Happy Human Rights Day!

http://www.humanrightsactioncenter.org/petition/index.php

Here's an idea: along with all that crap our rulers think we need to carry with us whenever they deign to let us move around on our own home planet, how about carrying something valuable and humane (even eye-opening, since the US won't recognize the economic rights that are part of the UDHR, signed or not, and of course routinely violates other parts or supports violations, which amounts to the same thing).

More free time? Instead of squishing your butt into the couch in front of the TV, how about calling Congress at 877-331-1223 and telling them, while we're bailing the corporate "artificial persons" who created this mess we're in, to bail out the people who are this country.

Tell them we need a Social Monetary Fund, not IMF-style Friedmanomics. Tell them to get those damn troops home yesterday - all of them! And tell them to close down Guantanamo and every othet torture camp in the world, CIA or otherwise. And tell them if we don't want to be the world's favorite target, we could start helping the struggling peoples of the world instead of propping up their murderous, torturing governments and manipulating their economies to serve us (and by "us" I mean primarily "the rich who are not us, but who want us to think they are.")

Win for workers!

AP is reporting: UE workers occupying the Republic Windows plant in Chicago have won a major victory! Bailout recipient Bank of America has finally agreed - under intense pressure - to lend the company the money to pay the workers.

About time!

As always there is more they might have won: the right to run the plant themselves, as a co-op or something, for example. But this win is significant, and it might be just the beginning.

Certainly the Illinois Governor and US President-elect seem to see it that way. (Could it be that the economic crunch looks just bad enuf, like it might be ushering in a trend of plant closings, that the spirit of M. Keynes advises settling with workers fast, when their demands are confined to "the money we're owed" - in other words, before workers start demanding to keep their plants? That could still be next.)

Hold your butts!

OK, if you haven't seen this yet, brace yourself; it's worse than expected (and we expected pretty bad):

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081205/ap_on_bi_go_ec_fi/financial_meltdown

“[…] employers slashed 533,000 jobs in November, the most in 34 years […]"

By the way, that's around twice what the experts were predicting. And the most dire warnings had us around 300,000 job losses per month by the end of the year - optimistic, it seems!

“As companies throttled back hiring, the unemployment rate bolted from 6.5 percent in October to 6.7 percent last month, a 15-year high."

Remember, that's official unemployment, which doesn't count millions of people by design.

“These numbers are shocking," said economist Joel Naroff [… And ...] The unemployment rate would have moved even higher if not for the exodus of 422,000 people from the work force. […]”

That means they gave up, so the feds just stop counting them. That happens every month, but usually not this many. With "underemployment" estimated around 11%, the real deal is a whole lot spookier than these spooky numbers!

A few Obama DO's and DONT's

http://www.ucimc.org/content/obama-should-make-clean-break-past-latin-america

Sometimes it's good just to run down the list. It is hard to imagine Obama being as bad as the W. (And this is just Latin America.)

Florida tomato pickers still want Obama to visit Immokalee, though. (See link below.) Slavery is still alive and well in America. So are a lot of things most people don't know about, especially in the fields.

More good news from Immokalee!

Subway agrees to farmworkers demands! Subway-bashing canceled nationwide!

http://www.ciw-online.org/

Once again the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, those impoverished, mostly immigrant and largely non-English-speaking farmworkers from the Southeastern US, are showing us all the way.

Their patient, direct grassroots organizing, combined with smart, media-savvy coalition-building and corporate consumer campaigns have paid off again and again. The effect of meeting the workers themselves, in person - and the message that human slavery and other horrendous conditions exist right now in the US - is powerful. But so is the dedication of these workers, who come from Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti and from the Southern US. They've built their own organization, and nobody tells them how to run it.

Yet they are excellent listeners. They have worked closely with students, building on the anti-sweatshop and anti-corporate globalization movements, and the result has been a symbiosis that has developed power and energy and understanding on all sides.

First Taco Bell in 2005, then McDonald's in 2007, Burger King this year, and a few others along the way like Pizza Hut and KFC, then Whole Foods, and now the third largest fast food chain!

Go CIW!

Depression, by any other name ...

“Private employers cut 250,000 jobs in November, the most in seven years, a report by a private employment service said on Wednesday, (Reuters 12-3-08).”

context & thanksgiving

Context, as they say, is all-important.

That’s probably why the dominant culture generally tends to omit context. Take the Thanksgiving holiday for example. Criticism of the holiday often elicits a response from well-meaning liberals (the pro-Chief take on it isn’t worth discussing) that goes something like this: Yes, the apocalyptic genocide of the original Americans was a terrible thing. But that first Thanksgiving was a humanitarian oasis in the midst of the insanity, a time when both populations put aside their differences and shared in their common humanity.

Green but not Soylent Green

"It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people."
- "Soylent Green" (Richard Fleischer, 1973)

For as long as there have been bailouts, people have known that bailouts suck. The rich play, we pay. "Privatized profit, socialized risk," it's called. Now, with more bailout requests in the pipeline and the President-Elect promising the mother of all stimuli, critics are girding for battle - and rightly so - but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The bailouts have many critics on the left - not just the nutcases on the right who still believe in "free enterprise" - but some are seeming more insightful than others. US Sen. Bernie Sanders says if a corporation is "too big to fail," it's "too big to exist." He says the government should break them up. Sanders also says, "let the rich bail out the rich" by paying a surcharge on income over $1 million to cover the costs. Jobs With Justice, ACORN and others in the grassroots left are calling for a "People's Bail-Out." All good ideas. Then there's my personal broken record: a comprehensive Social Monetary Fund to restructure the whole ball of wax.

But some of our friends, in their haste to fund "green infrastructure," sometimes forget who the effort is for.

Reede Stockton of Global Exchange, writes in an article on Common Dreams about a "new green economy" with massive public expenditure to rebuild the nation's rail network and support free public transportation using all clean energy. It's a great idea, but he says we should do it instead of rescuing the auto industry.

The US economy is on track to lose as many as a million and a half jobs by the new year. If even one of the Big Three car companies goes under, that failure and its ripple effects could add another 2-3 million jobs lost next year - not counting other job losses, already estimated as high as 300,000 a month by year's end. But they can go anywhere they want to go for free.

To be fair, the public investment in infrastructure Stockton proposes would create some jobs. But these are different jobs, very different. A comprehensive plan is needed, with public money for retraining, provisions for people who can't make the transition so easily - retirement, maybe a kind of G.I. bill for veteran of the workforce - etc.

But if the government decided to now turn its back and let an integral part of the economy collapse, millions of people fall into the dustbin of redundancy, buildings and machines tossed in the landfill or left to obstruct new development, that would be recklessly destructive. And it would gain the "new green economy" a generation of enemies that could have been allies. Why throw away the product of a hundred years of public subsidy and entrepreneurial ingenuity (albeit not "free")? The car industry could help, with the proper realistic incentives.

If we can put a man on the moon - if we can put an intelligent, well-spoken man in the White House (a black man no less, whose middle name is Hussein) - we can do this.

Piven: Obama needs a protest movement

Sociologist and activist Frances Fox Piven is wonderful as always:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/11/15-0

Piven's Regulating the Poor is an absolute epiphany. But you can read Poor People's Movements for a broader vision of Piven's and political scientist Richard A Cloward's rare method. Why American's Don't Vote and Why Americans Still Don't Vote are now slightly dated in terms of some of the voting obstacles they discuss, but the history is instructive, and in fact most of what they write about is timely. I was lucky enough to interview Piven a couple years ago:

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1015-29.htm

Her analysis expressed in that conversation is also still instructive.

Say it ain't so, Barack!

Obama's gang is telling us today (anonymously - how slick) that the new Prez might delay tax cuts to the rich ... because (incredibly) of the economic "downturn" (AP, 11-23-08).

WRONG! The "downturn" - economists sometimes call it a "correction" (or a "major correction") - is the best reason that's come along in a long time to increase taxes on the rich. In the immortal words of the esteemed Senator from Vermont: "Let the rich bail out the rich!"

Sanders's 10% on incomes over a million ($500,00 for individuals) won't be enough, but he's on the right track.

It is true, I have to admit, that income tax is not the best way to do it, not even a progressive income tax, which we barely still have. (The Bushies lowered the top bracket from 39% to 35% - a long drop from the 77% I recall from my pre-Reagan youth, as if in a dream.) A wealth tax would be better, according to the really smart people. In other words, we ought to tax what we don't want, not what we do. That is, we want production, not speculation, etc.

But in the short run, income tax is what we've got. Somebody has to pay, not just for the bailouts, but for all this stimulus ... and those of who are losing income, prospects, and so on, should not be the ones, nor should our children.

My point? Obama's apparently feeling a lot of pressure from the Dark Side - let's give him some from our side!