For Full Citizenship Rights For All Who Arrive On These Immigrant Populated Shores  

Encuentro 5 & Mesa sin Fronteras

p r e s e n t

Peña Latinoamericana Human Rights & International Migrants Day

When: Sat. Dec. 13 | 7:00 - 11:30 pm
Where: at e5 9 Hamilton Place, Boston, MA 02108

Refreshments Provided

$5 suggested donation.  No one turned away.

 Join us for a night of music, folklore, storytelling, arte y amor, the poetry of struggle bringing histories to life, and life to our circles of song. 

 A Peña is a gathering of musicians, artists, and friends who come to share their work and to play together. Peñas take historical root from Chilean social gatherings during the 60s and early 70s that expressed the spirit of creativity and resistance in melody, poems, and artwork. 

Please feel free to bring your own stories, songs, poems, or artwork to share.

www.encuentro5.org

About: Human rights are moral principles or norms[1] that describe certain standards of human behavior, and are regularly protected as legal rights in national and international law.[2] They are commonly understood as inalienable[3] fundamental rights "to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being,"[4] and which are "inherent in all human beings"[5] regardless of their nation, location, language, religion, ethnic origin or any other status.[3] They are applicable everywhere and at every time in the sense of being universal,[1] and they are egalitarian in the sense of being the same for everyone.[3] They require empathy and the rule of law[6] and impose an obligation on persons to respect the human rights of others.[1][3] They should not be taken away except as a result of due process based on specific circumstances,[3] and require freedom from unlawful imprisonment, torture, and execution.[7]

International Migrants Day is an international day observed on December 18 as International Migrants Day appointed by the General Assembly of United Nations on December 4, 2000 taking into account the large and increasing number of migrants in the world. On December 18, 1990, the General Assembly adopted the international convention on the protection of the rights of migrant workers and members of their families (resolution 45/158).[1]

This day is observed in many countries, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations through the dissemination of information on human rights and fundamental political freedoms of migrants, and through sharing of experiences and the design of actions to ensure the protection of migrants.’

Encuentro 5 & Mesa sin Fronteras

p r e s e n t a

 Peña LatinoamericanaDerechos Humanos & Dian Internacional del Migrante
Cuando: Sáb. Dec. 13 | 7:00 - 11:30 pm
Dónde: e5 9 Hamilton Place, Boston, MA 02108

 Habrá aperitivos

Donativo sugerido $5:00. Nadie será rechazado

Ven a compartir una noche de folklore, narrativa de arte y amor. La poesía de la lucha que traen las historias y vidas en los ciclos de la canción.

La Peña es un encuentro de músicos, artistas y amigos que vienen a compartir su trabajo y música juntos. Peñas surgieron a raíz de las de reuniones político-sociales chilenas durante los años 60 y principios de los 70 que expresan el espíritu de la creatividad y la resistencia en forma melódica, poemas y obras de arte.

Por favor, trae tus historias, canciones, poemas, obras de arte o para compartir con otros.

www.encuentro5.org

Tema: Los derechos humanos son principios o normas morales [1] que describen ciertas normas de comportamiento humano, y están protegidos regularmente como derechos legales en el derecho nacional e internacional. [2] Se entiende comúnmente como inalienables [3] derechos fundamentales "a la que una persona está intrínsecamente titulado simplemente porque él o ella es un ser humano ", [4] y que son" inherentes a todos los seres humanos "[5] con independencia de su nación, ubicación, idioma, religión, origen étnico o cualquier otra condición social. [3 ] son aplicables en todas partes y en todo tiempo en el sentido de ser universales, [1] y son igualitaria en el sentido de ser la misma para todos. [3] se requieren empatía y el estado de derecho [6] e imponer un obligación a las personas a respetar los derechos humanos de los demás. [1] [3] no deben ser quitados excepto como resultado del debido proceso basado en circunstancias específicas, [3] y exigir la libertad de encarcelamiento ilegal, tortura y ejecución. [7]
Día Internacional del Migrante es un día internacional observada el 18 de diciembre como el Día Internacional del Migrante designado por la Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas el 4 de diciembre 2000, teniendo en cuenta el elevado y creciente número de migrantes en el mundo. El 18 de diciembre de 1990, la Asamblea General aprobó la Convención Internacional sobre la protección de los derechos de los trabajadores migratorios y de sus familiares (resolución 45/158). [1]
Este día se observa en muchos países, las organizaciones intergubernamentales y no gubernamentales a través de la difusión de información sobre los derechos humanos y las libertades políticas fundamentales de los migrantes, y mediante el intercambio de experiencias y el diseño de acciones para garantizar la protección de los migrantes.

 

In Solidarity

-- 

Sandra Harris

sharris@tecschange.org

617-230-9332

Great minds discuss ideas;

average minds discuss events;

small minds discuss people.

On The Parliamentary Front Against The American Middle East Wars And Other Depredations

 

Dear friend,
Below is Congresswoman Katherine Clark's statement regarding the spending bill that passed in the U.S. House:

“This spending bill is a glaring example of the disconnect between priorities in Washington and the needs of families at home.

 

“The needs of our families didn’t make the cut, yet we are offering Wall Street and the ultra-wealthy another sweetheart deal. This bill fails to restore critical funding to education programs, transportation, and NIH research that was slashed under sequestration. Instead, it allows our hard-earned tax dollars to be the backstop for the risky Wall Street gambling that crippled our economy and cost millions of jobs. It also rewards the wealthiest Americans with exclusive political influence. This is a bad deal for families, our economy, and our future.

“One year ago tomorrow I was sworn in as a Member of Congress, and I told my colleagues that families in our district want to know that the issues they talk about around their kitchen tables are the issues we will talk about in Congress. Most of all, they want to know that because they work hard and play by the rules, they can have a fair shot. I continue to urge my colleagues to stop governing by crisis, stop the cynical posturing, and let’s get to work to create an economy that works for everyone.”

 

For questions regarding this bill or reach our office, please call 202-225-2836 or visit http://katherineclark.house.gov/

 

 

 

 

 

 

Free Chelsea Manning-President Obama Pardon Chelsea Now! 

 

Dear Friends, People are taking action in 10 cities across the world on and around Chelsea's birthday to demand her release.  Let us know if you are planning an event and we'll help publicise it. Power to the whistleblowers!  Free Chelsea Manning now! Payday and Queer Strike Force for change on transgender rights Chelsea Manning. A call for her release will be made in London on 17 December.  Thursday 11 December 2014 Martin Pengelly’s article (8 December) on the denial of Chelsea Manning’s transgender rights rightly argues that it has become a “cause celebre for transgender rights in the military and even worldwide”. Chelsea has become one of the world’s best-known whistleblowers. Not only the LGBTQ movement but also the anti-war, anti-racist, anti-rape and anti-zionist movements have organised actions in 10 cities so far – from Berlin to Vancouver, San Francisco and Istanbul – to mark Chelsea’s birthday on 17 December. Since we have all benefited from her whistleblowing, we have a responsibility to get her out. In London, we will stand at St Martin-in-the-Fields, 2.30 - 4pm to back her transgender rights and demand her release. All are welcome. Didi Rossi Queer Strike Ben Martin Payday Men’s Network
Happy Birthday! CHELSEA MANNING Free her now!
Wed 17 December 2014, 2.30-4pm VIGIL on the steps ofSt Martin-in-the-Fields Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 4JJ Charing Cross (St Martin’s requests that vigils on the steps are silent) Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Istanbul, London, Philadelphia, Rome, San Francisco, Venice, Vancouver. . . See details of actions here Chelsea Manning is 27 years old on this day.  Formerly known as Bradley, she is the transgender whistleblower, US soldier, Grand Marshal at San Francisco Pride 2014, who revealed US, UK and other governments’ war crimes and corruption.  She leaked hundred of thousands of documents to Wikileaks exposing the truth and therefore saving many lives.  Imprisoned in 2010 and held for months under torturous conditions, she was sentenced to 35 years in August 2013. Thanks to Chelsea's whistleblowing, we the public now know about: The “collateral murder” video of a US helicopter crew killing Iraqi civilians ● the cover-up of rape in Iraq & Afghanistan ● the secret use of drones for extra-judicial killing ● US dirty tricks in Haiti, Venezuela, Peru & elsewhere ● Egyptian and Palestinian Authority collusion with Israel’s bombing of Gaza . . . If the sentence stands, she’ll be out in 2045. We cannot let this happen – we have to get her out!
WHAT WE CAN DO Sign Amnesty International’s petition Write to Department of Defense officials Write to Chelsea Translate / circulate this message to your network
For more info: Chelsea Manning Support Network Payday men's network  www.refusingtokill.net US: 001 215 848 1120  UK: 020 7267 8698 Queer Strike    US: 001 415 626 4114  UK: 020 7482 2496

On The 50th Anniversary- Ollie's Restaurant Decision- Alabama Goddam 

Forced To Seat Blacks, Ala. Restaurant Complied With History

December 13, 2014 9:42 AM ET

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Andrew Yeager

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i i

Ollies Barbecue was a Birmingham, Ala., landmark where where white plumbers and electricians sat next to white doctors and bank presidents,” but in 1964, blacks weren't allowed to eat there. Courtesy Ollie McClung Jr. hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy Ollie McClung Jr.

Ollies Barbecue was a Birmingham, Ala., landmark where where white plumbers and electricians sat next to white doctors and bank presidents,” but in 1964, blacks weren't allowed to eat there.

Courtesy Ollie McClung Jr.

At Lena's, a diner in Birmingham, Ala., the cashier hands a customer a plastic bag with food which he carries out of the restaurant. There's nothing noteworthy about it now, but that action — taking out the meal — is a faint echo of the Jim Crow South.
Fifty years ago Sunday, the Supreme Court effectively ended segregation in restaurants. Before that ruling, restaurants were segregated, but some white establishments would serve black customers take-out.
Washington Booker, eating breakfast at Lena's, remembers the routine.

Code Switch

Why We Asked Experts To Annotate The Civil Rights Act

"Some restaurants would let you come in, go up to the counter and order," Booker says. "You had to have a certain kind of posture. You had to just stand there, couldn't just be looking around. And then, when your sandwich came, you took it and you left."
Booker grew up in Birmingham and was a teenager in the early '60s. He says the restrictions in restaurants and the downtown department store lunch counter stung.
"You may not remember all the other discrimination, but the fact that you couldn't go into Newberry's and sit at that counter and get you a banana split kind of bothered you," he says.
Congress banned such discrimination in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Many restaurants complied — but not all.
Ollie McClung Jr. remembers that time. He and his father owned a restaurant, Ollie's Barbecue, a Birmingham landmark founded by his grandfather. McClung says it was the kind of place where white plumbers and electricians sat next to white doctors and bank presidents. Bible verses hung on the walls. McClung says the staff could take on a lunch crowd that often stretched out the door.

ii

Ollie McClung Sr. hands religious tracts to employees. Most of Ollie's Barbecue's employees were black. Courtesy Ollie McClung Jr. hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy Ollie McClung Jr.

Ollie McClung Sr. hands religious tracts to employees. Most of Ollie's Barbecue's employees were black.

Courtesy Ollie McClung Jr.

"We had wonderful waitresses," McClung says. "Many of them were with us 30 and 40 years. They never wrote anything down. In fact, that was one of the highlights of people coming in the place."
The majority of Ollie's employees were black, and McClung says they had some regular black customers, but as was the norm when segregation was the law, they were only served take-out. When the Civil Rights Act went into effect, McClung and his dad were concerned that seating blacks would drive away white patrons. So they sued.
"Most people going to say the heart of the matter was the rights of black people," he says. "The real heart of the matter was, now wait a minute, the federal government can't come in and tell us what to do. We're a local business."
At the time, Southern politicians often used a states'-rights defense to justify segregation. A three-judge panel in Birmingham initially sided with the family, but on appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously against them. Southern politicians were up in arms about a decision they felt was unconstitutional.
"But I think amongst constitutional scholars there was simply, virtually no doubt whatsoever that the Congress had the power to do this," says Richard Cortner, a retired University of Arizona political science professor who wrote a book about the case.

ii

Ollie's sued the government for forcing it to desegregate, claiming local businesses should be free from federal interference. Fifty years ago Sunday, the Supreme Court disagreed. Courtesy Ollie McClung Jr. hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy Ollie McClung Jr.

Ollie's sued the government for forcing it to desegregate, claiming local businesses should be free from federal interference. Fifty years ago Sunday, the Supreme Court disagreed.

Courtesy Ollie McClung Jr.

Cortner says Ollie's Barbecue was a local business, but the court says Congress can regulate local actions that in aggregate would have an effect on interstate commerce.
McClung says he and his father were disappointed by the ruling. Fifty years later, he feels much the same.
"Whether to have or not have segregation, obviously that has changed, but the decision at the time, no," he says. "Still think they got it wrong."
But they obeyed the ruling. McClung says the day after the decision, a group of black civil rights leaders came into the restaurant.
"But my waitresses, the black ladies who were waitresses, they were kind of like stand-offish," he recalls. " 'I don't know about this,' you know. I said, 'Go ahead and serve them like anybody else.' "
He says integration didn't hurt the restaurant, nor did it really increase their black clientele. That doesn't surprise Nathan Turner Jr. He grew up nearby and doesn't remember any black people going there, even after the court case.
"Just the fact that Ollie's pushed it that far, to take it to the Supreme Court, it left a bad taste, pun intended, in the mouths of a lot of black people in Birmingham," Turner says.
McClung closed Ollie's Barbecue in 2001 and sold the sauce recipe. The sauce is still on grocery story shelves around Birmingham — a reminder of the battle for the chance to eat that barbecue on equal terms.

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Piketty's Big Data
by Rainer Rilling and Robert Misik Email: marc1seed (nospam) yahoo.com	17 Nov 2014
The empirical-historical analysis of the top incomes and their wealth are at the center with Thomas Piketty's "Capital" (2014). The share of the top 10% in income was never below 60% from 1917 to 2012. A wealth tax is vital to reverse the exploding inequality. The richest 400 Americans have more wealth than 150 million.
PIKETTY’S BIG DATA By Rainer Rilling [This article is translated from the German in the free Rosa Luxemburg book “Oh, Gott!” (2014) www.rosalux.de. Rainer Rilling is a sociologist and senior fellow at the Institute for Social Analysis of the Rosa Luxemburg foundation.] Unlike the left deconstruction of the distribution- and inequality question focused mostly on poverty, the empirical-historical analysis of the development of the top incomes and their wealth are in the center with Thomas Piketty’s Capital (2014). The international research group claims to have built the most comprehensive data collection on the historical income- and wealth research with the World Top Income Database (WTIP). Since the beginning of the last decade, it has published 22 country studies and 45 more are underway. The analyses refer back to tax data. From this, they draw conclusions on incomes (dividends, interests, rent etc) from capital. Other sources are cited so statements can be made about wealth development. The journal Science that devoted its May 2014 issue titled “Science of Inequality” to the “haves and have-nots” compared the WTID with the grail of the natural science data world, the Human Genome Project (HGP) decoding the human genom. Capital repeatedly hits the mark. All the studies and empirical findings in Capital (like the data base) are openly accessible on the Internet. If the HGP and the corollary projects open up a new dimension of commodification and new capital investment possibilities, this project of large-scale economic research is a case of public science that actually ends up as politicization, not commercialization. As there is a broad debate and the beginnings of a public sociology (above all in the US) on Michael Buraway’s initiative, the WTID and Piketty’s Capital give a critical scholarly impetus for shifting political relations. Piketty himself places his text in political economy, Capital’s big data from the last 250 years counters the habit of the rich and “their” sciences of making their wealth as invisible as possible. That is part of public political economy. Its empirical data brings a distribution-critical approach with the means of an empirical-historical analysis and also stands up to the first critical polemics (e.g. The Financial Times). For a long time, big data was hardly a field of conflict between the subordinate and the rich. This changed with Capital. “Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off” (Piketty 2014a, 577). THE NEW PERSPECTIVE From the treatment of his data, Piketty votes for a fundamental change of view on the history of inequality in capitalism. He formulates a counter-thesis to the “great fairy tale” (Piketty) of US economics about economic growth and income inequality told by the president of the American Economics Association, Simon Kuznets in 1953. According to this fairy tale, the growing inequality in the initial phase of capitalism was superseded by a perpetual era of increasing equality with the increasing industrialization. Against this, Piketty says: the expansion of income and assets inequality in capitalism is normality, not an exception. There are regions and periods of time when inequalities declined – in Europe in the period between 1914 and the beginning of the 1970s. The everyday consciousness and the leading scholarly conceptions were marked by this. The two great narratives of the “Age of Catastrophes” (up to 1945) and the following “Golden Age” (Hobsbawm) were hegemonial. Generations were marked by this integrative social narrative of capitalism’s promises of equality. However this is an exception for Piketty, not a new normality. Capitalism is a machine of growing inequality if it is not checked and ultimately stopped. THE TURN TO WEALTH ANALYSIS Piketty’s political motivation is coupled to a research interest that is different from the current approach of his guild. “I wanted to understand how wealth or super-wealth is working to increase the inequality gap. What I found […] is that the speed at which the inequality gap is growing is getting faster and faster. You have to ask what does this mean for ordinary people who are not billionaires and will never be billionaires. I think it means deterioration in the first instance of the economic well-being of the collective, in other words the degradation of the public sector […]. There is a fundamental belief among capitalists that capital will save the world and it just isn’t so” (Guardian 4/13/2014). Piketty, Anthony Barnes Atkinson, Gabriel Zucman, Emmanuel Saez and others diagnose a massively escalated concentration of income and wealth in the example of the US (and with the help of two dozen other countries). The share of the top ten percent in income from assets in the US was never below 60 percent between 1917 and 2012, continuously increased since 1987 and currently is at 75 percent. In Europe, it amounts to 65 percent. The share of the top one-percent rose from 25 to around 40 percent between 1978 and 2013; thus it increased more intensely. In the course of the last 30 years, more than 15 percent of US national income shifted from the bottom 90 percent of the population to the top 10%. The share of the richest (the top 0.01 percent, 16,000 households with over $100 million) in US wealth multiplied in the last 35 years (from 4 to 11 percent in 2013). The music plays there. (Boyer 2013). The wealth of the richest persons in the world grows three times as fast as the average income. The frequent reference to the rise of the middle classes in the BRIC-states or to global adjustments of the average incomes is not an argument against the enormous differences in wealth. “Theoretically in 30 to 40 years, a few rich could possess nearly all assets worldwide” (Piketty 2014b). PATRIMONIAL CAPITALISM Piketty emphasizes the growing significance of inherited wealth. The four members of the Walton family (Wal Mart) alone take the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th places on the Bloomberg list of the global rich and possess more inherited wealth than the lower 50 million families in the US. Inherited wealth already amounts to a third of the “Forbes 400.” In countries like France and Germany, the rise of the highest incomes and the increase of wealth through inheritance has become a key question again in the last quarter of a century. Already in 2010 inherited capital in France amounted to two-thirds of private capital. Inheritance policy and inheritance taxes becomes a central field of distribution- and justice-policy since capital from inheritances or capital under family- and clan control has become a central political actor today in a series of countries. Patrimonial capitalism casts a long shadow. CAPITAL IS BACK R > G What is the background of these developments? The top-medium of market radicalism – the British Economist - summarizes Piketty’s core thesis in the sentence: wealth grows faster than the whole economy. Piketty sees here “the fundamental force for divergence” (2014a, 25), a “principle destabilizing force” (ibid, 571) and even “the central contradiction of capitalism” (ibid). For a long time – in capitalism and before – the return on capital grew faster than the growth rate of income from labor and capital, that is value creation (g). Incomes and assets concentrate more and more at the top of the social pyramid. Piketty follows the widespread assumption that rising productivity through technological progress and increasing population growth is the real driving force of growth. Inequality increases with strongly growing returns on capital or declining growth (also population growth). Around half of the growth of the GDP in the last century referred back to population growth – a trend that ended for Piketty and Zucman (2014): “Capital is back because low growth is back.” The growing inequality goes back to the increase of income that flows into capital in the form of profits, rental incomes or interests seeking investment since only a small part is consumed. If the general growth rate declines, the growth of income from capital must also fall but more slowly. The income from capital is the great driver of inequality, not the movement of income from labor. The return on capital (r), the profit rate on tangible- and financial assets, was between four and five percent a year in the last 250 to 300 years compared to the growth from all income, the GDP (g) that increased between one and two percent a year in the rich countries. Piketty (2014a, 27) concludes: “The more perfect is the capital market (in the economist’s sense), the more likely r is to be greater than g.” What Piketty condenses to a formula (r > g) is cautiously described as a “probability” or “tendency” by his critics. In an interview (2014b), he emphasizes: “I do not claim the future cannot be different. A prediction about the coming decades is fraught with many uncertainties. Capital returns need not remain so high and economic growth can increase again and thereby reduce the inequality. But there is a risk that it will rise again and we must be aware of that.” He summarizes: “To sum up: the inequality r > g has clearly been true throughout most of human history right up to the eve of World War One and will probably be true again in the 21st century. Its truth depends however on the shocks to which capital is subject as well as on what public policies and institutions are put in place to regulate the relationship between capital and labor” (2014a, 358). NO END OF THE GREAT DIVERGENCE? Piketty describes the possible consequences of this development of a new great divergence as “terrifying.” A permanently lower growth rate can be expected, a clearly lower growth rate of the population of one percent (reducing the supply of workers) and a constant technological progress despite robot capitalism. A return of the time before the First World War looms if the return on capital r remains at a rate between four and five percent – thus no shocks , no catastrophes, no capital devaluation on a large scale, no environmental collapse, no political intervention toward a great transformation (and thus no squeeze!) and growth at around 1.5 percent. Piketty: »I have used the demographic and economic growth predictions [...] according to which global output will gradually decline from the current 3 percent a year to just 1.5 percent in the second half of the twenty-first century. I also assume that the savings rate will stabilize at about 10 percent in the long run. With these assumptions, the [...] global capital/income ratio will quite logically continue to rise and could approach 700 percent before the end of the twenty- first century, or approximately the level observed in Europe from the eighteenth century to the Belle Époque. In other words, by 2100, the entire planet could look like Europe at the turn of the twentieth century« (ebd., 195). Is Richistan, a land of courtiers, toadies, flatterers and family dynasties the land of the future? Hardly. Rather a Richistan 2.0 of a gated capitalism where markets and financialization allow and demand a historically unparalleled generalization of inequality, power and subordination appears so fussy compared to the Victorian-Wilhelminish Downton-Abbey time as the British TV station presents to us so wonderfully in its soap about the decaying parallel societies of the British low nobility. OUTBREAK, ERUPTION AND POLITICAL RADICALISM With his demand for clear and permanent global taxation of the highest incomes and mammoth assets, Piketty is not afraid of political radicalism forced by his historical view of the disastrous future of present capitalism. Political radicalism is on the agenda more urgently than ever with and after Piketty. With new emphasis, Capital dramatizes a global problem situation that will be intensified and not solved (according to his argumentation) through the further course of things. The central moment of wealth breaks out with a great dynamic from the many axes of the conditions of inequality…. Suddenly time becomes short. Parallels to climate policy suggest themselves. The release and deregulation of the wealth machine in the neoliberal age has limits, if one believes Piketty. The time period available for a solid contra-intervention is limited. The direction in which it must go is unavoidable. A long period of the transformation from r > g into r < g must be introduced that aims at reorganization of the wealth matrix. Intervention in distribution-, property- and power-relations is central. The field of actors demanded here goes far beyond the classical left. A detailed German version of this text under the title “Die Ungleichheitsmaschine” was published on Telepolis (www.heise.de/tp). LESS INEQUALITY WOULD BE GOOD FOR EVERYONE On the German edition of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” By Robert Misik [This article published on October 13, 2014 in Neues Deutschland is translated abridged from the German on the Internet, http://www.misik.at.] When a book is a big hit like Thomas Piketty’s monumental “Capital in the 21st Century,” that is mostly due to its effect on the world, not only on its quality. This book will “change economics,” so Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman praised the work. Summarizing Piketty’s study in a lively way, we could say: it shows that inequality grows and “injustice” increases in capitalism (and in an intensified way in the past thirty years) and secondly this contributes to a growing instability of the system. Inequality is not necessarily identical with injustice. What form of distribution is “just” is always controversial… When lunch is distributed unequally, that can be just and needs justifications like: papa receives more because he works so hard or the child is given more because he must grow. Unequal distribution can be regarded as “just”… Everyone lives according to his or her preferences… Market distribution is the result of a subjectless mechanism, not an allocation (no one distributes the layer cake). This is like happiness and chance. When one wins in the lotto and others do not win, that is not unjust. It would only be unjust if a minister determines who wins and who loses in the lotto. From this perspective, market results are always “just.” It could be objected the market economy is a “power economy,” not a market economy in this sense. Whoever has will be given. Whoever has economic power determines the rules of the game… More equal distribution (even if not absolutely totally equal distribution) would also be more just. The neoclassical economic theory would protest that no one would have anything from such justice. Administrative redistribution from top to bottom makes the economy as a whole less prosperous and everyone could have less at the end. There would be less inequality but on a lower level. If that comes true, justice would be just but would prove counter-productive. The point of Piketty’s study and the analyses of others (Krugman, Stiglitz and the “neo-Keynesian” school) is that more equality would not only be more just but also economically useful. A more egalitarian distribution stabilizes the economy, even under the conditions of a capitalist market economy. It strengthens domestic demand and leads to more stable growth so more people can make something of their lives and develop their talents (which leads to higher productivity). It increases work satisfaction and so on. Crass unequal distribution does not only lead to lower growth (and lower profit chances in the real economy). It also results in excess in wealth and indebtedness, the hunt for speculative profits and therefore makes financial crisis more likely. But this is not the end of the song. Many sociological studies in the last years have documented that the general life satisfaction of nearly all citizens is greater in more equal societies. Very colloquially, everyone is happier in egalitarian societies. Everyone – even the rich – is unhappier in unequal societies. In his book “The Happy Society,” Richard Layard stresses “that people are not happier today than 50 years ago – even though the real average income has more than doubled in this time period.” When the wealth of a society grows – that is the per capita national income – and also the inequality, people are often more unhappy. Then a “status race” starts and we feel a great need to keep pace with others.” In their path-breaking work “Equality is Happiness,” Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett showed with an abundance of facts from 200 international data banks that people on average are unhappier in societies with gross inequalities. In these societies, the rich are happier than the poor but persons in every income segment are unhappier than in more egalitarian societies. Thus the richest are in no way especially happy in societies that are sharply split in rich and poor. Quite the contrary! In short, egoism is uncomfortable for the egoists. The authors rely on soft parameters like “subjective life satisfaction” and on hard quality of life parameters like life expectancy, risk of sickness, mental problems, violent criminality, obesity, teenage pregnancies, social mobility etc. Inequality puts everyone under stress with those on the lower rungs of the social ladder paying by far the highest price. Degraded existence, the underprivileged, material privation, disturbed social relations, cultural dependence and disrespectfulness – all this is rampant in societies with crass and growing inequalities. When the winners want to make us believe inequality is functional for well-being or prosperity because it rewards achievement, they gladly ignore the costs for society. Whoever is on the bottom in society with intensified status competition feels humiliated. Degraded and dependent existence makes people mentally ill. The social state guarantee of the existential minimum can not really change much. Whoever is on the bottom is harassed daily, exposed to disrespectfulness, a target of continual sicknesses, stamped a loser and becomes a victim. This means he or she has no subject status any more and is only an object of social work management. Societies rot from within when many people are exposed to daily humiliations.
See also: http://www.freembtranslations.net http://www.nextnewdeal.net

Inequality and Liberal Democracy: A Disturbing Association
by Walden Bello	01 Dec 2014
How do we bring fundamental reforms about at a time when organized minorities and disorganized, quiescent majorities appear to be the norm in both the North and the South?
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The evidence from Thomas Piketty, the United Nations, and other sources is quite conclusive that we now have rates of inequality in the North and globally that are unprecedented. Neoliberal policies that have reigned since the 1980s, in the form of Reaganism and the Third Way in the North, and in the shape of IMF-imposed structural adjustment and WTO-compliant trade liberalization in the South, have been responsible for this bleak situation. In his celebrated book Capital in the 21st Century, Piketty says that, in fact, things are likely to become even worse: If the top thousandth enjoy a 6 per cent rate of return on their wealth, while average global wealth grows only at 2 per cent a year, then after thirty years the top thousandth’s share of global capital will have more than tripled. The top thousandth would then own 60 per cent of global wealth… The dynamics of contemporary capital accumulation, he warns, “can lead to excessive and lasting concentration of capital: no matter how justified inequalities of wealth may be initially, fortunes can grow and perpetuate themselves beyond all reasonable limits and beyond any possible rational justification in terms of social utility.” Piketty’s data show that since the eighteenth century, when capitalist growth took off, rising inequality has been the norm. This was broken only in the first seven decades of the 20th century. From what appeared to be the evidence of the first half of the 20th century, the economist Simon Kuznets came out with the theory that as capitalism matured, inequalities would decrease, which he illustrated with the famous “Kuznets Curve.” Piketty says, however, that the Kuznets Curve is an invalid extrapolation of a theory beyond a period that was marked by exceptional circumstances: what he calls “exogenous events” like two global wars and the domestic upheavals they produced led to political and social arrangements that temporarily reversed capitalism’s natural dynamic towards inequality. As he writes, “The sharp reduction in income inequality that we observe in almost all the rich countries between 1914 and 1945 was due above all to the world wars and the violent economic and political shocks they entailed. It had It had little to do with the tranquil process of intersectoral mobility…” Liberal Democracy on Trial As a member of parliament and long-time pro-democracy activist, I find Piketty’s remarks unsettling, for one of the things he seems to be saying, implicitly, is that democratic regimes, which are supposed to aim at promoting equality among citizens, don’t really work when it comes to containing economic inequality. That is, the natural dynamics of democracy cannot be relied on to contain inequality. They, of course, enshrine formal equality, run on the principles of one person, one vote, and institutionalize majority rule, but they are ineffective when it comes to bringing about greater economic equality. Now my generation came of age in the Third World fighting to oust dictatorships and bringing about democracy from the 1970’s to the 1990’s. As people who participated in these anti-dictatorship struggles, one of our potent arguments against authoritarianism was that it promoted concentration of income in dictatorial cliques allied with transnational capital. We said that democracy would reverse this process of impoverishment and inequality. From Chile to Brazil to South Korea to the Philippines, fighting against the dictatorship was a fight for both democratic choice and greater equality. Yet the evidence now seems clear that what Samuel Huntington called the “Third Wave” of the spread of democracy in the South in the 1980s and 1990s went hand in hand with the spread and consolidation of inequality-creating structural adjustment policies. How Liberal Democracy Promotes Inequality: The Philippine Case The way that negative social outcomes are generated by liberal democratic process is illustrated by the land reform struggle in the Philippines, in which I have been an active participant both as an activist and a legislator in the 28 years since we overthrew the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. Land reform is probably the single most important factor in sharply reducing inequality during the process of development, as shown in the case of Taiwan, China, South Korea, Japan, and Cuba. In the Philippines, at first, things appeared to be headed in the right direction. With the ouster of Marcos in 1986, not only was a constitutional democracy set up, but a sweeping land reform law, the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) was passed that was designed to give millions of peasants title to their land. Redistribution would be accomplished peacefully under democratic governance, in contrast to the coercive programs in China, Vietnam, and Cuba. Over the next few years, however, the country evolved as a classical or western-style liberal democracy, where competitive elections became a mechanism whereby members of the elite fought one another for the privilege of ruling while consolidating their control of the political system as a class. One of the victims of this congealing of landed class power was CARP. With the combination of coercion, legal obstructionism, and permissible conversion of land from agricultural to commercial and industrial purposes, the agrarian reform process stalled, with less than half of original 10 million hectares designated for distribution actually distributed to peasants by 2008, 20 years after the beginning of the program. Indeed, with little support in terms of social services, many peasants ended up reselling their lands informally to the landlords, while other beneficiaries lost their recently acquired lands to aggressive legal action by landowners. It is at this juncture that I and several other parliamentarians got together to sponsor the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program Extension with Reforms Law, or CARPER. It was a hell of a time we had getting this passed, but we did it in August 2009. What made the difference were peasant strikes, marches--including a 1700 km march from the southern island of Mindanao to the presidential palace in Manila--and even efforts to disrupt congressional sessions. CARPER plugged many of the loopholes of the original CARP, and allocated P150 billion (some $3.3 billion) to support land redistribution as well as support services, like subsidies for seed and fertilizer as well as agricultural extension services. Support services had been singularly lacking under the original CARP. Most important of all, CARPER mandated that the distribution of all remaining land had to be done by June 30, 2014. My party Akbayan (Citizens’ Action Party) joined the new Aquino administration as a coalition partner after the elections of May 2010, partly because we felt that the administration would put an emphasis on completing agrarian reform via CARPER. Despite our monitoring and constant pushing, the process of land acquisition and distribution proceeded at a snail’s pace. Landlord resistance using loopholes in the agrarian reform law and other legal mechanisms, bureaucratic inertia on the part of the Department of Agrarian Reform, and nonchalance on the part of the president combined to create a situation whereby, by the time the mandated period for land acquisition and distribution ended on June 30 this year, over 550,000 hectares of land remained undistributed, with 450,000 of them being private lands, indeed the best lands in the country. Since this core of elite landholdings had not been touched and most of the private land that had been distributed had not been subject to compulsory acquisition, the agrarian reform secretary was forced to admit in hearings last year that in all of the last 25 years, agrarian reform had not undergone its acid test. With the awful implementation of a law that I was one of the sponsors of, I tried one last time a few weeks ago to salvage it by having the president dismiss his timid Secretary of Agrarian Reform. He refused. The president, Benigno Aquino III, is a scion of one of the most wealthy landed clans in the country. Now, even as the landed elite was relying on the mechanisms of liberal democracy to subvert agrarian reform, it was also through liberal democracy that foreign powers like the US, International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank sought to fashion our economy along neoliberal lines. It was not a dictatorship but a democratically elected Congress that passed the automatic appropriations law that allowed foreign creditors to have the first cut of the government budget. It was not a dictatorship but a democratically elected government that brought down our tariffs to less than five percent, thus wiping most of our manufacturing capacity. It was not a dictatorship but a democratically elected leadership that brought us into the World Trade Organization and opened our agricultural market to the unrestrained entry of foreign commodities that has led to an erosion of our food security. Today, a thriving electoral politics, where elites fight it out with money and other resources, coexists with a situation where at 27.9 per cent, the rate of poverty remains unchanged from the early 1990’s. True, the last three years have shown relatively high GDP growth rates of 5-7.5 per cent, but all studies show that the rate of inequality in the Philippines remains among the highest in Asia, underlining the fact that the fruits of growth continue to be appropriated by the top stratum of the population. Liberal Democracy: Neoliberal Capitalism’s Natural Political Regime? The experience of the Philippines is very much like that undergone by other developing countries over the last 30 years, so that ironically, the liberal democracy we fought for also became the system for our subjugation to local elites and foreign powers. Argentina, Peru, Jamaica, Mexico, Ghana, Brazil: these are some of the scores of democratic or democratizing polities that implemented inequality-generating structural adjustment programs. Even more than dictatorships, Washington- or Westminster-type democracies are, we are forced to conclude, the natural system of governance of neoliberal capitalism cum landlordism, for they promote rather than restrain the savage forces of capital accumulation that lead to ever greater and greater levels of inequality and poverty. In fact, liberal democratic systems are ideal for the economic elites, for they are programmed with periodic electoral exercises that promote the illusion of equality, thus granting the system an aura of legitimacy, while subverting equality in practice, through money politics, the law, and the workings of the market. The old Marxist term “bourgeois democracy” is still the best description for this democratic regime. To reverse the process requires not just an alternative economic program based on justice, equity, and ecological stability but a new democratic regime to replace the liberal democratic regime that has become so vulnerable to elite and foreign capture. As for the social democratic or welfare state variant of democracy, it is questionable how useful it is as a model since its safeguards against gross inequality have been swept away by the neoliberal counterrevolution in most of the countries where it came into being after the Second World War. Towards a New Democracy What might be some of the features of this new democracy? First of all, representative institutions must be balanced by the formation of institutions of direct democracy. Secondly, civil society must organize itself politically to act as a counterpoint and check to the dominant state institutions. Third, citizens must keep in readiness a parliament of the streets or “people power” that can be brought at critical points to bear on the decision-making process: a system, if you will, of parallel power. People power must be institutionalized for periodic intervention, not abandoned once the insurrection has banished the old regime. Fourth, citizen socialization must move away from the idealization of liberal democratic forms and towards bringing people to participate in the formulation of new, more participatory democratic arrangements. Likewise, equality, in the radical French Revolution sense of the term, not simply in terms of the bourgeois notion of equality of opportunity, must be brought back to center stage. Fifth, unlike in liberal democracy, when most people participate in decision-making only during elections, under the new democratic regime, political participation would become a constant activity, with people being formed into active citizens instead of passive political actors in the process. “Exogenous” Events as Triggers of Change The question is, how do we bring such fundamental reforms about at a time when organized minorities and disorganized, quiescent majorities appear to be the norm in both the North and the South? Will the democratic reforms I have enumerated be “triggered” mainly by what Piketty calls “exogenous events”? Noting that “the long term dynamics of the wealth distribution are potentially terrifying,” he asks whether the only solution might lie in violent reactions or radical shocks, like the wars and the social revolutions they triggered during the first half of the 20th century. Perhaps we are now in for those radical shocks. Perhaps current developments in Iraq and Syria are not marginal events but explosions that will sooner or later also occur in other regions, including the North. When the political explosions occasioned by inequality and the search for identity are combined with what many foresee as the turbulent social consequences of the climate apocalypse, then perhaps we are not too far away from the unfolding of events such as those that marked the period 1914-45. Change, to quote one famous figure from the 20th century, is not a cocktail party. It is a raging bull in a China shop. ______________________ Walden Bello is a Filipino author, academic, and political analyst who currently serves in the Philippine Congress. He is a professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines Diliman, as well as executive director of Focus on the Global South. In 2003, Bello was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, whose website describes him as "one of the leading critics of the current model of economic globalization, combining the roles of intellectual and activist." Bello is also a fellow of the Transnational Institute (based in Amsterdam), and is a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus. In March 2008 he was named Outstanding Public Scholar for 2008 by the International Studies Association.

No Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- You Have Got That Right Brothers and Sisters-Speaking Truth To Power

Thousands Protest Again In Boston Against Police Violence
by Michael Borkson Email: nosanctions (nospam) yahoo.com	13 Dec 2014
12.13.2014 Boston, Mass.: There was another huge protest against police violence today as part of a nation-wide call to action.
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Hundreds gathered in front of the State House, soon turning into thousands marching through downtown Boston to the Boston Nashua Street jail, where prisoners saw the protest outside and banged on their windows in a show of support. There was a brief sit-in near the jail because police wouldn't let the march proceed - then the police allowed the march to proceed to the jail. Boston.com reported 23 arrests near the I-93 on ramp leading to the jail Then the march proceeded back to Boston Common. Here are links to video and photos I took-- video(5 min.): http://youtu.be/tvjE6UDuPp0 more photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/protestphotos1/sets/72157649750843135/
Click on image for a larger version Thousands Protest In Boston Against Police Violence
Click on image for a larger version Thousands Protest In Boston Against Police Violence
Click on image for a larger version Thousands Protest In Boston Against Police Violence
Click on image for a larger version Thousands Protest In Boston Against Police Violence
Click on image for a larger version Thousands Protest In Boston Against Police Violence

No Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- You Have Got That Right Brothers and Sisters-Speaking Truth To Power

Thousands March Around Country Protesting Against Police Violence

• Thousands March Around Country Protesting Against Police Violence

Marchers by the thousands hit the streets chanting "I can't breathe!" and "Hands up, don't shoot!" to protest police violence against black men.

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  Olivier Douliery / Abaca

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  More than 40,000 Americans rally during a national march against police violence on Dec. 13, 2014 in Washington D.C. The families of more than a half-dozen black men and boys who have been killed by police addressed the protesters demanding Congress adequately tackle police brutality. less
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  Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

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  Kadiatou Diallo, mother of Amadou Diallo; Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin; Samaira Rice, the mother of Tamir Rice; and Lesley McSpadden, the mother of Michael Brown Jr. raise their hands in the air during the "Justice For All" march and rally through the nation's capital. less
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  Eduardo Munoz / Reuters

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  People shout slogans against police as they take part in a march against police violence, in New York. Organizers said the event and the parallel march in Washington D.C. would rank among the largest in the recent wave of protests against the killings of black males by officers in Ferguson, Missouri, New York, Cleveland and elsewhere.