This Month's Issue - November
2014
Increase Security:
Support the Nuclear Agreement with
Iran
The U.S., U.K., France,
Russia, China and Germany, called the P5+1, have been negotiating
for almost a year on a nuclear agreement with Iran. Their stated reason is to
keep Iran from
developing nuclear weapons in return for the lifting of economic sanctions
on Iran. They
reached an interim agreement, which all the parties have faithfully
observed: Iran
stopped producing 20%-enriched uranium and rendered its existing
stockpile unusable
for nuclear weapons, while the P5+1 lifted certain sanctions as agreed.
This progress
has built trust. Iran has also agreed to reconfigure its Arak nuclear
reactor to
significantly reduce the amount of plutonium it produces, not to use its
Fordow underground
facility for uranium enrichment, and to allow enhanced monitoring of
its facilities.
That leaves the issue of
the size and contours of Iran’s uranium enrichment program
to be
settled. How many centrifuges should remain in its enrichment program, a
program it is
entitled to under the Non-Proliferation Treaty? Recent reports say 4,500
centrifuges may be
acceptable to the P5+1. With about 20,000 centrifuges, about 10,000
operating, Iran’s
proposals are hovering in the 7,000 to 10,000 range.
Negotiators
are expected to reach a deal by the Nov.
24 deadline. The question is: will
Washington and Tehran accept it? In the U.S. Congress, there appears to
be significant
opposition to accepting any deal that does not call for zero
centrifuges—totally
unrealistic. But, scuttling this internationally supported deal would leave Iran
free to enrich
at will, with minimal observation. Such a situation would raise the danger
for everyone,
and increase the possibility of a military strike on Iran that would
unleash even more
war in the Middle East.
Contact your Senators and
Representative. Urge them to support the P5+1 negotiated nuclear
agreement with Iran. Such an agreement will avoid potentially
chaotic consequences,
including war, and open the door to a more peaceful, productive relationship
with Iran.
CONTACT:
YOUR SENATORS &
REPRESENTATIVE
202 224-3121 (Capital
switchboard)
Senator or Representative
(first & last name)
U.S. Senate, Washington,
D.C. 20510
U.S. House of
Representatives, Washington, D.C. 20515
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This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
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The Last Days of Tomas Young[From Your Sisters and Brothers At Veterans For Peace-Tomas Young-Presente!] [see Phil Donahue's film, Body of War See interview with Thomas on Dem Now]
Tomas Young was shot and paralyzed below his waist in Iraq in April 2004 when
he and about 20 other U.S. soldiers were ambushed while riding in the back of an
Army truck. He died of his wounds Nov. 10, 2014, at the age of 34. His final
months were marked by a desperate battle to ward off the horrific pain that
wracked his broken body and by the callous indifference of a government that saw
him as part of the disposable human fodder required for war.
Young wrote a poignant open letter to Bush and Cheney on the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. He knew that they, along with other idiotic cheerleaders for the war, were responsible for his paralysis and coming death Young, who had been in Iraq only five days at the time of the 2004 attack, was hit by two bullets. One struck a knee and the other cut his spinal cord. He was already confined to his bed when I visited him in March 2013 in Kansas City. He was unable to feed himself. He was taking some 30 pills a day. His partly paralyzed body had suffered a second shock in March 2008 when a blood clot formed in his right arm (which bore a color tattoo of a character from Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are”). He was taken to the Veterans Affairs hospital in Kansas City, Mo., given the blood thinner Coumadin and released. The VA took him off Coumadin a month later. The clot migrated to one of his lungs. He suffered a massive pulmonary embolism and went into a coma. When he awoke in the hospital his speech was slurred. He had lost nearly all his upper-body mobility and short-term memory. He began suffering terrible pain in his abdomen. His colon was surgically removed in an effort to mitigate the abdominal pain. He was fitted with a colostomy bag. The pain disappeared for a few days and then returned. He could not hold down most foods, even when they were pureed. The doctors dilated his stomach. He could eat only soup and oatmeal. And then he went on a feeding tube. Young hung on as long as he could. Now he is gone. He understood what the masters of war had done to him, how he had been used and turned into human refuse. He was one of the first veterans to protest against the Iraq War. Planning to kill himself by cutting off his feeding tube, he wrote a poignant open “Last Letter” to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in March of 2013 on the 10th anniversary of the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. He knew that Bush and Cheney, along with other idiotic cheerleaders for the war, including my old employer The New York Times, were responsible for his paralysis and coming death. After issuing the letter Young changed his mind about committing suicide, saying he wanted to have more time with his wife, Claudia Cuellar, who dedicated her life to his care. Young and Cuellar knew he did not have long. The couple would move from Kansas City to Portland, Ore., and then to Seattle, where Young died. Veterans Affairs over the last eight months of Young’s life reduced his pain medication, charging he had become an addict. It was a decision that thrust him into a wilderness of agony. Young’s existence became a constant battle with the VA. He suffered excruciating “breakthrough pain.” The VA was indifferent. It cut his 30-day supply of pain medication to seven days. Young, when the pills did not arrive on time, might as well have been nailed to a cross. Cuellar, in an exchange of several emails with me since Young’s death, remembered hearing her husband on the phone one day pleading with a VA doctor and finally saying: “So you mean to tell me it is better for me to live in pain than die on pain medicine in this disabled state?” At night, she said, he would moan and cry out. “It was a battle of wills,” Cuellar told me in one of the emails. “We were losing. Our whole time in Portland was spent dealing with trying to get what we needed to be at home and comfortable and pain free. THAT’S ALL WE WANTED, TO BE HOME AND PAIN FREE, to enjoy whatever time we had left.” Last month they moved from Portland to Seattle. They would be closer to a good spinal cord injury unit. Also, Washington was one of the states that had legalized marijuana, which Young used extensively. When I saw Young in Kansas City last year he told me he had thought of having his ashes sprinkled over a patch of soil on which marijuana would be planted, “but then I worried that no one would want to smoke it.” After they moved to Seattle he and Cuellar again pleaded with the VA for more pain medication, but the VA staff said Young would have to be evaluated over a two-week period by a “pain team.” The pain team could not see him until the last week of November. He was dead before then. “Last week I called because his breakthrough pain started happening throughout the day,” Cuellar said in an email. “I was using more and more of the morphine and Lorazepam. I was running out of pills. He had a high tolerance for pain, but it was getting bad. I called to report to the doctor that it was getting bad fast. I would not have enough pills to bridge him to the appointment on the 24th. The doctor was unsympathetic. He gave me a condescending lecture about strict narcotics regulations. I said, ‘but my husband is in pain what do I do?’ ” Young tried to take enough sleeping pills to sleep away the pain. But he was able to rest for a prolonged period only every few days. The pain and exhaustion began to tear apart his frail body. He was dispirited. He was visibly weaker. He felt humiliated. 1 2 NEXT PAGE >> |
imagine what he thought of this hysterical laughter
in DC |
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viewing this email? Read it online
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Boston Rally in solidarity with the Mexican students of the Normal de Maestros of
Ayotzinapa
When: Wednesday, November 19th @ 5:00 pmWhere: Across street from Mexican Consulate55 Franklin Street, Boston, MABring a flashlight!Enough isenough!!Forty-three studentskidnapped in Mexico. Ayotzinapa is not anisolated case: The state of Guerrero is onlyone of several Mexican states where thegovernment authorities are involved incorruption, police brutality, organized crime,and torture. Murders and disappearancesare perpetrated on peaceful protesters.Ayotzinapa calls to mind other similar casesincluding: Aguas Blancas and Acteal wherecorrupt police in league with organized crimehave effectively criminalized social protest.The kidnapped students were from theRural Teacher’s School of Ayotzinapa,which was founded in 1926, to offerchildren of farm workers access toeducation. The student body is well knownfor its activism, advocating bettereducation and expanded enrollment for thechildren of farm workers. This teachers’college has experienced governmentalattacks in the past including threats toclose the school and to force privatization.These students were involved in an effortto prepare for a commemoration of theTlatelolco massacre in Mexico City onOctober 2nd, 1968. The students werecollecting donations in Ayotzinapa and hadcommandeered three buses to further theirefforts. They were arrested, picked up, andwere never heard from again.The protest in Boston is being organized toexpress solidarity with the march organizedin Mexico by the Student Federation ofSocialist Peasants (Federación de EstudiantesCampesinos Socialistas de MX :FECSM).Among their demands, are the impeachment ofMexico’s President, Enrique Pena Nieto andprison for Guerrero’s former governor,Ayotzinapa’s former mayor & his wife, and thesecretary of public safety from Iguala.
As The 100th
Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars)
Continues ... Some Remembrances-Poets’ Corner
In say 1912, 1913,
hell, even the beginning of 1914 before the war clouds got a full head of steam
in the summer they all profusely professed, artists who saw the disjointedness
of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put
twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other, writers of serious history
books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress, humankind had moved beyond war as an
instrument of policy, writers of not so serious novels drenched in platitudes
and hidden gabezo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing
words that man and woman had too much to do to denigrate themselves by crying
the warrior’s cry and the maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets,
musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos,
and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber
swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the
hells before touching the hair of another man, that come the war drums they
would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist,
Constructionist, Cubist, world and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes,
words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels.
And then the war
drums intensified and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out,
poets, artists, sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the
trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for….
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
Important Mumia Abu Jamal Update-Free Mumia
Some facts about the case from the PDC (2006):
An Open Letter to Mumia Abu-Jamal Supporters-A Personal Commentary (April 2008)
The Partisan Defense Committee has passed "An Open Letter to All Supporters of Mumia‘s Freedom" to this writer. Those few who might not know of the torturous legal battles to free this innocent man can find further information at the above-mentioned Partisan Defense site. I make my own comments below.
Normally I pass information about the case of political prisoner Mumia abu-Jamal on without much comment because the case speaks for itself. The case has been front and center in international labor defense struggles for over two decades. However, in light of the adverse ruling by a majority of a federal Third Circuit Court of Appeal panel in March 2008 that affirmed Mumia’s 1982 conviction for first-degree murder of a police officer and left the only issue for decision that of resentencing to either reinstate his original death sentence or keep him imprisoned for life without parole I have some things to say about this fight.
Occasionally, in the heat of political battle some fights ensue around strategy that after the smoke has cleared, upon reflection, leave one with more sorrow than anger. Not so today. Today I am mad. Am I mad about the irrational decision by the majority of the Third Circuit panel in Mumia’s case? Yes, but when one has seen enough of these cases over a lifetime then one realizes that, as the late sardonic comic and social commentator Lenny Bruce was fond of saying, in the Hall of Justice the only justice is in the halls.
What has got me steamed is the obvious bankruptcy of the strategy, if one can use this term, of centering Mumia’s case on the question of a new trial in order to get the ‘masses’- meaning basically parliamentary liberal types interested in supporting the case. This by people who allegedly KNOW better. The bankruptcy of this strategy, its effects on Mumia’s case and the bewildered response of those who pedaled it as good coin is detailed in the above-mentioned Open Letter. Read it.
Today, in reaction to the Third Circuit court’s decision, everyone and their brother and sister are now calling for Mumia’s freedom. At a point where he is between a rock and a hard place. However, it did not have to be that way. Mumia was innocent in 1982 and he did not stop being innocent at any point along this long road. Freedom for Mumia was (and is) the correct slogan in the case. A long line of political criminal cases, starting in this country with that of the Haymarket Martyrs if not before, confirms that simple wisdom. Those who consciously pedaled this weak ‘new trial’ strategy as a get rich quick scheme now have seen the chickens come home to roost. And Mumia pays the price.
I would point out two factors that made a ‘retrial’ strategy in the case of an innocent man particularly Pollyanna-ish for those honest militants who really believed that Mumia’s case was merely a matter of the American justice system being abused and therefore some court would rectify this situation if enough legal resources were in place. First, it is illusory that somehow, as exemplified in this case, a higher court system would remedy this egregious wrong. Long ago I remember a lawyer, I believe that it might have been the late radical lawyer Conrad Lynn no stranger to political defense work, telling a group of us doing defense work for the Black Panthers, that all these judges belong to the same union. They do not upset each other’s work except under extreme duress.
Second, and this is where the ‘wisdom’ of the reformists about reaching the ‘masses’ by a stagest theory of defense work (fight for retrial first, then freedom) turns in on them. As witness the list of names of those who have signed the Partisan Defense Committee’s call for Mumia’s freedom, excepting professional liberals and their hangers –on, those interested in Mumia’s case (or any leftwing political defense case) will sign on just as easily for freedom as retrial. Thus, opportunism does not pay, even in the short haul. That said, Free Mumia- say it loud, say it proud.
Click below to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site.
Commentary
The legendary social commentator and stand up comic Lenny Bruce, no stranger to the American ‘justice’ system himself, once reportedly said that in the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls. The truth of that statement came home on Thursday March 27, 2008 as a panel of the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals voted two to one to uphold Mumia’s conviction.
The only question left is that of resentencing- the death penalty or, perhaps worst, life in prison without parole. I have not yet read the decision but we are now a long way away from the possibility of a retrial-the narrow legal basis for even appealing in the legal system in the first place. Know this- in the end it will be in the streets and factories through the efforts of the international labor movement and other progressive forces that Mumia will be freed. That is the only way, have no illusions otherwise, whatever the next legal steps might be.
*****Some facts about the case from the PDC (2006):
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The Partisan Defense Committee has passed "An Open Letter to All Supporters of Mumia‘s Freedom" to this writer. Those few who might not know of the torturous legal battles to free this innocent man can find further information at the above-mentioned Partisan Defense site. I make my own comments below.
Normally I pass information about the case of political prisoner Mumia abu-Jamal on without much comment because the case speaks for itself. The case has been front and center in international labor defense struggles for over two decades. However, in light of the adverse ruling by a majority of a federal Third Circuit Court of Appeal panel in March 2008 that affirmed Mumia’s 1982 conviction for first-degree murder of a police officer and left the only issue for decision that of resentencing to either reinstate his original death sentence or keep him imprisoned for life without parole I have some things to say about this fight.
Occasionally, in the heat of political battle some fights ensue around strategy that after the smoke has cleared, upon reflection, leave one with more sorrow than anger. Not so today. Today I am mad. Am I mad about the irrational decision by the majority of the Third Circuit panel in Mumia’s case? Yes, but when one has seen enough of these cases over a lifetime then one realizes that, as the late sardonic comic and social commentator Lenny Bruce was fond of saying, in the Hall of Justice the only justice is in the halls.
What has got me steamed is the obvious bankruptcy of the strategy, if one can use this term, of centering Mumia’s case on the question of a new trial in order to get the ‘masses’- meaning basically parliamentary liberal types interested in supporting the case. This by people who allegedly KNOW better. The bankruptcy of this strategy, its effects on Mumia’s case and the bewildered response of those who pedaled it as good coin is detailed in the above-mentioned Open Letter. Read it.
Today, in reaction to the Third Circuit court’s decision, everyone and their brother and sister are now calling for Mumia’s freedom. At a point where he is between a rock and a hard place. However, it did not have to be that way. Mumia was innocent in 1982 and he did not stop being innocent at any point along this long road. Freedom for Mumia was (and is) the correct slogan in the case. A long line of political criminal cases, starting in this country with that of the Haymarket Martyrs if not before, confirms that simple wisdom. Those who consciously pedaled this weak ‘new trial’ strategy as a get rich quick scheme now have seen the chickens come home to roost. And Mumia pays the price.
I would point out two factors that made a ‘retrial’ strategy in the case of an innocent man particularly Pollyanna-ish for those honest militants who really believed that Mumia’s case was merely a matter of the American justice system being abused and therefore some court would rectify this situation if enough legal resources were in place. First, it is illusory that somehow, as exemplified in this case, a higher court system would remedy this egregious wrong. Long ago I remember a lawyer, I believe that it might have been the late radical lawyer Conrad Lynn no stranger to political defense work, telling a group of us doing defense work for the Black Panthers, that all these judges belong to the same union. They do not upset each other’s work except under extreme duress.
Second, and this is where the ‘wisdom’ of the reformists about reaching the ‘masses’ by a stagest theory of defense work (fight for retrial first, then freedom) turns in on them. As witness the list of names of those who have signed the Partisan Defense Committee’s call for Mumia’s freedom, excepting professional liberals and their hangers –on, those interested in Mumia’s case (or any leftwing political defense case) will sign on just as easily for freedom as retrial. Thus, opportunism does not pay, even in the short haul. That said, Free Mumia- say it loud, say it proud.
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