and the boards of directors they select. This
latter also select their own replacements.

Capitalism thus entails and reproduces a highly undemocratic
organization of production inside enterprises. Tina believers insist
that no alternatives to such capitalist organizations of production
exist or could work nearly so well, in terms of outputs, efficiency, and
labor processes. The falsity of that claim is easily shown. Indeed, I
was shown it a few weeks ago and would like to sketch it for you here.

In May 2012, I had occasion to visit the city of Arrasate-Mondragon, in
the Basque region of Spain. It is the headquarters of the Mondragon
Corporation (MC), a stunningly successful alternative to the capitalist
organization of production.

MC is composed of many co-operative enterprises grouped into four areas:
industry, finance, retail and knowledge. In each enterprise, the co-op
members (averaging 80-85% of all workers per enterprise) collectively
own and direct the enterprise. Through an annual general assembly the
workers choose and employ a managing director and retain the power to
make all the basic decisions of the enterprise (what, how and where to
produce and what to do with the profits).

As each enterprise is a constituent of the MC as a whole, its members
must confer and decide with all other enterprise members what general
rules will govern MC and all its constituent enterprises. In short, MC
worker-members collectively choose, hire and fire the directors, whereas
in capitalist enterprises the reverse occurs. One of the co-operatively
and democratically adopted rules governing the MC limits top-paid
worker/members to earning 6.5 times the lowest-paid workers. Nothing
more dramatically demonstrates the differences distinguishing this from
the capitalist alternative organization of enterprises. (In US
corporations, CEOs can expect to be paid 400 times an average worker's
salary – a rate that has increased 20-fold since 1965.)

Given that MC has 85,000 members (from its 2010 annual report), its pay
equity rules can and do contribute to a larger society with far greater
income and wealth equality than is typical in societies that have chosen
capitalist organizations of enterprises. Over 43% of MC members are
women, whose equal powers with male members likewise influence gender
relations in society different from capitalist enterprises.

MC displays a commitment to job security I have rarely encountered in
capitalist enterprises: it operates across, as well as within,
particular cooperative enterprises. MC members created a system to move
workers from enterprises needing fewer to those needing more workers –
in a remarkably open, transparent, rule-governed way and with associated
travel and other subsidies to minimize hardship. This security-focused
system has transformed the lives of workers, their families, and
communities, also in unique ways.

The MC rule that all enterprises are to source their inputs from the
best and least-costly producers – whether or not those are also MC
enterprises – has kept MC at the cutting edge of new technologies.
Likewise, the decision to use of a portion of each member enterprise's
net revenue as a fund for research and development has funded impressive
new product development. R&D within MC now employs 800 people with a
budget over $75m. In 2010, 21.4% of sales of MC industries were new
products and services that did not exist five years earlier. In
addition, MC established and has expanded Mondragon University; it
enrolled over 3,400 students in its 2009-2010 academic year, and its
degree programs conform to the requirements of the European framework of
higher education. Total student enrollment in all its educational
centers in 2010 was 9,282.

The largest corporation in the Basque region, MC is also one of Spain's
top ten biggest corporations (in terms of sales or employment). Far
better than merely surviving since its founding in 1956, MC has grown
dramatically. Along the way, it added a co-operative bank, Caja Laboral
(holding almost $25bn in deposits in 2010). And MC has expanded
internationally, now operating over 77 businesses outside Spain. MC has
proven itself able to grow and prosper as an alternative to – and
competitor of – capitalist organizations of enterprise.

During my visit, in random encounters with workers who answered my
questions about their jobs, powers, and benefits as cooperative members,
I found a familiarity with and sense of responsibility for the
enterprise as a whole that I associate only with top managers and
directors in capitalist enterprises. The easy conversation (including
disagreement), for instance, between assembly-line workers and top
managers inside the Fagor washing-machine factory we inspected was
similarly remarkable.

Our MC host on the visit reminded us twice that theirs is a co-operative
business with all sorts of problems:

      "We are not some paradise, but rather a family of co-operative
enterprises struggling to build a different kind of life around a
different way of working."

Nonetheless, given the performance of Spanish capitalism these days –
25% unemployment, a broken banking system, and government-imposed
austerity (as if there were no alternative to that either) – MC seems a
welcome oasis in a capitalist desert.

Richard D Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He
is currently a visiting professor in the graduate program in
international affairs of the New School University, New York City.
Richard also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan.
His most recent book is Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic
Meltdown and What to Do About It (2009). A full archive of Richard's
work, including videos and podcasts, can be found on his site



--
Dan Clore

New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-unspeakable-and-others/6124911
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

"From the point of view of the defense of our society,
there only exists one danger -- that workers succeed in
speaking to each other about their condition and their
aspirations _without intermediaries_."
--Censor (Gianfranco Sanguinetti), _The Real Report on
the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy_

Tuesday, June 26, 2012Los Angeles Adult Protective Services Refuses to Accept
Reports of Conservator AbuseJanet Phelan
Activist Post

The elder abuse hotline runs round the clock in Los Angeles County. Twenty four
hours a day, a social worker is available to take incoming complaints of abuse
and neglect of elderly and dependent adults.

But not, apparently, if the abusing party is a conservator. During a call to APS
last Thursday, a complaint was made that a local conservator was neglecting and
medically abusing one of her wards in Pomona, California. The worker refused to
accept the complaint, stating that APS
  does not take complaints of conservator abuse.

The call was then transferred to the supervisor, Alejandro, who stated that the
Welfare and Institutions Code blocks Adult Protective Services from following up
on complaints of conservator abuse. Alejandro was unable to provide the relevant
WIC and promised to call back after researching it. He did not.

But both Alejandro and his social worker spoke in error. A call to the
Administrative Office of Los Angeles County Adult Protective Service today
confirmed that there are no legal guidelines that would inhibit APS from taking
and investigating a complaint of this nature. So why are the workers declining
to take these calls?

Calls to Administration got some action, but not very many answers. A call
center manager named Solomon assured me he would have someone take my complaint
and offered to transfer me back to the Call Center. I told him I would call over
myself, to
  see what sort of response another social worker provided.


A social worker named Diana answered the call and informed me that APS does not
investigate conservator abuse. She told me to contact the Public Guardian. When
pressed, she went off the line and when she returned she told me she had been
authorized to take this complaint. To wit:

In Redlands, a homeless man
  named Charlie Castle had been grabbed off the street by the mental health court
officers and placed under a mental health conservatorship. Private Conservator
Melodie Scott petitioned to take over as conservator and was so appointed. She
then put the individual into a long-term nursing home, which does not provide
mental health treatment, and proceeded to ignore him. The conservatorship
appears to have been conceived in a grave conflict of interest. The attorney --
Ryan Sheehan -- representing the conservatee is, in fact, Melodie Scott’s
lawyer. Castle has now been locked up for a year.

Apparently, Scott has a personal interest in Charles Castle. Castle recalls
that, a couple of months before he was grabbed, Scott approached him on the
street. She asked him if he would like her to “take care” of him. “No,
ma’am,” he replied emphatically.

I had been contacted by a friend of Charlie Castle, who believed that the
conservatorship had become abusive and that the conservator was neglecting
Castle. The friend, a local schoolteacher, provided a picture of Charlie as
someone who was intelligent, friendly and docile and, while somewhat eccentric,
was able to manage his own
  affairs. Other members of the community, including Ken Stein, a director at the
local YMCA and Pastor Craig at the Blessing Center, repeated the same
perceptions of Charlie Castle.

"Charlie loves his freedom," said Stein. "He marches to a different drummer and
to lock him up would be a death sentence."

According to the San Bernardino Court public records, Castle has never been
charged with a crime. According to all contacts, he does not pose a danger to
himself or others.

All the way up the bureaucratic food chain, agencies mandated to protect the
elderlyand disabled are backing off from allegations of conservator abuse.
 Reports to police go uninvestigated, District Attorneys pass on their
obligations to prosecute, the state agencies, such as the Professional
Fiduciaries Bureau in California seem to be paralyzed and unable to even reply
to incoming complaints. The State Attorney General’s offices refuses to
investigate, saying they don’t “do probate.”

Numerous complaints have been tendered to the FBI, from Florida to California.
The FBI has never launched an investigation. When the GAO submitted a recent
report on conservatorship abuse, the recommendations were seen to only eventuate
in an increase in the numbers of people under the thumb of the State, rather
than to address the inherent abuses that may occur when a person loses all his
rights and all access to his property. (Source)

Solomon has stated that he will institute better training among the social
workers at Los Angeles County APS. One can only hope so.


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

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

http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/06/u-s-marijuana-reform-may-have-hit-tipping-point/
U.S. Marijuana Reform May Have Hit Tipping Point
By Matthew Cardinale

ATLANTA, Georgia, Jun 26 2012 (IPS) - Over the last several years, many
U.S. states have quietly adopted laws decriminalising the possession of
marijuana or legalising medical marijuana.

Now, a flurry of activity over the last few weeks appears to signal that
– perhaps like same-sex marriage – marijuana policies have also reached
a tipping point in the U.S.

On Jun. 1, Connecticut legalised medical marijuana, making it the
seventeenth U.S. state, in addition to Washington, D.C., to do so.

On Jun. 12, Washington’s government announced four dispensaries eligible
to distribute medical marijuana in the nation’s capital. While medical
marijuana was already legal there, the dispensaries are new.
Related IPS Articles

      U.S. Allies Call for Drug Legalisation

Three days later, Rhode Island decriminalised small amounts of
marijuana, making it the fifteenth U.S. state to do so.

Also in early June, the governor of New York announced his support for
decriminalising marijuana in public view (currently it is decriminalised
in private view).

Legislation is pending in Illinois and New Hampshire, ballot initiatives
have already qualified in Colorado and Washington, and the collection of
signatures for additional ballot initiatives is also underway in several
states.

Under the Marijuana Policy Project’s “28 by 2014” campaign, the
organisation seeks to legalize medical marijuana in more than a majority
of U.S. states by 2014 (half of the 50 U.S. states would be 25).

“For medical marijuana, I think the prospects are pretty good” in terms
of reaching the goal, Morgan Fox, communications manager for MPP, told IPS.

“If there is the same activity next year, I don’t think it will be a
stretch at all to say 28 by 2014,” Fox said.

Fox noted there are important differences between medical marijuana laws
and decriminalisation.

“Decriminalisation is far, far different that a medical marijuana law,
in which there is a regulated system to provide medical marijuana to
patients,” Fox said. “Decriminalisation doesn’t have to do with the
supply side, it only deals with small possession. It doesn’t affect the
market.”

Colorado and Washington, which both already have medical marijuana laws
and decriminalisation of possession of small amounts, are considering
legislation to take it a step further, which is to tax and regulate
marijuana like alcohol or cigarettes, meaning that it could be sold in
stores.

“We have reached a tipping point – more than half of Americans think
marijuana should be treated similar to alcohol or tobacco. By regulating
it, we’ll be able to ensure criminals won’t control the marijuana
market,” Fox said.

Indeed, recent polls by Gallup and Rasmussen have found more than a
majority of U.S. residents support the taxation and regulation of marijuana.

One-third of the U.S. population currently lives in a state where
medical marijuana is legal.

Meanwhile, more legislative initiatives for medical marijuana are still
pending in Illinois and New Hampshire.

In New Hampshire, the legislature passed medical marijuana legislation,
although the bill was vetoed earlier this month by Gov. John Lynch, a
Democrat.

Advocates there are currently working to find two more state senators to
support the bill; at least two more will be necessary to override the veto.

For one co-sponsor of the bill, the issue is not just political. It’s
personal. State Rep. Evalyn Merrick, a Democrat from Lancaster, New
Hampshire, who suffers from a type of blood cancer called multiple
myeloma, credits marijuana with saving her life.

“I was given a short time to live if I didn’t have a bone marrow
transplant,” Merrick told IPS.

“I had to take heavy-duty chemotherapy for three straight months in
preparation for a transplant. They kill my immune system, they go in and
kill as much of the cancer as they can, they harvest clean cells, then
they gave me back my cells. The hope is my body will accept and re-grow
its immune system,” Merrick said.

“The chemo is so intense. The transplant was successful. But the impact
on my digestive system, I couldn’t eat. I started starving to death. I
could not eat, I could not drink,” she said.

A family friend suggested that Merrick try smoking marijuana to
stimulate her appetite, as no traditional pharmaceuticals were working.

“My husband (a doctor) had everything to lose by introducing marijuana
into our home. Within 10 minutes, it seemed almost instantaneous, I
asked for something to drink,” she said. “My body was like, hey, we know
what this (water) is. We need this.

“It’s time to stop denying our sickest citizens what I feel and other
people know is a life-saving medicine. We have recognised since the
beginning of time the value of this natural medicine,” Merrick said.

“We have to be able to make it available. We have to look beyond the
political issues, because quite honestly, I feel it’s no longer a
scientific controversy – I think it’s still, inappropriately, a
political controversy.”


--
Dan Clore

New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-unspeakable-and-others/6124911
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

All laws are good, to those who draw a salary for
their enforcement.
-- Clark Ashton Smith

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

http://www.dw.de/dw/article/0,,16048200,00.html
Occupy author examines archeology of debt

Few books have provoked the kind of media hype, discussion and praise
that David Graeber's "'Debt: The Last 5,000 Years" has in the past few
weeks. DW looks at the movement and the man behind the book.

He doesn't stay in one place for long. One minute David Graeber is in
London, where he teaches anthropology at Goldsmith College, the next
he's in Frankfurt at Blockupy, then in Cologne and Berlin for book
releases, next stop New York. It's no wonder that Graeber is so busy:
He's published three books in 40 days.

The best-known of the three, "Debt: The First 5,000 Years," was
described by journalist and political talk show host Maybritt Illner and
culture presenter Dieter Moor as "perhaps the most important book of the
year." With the three publications, the man whose slogan is "We are the
99 percent" - now deeply ingrained in the system-critical Occupy
movement - has managed to attract more attention than any of his
fellow-campaigners before him.

He's an activist, anarchist and anthropologist who appears in all the
most influential feuilletons. But what does Graeber have to say for himself?

Chronicling the history of debt

"Debt: The Last 5,000 Years" is a radical look at the roots of the
current economic crisis

In 400 pages, Graeber chronicles the history of debt and, with that, the
history of humanity. He begins the book with a slick, but provocative
sentence: "Debt doesn't have to be repaid."

He then goes on to describe the economic systems of various indigenous
groups and the invention of coinage, finally landing in the present. The
assumption that barter trade was initially in existence before it was
simplified with the introduction of coinage and later the credit system
is, he concludes, idiocy.

Credit systems were in existence long before the invention of money.
People who live together in a community are constantly lending things
and helping each another, so everyone owes a debt in one way or another.
But these debts have nothing to do with money, argues Graeber.

Graeber shows that debt has a moral dimension. He finds it remarkable
that the moral imperative that debt must be repaid is now considered
more important than other moral and ethical obligations. Why else could
it be that governments in poor countries prioritize debt repayments over
the basic nutritional requirement of their citizens? Debt, says Graeber,
is a moral principle merely enforcing the power of the ruling classes,
leading to the repression of the masses.

This system can't function forever. When too many people are in debt,
uprisings and revolutions occur. The solution? Debt cancellation, says
Graeber.

Success story

FAZ editor Frank Schirrmacher described Graeber's book as a "revelation"

This demand is in keeping with Graeber's style, having in the past
represented a number of radical positions. He has no allegiance to any
political party, calls himself an anarchist, is a member of the union
Industrial Workers of the World and has researched power and the meaning
of history and slavery in Madagascar. Graeber taught at Yale until 2007
when his contract was controversially not renewed. Critics believe the
decision was politically motivated.

The 51-year-old American has secured himself a place on the bestseller
list of Germany's prominent news magazine Der Spiegel, reaching fourth
place last month. The success story of the book began in fall 2011 with
the English edition. The editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
Frank Schirrmacher, wrote that the book was "a revelation because the
author has shown that one is no longer obliged to react in the system of
apparent economic rationality." This review made Graeber's risqué theses
socially acceptable.

But the media hype really began when the German translation of the book
was published in May, in conjunction with the release of Graeber's
"Inside Occupy," a monograph about the Occupy movement. The book reveals
much about Graeber's political background: He was involved in the Occupy
protests as an organizer and follower right from the start, while
simultaneously analyzing, promoting and shaping the movement.

All of the major German newspapers were talking about Graeber -
Süddeutsche Zeitung, TAZ, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt,
Der Spiegel and Stern to name just a few. Most critiques of the book
were benevolent. Graeber's theories were described as brilliant,
illuminating, exciting. Graeber translated between worlds, between
critics and supporters of the system, between academics and the media.
He presented his complex theories in bite-size, easy to understand
sections. He interrupts analyses to build strands of thought, while
still remaining entertaining.

Playing by the rules

The media have called Graeber the "brains" behind the Occupy movement

But it's not just the content of the book. It's Graeber, the person. The
idea of the "99 percent" in the slogan "We are the 99 percent" comes
from him. And even though he himself is one of the 99 percent, he knows
the language of the one percent. He also knows the unwritten rules of
getting heard in public.

On Maybritt Ilmer's talk show, Graeber was smartly dressed in a black
suit-jacket. It was his 67th interview with the German press. Still, he
remained polite, succinct and never looked bored. As radical as his
thinking may be, his appearances are always in keeping with convention.
He's well aware of how much conformity is necessary to inspire interest
in non-conformist thinking. He's no madcap revolutionary; rather, he
fits into the protocol of prime-time programming.

Above all, he's a figurehead for the so-called 99 percent. The media
have bestowed a range of attributes upon him, from "mentor" to "brains"
behind the Occupy movement, but also the moniker "intellectual superstar."

Reading his "Inside Occupy," one thing is clear: The last thing that
Occupy wants is a leader. "Direct Action," basic democracy and no
hierarchy are central to the movement. But Graeber is already easily
available for the media. Just as he explains the history of debt, he can
also easily formulate what Occupy is all about. Slogans such as "We
explain why the system doesn't work" are more likely to be taken
seriously when they come from the mouth of a Yale professor than from a
20-year-old with a hoodie and dreadlocks.

In the meantime, the media hype has trailed off, the financial system in
still in place, and the reluctance to cancel debt hasn't changed. The
revolution hasn't happened yet. Will it take another 5,000 years to
rethink the financial system?

Author: Ruth Krause / hw
Editor: Kate Bowen



--
Dan Clore

New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/3tyj9cq
Lord We˙rdgliffe & 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"

This is an 8 minute Real News video report dated June 25:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tBm0mxw7kg&feature=em-uploademail

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

6/22/2012
How Far Will They Go To Stop Obama?

	 If you take the second "m" out of the word, "Mormon," you get…Romney.  I have
heard commentators comparing Romney to the 1948 Republican candidate, Thomas
Dewey.  That is not a very good comparison.  Dewey had an imperious disposition.
Who could you compare Romney to?  "Calling Dr.Frankenstein! Paging
Dr.Frankenstein! Need an analogy for this sentence!"  If Dr. Frankenstein were
to combine the speaking style of Hubert Humphrey with the personality of
DubbaYa, you'd get Romney.  After observing Romney on T.V., many people,
including myself, would swear that Romney just came from the dentist's office
following a substantial dose of Nitrous Oxide.  The goofy fool is always
laughing!  Why is that?!  A normal person knows when it's appropriate to laugh
or to remain serious.  Not Romney!  Is he suffering from sort of mania?
	 Over the years, I've noticed that people in cults are always laughing.  Is it
because Romney is Mormon?  Are they a cult?  I don't know!  Some major movie
stars are into Scientology.  Madonna is into Kabbalah, for Christ shake!  But
the public seems to overlook these facts.  It may be that he belongs to two
cults:  the Republican Party and the Mormon Church.  Hey!  That would make me a
laughing fool—belonging to two cults at once!
	 Sorry about being hung up on this laughing thing, but you have to wonder. 
There are sadists who laugh at people who are suffering from pain.  Old villains
in vintage Hollywood movies or comic books are always laughing.  "Ah, ha!
Batman! You will die! Hee! Hee! Ha! HA!" says The Joker.  Glen Beck used to do
that shit.
	 Is Romney's laughter voluntary or involuntary?  Ask any degreed psychologist
who'll confirm that laughing is sometimes used as a defense mechanism.  For a
villain in a comic book, laughter means he is invincible.  Bullies, after they
beat the shit out of you and you're lying on the ground, bleeding, will point at
you and laugh.  A laughing fool is obnoxious and right wing clowns know this. 
The right wing's debating method is to call their opponent a coward.  They will
elicit your anger and, should you display it, they'll accuse you of being
unhinged!
	 So what is this laughing shit all about?  To intimidate you and make you feel
small!  They laugh, not because they are happy; they laugh because they are
sadistic.  The left should not react; they should just be stoic and that will
drive them NUTS!
	 So, will the U.S. public fall for a fake, cavalier facade?  The so-called
liberal news media is pro-Romney.  CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN all support Romney. 
So does Fox News.  So who's the "lame stream" now?!  Fox News is part of it. 
How about the public?  The entirely phony polling machine will tell you that the
race is tight, but that is greatly misleading.  So, will perspicacity prevail? 
Hell, YEAH it will!  I doubt the public at large will fall for another Bush.  If
we live in an ethical nation, Obama has this election in the bag.
	 But we don't.
	 How far will Obama's adversaries go to stop him?  One way is massive election
fraud.  Going after the Attorney General is a lame tactic.  Demanding poor
blacks present government-issued I.D. to vote is unconstitutional.  Dissolving
ACORN will NOT stop people from voting.  So what will work?  Having Republican
operatives working as election workers could succeed.  Sabotaging election
ballots could work.
	 Then, there is the unspeakable.
	 I shutter to think it.

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

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/07/02-8
Monday, July 2, 2012 by Common Dreams
A New Era for Worker Ownership?
by Gar Alperovitz

The workers of the just-formed New Era Windows cooperative in
Chicago—the same workers who sat in and forced Serious Energy to back
down on a hasty shutdown of their Goose Island plant a few months ago,
and famously occupied the same factory for six days in December 2008—not
only are putting together a bold plan for worker ownership, they are
likely to move the entire subject into national attention, thereby
spurring others to follow on. Though they have a powerful start, if the
past is any guide, they will need all the help they can get—financial as
well as political.

I was one of the architects of an attempt to establish a worker-owned
steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio in the late 1970s—a plan that began with
powerful intentions, the financial support of the Carter administration,
and the backing of religious and political leaders in the state of Ohio
and nationally. The plan was on-track, including a promised $100 million
in loan guarantees from the Carter Administration—until, somehow, those
opposed to the plan sidetracked the effort, with the promised money
disappearing conveniently just after the fall 1978 elections had passed.

The Chicago workers have a much, much greater chance of success. They
have the skills they need to run a manufacturing business. They have a
good market—an energy efficient window is a good friend in a Chicago
winter, after all—and heavy, fragile, made-to-order windows are much
less vulnerable to global competition than other products. And, thanks
to their inspiring struggle to keep their jobs, they can count on a
significant amount of public support.

They also have the backing of the United Electrical workers (UE): an
independent and fiercely democratic union; and the support of the
Working World, a non-profit that has helped make hundreds of loans to
Argentina’s thriving network of “recuperated” worker-owned businesses.

Above all, their own track record of bold and brave action to defend
their jobs is promising in itself, and stirring in terms of public
response: many more people are rooting for this company than your
average small manufacturing startup.

The workers are taking this very seriously; after all, it’s their
livelihoods on the line. For the past few months, they have been engaged
in intensive trainings in cooperative management, building the skills
they’ll need to not just make windows, but market their product and
secure and fulfill contracts. They’ve been scraping together a thousand
dollars apiece to buy into the newly formed cooperative. And they’ve
been exploring city programs—like a Midway airport noise insulation
project and a city-wide energy retrofit effort that could generate
significant contracts.

... cooperatives empower workers and communities while offering an
alternative to the ownership of the 1%...

Still, this is a tough business. If there is one lesson from the early
days of worker ownership attempts it is that building a powerful local
and national support group of public figures, nonprofit organizations,
national labor and religious leaders and others can be of great and
unexpected importance. It can help keep the story alive at critical
times, and also help create and sustain a market. (Churches, for
instance, buy a lot of windows, as do many other nonprofit
organizations.) As the workers in Chicago deal with the myriad of tasks
involved in raising money, negotiating with their former employer,
Serious Energy, to purchase the factory’s equipment, and restarting
production (not to mention learning how to democratically manage their
own workplace!), building local and national alliances to support their
work is a critical task that can be taken on by allies.

What’s happening in Chicago is part of a very important national trend;
many parts of the country are looking towards worker ownership as a way
to root jobs in the communities that need them. In Cleveland, for
instance a community foundation, with the support of local universities
and hospitals, is helping create a network of interlinked green worker
cooperatives as part of an economic development strategy designed to
help lift devastated neighborhoods out of poverty. With an industrial
scale laundry and a solar installation and weatherization firm already
operational, and a 3.5 acre urban greenhouse scheduled to launch in a
few months, the Cleveland model is one that many other cities—including
Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Washington D.C.—are actively exploring today.
Crucially, the model developed in Cleveland looks beyond the individual
worker-owned company to understand how a community can support the
businesses and workers that in turn support it: in this case, the
purchasing power of the city’s largest so-called “anchor institutions”
is mobilized to develop worker-owned jobs in the very neighborhoods
these institutions call home.

Moreover there is now a quiet trend in the union movement—away from
disinterest in new forms of ownership and towards positive assistance.
The United Steelworkers, working jointly with Mondragon (the 80-thousand
member strong complex of cooperatives in the Basque country), have taken
the lead in proposing and developing “union coops” which will combine
worker ownership and the collective bargaining process. The Service
Employees union (SEIU) has taken some interesting steps here as well,
with a worker-owned and unionized laundry slated to launch in Pittsburgh
this year, and a groundbreaking partnership with New York City’s
Cooperative Home Care Associates, the largest worker cooperative in the
United States. Also notable is a growing sophistication among unions
regarding a far more common form of U.S. worker ownership, the ESOP or
Employee Stock Ownership Plan (which involve 10 million workers): unions
like the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) are taking a strong
role in making sure workers’ interests are protected as companies
convert to worker ownership.

The Chicago workers’ effort is important, not only on its own terms, but
as a beacon of hope and an opportunity for many others to learn about a
building an economy that perhaps will one day take us past ownership by
the 1% to a very different democratic model. It’s time for
others—individuals, groups, activists, churches, non-profit
organizations—to do what we can to help make sure they succeed.
Gar Alperovitz

Gar Alperovitz is the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at
the University of Maryland and co-founder of the Democracy
Collaborative. Among his most recent books are America Beyond Capitalism
and (with Lew Daly) Unjust Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common
Inheritance and Why We Should Take It Back.



--
Dan Clore

New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-unspeakable-and-others/6124911
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

"From the point of view of the defense of our society,
there only exists one danger -- that workers succeed in
speaking to each other about their condition and their
aspirations _without intermediaries_."
--Censor (Gianfranco Sanguinetti), _The Real Report on
the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy_

The Popular Education Project to Free the Cuban 5
www.freethecuban5.com
freethecuban5@...
Free the Cuban 5 Hotline: 718-601-4751

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

The hum of the electric heater
  is the only sound tonight
  drowning out the lapping waves
  and the foghorns.
  Soon we will hook up
  the de-salinators
  unless the fish are floating
  belly up.
  Then, there will be no point.

  We have headed into dark waters.
  Are they unmapped?
  They are not on any grid
  in any book I have ever read.

  I am remembering America
  tonight
  like a great beacon
  that lit up the world
  with a cold, blue precision:
      This is the territory
      Here it is safe
      Stay inside the circle
      Stay inside the light


  The light dimmed.
  Maybe the light died.
  Maybe the light
  simply shifted its focus
  elsewhere.
  Maybe
  the light was a lie.

  Nearly everything is these days.

  I am remembering America
  like a big fuzzy blanket
  like Christmas morning
  like my first kiss
  like the way he looked at me
  when he slipped the ring on my finger
  like the first cup of coffee
  on a cold winter day.

  But tonight
  there is just the boat
  the small whir of the heater
  and the black
  relentless sea.

  Janet C. Phelan

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

 




 







































!!!!!!PRESS RELEASE!!!!!!











You have been invited by Jack Bauer to join a live Community Call.
The American Reconstruction Project (Join in)

Host: Jack Bauer - bowersecret@...
 
EPISODE #131 - The American Reconstruction Project!!!!


 
Tomorrow, Saturday, 7-07-2012, evenings show!!
 
    I've got  Janet Phelan coming back for some more use and abuse, no wait,
that's the guvmnt that does that!! Who is Janet you might ask? Janet was on my
show about 3 week ago, and was seeking some help in exposing the common
practice, primarily by the powers that be, of using the medical community to
assist them in steeling peoples PRIVATE PROPERTY without ANY due
process!! Apparently, the practice involves an individual who decides they want,
oh let's say YOUR HOME!! Here's what they do next. The individual who's
perpetrating this CRIME starts a SHORT campaign, and I do mean SHORT, in
convincing the authorities that the VICTIM is incompetent, and unable to take
care of themselves. Once this is accomplished, which is getting easier to do
with every day that
  passes, the perpetrator then gets themselves assigned as "trustee" of the
VICTIMS properties and everything else the VICTIM may have control over. Anyway,
that's what we knew about Janet before.
 
    Fast forward to now!! Well,,, to my surprise,, there's more to this Woman
than meets the eye!! Come to find out, she's also known to be an BIOLOGICAL
WEAPONS expert also!!! Several years ago, Janet decided to bring this URGENT
information to the public, you know them? Yes, you & I! What she was being
painted as was, I think the proper term for it is "WHISTEL BLOWER".  As you can
imagine, our ABOVE THE LAW guvmnt decided it would not be in their best interest
to let this information surface, and started doing what they do best, the
process of ELIMINATION!!. Yes,this F-cked up countries  guvmnt started a
campaign to ELIMINATE her, by making her cease to exist. This Woman deserves ALL
the credit I can muster!! In the dark of the night, she hailed a taxi and
  left this BULL$HIT country in the rear view mirror! In doing this BRAVE move,
she left all her belongings behind, including her BEST FRIEND, her cat. Only
when she was far enough away from what she considered to be harms way, did she
use a pay phone to contact one of her TRUSTED her friends, to let them know what
the plan she had kept secret to all, had been, and ask them to PLEASE go pick up
and take care of her beloved cat.
 
    Stop for just a moment and ask yourself, WHAT'S your breaking point? Do you
have a "PLAN" in place for when the inevitable does happen? This BRAVE Woman
did, and answered her calling!! Thank You Janet for risking all you have and
had!! So here's a little BIO she sent me to give us all a little better
understanding of what she's about and her credentials:  
      





    Janet Phelan is on the trail of the U.S.'s illegal biological weapons
program, which was ratcheted up after the false flag anthrax attacks of
September 2001. Her research has taken her to Tel Aviv and to Geneva,
Switzerland, where she attended and presented at the Biological Weapons
Convention at the United Nations this past December. She writes regularly for
www.Activistpost.com and www.Salem-news.com, covering biological weapons, the
courts and more. She has hosted radio shows on Republic Broadcasting and KSKQ,
in Ashland, Oregon and regularly appears as a guest on numerous shows across
  US and Canada.
  Her website is http://Janetphelan.com.
 
    This weeks call should blend very well as a follow-up to last weeks call
with Victoria  Baer on AGENDA 21! I promise to do my best, top stay on topic.
Seems I tend to take little side trips more than I should!! I'm working on it
folks!! HONEST!! 
 
    Of course, as always, I'll be giving the latest information I've got in
regard to David Myrland's condition in this corrupt "legal" system. As I've
reported, they, I.e. The ROTTEN judicial system, have done everything in their
power, short of killing him , to keep a lid on what's going on to and with his
case!! David-Winn: Miller is back from his visit to China, and hopefully will be
KICKIN some major judicial ASS and getting David out of this atrocious violation
of his rights. Stay tuned for what's coming!!!
 































When Injustice becomes law, Rebellion becomes duty!

Simply trying to Return America to what our Forefathers Ideas of Freedom and
being an AMERICAN originally was!!!!
Just Click on this link to join or listen to the show, including the archives!!

!!!!The American Reconstruction Project!!!!
Hosted by: Jack Bauer
Saturday's: 6pm to 8pm Pacific, 9pm to 11pm Eastern.
How can you participate????
Call in:
(724) 444-7444
Call ID: 74235#
On your phone keypad:
*6 to mute on *6 again to mute off, Press *8 to raise your hand to ask a
question.
If you just want to listen, click on this link: Crusade Radio
To connect with me on SKYPE, my contact info: Michael.w.golden
My personal Web Page including my Thesis, click here:

Learn how to BEAT the BA$TARDS at their own game by clicking on this link:

Check out my Facebook Page (And don't forget to CLICK "Like" it)
"When the government fears the people, you have Liberty.
When the people fear the government you have Tyranny."
~Thomas Jefferson,
Don't Fall into the Sheeple Pit...

TURN OFF YOUR TELEVISION!
Ignore the TV Media
Investigate 911


Disclaimer: I'm not a Lawyer, this is not legal advice. Nor am I a Brain
Surgeon, Pastry Chef or Indian Chief. This communication is private and
privileged intended only to those individuals marked "To", "CC" or "BCC". To the
snoopy government agencies, or anyone else, this mail isn't being specifically
directed to; with all due Respect; cordially invited and instructed to take a
hike:)
Sincerely, Jack Bauer aka RadioRebel


 
 












 









 




 
 
 










[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/2012/07/05-1
Thursday, July 5, 2012 by The Nation
Workers vs. Investors: Famous Windows Factory in Danger of Liquidation
by Laura Flanders

A workers' cooperative in the Goose Island area of Chicago is
desperately trying to stop the liquidation of a windows and doors
factory the sale of which will scuttle their plans but benefit some
well-connected investors.

Union members who put their bodies on the line not once but twice to
save their windows and doors factory in Chicago found out Sunday that
their former employer has broken a pledge to give workers a fair chance
to buy factory equipment and plans instead to sell off machines as soon
as Friday rather than let a Black and Latino-led workers' cooperative
buy and keep the plant in operation.

The workers, members of the United Electrical and Machine Workers of
America Local 1110, sat in and briefly occupied their plant this
February after owner, Serious Energy of California, announced a
shut-down and a plan to move jobs out of state. Many of the same workers
occupied the same factory in December 2008, becoming a cause-celebre at
the height of the unemployment crisis.

After the sit-down, Serious agreed to delay liquidation and to give
workers a fair chance to bid on the plant's equipment. About two dozen
long time employees then formed a co-operative -- New Era Windows –
kicking in $1,000 each (wth the help of family and friends.) For months,
several workers have been attending weekly co-op management classes.

The news of a next chapter for the famous Chicago windows workers was
beginning to spread. (America Beyond Capitalism author Gar Alperovitz,
wrote about them this week.) Prospects for a worker take-over were
looking good when, three days before the July 4th holiday, Serious
Energy announced on a conference call that bids were due at once and
told New Era that their offer of $1.2 million ($500,000 in cash), was
insufficient.

"No one else is going to save the factory. Every other bidder is going
to chop the place up and sell the machines for scrap," said Brendan
Martin who was on the call. Martin's nonprofit, the Working World, has
been helping New Era. "It seems Serious never intended to give the
workers a chance to buy."

Calls to Serious Energy executives have so far not been returned.

Now the workers have launched a petition drive, calling on Serious to
play fair. On Thursday July 5, at noon, they are planning a march that
could turn up the heat on local politicians.

One of the investors most likely to profit from Serious’s shady sell-off
is Mesirow Financial, a financial firm with close ties to Chicago Mayor
Rahm Emanuel. Mesirow made a $15 million investment in Serious in 2009.
Thomas E. Galuhn, a Senior Managing Director at Mesirow Financial, sits
on the board of directors at Serious.

When Mayor Emanuel graced the cover of Michigan Avenue Magazine this
May, the party for the issue was hosted at Mesirow's swanky Chicago
headquarters. In December 2011, Emanuel appointed Olga Camargo, still
senior VP of Mesirow, to the City of Chicago Plan Commission, which,
among other things, reviews city development plans and long term
"community projects."

Mesirow Chairman, Howard Rossman, is a major contributor to Democratic
party campaigns. According to the Center for Responsive Politics,
Rossman gave $30,800 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in
2012, along with $5,000 to the DNC and another $2,500 to Barack Obama's
re-election effort.

“Rahm could do the right thing, or he could watch this become his Bain
Capital,” said Brendan Martin Tuesday.

New Era workers had been hoping that Emanuel’s “Refit Chicago” plan to
retrofit city buildings could be a source of good contracts for their
conveniently-located, energy efficient window business.

Instead, quite possibly with supporters Van Jones and Michael Moore at
their side, New Era workers and their friends will be marching on the
Mayor’s pals at Mesirow at noon today, Thursday, July 5, asking why the
well-off firm would rather make a quick mean buck than keep viable jobs
in a low-income, high unemployment community.

(My thanks to Zoe Schlanger for research help on this article - LF)

Laura Flanders was the founder and host of GRITtv and is the author of
the books BUSHWOMEN and Blue Grit. She's the editor of At the Tea Party



--
Dan Clore

New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-unspeakable-and-others/6124911
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

"From the point of view of the defense of our society,
there only exists one danger -- that workers succeed in
speaking to each other about their condition and their
aspirations _without intermediaries_."
--Censor (Gianfranco Sanguinetti), _The Real Report on
the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy_

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

[Has the Free State Project had any actual success at making New
Hampshire more libertarian that it can poin to? Serious question.--DC]

http://reason.com/archives/2012/07/06/the-free-staters-go-camping
The Free Staters Go Camping
What happens when you bring together politicos, voluntaryists, and
off-the-grid farmers for a week?
by Garrett Quinn
July 6, 2012

Every summer since 2004, hundreds of people belonging to and interested
in the Free State Project, an effort to move 20,000 libertarians to New
Hampshire, gather at a remote campground in the northern part of the
state for a weeklong event called the Porcupine Freedom Festival. The
outdoorsy extravaganza, more commonly known as PorcFest, is one of the
biggest libertarian gatherings in the entire country.

The libertarian stereotype of the nerdy, balding, middle-aged white guy
goes out the window at PorcFest. The attendees are so diverse, one
wonders how organizers managed to get everybody together in the same
place without burning the forest down in a fit of rage. If you want to
see what happens when you bring together libertarian politicos,
voluntaryists, and off-the-grid family farmers that love raw milk for a
week to celebrate one of the more quixotic elements of the libertarian
movement, then you have to go to PorcFest.

For Carla Gericke, the president of the Free State Project, this is her
busiest week of the year. She is constantly checking on events, meeting
with people, moderating panels, and judging contests. She views PorcFest
as one of the best ways to convince people to become Free Staters and
make the move to the Granite Stat. Recently her group has tried to
attract more families, not just individuals.

"I definitely think we had over a thousand people. We sold 650+ presale
tickets and allowed walk-ins. We don't count children, but there were a
lot of them. Definitely moved more to a family friendly vibe, which was
our goal,” Gericke says in an online interview after the event. Gericke
was so busy during PorcFest that not only did she not have time to stop
for an interview, she lost her voice on the final day.

In years past there have been squabbles, but this year the event was
“drama free,” according to Gericke.

"People tend to sort themselves according to their noise level
tolerance. The families tend towards the quieter zones at the back, and
others gravitate to the late night noise area. We did try this year to
keep late night noise tolerable, with loud music ending at midnight,”
she says.

The divide was certainly visible to anyone that took a stroll through
the camp on the final full day of activities. Large families gathered in
the back of the campground away from the action while younger people
stayed closer to the fire and the merchants row, known as Agora Valley,
where agorists hawked their wares to festivalgoers. In Agora Valley you
could buy a wide variety of food, books, clothing, soaps, tapestries,
and (of course) gold and silver. Farmers offered samplings of the fruits
of their labor while promoting deals to Free Staters on baskets of fresh
produce and meats delivered from their farm straight to their door. Some
agorists, like George Mandrick, took a more direct route and set up shop
in the main hall, the Shire Society Pavilion.

Mandrick is a full-time personal chef and home cleaner who does some
catering on the side. Like many of the people here, he is committed to
the ideas of agorism, a philosophy created by anarchist Sam Konkin in
the 1970s. This is Mandrick’s second year of catering PorcFest and,
though he sees the philosophical divides at PorcFest, he doesn’t see
himself in any camp.

“I am not politically active at all, I have no interest in politics. I
am not even an activist, I am really just a businessman. I want to live
my life as free as possible and it’s much easier for me to do that here
because there are people that I can connect with. They also just want to
have cash transactions with me,” he says.

This is the first time Mandrick has had a 15 minute break all night, but
soon festivalgoers start queuing for his burgers. Again. He tightens up
his apron and begins to look back at his stand as if encouraging me to
wrap up the interview.

“For me, it’s about interactions and business dealings between
individuals,” he says as he heads back to his grill.

In a large tent next to the pavilion, New Hampshire Republican state
representative Mark Warden holds court behind a makeshift bar. Warden
left Nevada, another state with strong libertarian leanings, in 2007
when the market took a turn for the worse. Warden says one of the
reasons he moved to New Hampshire and joining the FSP was the natural
beauty of the state. PorcFest, he thinks, is one of the ways to show
that off because it is a large outdoor festival unlike other libertarian
gatherings that tend to be held at large resort hotels (think Freedom
Fest in Las Vegas).

“When you’re in Las Vegas at FreedomFest there are two parts: the
liberty portion and investments. So you have a lot of people from Wall
Street. Here we have more Main Street, more Austrian economics, people
that are self-reliant, people that invest in metals, in real estate,” he
says, adding that the crowd tends to be younger at PorcFest.

At PorcFest, you won’t see much white hair.

“It’s very diverse. You see some dreadlocks here, you see some Occupiers
here, you see some Tea Partiers here, you see some straight laced
non-drinking Christian businessmen here, you see it all,” he says.

Warden attributes the congenial nature of the event to the natural
libertarian aversion to force.

“Libertarians tend to be pretty tolerant. Most people here think their
way is the best or the right way but they won’t force other people to do
it their way. They want the competition for ideas to flourish and for
the best way to run things to be settled on the battlefield of ideas,”
he says, as someone offered us cigars.

Despite the remoteness of the campground and nearly nonexistent internet
access a web based radio station, The Liberty Radio Network, managed to
broadcast from the site all week. The station’s program director, Ian
Freeman, moved from Florida to New Hampshire as part of the FSP in 2006
after growing increasingly frustrated with Libertarian Party there and
the level of activism. Freeman is one of the more unique individuals at
PorcFest because he has participated in activism across the libertarian
spectrum.


“I do whatever activism I can do. Creating media, outreach, civil
disobedience, noncooperation, whatever it is I can do I am involved,” he
says sitting with me at a table inside the Pavilion on the last day of
the festival.

Freeman programs and hosts the nationally syndicated libertarian talk
show, Free Talk Live, something he considers not only a job but a calling.

“It’s business first and foremost but it has a benefit of spreading the
ideas,” he says.

Despite his aversion to the cold weather as a Florida native Freeman
knew that New Hampshire was where he had to be. When Freeman packed his
bags for the Granite State he did not stop in Concord or Manchester or
Portsmouth, he went straight to Keene, a place many consider to be a hub
for hardcore libertarian activists.

“Political candidates don’t do civil disobedience so my experience had
not been anywhere in that realm. I just thought ‘This is the most
exciting thing happening in the liberty movement that I’ve ever seen.’
So I had to be a part of it,” he says.


--
Dan Clore

New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/3tyj9cq
Lord We˙rdgliffe & 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"