May 24, 2008 - Some News, Views, and Info Links

Amazon Indians Lead Battle Against Power Giant's Plan to Flood Rainforest (The Independent UK) May 23, 2008

US Empire in Somalia: Hidden Catastrophe, Hidden Agenda (Media Lens) May 13, 2008

US Senate Passes No-Strings War Funding Bill (Inter Press Service) May 23, 2008

“War, Inc.”: John Cusack’s New Film Satirizes the Corruption, Profiteering and Hubris Behind the Iraq War (Democracy Now!) May 23, 2008

Why Cusack's War, Inc.. Is Must-See Political Filmmaking (Alternet) May 21, 2008

Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU): Say No to Xenophobia (MR Zine) May 21, 2008

Union-Busting at Woodman’s Grocery Chain in Wisconsin (Socialist Worker) May 23, 2008

May 19, 2008 - Some News, Views, and Info

Plans For New Coal Plants Under Fire In UK: Protesters are to launch one of the hardest-hitting environmental campaigns for more than a decade over plans to build a new generation of coal-fired power stations in the UK. (London Observer) May 18, 2008

I Give Up, Says Brazilian Minister Who Fought To Save The Rainforest: In a letter to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Ms Silva said that her efforts to protect the rainforest acknowledged as the "lungs of the planet" were being thwarted by powerful business lobbies. (The Independent UK) May 15, 2008

The Emergence of Real Trade Unionism in Wal-Mart Stores in China (China Labor News Translations) May 4, 2008

Comments on the Strike Movement in Egypt (International Socialist Review) May-June 2008

Women - The Guardians of Potato Biodiversity in Peru (Inter Press Service) May 16, 2008

Iraq Veterans Describe Atrocities to US Lawmakers (OneWorld.net) May 17, 2008

Santa Ana, California Labor Rally: HEY, ARNOLD! NO BUDGET CUTS! (Los Angeles Indymedia) May 15, 2008

May 16, 2008 - News, Views, and Info

US Naval Fleet To Be Positioned Off the Coast of South America (Upside Down World) May 13, 2008

John Cusack’s War: The Actor Battles to Un-Embed Hollywood With His New Film, ‘War, Inc.’ (Common Dreams) May 16, 2008

The Horrors of ICE: Dangerous Forced Psychotropic Drugging, Frightening Lack of Medical Care (American Leftist) May 14, 2008

California Supreme Court Strikes Down Same Sex Marriage Ban (365Gay.com) May 15, 2008

China's All-Seeing Eye: With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export. (Rolling Stone) May 29, 2008

Species are dying out at a rate not seen since the demise of the dinosaurs, according to a report published today – and human behaviour is to blame. (The Independent UK) May 16, 2008

May 13, 2008 - News, Views, & Info

Perceived as “Dykes, Whores, Bitches”: 1 in 3 US Military Women Experience Sexual Abuse (The WIP) May 7, 2008

Bolivia: Fraud, Violence and Mass Resistance Marks Right-Wing Push (Bolivia Rising) May 11, 2008

Food Crisis (Part One): The Greatest Demonstration of the Historical Failure of the Capitalist Model (Socialist Voice) April 28, 2008

FOOD CRISIS (Part Two): Capitalism, Agribusiness, and the Food Sovereignty Alternative (Socialist Voice) May 11, 2008

Exposing 'Juan Crow' in the state of Georgia: the matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and symbolic systems enabling the physical and psychic isolation needed to control and exploit undocumented immigrants. (The Nation) May 8, 2008

Antiwar Marine's Mother Elaine Brower Reports From March's Winter Soldier
(Against the Current) May/June 2008

A Report on Winter Soldier 2008 (Against the Current) May/June 2008

Amazon's Future in Delicate Balance. 75% of Deforestation in Amazon is to Create Cattle Pasture (BBC News) May 12, 2008

May 11, 2008 - Some News, Views, and Info

Hollywood Could Soon See Another Strike (Workers Independent News) May 8, 2008

A Nuclear Problem: Oglala Sioux Fight Expansion of Uranium Mine (Indian Country Today) May 9, 2008

Regime in Burma Worsens Suffering from Cyclone (Green Left Weekly) May 10, 2008

World's Native Peoples Take on Climate Change (Living on Earth) May 9, 2008

Journalist Kevin Pina on the Neoliberal Roots of Haiti's Food Crisis (Socialist Worker) May 5, 2008

May 10, 2008 - Some News, Views, and Info

Indigenous Speak Out Against Carbon Markets (Inter Press Service) May 4, 2008

Two More Gruesome Weeks Under Colombia's Alvaro Uribe (Latin America News Review) May 7, 2008

The Wages of Left Capitulation to the Democratic Party 1 (Counterpunch) April 26/27, 2008

McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Left Capitulation to the Democratic Party 2 (Counterpunch) May 9, 2008

Polarizing Bolivia: Santa Cruz Votes on Autonomy (Upside Down World) May 8, 2008

Expanded Undercover Investigation Shows Mistreatment of Downer Cows Is Commonplace at Livestock Auctions (Humane Society of the United States) May 7, 2008

Mumia Abu-Jamal Asks: Who's uncle is really crazy? Uncle Jeremiah or Uncle Sam? (Prison Radio) May 1, 2008

Rockefeller Family Fables (Dissident Voice) May 8, 2008

Burger With a Side of Spies: How Burger King Hired a Sketchy Private Security Firm to Spy on Non-Violent Activists (New York Times) May 7, 2008

"We Are Workers, Not Criminals"

By David Bacon, IRC Americas Program, May 5, 2008

In the big immigrant marches that swept the country on May Day in 2006 and 2007, one sign said it all: "We are Workers, not Criminals!" Often it was held in the calloused hands of men and women who looked as though they'd just come from work in a factory, cleaning an office building, or picking grapes.
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Deportations, firings, and guest-worker programs all make labor cheaper and union organizing harder. They contribute to a climate of fear and insecurity for everyone.
Instead of making work a crime and treating immigrants as criminals, we need equality, economic security, jobs, and rights for everyone.

Read all of '"We Are Workers, Not Criminals"'. . .

'The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All' by Peter Linebaugh

Description of the book on the UC Press site:

This remarkable book shines a fierce light on the current state of liberty and shows how longstanding restraints against tyranny–and the rights of habeas corpus, trial by jury, and due process of law, and the prohibition of torture–are being abridged. In providing a sweeping history of Magna Carta, the source of these protections since 1215, this powerful book demonstrates how these ancient rights are repeatedly laid aside when the greed of privatization, the lust for power, and the ambition of empire seize a state. Peter Linebaugh draws on primary sources to construct a wholly original history of the Great Charter and its scarcely-known companion, the Charter of the Forest, which was created at the same time to protect the subsistence rights of the poor.

Obama's Money Cartel: How Barack Obama Fronted for the Most Vicious Predators on Wall Street

By Pam Martens, Black Agenda Report, May 7, 2008

The candidate that claims to be the only presidential contender who doesn't take money from lobbyists is in fact the biggest recipient of lobby-related contributions. Barack Obama rakes in millions from law firms serving the interests of Wall Street, including the financial institutions that gave us the subprime lending crisis. Lawyers that work for firms that earn hundreds of millions of dollars for lobbying may technically not be lobbyists, but they share in their colleagues' earnings as influencers of Congress - a legal loophole that allows Obama to claim his hands are clean of lobby loot. "The top contributors to the Obama campaign are the very Wall Street firms whose shady mortgage lenders buried the elderly and the poor and minority under predatory loans."

Continue reading 'Obama's Money Cartel: How Barack Obama Fronted for the Most Vicious Predators on Wall Street'. . .

Revolt in Mahalla

As food prices rise in Egypt, class struggle is heating up.
By Hossam El-Hamalawy, International Socialist Review, May-June 2008

Egytian police cracked down in early April on the Nile Delta town of Mahalla—home to the biggest textile mill in the Middle East with its labor force of 27,000—aborting a strike, as the town erupted in two bloody days of street uprisings that left at least two young men killed by President Hosni Mubarak’s U.S.-backed regime. Solidarity protests in Cairo and the other provinces were also squashed by the security services, which rounded up hundreds of ordinary citizens and dissidents, including bloggers and organizers.
A strike had been called by the left-leaning Textile Workers’ League in the Ghazl el-Mahalla textile mill for April 6, to pressure the government into raising the national minimum wage that has not moved from a pathetic $6.40 per month since 1984. The workers were demanding an increase to $222 per month, as well as other demands related to food allowances, industrial safety, and work conditions.
Ghazl el-Mahalla is at the heart of the ongoing strike wave, the biggest to engulf Egypt since the end of the Second World War.

Continue reading 'Revolt in Mahalla'. . .

Cops, Deaths, and Tasers

By LarryE, Lotus - Surviving A Dark Time, May 4, 2008

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The bottom line fact is that, as I have said more than a dozen times, tasers are dangerous weapons designed to inflict disabling pain and which all too often prove deadly - and which have, exactly as I predicted, become a weapon of domination, one intended to induce meek submission, no longer (as they supposedly were intended to be) an alternative to lethal force but an alternative even to no force. And the risks associated with their use will continue to increase as more police forces obtain them precisely because cops are falsely trained that they are "safe." As a result, and as experience has shown, police simply cannot be trusted to use tasers in the way their proponents insist is their purpose, as a last resort. They should be banned.

Read all of 'Cops, Deaths, and Tasers'. . .

Multinational Corporations Make Billions In Profit Out of Growing Global Food Crisis

By Geoffrey Lean, The Independent UK, May 4, 2008

Giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. And speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry.
The prices of wheat, corn and rice have soared over the past year driving the world’s poor - who already spend about 80 per cent of their income on food - into hunger and destitution.
The World Bank says that 100 million more people are facing severe hunger. Yet some of the world’s richest food companies are making record profits.

Continue reading 'Multinational Corporations Make Billions In Profit Out of Growing Global Food Crisis'. . .

The Border Wall and Jaguars

No Border Wall, May 1, 2008

The Center for Biological Diversity is bringing suit to force the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to develop a recovery plan for jaguars in southern Arizona. Listed under the Endangered Species Act, the jaguar is one of the first species that will be driven to extinction by the border wall. If the walls that are on the books for 2008 are built, the Sonoran pronghorn, cactus ferruginous pygmy owl, ocelot, jaguarundi, and a number of other species will follow the jauar into oblivion.

Continue reading 'The Border Wall and Jaguars'. . .

Food Crisis: The Greatest Demonstration of the Historical Failure of the Capitalist Model

By Ian Angus, Socialist Voice, April 28, 2008

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Food is not just another commodity — it is absolutely essential for human survival. The very least that humanity should expect from any government or social system is that it try to prevent starvation — and above all that it not promote policies that deny food to hungry people.
That’s why Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez was absolutely correct on April 24, to describe the food crisis as “the greatest demonstration of the historical failure of the capitalist model.”

Read all of 'Food Crisis: The Greatest Demonstration of the Historical Failure of the Capitalist Model'. . .

May Day Immigrants Rights March in Los Angeles

By Jacob Adelman, Press-Enterprise, May 1, 2008

Immigration-reform advocates gathered Thursday for downtown demonstrations one year after peaceful marches on the issue ended violently when police officers used batons and fired so-called non-lethal rounds to clear people out of a park during the day's closing rally.

Continue reading 'May Day Immigrants Rights March in Los Angeles'. . .

Longshore Workers Proud Of May Day Antiwar Action

By Doug Cunningham, Workers Independent News, May 1, 2008

Despite efforts by employers to stop it, longshore union workers in California are going ahead with their planned work stoppage Thursday to protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jack Heyman of ILWU Local 10 expects the ports to be shut down during the day shift May 1st.
[Heyman]: "This action on May Day is a culmination of our internationalist perspective, and we’re really proud that we’re actually going to be doing this."

LINK

Daryl Hannah, Environmentalists Protest in Westwood, Demanding That Occidental Oil Company Clean Up Amazon

The actress and representatives of several groups say the firm's operations in Peru left behind toxics that continue to contaminate an indigenous people's waters.
By B. Bloomekatz, Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2008

Wearing white hazmat suits and carrying brooms and mops, dozens of activists crowded the entrance to Occidental Petroleum's headquarters in Westwood on Wednesday to demand that the company clean up toxic contamination they say it left behind in the rain forest of the Peruvian Amazon.
"Oxy, Oxy, clean up now!" chanted the protesters from various humanitarian organizations, including Amazon Watch and the Rainforest Action Network.
During the 30 years that the oil company operated in the Peruvian Amazon, activists claim, it dumped hundreds of thousands of barrels daily of toxic oil byproducts and wastewater into rivers and streams used by the indigenous Achuar people for drinking, bathing and fishing.

Continue reading 'Daryl Hannah, Environmentalists Protest in Westwood, Demanding That Occidental Oil Company Clean Up Amazon'. . .

Cynthia McKinney's Statement on the Sean Bell Verdict

By Cynthia McKinney, AllThingsCynthiaMcKinney.com, April 27, 2008

"[T]he legislation and histories of the time, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show, that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument. . . . [A]ltogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."
And with that, the United States Supreme Court ensured that the 20th Century would be defined, as W.E.B. DuBois wrote, by the color line. So, while we might be outraged at the Sean Bell decision itself, it comes directly from the flawed jurisprudence that gave us the Dred Scott Decision in 1857, Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, Bakke in 1978, Croson in 1989, Adarand in 1995, Gratz in 2003, and all of the Ward Connerly-inspired attacks on the very same affirmative action hard won by students facing water hoses and dogs; men and women facing jail, lynch mobs, and death.
Interestingly, according to Attorney Roger Wareham of the December 12th Movement's International Secretariat, the criminal justice system in this country "always finds a rationale for letting off cops who kill black and brown people." Indeed, police officers seem to know that they can kill certain people with impunity.

Continue reading 'Cynthia McKinney's Statement on the Sean Bell Verdict'. . .

Wasted Youth

Arnie’s proposed cuts would dramatically worsen an already dismal situation for California’s neediest kids
By Dan Heimpel, Pasadena Weekly, April 23, 2008

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s call for an across-the-board budget cut of 10 percent will exacerbate the often dismal situation for children in group homes.
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The LA County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) is bracing for a 10 percent reduction to its $168 million allocation for group homes which will possibly be announced in September. Child welfare experts point to the dangers that continued cuts can make to an already weakened group home system. Crippled by a chronic lack of funding since reimbursement rates were established in 1990, the system will be even further undermined by a tax cut.
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“These cuts will absolutely decrease their [group homes’] ability to provide quality services to the most needy children in the system,” says DCFS Director Trish Ploehn, whose department manages out-of-home care for 20,000 kids and a budget of $1.6 billion.

Read all of 'Wasted Youth'. . .

Green Scare State Terrorism

By Stephen Lendman, SteveLendmanBlog, April 28, 2008

In May 2005, FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism John Lewis told a Senate panel that ecoterrorism is "one of today's most serious domestic terrorism threats." Then the FBI's James Jarboe estimated that two organizations (the Earth Liberation Front - ELF and Animal Liberation Front - ALF) committed over 600 criminal acts since 1996, causing over $43 million in damage. For his part, Lewis said both groups committed more than 1100 such acts since 1976, "conservatively" resulting in around $110 million in damages.
What's going on, and is there anything to these charges? Coming from FBI sources makes them highly suspect, especially when there are two types of documented cases:
-- people guilty of non-violent offenses called "terrorism" and given excessively harsh sentences; and most disturbing
-- innocent people targeted, accused, convicted and sentenced to hard time for environmental activism or supporting animal rights; and that's on top of hundreds of other political persecutions and many thousands of innocent people (or petty criminals) in US prisons.

Continue reading 'Green Scare State Terrorism'. . .