Dispassionate Analysis,
Passionate Solidarity
By Max Elbaum
War Times/Tiempo de Guerras
June 29, 2009 - For determining effective strategy and tactics, the peace movement needs hard-nosed, dispassionate analysis.
At the same time, the heart and soul of the peace movement's very existence is passionate solidarity with human beings across the globe in their battles for dignity, equality and a decent life.
Watching Iran this last month it's the passion that has come to the fore.
Certainly there are a variety of political viewpoints advocated by different strands of the Iranian protest movement. They run the gamut from infatuation with Western culture to radical demands for workers' emancipation. No doubt some promoters of the demonstrations are employed by the CIA, making trouble for a regime long in Washington's gunsights.
But the bottom line is that tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of Iranians have taken to the streets. Their overwhelmingly dominant demand is for an honest and transparent electoral process. Rippling within that are massive currents for more democratic freedoms generally, for women's rights, for an end to the forcible imposition of particular religious mores on people's day-to-day lives.
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July 1st, 2009 by webmaster | No Comments | Filed in Antiwar, Iran, Palestine, Strategy
The Young are the Restless: Jennifer Pae
[This is the first installment in a three part series about young activists facing a troubling economy.]
By Adam Raphael
CampusProgress.org
June 4, 2009
Jennifer Pae speaking at the 2006 Campus Progress National Conference. (Photo: Campus Progress)
A 2005 graduate of the University of California, San Diego, Jennifer Pae understands first-hand the importance of making higher education more affordable.
The daughter of two immigrant parents, Pae was the first member of her family to attend college. In her senior year at UCSD, Pae became the university’s first Asian-American woman president, and openly acknowledges that without financial aid programs, this opportunity would not have existed. Nonetheless, Pae feels strongly that the current system has significant flaws and desperately needs reworking, “We need to educate prospective students about their options and assure them the best possible aid package. Right now, that isn’t happening.”
Like so many other young people around the nation, Jennifer Pae was faced with an overwhelming amount of debt. While the average student in the United States graduates college with approximately $20,000 in loans, Pae had to pay off about double that amount. Unfortunately, she was part of the 39% of student borrowers in this nation who graduate with unmanageable debt.
Pae pointed out that many of the University of California campuses are in some of the state’s most expensive cities, such as Los Angeles and San Diego. And all this occurs in the only state to receive a passing grade in the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education’s National Report Card on Higher Education in 2008.
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June 25th, 2009 by webmaster | No Comments | Filed in Economic Justice, Green Jobs, Organizing, Youth Insurgency
Too Poor to Make the News
By Barabara Ehrenreich
New York Times Op-Ed
June 14, 2009 - The human side of the recession, in the new media genre that’s been called “recession porn,” is the story of an incremental descent from excess to frugality, from ease to austerity. The super-rich give up their personal jets; the upper middle class cut back on private Pilates classes; the merely middle class forgo vacations and evenings at Applebee’s. In some accounts, the recession is even described as the “great leveler,” smudging the dizzying levels of inequality that characterized the last couple of decades and squeezing everyone into a single great class, the Nouveau Poor, in which we will all drive tiny fuel-efficient cars and grow tomatoes on our porches.
But the outlook is not so cozy when we look at the effects of the recession on a group generally omitted from all the vivid narratives of downward mobility — the already poor, the estimated 20 percent to 30 percent of the population who struggle to get by in the best of times. This demographic, the working poor, have already been living in an economic depression of their own. From their point of view “the economy,” as a shared condition, is a fiction.
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June 15th, 2009 by webmaster | No Comments | Filed in Uncategorized
Graphic: Rightwing Anti-EFCA Banner
Battle over Labor Law Reform
Shows True Power of the Right
By Abby Scher
PublicEye.org Some people may enjoy watching the Right thrash around trying to find its way in the Obama Age, but I take the election results and their aftermath as a sign of a country dangerously divided. There really was a stark difference in the major party candidates, and 46 percent voted for the guy who lost. 59,946,378 is a lot of people. This political force isn’t going away.
During the McCarthy Era of the early 1950s, the anticommunist movement fed off of disgruntled Republicans who could not accept that huge influential chunks of their party accepted the New Deal and the role of the government in regulating capitalism. They saw America’s new regulations and modest aid for people tossed by harsh business cycles as outright property theft and communism. That the New Deal asserted federal power over the states could mean only a loss of political sovereignty and American liberty. Feeling disenfranchised not just by Washington but parts of their own party, the Republican Right created an alternative universe of betrayal, suspicion, and conspiracy.
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June 2nd, 2009 by webmaster | No Comments | Filed in Economic Justice, Right wing, trade unions
Washington's Wars
and Occupations
By Max Elbaum
War Times/Tiempo de Guerras
May 29, 2009
TURNING THE SHIP - TOWARD WHAT?
Responding to a questioner saying that there seemed to be little change in Washington policies, President Obama replied: "The ship of state is an ocean liner, it's not a speedboat... if we can move this big battleship a few degrees in a different direction, we may not see all the consequences a week from now or three months from now, but 10 years from now, or 20 years from now."
Obama is right that the "big battleship" of U.S. imperial militarism can't be easily turned, much less quickly stopped altogether. But Obama's remark also impels us to examine the nature of the turn he is trying to make, and to analyze where it does and doesn't overlap with, or open doors for, an antiwar agenda.
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May 31st, 2009 by webmaster | No Comments | Filed in Antiwar, NeoCons, militarism
Graphic: New Rightist DVD on Obama and 'the Illuminati'
Conspiracy Theory
Conservatives
Jeffrey Feldman
Editor-in-Chief, Frameshop
If the rash of 'Tea Party' protests planned on Tax Day 2009 is any indication, the Right Wing in American politics may finally abandon all pretense at what Barry Goldwater once called the "conscience of a conservative." Instead of that lofty, albeit tattered ambition, the Right Wing of 2009 is rapidly embracing a wild-eyed, media manipulated, and self-destructive "conspiracy theory conservatism."
If I were a Republican leader, I would be very worried about this change. Should it come to pass that conspiracy theory conservatism wins out once and for good over Goldwater conservatism, the Republican Party will be doomed, broken, kaput.
The shift to conspiracy theory Conservatism is not hard to spot, even if a ready description has only just begun to rise through the din of the 24/7 news chatter.
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May 26th, 2009 by webmaster | No Comments | Filed in Elections, Racism, Right wing
Washington Needs to Address 'Shadow Banking'
By David Weidner
MarketWatch
May 19, 2009 - What or who exactly caused the banking crisis? Was it the banks? The bankers? The borrowers? Did the government fail? Like torture, can we blame it on former President Bush and just move on?
It seems everyone had a role in the biggest financial and economic disasters since the Great Depression. Though degrees of guilt vary, it is a rare economic collapse where everyone in society doesn't have some kind of role.
This time around, however, one party seems particularly culpable. It's what has come to be known as the "shadow banking" system. Loosely defined, the shadow banking system is the group of non-bank institutions that are doing a whole host of banking functions.
They lend, and they take collateral. We know them as pension and hedge funds, investment banks, structured investment vehicles and various insurance companies. During the last 20 years, as the economy has hungered for more credit, the shadow banking system has provided the meat.
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May 21st, 2009 by webmaster | No Comments | Filed in Economic Justice, Financial Crisis, Pushing Obama
Traffic: One of Our Most Irrational Activities
Coal, Electric Industries Big Winners in Climate Bill Deal
Regional Interests Watering Down Bill
Aimed at Curbing Global Climate Change Effects
By Mike Lillis
Washington Independent
Even as House Democrats are celebrating their deal with conservative-leaning colleagues on climate change legislation, the real winners under the compromise have been the coal, electric and auto industries, who are largely the source of the nation’s carbon emissions to begin with.
Details of the compromise are still emerging, but already the chief sponsors of the measure — Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) — have been forced to lower carbon-reduction targets, cut renewable fuel standards and dole out billions of dollars in benefits to the nation’s largest polluting industries. Many environmentalists say the compromise comes at the too-high cost of undermining the bill’s very purpose, which is to slash emissions dramatically enough to prevent a warming planet from heating further. Some are asking Democrats either to bolster the environmental protections or to scrap the proposal altogether.
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May 16th, 2009 by webmaster | No Comments | Filed in Economic Justice, Energy, Pushing Obama
Light Rail Mass Transit in Tacoma, WA
Who's Afraid of Industrial Policy?
By Max Fraser
The Nation
June 1, 2009 - When President Obama announced Chrysler's bankruptcy filing, on April 30, as "one more step on a clearly charted path to Chrysler's revival," even the most Pollyannaish of observers must have done a double take. Plagued by years of declining international competitiveness and now the worst economic downturn in three-quarters of a century, Chrysler, General Motors and even the temporarily healthy Ford have no clear path to recovery. And with much of the public discussion about how to "save" the industry focused on slashing workforces, eliminating surplus productive capacity and ditching obligations to current and retired employees, one could hardly expect autoworkers to share the president's optimism. "Our marching orders were to do both Chrysler and GM the way we would do a strictly commercial deal," an unnamed member of the Treasury Department's Auto Task Force told the New York Times, with the martial tone and menacing verb "do" sounding an awful lot like they were borrowed from Jack Welch's lean-and-mean corporate playbook of the 1980s.
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May 15th, 2009 by webmaster | No Comments | Filed in Economic Justice, Green Jobs, Workers, trade unions
Unions and
the Crisis:
Ways Forward?
By Greg Albo
Socialist Project - Canada
The political and economic setting facing the union movement today is, perhaps, the most difficult since the Great Depression. Unions had already confronted two decades of unrelenting assault from neoliberal policies of labour market flexibility, austerity and political conservatism. Then, the global financial crisis triggered by defaults in the U.S. subprime mortgage market starting in 2006 ripped across the entire world market. Indeed, many forecasts for 2009 are projecting negative growth for the world economy as a whole for the first time since the 1930s. It is no longer uncommon to hear discussion of the possibility of depression from the most apologetic for capitalism.
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May 2nd, 2009 by webmaster | No Comments | Filed in Economic Justice, Financial Crisis, Organizing, trade unions
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