African American Communist: James W. Ford (1893-1957)

From: The Communist Party USA

Author: CPUSA

First published 02/26/2009 21:11

Black History Month Special

Part of a series on African American communists in US history.

Before working for the Communist Party, James Ford had been active in the labor movement, including working in the Chicago Federation of Labor. In 1929, he and William L. Patterson attended the Second Congress of the League Against Imperialism in Frankfurt, Germany. The following year, when the First International Congress of Negro Workers was convened in Hamburg, Germany, Ford became its secretary and opened an office in Hamburg, where he established relationships with African and Asian workers and helped them to organize.

When he returned to the US, he became the first African American to run for vice-president of the United States (he ran in 1932, 1936, and 1940).

For more information: Ford, James W. (1893-1957) from the Black Past Encyclopedia

(Compiled by Kevin Lindemann)

African American Communist: Pat Ellis (1920-2005)

From: The Communist Party USA

Author: CPUSA

First published 02/26/2009 12:27

Black History Month Special

Part of a series on African American communists in US history.

Jonnie Lumpkin Ellis, who was known by her adopted name "Pat", was born in Washington, GA. Her family moved to Orlando, Florida, where they worked picking oranges.

In 1939, Her brother-in-law, Taft Earl Rollins, returned to Fort Bragg, NC, unaware that a racist riot was raging. The Army sent his body back to Orlando with no explanation. The sergeant who accompanied the body had strict orders to keep the casket closed.

Jonnie defied the orders, opened the casket and saw that Rollins’ head had been
smashed in. It was a lynching, not an accident. Jonnie did not let the Army cover up the crime. She insisted on an open casket funeral.

Jonnie moved to Buffalo, NY with her family in December 1941, where she worked as a housekeeper for a communist couple. She soaked up their message of class struggle and socialism and joined the Communist Party.

She was later hired at Bell Aircraft in Niagara Falls, where she became a shop steward and filed a discrimination complaint with the new Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) that resulted in Bell Aircraft upgrading 233 African Americans from janitors to production work.

Lumpkin married Henry "Al" Ellis in 1949 and, in 1950, became the Communist Party’s section organizer in Harlem. In 1955, the couple moved to Chicago. Soon after they arrived, the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till shocked and angered decent people all over the world.

Pat and another comrade, Arlene Brigham, encouraged Mamie Till Mobley, mother of Emmett, to have an open casket funeral. Mamie Till Mobley’s brave act triggered a huge protest. In addition to her community activism, Ellis served as organizational secretary of the Illinois Communist Party for many years.

For more information: Black Women Workers by Tim Wheeler

(Compiled by Kevin Lindemann)

Marvel Cooke: Journalist, labor and peace activist

From: The Communist Party USA

Author: Marilyn Bechtel

First published 02/25/2009 11:32 by {article_topic_desc}

Black History Month Special

Reprinted from the People's Weekly World

At the intersection of African American History and Women's History months is a long list of Black women who have made history as civil rights, labor and peace activists, educators, scientists, elected officials, physicians, astronauts, artists and much more.

Prominent among them, and combining several of those roles, is the journalist and activist Marvel Cooke. In her long life (1903-2000), Cooke participated in such crucial and often interrelated developments as the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, the intense upsurge of labor organizing in the 1930s and decades of work for world peace, civil rights and civil liberties.

Along the way she, too, achieved "firsts" first woman journalist at the Amsterdam News, participant in organizing New York City's first Newspaper Guild chapter, first African American or woman reporter at the white-owned daily Compass.

In fact, Marvel Cooke's life began with a "first" the first African-American baby born in Mankato, Minn. Her father, Madison Jackson, son of a free Black farmer in Ohio, had graduated in law from Ohio State University. But in the turn-of-the-century Midwest, he could not find work in his profession, and became a Pullman porter. Her mother, Amy Wood Jackson, had served as a cook and teacher on a Native American reservation before her marriage. The family later moved to Minneapolis.

During those years the foundations were laid for Cooke's later activism. As a member of the first African American family to move into the upper middle class Prospect Park neighborhood near the University of Minnesota campus, Cooke experienced initial hostile reactions from neighbors. (They were later won over by her father's astute decision to create an irresistible children's playground in their yard for Marvel and her two sisters).

Cooke characterized her parents as "Eugene Debs socialists. She credited her father, in particular, with helping her to develop many of the ideas that underlay her activism. Late in life, interviewed by Kathleen Currie for the Washington Press Club Foundation's Women in Journalism series, she recounted her father's thoughts about voting for Debs as he ran for president from a prison cell. Cooke said her father told her, "I'm voting for him as a protest against the way things are going in this country. The bigger protest vote we can get in this country, whoever goes in will listen to this great group of people out here that don't agree."

Though her mother was less active politically, she was equally supportive of Cooke's activities; Cooke told how much later, during a visit to New York City, Amy Jackson joined a picket line protesting injustices faced by tenants in the apartment building where Cooke's younger sister lived.

Cooke's husband, Cecil Cooke, a former college star athlete and a longtime member of the New York City Recreation Department staff, also consistently supported his wife's activities.

Cooke's journalistic career began when, on invitation of legendary civil rights leader Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois – who had dated her mother – she went to work at the Crisis, the magazine Du Bois had founded in 1910.

Arriving in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance, over the years Cooke became friends with such cultural luminaries as authors Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and Richard Wright, artist Elizabeth Catlett and legendary actor, singer, civil rights and peace leader Paul Robeson.

After Du Bois left the Crisis, Cooke joined the staff of the Amsterdam News, first as secretary to the women's editor, and later as the paper's first female reporter. It was during this period that she joined the Newspaper Guild's organizing drive at the paper, walking picket lines and being jailed at least once during the paper's 11-week lockout of its workers.

It was also at this time that she joined the Communist Party. As Cooke told the story, Communist leader Benjamin Davis, then editor of The Liberator and later a New York City Councilmember, was participating in the workers' picket line one day. "Why aren't you a member of the Communist Party?" he asked her. Cooke replied, "Because no one ever asked me." And she joined on the spot, remaining a member the rest of her life.

During this period Cooke and fellow civil rights activist Ella Josephine Baker collaborated on an essay for the Crisis, revealing the desperate plight of African American women who gathered on street corners to seek hourly domestic work. As "The Bronx Slave Market" told their story, "Rain or shine, cold or hot, you will find them there Negro women, old and young sometimes bedraggled, sometimes neatly dressed but with the invariable paper bundle, waiting expectantly for Bronx housewives to buy their strength and energy for an hour, two hours, or even for a day at the munificent sum of fifteen, twenty, twenty-five or if luck be with them, thirty cents an hour."

The two journalists told how the Great Depression had forced the women to seek such a livelihood, and how they were often cheated out of their meager earnings.

In 1950, while working for the progressive daily newspaper, the Compass, Cooke returned to the subject, going undercover as a domestic worker to gather material for a five-part expose. "Hundreds of years of history weighed on me," she wrote then. "I was the slave traded for two truck horses on a Memphis street corner in 1849. I was the slave trading my brawn for a pittance on a Bronx street corner in 1949. As I stood there waiting to be bought, I lived through a century of indignity."

In the early 1950s Cooke served as New York director for the Council of Arts, Sciences and Professions, a progressive organization of workers in the arts. During that time, Cooke participated in an international peace conference in the German Democratic Republic, substituting for Paul Robeson, whose passport had been lifted during the post-World War II anti-communist witchhunts. "Up to that point in my life," Cooke later said in an interview, "it was the most exciting thing I had ever done."

On the last day of the conference, Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich singled her out for special attention as the only American to attend the conference, presenting her with gifts for herself and for Robeson.

Not long after her return home, two FBI agents appeared at her door, demanding that she, too, surrender her passport. Though she ultimately yielded the document, she recalled asking them, "Didn't your parents have anything better to do with their money than to send you through college to become spies?"

Later, as she appeared before a Congressional witchhunt hearing, Cooke's response to a question about her birthplace "I was borne in Minnesota, across the St. Croix River from where Sen. McCarthy comes, but we're not all the same out that way" brought the house down. Cooke said that ended the questioning.

In the early 1970s Cooke played a leading part in organizing the broad nationwide movement to defend African American educator and activist Angela Davis, who was accused of murder and kidnapping.

After Davis was acquitted, Cooke served for many years as national vice-chair of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, which emphasized building person-to-person ties with individuals and organizations in the USSR as an avenue to world peace. During that time she dedicated substantial volunteer time to the work of the magazine New World Review, which reported on developments in the socialist countries and national liberation movements.

Talking with interviewer Kathleen Currie in 1989, Cooke summed up her life: "I think I've been inordinately lucky ... I wouldn't have wanted to be born in any other period. I would have wanted to have produced more, have done more myself, but I got so involved in unions and things of that sort, that I didn't do the creative writing that I thought I was going to do when I was young."

---

Marilyn Bechtel is California correspondent for the People's Weekly World. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, she worked with Marvel Cooke at the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship and at the magazine New World Review.

African American Communist: Hosea Hudson (1898-1988)

From: the Communist Party USA

Author: CPUSA

First published 02/23/2009 13:12

Black History Month Special

Part of a series on African American communists in US history.

Hosea Hudson was born in Wilkes County, Georgia. He worked as a sharecropper in what was then known as the "Black Belt" of Georgia before moving to Birmingham and working as a skilled iron molder. He became active in the movement to save the Scottsboro youth and joined the Communist Party in 1931.

In 1938, he organized the Right to Vote Club, which helped literate African Americans to register to vote (he himself had just learned to read at a CPUSA National Training School).

During the Depression, he worked on the Works Progress Administration (WPA), serving as secretary of the Jefferson and Birmingham County locals of the WPA's union. With the start of World War II, Hudson returned to his work as an iron molder and became active in the United Steel Workers' union, serving first as recording secretary of Local 1489 and then as founder and president of Local 2815.

During the McCarthy period, he was expelled from the Birmingham Industrial Union Council, fired from his job, removed from his offices in Local 2815, and blacklisted as a communist.

In 1980, though, his life's work was honored when Richard Arrington, the first Black mayor of Atlanta, proclaimed February 26, 1980, as Hosea Hudson Day. In his proclamation, Arrington noted Hudson's pioneering work in the civil rights movement. Hudson’s life is chronicled in his autobiography, Black Worker in the Deep South.

For more information: The Story of Hosea Hudson: Lessons of a ‘Black worker in the deep South’ still loom large

(Compiled by Kevin Lindemann)

Eddie Carthan and the struggle for Black empowerment in the Deep South

From: the Communist Party USA

Author: John Wojcik

First published 02/21/2009 11:46

Black History Month Special

Reprinted from the People's Weekly World

In Jackson, Miss., when the air is heated all day by a blazing sun, it doesn’t cool off at night. Instead, like a sponge, it soaks up the moist winds coming up from the Gulf of Mexico. I remember how, on a hot and humid July night in 1981, I counted the steps from my car door to the motel entrance, praying that there would be an air conditioner inside.

No such luck, and the piercing stare of the old white woman behind the check-in desk didn’t make me feel any cooler. A mosquito, circling under the lamp hanging 3 feet above my hand as I signed in, dived to take a chunk of my left arm. I cussed as I dropped the pen to slap the insect. The woman, wagging her forefinger, said, “If the Lord God didn’t want the bugs, he wouldn’t have made them.”

It wasn’t the greatest start but I was determined, as a reporter for this newspaper’s predecessor, the Daily World, to do what I was sent to do — tell the story of Eddie Carthan, a 33-year-old man who, when he was only 29, had been elected the first African American mayor of a Mississippi Delta town since Reconstruction, and who was now in jail, accused of murder.

The next day I met Aaron Henry, a state legislator who had led the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in its historic battle against the state’s segregationist Democrats, and Charles Tisdale, editor of the Jackson Advocate, long considered one of the nation’s leading African American newspapers.

‘Sometimes they only throw rocks’

Henry told me about an important march taking place. I went to it and saw 30 poor Black farmers and two lawyers picketing outside the Mississippi Supreme Court, demanding bail for Carthan, who they said was the victim of a frameup. Six Ku Klux Klansmen, one dressed in full Klan regalia sitting atop a horse, were there, giving out leaflets calling for “removal of all Black murderers from office.” The leaflets were signed by several Jackson “businessmen.” Some of the same names appeared on flyers printed by the Jackson, Miss., Election Committee for Ronald Reagan, which Tisdale showed me later that day.

The first time I walked into the office of the Jackson Advocate, two of the four front windows were boarded up. Tisdale said a Molotov cocktail had recently been thrown through the plate glass. “How often does that happen?” I asked. “Only a few times a year,” he said, “Sometimes, they only throw rocks.”

He phoned Carthan’s wife and set up a meeting with the family for me. It was at those meetings in the Carthan home that I learned many details of what was nothing less than a conspiracy to stop any meaningful Black political representation from happening in Mississippi.

Mississippi stories

In exchange for Tisdale’s help, I agreed to write some other stories that the Advocate, along with the Daily World, could print.

I traveled to several Mississippi towns where the water department was run by close relatives of Carthan’s prosecutor. When they tripled the water bills, 600 people refused to pay and their water was shut off. For weeks, nearly a thousand folks in the Delta donated their cars, trucks and bodies to haul water to the victims. They brought it in every kind of receptacle imaginable, from towns as far as 20 miles away. The company was forced to restore the water without the rate hike.

I went to Parchman State Penitentiary, one of the nation’s largest prisons. I saw the units they had there for hundreds of mentally retarded youth. There was no therapy and there were no treatment plans. Like other prisoners, these youth performed unpaid labor on nearby cotton plantations owned by wealthy whites.

When I visited Carthan in the Holmes County jail, there was an old African American woman in one cell and a Catholic nun in another. The nun had participated in a march to free Carthan. The old woman had been arrested for sitting in a bus shelter during a torrential downpour. The nun said she had been given a rice and bean ration that had ants crawling in it.

The struggle in Tchula

When Carthan took office as mayor of Tchula, Miss., the town was completely segregated. The 15 percent white population lived on one side of the tracks, the 85 percent Black population on the other. The streets in the Black side were unpaved and had no sidewalks or streetlights. Many homes were without indoor plumbing and there were no social services.

With some available federal funds, Carthan began work on building public housing and a day care center. The newly hired workers had spent half the year as low-paid labor on cotton plantations and the other half as welfare recipients.

When Carthan was elected in 1977, four other Blacks were elected to the five-member board of aldermen. A 3-to-2 majority backed Carthan’s agenda.

In 1978, however, one of Carthan’s supporters on the board resigned. Many people in town told me he had been forced out by threats against his family, himself and his home.

The pro-Carthan alderman was replaced by another African American, Roosevelt Granderson, a convenience store clerk. I was told that Granderson had been the biggest drug dealer in the Mississippi Delta. He turned out to be a close ally of John Edgar Hays, a wealthy white cotton farmer and the only white member remaining on the board after Carthan’s election. From then on, the opposition was able to block Carthan at almost every turn.

Murder and conspiracy

In 1980, Tchula’s police chief quit because of ill health. Carthan appointed an African American to the post. In violation of the law, the majority on the board of aldermen appointed its own, white, police chief. When Carthan tried to enter City Hall with his duly appointed police chief he was roughed up by several policemen, charged with assault, convicted and sentenced to three years in jail, and forced to leave office.

The board of aldermen then installed Granderson as mayor. In 1981 Carthan’s two remaining supporters on the board were defeated after an election that later was shown to be full of irregularities. Carthan’s white predecessor was also returned to the mayor’s seat.

Three weeks later, Vincent Bolden and David Hester of East St. Louis robbed Granderson’s store, took him in the back and killed him. The prosecution, ignoring evidence that Hester had once sold Granderson $200,000 worth of cocaine, claimed Carthan had hired the men to kill his old opponent.

The prosecution struck a deal first with Bolden, and when that fell apart then with Hester. In exchange for testifying that Carthan had hired the two, Hester was to get off with a lesser charge.

Local Black farmers raised the $115,000 bail required to get Carthan out of jail. Actor Ossie Davis went on a 66-city tour to raise funds and build support for the struggle to free Carthan.

‘Still a little way to go’

After Carthan was acquitted on the murder charge in 1982, he traveled around the country to support other victims of frame-ups, and to thank the many organizations that had helped his struggle for freedom. I had coffee with him in New York then. He thanked me for my stories and I told him how glad I was that his terrible ordeal was over. He smiled a little, saying, “I think there’s still a little way to go.”

After his father died in 1983, Carthan began growing cotton, soybeans and wheat on the fertile land of the Delta farm his father had left him.

In the 1980s and ’90s he led a struggle by Mississippi small farmers fighting to keep their land. He fought cotton gin owners who refused to gin the cotton grown by Black farmers, forcing them to travel 30 or more miles to have it done at a higher cost. He exposed the connections between the gin owners and local banks that discriminated against poor Black farmers.

Today we see right-wing Republicans go down to defeat in elections in Mississippi. We have an African American president who said recently, “Our destiny is not written for us, but by us.” I remember all those people I met in Mississippi 30 years ago — Aaron Henry, Charles Tisdale, the old lady and the nun in the jailhouse, the staff working in the back room of the Jackson Advocate office to avoid objects hurled through the front glass, the people hauling water along hot, dusty roads, a brave family without the man they loved, and Eddie Carthan himself.

They all helped bring us to a place we would never have dreamed possible — but a place from which “there’s still a little way to go.”

jwojcik @pww.org

Iraq vet faces new battle – worker rights at home

From: PWW

Author: John Wojcik
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 02/19/09 13:22

Jose Hill, photo by Linc Cohen AFSCME Council 31

CHICAGO — “The irony of it all – Bush got on TV and said we were in Iraq because we had to get rid of weapons of mass destruction, stop terrorism and spread democracy over there. I served my country honorably over there only to come back home to a place where, as a worker, I don’t even have the right to union representation. The companies hold all the cards. They do us serious hurt if we try to exercise our rights.”

The words were those of former U.S. Army Sgt. Jose Hill, 30, a resident of this city’s South Side and a Comcast technician who belongs to Local 21 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Hill, interviewed by the World, was among thousands of workers who rallied here Feb. 17 for a stronger labor law that would give workers a chance to exercise their rights to bargain collectively for better pay, health care benefits and retirement plans.

3000 people pack Chicago's Plumbers Hall in support of the Employee Free Choice Act. PWW photo by Pepe Lozano.

They packed the Plumbers Hall, Feb. 17, at a town hall style rally where they were joined by national labor leaders, elected officials, grassroots community and religious groups to support the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation that would simplify matters for workers who want to join unions.

Speakers told the cheering, chanting and foot-stomping crowd of 3,000, representing almost every union in Chicagoland, that the bill would also stimulate economic recovery by pumping more money into the economy. Union members earn, on average, 30 percent more than their non-union counterparts, are 59 percent more likely to have employer-provided health care coverage and four times more likely to have pensions.

Gail Warner, a speaker at the rally who is fighting for a union at Heartland Human Services in Effingham, Ill., told the World her story in an interview.

Gail Warner, photo courtesy of Linc Cohen AFSCME Council 31

Warner, 39, is married and has a 14-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter. She worked as a secretary at her company’s outpatient center when the workers there, in a 49-5 vote, won an election for representation by AFSCME.

“We decided to go union,” she said, “because they would always get rid of long-term workers in favor of newer people for less pay. In October of 2005 they took away benefits, made us work more hours and said ‘If you don’t like it, there’s the door.’ So we went union in January of 2006.”

Warner described how the workers spent the next 15 months trying to negotiate a contract and how the company refused to budge. “After all those months, in June, 2007, 36 of us walked out onto the picket line. They hired less qualified scabs to fill our jobs and they paid the scabs more than they paid us. That went on for a year.”

Warner described how, during that year, even some of the scabs started to suffer the same mistreatment that had been doled out to the original workers – rollbacks in pay, increases in hours and other abuses.

A year later, in June 2008, the striking workers decided to go back, hoping to continue negotiations from the inside. The company locked them out, however, and they remain on the picket line. “Heartless Human Services is what we call them,” Warner said.

“I think our case is one of the most compelling to be made for the Employee Free Choice Act,” she said. “If it were to become the law, when workers form a union, both sides would have 120 days to come to an agreement. If they couldn’t, we would go to binding arbitration. The hardships we face in Effingham would never have happened.”

At the rally and at a press conference earlier in the day, union leaders warned that business interests are spending, and will spend “many millions of dollars” to thwart passage of the Employee Free Choice Act and that they will portray union support for it as an attempt to take away the right of workers to cast a secret ballot.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” declared Roberta Lynch, a member of AFSCME, District Council 31, at the press conference. “Right now unions can be formed by card check or by secret elections but the company makes that choice. With the EFCA it will be the same but it will be the workers who make the choice.”

She heaped scorn on what she called “company concern for democracy. Do they consult workers on investment policy or on planned layoffs? Do they consult workers on even where the water cooler should be placed? Why do they have any business, whatsoever, telling workers whether they want a union.”

jwojcik @pww.org

Leading economists: Employee Free Choice key to rebuilding economy

Author: Seth Michaels, AFL-CIO Blog
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 02/25/09 09:38

Original source: AFL-CIO Now In a statement delivered today to Capitol Hill and published as a full-page advertisement in The Washington Post, more than three dozen of the nation’s top economists call on Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act to help restore an economy that works for everyone, built on a sustainable, wage-based growth.

The statement, signed by 39 of America’s top economists, including two Nobel Prize winners, points to the failure of U.S. labor laws to protect employees’ freedom to form a union and bargain as a major factor in our economic crisis. The statement says in part:

Indeed, from 2000 to 2007, the income of the median working-age household fell by $2,000—an unprecedented decline. In that time, virtually all of the nation’s economic growth went to a small number of wealthy Americans. An important reason for the shift from broadly shared prosperity to growing inequality is the erosion of workers’ ability to form unions and bargain collectively.

These economists, representing respected universities and policy institutions from across the nation, point to the corporate-dominated system for forming unions—and the coercion and anti-union campaigning by management—as the causes for declining wages and a gravely weakened economy.

A rising tide lifts all boats only when labor and management bargain on relatively equal terms. In recent decades, most bargaining power has resided with management. The current recession will further weaken the ability of workers to bargain individually. More than ever, workers will need to act together.

Although current headlines are dominated by the crises in the stock market and the financial sector, working families have been struggling for years under the weight of an unbalanced economy. These economists say that restoring bargaining power and ensuring working people have a voice in their workplace, and in their health care, pensions and wages, is critical to rebuilding our economy.

James K. Galbraith of the University of Texas, one of the economists who has signed on, says the freedom to form unions and bargain has many benefits for the economy and the country.

I support the Employee Free Choice Act for two reasons. First, it levels the playing field after a generation of anti-union policies, and in a world where far more workers are in decentralized, hard-to-organize workplaces than was true a generation back. Second, unions are a proven ally of progress, not only in politics but also in economics: unionized workforces promote technical change and productivity growth, because they make it possible to distribute more fairly and less brutally the costs of change.

You can view the ad as it ran in today’s Washington Post here. It includes a full list of the prominent economists who have signed on.

Afghanistan: Civilian deaths up 40 percent

from: PWW

Author: IRIN
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 02/25/09 10:55

KANDAHAR, 25 February 2009 (IRIN) - Last year was the worst for Afghan civilians since the end of major hostilities in 2001 as more than 2,100 non-combatants lost their lives in conflict, according to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).

Civilian deaths increased by 40 percent in 2008 on the year before as warring parties, particularly insurgent groups, paid little heed to the safety of non-combatants, UNAMA said in a report.

Suicide attacks and the use of improvised explosive devices by insurgent groups inflicted heavy losses on civilians, as did aerial bombardments by international forces, UNAMA said.

"In addition to fatalities as a direct result of armed hostilities, civilians have suffered from injury, loss of livelihood, displacement, destruction of property, as well as disruption of access to education, healthcare and other essential services," states UNAMA's report on the protection of civilians in armed conflict.

UNAMA's concerns were echoed by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), whose spokesman, Ahmad Zia Langary, said: "The impact of war on civilians cannot be limited to fatality figures, they are broad and numerous."

Aid agencies have warned that conflict has spread lawlessness and insecurity across the country and humanitarian operations have been especially squeezed.

Thirty-eight aid workers were killed and 147 kidnapped, and 198 security incidents involving NGOs were recorded in 2008, the UN said.

"Unseen victims"

In conflict-affected areas, mostly in the south and east, women and children are particularly harmed by conflict.

"Women and children have, to a significant extent, been the unseen victims of the armed conflict in Afghanistan," said the UN report.

Financial burdens resulting from the loss of a breadwinner mostly deprive children and women of education, healthcare, food security and many other opportunities.

Dozens of schools and health centres were attacked and many school-children targeted by insurgent elements throughout 2008.

It is unclear how many of the reported 2,118 civilian deaths in 2008 were women and children but UNAMA said it would introduce a new electronic database to provide disaggregated information on the gender and age of civilian casualties of war.

Guadeloupe workers sustain wage protest

from: PWW

Author: Morning Star
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 02/24/09 16:19

WORKERS in Guadeloupe rebuilt roadblocks on Monday and vowed to maintain their 35-day-old general strike after Paris went back on a pledge to boost the lowest-paid wages.

Representatives of the French government left the negotiating table after hours of talks with strike leaders, declaring that they were not prepared to meet the strikers' demand for a 200 euros (£176) monthly raise for those making 900 euros (£794) a month.

Last week Prime Minister Francois Fillon vowed that Paris would make "support payments" to low wage earners totalling almost 200 euros a month.

But, on Monday night, Guadeloupe Prefect Nicolas Desforges said: "The state doesn't believe that it should finance or reimburse wage increases for private employers."

Leaders of the Collective Against Exploitation (LKP), which is leading the strike, said that they had reached a tentative agreement with small business groups to meet half the requested raise, but that the rest would have to come from the government.

Protesters prepared to take the dispute back to streets where riots raged last week, pushing burnt-out cars back into intersections and erecting new roadblocks on major roads.

LKP activist Patrice Tacita said: "If they don't want to talk, we will put the popular pressure on the streets and make them share their fortune with the people of Guadeloupe."

The collective of unions and left-wing groups has a list of nearly 140 demands including the wage increase, covering issues from lowering the cost of imported goods and breaking up monopolies to environmental and judicial reform.
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Irish protesters warn of another Iceland

From: PWW

Author: Morning Star
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 02/22/09 17:51

Original source: morningstaronline.co.uk

More than 120,000 workers surrounded the Dail, or Irish Parliament, to protest against bail-outs for wealthy bankers, soaring unemployment and the Fianna Fail government's attempts to force public-sector workers to take a pay cut.

Wielding placards denouncing "corporate swindlers" and "banking cartels," protesters - including police officers, hospital workers and teachers - closed down the capital for an entire day in what one demonstrator described as "a lesson learnt from Iceland."

Union-organised protests forced the Icelandic government to fall in January and Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) leader David Begg said that the Dublin demonstration was "just the first step" in a similar campaign to bring their own bankers and government to account.

"There is anger, because everybody knows that this crisis is not our fault, that a business elite has destroyed our economy and has as yet to be made accountable for it," Mr Begg told the huge rally at Merrion Square in the heart of Dublin.

And he dismissed Taoiseach Brian Cowan's assertion that "painful" public-sector cuts were "essential" to deal with the crisis.

"There is only one action that will correct the damage that has been done and that is to get rid of all those who have committed this economic treason," declared Mr Begg.

Mr Cowan has been beseiged by workers' protests since he was appointed to the top government job after a series of scandals felled previous leader Bertie Ahern last May.

As Saturday's mass demonstration took over the streets - at one point being led by workers from Waterford Crystal in Cork, where staff have occupied their factory in an attempt to stop job cuts - ICTU president Patricia McKeown addressed the marchers, tearing into the "casino capitalism that has brought this country to its knees.

"An economy cannot be built on shady financial deals, privatisation of public services and the ever insatiable greed of the very, very wealthy," she insisted.

"But we face a government which wants the workers who built the economy to now sacrifice while it protects and bankrolls those who wrecked it. We are not prepared to live in that type of society," Ms McKeown declared.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams stressed that Irish workers were not simply opposing the government, but were making a positive stand "in defence of jobs and public services. Ard Fheis salutes and supports these efforts," he told his party's annual conference.

Trade Unions Against the European Union Constitution spokesman Brian Denny also praised the demonstrators for resisting the Irish government's "attempts to make them pay for the crisis.

"It's not the workers, but the obsession with privatisation enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty that the Irish government supports that has helped cause the crisis," he emphasised.

What a recession means for Black America

from: PWW

Author: Algernon Austin
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 02/21/09 08:14

Original source: epi.org/publications/
Recessions hurt. And they hurt the poor and socially marginalized populations the most. As we face the prospect of the second recession of the decade and consider the merits of various stimulus packages, it is useful to examine what a recession would mean for black America.

The late 1990s produced a full employment economy and significant absolute and relative economic gains for blacks. This Issue Brief contrasts the benefits of a national full-employment economy with the harm caused by the 2001 recession and the weak job growth that followed.

Black America's permanent recession

In the best of times, many African American communities are forced to tolerate levels of unemployment unseen in most white communities. The 2001 recession pushed the white annual unemployment rate up from a low of 3.5% in 2000 to a high of 5.2% in 2003. During the same period, the black unemployment rate shot up from 7.6% to 10.8%. National recessions take African Americans from a bad situation to a worse one.

In 2007, the black unemployment rate was 8.3%. This figure is still above the pre-recession low and more than twice the white unemployment rate. Goldman Sachs estimates that a new recession would increase the national unemployment rate to 6.4% by 2009.1 For African Americans, the unemployment rate would be expected to rise to 11.0%.2



African Americans lose income relative to whites



The low unemployment rates of the 1990s led to positive gains in the black/white income ratio. In 1995, the median black family earned 60.9% of what the median white family did. By 2000, the ratio had climbed to a record high of 63.5%. The effect of the 2001 recession and the weak economic recovery was to undo all of those gains?and then take away some more. By 2005, the median black household earned only 60.2% of the median white household, 0.7 points lower than it was in 1995. 3

But median family income does not tell the entire story. The 2001 recession and weak recovery hurt the poorest African Americans the most. In 1995, the poorest fifth of black families only earned on average 43.0% of what the poorest fifth of white families earned. Again, the economic growth of the late 1990s was a significant boon. The black/white average income ratio for the poorest fifth increased to 49.9% in 2000. By 2005, it had fallen back to 43.4%. Among blacks, the poorest black families lost the largest share of their income gains from the late 1990s.4

Another recession will likely reduce the median family income for all Americans by about 4%. However, for blacks, the decline would be about 6%, leaving the average African American family $2,400 poorer.5 Again, this loss of income will hurt the poorest fifth of African Americans the most.

Additional social costs

Associated with the strong economy of the 1990s, there were significant declines in the black violent crime rate and the black teen pregnancy rate. Between 1993 and 2001, the black violent crime rate declined by 60%.6 Between 1990 and 2004, the black teen pregnancy rate declined by 46%.7 These improving trends have ended, and it is likely that the worsening economic conditions of African Americans since 2001 have played at least a partial role.

At the community level, criminologists find a correlation between violent crime rates and socioeconomic disadvantage.8 At the national level, too, the black violent crime rate has recently been strongly correlated with black poverty rates.9 Therefore, it is not surprising that the historic crime decline of the 1990s ended with the reversal of economic fortunes that African Americans experienced at the beginning of the 21st century.

Based on a study of five countries including the United States, the Alan Guttmacher Institute reports "across all of the focus countries, young people growing up in disadvantaged economic, familial and social circumstances are more likely than their better-off peers to engage in risky behavior and have a child during adolescence."10 Given that socioeconomic disadvantage has increased for African Americans since 2000, it is not entirely surprising that black teen pregnancy rates have started to rise again.

Another recession would likely continue these negative trends. The black violent crime rate and the black teenage pregnancy rate both will likely rise. Once again, the negative effects of these trends will hurt the poorest African Americans most.

What black America needs

Even when the national unemployment picture is good, the black unemployment rate is more than twice that of the white unemployment rate. This means that in what looks like good economic times nationally, most of black America is still experiencing a recession. When white America is in recession, black America is in an economic depression.

Faced with the prospect of another recession, what black America needs is what all of America needs: a stimulus package that will help average Americans and those with the most insecure jobs. The lesson from black America is that the poorest among us are most hurt by recessions. Stimulus proposals based on tax cuts for the wealthy or for business owners are not likely to provide immediate relief to those still hurting from the 2001 recession, much less protect them from the additional damage of a new one.

A better approach would be to boost the economy by 1) providing targeted supports through expanded unemployment insurance and broad-based tax rebates, 2) providing assistance to states to prevent tax increases or spending cuts, and 3) directly stimulating job growth by accelerating funding for infrastructure, particularity for bridge and school repair. (See EPI's Strategy for An Economic Rebound for more details.)

While the discussion above is based on national data about African Americans, it is important to remember that some black communities are better off than average and some are worse off. Also, although the discussion is about African Americans, the findings likely apply to a degree to other poor minority communities and to the poorest white communities, as well. For example, the violent crime decline for whites has also stalled, and the teen pregnancy rate for whites has also increased in the latest data from the National Center for Health Statistics.11

Notes

1. U.S. Economics Analyst, Issue 08/02, January 18, 2008, p. 3.

2. Based on an analysis of historical economic data by Jared Bernstein.

3. Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Sylvia Allegretto, The State of Working America 2006/2007. An EPI book. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 2006) p.51.
http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/

4. Author's analysis of tables F-3 white and F-3 black, 2005 dollars, Historical Income Tables, U.S. Census Bureau, http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/ineqtoc.html.

5. Based on an analysis of historical economic data by Jared Bernstein.

6. Author's calculations of violent crime rates from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/tables/racetab.htm.

7. Author's calculations of birth rates for 15-19-year-olds from Table 4, Health in the United States, 2006 (Hyattsville, Md.: National Center for Health Statistics, 2006), p. 135.

8. Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate (N.Y.: The New Press, 2006), pp. 177-186.

9. For the years 1976 to 2005, the correlation between the black poverty rate and the black violent crime victimization rate is 0.92. Author's analysis of Census poverty rates for all people and Bureau of Justice Statistics victimization rates.

10. Heather Boonstra, Teen Pregnancy: Trends and Lessons Learned, The Guttmacher Report on Public Policy, February 2002, Vol. 5, No. 1, http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/tgr/05/1/gr050107.html.

11. See Teen Birth Rate Rises for the First Time in 15 Years, National Center for Health Statistics, December 5, 2007, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/07newsreleases/teenbirth.htm.

Worldwide unemployment to increase dramatically due to global economic crisis

Author: ILO News
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 02/17/09 15:33

GENEVA (ILO News) – The global economic crisis is expected to lead to a dramatic increase in the number of people joining the ranks of the unemployed, working poor and those in vulnerable employment, the International Labor Office (ILO) says in its annual Global Employment Trends report (GET).

Based on new developments in the labor market and depending on the timeliness and effectiveness of recovery efforts, the report says global unemployment in 2009 could increase over 2007 by a range of 18 million to 30 million workers, and more than 50 million if the situation continues to deteriorate.

The ILO report also said that in this last scenario some 200 million workers, mostly in developing economies, could be pushed into extreme poverty.
“The ILO message is realistic, not alarmist. We are now facing a global jobs crisis. Many governments are aware and acting, but more decisive and coordinated international action is needed to avert a global social recession. Progress in poverty reduction is unravelling and middle classes worldwide are weakening. The political and security implications are daunting”, said ILO Director-General Juan Somavia.

“The crisis is underscoring the relevance of the ILO Decent Work Agenda. We find many elements of this Agenda in current measures to promote job creation, deepening and expanding social protection and more use of social dialogue,” Somavia said. He called on the upcoming meeting of the G-20 on 2 April in London, alongside financial issues, to urgently agree on priority measures to promote productive investments, decent work and social protection objectives, and policy coordination.

Key projections of the GET report
The new report updates a preliminary estimate released last October indicating that the global financial crisis could increase unemployment between 15 to 20 million people by 2009. Its key conclusions are as follows:
· Based on November 2008 IMF forecasts, the global unemployment rate would rise to 6.1 per cent in 2009 compared to 5.7 per cent in 2007, resulting in an increase of the number of unemployed by 18 million people in 2009 in comparison with 2007.

· If the economic outlook deteriorates beyond what was envisaged in November 2008, which is likely, the global unemployment rate could rise to 6.5 per cent, corresponding to an increase of the global number of unemployed by 30 million people in comparison with 2007.

· In a current worst case scenario, the global unemployment rate could rise to 7.1 per cent and result in an increase in the global number of unemployed of more than 50 million people.
· The number of working poor – people who are unable to earn enough to lift themselves and their families above the US$2 per person, per day, poverty line, may rise up to 1.4 billion, or 45 per cent of all the world’s employed.

· In 2009, the proportion of people in vulnerable employment – either contributing family workers or own-account workers who are less likely to benefit from safety nets that guard against loss of incomes during economic hardship – could rise considerably in the worst case scenario to reach a level of 53 per cent of the employed population.

Other findings
The ILO report notes that in 2008, North Africa and the Middle East still had the highest unemployment rates at 10.3 and 9.4 per cent respectively, followed by Central & South Eastern Europe (non EU) & the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) at 8.8 per cent, sub-Saharan Africa at 7.9 per cent and Latin America at 7.3 per cent.

The lowest unemployment rate was once again observed in East Asia at 3.8 per cent, followed by South Asia and South-East Asia & the Pacific where respectively 5.4 and 5.7 per cent of the labor force was unemployed in 2008.

The report shows that the three Asian regions – South Asia, South-East Asia & the Pacific and East Asia – accounted for 57 per cent of global employment creation in 2008. In the Developed Economies & European Union region, on the other hand, net employment creation in 2008 was negative, minus 900,000 which explains in part the low global employment creation in this year.
Compared with 2007, the largest increase in a regional unemployment rate was observed in the Developed Economies & European Union region, from 5.7 to 6.4 per cent. The number of unemployed in the region jumped by 3.5 million in one year, reaching 32.3 million in 2008.

According to the study, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia stand out as regions with extremely harsh labor market conditions and with the highest shares of working poor of all regions. Although the trend has been declining over the past ten years, around four fifths of the employed were still classified as working poor in these regions in 2007.

Policy measures
The economic crisis of 2008 has deepened the concern over the social impacts of globalization which the ILO had previously raised. Stressing the need to take measures to support vulnerable groups in the labor market, such as youth and women, the ILO report observes that a huge labor potential remains untapped worldwide. Economic growth and development could be much higher if people are given the chance of a decent job through productive investment and active labor market policies.

“The Decent Work Agenda is an appropriate policy framework to confront the crisis. There is a powerful message that tripartite dialogue with employers and workers organizations should play a central role in addressing the economic crisis, and in developing policy responses,” Somavia said.
The report lists a number of ILO recommended policy measures being applied by many governments, as discussed by the ILO Governing Body in November of 2008, namely:

· i) wider coverage of unemployment benefits and insurance schemes, re-skilling redundant workers and protecting pensions from devastating declines in financial markets;
· ii) public investment in infrastructure and housing, community infrastructure and green jobs, including through emergency public works;
· iii) support to small and medium enterprises;
· iv) social dialogue at enterprise, sector and national levels.

If a large number of countries, using their own accumulated reserves, emergency IMF loans and stronger aid mechanisms, put in place coordinated policies in line with the ILO Decent Work Agenda, then the effects of the downturn on enterprises, workers and their families could be cushioned and the recovery better prepared.

Strike in Guadeloupe escalates into rioting

From: IHT online

International Herald Tribune, Reuters, The Associated Press

Published: February 17, 2009

POINTE-À-PITRE, Guadeloupe: As President Nicolas Sarkozy prepared Tuesday to meet with labor unions and employer representatives to try to head off mounting unrest over France's declining economy, a month-long general strike on the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe escalated into widespread rioting, raising fears that political violence would spread to other French territories.

Protesters ransacked shops and torched vehicles in Guadeloupe overnight as a strike over the cost of living escalated, and one senior local official said the island was "on the verge of revolt."

Trees and smoking car wrecks were strewn across streets in Guadeloupe's largest town, Pointe-à-Pitre, and in other areas including Sainte-Rose in the north after a night of clashes between the police and protesters, although no injuries were reported.

Tear gas was fired during a standoff overnight between a group of 60 protesters and two squadrons of riot police, according to the French newspaper Le Monde, which reported that some protesters were armed with shotguns.

Interior Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie issued a statement appealing for "calm, responsibility and restraint." The French government, which last week deployed 100 riot police officers to Guadeloupe, has become worried about violence spreading to other French territories.

In mainland France, 1 million to 2.5 million people took to the streets Jan. 29 in the largest general strike in three years. French unions are demanding that Sarkozy better protect jobs and consumers during the global economic crisis, and are already planning new strikes for March.

Sarkozy called a "social summit" earlier this month in a televised address during which he sought to reassure a nation nervous after the Jan. 29 strike, which hobbled transport systems, schools, hospitals and mail services.

French university professors have also been protesting higher education reforms for three weeks, and have called their own strike for Thursday.

In the back of everyone's minds are massive protests that shut France down for weeks in the winter of 1995 and sapped President Jacques Chirac's appetite for reform for years to come.

Despite putting in place a €26 billion, or $33 billion, economic stimulus package and pledging billions of euros more to aid the car industry, Sarkozy is coming under increasing criticism for seeming to do more to help businesses than average French workers. Reversing that view is the president's challenge at the meeting Wednesday, which will include the leaders of France's five labor unions and three employers' organizations.

The following day Sarkozy plans to meet with lawmakers and local leaders from Guadeloupe and Martinique at the Élysée Palace in an attempt to calm the situation, French news media reported. He has said he may address the Guadeloupe crisis when he gives another televised address the same day.

Victorin Lurel, the Socialist president of Guadeloupe's regional council, told France Info radio that the island was "on the verge of revolt," adding, "there is a tense standoff between the security forces and demonstrators."

The demonstrations, which have been coordinated by an alliance of about 50 unions and associations known as LKP or "Liyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon" - "Stand Up Against Exploitation" in local dialect - have been peaceful. But the tone has grown angrier recently as the government in Paris has refused to budge on a demand for a €200 monthly increase for low-paid workers.

The LKP leader, Elie Domota, warned in a television interview Saturday that "if anyone injures a member of the LKP or a striker on Guadeloupe, there will be deaths."

Guadeloupe, a French overseas department, has been brought to a standstill for nearly a month by strikes and demonstrations over high prices for food and other necessities. The situation has degenerated over the past two days as protesters have set up roadblocks in different parts of the island and police have made dozens of arrests.

Living costs are high on the French islands, which depend heavily on imports and use the euro. Prices for many staples are far higher than in mainland France, while salaries are generally lower and unemployment is high.

The strike also is exposing racial and class tensions on islands where a largely white elite, many the descendants of colonial settlers, makes up only 1 percent of the population but controls most businesses.

Fears are rising in the government that similar unrest would spread to other French territories, the newspapers Le Monde and La Tribune reported. The popular far-left leader Olivier Besancenot, who has been a key figure behind recent protests in France, was planning to travel to Guadeloupe on Friday, according to the newspaper Le Figaro.

France's National Travel Agencies organization has reported that 10,000 tourists have canceled planned vacations in Martinique and Guadeloupe. Several hotels in Guadeloupe reported Monday that they could not accept guests because protesters were congregated outside and staff did not show up to work.

The airport in Point-à-Pitre was closed, according to American Airlines, which canceled flights to the island.

On Monday night, groups of hooded protesters blocked roads at several points around the town of Le Gosier on the south coast of the island, burning rubbish bins and wooden pallets.

The police detained about 50 people on Monday after coming under a barrage of stones as they tried to take down barricades on Guadeloupe, said Nicolas Desforges, the island's top government official. Most of those detained were released as a large crowd gathered outside the main police station in Pointe-à-Pitre.

Lines of cars snaked outside of gas stations in Martinique as islanders tried to fill their tanks.

Strikers allowed 28 of the island's 85 gas stations to be resupplied, but forced small shop owners, who had opened over the weekend, to close again. They also blockaded industrial zones.

Matthew Cowen, a British technology consultant who lives on Martinique, said Fort-de-France, the island's main town, was encircled by barricades, and garbage has been piling up along the island's narrow streets.

"I had a colleague who tried to cycle to the office but he was told under no circumstances would he be allowed to pass through," said Cowen, who lives on the outskirts of Fort-de-France. "It seems there is a certain hardening of the movement and there are a lot of people behind it."

Russia still wary of US missile shield

from: PWW

Author: Prensa Latina
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 02/15/09 18:23

Moscow, Feb 15 (Prensa Latina) Russian Foreign Minister Serguei Lavrov on Sunday reiterated that the planned US missile defense shield in Europe poses a threat to Russia´s security and correlation of forces worldwide.

According to Lavrov, the missile defense system has no relation at all with the Iranian nuclear program, but it points directly at Russia"s strategic arsenal and deterrent potential.

“Through direct channels and experts, we have repeatedly told the US side we are totally convinced the shield has nothing to do with Iran’s nuclear program,” the diplomat said.

Moscow viewed the plan to site missiles in Poland and a radar tracking station in the Czech Republic as a threat to its security in its traditional backyard.

Is a progressive revolution possible?

from: PWW

Author: AFL-CIO Blog

People's Weekly World Newspaper, 02/15/09 13:18

Original source: AFL-CIO Now
“American history consists of one long battle between the forces of reaction and the defense of wealth and power, on the one hand, and the forces of progressivism and community, on the other.” That’s the premise of a new book The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be by Michael Lux.

A long-time political activist and consultant in Washington, Lux is now best known as a regular columnist for Huffington Post and a co-founder of the progressive blog, OpenLeft. But he’s also, by his own description, “a thoroughly devoted history buff” who has “devoured every American history book that I had time to read.”

In The Progressive Revolution, he draws on his reading and experience to offer both an overview of the nation’s past and predictions for the future.

Lux is clear from the start which side of the battle he’s on. His heroes include Tom Paine, whom he calls “one of the greatest political philosophers of all time,” Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, John L. Lewis, Walter Reuther, Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez and Rachel Carson. Movement leaders such as these “have always been ahead of the politicians and have pushed our country to become better,” he maintains.

On the other side of the battle, Lux lists the considerable failures of conservative administrations over two centuries and then reviews the Bush record—everything from grossly inadequate job creation to the decline in median family income, the high rates of personal bankruptcy and the large numbers of Americans without health insurance.

From all of this, Lux concludes:

When you look at our country’s economic history…conservative policies have been at the heart of our worst economic times and progressive policies have given us our best economic times.

What of the future? Although he completed his book before the November elections, he was correct in predicting that “the time is now ripe for one of those big change moments, but making this moment happen will demand courage and boldness.” He senses that “the progressive movement is finally beginning to emerge from its period of relative slumber.”

Lux is encouraged by the rise of new multi-issue organizations on the left, long-term strategic thinking among progressive donors and foundations, the union movement “showing some spunk and energy in organizing” and young people getting involved in politics.

But perhaps most important of all, in Lux’s view, is the way progressive have developed a vibrant movement via the Internet—”MoveOn.org, blogs and other Internet-based structures [that] have created tools that let people volunteer, give money, meet their neighbors at house parties and contact their elected officials.”

Of course, nothing is guaranteed. In the end, Lux’s vision of a new progressive revolution in America comes down to this:

We can solve the immense problems of our time if we understand our history, throw fear and caution aside, and then choose the path that goes forward.

Lawsuit sheds more light on terror war abuses

From: PWW

Author: William Fisher
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 02/16/09 03:59

NEW YORK, Feb 15 (IPS) - Three human rights groups have released documents that they say reveal close cooperation between the U.S. Defence Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in rendering terrorism suspects to secret prisons, creating 'ghost prisoners' by concealing their identities from the Red Cross, and delaying their release to counter negative publicity about their treatment at Guántanamo Bay.

Close to a thousand pages of documents were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Amnesty International USA (AIUSA), the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and New York University's Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ). The suit, dating from 2004, seeks the disclosure of government documents relating to secret detention, extraordinary rendition, and torture.

At a press conference earlier this week, the groups revealed that the newly released documents confirm the existence of 'black site' prisons at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and in Iraq; affirm the Defence Department (DOD's) cooperation with the CIA's "ghost" detention programme; and show one case where the DOD sought to delay the release of Guantánamo prisoners who were scheduled to be sent home in order to avoid bad press.

"These newly released documents confirm our suspicion that the tentacles of the CIA's abusive programme reached across agency lines," said Margaret Satterthwaite, Director of the CHRGJ. "In fact, it is increasingly obvious that defense officials engaged in legal gymnastics to find ways to cooperate with the CIA's activities."

"A full accounting of all agencies must now take place to ensure that future abuses don't continue under a different guise," she said.

While most of the documents simply contain news articles, there were several significant disclosures from the DOD.

A February 2006 email to members of the DOD's Transportation Command discusses how to deal with the bad press the U.S. was receiving over its detention facilities. It said the U.S. was "getting creamed" on human rights issues sparked by "coverage of the United Nations Rapporteur's report on Guantanamo, plus lingering interest in Abu Ghraib photos." These developments add up to "the U.S. taking a big hit on the issues of human rights and respect for the rule of law, the email said." It cited criticism of the U.S. in blogs and discussion boards.

"America has lost its prestige," a blogger from Yemen wrote. "Every year the world waits for the annual U.S. State Department report on human rights. Today, it is America that awaits the world's opinion of its human rights policy. From Gitmo, to Abu Ghraib, to secret prisons in Europe, the world accuses America of not respecting human rights."

To temper the bad PR, the email suggests delaying the release of prisoners at Gitmo "for 45 days or so until things die down. Otherwise we are likely to have a hero's (sic) welcome awaiting the detainees when they arrive."

The email adds, "It would probably be preferable if we could deliver these detainees in something smaller and more discreet than a T tail (a larger aircraft with a T-shaped tail wing)."

"It is astonishing that the government may have delayed releasing men from Guantánamo in order to avoid bad press," said CCR attorney Gitanjali Gutierrez, who represents many of the men held in Guantánamo and has made 30 trips to the base since 2004. "Proposing to hold men for a month and a half after they were deemed releasable is inexcusable. The Obama administration should avoid repeating this injustice and release the innocent individuals with all due haste."

In a second document, one heavily redacted page mentions an "undisclosed detention facility" at Bagram.

Another highlights how the Geneva Conventions can be interpreted to allow the CIA and the DOD to 'ghost' detainees' identities so they can be denied a visit from the International Committee of the Red Cross. The organisations charged that the document, entitled "Applicability of Geneva Conventions to 'Ghost Detainees' in Iraq", shows that the DOD interpreted the 'security internee' provisions of the Geneva Conventions to allow for 'ghosting' of detainees by prohibiting the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from visiting.

It also shows that the DOD recognised that indefinitely prohibiting the ICRC from visiting or failing to notify the ICRC of the existence of detainees was illegal under the Geneva Conventions, the groups said.

A 2005 document labeled a "Detainee Update" presentation dealt with "Internment Serial Number Policy (ISN). The organisations said, "It shows that the DOD did not, as a matter of course, register detainees with the ICRC until they had been in custody for up to 14 days and that authorisation was sought to hold some individuals for up to 30 days without ISN/registry with ICRC to 'maximise intelligence collection'," even though "there is some disagreement as to legal basis to go beyond 14 days."

The groups said these policies "demonstrate the ease with which the CIA could have used DOD facilities as 'sorting facilities' without having to worry about ICRC oversight or revelation of the ghost detainee programme."

Records from a Detainee Senior Leadership Oversight Council meeting contain references to a previously unreleased section of the Church Report and discuss the need for the DOD to develop and enforce guidelines governing their relationship with 'Other Government Agencies', including the CIA, in order to regulate interrogation and other operations overseas.

The organisations claimed that these documents demonstrate that the DOD and CIA were in an ad hoc relationship, "apparently unconstrained by formal guidelines".

The lawsuit is based on Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests dating back to 2004. Previous government releases also included documents largely already in the public record, including, in one instance, a copy of the Geneva Conventions. This is the first time the DOD has provided any documents in response.

"Out of thousands of pages, most of what might be of interest was redacted," said Tom Parker, policy director for Counterterrorism, Terrorism and Human Rights at AIUSA.

"While the sheer number of pages creates the appearance of transparency, it is clear this is only the tip of the iceberg and that the government agencies have not complied with spirit of President Obama's memo on Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. We call on Attorney General Eric Holder and the Obama administration to put teeth into the memo and work actively to comply with FOIA requests."

In his first week in office, President Obama signed an order closing the Guantanamo detention facility in Cuba within a year and prohibiting CIA secret prisons. However, the order allows the CIA to detain people temporarily. Obama also pledged increased openness and transparency during his administration.

It is not known whether the Pentagon or the CIA still holds 'ghost detainees,' Satterthwaite said, referring to people housed at secret facilities.

Venezuelan president's backers celebrate referendum win

From: PWW

Author: Peoples Daily Online
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 02/16/09 03:25

February 16 (Xinhua) Supporters celebrated President Hugo Chavez's win in the constitutional referendum Sunday night, which has lifted term limits to allow him to run in 2012 presidential election and stay in power as long as he keeps winning elections.

Chavez won the referendum with 54 percent of approval according to preliminary results, Tibisay Lucena, president of the National Electoral Council, announced late Sunday, hours after the referendum was officially closed.

Supporters roamed the streets in vehicles and motorcycles in Caracas after the announcement, waving red flags and honking horns to celebrate the victory. Fireworks were lit across the city.

Chavez, in his signature red shirt, led the supporters gathering in front of the balcony of his presidential palace singing the national anthem.

"Today we opened wide the gates of the future. Venezuela will not return to its past of indignity," he told the supporters.

The celebrations had already started early morning though the closing of the voting time is around 18:00 (2230 GMT) Sunday.

Venezuelans from almost all the 23 states of the country got up early, and gathered at the voting centers to participate in the referendum, which began at 6:00 a.m. local time (1030 GMT).

A lot of people had been waiting for the voting centers to open way earlier before the first sun beam showed up, local TV reported.

Nearly 17 million people cast their vote at the referendum.

The voting process went smoothly in all the states, said General Jesus Gonzalez, who leads the security movement known as the "Plan Republica", told a press

Gonzalez said that several people have been arrested in different states due to felonies against the voting centers.

Chavez was first elected in 1998 and reelected in 2006. The constitution was amended one year after his first election to allow him to run for a second term. His current term will end in 2013.

He proposed to amend the 1999 constitution to allow him seeking presidency in 2009

Democracy Now!: Hampshire College Becomes First U.S. College To Divest From Israel

Hampshire College Becomes First U.S. College To Divest From Israel

The Board of Trustees at Hampshire College has agreed to divest from six companies because of their involvement in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Hampshire is believed to be the first U.S. college or university to divest from companies tied to the Israeli military. The companies are Caterpillar, United Technologies, General Electric, ITT Corporation, Motorola, and Terex. The Board agreed to the divestment following a two-year campaign by the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine. 32 years ago Hampshire College became the first school to divest from apartheid South Africa.

A message from our comrades in the DKP LGBT commission:

A message from our comrades in the DKP (German Communist Party) LGBT commission:

Dear Comrades,

DKP queer is a commission of the party executive committee (Parteivorstand) of the DKP
We exist as a commission since September the 9th 2007. We would be pleased to be contacted by you, if you have or going to found somewhat comparable like DKP queer.
Our task is to make the topic “gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender” (SLBT) wellknown in the communist movement and to carry on communists positions into the SLBT
community. You can contact us by e-mail info@dkp-queer.de or by snail mail: DKP queer post office box 1344 in D-61283 Bad Homburg
Our homepage is www.dkp-queer.de

With communist greetings,
Thomas Knecht

Stiglitz: Nationalized banks are ‘only answer’

from: PWW

Author: Michael Knigge
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 02/13/09 13:54

Reposted from Deutsche Welle http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4005355,00.html

Nationalized banks are the "only answer," economist Stiglitz says. In an interview with Deutsche Welle, Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz talks about nationalizing banks, the outlook for developing countries, and the need for an international financial regulator.

DW-WORLD: Many experts fear that while things are bad now, we haven't seen the worst of the crisis yet. Do you share the belief that we are facing a long decline that could rival the Great Depression?

Joseph Stiglitz: We live in a very different world than during the Great Depression. Then, we had a manufacturing economy. Now we have a service-sector economy. Many people in the in the United States are already working part time because they can't get full-time jobs. People are talking more about the "comprehensive" measures of unemployment, and these show unemployment at very high levels, around 15 percent. So it clearly is a serious downturn.

Another big difference between now and the Great Depression is then we didn't have a safety net. Now we have unemployment insurance.

Economists Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb, who predicted the global economic downturn, have called for a nationalization of banks in order to stop the financial meltdown. Do you agree?

The fact of the matter is, the banks are in very bad shape. The U.S. government has poured in hundreds of billions of dollars to very little effect. It is very clear that the banks have failed. American citizens have become majority owners in a very large number of the major banks. But they have no control. Any system where there is a separation of ownership and control is a recipe for disaster.

Nationalization is the only answer. These banks are effectively bankrupt.

The Institute of International Finance estimates that the private flow of capital to developing countries will shrink by about two-thirds. Are we facing a situation where we could see a total collapse of many developing countries?

I think many governments of emerging nations actually have a much better central banking system than the United States. They realized the risks of excessive leverage, excessive dependance on real estate lending and so they took much more prudent actions. Many developing countries also built up large reserves and are in a better position to meet this crisis than they were a decade ago.

But some will face very difficult times, potentially defaults. Some of these countries are suffering from having paid too much attention to what has gone on in the United States.

Should steps be taken to help these developing countries?

Very definitely. I think it is absolutely imperative not just for the interest of these countries, not just from a humanitarian perspective, but from the perspective of global stability. It is not possible to have a strong global economy when there are large pockets of economic turmoil.

The World Bank has called for advanced industrial countries as they are bailing out their own industries and provide subsidies, to set aside some amounts for the developing countries, who can't compete on this uneven playing field.

U.S. President Obama blasted banks for paying out billions in bonuses to executives while still on brink of collapse. Do you agree with him that their behavior is "shameful" and "irresponsible"?

Yes, it is shameful and irresponsible. But it is not a surprise ... for years the executives of American firms have defended their outrageous compensation, saying it's important as an incentive scheme. How in the world can you give bonuses of billions of dollars when your firm has had record losses of billions of dollars? Unless you're rewarding people for failure you shouldn't be getting bonuses, you should be getting penalties.

In her speech at the World Economic Forum, German Chancellor Merkel warned the U.S. of protectionism and criticized subsidies for American auto companies. Is she correct? Do you see a danger that the U.S. will resort to protectionist measures?

Yes, very clearly. We have always been aware that protectionism takes two forms: Tariffs and subsidies. Subsidies distort the playing field just like tariffs do. Subsidies are even more unfair and even more distorting, because while developed countries can give subsidies, poor countries can't afford to do so. Rich countries are distorting the level playing field by giving huge subsidies, not necessarily in the intention of protection, but with the consequence of protection.

Merkel recently called for an international financial oversight body, and consensus on the issue is growing. How realistic do you think it is that governments and companies would give up sovereignty to an international entity?

Merkel's idea is a very important one, which I have long supported. You need to have coordination of global economic policy that goes beyond the IMF, which has failed, and the World Bank. You cannot say that we have open borders without global regulation. It is inconceiveable as we go forward that we would allow financial products that are risky, manufactured in countries with inadequate regulation, to come without regulation into the United States and vice versa. International companies that are committed to globalization should be at the forefront of calling for international regulation.
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Joseph Stiglitz was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001. Under US President Bill Clinton he served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1995- 1997. He was chief economist of the World Bank from 1997-2000 and was a lead author of the 1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He is currently a professor at Columbia University in New York.

Peanut butter crisis

from: PWW

Author: PWW Editorial Board
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 02/13/09 14:08

Once again the Bush-stacked and -stymied Food and Drug Administration is asleep on the job in its duty to protect the people from poisoned foods and drugs. Salmonella-tainted peanut butter produced by Georgia-based Peanut Corporation of America has killed eight people and sickened 19,000, a majority of them children, in 43 states.

It has forced one of the most sweeping recalls of tainted food in recent history. The peanut butter was distributed in jars, in crackers, snack bars labeled “organic” and in ready-made meals and TV dinners. FEMA is in the midst of recalling millions of emergency food rations containing the toxic peanut butter.

In case anyone thinks this is an isolated incident, The New York Times obtained documents proving that a peanut-processing plant owned by ConAgra that was only 70 miles from the PCA plant also produced and distributed salmonella-tainted peanut butter. It caused a similar nationwide outbreak of salmonella poisoning in 2007. The Times reports that in 2004, lab tests at the ConAgra facility came up positive for salmonella. ConAgra refused to release the lab results until the FDA agreed not to make the data public, claiming the information was “proprietary.”

Three years later, the 2007 salmonella outbreak forced the FDA to finally end the coverup and release the data.

Peanut Corp. of America, ConAgra and Bush administration officials should be charged with manslaughter and reckless indifference to human safety and health.

This situation calls for quick action by the Obama administration to strengthen oversight and inspection of the nation’s food supply. Congress should quickly create a new federal agency with the single mission of insuring safe foods, with far more inspectors and the power to shut down unsafe food operations.

Obama should also pursue a farm and food policy that helps break the stranglehold of ConAgra, Monsanto, Cargill, ADM and other agribusiness giants.

Obama is right to push for 21st century sustainable energy, public education and health care. We also need a 21st century system of sustainable agriculture that produces safe, fresh, nutritious food. That means encouraging production of food on independent and family farms, locally grown, and with a minimum of factory processing.

Safe and healthy food is a national security issue, which shouldn’t be left to the capitalist imperative to maximize profits over people’s health.

Lincoln and Darwin: Bicentennial for two great emancipators

from: PWW

Author: Steven Conn
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 02/05/09 16:03

Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, has been much on our minds recently as Barack Obama moved into the White House. Exactly 200 years after Lincoln’s birth, Obama’s presidency is one fulfillment of the work Lincoln started.

Lincoln shares his birthday with Charles Darwin, the other Great Emancipator of the 19th century. Though in different ways, each liberated us from the traditions of the past.

Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were exact contemporaries. Both were born on February 12, 1809 — Darwin into a comfortable family in Shropshire, England, Lincoln into humble circumstances on the American frontier.

They also came to international attention at virtually the same moment. Darwin published his epochal book, “On the Origin of Species,” in 1859. The following year, Abraham Lincoln became the 16th president of the United States, and in that very year Harvard botanist Asa Gray wrote the first review of Darwin’s book to appear in the United States.

They initiated twin revolutions: one brought by Lincoln — the Civil War and the emancipation of roughly four million African American slaves; the other initiated by Darwin’s explanation of the natural world through the mechanism of natural selection.

Lincoln’s Civil War transformed the social, political and racial landscape in ways which continue to play out. Darwin transformed our understanding of biology, thus paving the way for countless advances in science, especially in medicine. With this powerful scientific explanation of the origins of species, Darwin dispensed with the pseudoscientific assertions of African American inferiority. In this way, Darwin provided the scientific legitimacy for Lincoln’s political and moral actions.

Both revolutions share a commitment to the same proposition: that all human beings are fundamentally equal. In this sense, both Lincoln and Darwin deserve credit for emancipating us from the political and intellectual rationales that justified slavery.

For Lincoln, this was a political principle and a moral imperative. He was deeply ambivalent about the institution of slavery. As the war began, Lincoln believed that saving the Union, not abolishing slavery, was the cause worth fighting for.

As the war ground gruesomely on, Lincoln began to see that ending slavery was the only way to save the Union without making a mockery of the nation’s founding ideals. This is what he meant in his address at Gettysburg in 1863 when he promised that the war would bring “a new birth of freedom”; he was even more emphatic about it in his second inaugural address in 1865. Slavery could not be permitted to exist in a nation founded on the belief that we are all created equal.

For his part, Darwin was a deeply committed abolitionist from a family of deeply committed abolitionists. Exposed to slavery during his trip to South America, Darwin wrote, “It makes one’s blood boil.” He called abolishing slavery his “sacred cause.” In some of his first notes about evolution he railed against the idea that slaves were somehow less than human beings.

For Darwin, our shared humanity was simply a biological fact. Whatever variations exist among the human species — what we call “races” — are simply the natural variations that occur within all species. Like it or not, in a Darwinian world we are all members of one human family. This truth lay at the center of Darwin’s science and at the center of his abolitionism.

That understanding of human equality, arrived at from different directions and for different reasons, helps explain the opposition to the revolutions unleashed by Lincoln and Darwin, and why many Americans, alone in the developed world, continue to deny Darwinian science.

For their part, many white Southerners never accepted Lincoln’s basic proposition about the political equality of black Americans. In the years after the Civil War and Reconstruction they set up the brutally baroque structures and rituals of segregation. All the elaborate laws, customs and violence of the segregated South served to deny the basic truth that all Americans are created equal. For their part, most Northerners didn’t care all that much about the “Southern problem.”

No wonder, then, that many Americans simply rejected Darwin’s insights out of hand. Slavery and segregation rested on the assumption that black Americans were not fully human. Yet Darwinian science put the lie to all that.

Lincoln insisted on equality as a political fact. Darwin demonstrated it as a biological fact. In their shared commitment to human equality these two Great Emancipators, each in their own realm, helped us to break free from the shackles of the past.

Steven Conn is a professor and director of public history at Ohio State University. This article was distributed by the History News Service.