HAPPY MAY DAY!

http://www.cpusa.org/article/articleview/1044/1/27/

Happy May Day to working people everywhere from the Communist Party USA!

May First is celebrated as International Workers' Day around the globe, but was born here in the United States in the struggle for the eight-hour workday. For many years, May Day was not celebrated in the country of its birth as it was internationally, but in recent years May Day has been reborn.

Larger and larger sections of the labor movement and the immigrant rights movement in the United States have embraced May Day as a day of struggle for workers rights and of celebration of the contribution of all workers: men and women, gay and straight, every race, language, religion or nationality.

We join with all struggling people around the world in celebrating May Day and continuing the fight for a better world.

Below are links to articles on the history and origins of May Day, thoughts on the workers movement today and more.

Born in the USA
Reclaiming the May Day tradition: "Through unity we find our strength"
Labor on the road to unity
Haymarket landmark finally established
Historical Interpretation: Haymarket Square, May 4,1886

Home child care providers are paid so little, they’re losing homes, cars

From: PWW

Author: John Rummel
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/24/09 09:57

LANSING, Mich. — They are 40,000 strong and they feed, clean, and teach Michigan’s young, in their most formative pre-school years. And for doing such an important job, what do they earn? “In Wayne County, we earn $1.66 an hour for each child,” said Daisy Jackson, an American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees organizer from Detroit.

AFSCME organizer Daisy Jackson

In addition, Jackson said, the books, food and toys these home-based child care providers supply each day are “on your own dime.” Not to mention the wear and tear on their home and furnishings.

The child care providers are paid by the state of Michigan. In 2006, under the joint leadership of the United Auto Workers and AFSCME, the 40,000 home-based providers were organized into a new union: Child Care Providers Together of Michigan (CCPTM). They won wage increases of 8 percent for each of three years, but due to the state budget crisis, the state Legislature hasn’t allocated the funds to pay for the raises that were negotiated and agreed to.

To win justice, providers from throughout the state descended on the state Capitol here April 21. They visited every member of the state Senate and House and demanded what was rightfully theirs.

Home child care providers gather at the Capitol

Herbert Sanders, the union’s AFSCME director, said, “There was a promise made and that promise hasn’t been kept. That’s why we are here today.” He argued that monies from the federal stimulus package, targeted for child care, are sufficient to fund the contract.

Grant Grace, the UAW coordinator for the union, told the child care providers gathered here, “For too long the state has not respected what you do. We keep our word, we raise the next generation,now we want the state to keep their word.”

Providers Becky Hardesty and Lu Hilden, from Flint and Owosso, respectively, stated their case effectively with each official they visited.

“We do a very important job — taking care of children,” said Hardesty. “We are so far below poverty level — the [state budget] cut cannot come from us. We have providers losing homes, phones and cars.”

Hilden told the lawmakers that some children don’t thrive with institutional day care and really need the attention and atmosphere a home setting provides. But when home care providers earn so little, she said, it is getting to the point where some won’t take state-funded children. “Children are treated special in home-based care and that option is being threatened,” she said. “Strong providers make strong children — and less children ending up in foster care and the penal system.”

Northwest Detroit resident Violet Meadows is one of those strong providers. She currently takes care of five children but is licensed to care for up to eight. She has provided for children since 1994. “Word of mouth” helped to advertise her child care. Meadows said the children begin to get dropped off at her house at 8 a.m. and may be picked up 10 or 12 hours later. She joined the union because she had a brother and nephew, employed in the auto industry, who knew that being in a union was “good,” she said.

Child care provider Violet Meadows

Meadows is a person any parent would want taking care of their children. She takes the children on field trips and to restaurants to teach them how to behave in public and to eat properly. She tells them they can be anything they want in life: doctors, nurses, teachers and lawyers. She helps them plant a garden in her backyard.

When Katrina devastated New Orleans, she took the kids to a big box store and gave them $5 each to buy items for a care package.

Jonathan Fung, from Interfaith Worker Justice, traveled on the bus from Detroit. He summarized the incredible contradiction child care providers find themselves in. They “are some of the most unappreciated workers in Michigan,” he said. “What is more important than caring for our children?”

jrummel @ pww.org

You and What Movement? A Response to Naomi Klein

From: Political Affairs Online

Original source: Narco News Bulletin

Naomi Klein is suffering, along with some other sectors of the academic North American left, an existential crisis.

In a recent column she published in The Nation and in The Huffington Post, she complained about “the awkward in-between space in which many US progressive movements find themselves” now that Barack Obama is president of the United States.

Revealing a bizarre contempt and college-educated condescension toward a vast multi-racial swathe of progressive supporters and sympathizers of Obama and his movement, Klein seeks to explain us away as dupes. We (I use the first person plural proudly and without hesitation) are, according to Klein, part of a “superfan culture,” that, she says, believes we can “save the world if we all just hope really hard,” and that suffers from the following psychological ailments: “Hopeover… hoper coaster… hope fiend… hopebreak… and hopelash.”

Her theory, that progressive Obama supporters are now inflicted by buyer’s remorse, flies contrary to all objective measurement. The pollster.com aggregate of all recent public opinion surveys finds that 61.8 percent of Americans view Obama (less than 100 days into his presidency) favorably, compared to 32.9 percent that view him unfavorably. As Gallup notes, President Obama’s first-quarter average favorability of 63 percent exceeds that of the first three months of his eight immediate predecessors: Presidents Bush II, Clinton, Bush 1, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon or Johnson.

Ah, but Klein is talking about “progressives,” so let’s take a look at the hard data that is available. Separate out the crosstabs, and those numbers are even sky higher among progressive demographic groups. Among Democrats, according to an early April Pew survey, 88 percent view the young president favorably, so it’s not really clear who Klein is talking about, imagining or inventing out of thin air when she devotes an entire column to claim a non-existent demographic trend.

Among African Americans (without which there can be no successful “progressive movement” in the United States), a towering 94 percent approve of how the president is doing his job, according to the Quinnipiac survey. Among Hispanic Americans (just as important to any progressive future in the US), 73 percent feel the same way. Among Americans that earn less than $50,000 a year (the working class and the poor), a solid 60 percent approve. The question must be asked: What “movement” does Klein thus imagine? An exclusively white and college educated one? I fear that the truth may not be far from it if she is so quick to insult and dismiss such a large bloc of people who skew non-white, poor and working class.

There is currently no quicker way for white progressives to further divide themselves from African American, Hispanic American, working class and poor Americans – all sectors without which serious and successful progressive movements in the US would be impossible – than to invent derogatory psychobabble terms for us because we do not share Klein’s tendencies to feel somehow demoralized by the country’s first African American head of state, and demonstrably its most progressive since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

That such complaint comes after less than 100 days, when the President has just eased the Cuba embargo that was foolishly embraced by Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, is nothing less than pathetic. In the same week, Obama made the classified torture memos public (and as any working journalist or investigator knows, every department of his administration now responds quickly – usually overnight – to our Freedom of Information Act requests for information; a sea change from all previous administrations). The passage of Obama’s economic Stimulus bill marked the single largest expenditure ever on jobs and social programs like unemployment insurance, Medicaid and public education in the history of any country. He has already made the orderly withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq official policy with a timeline that has most of it done before the 2010 midterm elections. And in three short months, Obama has restored the principle of progressive taxation to the United States.

Yesterday, at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad [Ed. – this article first appeared on April 18th], the US president extended a long overdue hand of friendship to his Venezuelan counterpart, a democratically elected leader that suffered an attempted military coup d’etat that was cheered, if not planned, by Washington. The President, in short time, has already defused an entire string of similar policy time bombs left by previous administrations (Republican and Democratic alike). Will there be more tensions between Chávez and the US? Very likely the answer is yes, but the gravity and context of them has shifted positively. This hemisphere is already a safer place for dissident journalists, community organizers, governments of the left and other grassroots change agents. That, alone, makes it more possible for us to organize and make bigger and better changes – of the kind for which we do not need any government’s permission – in the days and years ahead.

I quite agree with Klein’s belief that “demanding” is better than “hoping” when it comes to changing public policy. But where I get off her bus is upon her inference that we who are supportive of – and more happy than not about – Obama’s presidency somehow believe differently. Her claim only demonstrates her gross ignorance toward the important sector of the left (including parts of the Obama movement) that are community organizers. “Demanding” is necessary but without “organizing” to back it up it is merely an act of intellectual masturbation. It accomplishes nothing. It never has won a single battle. And that’s why, until 2008, the US left in particular – so busy demanding without doing the hard work of organizing – went through at least three “lost decades.”

The problem with too much of the “activist left” in North America is that so many of its adherents don’t really want to do the hard work of community organizing. I wonder: when was the last time that Klein went door-to-door, or staffed a phone bank, or otherwise reached out directly to real people demographically different from her? Any journalist or writer that hasn’t, at minimum, accompanied organizers doing that real work of change should shut the fuck up when it comes to opining about “the people.” They don’t have a clue as to who “the people” are. Activism that doesn’t involve one or more of those tasks does not rise to the level or effectiveness of organizing. And those that don’t do it really have no idea where the public is at: the masses (or “the multitude” in current jargon) are imaginary cartoon characters to these people. Their view of us is as elitist as it is condescending.

They can complain about, for example, US policy toward Israel and Palestine, seemingly oblivious to how US public opinion on the matter keeps those very bad policies in place. If they got off their duffs and knocked on doors to ask real people about it, they’d get a lesson in civics, and perhaps learn better ways to move public opinion in a better direction. They can bemoan the “bailouts” (essentially government loans to financial services industries) ignorant of the fact that when big corporations fall they land hardest on the workers and the poor, as would a 1929-level crash of the kind that nearly occurred last October. They can demand “nationalization” of the banks, without offering any detail as to what that would look like. I live in Mexico where the 1982 bank nationalization proved disastrous for the country’s workers, and helped destroy its middle class. The devil is always in the details.

I am not a member of the Democratic Party, and I did not vote for twelve years prior to 2008 until Obama’s candidacy gave me a reason to do so. While the academic North American left went jet-hopping from summit protest to social forum across the globe, I went to Latin America, lived, worked and reported alongside the authentic social movements that many of them came to visit for a weekend or maybe a month. I’m more comfortable with an anarcho-syndicalist view of the kind of society that I daily work toward than I am with electoral politics. Socialist, although it’s a moniker that seems a bit statist and conservative for me, is still a term that I’m more comfortable with than “Democrat.” And yet every day I see the President moving the United States closer to my own version of utopia, after a lifetime of watching each of his predecessors pull it farther away. More importantly, for me, as a journalist and an organizer, the Obama presidency has created much more space for people like us to get out there and do this hard work without the repression and marginalization that we have struggled under for decades.

Here’s what the academic left – hopping mad, frustrated and now, like Klein, lashing out at those of us in the working left – doesn’t get: It was Obama – not Klein’s post-Seattle ’99 milieu of “anti-globalization activists” – who opened the doors of the American left for the first time since the Civil Rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s to the building of an authentically multi-racial movement. It was Obama – not Klein and her colleagues – that got working class whites struggling alongside working class blacks and Hispanics in the United States, and who turned a new generation onto the art of community organizing that the activist left had abandoned.

When colleagues like Klein so summarily insult Obama supporters and sympathizers, they are driving yet another stake between their white college-educated ghetto and the 94 percent of African-Americans, and the 73 percent of Hispanic Americans, and the 60 percent of the entire American working class, that is pleased, as I am, that this unique historic figure is, for the next four years at least, the President of the United States.

I’m reminded of the scene from the Martin Scorcese motion picture, The Aviator, in which Kathryn Hepburn (Cate Blanchette) brings Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) home to meet her family. “We’re socialists,” the mother tells Hughes. And then, when she thinks Hughes is speaking ill of President Franklin Roosevelt, she nearly runs him out of the house. FDR, like Obama, wasn’t a socialist (and unlike Obama, he was born into privilege). But a great many socialists, communists and even anarchists of the era understood that their work was made so much more possible by his presidency. And that cultivated an intense synergy, not to mention a renaissance of labor and community organizing during that epoch. In retrospect, that synergy between the working left and the FDR presidency brought with it many of the 20th century’s most progressive advances.

The same is happening now – although Klein and others haven’t done the investigative or organizing spadework to recognize it – and that (even without the many progressive policies enacted by the Obama administration already, and those important ones like immigration reform yet to come) makes me an unabashed, eyes wide open, Obama sympathizer, guilt-free, without any of the feelings of remorse Klein seeks to assign to me and millions like me. That enthusiasm hasn’t turned us into blind followers: these pages are already filled with hard-hitting critiques when the Obama administration has been wrong; on Plan Mexico, on the drug war, and other deadly serious matters. And yet even on those fronts, our ability to push back and serve as a check and a break on the extremities of those bad policies vastly outweighs what we were able to do for many previous decades.

But I’m not going to sit back silently while some white progressives – dripping with the nastiest forms of envy because, truth be told, the Obama movement succeeded at resurrecting community organizing and multi-racial struggle whereas their tired tactics and strategies had failed again and again to do so – try to claim to me or anyone else that they’re the ones doing the demanding while we’re somehow sitting back and thinking we can “save the world if we just hope really hard.”

Memo to Ms. Klein: Go back to the only school that ever got the left – in which I take no back seat to you in either mileage or scar tissue – anywhere: that of community organizing. We’re doing it. You’re not. And when you go to give your next speech at some university or activist hall, look around at the white, privileged faces that occupy more than half those seats. Study how many of them choose to self-marginalize from workers or racial minorities with their freak-show narcissistic – and yet humorless! – antics. You know what I’m talkin’ about. And you probably wince regularly as they ask you to sign your book for them.

Ask yourself, “are these the so-called masses that are going to make a progressive movement succeed?” You know damn well, in your heart, that they’re not. They do buy hardcover books though, a lot more than the workers and the poor ever will. With all due respect I must ask: Have you become an intellectual prisoner of what you think it takes to pander to your own college-educated consumers?

No thank you, Ms. Klein: When it comes to the United States, I’ll take my chances with the multi-racial community organizers of the Obama movement, and the tens of thousands of young organizers they’ve inspired and trained, at least until the non-electoral North American left gets its shit together, which, after reading a column like yours, seems still a long and far away struggle.

Nationalize General Motors? UAW and U.S. government could own 89 percent of company under GM's plan

by The Associated Press

Tuesday April 28, 2009, 8:12 AM

AP Photo General Motors says it will cut 21,000 U.S. factory jobs by next year and phase out its storied Pontiac brand as part of a major restructuring effort needed to get more government aid. The struggling automaker also says it will offer 225 shares of common stock for every $1,000 in notes held by bondholders as part of debt-for-equity swap.

General Motors, once the colossus of American capitalism, will become a leaner, government-owned company if the Obama administration goes along with the automaker's plan to slash jobs, close plants and eliminate the legendary Pontiac brand.

As GM laid out the proposal Monday, new agreements fell into place between Chrysler and its unions in the United States and Canada, making it apparent that the future of both companies now rests with their creditors.

General Motors CEO Fritz Henderson said the company would offer the Treasury Department more than 50 percent of its stock to absolve GM of $10 billion in government loans.

GM has thousands of employees at several facilities in Ohio, including a major assembly complex in Lordstown, near Youngstown.

The automaker also proposed that the United Auto Workers take GM stock for at least half the $20 billion the company owes to a union-run trust that will assume retiree health care expenses starting next year.

Combined, the union and government would own 89 percent of the century-old automaker, which has been bleeding red ink and is saddled with more than $62 billion in debt.

"It is unprecedented, but it signifies the importance of the automobile industry," said David Lewis, a retired professor at the University of Michigan who taught business history for 43 years.

Although the government has loaned money to corporations in the past, including to Chrysler in the 1970s, Lewis could not recall a time when it had taken a majority stake in a company.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the administration does not want to own GM or any other auto company.

"This administration has no desire to run an auto company on a day-to-day basis," Gibbs said. "We strongly back an auto industry we believe can, and should, be self-reliant of government funding."

But GM's plan depends on persuading unsecured bondholders who have loaned GM $27 billion to forgive that debt in exchange for a 10 percent stake in the company.

Current GM shareholders would own only about 1 percent.

GM's announcement sent its shares up 21 percent to $2.04 Monday, meaning bondholders would get about 46 cents on the dollar. But that does not take into account dilution of GM's shares once the government and the union get their giant piece of the pie.

Analysts estimated that the value was closer to 5 cents on the dollar.

General Motors is surviving on $15.4 billion in government loans, and said Monday in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it envisions getting an additional $11.6 billion.

GM Chief Financial Officer Ray Young said that's all the company will need under its new plan.
But if GM's restructuring plan cannot put all the pieces in place by June 1, the struggling company could go into bankruptcy protection.

Meanwhile, Chrysler is surviving only because of $4 billion in government aid. The company has until Thursday to adopt a partnership with Italy's Fiat Group SpA and to devise a restructuring plan that satisfies the government so it can get an additional $6 billion.

Just hours before GM gave its progress report, Chrysler announced it had a tentative concession agreement with the UAW that had been blessed by the government. United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger said the union's factory-level leaders voted unanimously Monday night to recommend that members approve concessions that could give a union-run trust 55 percent ownership of a restructured Chrysler LLC.

Union leaders say ratification votes across the nation should be finished by Wednesday. The deal, designed to keep the automaker out of bankruptcy, would see workers no longer get most of their pay if they are laid off but instead receive supplemental pay from the company equal to 50 percent of their gross base pay.

The Chrysler deal almost certainly will be the template for GM, although Young said negotiations with the union had not yet resumed in earnest. In addition, both companies have deals with the Canadian Auto Workers.

If successful, the plan for the government to own a majority of GM's outstanding common shares would wipe out $44 billion of GM's $62.4 billion debt. Bondholders have until May 26 to accept the offer, which is contingent on the deals with the government and the UAW falling into place.

Young said the Treasury Department always expected some of the government debt to be exchanged for GM stock, but the government issued a statement saying it had not decided to do it.

The company still prefers restructuring outside of court, but Henderson acknowledged bankruptcy is more likely now than a few weeks ago.

"The task at hand in terms of what we need to get done is formidable," Henderson said. "But it can be done."

GM said it would speed up six factory closings announced in February and close three additional facilities in 2010. Henderson expects to identify the plants in May and said they will include assembly, engine, transmission and parts-stamping factories.

GM will also cut 21,000 hourly jobs in the U.S. by 2010 -- 7,000 more than what the company outlined just two months ago.

With the factory cuts, GM will be a mere fraction of its old self. At the end of 1991, the company had 304,000 hourly workers in the U.S.; by the end of 2010, it would have 40,000.

Also, General Motors Canada said it plans to slash its hourly work force from 10,300 to 4,400 by 2014. Young said the reduction follows previously announced plant closures.

In addition, GM plans to cut additional U.S. salaried jobs beyond the 3,400 cuts completed last week, and it plans to reduce dealerships 42 percent by 2010.

Mark LaNeve, vice president of North American sales, said many of the 450 dealers to be cut would be dropped with the elimination or sale of the Saturn, Hummer and Saab brands by the end of this year.

GM also said it will end its storied Pontiac brand no later than next year, killing a brand known for muscle cars such as the Trans Am and the GTO.

David Westcott, a Burlington, N.C., Pontiac dealer who also holds Buick, GMC and Suzuki franchises, was saddened, but not surprised.

"The bad thing is they make some great, great products," said Westcott, who has been selling Pontiacs for more than a decade. "But over the last few years, the volume has been decreasing."

Equal Pay Day: April 28

From: AFL-CIO blog

by James Parks, Apr 28, 2009

April 28 is Equal Pay Day and workers across the country will commemorate the day by reaffirming their determination to make sure women are paid equally as men for the same work. Equal Pay Day symbolizes how far into the year a woman must work, on average, to earn as much as a man earned the previous year.

Equal Pay Day 2009 comes at an exciting time for those who support equal pay for women. President Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law on Jan. 29 and established a White House Council on Women and Girls in March. Yet more than 45 years after the Equal Pay Act was signed, women in the United States still earn only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns—even with similar education, skills and experience—and African American and Hispanic women earn even less.

Members of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) will commemorate Equal Pay Day with rallies around the country in support of the Paycheck Fairness Act and the Employee Free Choice Act. CLUW is urging all workers to wear red on Equal Pay Day to symbolize how far women and minorities are “in the red” with their pay!

While the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act ensures workers can seek restitution for unequal pay, the Paycheck Fairness Act, which still needs Senate approval, would update the Equal Pay Act by creating stronger incentives for employers to follow the law, empower women to negotiate for equal pay and strengthen federal outreach and enforcement efforts. It also would close a significant loophole in the Equal Pay Act to allow for full compensation for sex-based wage discrimination. Learn more about the Paycheck Fairness Act here.

Says CLUW President Marsha Zakowski:

Two bills in Congress would dramatically change the economic lives of women. Union women earn, on the average, 32 percent more than unorganized women. The Employee Free Choice Act would allow women and men workers to form unions at their work places without fear of employer intimidation and unlawful firings. The Paycheck Fairness Act would correct wage discrimination.

You can act now to help women workers gain equal pay. Urge your state’s representatives and senators to vote for the Employee Free Choice Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act by calling the U.S. Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121.

You also can download a CLUW fact sheet on The Importance of the Employee Free Choice Act to Women and other materials here.

CLUW also is calling all bloggers to sign up at www.cluw.org to Blog for Fair Pay Day 2009.

The need for the Employee Free Choice Act for women is obvious, CLUW says. Union participation benefits society as a whole because union members earn higher wages and have greater access to health care and pensions. The Employee Free Choice Act ensures that employees have the freedom to form unions and take advantage of these benefits.

A recent study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that for the years 2004-2007, union women were much more likely to have health insurance (75.4 percent) and a pension (75.8 percent) than women workers who were not in unions (50.9 percent for health insurance, 43 percent for pensions).

Equal Pay Day was originated by the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) in 1996 as a public awareness event to illustrate the gap between men’s and women’s wages. The day, observed on a Tuesday in April, symbolizes how far into the year a woman must work, on average, to earn as much as a man earned the previous year. (Tuesday is the day on which women’s wages catch up to men’s wages from the previous week.)

The book Chavez gave Obama

From: PWW

Author: W. T. Whitney Jr.
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/24/09 16:44

A few national security partisans realize now there’s more to worry about than guns, bombs and rogue states. That would be ideas, and last week, a book. It’s a “really dangerous one that can put the White House at risk,” warned a not-very-serious David Brooks, the Mexican daily La Jornada’s Washington correspondent. He was referring to the book Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave Barack Obama during the recent Summit of the Americas.

“Open Veins of Latin America,” written by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano in 1971, is a famous, superbly written account of 500 years of Latin American distress under colonialism and imperialism. The notable Chilean author Isabel Allende writes that on going into exile following the 1973 Pinochet coup in her country, she took along clothes, family pictures, “a small bag of dirt from my garden, and two books: an old edition of the ‘Odes’ by Pablo Neruda and the book with the yellow cover, ‘Open Veins of Latin America.’”

“That book has a power that scares many,” Brooks notes. One is Otto Reich, former State Department official under Ronald Reagan and both Presidents Bush. Quoted on Newsmax.com, Reich opined that the presidential staff “should not have put President Obama in that embarrassing situation because this is very much an anti-U.S. book. Anti-Europe as well.” Galeano is “a far-left Latin American, a very unknown author,” he claimed.

For Miami Herald columnist Andrés Oppenheimer, the book is “a diatribe whose underlying theme is that Latin America’s poverty is caused by U.S. imperialism.” And Obama showed misplaced appreciation for the gift “considering that Chávez’ gesture was the equivalent of presenting Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ to an Israeli president.”

Meanwhile, an Air France flight was proceeding from Paris to Mexico City. Writer Hernando Calvo Ospina was on board, citizen of Colombia and resident of France. Calvo Ospina was heading for Nicaragua on behalf of Le Monde Diplomatique. His books include “Bacardi: The Hidden War,” “The Cuban Exile Movement: Dissidents or Mercenaries” and most recently, “Colombia: Laboratorio de Embrujos” (Laboratory of Curses), which analyst James Petras sees as “the most important study of Colombian politics in recent decades.”

Over the North Atlantic, passengers heard the captain’s voice announcing their Mexico City arrival would be delayed five hours, because U.S. air space was off limits. One of their fellow passengers, he explained, “was not welcome because of national security reasons.” Calvo Ospina learned later from the co-pilot he was the offending party.

The airliner took on extra fuel in Martinique. Flight crew members said restrictions on over-flying the United States were new for Air France.

The traveler later caught a flight to Managua, after questioning by immigration officials in Mexico City. Asked about experience with weapons, Calvo Ospina, writing on Rebelion.org, indicated his “only weapon was writing, especially in denouncing the U.S. government which I regarded as terrorist.” His interrogator commented, “That weapon is often worse than rifles and bombs.”

As if in confirmation, Amazon sales rankings of “Open Veins of Latin America” vaulted overnight from number 54,295 to second place.

atwhit @ roadrunner.com

THINK BEFORE YOU DRINK: WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT BACARDI

link

Rock around the Blockade, which campaigns in solidarity with Cuba, has launched a Boycott Bacardi campaign to highlight the organised attempts by the Bacardi company to undermine the Cuban Revolution – a stance belied by its publicity for its apparently ‘Cuban’ rum.

In advertising its lead brand white rum, Bacardi plays on its Cuban roots, misleading drinkers into believing that Bacardi still has some links with the island. In fact the Bacardi empire is based in the Bahamas and the Bacardi company broke all ties with Cuba after the Revolution of 1959, when its cronies in the hated Batista dictatorship were overthrown by a popular guerrilla movement led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.

Since then the Bacardi company has backed illegal and violent attempts to undermine the Cuban Revolution, including funding the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF), a virulently anti-Castro right-wing exile organisation based in Miami, which has been responsible for systematic acts of terrorism against Cuba. Bacardi’s lawyers also helped draft the US Helms-Burton Act, which extends the United States’ blockade of Cuba to third countries, in breach of international trade law. So central was the role of Bacardi’s lawyer, Ignacio E Sanchez (a CANF member) in establishing Helms-Burton that US Senator William Dengue said the law should be renamed the Helms-Bacardi Protection Act.

The Helms-Burton Act was designed to tighten still further the United States blockade of Cuba. The blockade prevents the sale of food, medicines and other essential supplies to Cuba and threatens other countries (including Britain) if they trade with Cuba. It has been estimated that the blockade has cost Cuba over $40 billion in lost production and trade. Every year the US blockade is overwhelmingly condemned by the United Nations.

The blockade is responsible for severe shortages and suffering among the Cuban people. For instance, the prestigious American Association for World Health (AAWH) reported in 1997 that the US blockade is contributing to malnutrition and poor water quality in Cuba and that Cuba is being denied access to drugs and medical equipment which is causing patients, including children, to suffer unnecessary pain and to die needlessly. The AAWH gave examples of a heart attack patient who died because the US government refused a licence for an implantable defibrillator, of Cuban children with leukaemia denied access to new life-prolonging drugs and of children undergoing chemotherapy who, lacking supplies of a nausea-preventing drug, were vomiting on average 28 times a day.

The AAWH concluded that a humanitarian catastrophe had been averted only because the Cuban government has maintained a high priority for a system designed to deliver primary and preventive care to all its citizens. It is worth recording that, despite the effects of the blockade, Cuba last year received a World Health Organisation (WHO) award for meeting all the WHO targets for all countries by the year 2000 – the only country so far to have done so.

This is the humane, socialist system that Bacardi seeks to destroy.

Through its support for the blockade and its funding of CANF, Bacardi shares the responsibility for the suffering imposed on Cuba over the last 40 years by those who refuse to accept the socialist path chosen by the Cuban people. At the beginning of June 1999, the courts of Cuba issued a lawsuit against the US government and its representatives for human damages as a result of aggression perpetrated against Cuba for the last 40 years, based on witness statements and recently declassified US government papers. These crimes include the destruction of ships and civilian aircraft, biological and guerrilla warfare, the firebombing of factories and crops, assassination and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by US-trained mercenary troops in April 1961. The death toll from these activities is set at at least 3,400 Cuban citizens. These are the sort of terrorist acts supported by the Bacardi empire.

Not content with this, Bacardi has now resorted to stealing the Havana Club label. Although the blockade means that Cuban rum cannot be sold in the USA, in 1974 Cubaexport registered the Havana Club trademark there to prevent its use by other companies. The rights to the trademark were bought by the French company Pernod Ricard when it set up a joint venture with Havana Club Holdings in 1994 - in the face of threatening letters from Bacardi.

In 1996, Bacardi started illegally marketing its own Havana Club. Pernod Ricard sued. But, thanks to a section (section 211) hastily tacked onto last year’s US budget after frantic lobbying by Bacardi’s lawyers, Bacardi won. Section 211 arbitrarily stipulates that no court in the USA may recognise or in any way validate any claim regarding trademarks and commercial names related to properties ‘confiscated’ by the Cuban government. Bacardi claims Havana Club uses former Bacardi assets nationalised by Cuba in 1960. Section 211 contravenes international trade law, and Pernod Ricard is taking the case to the World Trade Organisation. As Castro pointed out, ‘I hope no one will now complain if we start marketing a Cuban Coca-Cola.’

Boycott Bacardi!

The Boycott Bacardi campaign launched by Rock around the Blockade will use petitions, protests, leaflets, stickers and direct action to expose the truth behind Bacardi’s ‘Cuban’ image and persuade consumers not to buy Bacardi. People throughout Britain will be asked to pledge not to buy any Bacardi products and pubs, clubs, student bars and shops will be asked not to stock them.

The campaign aims to threaten Bacardi’s profits and force them to get off Cuba’s back. It will build on the success of similar campaigns against other multinational companies involved in inhumane activities, such as that against Nestle for promoting powdered baby milk in underdeveloped countries and that against Shell for its involvement in atrocities committed against the Ogoni people in Nigeria. These campaigns attracted worldwide support and forced the companies involved to reconsider their policies.

Already a number of student bars and pubs have decided to make a stand against Bacardi’s activities by no longer stocking Bacardi and replacing it with Havana Club, a genuine Cuban rum whose sales bring much-needed hard currency into the Cuban economy. The challenge from Havana Club worldwide has left Bacardi sales down an estimated $25 million since 1990.

Don’t drink Bacardi – it’ll leave a bad taste in your mouth!

For further information contact Rock around the Blockade
c/o FRFI, BCM Box 5909, London WC1N 3XX

Tel: 020 7837 1688 Fax: 020 7837 1743
e-mail: rcgfrfi@easynet.co.uk

New moves by administration seen as step toward bank nationalization

From: PWW

Author: John Wojcik
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/20/09 13:15

In a major change of course, Obama administration officials are saying they don’t have to ask Congress to add money to the Bush administration’s bank bailout and that they can convert the government’s existing loans into common stock. Although the move would turn federal bailout money already handed out into available capital for the banks, it would give the government a major ownership stake in the nation’s largest 19 banks.

Some Republicans are already complaining that the move will make the government the largest shareholder in several banks and that it is really just a back door to nationalization. Others are saying the administration is making the move because it is unwilling to ask Congress for more money when mass opposition to bank bailouts is so high.

In the next few weeks federal bank regulators will finish the so-called stress tests they are conducting on the nation’s largest 19 banks. Several major banks, including Bank of America, are expected to fail those tests with results showing that they need billions. Under the administration’s new approach the “stress” would be relieved, not by pumping in more federal tax dollars, but by changing existing loans to common stock.

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said, on a television news program Sunday, that the government had enough money to shore up the banks without asking Congress for any additional money. He did not elaborate further. The shift in administration strategy announced today clarifies his statement.

The 19 big banks have received more than $140 billion from the government, and all of that has been in exchange for nonvoting preferred shares that pay an annual interest rate of 5 percent.

The Obama administration already decided in January in its deal with Citibank what it is now prepared to do with more of the big 19 banks. The Citibank deal would convert $25 billion of preferred stock, in effect, a loan, into common stock, which represents equity for taxpayers.

After doing this, the government would hold 36 percent of Citigroup’s common shares, making it the largest shareholder and bringing it close to having nationalized a major bank.

If the common stock deal is done with all the other large banks that don’t perform well on the stress tests, the government could end up with the controlling interest in several major banks.

Republicans can’t be happy about the Obama administration’s apparent ability to gain so much political space on this issue. Some Republicans could hardly conceal their glee over what they expected would be a tough struggle for the administration in Congress, where Democratic leaders had warned that they would not be able to muster votes in support of more bailout money for financial institutions that had precipitated the economic crisis.

The Republicans are even less happy that there appears to be more support for steps that go in the direction of nationalization than there is for either the approach of more tax cuts for big business or for the approach, as some Republicans have advocated, of doing nothing about the economic and financial crises.

The labor movement has been, since the AFL-CIO’s January executive council meeting in Miami, calling upon the Obama administration to get some control over the institutions bailed out by taxpayers with measures up to and including nationalization.

If anything, labor can be expected to continue “upping the ante” by putting forward additional bold solutions for the nation’s economic problems. Author and economist William Greider, speaking to a crowd of 200 at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington D.C. April 17, said “It’s time for labor to dream bigger dreams” and that “our current economic crisis runs deeper than just the financial meltdown.” He urged workers and their unions to “jump into the discussion of the nation’s future in a large way. It is time for the union movement to lay down the markers and tell Congress, including the Democrats and the White House, that when they meet the marks, we are with them and when they won’t, we can’t support them. The ongoing economic meltdown demonstrates what working people have been saying for years – an economy built on what’s good for Big Business is not good for the country as a whole.”

AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker, in her introduction of Greider, quoted from one of his books: “Our problem was made in America, not in foreign nations…defending society means not being willing to throw people over the side. Profit making is important, but it should not trump society.”

The Problem of Transition: Development, Socialism and Lenin's NEP

From: Political Affairs Online

By C.J. Atkins

Editor's note: This article is excerpted from a larger thesis by Atkins titled, "Competing Agendas: Class Struggle, the Chinese State and the World Economy."

Socialism can be defined as a phase of social-economic development during which ever-larger numbers of people in society are increasingly empowered to collectively control the direction of their lives through the process of incrementally crafting new democratic means of ownership and institutions for running the economy and other areas of social life. It is a society in which surplus labor is shifted away from individual, private profit toward allocation based on social needs and the public good, thus moving toward the resolution of the contradictions of capitalist social relations.

But socialism is not just democracy and collectivity for their own sake; it is not simply a project for spiritual freedom or equalitarian psychological satisfaction. It is also very much about ensuring ever-rising standards of living and material security to the members of society as a whole. In other words, egalitarianism is a laudable goal, but only if society actually has the material resources to give it substance. There must exist the capability to produce a sufficient economic surplus to satisfy the ever-growing needs of society. And that surplus has to be produced in a manner that is efficient in the employment of natural resources and productive forces (means of production and labor power) and which supplies use values in accordance with the social and economically realistic need for them – a point on which too often the existing socialist countries fell short. A "socialist" system of common poverty, shared underdevelopment or wastefulness is not something to strive for.

While definitions of socialism are of course not blueprints to be drafted in advance with all the details predetermined, there are a few basic aspects that can be delineated. Socialism, as a socio-economic system succeeding capitalism, would be characterized by the social ownership and control of the decisive sectors of an economy, such as the most important industrial firms, the banks and financial institutions, the energy and natural resources industries, health care and social services, and probably much of the national distribution/transportation system. Democratization of the workplace would be central to gradually altering the exploitative relations which characterize the capitalist enterprise, making it possible to begin to develop in practice a new kind of economy in which those who create value have more meaningful collective control over their conditions of work and the disposition of that surplus value through social control of investment. As socialism becomes consolidated, services such as health care, education through university level, the ending of illiteracy, malnutrition, and unemployment would be priorities if they had not already been achieved. Social ownership would not necessarily be straight-jacketed into the two simple categories of "state property" and "collective property," as was the distinction made in Soviet political economy. Ownership could conceivably take various forms depending on the goals of planned production and social needs: public or state ownership at various levels, publicly-invested and controlled enterprises, cooperative/collective and joint ownership forms, and likely some role for private ownership in certain businesses or industries for at least some length of time. The exact forms of ownership cannot accurately be predicted beforehand. Rather, they have to be crafted in the course of political development and in line with the needs of a balanced economy and sustainability. The political system would be one in which the interests of the working class of a society are the dominant, but not necessarily the only, political force. State institutions may vary temporally and geographically and be characterized by long periods of flux as the political and economic tasks change. The governing party or coalition would be subject to regular elections and the necessity of constantly winning anew its popular mandate. As Wu Yiching reminds us, “socialism without meaningful democracy is unfeasible.”

The definition of socialism given above, prefaced as it is as a period successive to capitalism, implies the pre-existence of highly-developed productive forces and the means of common prosperity – or at the very least access to them from other countries or economies. While it may be true that high levels of human development (social, economic, and cultural) have been achieved by the socialist countries with low levels of income in the past, the reality is that in order to prevent stagnation and promote further development, a modern industrial foundation has proven a necessity.

Looking at the first attempt at building socialism in the Soviet Union after the 1917 revolution and how it came up against a wall of economic underdevelopment can provide an insight into some of the challenges which many underdeveloped countries find themselves facing today. For example, many today dismiss China’s economic reform as a return to capitalism. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, however, also faced criticism during the early years of Soviet power for the course of their economic program. Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) was often characterized, both outside and inside the Communist movement, as an abandonment of socialism and Marxist ideology. It seems to be the case that any recognition of the aforementioned fundamentals of historical materialism and practical policy which ensues from them (whether in Moscow in 1921 or Beijing in 1978) will inevitably give rise to the charge of heresy in certain sectors.

In the early years of the Russian Revolution, Lenin understood the underdeveloped position of Soviet Russia and was aware of the difficulty of constructing socialism under the kind of conditions which Marx and Engels had believed ill-suited to its success. Initially, he still believed that revolution would break out in one or more industrialized capitalist countries and that they would then assist Russia. “Soon,” he said, “after the victory of the proletarian revolution in at least one of the advanced countries, a sharp change will come about. Russia will cease to be the model and will once again become a backward country.” When such assistance ultimately failed to materialize, Lenin was forced to look for new ways to build up Russia’s productive forces in order to lay the ground for an eventual socialist transformation. He concluded that there could be no successful advance to socialist relations of production without highly-developed productive forces to sustain socialist methods of distribution and went about formulating a pragmatic response. Addressing the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party in March of 1921, on the necessity of cooperation with foreign and domestic capitalist elements, Lenin stated, “We are now in a transitional stage, and our revolution is surrounded by capitalist countries. As long as we are in this phase, we are forced to seek highly complex forms of relationships.”

A component of these “highly complex forms of relationships,” of course, was the institution of market methods of distribution in first the agricultural, and later other, sectors of the economy. In further remarks to the Congress, Lenin assured delegates that the gravest problem in the immediate period was not the policy of concessions to capitalism as some, particularly those on the left, warned. Rather, it was the very low level of productive forces that threatened the survival of the October Revolution: “We must not be afraid of the growth of the petty bourgeoisie and small capital. What we must fear is protracted starvation, want and food shortage, which create the danger that the proletariat will give way to petty-bourgeois vacillation and despair.” Many of Lenin’s writings from the early 1920s demonstrate that he gradually came to the conclusion that in a predominantly peasant country with low levels of productive forces, education, and culture there could be no leap to socialist or communist lines of production or distribution. He began to see that the rapid nationalizations and high hopes for broad planning in the economy that had characterized the early years had gone “too far, too fast.” Instead, the transition would have to take place in stages. These kinds of measures were intended to build up the material-technical foundations for socialism that Marx and Engels had envisioned being already developed by capitalism in advanced industrial societies, where they had foreseen the first socialist revolutions taking place. The proletarian revolution, as we have seen, was expected to occur in the most technologically and economically advanced capitalist countries because of the development of a large industrial working class and the acute contradictions of advanced capitalist relations of production which would serve as the catalyst for raising class consciousness.

The victory of socialist revolutions in poor, underdeveloped, and usually agrarian countries of course presented a new challenge; once working class-based parties succeeded in capturing state power, they were confronted with the task of trying to develop socialism in economies that were in no way prepared to support it. Lenin and the Soviet Communists were the first to face the real-life situation of building a socialist system on an underdeveloped base.

Shortly after the victory of the October Revolution, Soviet Russia became embroiled in a civil war and came under attack by interventionist armies from fourteen nations, among them the United States, Britain, Canada, France and Japan. Under these conditions, with food and industrial shortages plaguing the country, a harsh system of surplus extraction from the peasants was introduced and wages were leveled – the policy of "war communism." Almost all industrial enterprises were seized and production was carried on under a strict command basis. Money and markets were, for all practical purpose, eliminated in every area of the economy. Some among the Bolsheviks believed that war communism was not just a time of intense struggle and difficulty, but that it actually represented the beginnings of true socialism and communism – the fulfillment of the revolution’s purpose. Others, like Trotsky, saw such measures as an unavoidable result of the particular situation the Bolshevik government found itself in and not the preferred method of building socialism. With domestic counterrevolutionary forces attempting to make a comeback at precisely the moment of an outside military attack, the Soviet government was not in a position to go about following any preplanned theoretical models. Writing in 1920, he said:

Once having taken power, it is impossible to accept one set of consequences at will and refuse to accept others. If the capitalist bourgeoisie consciously and malignantly transforms the disorganization of production into a political struggle, with the object of restoring power to itself, the proletariat is obliged to resort to socialization, independently of whether this is beneficial or otherwise at the given moment.

After the civil war was won by the Red Army and the foreign interventionists were pushed out of the country, the Soviet economy was in ruins. The productive capacity of the nation had dwindled; agriculture was below even pre-1914 levels. The working class which the party had purported to represent was decimated, leaving only the party itself and the old state bureaucracy to pick up the pieces. Peasant farming was now an even more dominant part of the economy, but it was in need of industrial products which the state was unable to provide. There was an urgent need to raise capital and jumpstart the development of the productive forces if the country was to survive. After these few years of immense difficulty, Lenin proposed what has recently been described as a “socialist market economy in embryonic form.”

In 1921, he introduced the NEP to replace the extreme measures of war communism, “with which,” in his words, the country had been “saddled by the imperative conditions of wartime.” The NEP allowed limited denationalization, foreign-domestic joint ventures, some foreign-owned enterprises, cooperatives running on market principles, and the use of economic administrators who had been trained in capitalist management methods. Many of these administrators came from the former bureaucracy and managerial strata who had been removed from their positions shortly after the revolution but were now the only ones with the knowledge and expertise to run the national economy. The remaining state-owned enterprises, which for the most part would now only occupy the commanding heights of the economy, had to be self-reliant and operate on profit/loss principles. The commanding heights referred to the lifeline sectors of the economy, such as energy, transport, finance/banking, and steel – those sectors that effectively control or support most other areas of the economy. Under the NEP, the state still formulated an overall plan for the economy, but it was achieved primarily through market, not administrative, means. Production of individual goods and services would be based on supply and demand, not on the decree of a central planning authority. Economic competition defined relations between public and private sectors. Of primary importance in this competition was which sector would win out. Addressing the Second Congress of Political Education Departments in the fall of 1921, Lenin stated the matter bluntly:

We must face this issue squarely – who will come out on top? Either the capitalists will succeed… Or the proletarian state power, with the support of the peasantry, will prove capable of keeping a proper reign on these gentlemen, the capitalists… The question must be put soberly.

Lenin admitted that such an arrangement was not the kind of socialism the Bolsheviks had earlier had in mind. “Retreat is a difficult matter, especially for revolutionaries who are accustomed to advance.” He realized, however, that market relations and a commodity economy were necessary until the capacity and infrastructure of a fully socialized economy could be constructed and secured. This was a task which he foresaw encompassing years, even decades of transition. Nove has pointed out that Lenin believed “the new policy was to be carried through 'seriously and for a long time.'" Lenin spent much time trying to explain what the NEP was and why it was an absolute necessity:

What is free exchange? It is unrestricted trade, and that means turning back towards capitalism… How then can the Communist Party recognize freedom to trade and accept it? Does not the proposition contain irreconcilable contradictions? The answer is that the practical solution of the problem naturally presents exceedingly great difficulties. How this is to be done, practice will show.

And,

Since the state cannot provide the peasant with goods from socialist factories in exchange for all his surplus, freedom to trade with this surplus necessarily means freedom for the development of capitalism. Within the limits indicated, however, this is not at all dangerous for socialism as long as transport and large-scale industry remain in the hands of the proletariat.

The development of such a form of capitalism controlled and regulated by the state, which Lenin time and again referred to as "state capitalism," if directed carefully by a socialist state, would be not only advantageous, but even necessary, especially in an underdeveloped country.

The NEP, though, was effectively ended by the latter half of the 1920s, for reasons both political and economic. In the years following Lenin’s death, Joseph Stalin had positioned himself as a moderate and a centrist among the party leadership, always promoting himself as a faithful disciple of Lenin. Early on, he allied himself with Bukharin in advocating pro-peasant policies and the extension of the NEP. As long as the NEP approach seemed to be working in its efforts to revive agriculture and industry, Stalin criticized proposals by Trotsky and others for increased investments in heavy industry as well as those by E. Preobrazhensky for a "primitive socialist accumulation" of squeezing the private peasants for the sake of industry. Portraying himself as the pragmatist, he progressively undercut support for Trotsky and his other opponents. Whenever the NEP started to experience imbalances and industrial development reached a plateau, however, Stalin rapidly swung to the left, adopted those same policies he criticized when Trotsky and the others had proposed them, and dumped his erstwhile ally Bukharin. Zinoviev, the head of the Communist International, had been a critic of the NEP as well as of Stalin and Bukharin’s plan to build "socialism in one country." When Stalin decided to drop the NEP but not "socialism in one country," Zinoviev had to go as well. Within a matter of a few short years, Stalin was able to successfully move from one policy position to another in accordance with the needs of the moment while simultaneously eliminating (first politically and later physically) all other party leaders from any positions of authority.

In his power struggles with these other party leaders, Stalin began to argue that the concessionary measures of Lenin’s NEP were intended only to be of the most temporary nature, not guiding developmental policy. He accused those who wanted to continue the NEP or extend it to more areas of the economy, like Bukharin, of wanting to restore capitalism and of spreading a “most harmful, anti-Leninist interpretation of NEP.” This was one of the earliest occasions in which those who followed Lenin’s ideas were branded "anti-Leninist," a hallmark charge of the Stalin era. There was now to be only one recognized successor to the cause of "Leninism." Trotsky and other critics were denounced as a "petty bourgeois opposition" and faced either exile or execution. Trotsky himself would eventually suffer both.

Instead of continuing to build up the productive forces under the auspices of the NEP, Stalin pushed the Party to opt for forced collectivization of agriculture and complete state or cooperative ownership of all other means of production in line with rapid industrialization under the first five-year plan – the same "leftist" line he had spent much of the twenties arguing against with Bukharin by his side. The Fifteenth Soviet Party Congress was convened in December 1927, and at Stalin’s urging decided that “with respect to the elements of private capitalist economy which have increased absolutely…a policy of even more squeezing out can and must be pursued.” This marked the beginning of a particular stream of ultra-leftist thought which branded the market as eternally incompatible with socialism and christened the comprehensive plan and total public ownership as the necessary and sufficient conditions for building a socialist system.

1,500 Indian farmers commit mass suicide: Why we are complicit in these deaths

(Reposted from www.alternet.org)

The headline has been hard to ignore. Across the world press, news media have announced that over 1,500 farmers in the Indian state of Chattisgarh committed suicide. The motive has been blamed on farmers being crippled by overwhelming debt in the face of crop failure.

The UK Independent reported:

The agricultural state of Chattisgarh was hit by falling water levels.

"The water level has gone down below 250 feet here. It used to be at 40 feet a few years ago," Shatrughan Sahu, a villager in one of the districts, told Down To Earth magazine.

"Most of the farmers here are indebted and only God can save the ones who do not have a bore well."

While many may have been shocked by these deaths, farmer suicides in India, and increasingly across the world, are not new.

In the last ten years, the problem has been reaching epidemic proportions. In one region of India alone 1,300 cotton farmers took their own lives in 2006, but the culprit cannot rest solely on a falling water table.

As the Independent article continues:

Bharatendu Prakash, from the Organic Farming Association of India, told the Press Association: "Farmers' suicides are increasing due to a vicious circle created by money lenders. They lure farmers to take money but when the crops fail, they are left with no option other than death."

But there's more to the story than that. Farmer suicides can be attributed to, "something far more modern and sinister: genetically modified crops," the UK's Daily Mail reports.

Shankara, like millions of other Indian farmers, had been promised previously unheard of harvests and income if he switched from farming with traditional seeds to planting GM seeds instead.

Beguiled by the promise of future riches, he borrowed money in order to buy the GM seeds. But when the harvests failed, he was left with spiraling debts -- and no income.

So Shankara became one of an estimated 125,000 farmers to take their own life as a result of the ruthless drive to use India as a testing ground for genetically modified crops.

And no company has been as notorious in the business as the U.S. agra-giant Monsanto. As Nancy Scola explained in a piece for AlterNet:

Here's the way it works in India. In the central region of Vidarbha, for example, Monsanto salesmen travel from village to village touting the tremendous, game-changing benefits of Bt cotton, Monsanto's genetically modified seed sold in India under the Bollgard® label. The salesmen tell farmers of the amazing yields other Vidarbha growers have enjoyed while using their products, plastering villages with posters detailing "True Stories of Farmers Who Have Sown Bt Cotton." Old-fashioned cotton seeds pale in comparison to Monsanto's patented wonder seeds, say the salesmen, as much as an average old steer is humbled by a fine Jersey cow.

Part of the trick to Bt cotton's remarkable promise, say the salesmen, is that Bollgard® was genetically engineered in the lab to contain bacillus thuringiensis, a bacterium that the company claims drastically reduces the need for pesticides. When pesticides are needed, Bt cotton plants are Roundup® Ready -- a Monsanto designation meaning that the plants can be drowned in the company's signature herbicide, none the worse for wear. (Roundup® mercilessly kills nonengineered plants.)

Sounds great, right? The catch is that Bollgard® and Roundup® cost real money. And so Vidarbha's farmers, somewhat desperate to grow the anemic profit margin that comes with raising cotton in that dry and dusty region, have rushed to both banks and local moneylenders to secure the cash needed to get on board with Monsanto. Of a $3,000 bank loan a Vidarbha farmer might take out, as much as half might go to purchasing a growing season's worth of Bt seeds.

And the same goes the next season, and the next season after that. In traditional agricultural, farmers can recycle seeds from one harvest to plant the next, or swap seeds with their neighbors at little or no cost. But when it comes to engineered seeds like Bt cotton, Monsanto owns the tiny speck of intellectual property inside each hull, and thus controls the patent. And a farmer wishing to reuse seeds from a Monsanto plant must pay to relicense them from the company each and every growing season.

The cycle of debt continues into a downward spiral. And to be sure, water problems are adding to the crisis. In this most recent instance dam construction nearby was a significant contributor. While changes in water availability may be the jumping point for some farmers in India, it has been the globalization model of agriculture hyped by companies like Monsanto and Cargill that have led farmers to the cliff in the first place.

As renown physicist and anti-globalization activist Vandana Shiva (who has also fought against big dam construction) said in an interview with Democracy Now! in 2006:

A few weeks ago, I was in Punjab. 2,800 widows of farmer suicides who have lost their land, are having to bring up children as landless workers on others' land. And yet, the system does not respond to it, because there's only one response: get Monsanto out of the seed sector--they are part of this genocide -- and ensure WTO rules are not bringing down the prices of agricultural produce in the United States, in Canada, in India, and allow trade to be honest. I don't think we need to talk about free trade and fair trade. We need to talk about honest trade. Today's trade system, especially in agriculture, is dishonest, and dishonesty has become a war against farmers. It's become a genocide.



The recent mass suicide in India should be a wake up call to the rest of the world. The industrial agriculture model is literally killing our farmers.

YCL Weekly Update

I. In The News: 'Pirates' Strike a U.S. Ship Owned by a Pentagon Contractor, But Is the Media Telling the Whole Story?

II. Mass Action: Tell Congress to put Education Before Profits

III. YCL College Call

IV. Montana YCLers hold House Parties for EFCA

I. In The News: 'Pirates' Strike a U.S. Ship Owned by a Pentagon Contractor, But Is the Media Telling the Whole Story?

By Jeremy Scahill

"Coverage of the pirates is similar to the false narrative about "tribalism" being the cause of all of Africa's problems. Of course, there are straight-up gangsters and criminals engaged in these hijackings. Perhaps the pirates who hijacked the Alabama on Wednesday fall into that category. We do not yet know. But that is hardly the whole "pirate" story."

To read the whole story visit Alternet's website.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

1. Do you think the pirates were justified in taking over the ship?

2. Do you think the pirates that took over the ship were interested in addressing the larger issues of unregulated fishing and the dumping of toxic waste?

3. What actions could Obama take to address the issue of piracy off the coast of Somalia?

II. Mass Action: Tell Congress to put Education Before Profits

Over a month ago President Obama addressed the nation and proposed some of the firmest commitments to education we've seen in a generations. His bold plan promised all of us that the government would permanently fund the Pell Grant programs so that anyone who wanted to go to college and needed help paying for it would be able to get the support they needed without taking out bad loans that would put them into decades of debt.

Today the private loan companies came out of the shadows to tell Congress they must choose between investing in America's future or funding the private loan companies.

Our country shouldn't be forced to choose between the Pell Grant and funding the private loan companies- WE NEED TO INVEST IN EDUCATION in order to rebuild America's economy and our future.

Sign the petition from the United States Student Association (USSA) and Studetnt Labor Action Project (SLAP) telling your Congressperson and Senators to invest to put our education before the profits of private loan companies.

III. YCL College Call

Our next YCL College Call will be next Thursday April 23rd. Get updates from the Unites States Student Association (USSA) on upcoming legislative and national actions impacting students, discuss what is happening on campuses across the country with other YCLers, and get new ideas to build a club on your campus.

If you are interested in attending the call, email Ursula at ursula@yclusa.org

IV. Montana YCLers hold House Parties for EFCA

The YCL in Butte, Montana held an EFCA letter-writing house party (complete with red-frosted communist sugar cookies with hammer and sickles, and course, Lenin-lime punch!) this week that brought youth and students together to urge their Senators to support EFCA. After writing personal letters at the party, they drafted an open letter and spent the day tabling at Montana Tech and gather over 40 signatures from students on campus.

At 4 o'clock they took their packets of letters to the Senators' local offices. The United Students Against Sweatshops club at the University of Montana in Missoula coordinated with them and took theirs in at the same time. The Senators weren't in but their staff at the offices were really stoked to see and hear from young people getting active for the Employee Free Choice Act.

"I'm really excited about how things turned out. It seemed like just about everyone we approached was really cool with what we were doing, and we made a few new friends that are down with the what our YCL Club is doing. I don't know if they'll turn out to be YCLers, but I know I can count on them to help us out and come to our future events. I'm still really stoked, I feel like we might have really made an impact and at the same time got our YCL club into the public and made some new connections," said club member Jesse Jack.

Wowza, New CEO Pay Numbers‏

Dear Peter,

Do Something About It Just as passing the Employee Free Choice Act is central to securing the economic future of America's working families, so is ensuring that our financial markets are regulated. Take action today and tell Rep Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), chairs of the House Finance Committee and the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, that we're counting on them to draft legislation that truly strengthens our financial regulations and begins curing the disease that has infected our economic system.

In 2008, CEOs and other executives responsible for our current financial crisis pocketed millions of dollars from bonuses and golden parachutes, while our government spent billions of our dollars bailing out their companies.

Vikram S. Pandit, CEO of Citigroup Inc., received more than $38 million in total compensation in 2008, the same year his company took $50 billion in U.S. taxpayer money.

To shed light on executive pay, the AFL-CIO released Executive PayWatch 2009 earlier today. In this report, we learn that CEO perks alone grew in 2008 to an average of $336,248—or nine times the median salary of a full-time worker.

This comprehensive report includes much more information, including:

• Detailed CEO compensation data for some of the country's largest companies.
• Tools that allow you to compare your pay to the CEOs.
• Close-up case studies focusing on 10 executive compensation practices that define a broken system that leaves the American taxpayer holding the bag.
• The anatomy of a double standard: Executives enjoy job and retirement security while fighting the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow workers to form unions and bargain for basic security.
• Action for you to take to put balance back into our economy.
• Boot the CEO, a satisfying online game.

Outrageous executive pay is a symptom of a disease that has infected our entire economic system. It is a disease of greed and corruption made worse by the Bush administration’s obsession with further deregulating Wall Street and ideological aversion to oversight and accountability in our financial system.

Check out Executive PayWatch 2009 today and pass it around to your family and friends. It’s time to shed light on outrageous executive compensation, particularly while America’s working families are bearing the brunt of the worst economic crisis in our country since the Great Depression.

In Solidarity,

Marc Laitin
AFL-CIO Online Mobilization Coordinator

P.S. Mad about overpaid CEOs? So are we. The most important thing to do right now to curb executive pay is to fix our broken financial system by regulating our financial markets. Tell your representatives to draft legislation that truly strengthens our financial regulations and begins curing the disease that has infected our economic system.

Michigan ACLU Update

Today's New York Times editorial features the ACLU of Michigan and the increasing practice of throwing poor people in jail because they're poor. The Times discusses our case on behalf of Edwina Nowlin, a resident of Escanaba, who was sentenced to 30 days in jail for being poor. Ms. Nowlin couldn't afford to reimburse the state for her son's stay in a juvenile detention facility; the fact that Ms. Nowlin had lost her job and was homeless didn't matter to the judge.

Unfortunately, Edwina Nowlin is just one of many Michigan residents who have found themselves sentenced to jail or kept in the system because they are too poor to get out.

For years, David Sutton's probation was extended because he could not afford his court supervision fees.

In 2003, Mr. Sutton, from Detroit, had fulfilled all the conditions of his one-year probation, including community service. But with a $262 monthly disability check as his only source of income, he was unable to pay the supervision fee. Consequently, a Wayne County Circuit Court judge extended Mr. Sutton's probation year after year. In February 2009, we successfully represented Mr. Sutton at a hearing where the state had once again moved to continue his probation.

You can help us fight the re-emergence of debtor's prisons with two actions:

• Spread the word about these cases by forwarding this e-mail or link to our press release on your Facebook or Twitter account. The ACLU suspects that many more low-income people in Michigan are being kept in jail because of their poverty but may not know they can call on us for help. Making sure your friends, family and colleagues know about these stories and asking them to spread the word is an important first step in protecting the rights of poor people.
  
  
• Make a donation of any amount to the ACLU of Michigan to keep us strong and able to respond to these cases wherever they take place across the state. If you're not a member, join us. Visit our website here to make a tax-deductible contribution or become a member.

For the last fifty years, the ACLU of Michigan has worked to protect the fundamental rights of all Michigan residents, rich or poor. Help us continue to fight for freedom today.

Thank you for all you do,

Kary Moss
Executive Director

Thousands rally for public takeover of big banks

From: PWW

Author: Tim Wheeler
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/13/09 17:25

Thousands of protests staged 60 rallies and vigils across the nation, April 11, to demand nationalization of the banks, many still insolvent despite hundreds of billions in taxpayer bailouts.

The actions were organized by the online group A New Way Forward (ANWF) that signed up 11,000 supporters in just three-and-a-half weeks to demand a public takeover of the crisis-wracked financial system.

It included 100 people standing in the pouring rain in New York City’s Union Square, 300 in Portland, Oregon, and 400 in Los Angeles. A group who had met online staged a vigil at a street corner in Anchorage, Alaska. In Raleigh, N.C. 200 people put on a “nest egg hunt” in observance of Easter and in solidarity with millions of retirees whose nest eggs have been stolen.

The protests demanded, “temporary bank nationalization and structural reform including a new decentralized banking system where no bank can ever again become too big to fail,” said an email sent out by ANWF.

Tiffany Cheng, and a friend, Donny Shaw, both technologists and bloggers in Massachusetts initiated AWNF out of frustration that the Obama administration and Congress continue to pour hundreds of billions into the coffers of bankers who created the problem with no signs that it has restored the flow of credit or stabilized the economy.

“People of all races and backgrounds joined in the April 11 protests who had thought about the bailouts and were angry,” Cheng (email address info@joetrippi.com) told the World in a phone interview. “These are people who want to learn more about solutions. We’re not seeing policies coming out of the White House that are actually going to help us get out of this crisis. The main thing we want to point out is that the bankers are becoming the middle-men between us and this crisis. We need to own-up to this crisis and deal with it head-on. Stop feeding the bankers, the middle-men.”

Cheng said Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, deeply influenced ANWF with his open advocacy of nationalizing the banks. Joseph Stiglitz, former Senior Vice President of the World Bank has also advocated public takeover of the banks as the only solution.

Polls show that 94 percent of the people disapprove of the current bail-out plans while another poll shows that 50 percent favor temporary nationalization of the banks. “So we have the job ahead of us of talking to each other about sound solutions we can all believe in,” Cheng said. “We are calling on everyone to talk with five people every week about the economy and about nationalizing the banks.”

ANWF is planning four or five large panel discussions across the country on the topic “What is Nationalization?”

There is some evidence that the Obama administration, itself, is divided on the way forward to solve the crisis with some, especially Obama’s political advisers at odds with the President’s financial advisers on the issue of a public takeover of the banks.

“It does seem like there is a possibility that (nationalization) might be the next step,” she continued. “As long as the bankers are so influential, the chances of pursuing a policy that is actually beneficial to the people is low. We have to let President Obama know, ‘We are here to support you in these policies. We’ve got your back.’ We need to pursue economic and financial policies that will enable all people to prosper, not just the bankers.” That, she said, is the goal of bank nationalization.

greenerpastures21212@yahoo.com

National unions form coordinating committee; AFL-CIO president announces retirement plans

From: PWW

Author: Mark Gruenberg
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/13/09 09:09

WASHINGTON (PAI) AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney formally told top leaders of the federation that he will retire at the AFL-CIO Convention in September. At the same time, Sweeney, Change To Win leaders and National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel announced creation of the National Labor Coordinating Committee, a group of presidents of the nation’s 12 largest unions.

In arrangements worked out by American Rights At Work President David Bonior, the committee is the first concrete step towards reunifying the labor movement all under one roof. And that includes the 3.2-million-member NEA, which is both unaligned with either labor federation and the nation’s largest union.

Sweeney’s retirement was expected. The former Service Employees president, who will turn 75 in May 5, has led the now-56-union group since 1995, when his slate ousted incumbent Tom Donohue, who took over from Lane Kirkland months before.

Sweeney’s departure also comes at a key time for labor: Workers played a top role in electing pro-worker Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama to the White House and increasing pro-worker ranks in the Democratic-run Congress.

Increased political activism and mobilization, to enhance the chances of pro-worker legislation in Congress and nationwide, was and is a top Sweeney cause. The results were that unionists and their families were more than one-fifth of the electorate in 2008, almost double the share (12.4%) of union members in the workforce.

But even as Sweeney leaves, problems remain:

* Labor is still split. One of the leading events of Sweeney’s 14 years at the federation’s helm was the 2005 withdrawal of seven unions -- the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Teamsters, the Laborers, SEIU, UNITE HERE, the Carpenters and the United Farm Workers -- to form Change To Win. CTW wanted more emphasis on organizing and less on politics, but it has joined the AFL-CIO’s political efforts. The new coordinating committee is the first step to heal the split.

But Change To Win has its own problems: UNITE HERE has divided and a majority of its board voted to talk with Sweeney on re-affiliation with the AFL-CIO. UNITE HERE also charged SEIU was trying to take it over. SEIU has an internal battle with its biggest West Coast local. The Laborers, while not back in the AFL-CIO yet, are half-in, half-out, as members of its Building and Construction Trades Department.

* The Employee Free Choice Act, labor’s #1 legislative priority, which Obama supports and pledged to sign, faces a planned GOP Senate filibuster. It has yet to get the 60 committed senators it needs to break a fatal talkathon. A key senator, past co-sponsor Arlen Specter, R-Pa., defected under pressure from business and his party’s Radical Right, which wants to beat him in a primary next year. Several Democrats, notably Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., have drifted away.

The bill would help level the playing field between workers and bosses in organizing and bargaining, by writing into law that workers -- not employers -- get to choose how they want their union recognized: Through an NLRB-run election or through the agency’s verification that the union collected authorization cards from a majority of employees at a worksite.

The bill would also increase penalties for labor law-breakers and mandate binding arbitration for a first contract if the two sides can’t agree within 120 days of starting bargaining. The Executive Committee spent part of its Meany Center session discussing the proposal’s prospects and labor’s nationwide campaign for it.

* Even without the CTW unions, the number of members in AFL-CIO-affiliated unions declined by a net of 43,326 from 2007 to 2008, and by 139,474 from 2003 to 2008, the federation’s own figures show.

That decline in turn has hurt the AFL-CIO’s finances, which depend on remittances -- calculated on a per-member basis -- from its 56 member unions, plus payments from its affinity credit card. The federation asked for voluntary contributions last year to pay for the big political push, but the payments fell short of goals.

* Successorship questions. Until Sweeney ousted Donohue at the 1995 convention in New York City, AFL-CIO presidents were often succeeded by their #2 officers, the secretary-treasurers. Current Secretary-Treasurer Richard L. Trumka, a former Mine Workers president, is a leading candidate to succeed Sweeney. But at least one CTW union that might return to the AFL-CIO would not do so if Trumka is in the top job. And other names have been floated for Sweeney’s post.

* Structure. Any new, unified labor federation must figure out its structure -- the consensus-based but sometimes-slow AFL-CIO, the leaner top-down CTW, or a mix of both. And it must figure out what to emphasize and what to leave to member unions.