Facts For Working People: November 2009

Monday, November 30, 2009

Protest against Afghan troop escalation!

For free education for all, for a job for all.

Capitalism cannot live with full employment. One of the main tasks of the Federal Reserve is to manipulate interest rates to keep unemployment at a high enough level. What do the capitalists mean by a high enough level? If there was full employment this would increase the power of the working class to demand higher wages and benefits. So every few weeks the Federal reserve has to go to Congress to reassure these representatives of the profit addicted corporations that they are keeping enough workers unemployed so they do not feel they have the power to fight. Unemployment is not an accident. It is a deliberate and inevitable product of capitalism.

Of course the actual level of unemployment is also affected by the ups and downs, the crises, in the capitalist system itself. The recent financial collapse has resulted in over 10.00% unemployed in the US according to official figures. The real figure is much greater. There are over six times as many Americans looking for work as there are jobs. And the duration of unemployment is the highest since the 1930's.

The student movement in California and around the world is fighting for access to decent education for all. This is not just a movement for decent education for all. It is also a movement for a decent job for all. Without a decent education it is much harder to get a job. If the student movement recognizes this it has a real opportunity to build a wider movement, to gain new allies. To do so means fighting for a program that deals with the problems of all working people.

The student movement should fight for:

Free education for all.

A program of public investment to build and develop the infrastructure and provide jobs.

A shorter work week with no loss in pay to provide more jobs and create more time for study and leisure.

We should build our movement around this program and around mass direct action based in the colleges and universities, in the high schools, in the workplaces and we will have a movement that will be unstoppable.

This is the way to build student and worker unity and successfully take on the struggle for jobs for all. In the course of this struggle we will come up against the reality that to have jobs for all we have to get rid of capitalism. We have to move towards a democratic socialist system.

Sean.

Burma, Immigrants and Tent Cities

When my friend Htin added, "We will camp out at city hall if we need to, we have suffered far worse than that!" I was a little shocked. We'd hung out before and briefly chatted about life as immigrants in the US. As an organizer with the Campaign for Renters Rights, a direct action housing group I Htin got my ear.

Htin is from Burma/Myanmar. He has been here for over a decade. Like myself, he is not fully employed. He volunteers as a translator for local Karen people, a small ethnic group from Burma. The Karens are a nationally oppressed minority in Burma of about 3 million people. There are 200 ethnic Karens who in recent years have arrived in the San Francisco in Bay area and Htin thinks there is not a single person among them that speaks English. When they are at the hospital or social services it requires three persons to translate. First the Karen immigrant say what they need, then another person translates to Burmese, then Htin translates from Burmese to English.

Htin explains the high level of expectations that people had when they came to the US. They thought that they would get help to assimilate, possibly land and housing. They get some help, but after 8 months all public assistance is withdrawn and they are on their own. Everyone of these immigrants spent several years in harsh Thai refugee camps, following years of violence in their homeland, where a brutal dictatorship has been fighting the Karen independence movement for decades.

"The hardest thing was the American dream. They thought all their suffering would be over when they got here. That they could work hard and do well. Now they are at the bottom of a huge mountain of unemployment and many cannot pay their rent anymore.

"But if they are going to get thrown out of their homes, I advised them: we must go down to the city hall, with tents and let the people know how we are being treated. We are used to living in tents. We will do what we need to do."

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Trinity College Dublin. Library occupied. Report from inside.

from inside the library...

TCD library has just been occupied by the students union

Over 50 students are currently occupying the library

These are the demands to the Provost:

1: Reverse the €650,000 book-buying cut
2: Increase library opening hours to the national average instead of cutting them futher
3: Come to the library today, sit down with the student representatives and hear the students concerns.

Add Your Comments >>

Food stamps and consciousness and the difference between Ireland and the US.

I was born in Ireland, a country with a history of centuries of oppression and exploitation. British colonialism, British and US, other international capitalist powers and local capitalism, have been the source of this. The state apparatus in Ireland , the armed bodies of men and women, and the government and political bureaucracies have represented these forces. This has had a big effect on consciousness. For working class people these state and political institutions tend to be seen as the enemy. For working class people therefore it tends to be natural to try and get what we can from the state and the powers that be in whatever way we can. If we are not getting as much as we can from the state and the employers then we are idiots. The art of fiddling the state and the corporations is an accepted, in fact an expected, art form in Ireland.

When I came over here I saw things tended to be different. The system here has had much greater success in convincing the majority of the working class that they should not accept help from the state. The system has even managed to convince the majority that it was a disgrace to accept welfare. It was okay for the corporations to be bailed out and get welfare, it was okay for the banks and financial institutions to be bailed out and get welfare, but for ordinary people, they had to stand on their own feet. The majority of ordinary people even tended to think it was un-American to accept welfare or help from the state, never mind engage in the good old fashioned fiddle.

Well things are changing. Those applying for and receiving food stamps has gone up by one third in the past two years to 36 million. 1 in 8 Americans and 1 in 4 American children are now on food stamps. Warren county in Ohio was so against government help that in its insanity it refused its share of the government stimulus but now food stamp use in the county has doubled. Things become clearer when you are hungry.

One couple explained that they had started the year expecting to earn $70,000 but both were laid off and they ended up in their house one night with one can of beans. They explained they became angry at each other. "You get irritable when you are hungry." Yes this sounds right. The man explained: "I always thought people on public assistance were lazy but it helps me know I can feed my kids." This man's consciousness like that of tens of millions of others is being changed by the crisis of capitalism of the past year. Belief in the system is weakening and a movement to struggle is being prepared.

Events change consciousness. When the overwhelming majority of Americans could have well paid jobs the system was able to convince them that all who could not get by were lazy and shirkers, that they did not deserve help. They were able to divide the working class from the poor and in this way divide and rule. They were able to attach a stigma to receiving food stamps and welfare. This helped the right wing political forces keep their base. But things are changing. As more and more people have to get food stamps to survive more and more people are seeing that it is the system that is to blame not poor people. This is preparing the basis for a new movement of struggle from below.

Sean.

Socialist Poet

We published a poem on the blog here that was written by Irish Poet, Kevin Higgins. After he read some of the accounts of the student struggles in California on this blog, he dedicated it to them and their efforts. Below is a review of some of his poetry by another Irish writer and poet, Bridget O'Toole. You can visit Higgins' poetry and hear him reading by clicking on the Salmon Poetry link in the left hand column under links.

The Poetry of Kevin Higgins

The Boy With No Face (2005) and Time Gentlemen, Please (2008)

In the 1980s Kevin Higgins was living in England where he was active in the opposition to the poll -tax, an anti-working-class measure which brought thousands onto the streets. Now he organises poetry events in Galway. There is no contradiction here – Higgins is an unusually political poet.. He has read his poetry at a number of different venues; it also works well on the page.

His political vision takes in a wide range of subjects. He writes about the people whose situation cries out for fundamental change, those living without hope in grim rented rooms, the 'almost invisible ' man on the street corner, the inescapable quarrelling of neighbours behind thin walls. Working life, for those who can get work, is likely to be soul-destroying.

You there, with your grim cheese slices,
your tar-like tea, not liking the look,
smell, texture or sound of anything; as outside
a new calendar's first Monday comes,
like a dentist's drill, screaming to a start.
( From A New Calendar)

As well as describing ordinary lives in a way that arouses a political response, he also writes of people specifically involved in politics, or, more often, those who have a political past. He laughs at his own youthful part in the Militant, his naive version of transitional demands, how he postured, lording it over his family, particularly his father.

It's nineteen eighty two and I know everything.
Hippies are people who always end up asking
Charles Manson to sing them another song.
I'd rather be off putting some fascist through
a glass door arseways, but being fifteen,
I have to mow the lawn first. Last year,

Liverpool meant football; now
it's the Petrograd of the British Revolution.
Instead of masturbation, I find socialism.
While others dream of businessmen bleeding
in basements; I promise to abolish double-chemistry class
the minute I become Commissar. In all of this
there is usually a leather jacket involved. I tell
cousin Walter and his lovely new wife, Elizabeth,
to put their aspirations in their underpants
and smoke them; watch my dad's life become a play;
Sit Down In Anger.
(My Militant Tendency)

He is harsher with those who are stuck in ugliness and insensivity and refuse to adapt

You've hawked that suitcase
full of broken old slogans all the way
from Grosvenor Square to here.
Your imagination now a cluttered
basement. By the time you sit down
no-one will be in any doubt,
if rigor mortis could talk
this is how it would sound.
(From From Grosvenor Square to Here)

and with the eager former socialists who preach incessantly and then sell out

I got his dog-eared copy
Of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
The day he went into human resource management;
his Communist Manifesto the day he boarded the plane
for a piece of the action on the new Moscow stock exchange.
(From Ending Up)

One man who never sold out was the lifelong Trotskyist, Ted Grant. Higgins's poem, 'Death of a Revolutionary: Ted Grant 1913 – 2000' brings him back to life with his plastic bag packed with propaganda, his legendary tea mug and Kevin himself following his words: 'My every thought, part/ of your master plan.' The final lines have a bleak honesty:
'I do not say as you did
“We have kept the faith”

I'm reminded of WB Yeats's sad acknowledgement in 'Easter 1916' that the heroes of the Rising possessed a commitment that he could not share.
For all that, Higgins is a political thinker and can write sharply about a political idea. He takes a phrase used by the British Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1980s, 'the hidden hand of the free market' and brings it imaginatively to life, making the abstract real:

I set the interest rate, decide the price,
I believe in Milton Friedman
And he believes in me. I sometimes
work in mysterious ways; can
make a million bucks vanish
just like that. I made Joseph Kennedy rich,
tossed Robert Maxwell off his yacht.
I am the be all, the end all; the hidden hand
which makes you dance.
(From The Hidden Hand)

Reading these poems it's easy to believe Higgins when he says he's interested in 'the problematic intersection between literature and politics' and also in 'anyone with a black sense of humour.' Many of the poems in The Boy With No Face turn on a bleak joke. Sometimes it seems as though the courage needed for political confrontation has taken the form of a daring wit, a bringing together of images and ideas from which a conventional thinker would draw back.

Both these volumes of poetry, published only three years apart show a powerful energy. In Time Gentlemen, Pleasethe humour is more restrained but the satire still bites when it needs to. However a depth comes with a compassion that softens some of the observations. In 'Retirement' for instance, the description which might have been belittling, is sympathetic as an old man is being read to in a home and you remember when life was something dreamt up at a bus-stop on the outskirts of Athlone by a young fool who thought the rain would stop soon.
(from Retirement)

Getting close to these poems, I have become aware of the author's craft - for instance, where he puts the emphasis in a line, where he ends it in relation to others, how what appears to be spontaneous energy is, in fact, the result of careful technique. It's the energy that draws us in. The world and its inhabitants may be hopeless – Eleanor Rigby wanders into Desolation Row – but the movement of the verse is forward.Personal relationships are mostly viewed with cynicism in The Boy With No Face. But in Time Gentlemen, Pleasethere are some deft and tender love poems. The earlier 'Knives' recognises his own verbal combativeness

I come from a long line of men
who saw words not as decorations
but weapons, knives with which to cut
others down to size.
(from Knives)

but it is modified with some charm in 'She Considers His Proposal:'
That when things go wrong he turns to her
and says:”just because I'm kicking
imaginary people in the testicles
doesn't mean we can't hold hands.”

He begins to admit the possibility of happiness and in 'Living Proof' for Susan he moves from a matter-of-fact account of himself waiting at the end of an aisle on his wedding day to the lyrical last lines:

This best June day.
The sun extravagant, the music starting to play

It's obvious that the quick-witted satire and the political acumen are part of a very thoughtful intelligence. Some readers may wish his work to develop into something more weighty and serious. But Kevin Higgins's directness, humour and total lack of reverence have made him successful in performing to a wide audience and reaching people who would normally not read or listen to poetry.

Bridget O'Toole

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Charity

At Thanksgiving my partner and I usually hope from place to place. We went to my mothers and hung with my immediate family and then we made our way to a family of tenants Campaign for Renters Rights organized with of which we are both members.

Tenants we have organized with invited us over to eat, talk and catch up on the goingson at the apartment. Since the campaign has concluded the apartment has been repainted, a security door installed at the front entrance, the painting of the doors, railings and fumigations for the entire complex. this was organized by mostly Latina women and on a shoe string budget of donations. In the conclusion of it CRR has been able to play a role in showing working class people our own strength and how our militantcy can chill the bones of millionaire slumlords. And of course, we have made friends.

This particular couple Luis and Marisol are fighters. In one instance a landlords henchwoman pushed Marisol's son Junior when she wanted to illegally enter the house. Marisol pushed back. Marisol was put in handcuffs in front of her son. The police later had to retracted their threat of arrest when another tenant present showed the police a video of the landlord's henchwoman initiating the conflict. The henchwoman was not charged.

Thanksgiving day Marisol was feeling good and offered me and my partner some fruit punch-with or without tequila. We ate a little all of us pretty full already. Marisol tells us about her son's school. It seems the same henchwoman called Child Protective Services to report this family as retaliation for organizing. Marisol and Luis are one of the most patient and tolerant parents I have met. Whenever we have had meetings they have encouraged Junior to speak his mind and ask questions. Well it paid off! According to Marisol and Junior (who is nine) when the CPS worker came to interview and Junior about abuse he began to interview her demanding who told her these lies about his parents and insisted on owning the culprits! The CPS investigation concluded with no findings and Luis and Marisol are considering their fight back options on harasment on the part of the landlords.

Marisol then began to talk about the school. She said before the Thanksgiving holiday the school asked for donations to the "less fortunate" families. But this was not out of goodwill but mandatory charity enforced by the school! Marisol would have none of it! She said, " we are poor, why should we buy these families pizza when we are hungry too?! The school should not ask us for food but ask the rich who have plenty of food and money".

The holidays are ways to bleed working people a little more. We not only spend a great deal of money for presents, decorations, airplane tickets and of course the silent attack of guilt. Every holiday there is an implication: people are poor because working people do not give enough. With trillions of dollars are spent on the bailout and war we have already given enough to the rich. We can take it back. No it is capitalism-making people homeless and jobless and perpetually struggling. Giving to our sisters and brothers creates solidarity and maybe this year we can work on donating our fight back advise as well. If we are donating this holiday lets also give the gift that keeps on giving. Knowledge, courage, support, organization.

Some of them are frightened.

There are different wings in the ruling class. Some like the Cheyney's and co. believe they can get through this difficult period by continuing to rule through their monopoly of politics, their state repression and their massive propaganda machine which divides the working class. But another, so far less influential wing, believes that concessions should be made in case the anger in the working class explodes and threatens the whole system. This latter was the approach of FDR in the 1930's. And it can be seen regularly in the pages of the New York Times today. There is an example of it on Saturday 28th, 2009 where journalist Bob Herbert attempts to warn the more right wing section of the ruling class that they can go too far in attacking working people and filling their own pockets.

Amongst other things Herbert makes these points writes: "The American economy is broken, ruined by the greed and irresponsibility of fabulously wealthy corporate chieftains and their shabby acolytes and enablers in government. While Wall street is handing out billions in bonuses, American families are struggling with joblessness, home foreclosures and rampant debt. The economic woes are exacting a fierce toll on family life, and children are taking a big hit - emotionally, psychologically and otherwise."

He goes on: "there has been a big jump in the number of runaway children, many of them living in dangerous conditions on the street.....more than one third of all black children in America are poor. That more attention is not being paid to this growing disaster is criminal."

He then goes on to write about "the system" today, he means the situation after the Obama regime's hand out to the banks and Wall Street. "We remain stuck in an economic model that not only permits but encourages the continued existence of financial institutions that are too big to fail, which means that when one or more of them fail - as will surely happen at some point - we'll again be rushing to 'save the system' by bailing them out at taxpayers expense."

"The system remains grotesquely unfair, with the deck stacked against working people, even as we're desperate to have them sustain the economy with non stop consumer purchases. Keep in mind that at the start of the recession the collective wealth of the richest 1% of Americans was greater than that of the bottom 90% combined. The economic and political clout of that bottom 90% has only weakened since then.

We still have a hideously dysfunctional public education system, one that has mastered the art of manufacturing drop-outs and functional illiterates. We have not even begun to turn that around.

We keep on fighting tragic, futile, stupid wars, squandering lives and resources and creative energies that could be put to use right here at home, where the need for nation building is beyond critical."

Herbert is trying to convince his own class that they are in danger of going too far and provoking the working class into rising up, that they must take some measures to steady and improve their own system and to alleviate the pressure on the working class. The main importance of this article is that Herbert sees the anger that is developing below the surface in society and is in danger of exploding. The Cal students struggle is part of this anger and some of the first storm lighting of the great hurricane to come.

Where Herbert is wrong is that he poses the issue as if it was just a question of some mistakes made by the ruling class or sections of the ruling class. This is not the case. The ills that Herbert points to and which we see around us are the inevitable crisis of the profit addicted capitalist system. You cannot have capitalism without great economic bubbles and bursts, you cannot have capitalism without mass poverty and suffering even in the richest country in the world never mind the former colonial world, you cannot have capitalism without the capitalist politicians and state being in the pockets of the capitalists, you cannot have capitalism without wars and occupations and mass slaughter. Herbert is trying to get capitalism to make adjustments in the way it rules and make concessions in order that it will be more secure. However capitalism is inevitably a system of crisis and conflict. This will not change, it cannot be changed.

There is a jobs summit coming up. Obama is calling it. A more accurate title would be a cover his ass summit. There will be a number of labor and other organizations present. These will include the Economic Policy Unit, the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the N.A.A.C.P., the National Council of La Raza and the Center for Community Change. They are urging the Obama regime to provide additional aid to economically distressed state and local governments, to invest in much more widespread infrastructure improvements, and to engage in some direct government creation of jobs.

We would not disagree with any of these. But even the pro-capitalist Bob Herbert himself says that these would "amount to just a first step."

Herbert talks about the big financial institutions and as we point out has this to say: "when one or more of them fail as will surely happen at some point - we'll be rushing to 'save the system' by bailing them out at taxpayers' expense." Herbert, because he supports capitalism, accepts that this is inevitable. We do not. We are against any bailout of the major financial institutions and Wall Street. We stand for Wall Street and all the major financial institutions in the country to be taken into public ownership and run by representatives of the workers in those institutions, representatives of the consumers who use the services of these institutions, and by elected representatives of working class people as a whole. There would have to be a cut off point in terms of the wealth of individuals who could be representatives and how much anybody could spend on trying to get elected which would prevent the rich and from using their wealth to bribe and campaign to get themselves elected.

So what we are saying is no bail out at taxpayers expense. But public ownership of all these institutions. Do not bail them out, take them over. Compensation would be only on the basis of proven need. The elected representatives would elect a separate body to deal with claims of compensation. Folks who had all their savings and lived on these and could not work would be compensated, those who could work and swindlers and speculators would be sent out to get a job like working people are sent out every day. It would only be good for them.

Such action would have one other extremely important result. It would take the mountains of wealth which are at present in the hands of Wall Street and the speculators and put them in a central fund which would be controlled and used by the elected representatives as explained above to invest in education, health care, infrastructure and all other needs of the working class. No bail outs of Wall Street or the major financial institutions take them over. Use our wealth to invest in the needs of the working people. Take this step and immediately we would have more than sufficient funds to invest in education and avoid fee increases, cuts, and at the same time increase investment.

What we are talking about here is a step towards a democratic socialist society. This is the alternative that has to be put forward. As long as the financial institutions are left in the private hands of the speculators and swindlers then they will always blackmail society claiming that if they are not bailed out they will pull the whole system down. This is what they did in the last crisis, this is what they will try and do again. The only way to stop them is to take the wealth off them. Then they cannot blackmail society.

On a final point about the so-called jobs summit. The leadership of the union movement must not come out of this with a press statement about how they "urged" Obama to help etc. They have to come out of this with a plan to hold mass workplace meetings, state and city wide one day general strikes and days of action, all building towards a national one day general strike and day of action to halt the bosses offensive and to begin a new period in US history when the working class will begin to shape events, begin to lead the great movement for change, begin to set down a blueprint for a new society, a democratic socialist society in the US and worldwide.

Part of this is the need to break with the bosses party the Democrats. Launching the campaign for a program that would solve working peoples needs and a one day general strike and day of action to launch this would also lay the basis for the launching of a new mass Working Peoples Party which would be an alternative to the Democrats.

#No bail outs for Wall St. and the Banks. Take them into public ownership, nationalize them, under democratic control. .

#For a $15.00 minimum wage or $5.00 an hour increase whichever is the greater.

#No layoffs, no cuts in wages or benefits. Build Hands of our jobs,wages and benefits Committees in the workplaces.

#Not a single family or person to be evicted. For a house building program to build affordable high quality housing for all. Build Hands off our Homes Committees in the neighborhoods.

#For free education to the highest level and free health care for all at the point of use.

#End all foreign wars and occupations, bring home all troops.

# Use the wealth spent on the military and use the country's resources to build a society which provides for the needs of all in a sustainable fashion.

#Build a democratic socialist society.

Sean.

Friday, November 27, 2009

California student strike, protest at regents meeting and building occupations on Illinois World Labor Hour

Tune in tomorrow, Saturday to listen. Students activists, from the California struggles are scheduled at 9.30 but tune in for the hour.

ILLINOIS WORLD LABOR HOUR

SATURDAY NOV. 28TH.
11AM - 12NOON ( U.S. CENTRAL TIME ).

90.1 FM and webcast world-wide live at
www.weft.org

CALIFORNIA STUDENT STRIKE AND BUILDING OCCUPATIONS.

Students from California will be calling into the show to report about last weeks student strike that involved ; locked arm pickets, building occupations, and subsequent police repression.

Tune in to hear their dramatic story and their refusal to back down from corporate greed and the corporate control of OUR public Universities.

WEFT, listener supported community radio for east-central Illinois and the world.

British students hear about Troy Davis

The report below is from Roger Silverman, a teacher at Lister Community School in London UK. (ed)

Left: Troy Davis
Here is a press release reporting yesterday's Troy Davis Campaign meeting held at my school last night...

Not so long ago, young black Afro-Americans were routinely strung up on the nearest tree; any black man would do. The Troy Davis case is just another of countless judicial racist lynchings.

Last night, at Lister Community School – a deprived multi-ethnic comprehensive in London's East End – 100 students aged 13-15, Afro-Caribbean, Asian and European, sat with rapt attention for an hour and a half as Troy’s sister Martina Correia, an electrifying speaker; Richard Hughes of the band Keane; and speakers from Amnesty International spelt out why Troy must not die. In particular, they were spellbound as their own contemporary De’Jaun Correia, Troy’s fifteen-year-old nephew, demonstrated brilliantly – with the help of volunteers from the audience – the ludicrous nature of the prosecution case.

The Troy Davis meeting belongs to a proud and unparalleled tradition. Previous CARBOLIC events have included meetings with the newly-released former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg; campaigners for justice for Zahid Mubarek, the Asian teenager murdered in his prison cell; and a protest rally against the invasion of Gaza, where both Muslim and Jewish speakers spoke in solidarity. Up to 200 students have participated in these meetings.

Even a full hour after the close of the meeting, it was nevertheless impossible to drag our students, so often sullen and demotivated in the classroom, out of the hall, as they exchanged stories and jokes with De’Jaun and the other speakers, queued up for stickers, and eagerly collected start-up packs for the new youth branch of Amnesty International they decided on the spot to set up.

Who says young people today have a short attention span? Who says they are non-political? Give them something worth listening to, and something worth fighting for, and they'll soon surprise us all.

Troy Davis was framed on a charge of murdering a police officer in Savannah, Georgia in 1989. Nearly all the original prosecution witnesses have retracted their evidence, saying they were pressurised by the police, and several witnesses have given compelling evidence against one of the two remaining witnesses. He has several times come within hours of execution.

You can read more about this at the following sites...
www.troyanthonydavis.org
www.aiusa.org/troy
www.justicefortroy.org
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&template=x.ascx&action=12970&msource=semgooglg&cid=psgi2970
Roger Silverman

Superdrug strikers march back to work

This is a stirring report from the Superdrug strike in Barnsley where 25 years ago miners waged a civil war against 18,000 cops sent there to crush them by Thatcher.It was sent in by Terry Pierce from the UK who is involved with the National Shop Stewards Network. (ed)

At 5.30am on Tuesday 24 November Superdrug strikers assembled by the Barnsley Oak pub in South Elmsall to march back to work at the Superdrug depot. The day before they had voted by 185 votes to 59 to accept the deal thrashed out after eight hours of talks at ACAS the previous Friday.

Twenty days before the 261 union members, after an 86% vote in favour of strike action, walked out on indefinite strike at exactly the same time, 5.30am, following months of futile negotiation with management.

Management wanted to drive through changes in shift pay and overtime payments which would have left some workers out of pocket by more than £2000. They wanted the power to change and schedule shifts with only seven days’ notice and the workforce to opt out of the 48-hour European Working Time Directive. They also wanted to cut sick pay and change pension entitlements.

Management by diktat.

Superdrug, the UK’s second largest health and beauty retailer with 1,000 stores and 16,000 staff is part of a worldwide conglomerate, Hutchison Whampoa of Hong Kong, which has an annual turnover in excess of £10 billion. The changes they sought to impose may have seemed small beer to top management, but for the workers in South Elmsall, a former pit village, it was the difference between a living wage and living on benefits.

What happened next was inspirational. Teams of strikers fanned out all over the country giving out 110,000 leaflets outside 150 Superdrug shops informing shoppers of the management assault on their wages and working conditions.

Outside the Superdrug depot the strikers dug in for a long strike, mounting a lively twenty-four hour, seven day a week picket. A local butcher, Voddens, supplied meat for the picket barbecue, and workers from the other depots on the industrial estate supplied wood for the picket line fires.

Support for the strikers poured in from other areas of the trade union movement. My own National Union of Journalists branch, Leeds, sent a cheque for £100 and a bucket collection at out national conference in Southport raised £545.60 and €0.90 cents (our membership covers all of Ireland).

The workforce included 30 Polish workers who also were out on strike, and 20 former miners from the 1984-85 strike. The senior steward, Stephen Benn, was at Frickley Colliery. He commented, ‘We’ve done well. We got them to the table in three weeks. I thought it would take longer.’ Another former miner said to me on the picket line, ‘I didn’t think we would be out again twenty-five years later.’ But he also said they had put into practice lessons learned during the strike - regular mass meetings, and the active involvement of strikers so that people did not sit at home moping.

The return to work was also a poignant reminder of the different end to the1984-85 miners’ strike when the Frickley miners marched back behind their banner. But even after a year on strike, when the Kent miners in a desperate last action mounted a picket outside the colliery, the miners refused to cross it and turned back. This time as the strikers marched through the gate into the depot celebratory rockets were fired off.

Granville Williams

Cal Students. Divide and Rule. Don't let them do it.

This country and the education system is controlled by a tiny minority, the capitalist class. The vast majority are not in this class and are in fact exploited and kept down by this class. But in spite of this the tiny minority continue in charge. How do they do it? It is not hard to figure out. They do it by the strategy of divide and rule. The great majority are divided by the tiny minority and so the potential strength and ability to run the country of the majority is prevented from expressing itself.

The tiny minority of the capitalist class own and control a vast media propaganda machine and the education system. Through these they push their propaganda of divide and rule. Racism, sexism, the better off against the less well off, the skilled workers against the unskilled, the students against the workers, the documented against the undocumented, they look for every example of division they can get and highlight this. Of course they have to do this carefully after the great victories of the black revolt and the women's movement in the past. But they still do it. Thinks about the big campaign against undocumented workers. This is divide and rule.

When was the last time you saw CNN or your local TV station or newspaper leading with a great celebration of workers unity or workers and students unity to improve their lives. When there is a student or workers struggle there is a powerful tendency towards unity and the divide and rule strategy is thrown back. But the mass media machines, the education system do not give this the publicity instead they give the examples of division the coverage. Divide and rule must be preserved at all costs.

The tiny minority who control the country also have control of the state apparatus, the cops and the military, to make sure their divide and rule policies are implemented and when united movements begin to develop they are put down. This, and capitalism's inability to provide decent jobs and good lives for all is what lies behind the police brutality on the streets and the racist character of that brutality. And this in turn adds further fuel to the divide and rule tactic.

We argue on this blog that the Cal student movement should unite with the workers and the anti war movement. We think this is correct. Overcome the divide and rule policies of the authorities to unite and win our struggle.

To build a united movement our program is key. We have to have in our program demands which take up the problems of the workers and students and also the anti war movement. A program which shows that we are fighting for something in common as well as our own issues is essential to building a united movement and over coming divide and rule.

It is easy to see how the states budget's cuts affect students and workers alike. No increase in fees, no cuts in jobs and services, free education for all are our unifying demands. Unity with the anti war movement needs a little more explaining. Every increase in fees and cut in education spending makes it harder for young people, especially from the working class, to get a decent education and a decent job. This makes them desperate for a job. And this in turn makes it easier for the kill or be killed US military to recruit them into their ranks.

This is a form of conscription, it is economic conscription. The fight against budget cuts, the fight against increased fees, the fight against cuts in jobs and services in education and the entire state budget sector will preserve more jobs and help young workers avoid having to go to the military. Therefore this campaign should also oppose the hundreds of billions spent on the military and on the wars and occupations abroad. These wars should be all ended and the money used on them put into education and job creation instead.

The struggle to defeat divide and rule also has to show that it is willing to fight and has the strategy and tactics to fight and most importantly to win. Direct action around a program such as referred to above and with mass spreading of the information of the factors and people involved and with organized boycotts of all the bosses and all the investors involved with management against the workers, this is what is needed and what can win the strike and give confidence to the workers and youth that they can win. This is the way we can overcome the bosses and authorities divide and rule tactics and to win our struggle.

Sean.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Thanx for Public education, Human Drama and Finding Truth

One sure-thing in the world of television production is that people enjoy a story of human drama where a web of evidence slowly unfolds. One sure-thing television advertizers recognize is that, if told well, people will stick around for the climax of a story. They will hold out for the truth to be revealed.

Many billions of dollars have been made from this basic tenet. Many hundreds of thousands of crap television programs have been aired on this basis. And many hundreds of billions of hours have been lost by all of us in this commercial-driven trap.

However, the two facts: that people like to share stories and people like to unearth the truth, are overwhelmingly good things for human society.

The myth of what we call Thanksgiving will remain mostly untouched today. Families will sit down and catch up with one and others' own life stories. Most working people are sympathetic to the plight of the Native Americans, whose contact with Europeans put them at the center of Thanksgiving. Most people also will feel that Native people have little to thank for their experience with this society.

One story that may be shared today, particularly by students returning home for the holiday, is the battleground of education. The struggle for free, public education has been brought into the foreground in recent weeks by the hundreds of thousands of students who have been demonstrating and sitting-in at colleges and universities from Berkeley to Belgrade. Their enemy, wether the story has revealed it to them or not, is capitalism, and with it, the Governments subservient to big business' profit-based ideals.

My own exposure to the war against public education lies in Oakland, California. At the "low-performing" public elementary school, my daughter attends, we are now 3-months into the school year and still do not have a Vice-principal. We also have no music teacher. No arts teacher. No gym teacher. It's all math, English and testing. But the teachers are fantastic, and life goes on.

Today I just wanted to put a shout out for one woman who's truth has been buried. A woman we can thank for putting up a critical fight for free, public education. This person was of world renown in her life time at the turn of the last century. Her name has subsequently been kept alive mostly by word and mouth. Her story was deliberately removed from encyclopedias and history lessons in the post war period.

In 1903 Mother Jones led the Children’s Crusade. Hundreds of children crippled in America’s factories, some as young as 5-years-old, marched on the White House. Their slogan was “We want to go to School!” At this time only some 6% of 18-year olds were in school. Between 1880 and 1900, during America’s most intense period of industrialization, children’s enrollment in schools had actually decreased. The struggle for public schools for children was intimately bound up with big business' struggle to keep children in their factories. Mother Jones, in her 70s at this point, was a virulant anti-capitalist and an organizer with the Miners’ Union. The Federal Government feeling the heat, then passed a weak child labor law, but under pressure from big business, the Supreme Court struck it down as “violating the child’s right to contract his work.”

Over the following 30 years big business fought any curbs on child labor or taxation for public schools. Finally in 1938 child labor was banned federally, by which time public schools were commonplace.

Big business is now attempting to turn the clocks back. They are spending hundreds of millions to promote school privatization and increased business penetration of our schools’ daily lives. If unopposed, big business will eventually turn public education into a business. The city and state-run colleges and universities are an example of how further education has been transformed from a virtually free right into a costly debt-burden for young people. Capitalism's first step to destroying public education is removing the word "free" from its association with public education.

Thanks go out Today for Mother Jones. For her fight to get children out of factories and into schools. For the birth of free, public education. For the real human drama of life and struggle of working people. And for the discovery of the truth, however deep it is buried.
Rob

MLK, the 1960's, unity between civil rights, anti war and economic struggles.

We have argued on this blog that to succeed the Cal Students movement should unite in struggle with the workers movement. It is great that we are all in general agreement with this. The method of uniting, the program around which we unite, there may be some differences on these, but the idea of uniting is agreed. This is a very important step forward.

It seems to be the case that the Obama regime is about to announce it will send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan. They envisage the war there dragging on for many years. The Wall Street Journal says the Taliban presently controls most of the country. At the same time US imperialism cannot get out of Iraq and they are being dragged into Pakistan and they and their Israeli allies are thinking about attacking Iran. They would even think about getting their Columbian allies to attack Venezuela if they could get away with it. This increased in war activity will breath new life into the anti war movement in the US and internationally.

I would like therefore to raise a point for discussion. Should the Cal Student movement, as well as seeking to unite with the workers against the cuts and the fee hikes seek also to unite with the anti war movement and the movements in the military and with military families against the wars and occupations abroad and to bring all troops home. I think they should. I think this would be a step forward.

There are important interests in common here. The more difficult it is to pay your student fees or tuition the more difficult it is to get a decent education and a decent job. No decent job means greater pressure on young people to take a job of kill or be killed in the military. Increased fees and cuts in education means less jobs and cuts in wages, means more youth forced to consider taking jobs in the kill or be killed military. We should try to build a united movement of students, workers and anti war activists and the anti war movement.

In the 1960's the civil rights movement came to the conclusion that they could not confine their struggle to civil rights. The millions who made up their ranks suffered from mass poverty and were being sent to kill or be killed in Vietnam. The civil rights movement took up these issues.

When Martin Luther King was murdered by the state he was in Memphis to help the garbage workers who were on strike there. Over that period also he was building for a poor peoples march on Washington. This was aimed at all working class people from all backgrounds. And he had begun to speak out against the war in South East Asia and US foreign policy.

Martin Luther King was inspired by his base to oppose the Vietnam war. In doing so he opened up a debate in the leadership of the civil rights movement, the most conservative of whom thought the civil rights should remain loyal to US imperialism's aims abroad and seek to get its objectives fulfilled at home. It is a credit to the mass of the rank and file of the civil rights movement and to Martin Luther King that they stood against this sentiment and moved to take up the economic issues, to unite with the workers in their economic struggles and to unite with the anti war movement in their struggle against the war.

This is an example for our movement today. All the issues are linked together. In the US there is an increase in mass poverty. There are calls for the government to act against this. We should be aware that as well as wars abroad being used to seize and control property and territory for US imperialism wars abroad are used for another reason. They are used to "defund" the call for reforms, to defund the country's resources and increase deficits, so the profit addicted capitalist class can claim there is no money for health care or to end poverty.

This is exactly what is going on at the moment. They say they need all the money for the "war against terrorism." In the 1950's calls for reforms were rejected because they said they needed the money to fight the Korean war, in the 1960's they say they needed the money to fight the war in Vietnam and South East Asia now it is the so called war against terror. Their profit addiction means they never have a war against poverty.

##Spread the movement. Unite the movement.

##For unity between students, workers and the anti war movement.

Sean.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Is taking your home in order to build a WalMart in the public good? I don't think so!

On June 5, 2004 the Housing Authority of the City of Alameda sent termination notices to 238 Section 8 Housing Assistance Program recipients. A member of the Campaign For Renter's Rights was one of those tenants and the CRR and the tenants waged a six week, direct action struggle to keep 238 families in their homes, forcing the feds to cough up almost one million dollars. During the course of the battle the group demanded the city take in to eminent domain a huge section 8 apartment complex that was owned by absentee slumlords out of Florida but with properties all over the country. The city of Alameda refused. The liberals on the council cried crocodile tears whining about how painful it was but the "money wasn't there."
Atlantic Yards; just a cozy neigborhood?

Yesterday, November 24th and five years later, the state of New York's highest court ruled that the state can "seize private land for use by private developers..." * But there's private property, a la WalMart, and there's private property, your home. This is a defeat for those that tried to prevent the state of New York from seizing a 22 acre site in downtown Brooklyn including an individual still living in his condo on it. Developers are rubbing their grubby little hands with glee. MaryAnne Gilmartin, executive VP of Forest City Ratner, the developers that want the land, says the developer is "pleased and excited." Their project, Atlantic Yards will be able go forward.

The judges that made this decision determined that it is constitutional for the state to seize people's homes or small business using Eminent Domain and hand it over to big developers in order to "improve blighted conditions." And how will this developer improve "blighted conditions"? He wants to build a center with office towers, apartments (that he'll collect rent on no doubt, or possibly sell to another slumlord who will live off of people's rent money) and, get this, a new $900 million arena for the New Jersey Nets.

This comes on the heels of the first case of this nature that readers might remember. In that decision the city of New London Connecticut seized private property for a research center to be built for Pfizer, the multi-national drug giant. A women named Susan Kelo, sued the city and lost. The city could take her house using eminent domain when it is for the "public good."

The state taking section 8 apartments in Alameda under eminent domain would have been for the "public good." But which public and how we define good is the issue. Propping up capitalism is "good" from the bankers, developers, speculators and other social parasites point of view. And they are "the public" as far as they are concerned because without their ability to profit, society would collapse. This is their view of the world regardless of all the misery and death it causes.

There's more.

One of the reasons the money grubbers are so elated is the timing of the decision. They can now start construction before December 31st, a crucial date for them. As the Wall Street Journal puts it, the developer must issue its bonds by that date "..to comply with a previous court ruling that limited the ability of privately owned sports team to qualify for tax-exempt bonds to pay for arenas from which they will derive the bulk of the financial benefits." Isn't freedom swell? If they don't get these tax exempt bonds, the developers say, the project won't move forward, "because the bond debt will be too expensive." And whose the developer? Why, it's Bruce Ratner, owner of the Nets whose home will be the new $900 arena.
Below
Whose gonna live here?

So this whole deal will be very much in his "public good" as well as for all the hangers on: public officials, judges and other wasters who live off the Labor of working people.

The owners of this blog believe we can change this situation. We want to join with others who want to change it. Send an e mail to us and subscribe to Facts For Working People; we want to have a conference not too far in to the future and hope many of our readers would attend and participate. If you want to get involved and are in LA, Chicago or the San Francisco Bay Area, contact us. The near collapse of the system has brought about a major shift in consciousness. Bankers and slumlords like Ratner are hated, the mood is changing as the heroic struggles of students here in California and around the world against the savage cuts in public education show.

Remember, class anger is healthy. Don't mourn, organize.

* Wall Street Journal, 11-25-09

The California students struggle. How the enemy sees it.

The California students struggle is of great significance. Its opponents see this. They want to hold firm on the fees increase. They send their cops to beat up and arrest students. They want to hold firm on the fees increase so they can hold firm on the State's budget cuts. These are part of their economic "solution" for the states ills. Their position is that any "solution" must protect and increase the corporations profits and cut the living standards of the working people and the youth. The working class and youth must pay for the state's crisis not the profit addicted corporations which caused it. This is what the multi millionaire profit addicted regents are up to, this is what dominates their thinking and actions.

California is the only state in the union which does not tax oil as it comes out of the ground. The oil companies are getting a free ride. Here is a simple and just solution right in front of our noses. Tax this oil as it comes out of the ground and along with this make the oil and utility companies pay back what they swindled from the state in the past through price fixing and other crimes. This would more than pay for free education for all.

But from the point of view of the corporations and the state and their class they must not pay for the crisis, there must be no taxing of oil companies or taking back what the corporations have swindled from the state. The youth and the working class must pay for the crisis. This is a principle for them. So from the point of view of the corporations and their politicians the students must be defeated. It is very important to grasp this basic fact otherwise illusions in the corporate politicians, both the Republicans and Democrats could develop. Otherwise we will not see the importance of building unity with the workers, and carrying out mass direct action struggles which will make the profit addicted corporate class and their politicians and state retreat.

For unity between the students and workers. For a united students and workers day of action.

Build joint action and coordinate the struggles of the students and the SEIU workers who have been arrested in San francisco.

There are all sorts of benefits to the corporate capitalist system that would flow from a defeat of the students. These are never mentioned because they are too explosive. The Obama regime and the two capitalist parties and the military industrial complex are preparing to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan. But their problem is getting enough troops. the war there, in Iraq and Pakistan will drag on for years and the US military will increasingly crack. So they need more and more troops. Increasing fees prevents more people from getting a decent education and so having to search desperately for work. Millions will not be able to get a job and so will be fodder for recruitment into the military to kill or be killed. The students struggle is a struggle against the wars and occupations abroad.

We must all support the students struggle.

I am an immigrant to this country. When I came first I asked what thanksgiving was about. For what were we giving thanks and to whom? I was told for getting safely to these shores. I asked did black people participate in thanksgiving? What about the middle crossing? Did native American people participate in thanksgiving? What about the genocide?

When we get together with friends and family tomorrow we should thank the California students for leading the struggle against the capitalist offensive. And at the same time we should condemn the capitalist elite and their system who have left left 21% of households with children "food insecure." That is that they go hungry. Maybe we should change thanksgiving day into: "Thanksgiving and Condemnation day."

Here is one thing we should condemn when we are sitting down with our families. The US government under Obama continues to refuse to sign the treaty banning land mines. These vicious weapons which kill and maim so many people, the US military industrial complex and the government says they must remain "legal."

Sean.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Students Strike in Mexico! Attacked by Pres. Calderon

From http://www.marxist.com/mexico-stop-attacks-against-clep-cedep.htm

Mexico: Stop the attacks against CLEP-CEDEP
Written by In Defence of Marxism Tuesday, 24 November 2009

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We republish here the appeal from the Mexican CLEP-CEDEP students that are facing a campaign of legal harassment and threats from the authorities. Five of them, all leading student activists, are facing jail sentences for the only crime of having defended free education. The authorities are accusing them on trumped up charges as a result of the students' strike to defend free education on June 4th. The legal costs involved in this campaign have already run up to 825 euros (16,000 Mexican pesos). We make an appeal to all IDOM readers to sign the protest letter, raise this issue in your organisation and donate generously to the Legal Defence Fund.
Read this appeal in Spanish.
The economic crisis has driven to despair the Calderón administration, the state's finances are suffering like never before, reflected in further adjustments and cuts in public spending, especially in areas related to the needs of working families of the cities and countryside. These budget adjustments and cuts have resulted in strong concern among students, teachers and workers in state education, which perceive their work and education conditions are deteriorating day by day, making the ferment of discontent increasingly evident.
Particularly in the state universities there are levels of tension that place on the agenda the feasibility of large mass demonstrations rejecting the policies of Calderon and the university authorities, encouraging the latter to promote reactionary measures that attempt to prohibit at all costs this discontent from being transformed into an open struggle in defense of state education and labour rights. Now they want to put in place constant persecution and harassment against anyone who dares to speak out against attacks on education.
Recently, this same policy has been implemented, against young students of the IPN, UNAM and UAM. In the case of the Polytechnic, the federal government has not been the only one who has driven this policy, but also the education authorities.

In 2007 they were responsible for one of the most severe attacks that the student movement has suffered in this institution. Through a gangster-like operation, 10 students from this school were arrested with the sue of extreme violence; they were put on trial and finally 4 of them were found guilty despite the inconsistency and falsehood of the evidence in the case.

To this day the authorities of the IPN continue to attack young people who belong to the CLEP-CEDEP. By apocryphal letters, purportedly sent from various social organizations, they continue to slander, threaten the comrades, and police investigation were launched for crimes that were not even explained.

This is in addition to the campaign that has also been carried out against members of the CLEP-CEDEP at UNAM. Similarly,the comrades are harassed, they are followed home, with pictures being taken from suspicious cars parked outside their homes and, moreover, appeals have been made, over the Internet, to physically them when they are see in schools.

In both cases, the IPN and UNAM, are part of the process of class struggle that we are witnessing all over the country. The mass mobilization of students and workers in defence of the SME and LyF have left the government of Felipe Calderón shaking, and who, like a cornered dog, launches furious attacks.
It is known by the labour and student movement, that such methods are used by the government to intimidate social leaders to get them to desist from their struggle, but what they don't not realise is that it takes more than that to get a social fighter to abandon his or her conviction to fight for a better world for workers and their families.

Given that the education authorities and the federal government are still using these kinds of methods to attack social organizations, members of the CLEP-CEDEP have made it clear that more youth will join the fight and we will link up our movement more closely with the workers' movement. We will seek solidarity, wherever necessary, not only nationally but also internationally and we place full responsibility on the government of Felipe Calderón, his representative in the IPN, Enrique Villa Rivera and José Narro Robles Rector, if any attacks, whether verbal, physical or psychological, are carried out against members of the CLEP-CEDEP.
We call on the labour movement and student movement in Mexico and the world to defend, together with us, the demands listed below.

The youth and workers undersigned:

1. We condemn the repressive measures that the government of Felipe Calderón and his cronies in the schools, Jose Villa Rivera and Jose Narro Robles, have deployed against the student movement and members of the CLEP-CEDEP and the labour movement, unions and social organizations.

2. We sympathize with the struggles that youth, workers and, in general, the people of Mexico, are organising against the anti-labour and anti-popular policies that the right-wing government of Felipe Calderón is implementing.

3. We demand the immediate withdrawal of the Preliminary Investigations against Jay Claudia Aguilar and Luis Enrique Martinez Orihuela, as well as any charges, as they have done nothing but to defend the rights of students and workers.

4. We demand an end to harassment that Hector Aguilar Campos has been submitted in the last period.

5. We also demand unconditional respect for democratic and trade union rights of all workers in the IPN, which is why we call for an immediate halt to the campaign of persecution and harassment that has been launched by the authorities of this institution against workers Samuel Sotelo Crespo, Patricia Gongora.

6. We hold responsible the government of Felipe Calderón, Enrique Villa Rivera, Director General of IPN and Jose Narro Robles, rector of UNAM, for any attack against the colleagues mentioned above or any other member of CLEP-CEDEP.

7. We pledge to carry out a campaign of solidarity in our ranks and our unions to report on the case of these comrades and the resolution you may have.

Stop attacks on the youth of CLEP-CEDEP!United and organized ... We will win!

Send this appeal using a form here.
Or send it per e-mail to:
Dr. José Narro Robles
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Dr. Enrique Villa RiveraDirector General of IPN\n ' ); //--> This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ' ); //-->">
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Lic Fernando Gomez MontSecretary of the Interior
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Obama says he will "Finish the job" in Afghanistan. With our youth.

I see Obama has informed us all that he intends to "finish the job" in Afghanistan. British imperialism has been "finishing the job" in Northern Ireland for 500 years; people never give up when others occupy their land. The US record in Afghanistan is not impressive. The right wing tribal chiefs with their 7th century morality and misogynistic philosophy were funded and aided by the US taxpayer to the tune of billions of dollars . Up to 1999, "US taxpayers paid the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official."* Osama bin Laden is a US product. How wrong could Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski have been when he said in defense of supporting the Mujahideen:

"What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War."

Those "stirred up" Moslems have wreaked a little havoc of their own. The roots of terrorism lie in US foreign policy.

The US government united with terrorists and mullahs to overthrow the Afghan government that was too pro-soviet. Obama is continuing this invasion. One of the main reasons is an oil pipeline to the sea that doesn't go through Iran. As billions of dollars of US taxpayer's money goes in to this predatory war, Obama and the Democrats and Republicans are forcing workers and the middle class to pay for an economic crisis of their making as they hand trillions to the bankers that caused the mess.
There is definitely a change in the mood as evidenced by the global response of students to the capitalist offensive. The current struggles of the students here in California will bring all sorts of attempts by liberal Democratic Politicians and others to derail it. They will promise this and that.

If the movement continues to grow, it is imperative that it relies on its own strength, that it relies on unity in action between workers and youth and doesn't allow liberal Democrats to suck it in and diffuse it. At some point it can find political expression, it can run candidates that are firmly rooted in the movement and the struggle on the ground, independent from the Democrats and Republicans.

The cost of education will increase the desperation that young people face with regards to a job and a future and the military will become the only option. Obama's troop surge comes at a time when youth unemployment is around 25% to 35%. Instead of sending our young people (mostly workers) to kill or be killed in Afghanistan or Iraq, we want free education and decent jobs for all---not Obama's war in Afghanistan.

We must have no illusions in Obama and the Democrats.

*Ted Rall: SF Chronicle, 11-02-2001 Quoted in War and Globalization by Michael Chossudofsky

SEIU workers arrested: students and rank and file workers can win with joint actions and campaigns against the cuts

Comrades, brothers and sisters,

as students were invading the UCOP building yesterday, or about that time, public sector workers in SF were protesting against cuts and layoffs and 18 of them from what I understand were arrested. The workers' actions are an inspiration to us, but the students courage and audacity, the willingness to challenge the law and sacred private property rights, have no doubt influenced the workers as they did in Seattle in 1999. Members of the Local involved, 1021, voted against a concessionary contract earlier this year but eventually had another one forced on them. Their leadership claimed they voted against the concessions because they were "confused."

http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2009/11/24/taking_city_hall_1.jpg

Workers were arrested, some of the students have been arrested and charged. The students' activities and support for those arrested have backed the state off a bit but we must keep the pressure up and we can appeal to the rank and file workers that protested yesterday to join with the students for a joint defense of all our comrades.

I heard on the news this morning that now the city of SF bureaucrats wants to meet with SEIU to discuss layoffs. We do not need to discuss layoffs or discuss cuts in education; these are non negotiable. We reject their education budget, we reject their views about what is important and what is not in society. The Wall Street Journal and other big business papers have boasted that the world is "awash in money". Investors, unwilling to take risks in their precious market game, are shifting money again in to US treasuries, a safer place to earn money without working. What this means is they are lending us money for a price so we can live. This is after the US taxpayer has handed over a trillion dollars to them and pledged trillions more.

I think it would be worth CAL folks getting in touch with those rank and file workers to see if they would be up for a joint action and ongoing joint campaigns against the cuts, job losses, foreclosures and other assaults on living standards.

Note: if you are a worker that protested in SF yesterday and agree with what is raised above, contact us at:we_know_whats_up@yahoo.com
Lets build with the students.

No Layoffs
More jobs through a shorter workweek and re-allocation of money lavished on wars and bailing out bankers.
Federally funded education at all levels
Drive the corporations from education
For a $15 an hour minimum wage or a $5 an hour increase whichever is greater
Full trade Union and democratic rights for all immigrant workers regardless of "official" status. Immigrant workers are our allies in this struggle

Cal Students have an important victory.

The Cal students have had an important victory. The burglary charges against them have been dropped. These were felony charges and so very serious. As far as I know other charges remain so the pressure must be kept on to drop all charges. If anybody is involved in criminal activities in this situation it is the regents, who protested by the power of the state in the form of the cops have put their hands in the pockets of the families of students and the students themselves and taken money in the form of increased fees. In the meantime they and the rest of their class live in the lap of luxury in spite of having brought the state and the country to a situation of economic collapse. These are the criminals.

The struggle must go on also because the main issue continues to stand. The fees have been increased and remain increased. This has to be reversed. At the very least and in the immediate term the fees must be taken down to their original level. But this is not enough. All young people have the right to a good education. This means that education must be free for all to all levels. This is a very reasonable position. The trillions spent on wars and occupations abroad and on the obscene tax cuts to the rich must be spent instead on education and health care.

For free education for all to all levels.

We have argued here on this blog that students and workers must unite. To more concretely further this idea we are proposing that we organize in all the campuses and beyond if possible a "Unite Students and Worker day." This idea should be developed and a date set. This is particularly appropriate now because yesterday 18 workers, members of the Service International Employees Union were arrested in San Francisco when they were in struggle against cuts. The attacks they are facing are part of the same capitalist offensive we are facing. Let us start our work for our Unite Student and Workers Day by approaching these San Francisco workers and offering our support and proposing the coordination of our struggles.

Drop all charges against all students and workers.

The organizers of this blog are in favor of direct action and disrupting the efforts of the authorities to increase our fees and attack our living standards. Our position is "No more business as usual" for the people and the class that do this. This direct action involves occupations, sit-ins, sit-downs and other tactics. We also argue that these tactics should not isolate the students. That they should not scare off others. This is sometimes possible when the cops are seen to be attacking. This can scare people off and isolate the students even though most people would otherwise support the actual demands we are struggling for.

We therefore propose that when we take these methods of direct action we simultaneously take measures to increase our support, to spread our actions, and most important of all to get out to the wider movement what we are fighting for. This is what we mean. Direct action should not just be seen as a way to disrupt the forces we are fighting but also as a platform to explain to workers and the community in general what we are struggling for.

For example if we occupy or have a sit in or sit down then take some of our forces and through distributing flyers before and during this make sure that our demands are known, that we are struggling for easier access to education for all. Not many working class or middle class people would oppose this. In particular we get our demands known to the workers in the campuses. But not only in the campuses. We must if possible expand out of the campuses. While spreading our struggle into the locals and workers in the campuses, we also have to get to the unions and union rank and file outside the campuses. Now is an important time and opportunity for this. San Francisco workers have been arrested, we should go there with flyers explaining our struggle and discuss the things we are fighting for in common and try to set up a coordinating committee, a joint action committee, to bring together both struggles.

We should also look imaginatively and concretely at other aspects of the struggle. Everybody has to take responsibility for their actions. We should identify the regents and go to their businesses, homes, clubs, churches and through distributing flyers explain what this person has done. The savage person this is. It is like making sure that a community knows that a predator lives in their midst. At number 24 or 68 or whatever, that is where that person lives who increased fees and made it much harder for our families to get a decent education. How many peoples' lives he or she has damaged. Ask the question of this person's fellow church goers, this person's other acquaintances do they want to be associated with such a person. But more important again with flyers explain the vicious actions of these people to the workers where these people gas their automobiles, where they shop, where their cable TV and electricity and gas comes from, and ask all the workers who work in these places to refuse to serve these regent people. In other words organize a boycott against these people. Isolate them from society for their crimes. After all this is the way that somebody like a mugger or somebody who is involved in a violent street crime is dealt with by capitalist society. society. They are isolated from society, only in their case it is in prison. We do not have any prisons with walls and wire and guards, so let us isolate the criminals who are destroying education in the prison of workers and students solidarity.

Sean.

THANKSGIVING & Eating Other People's Trash

In my tenth month of unemployment and looking at open-ended joblessness this coming year, I visited a food bank this week for the first time in my life.

In my Local of the Carpenters Union we petitioned our Executive Board to do more for our 500 unemployed members. It was a key issue in July's Executive Board and union President elections. In response we got a breakfast once a month and now a food bank giveaway once in November and once in December.

After I signed in at the union on Thursday I got my slip and headed down to the "Faithfirst" food bank. The last thing I wanted was religion mixed in with it, but I'm not that picky.

I loaded up my compact trunk and headed home with my bagged groceries. And let me re-iterate. I'm happy to get anything. It's free. My family needs free things. I'm unemployed, my wife is part-time seeking full time work. Anything I can get for free is welcome.

It was somewhat like Christmas is: a combination of hope and eventual disappointment. I was glad for the frozen chicken, but that's all it was, a small sad looking thing. I was glad for some of the beans and the can of organic pumpkin and the brown bread. The pastries and soda I was not so happy about. The diced potatoes in a can provoked questions about capitalist food culture that I could not answer.

But it was the other stuff, the non-food items that made me mad. I opened a box of sundries. Five shaving razor holders. Yes, holders. Somekind of stick to clean shower walls, but you needed to buy the brand-name replacements. Someone was fishing for brand loyalty, while all I could do was question the logic of the product altogether. Cheap mittens for a baby. Mmmm. A bunch of tiny hotel-like soaps.

As I delved my hand deeper into the box I had a (non-religious) epithany. I realized: I'd been dumped on. So I did what we all do when we need a question answered. I called a friend. They were out, so I went on the internet and my paranoid suspicions about capitalism turned out to be real again.

My needs were being mismatched with corporate America's need to dump its waste. I googled "food bank corporate dumping" and instead of finding a really good, insightful article by some left academic, maybe a Canadian or something, I instead found tons of food banks who were appealing to corporations to be DUMPED on. Yes. "Reduce your warehouse storage and dumping" a food bank in San Antonio offered. The corporations get their fat tax break by giving the crap that they can't sell to food banks and the poor, suprising, get stuck with the crap they wouldn't buy if they had the money in the first place.

So, I do not want anyone to say I looked a gift horse in the mouth. But then if someone walked a horse up onto my porch, and I looked it over, and if it had no teeth, should I still take it i?

Facts For Working People

Pages

Monday, November 30, 2009

Protest against Afghan troop escalation!

For free education for all, for a job for all.

Burma, Immigrants and Tent Cities

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Trinity College Dublin. Library occupied. Report from inside.

Food stamps and consciousness and the difference between Ireland and the US.

Socialist Poet

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Charity

Some of them are frightened.

Friday, November 27, 2009

California student strike, protest at regents meeting and building occupations on Illinois World Labor Hour

British students hear about Troy Davis

Superdrug strikers march back to work

Cal Students. Divide and Rule. Don't let them do it.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Thanx for Public education, Human Drama and Finding Truth

MLK, the 1960's, unity between civil rights, anti war and economic struggles.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Is taking your home in order to build a WalMart in the public good? I don't think so!

The California students struggle. How the enemy sees it.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Students Strike in Mexico! Attacked by Pres. Calderon

Obama says he will "Finish the job" in Afghanistan. With our youth.

SEIU workers arrested: students and rank and file workers can win with joint actions and campaigns against the cuts

Cal Students have an important victory.

THANKSGIVING & Eating Other People's Trash

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