Dumb Government's topics - tribe.net

New tribe against the occupation of Afghanistan

2008-07-27T06:33:50Z

New tribe against the occupation of Afghanistan
http://tribes.tribe.net/outnow#

Massive U.S. intervention in Afghanistan began in 1978 and continues to this day. The ongoing war in Afghanistan continues to kill thousands of Afghan civilians and cause extreme suffering due to horrendous injuries, the displacement of people from their homes and livelihoods, home invasions, sexual abuse, arbitrary arrests and torture, and the general humiliation of the Afghani people.

As this author stated for Liberation News on September 12, 2001:

“Americans watched in horror as the World Trade Center collapsed. Yet it was a horror no different from what the U.S. government has done with it's bombing of civilian populations in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Korea. The U.S. bombings of just these countries, not to mention many other U.S. acts of war, murdered millions of civilians. Terror against civilians is never justified…

“Today the clerical fascists of the Taliban rule Afghanistan. The CIA put them in power with billions of dollars in U.S. military aid. This massive U.S. intervention in Afghanistan was in opposition to the revolutionary PDPA government that came to power in 1978 on issues of promoting women’s rights and land reform. Literacy campaigns began teaching the poor and women how to read and write.

“Foreign religious fanatics and wealthy defenders of the old feudal system came together in a terrorist organization called the Mujahideen. With billions of dollars in assistance from the U.S. [starting under the Jimmy Carter presidency] these fanatical cutthroats waged a holy war that included killing women for teaching little girls how to read and write and throwing acid into the faces of women who had become liberated from the veil. The Taliban came to power as a result of this U.S. intervention.

“Will a U.S. war now against the Taliban and former CIA aid recipient Osama Bin Laden set things straight? No. It will be the people of Afghanistan who suffer death and destruction from war as the U.S. attempts to install a puppet government friendly to U.S. corporate [oil pipeline] interests.” Steven Argue, Liberation News, September 12, 2001

The Taliban was put in power by U.S. intervention. U.S. occupation today is a cause for war and continues to keep an extremely reactionary religious government in power. Afghanistan had secular governments with much wider women's rights before the U.S. began its massive intervention in Afghanistan in the 1970's. All U.S. imposed governments have been religious and anti-women. In Afghanistan, the Afghanis are better qualified to solve the problems caused by U.S. imperialism than U.S. imperialism is.

Yet rather than get out of Afghanistan Obama and McCain are proposing more troops, more helicopters, and more war.

NO TO THE BIPARTISAN OCCUPATION OF AFGHANISTAN!!!!

NO TO OBAMA and MCCAIN'S PROPOSED SURGE IN AFGHANISTAN!

U.S. OUT OF AFGHANISTAN NOW!

http://tribes.tribe.net/outnow#

posted in Dumb Government - 0 replies

1950: 100,000 Executed by Imperialism's Korean Dictatorship

2008-05-19T17:54:55Z

[The US war of aggression in Korea murdered 5 million Koreans. Part of that murder was the cold blooded executions of over 100,000 leftists and suspected leftists by the South Korean government in 1950. Over 54,000 U.S. soldiers died in the U.S. war to defend that murderous U.S. imposed regime. The following AP article exposes what many on the left have known about for decades, but has been hidden from the general public in the United States by the government and corporate media. -Steven Argue]

AP Probes 'Cold-Blooded Slaughter' in South Korea
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003805038

By CHARLES J. HANLEY and JAE-SOON CHANG, The Associated Press

Published: May 18, 2008 4:15 PM ET

DAEJEON Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation's U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in a summer of terror in 1950.

With U.S. military officers sometimes present, and as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the head, dumping the bodies into hastily dug trenches. Others were thrown into abandoned mines or into the sea. Women and children were among those killed. Many victims never faced charges or trial.

The mass executions - intended to keep possible southern leftists from reinforcing the northerners - were carried out over mere weeks and were largely hidden from history for a half-century. They were ``the most tragic and brutal chapter of the Korean War,'' said historian Kim Dong-choon, a member of a 2-year-old government commission investigating the killings.

Hundreds of sets of remains have been uncovered so far, but researchers say they are only a tiny fraction of the deaths. The commission estimates at least 100,000 people were executed, in a South Korean population of 20 million.

That estimate is based on projections from local surveys and is ``very conservative,'' said Kim. The true toll may be twice that or more, he told The Associated Press.

In addition, thousands of South Koreans who allegedly collaborated with the communist occupation were slain by southern forces later in 1950, and the invaders staged their own executions of rightists.

Through the postwar decades of South Korean right-wing dictatorships, victims' fearful families kept silent about that blood-soaked summer. American military reports of the South Korean slaughter were stamped ``secret'' and filed away in Washington. Communist accounts were dismissed as lies.

Only since the 1990s, and South Korea's democratization, has the truth begun to seep out.

In 2002, a typhoon's fury uncovered one mass grave. Another was found by a television news team that broke into a sealed mine. Further corroboration comes from a trickle of declassified U.S. military documents, including U.S. Army photographs of a mass killing outside this central South Korean city.

Now Kim's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has added government authority to the work of scattered researchers, family members and journalists trying to peel away the long-running cover-up. The commissioners have the help of a handful of remorseful old men.

``Even now, I feel guilty that I pulled the trigger,'' said Lee Joon-young, 83, one of the executioners in a secluded valley near Daejeon in early July 1950.

The retired prison guard told the AP he knew that many of those shot and buried en masse were ordinary convicts or illiterate peasants wrongly ensnared in roundups of supposed communist sympathizers. They didn't deserve to die, he said. They ``knew nothing about communism.''

The 17 investigators of the commission's subcommittee on ``mass civilian sacrifice,'' led by Kim, have been dealing with petitions from more than 7,000 South Koreans, involving some 1,200 alleged incidents - not just mass planned executions, but also 215 cases in which the U.S. military is accused of the indiscriminate killing of South Korean civilians in 1950-51, usually in air attacks.

The commission last year excavated sites at four of an estimated 150 mass graves around the country, recovering remains of more than 400 people. Working deliberately, matching documents to eyewitness and survivor testimony, it has officially confirmed two large-scale executions - at a warehouse in the central South Korean county of Cheongwon, and at Ulsan on the southeast coast.

In January, then-President Roh Moo-hyun, under whose liberal leadership the commission was established, formally apologized for the more than 870 deaths confirmed at Ulsan, calling them ``illegal acts the then-state authority committed.''

The commission, with no power to compel testimony or prosecute, faces daunting tasks both in verifying events and identifying victims, and in tracing a chain of responsibility. Under Roh's conservative successor, Lee Myung-bak, whose party is seen as democratic heir to the old autocratic right wing, the commission may find less budgetary and political support.

The roots of the summer 1950 bloodbath lie in the U.S.-Soviet division of Japan's former Korea colony in 1945, which precipitated north-south turmoil and eventual war.

In the late 1940s, President Syngman Rhee's U.S.-installed rightist regime crushed leftist political activity in South Korea, including a guerrilla uprising inspired by the communists ruling the north. By 1950, southern jails were packed with up to 30,000 political prisoners.

The southern government, meanwhile, also created the National Guidance League, a ``re-education'' organization for recanting leftists and others suspected of communist leanings. Historians say officials met membership quotas by pressuring peasants into signing up with promises of rice rations or other benefits. By 1950, more than 300,000 people were on the league's rolls, organizers said.

North Korean invaders seized Seoul, the southern capital, in late June 1950 and freed thousands of prisoners, who rallied to the northern cause. Southern authorities, in full retreat with their U.S. military advisers, ordered National Guidance League members in areas they controlled to report to the police, who detained them. Soon after, commission researchers say, the organized mass executions of people regarded as potential collaborators began - ``bad security risks,'' as a police official described the detainees at the time.

The declassified record of U.S. documents shows an ambivalent American attitude toward the killings. American diplomats that summer urged restraint on southern officials - to no obvious effect - but a State Department cable that fall said overall commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur viewed the executions as a Korean ``internal matter,'' even though he controlled South Korea's military.

Ninety miles south of Seoul, here in the narrow, peaceful valley of Sannae, truckloads of prisoners were brought in from Daejeon Prison and elsewhere day after day in July 1950, as the North Koreans bore down on the city.

The American photos, taken by an Army major and kept classified for a half-century, show the macabre sequence of events.

White-clad detainees - bent, submissive, with hands bound - were thrown down prone, jammed side by side, on the edge of a long trench. South Korean military and national policemen then stepped up behind, pointed their rifles at the backs of their heads and fired. The bodies were tipped into the trench.

Trembling policemen - ``they hadn't shot anyone before'' - were sometimes off-target, leaving men wounded but alive, Lee said. He and others were ordered to check for wounded and finish them off.

Evidence indicates South Korean executioners killed between 3,000 and 7,000 here, said commissioner Kim. A half-dozen trenches, each up to 150 yards long and full of bodies, extended over an area almost a mile long, said Kim Chong-hyun, 70, chairman of a group of bereaved families campaigning for disclosure and compensation for the Daejeon killings. His father, accused but never convicted of militant leftist activity, was one victim.

Another was Yeo Tae-ku's father, whose wife and mother searched for him afterward.

``Bodies were just piled upon each other,'' said Yeo, 59, remembering his mother's description. ``Arms would come off when they turned them over.'' The desperate women never found him, and the mass graves were quickly covered over, as were others in isolated spots up and down this mountainous peninsula, to be officially ``forgotten.''

When British communist journalist Alan Winnington entered Daejeon that summer with North Korean troops and visited the site, writing of ``waxy dead hands and feet (that) stick through the soil,'' his reports in the Daily Worker were denounced as ``fabrication'' by the U.S. Embassy in London. American military accounts focused instead on North Korean reprisal killings that followed in Daejeon.

But CIA and U.S. military intelligence documents circulating even before the Winnington report, classified ``secret'' and since declassified, told of the executions by the South Koreans. Lt. Col. Bob Edwards, U.S. Embassy military attache in South Korea, wrote in conveying the Daejeon photos to Army intelligence in Washington that he believed nationwide ``thousands of political prisoners were executed within (a) few weeks'' by the South Koreans.

Another glimpse of the carnage appeared in an unofficial U.S. source, an obscure memoir self-published in 1981 by the late Donald Nichols, a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, who told of witnessing ``the unforgettable massacre of approximately 1,800 at Suwon,'' 20 miles south of Seoul.

Such reports lend credibility to a captured North Korean document from Aug. 2, 1950, eventually declassified by Washington, which spoke of mass executions in 12 South Korean cities, including 1,000 killed in Suwon and 4,000 in Daejeon.

That early, incomplete North Korean report couldn't include those executed in territory still held by the southerners. Up to 10,000 were killed in the city of Busan alone, a South Korean lawmaker, Park Chan-hyun, estimated in 1960.

His investigation came during a 12-month democratic interlude between the overthrow of Rhee and a government takeover by Maj. Gen. Park Chung-hee's authoritarian military, which quickly arrested many then probing for the hidden story of 1950.

Kim said his projection of at least 100,000 dead is based in part on extrapolating from a survey by non-governmental organizations in one province, Busan's South Gyeongsang, which estimated 25,000 killed there. And initial evidence suggests most of the National Guidance League's 300,000 members were killed, he said.

Commission investigators agree with the late Lt. Col. Edwards' note to Washington in 1950, that ``orders for execution undoubtedly came from the top,'' that is, President Rhee, who died in 1965.

But any documentary proof of that may have been destroyed, just as the facts of the mass killings themselves were buried. In 1953, after the war ended in stalemate, after the deaths of at least 2 million people, half or more of them civilians, a U.S. Army war crimes report attributed all summary executions here in Daejeon to the ``murderous barbarism'' of North Koreans.

Such myths survived a half-century, in part because those who knew the truth were cowed into silence.

``My mother destroyed all pictures of my father, for fear the family would get an image as leftists,'' said Koh Chung-ryol, 57, who is convinced her 29-year-old father was innocent of wrongdoing when picked up in a broad police sweep here, to die in Sannae valley.

``My mother tried hard to get rid of anything about her husband,'' she said. ``She suffered unspeakable pain.''

Even educated South Koreans remained ignorant of their country's past. As a young researcher in the late 1980s, Yonsei University's Park Myung-lim, today a leading Korean War historian, was deeply shaken as he sought out confidential accounts of those days from ordinary Koreans.

``I cried,'' he said. ``I felt, 'Oh, my goodness. Oh, Jesus. This was my country? It was true?'''

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission can recommend but not award compensation for lost and ruined lives, nor can it bring surviving perpetrators to justice. ``Our investigative power is so meager,'' commission President Ahn Byung-ook told the AP.

His immediate concern is resources. ``The current government isn't friendly toward us, and so we're concerned that the budget may be cut next year,'' he said.

South Korean conservatives complain the ``truth'' campaign will only reopen old wounds from a time when, even at the village level, leftists and rightists carried out bloody reprisals against each other.

The life of the commission - with a staff of 240 and annual budget of $19 million - is guaranteed by law until at least 2010, when it will issue a final, comprehensive report.

Later this spring and summer its teams will resume digging at mass grave sites. Thus far, it has verified 16 incidents of 1950-51 - not just large-scale detainee killings, but also such events as a South Korean battalion's cold-blooded killing of 187 men, women and children at Kochang village, supposed sympathizers with leftist guerrillas.

By exposing the truth of such episodes, ``we hope to heal the trauma and pain of the bereaved families,'' the commission says. It also wants to educate people, ``not just in Korea, but throughout the international community,'' to the reality of that long-ago conflict, to ``prevent such a tragic war from reoccurring in the future.''

CHARLES J. HANLEY and JAE-SOON CHANG, The Associated Press
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Distributed by Liberation News, Subscribe free:
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

Join the Cool Earth Party
http://tribes.tribe.net/coolearth

posted in Dumb Government - 0 replies

ILWU to Shut Down Ports May 1 Demanding End to War in Iraq, Afghanistan

2008-05-02T21:00:46Z

[Liberation News is in agreement with the following article of the Internationalist Group and both have also actively advocated these kinds of industrial actions.]

For Workers Strikes Against the War!

ILWU to Shut Down West Coast Ports May 1 Demanding End to War in Iraq, Afghanistan

In a major step for the U.S. labor movement, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has announced that it will shut down West Coast ports on May 1, to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East. In a February 22 letter to AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, ILWU International president Robert McEllrath reported that at a recent coast-wide union meeting, "One of the resolutions adopted by caucus delegates called on longshore workers to stop work during the day shift on May 1, 2008 to express their opposition to the war in Iraq."

This is the first time in decades that an American union has decided to undertake industrial action against a U.S. war. It is doubly important that this mobilization of labor's power is to take place on May Day, the international workers day, which is not honored in the U.S. Moreover, the resolution voted by the ILWU delegates opposes not only the hugely unpopular war in Iraq, but also the war and occupation of Afghanistan (which Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and Republican John McCain all want to expand). The motion to shut down the ports also demands the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the entire region, including the oil sheikdoms of the strategically important Persian/Arab Gulf.

The Internationalist Group has fought from the moment U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan in September 2002 for American unions to strike against the war. Despite the fact that millions have marched in the streets of Europe and the United States against the war in Iraq, the war goes on. Neither of the twin war parties of U.S. imperialism - Democrats and Republicans - and none of the capitalist candidates will stop this horrendous slaughter that has already killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The only way to stop the Pentagon killing machine is by mobilizing the power of a greater force - that of the international working class.

The action announced by the powerful West Coast dock workers union, to stop work to stop the war, should be taken up by unions and labor organizations throughout the United States and internationally. The ILWU should be commended for courageously taking the first step, and it is up to working people everywhere to back them up. Wherever support is strong enough, on May 1 there should be mass walkouts, sick-outs, labor marches, plant-gate meetings, lunch-time rallies, teach-ins. And the purpose of such actions should be not to beg the bourgeois politicians whose hands are covered with blood, having voted for every war budget for six and a half years, but a show of strength of the working people who make this country run, and who can shut it down!

Now is the time for bold class action. Opposition to the war is even greater in the U.S. working class than in the population as a whole, more than two-thirds of which wants to stop the war but is stymied by the capitalist political system. In his letter to Sweeney, the ILWU president asked "if other AFL-CIO affiliates are planning to participate in similar events." Labor militants should make sure the answer to that question is a resounding "yes!"

There should be no illusions that this will be easy. No doubt the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) bosses will try to get the courts to rule the stop-work action illegal. The ILWU leadership could get cold feet, since this motion was passed because of overwhelming support from the delegates despite attempts to stop it or, failing that, to water it down or limit the action. And the U.S. government could try to ban it on the grounds of "national security," just as Bush & Co. slapped a Taft-Hartley injunction on the docks during contract negotiations in the fall of 2002, saying that any work stoppage was a threat to the "war effort," and threatened to occupy the ports with troops!

The answer to every attempt to sabotage or undercut this first labor action against this war, and against Washington's broader "war on terror" which is intended to terrorize the world into submission must be to redouble efforts to bring out workers' power independent of the capitalist parties and politicians. If the ILWU work stoppage is successful, it will only be a small, but very important, beginning that must be generalized and deepened. It will take industrial-strength labor action to defeat the imperialist war abroad and the bosses' war on immigrants, oppressed minorities, poor and working people "at home."

ILWU in the Forefront of Labor Action Against the War

Workers strike action against imperialist war isn't new - it just hasn't happened here for a long, long time. During World War I there were huge mass strikes in Germany against the battlefield carnage, culminating in the downfall of the kaiser in November 1918. A year earlier in Russia, working-class opposition to the war led to the overthrow of the tsar and the October Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky's Bolsheviks. The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International call today for transport workers to "hot cargo" (refuse to handle) war shipments. In the early 1920s, Communist-led French dock workers did exactly that, boycotting ships carrying war materiel to suppress a colonial rebellion in the Rif region of Morocco, as they
also did during France's war in Indochina in the 1950s.

In the U.S., the ILWU struck in 1948 amid Cold War hysteria and in defiance of the "slave labor" Taft-Hartley Act to defend its union hiring hall against the bosses and government screaming about "reds" in the union leadership. In 1953, at the height of McCarthyite witch-hunting, the ILWU called a four-day general strike in Hawaii of sugar, pineapple and dock workers over the jailing of seven union members for being communists. During the Vietnam War, socialist historian Isaac Deutscher said that he would trade all the peace marches for a single dock strike. The ILWU was the first U.S. union to oppose the Vietnam war, but during war and especially during the 1971 strike union leader Harry Bridges refused to stop the movement of military cargo. (Ship owners made use of this by falsely labeling cargo as "military" to evade picket lines and undermine the strike.) This betrayal went hand in hand with a "mechanization and modernization" contract that slashed union jobs.

As the U.S.-led imperialist invasion of Iraq was looming, in January 2003 train drivers in Scotland refused to move a freight train carrying munitions to a NATO military base. The next month, Italian railroad unionists and antiwar activists blocked NATO war trains by occupying the rails. In the United States, ILWU dock workers were a target of "anti-terrorist" government repression, as police fired supposedly "less than lethal" munitions point blank at an antiwar protest on the Oakland, California docks, injuring six longshore workers and arresting 25 people (who eventually won their legal case against the police). And every year since the war started, the San Francisco/Oakland ILWU Local 10 has voted for motions for labor action against the war. Usually they were voted down at caucuses and conventions of the ILWU, but not this time.

Last May, Local 10 longshoremen and Local 34 ships clerks refused to cross picket lines set up by the Oakland Teachers Association and antiwar activists, defying arbitrators' orders by refusing to work ships of the notorious antiunion outfit, Stevedoring Services of America (see "Oakland Dock Workers Honor Picket, Shut Down War Cargo Shipper," The Internationalist No. 26, July 2007). In the aftermath of that action, the union issued a call for a Labor Conference to Stop the War that would "plan workplace rallies, labor
mobilizations in the streets and strike action against the war." The Call to Action stated:

"ILWU Local 10 has repeatedly warned that the so-called 'war on terror' is really a war on working people and democratic rights. Around the country, hundreds of unions and labor councils have passed motions condemning the war, but that has not stopped the war. We need to use labor's muscle to stop the war by mobilizing union power in the streets, at the plant gates and on the docks to force the immediate and total withdrawal of all U. S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq."

As the conference date approached, the union was the target of several police attacks, including a vicious cop assault on two black dock workers from San Francisco working in the port of Sacramento. Some 250 demonstrators from every ILWU local in Northern California rallied in their defense outside the courthouse. Their trial to be set march 18 at a hearing will encounter even larger demonstrations.

The Internationalist Group and its union supporters helped build and attended the October 20 conference, along with some 150 labor and socialist activists from the Bay Area, elsewhere in California and across the country. At the meeting, a particular focus was resistance to the Transportation Workers Identification Card (TWIC), which threatens minority workers and the union hiring hall, and which the Democratic Party in particular has been pushing in order to carry out a purge of dock workers in the name of the "war on terror."
Not long after that conference, a federal judge ordered Local 10 elections canceled and replaced by a Labor Department-run vote, on the eve of 2008 contract bargaining. Federal agents even invaded the union hall to enforce their order. This action is a threat to the independence of all unions.

This set the stage for the recent longshore-warehouse caucus, which voted a motion for a 24-hour "No Peace, No Work Holiday" against the war. The resolution was introduced in Local 10 by Jack Heyman, who also presented the motion for the 24 April 1999 coast-wide port shutdown demanding freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther and renowned radical journalist who has been on Pennsylvania's death row for the last quarter century. Although the union tops maneuvered to prevent Heyman from being elected as a delegate to the Coast Caucus, the motion passed in Local 10. At the Caucus, the delegate from Local 34 referred to the October Labor Conference to Stop the War as the origin of the motion.

At the close of the Caucus on February 8, there was a vigorous debate on the resolution. The union tops tried to stop it, to no avail. They kept asking, "are you sure you want to do this action." The delegates overwhelmingly said "yes." Even conservative trade unionists, including veterans of the Vietnam War, were getting up saying the government is lying to us, we've had it with this war, we've got to put a stop to it now. So instead the bureaucrats tried to gut the motion, which was cut down from 24 hours to 8, and changed into a "stop-work" meeting (covered by a contract clause) instead of a straight-out shutdown, thinking that this would lessen opposition from the employers. In the end there was a voice vote and only three delegates out of 100 voted against.

The efforts to undercut the motion continue, as is to be expected from a leadership which, like the rest of the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, seeks "labor peace" with the bosses. In his letter to Sweeney, ILWU International president tried to present the action as an effort to "express support for the troops by bringing them home safely," although the motion voted by the delegates says nothing of the sort. Playing the "support our troops" game is an effort to swear loyalty to the broader aims of U.S. imperialism. It aids the warmongers, when what's needed is independent working-class action against the system that produces endless imperialist war. Yet despite the efforts to water it down and distort it, the May 1 action voted for by the ILWU delegates is a call to use labor's muscle to put an end to the war.

Mobilize Labor's Power to Defeat the Bosses' War!

For the West Coast dock workers union to shut down the ports against the war means a big step forward in the class struggle. The Internationalist Group has uniquely fought for workers strikes against the war, when all the popular-front "peace" coalitions dismissed this and even some shamefaced ex-Trotskyists refused to call for it, saying it had "no resonance" among the workers (see our October 20007 Special Supplement to The Internationalist, "Why We Fight For Workers Strikes Against the War [and the opportunists Don't]"). With signs, banners and propaganda we have sought to drive home the central lesson that it is necessary to defeat the imperialist war abroad and the bosses' war "at home" by mobilizing the power of the workers movement independent of and against the capitalist parties.

That means fighting the war mobilization down the line. First and foremost, this means actively joining the struggle for immigrant rights as the government turns undocumented working people into "the enemy within." Class-conscious workers should demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants. Last year, San Francisco Local 10 voted to stop work and join marches for immigrant rights on May 1, but this was opposed by the employers PMA and sabotaged at the last minute by the union tops. Shamefully, Local 13 in Los Angeles, a majority Mexican American port, made no protest when police attacked immigrant rights protesters that same day. Today, as the ICE immigration police stage Gestapo-style raids across the country, organized labor should take the lead in organizing rapid response networks to come into the streets to block the raids. Despite the campaign by the capitalist media and politicians to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria, there is widespread disgust among American working people toward the jackbooted storm troopers who are terrorizing immigrant communities.

At the same time, the unions should use the power to put a halt to the attacks on civil liberties which are part of the home front of the imperialist war. Driver's licenses with biometric data, TWIC identification cards with "background checks," warrantless spying and phone tapping, setting up special military tribunals for "trials" in which defendants are denied the right of habeas corpus, to know the "evidence" or even the charges against them - all these are part of a drive that is in high gear pushing the United States toward a full-fledged police state. There have been scores, perhaps hundreds of resolutions by unions and city, county and state labor bodies against the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, showing that labor activists are well aware of the danger. But just as is the case with the countless union antiwar resolutions, there has been no labor action. It is commonplace in the labor movement to bemoan the lack of real action when Reagan broke the 1981 PATCO air traffic controllers' strike, paving the way for massive union-busting, takeaways and racist attacks all down the line. Let's not let the labor bureaucrats bury the vital struggles of today.

Now is the time to turn words into deeds, to speak to the capitalist rulers in the only language they understand. The imperialist war parties must be defeated by a class mobilization of the working people at the head of all the oppressed. The ILWU motion to stop work on May Day to put a stop to the war can provide working people everywhere with the opening to turn from impotent protest to a struggle for power. For that the key is to build a class-struggle workers party fighting for a workers government, for socialist revolution here and around the world, that will put an end once and for all to the system of endless war, poverty and racism.

This is an Article of the Internationalist Group:
www.internationalist.org

and distributed by Liberation News, Subscribe Free!
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

posted in Dumb Government - 1 reply

Join the new “Cool Earth Party” tribe

2008-04-18T19:54:49Z

Join the new “Cool Earth Party” tribe

The Democrats and Republicans are the paid agents of the oil, armament, and insurance industries. Their continued rule of America will assure a future of more imperialist war, a healthcare system that doesn't work, and no meaningful action on global warming (the single biggest threat to the future of humanity and a healthy planet).

The Cool Earth Party is being established on the principles of revolutionary democratic socialism. We call for an end to the dictatorial power of the wealthy through the nationalization of major industries and for the establishment of a planned economy run to meet human and environmental needs. This socialist society must be established within the framework of full democratic freedoms and multi-party proportional democracy. To be truly Democratic all parties running in elections will be legally guaranteed equal time in the media, big campaign spending will be outlawed, and electronic voting machines (which are presently used to rig American elections) will be eliminated.

Upon taking power the Cool Earth Party will establish a system of socialized medicine for the United States, end all U.S. military occupations of other countries, end U.S. military aid to repressive governments, and nationalize the auto and energy industries to carry out immediate emergency measures to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Cool Earth Party
http://tribes.tribe.net/coolearth

posted in Dumb Government - 0 replies

listen to it

2008-03-08T22:19:37Z

http://asx.ljcentral.net/mp3/eir/tls/2008/tls080209_en_hi.mp3

posted in Dumb Government - 0 replies

Conspiracy History compilation DVDs torrents

2008-03-06T15:18:58Z

**************************************************

Greetings to all my relations.

This is the last step of our project History Watch. If History is
defined and known by the texts, we can now add to this definition the
recorded events of the filmed archives. Animated images are harder to
deny than printed words. Our objective is to spread out freely some of
the little broadcast, even hidden informations about our collective
History.

We put online a collection of 391 documentaries and other selected and
recut videos, to offer to a wide public the best of the infos
available on the net in english and in french. If you are interested,
you have the time, the right equipment and connection, all you have to
do is open the joint document and decompress it if needed (but normaly
your system should do it automaticaly). You'll find therein nine links
that will open the torrents for the nine DVDs we compiled (around 4.6
Gig each, for a total of a little over 41 G, being over 100 hours of
videos).

Otherwise, you can go directly to btjunkie.com and search for these titles.

11 Septembre 2001 - 9-11
Bush family & friends
Capitalist & Communist regimes
Capitalist conspiracy
Mind Kontrol - Secret Programs
New World Order - Secret Societies
Secret services - cover up - covert ops
Secret weapons - UFO
Terrorism Theories propaganda

Torrents are a system of peer to peer data transfer. The more people
download a torrent, the faster it spreads and the longer it stays on
the net. If you don't have a bittorrent software, we suggest that you
download uTorrent on utorrent.com. If you want to participate in
facilitating the diffusion of these infos about our collective
History, download these torrents on as many computers as possible,
whether it is in cybercafes. It takes one or two minutes to open up
the links and the downloading will keep proceeding on its own.

Please spread this out, take part in this action for social education
on a planetary scale. Thanks.

For more info: watch.history@gmail.com History Watch

posted in Dumb Government - 0 replies

Clinton and Obama: Failures on War and Global Warming

2008-02-10T17:23:29Z

Clinton and Obama: Failures on War and Global Warming

By STEVEN ARGUE

Today, every national academy of science of the industrialized world recognizes human caused global warming as a fact. These include the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences who explicitly use the word "consensus" on the issue.

The problem of global warming is one that will, and is, devastating the planet’s environment, causing mass extinction of species while also destroying agricultural and habitable land through rising oceans, more severe hurricanes, droughts, more unpredictable weather, increases in tropical diseases, year round freezing weather with a potential ice age in the northern hemisphere combined with higher temperatures closer to the equator, and the potential of runaway global warming with the melting of the ocean’s methane hydride that could actually cause the extinction of the human species.

Despite the severity of the problem, and despite the United States being the biggest contributor to global warming in the world, the U.S. government and corporate leaders continue to do worse than nothing, through blocking and sabotaging all potential solutions for the past fifty years up until the present. This is due to the massive profits that continue to be made by the big oil corporations, and the political strength they have in being able to buy the politicians in Washington.

On the biggest question facing humanity, human caused global warming, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are ignoring the urgent proposals of global warming experts and instead put forward conservative proposals of carbon credit trading for big corporations and proposals for so-called “cleaner” fuels for cars. Carbon credit trading, giving big corporations the “right” to buy and sell the “right” to pollute, will undermine the ability to pass other legislation that can better curb carbon pollution. And the “cleaner” bio-fuels being proposed make no substantial difference because it takes energy involving carbon emissions to grow the plants used to make bio-fuels. In addition, rainforests that would help remove global warming causing carbon from the atmosphere are being cleared to grow bio-fuels. To make matters worse, converting food-stuffs and croplands to bio-fuels increases world food prices, causing increased world hunger.

What is really needed, as opposed to the pro-oil industry measures of Obama and Clinton, is an immediate emergency program to begin the process of reducing carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 through converting to green technologies such as solar, energy conservation, and eliminating the combustion engine by going electric and cleaning up the grid. Such a program would also create jobs and could be paid for through cutting the military budget. To develop this program it will be important to nationalize the energy industries under the democratic control of society in order to run them for human and environmental needs, and to eliminate private energy’s corrupting influence on politics, where they promote policies of war and pollution. Socialists offer these real solutions. Meanwhile, the Democrats and Republicans have made human caused global warming a reality by promoting the policies that have caused it, even though the problem was known 50 years ago. Once again in this election, the Democrats have offered no real solutions to this problem that we are running out of time to address.

Just as the energy industries are promoting the destruction of the planet through carbon emissions, they, along with the powerful weapons industries, promote the mass murder of war as well.

In September 2007, when asked if he would have U.S. troops out of Iraq by 2013 Barack Obama said "I believe that we should have all our troops out by 2013, but I don't want to make promises not knowing what the situation's going to be three or four years out."

Similarly Hillary Clinton Said, “I agree with Barack” ("The Democratic Presidential Debate on MSNBC", New York Times 9/26/07).

The U.S. must leave by air, sea, and land as quickly as possible. Citing fear of violence and civil war is the oldest trick in the dirty book of imperialist oppression. U.S. imperialism has created a horrible situation, but that is no excuse to stay, and U.S. troops, Halliburton, etc. are only making matters worse. Over a million Iraqis are dead. These deaths are not just caused by the civil war that the U.S. has ignited, nor are they just caused by the death-squad government that the U.S. has put in power. U.S. guns and bombers are also the direct cause of a large number of deaths. Iraq needs to be turned over to the Iraqi people through immediate withdrawal.

Not only do Obama and Clinton make no promise to get out of Iraq, both have both voted for war appropriations. This puts them both in the position of having directly supported the war.

In addition, Clinton voted to invade Iraq. Obama was not yet in the Senate, so he didn’t vote on that resolution. Yet on the verge of the U.S. war of aggression against Iraq Barack Obama repeated Bush’s lies at an anti-war rally stating, “He [Saddam Hussein] has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity.” (Obama, 10/2002 Speech, Federal Plaza)

Last year Hillary Clinton stated she has no remorse for her murderous decision of voting to invade Iraq saying, "Obviously, I've thought about that a lot in the months since. No, I don't regret giving the president authority because at the time it was in the context of weapons of mass destruction, grave threats to the United States, and clearly, Saddam Hussein had been a real problem for the international community for more than a decade." (Hillary Clinton, “No regret on Iraq Vote”, CNN.Com)

In trying to let themselves off the hook many Democrats claim that Bush "did not fairly represent intelligence". Feeble cries by these politicians today that their votes for war weren't their fault because they were lied to by Bush not only make them look stupid, they are an insult to the intelligence of the American people.

While the Democrats helped promote the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq had no right to defend itself, Liberation News pointed out that it is the United States that has the weapons of mass destruction. Instead of war, we supported the right of Iraq to acquire the weapons necessary to defend themselves from U.S. aggression. There can be little doubt that if Iraq had acquired those weapons they might not be in the mess they are now.

Yet for the Democrats a Republicans Iraqi weapons were never the real motive for mass murder in Iraq. The capitalist ruling class, and their Democrat and Republican representatives, thought that they could use their superior military power to quickly move into Iraq and establish by force a stable neo-colonial puppet regime, and then make massive profits from the privatization of the Iraqi economy, especially oil. It is the failures of this imperialist plan, in the face of Iraqi resistance and growing unpopularity at home, that has forced some Democrats to pretend to distance themselves from the same Bush policies that they actually support.

Just as Liberation News opposes the U.S. occupation and corporate looting of Iraq, we also denounced the starvation blockade that was carried out through the UN by the Bill Clinton administration. That blockade cost the lives of about a million people, many of them children. While the number of deaths was partly due to the capitalist nature of Iraqi economy, and a socialist economy like that of Cuba could have made sure that everyone in Iraq had food, blame for this mass murder should also be put on the Bill Clinton administration. Likewise, it was this Clinton starvation blockade that also weakened Iraq for the Bush invasion.

Today, while the U.S. occupation of Iraq has murdered well over a million people and the U.S. starvation blockade of Iraq murdered a million or more, the U.S. government and its puppets in Iraq had the nerve to put Saddam Hussein on trial, and execute him, for propaganda purposes. Yet the worst crimes of the Saddam Hussein regime were also carried out when he was directly backed by the United States. In the 1980's the U.S. was giving massive military assistance to Iraq to help Saddam Hussein commit genocide against Kurds and carry out a bloody war with Iran at a time when Saddam Hussein was being used as an asset of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. Likewise, the CIA helped Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party come to power, supplying them with the names of 5,000 socialists and labor leaders that the Ba'athists subsequently rounded up and executed.

Yet to those who claimed that an invasion of Iraq would be a chance for the U.S. to finally set things straight and set up a democracy in Iraq, Liberation News responded before the U.S. invasion saying:

"In the 1970s Iraq nationalized its oil fields. This helped the Iraqi people by taking a chunk of the profits made off of oil out of the hands of the international oil monopolies and instead keeping them in Iraq. This money helped pay for free healthcare and education. As such this was a socialist measure carried out by Saddam Hussein's capitalist government. It was also a measure that stood up to the interests of the rich and powerful nations. For both reasons, socialists supported the nationalization of Iraqi oil while those measures infuriated the imperialists...

"While defending Iraq against imperialist attack, and supporting their right to defend themselves, socialists also recognize that Saddam Hussein is a capitalist leader and that the Iraqi people have their own scores to settle with him. Yet any government set up by a US occupation army will not be democratic and will only lead to the privatization of the resources that American oil monopolies intend to steal..."

"U.S. imperialism will never solve the question of women's liberation in the Middle East. Unlike all of the US supported governments and forces in the Arab World, Iraqi women have many rights found nowhere else in the Arab World except in the Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. Over 50% of Iraqi doctors are women. Iraqi women are allowed to walk unescorted in the streets. They are allowed to drive. Iraqi women can even freely criticize men. In addition Iraqi women have the right to work and control their own funds. This is in stark contrast to the treatment of women under the repressive U.S. backed governments of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where women have no rights what-so-ever.

"The U.S. ruling class hates governments like Iraq, Libya, and Venezuela who use the profits of their oil resources partly to benefit the people with social programs. Likewise, they love governments like that of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that strip the people of all their rights and keep the oil profits in the hands of the international oil monopolies and their corrupt local servants. Today in the United States we face unemployment, homelessness, and a lack of health care. The billions of dollars the U.S. will squander on killing Iraqis to steal their resources should be spent to benefit the working class and poor of the United States instead." -From Liberation News: What Is Socialism, and Why We Oppose The Invasion of Iraq

What was predicted is reality. Those predictions were not from a crystal ball. They were accurate because they were based on the past behavior of U.S. imperialism. Today in Iraq the U.S. has set up a puppet Islamic government with functioning death squads and torture chambers. Socialists have been excluded from participating in elections and unarmed demonstrators have been shot down and murdered in the streets by U.S. troops and troops of the puppet Iraqi government. The puppet Islamic government also opposes women's rights and women's rights have deteriorated dramatically since the U.S. invasion. The rebuilding of basic infrastructure, such as electricity, has lagged way behind what was rebuilt by Saddam Hussein after the massive U.S. bombardment of Iraq in 1992. The invasion has also set off a civil war that, combined with U.S. bombings and other murder, has killed over a million Iraqis, and forced millions more to flee their homes as refugees.

With the exception of the privatization of Iraqi oil, all of the predictions have shown themselves to be true and the only reason that Iraqi oil isn't completely under the direct control of U.S. oil monopolies now is because of the union resistance of 23,000 organized oil workers as well as the general resistance by the Iraqi people to the idea of Iraq's resources being looted by U.S. corporations.

For the working class in the United States there is ever growing frustration with a war that is costing many lives and nearly half-a-trillion dollars while needed programs for healthcare, jobs, the environment, and disaster relief do not get the funding they need. Just as the new imperialist masters of Iraq have shown a criminal lack of interest in the rebuilding the Iraqi infrastructure, so too they left the people of New Orleans to die.

Yet for the ruling class, their failure in Iraq is not in the murderous, undemocratic, and anti-woman puppet regime they have set up and the money that has been squandered in doing it, but in the failure of that regime to deliver the stability needed to acquire the oil loot. They complain that oil production in Iraq is below prewar levels and the occupation by U.S. and British troops serve as targets for the insurgency.

The words of Hillary Clinton make abundantly clear that what she opposes is not the oil war itself, but the fact that Bush is not winning it:

"Let us not confuse the leadership's failures with either the remaining mission in Iraq or the war on terrorism or with our support for our troops. What we have here is a failure of leadership to accomplish that mission. What was hailed as our shortest war has now become one of our longest. What was hailed as a model of democracy teeters on the brink of complete anarchy. What was the leadership that quickly claimed credit for success has been lethargic in the face of misjudgments and setbacks." Hillary Clinton

Likewise, Barack Obama has made similar complaints, saying that Bush should have sent more troops into Iraq.

Unlike Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, socialists see nothing good that can come from the continuation of the U.S. war against Iraq. The U.S. occupation of Iraq is doing nothing for anybody except the capitalists that are profiting from the war and the tax dollars of the American people. We call for no support to the Democrats and we demand: Iraq to the Iraqis! U.S. Out Now!

Liberation News calls for ending the war and global warming through becoming better organized; building the mass movement in the streets; striking with political demands against arms producers and polluters; hot cargoing war materials on the docks, trains, and trucks as has been done on a few occasions along the west coast; becoming ungovernable; and building towards a general strike against the war. Likewise, we support the right of military personal to refuse orders and resist these wars. We support students, such as those at UC Santa Cruz who have repeatedly driven military recruiters off campus. And we call for the nationalization of the energy industry, building the socialist movement, voting socialist, and ultimately ending imperialism and environmental destruction through a socialist revolution holding high the principles of an egalitarian socialist economy used for human and environmental needs rather than profit, an economy controlled by the people through full democratic rights and universal suffrage.

Also see:

The Case for Socialized Medicine in the United States, and the Struggle to Achieve It By STEVEN ARGUE
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/01/02/18469739.php

Closing Our Eyes Won’t Make Racial and Ethnic Inequalities Disappear
by STEVEN ARGUE
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/01/21/18473855.php

This is an article of Liberation News, subscribe free:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

posted in Dumb Government - 1 reply

No to Rightist Ron Paul, How We Can Really End the War

2008-01-12T07:33:22Z

"I'd rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don't want, and get it." Socialist Anti-war Candidate Eugene Debs (who garnered nearly a million votes while he sat in prison for opposition to U.S. involvement in World War One).

"Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action" wrote Ron Paul, who voted against the renewal of the Voting Rights Act in Congress, the act that gave Blacks the right to vote, quote from his “Ron Paul Newsletter”.

No to NYC Indymedia Censorship, How We Can Really End the War

By STEVEN ARGUE

Claiming that only an alliance with Ron Paul conservatives can end the war, New York City Indymedia volunteers have allowed blatant slander against Liberation News and have censored attempts to respond to those lies. Among the slanders posted were accusations that Liberation News is opposed to Ron Paul because we support Hillary Clinton and her healthcare program. I tried posting the following response, but it was censored on the site:

Ron Paul supporter: “it's pointed out that yes Ron Paul is a racist but Stevies candidate Hillary is even worse.”

Steven Argue: “I don’t support Hillary Clinton. Never have, but you don’t listen. This is pure slander.”

They then repeat their slander that I support Hillary Clinton for her healthcare plan saying, “It's pointed out that Stevie is willing to sacrifice liberty for a bogus health care plan”

Steven Argue: “Hillary Clinton opposes both socialized medicine and single payer healthcare. She supports insurance company healthcare, the kind that is killing untold millions in the United States. This is one of many reasons I oppose her.”

“And no, I don't see Clinton as a first step towards socialized medicine. Her promise to force people to buy insurance has nothing in common with socialized medicine, nor partially socialized medicine (i.e. single payer). I’m clear about this in my article:

The Case for Socialized Medicine in the United States, and the Struggle to Achieve It, By STEVEN ARGUE
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/01/02/18469739.php

“As for Ron Paul, he wants to privatize everything, including public education, Social Security, and Medicare, eliminate the Voting Rights Act and Roe V Wade in the name of "states rights", signed on to the "Marriage Protection Act", would eliminate every environmental and labor protection, etc. etc. etc. This is a prescription for the slavery of the majority to protect the “liberty” of a tiny handful of capitalists to exploit.

“I oppose both Hillary Clinton and Ron Paul. But I’ve already made that clear as being my position. These accusations are slanderous.”

Ron Paul supporter: “Then Stevie moves the goal posts again. Waaa. He's being censored.”

Steven Argue: “I repeatedly posted a response to the slander that I support Hillary Clinton’s healthcare plan, and the response is censored every time. I have no motive to make that up. I mentioned it because I wanted people to see my response. Frankly, I’m quite surprised it is happening. Let’s see if this one goes up.”

That response, as I feared, was also censored. Revealing the reasons behind the Ron Paul censorship at the site, the Ron Paul backers posted the following:

“Get off your sectarianism.

“What you don’t get is that there are only two ways we're going to end the occupation of Iraq:

“1.) A recession, and a bad one.

“2.) Convincing the vast majority of conservative Americans it's wrong. Ron Paul reaches these people. The guy with the Free Mumia shirt selling the "Socialist Worker" doesn't.

“To get anything done in a democracy you're going to have to work with people you don't agree with and people you might not even like. People in grown up countries do this all the time. They're called "coalitions".

“The Labor Party in Israel, for example, makes alliances with the ultra orthodox. The Liberal Democrats have made common cause with the Tories in the UK. The left made common cause with Vicente Fox to get the PRI out of power in Mexico.

“It's only in the puritan USA where everybody thinks you have to like all your political allies and agree with them on everything.”

Besides the fact that the majority of Americans already oppose the war; and besides the fact that these points show a total lack of understanding of the bourgeois nature of the coalitions in the countries mentioned; and besides showing a total lack of understanding of what it will take to end the war (I discuss this at the end of the article); New York City Indymedia’s lack of confidence in the ability of people to change has caused them to build a coalition with a capitalist politician who is a racist, homophobic, anti-worker, anti-environmental, bible thumping, sexist, anti-labor, anti-poor, free-market privatization fanatic. On top of that, they censor the left in order to achieve that coalition.

While a Ron Paul presidency would likely end the war, at what price would this come?

Ron Paul uses the term liberty a lot, so let’s take a look at what he means by liberty.

The liberty Ron Paul demands is:

The liberty of the capitalists to exploit without labor laws and environmental protections;

The "state’s right” to prevent Blacks from voting without the interference of the Voting Rights Act (voted against its renewal in Congress);

The "states right" to ban abortions without the interference of Roe v Wade;

The freedom of the government to deny same-sex rights (was an original sponsor of the "Marriage Protection Act");

The freedom of children not to attend schools (would abolish public education);

The freedom of the elderly and disabled to starve (would abolish Social Security);

The freedom of the sick to die (would abolish Medicare);

The freedom of the U.S. to destroy the planet without even the most basic limits on carbon emissions (opposes signing on to Kyoto and all other carbon limitations);

This is, in short, the liberty of a wealthy minority to make their money from the exploitation of labor and the environment with zero interference from labor laws, environmental laws, and the IRS. While his program is liberty for a minority of rich white heterosexual males, it is slavery for the majority.

Simply put, Ron Paul’s promises to end the war are not enough when one looks at the fact that he would eliminate two centuries of hard fought social progress in the United States.

Some of the anti-war backers of Ron Paul argue that we don’t have to worry about these things because Ron Paul will never be elected. They think that backing his campaign is a way to win over his supporters. What is clear is that such arguments could only come from people who are utterly lost and rudderless, which leaves unclear the question of what they are winning Ron Paul supporters over to. They are supporting a candidate whose program is George Wallace on crack cocaine! Yet, the ultimate absurdity is the fact that they are backing a candidate whose most reassuring feature is that he won’t get elected! Is this point lost on these people? And is the chance that their support may help him get elected a chance they really want to take? Nobody thought that third party candidate Jesse (the body) Ventura would get elected in Minnesota either, but he was, and as soon as he was elected he discarded his libertarian values on drug legalization and prostitution and instead proceeded to carrying out attacks on labor and carrying out disastrous cuts in education and other social spending.

Others argue that if Ron Paul is elected, he will easily be able to pull the troops out of Iraq, but congress will block him on the other issues. There is no doubt that they would block parts of Ron Paul’s program in order to prevent the social unrest such measures would cause, but with the ruling class’s desire to step up the exploitation of labor and the environment through eliminating regulation and through privatization, there can be little doubt that if he is able to maintain his presidency without being shot, aspects of Ron Paul’s domestic program would be implemented.

Today, in the United States we have two rightwing capitalist parties that rule. The activists who run New York Indymedia are floating around utterly lost and rudderless. On the one hand, their anarchist philosophy prohibits them from putting forward their own leadership or supporting socialist candidates; and on the other hand, they are stuck in the “real politic” of supporting “lesser evil” capitalist politicians. It is these characteristics that made them susceptible to being swept up on the Ron Paul band wagon. Despite their “libertarian” values of “freedom”, they have now taken this to the point where they are even willing to censor critics of Ron Paul on their website.

While Ron Paul, the only Republican candidate opposed to the war, is not worth supporting, the front running Democrats are also very bad. Clinton, Obama, and Edwards, are all pro-war. Both Edwards and Clinton voted for the war. Obama supporters claim that Obama never supported the war. While Obama was not yet in the Senate at the time of the Iraq war vote, Obama, Edwards, and Clinton have all voted for war appropriations. This puts them all in the position of having supported the war. Over a million Iraqis are dead due to the U.S. invasion and occupation, and billions of dollars have been squandered. Obama, by helping pay for the war, has his hands in this mass murder just as Clinton and Edwards do.

Obama’s Iraq War De-escalation Act of 2007 supposedly would have begun troop withdrawal in May 2007. Yet, it didn't call for full nor immediate withdrawal. In addition, under the bill, the withdrawal could be halted if the Iraqi government met a number of criteria laid out by the Bush administration. These included a broad number of things such as changes in the use of oil revenue, government reforms, an end to sectarian violence, and other economic and reconstruction criteria. In Obama’s bill we have a crystal ball into the future. The excuses laid out in the bill will be heard once again as Obama, Clinton, or Edwards explain why they are keeping the troops in Iraq for their entire presidency; that is unless other actions are taken by the people to stop the war.

This brings us to the fundamental question of how to stop the war. If we are to listen to the Ron Paul censors / supporters at NYC Indymedia the only thing we can do to stop the war is support Ron Paul or hope for (pray for?) economic collapse. Yet, this ignores other less damaging possibilities. These include the troops refusing to fight, a general strike, strikes against the movement of war materials, or socialist revolution.

1. The troops refusing to fight. This worked in the struggle to end the U.S. aggression against Vietnam. It was the socialist movement who were the primary organizers of the anti-Vietnam War movement. That movement, immediately after the government’s murders at Kent State in May 1970 had 8 million students out on strike, and some Universities, such a Berkley, were taken over by students and faculty as anti-war universities. After May 1970, the majority of those drafted were already opposed to the war before they got to Vietnam. Refusal to fight was widespread, and the fragging of pro-war officers was common. Nixon could not continue to wage a war with soldiers who refused to fight. This, along with the heroic resistance of the Vietnamese, brought an end to the war in Vietnam.

Troops refusing to fight also helped bring an end to Russian involvement in the First World War, and helped bring down two pro-war governments in 1917.

2. A general strike or strikes against the movement of war materials. Strikes with such political demands have a long history of success. France has many good social programs because the workers there were willing to shut down their country to achieve them; and they are still willing to do the same to protect those hard fought gains.

3. Socialist revolution. The October Russian Revolution achieved an end to Russian involvement in the First World War. This was a good thing, despite the undemocratic nature of the revolution. Learning from those lessons, Liberation News opposes the dictatorial system of one party rule and raises the banner of revolutionary democratic socialism, while at the same time learning from many of the revolutionary strategies of Lenin and Trotsky.

Protests, pickets, information distribution, building a socialist movement, and answering pro-Ron Paul and pro-Obama-Clinton-Edwards propaganda all help towards building the momentum needed in achieving the kinds of actions that can end the war. Putting support behind Ron Paul only helps an extreme rightwing movement achieve the mantel of leadership for an anti-war sentiment that already represents majority public opinion. In addition, backing a guy like Ron Paul who just crossed a picket line to appear on Jay Lenno’s “Tonight Show” destroys the anti-war strategy of reaching out to the working class, as does backing a racist candidate like Ron Paul hurt the ability to reach out to the multi-racial working class.

No to the Democrats and Republicans!

U.S. Out of Iraq Now!

No to Insurance Company Healthcare, For Socialized Medicine!

Save the Planet, Curb Carbon Emissions Now!

Vote Socialist, Build the Labor Movement, Build the Anti-War Movement, Build the Socialist Movement.

[Note, small changes were made to the response that was censored at NYC Indymedia to make it more readable within the format of this article. Those wishing to see the original version will be given it upon request. Likewise, anyone wishing further sources will be provided them upon request]

This is an article of Liberation News, a low volume newsletter, Subscribe free!
https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

posted in Dumb Government - 0 replies

The Ron Paul “Revolution”, an Extreme Rightwing Threat

2008-01-09T23:58:32Z

The Ron Paul “Revolution”, an Extreme Rightwing Threat

By STEVEN ARGUE

For the most part the Iowa caucuses were business as usual for the Democrat and Republican Parties. Among the Democrats, “Anti-war” and “pro-single payer health care” Democrat Dennis Kucinich put his support behind pro-war anti--single payer health care, Barrack Obama. Yet on the far right, anti-war Libertarian and Republican Ron Paul gained a stunning 10% of the vote.

Seeing the failure of the Democrats to deliver a candidate worth supporting; some left leaning individuals have been suggesting support to Ron Paul. One is anti-war Vietnam veteran Stan Goff, who suggested in his January 4, 2008 article ”Monkey Wrenching the System, Ron Paul’s Revolution” that people vote in the primaries for Ron Paul, switching party registration right away if they live in a state where such a move is necessary to vote in the Republican primaries.

At the root of the Ron Paul "revolution" is the dismantling of Social Security and the Department of Education as well as other basic social programs, and the elimination of worker and environmental protections. Advances like single payer health care? No way. Ron Paul's message is that you need to take care of yourself, and that there shouldn't be such government programs, nor such interference with private profit. While he puts forward reasons for not supporting going to war abroad, his domestic policies would ignite civil war at home.

In addition to pretending he's against all government, he's for outlawing abortion and supports the continued ban on same-sex marriage. He was one of the original co-sponsors of the "Marriage Protection Act".

He's also a religious extremist who thinks that creationism should be taught in the schools.

On race, Ron Paul was one of 33 Congress members to vote against the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, an act that was first passed to give Blacks in the south the right to vote. On a similar note, he says the Civil Rights Act violates the Constitution and impedes on individual liberties. Speaking of Blacks in Washington DC he states in campaign literature, "95 percent of African Americans in are semi-criminal or entirely criminal".

No wonder the American Nazi Party has close relations with him (see letter from Nazi Commander Bill White below). In addition, Ron Paul has the support of other white supremacists such as David Duke, and has knowingly taken donations from former KKK Grand Wizard Don Black.

Hell would freeze over before I'd support Ron Paul. And being an atheist; that will be a long time.

There are plenty of candidates to the left of the Democrats worth considering supporting who oppose the war, would preserve public education and Social Security, who would provide single payer or socialized medicine, and who aren’t raving racist, homophobic, and sexist “Libertarian” fanatics. Why not look at them rather than someone from the loony right?

I discuss some of the campaigns that may be worth supporting in the following article:

The Case for Socialized Medicine in the United States,
And the Struggle to Achieve It
By STEVEN ARGUE
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/01/02/18469739.php

Or here is a different version of the same article:
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2008/01/93820.html

*****************
American Nazi Party Chief says Ron Paul is one of us

Bill White, commander of the American National Socialist Worker’s Party, aka The American Nazi Party, wrote the following on the Nazi Vanguard News Network:

Comrades:

I have kept quiet about the Ron Paul campaign for a while, because I didn’t see any need to say anything that would cause any trouble. However, reading the latest release from his campaign spokesman, I am compelled to tell the truth about Ron Paul’s extensive involvement in white nationalism.

Both Congressman Paul and his aides regularly meet with members of the Stormfront set, American Renaissance, the Institute for Historic Review, and others at the Tara Thai restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, usually on Wednesdays. This is part of a dinner that was originally organized by Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis and Joe Sobran, and has since been mostly taken over by the Council of Conservative Citizens.

I have attended these dinners, seen Paul and his aides there, and been invited to his offices in Washington to discuss policy.

For his spokesman to call white racialism a “small ideology” and claim white activists are “wasting their money” trying to influence Paul is ridiculous. Paul is a white nationalist of the Stormfront type who has always kept his racial views and his views about world Judaism quiet because of his political position.

I don’t know that it is necessarily good for Paul to “expose” this. However, he really is someone with extensive ties to white nationalism and for him to deny that in the belief he will be more respectable by denying it is outrageous — and I hate seeing people in the press who denounce racialism merely because they think it is not fashionable.

Bill White, Commander
American National Socialist Workers Party

*********
Poor Bill White. He’s having trouble with his brand of racism, anti-Semitism, mass extermination, and genocide not being "in fashion". But hey, you've got to thank the knuckleheaded Nazi for confirming our suspicions on Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan! -Steven Argue

Liberation News
https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

posted in Dumb Government - 1 reply

The Fight For Single Payer and National Healthcare

2007-06-28T18:01:13Z

The Fight For Single Payer and National Healthcare

By Steven Argue

As an advocate for social justice and someone with no healthcare, I am strongly in favor of national healthcare like in Cuba, and short of that a single payer system would be a significant step forward.

National healthcare does work. It is working very well in Cuba. It is interesting that tiny poor Cuba under a U.S. economic blockade is able to provide good healthcare for everyone. Cuba, unlike the United States, does not let people die in the emergency rooms without treatment or turn sick people away from receiving healthcare because they lack insurance. Cuba has taken the profit out of illness and injury and provide healthcare as a human right.

Likewise, while the United States is sending military troops to set up death squad governments in Iraq and Haiti and to intervene in Afghanistan, the Phillipines, and prop up the death squad government of Colombia, Cuba instead sends doctors. Cuban doctors save lives. They are on the ground in a number of countries providing regular care, and they are also sent to countries in emergencies. A few years back Cuba sent doctors to Central America after a bad hurricane and saved many lives. Likewise they offered to send doctors to New Orleans immediately after Katrina, they were well trained in dealing with that type of situation and would have saved lives, but Bush refused to let them in. A similar thing happened with the Nicaraguan government refusing entry, but that government let the Cuban doctors in due to protests.

And Canada, also unlike the United States, has better healthcare where everyone is covered. Lately the NAFTA agreement has unfortunately been intervening against the Canadian single payer system, but it is still a much better system of healthcare than in the United States. Single payer is much cheaper and more efficient than the health insurance racket. Unfortunately the Democrats and Republicans are subservient to the insurance, pharmaceutical, and for-profit hospital industries. Single payer eliminates the health insurance racket with all of its waste in profits, paperwork, and overpaid CEOs. And despite the cries of the extreme right neo-cons and libertarians, none of the major candidates have any plans to make any significant change to the healthcare racket in America.

It will take a major struggle against the corporate power structure to gain single payer healthcare. The main force that has the potential strength to do so is organized labor, a force that could shut down production to make our demands.

Unfortunately many of the unions that are supposed to represent labor are in the back pockets of the corporations and the Democrat Party. Instead of fighting for single payer healthcare the SEIU recently held rallies for Senator Ben Cardin (D-Maryland), Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada), Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri), and Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota). None of these corporate politicians support single payer healthcare.

This is bad enough, but Dawn Lee, spokesperson for the SEIU, says the SEIU takes no position on HR 676, a single payer bill introduced by Conyers.

There are unions, such as the California Nurses Association (CNA), that support single payer. But until the labor movement breaks its love affair with the corporate Democrat Party, and begins to once again rely on the militant action of the rank and file, as it did in the 1930’s, we will not only not gain single payer healthcare, our standard of living will continue to decline by every other indicator as well, while massive corporate profits soar.

Pass HR 676, single payer for the United States!

Pass SB 840, single payer in California!

Put union dues into strike funds instead of the Democrat Party!

For mass action and a general strike for single payer healthcare!

End the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba!

Preserve Canadian Single Payer, Repeal NAFTA!

Steven Argue for Liberation News:
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

posted in Dumb Government - 0 replies

No to Angelides and Schwarzenegger! Yes to Janice Jordan!

2006-10-09T00:48:56Z

No to Angelides and Schwarzenegger!

Critical Support For Janice Jordan, Peace and Freedom Party Candidate For Governor

By Steven Argue

Last night’s debate between Phil Angelides and Arnold Schwarzenegger was a grueling hour of corporate politics. Angelides leveled criticisms against Schwarzenegger for cuts to education under his governorship. Schwarzenegger countered by asking where Angelides was when Democrat governor Gray Davis was making cuts to education and asked why Angelides supported those cuts under Davis. Schwarzenegger went so far as to ask why Angelides didn’t join in the student protests for education that had marched by his office under Davis.

It was a valid criticism, yet Schwarzenegger never supported those student protests either and as Angelides pointed out, he has made his own cuts to education.

On a similar note Angelides criticized Schwarzenegger for his praise for the racist anti-immigrant vigilantes called the “Minutemen” while in the same breath calling for a "guest worker" program that would create a new class of super-exploited worker with no political rights. Under the same type of program in the past U.S. bosses often failed to even pay Mexican workers for their hard labor. The fact that Angelides and the Democrat Party are now calling for this kind of legalization of indentured servitude place them firmly in the same racist camp as Schwarzenegger.

What was missing from the debate was the voice of an official candidate that will be on the ballot in November, but was excluded from the debate by the California Broadcasters Association. This candidate, Janice Jordan of the Peace and Freedom Party, could have chimed in that she did in fact support the protests against the cuts of both Davis and Schwarzenegger and that she opposes both the racist Minutemen and the racist guest worker program. But she was excluded from the debates, showing once again the bias of the corporate media as a pillar in preventing true democracy in America.

A truly democratic society would eliminate corporate control of the elections by nationalizing the corporate media and allowing all candidates equal access to the airwaves, cable, and print. Likewise a truly democratic society would carry out a sweeping “campaign finance reform” through the nationalization of the means of production (using that wealth for human and environmental needs rather than decadence and deception).

It will take a socialist revolution to bring democracy to America.

Liberation News sees the participation of socialists in the corrupted electoral politics of America as a critical platform in explaining how we differ from the capitalist Democrat and Republican parties. Likewise all of the undemocratic measures that are used against us, which will only intensify as we grow stronger, expose the parallel need for a revolutionary program to accompany any socialist electoral activity.

The Peace and Freedom Party is primarily an electoral party that speaks of the need for socialism, but generally avoids talk of the only step that will bring socialism, a step that can be summed up in one word: revolution. Revolution is about abolishing the current racist anti-worker and anti-poor police, military, and judicial system and carrying out a sweeping redistribution of the wealth.

Likewise the campaign literature the Peace and Freedom Party hand out at demonstrations often contain good criticisms of the Democrats and Republicans and outline a good platform for social and economic emancipation, but are usually missing another key component that will make putting human and environmental needs before profits possible in a socialist society. That being the nationalization of industry including oil (and other energy), “defense”, auto, the banks, the railroads, chemical, and the agricultural monopolies.

It is due to this lack of a true socialist program in the Peace and Freedom Party, and lack of any campaign statements from Janice Jordan countering it, that Liberation News can only give critical support to the campaign of Janice Jordan.

In giving this critical support to Janice Jordan we recognize that the social reforms called for by the Peace and Freedom Party do still have a revolutionary component in that they go far beyond anything that the capitalist class of the United States will ever allow short of their total overthrow. In giving critical support we intervene to denounce the undemocratic actions of the corporate media and capitalist campaign financing used against the campaign of Janice Jordan, but unlike the Peace and Freedom Party, we take those undemocratic actions to their logical conclusion: the ultimate need for socialist revolution.

While giving critical support to Janice Jordan’s campaign for governor, Liberation News is withholding support for the Peace and Freedom Party’s candidate for Lieutenant Governor, Stewart Alexander. Alexander’s campaign is spreading illusions in the Democrat Party. In his campaign statements Alexander pretends that the Republicans represent corporate interests and that the Democrats do not, their problems being "sitting on the fence" and an unwillingness to spend "political capital". This is nonsense; the Democrat Party is just as much a corporate party as the Republican, both in its financing and in its program.

In another campaign statement Stewart Alexander opposes the Peace and Freedom Party’s platform that calls for immediate withdrawal from Iraq from the right. In the statement he claims that the Peace and Freedom Party needs to draw up an exit strategy from Iraq. Yet immediate withdrawal is an exit strategy. It is an exit strategy that takes no consideration of continuing to prop up the undemocratic puppet death squad government the U.S. established, nor does it consider the logistical needs of keeping troops fighting and dying in Iraq to defend military hardware as it is evacuated. Troops are to be evacuated immediately by air, sea, and land the same way they were sent in; and the biggest cause of the bloodshed in Iraq will be gone. This is the exit strategy.

Liberation News calls for U.S. troops out now! Build the mass movement! For the labor movement to break from the Democrat Party of war and exploitation and to end the war through building the mass movement in the streets; striking against arms producers; hot cargoing war materials on the docks, trains, and trucks; and building towards a general strike against the war. For the right of military personal to refuse orders and resist this war. For student actions against recruiters, such as those at UC Santa Cruz that have repeatedly driven military recruiters off campus. For building the socialist movement as part of the anti-war resistance today and to ultimately end U.S. imperialism through socialist revolution.

While Phil Angelides and Arnold Schwarzenegger will carry out austerity connected to the U.S. war in Iraq and the economic problems of capitalism, neither the Democrats nor Republicans offer any solutions to the problems of war and capitalism because they support both.

Vote Janice Jordan for governor!

Money for social and environmental needs, not for war and capitalist profit!

For socialist revolution to end imperialism and establish democracy in the United States!
On other state offices Liberation News critical support to the following Peace and Freedom Party candidates:

Gerald Sanders for State Treasurer

Margie Akin for Secretary of State

Liz Barron for Controller

Jack Harison for Attorney General

Tom Condit for Insurance Commissioner

Liberation News:
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

mirror Liberation News:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Liberation-News/

posted in Dumb Government - 0 replies