Join the Boot the Braids Challenge on social media as the 4 for Fair Food Tour leaves TODAY!
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Saturday, March 02, 2019
Join the Boot the Braids Challenge on social media as the 4 for Fair Food Tour leaves TODAY! Coalition of Immokalee Workers
Send a message now to your representative in Congress telling them to add their name to Rep. Cicilline’s legislation prohibiting the President from sending U.S. troops to Venezuela.
H.R.1004 – “To prohibit the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities with respect to Venezuela, and for other purposes.” – has 33 cosponsors (all but one Democrats) and includes McGovern, Pressley, Keating and Moulton from Massachusetts
Senator Introduces Resolution [SJRes 11] to Prevent Military Intervention in Venezuela Without Explicit Congressional Authorization
Following repeated hints from the Trump Administration that it is considering a military intervention in Venezuela, Oregon’s Senator Jeff Merkley today introduced a Senate resolution that would prohibit military action in Venezuela without explicit congressional approval. Merkley is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and serves as the top Democrat on the Subcommittee on Multilateral Institutions. “It’s critical that the Venezuelan people are the ones to determine their own future, and that the U.S. does not repeat a failed strategy of military intervention in Latin America,” said Merkley“ More
US sanctions are killing Venezuelans, says former UN rapporteur
Former special rapporteur Alfred de Zayas, who finished his term at the UN in March, has criticized the US for engaging in “economic warfare” against Venezuela which he said is hurting the economy and killing Venezuelans… Despite being the first UN official to visit and report from Venezuela in 21 years, Mr de Zayas said his research into the causes of the country’s economic crisis has so far largely been ignored by the UN and the media, and caused little debate within the Human Rights Council… In his report, Mr de Zayas expressed concern that those calling the situation a “humanitarian crisis” are trying to justify regime change and that human rights are being “weaponised” to discredit the government and make violent overthrow more “palatable”. More
NOTES FROM THE STREETS OF VENEZUELA:
The People Are Resilient in the Face of Foreign Intervention
Hyper-inflation is depressing. But, the poor in places like Kaikachi benefit from subsidized flour for the bakery and subsidized food for the kitchen. The distribution of food is not perfect, but it saves people from the worst impact of the collapse of the oil prices and the U.S. sanctions… In front of Kaikachi is a middle-class apartment building. Sometimes Mariela says that people from that building throw trash and bottles into Kaikachi. “They want us to be evicted,” she says. If the Bolivarian government falls, Mariela points out, a government of the oligarchy will take the side of those residents. They will revoke any title that the 92 families have to the land. They will hand it over to a landlord, who will raise the rents and squeeze the poor. Right now, Mariela says, Venezuela faces an economic war from the United States and its allies. If the government in Caracas falls, she says, Kaikachi will face its own embargo from the government of the oligarchy, from the middle-class neighbors and—most of all—from the landlords. Their dreams of a better life will end. More
PUBLIC STATEMENT REGARDING BOSTON CITY COUNCIL IMMEDIATE RELEASE MARCH 1, 2019
PUBLIC STATEMENT REGARDING BOSTON CITY COUNCIL
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VFP Takes Action Against U.S. Coup in Venezuela
VFP Takes Action Against U.S. Coup in Venezuela
Thanks to all the VFP members and chapters who organized and participated in many actions last weekend against the attempted U.S. coup in Venezuela. Your participation made a real difference.
The regime change campaign seems to have suffered a setback after failing to push the U.S. Trojan Horse of “humanitarian aid” into Venezuela and failing to win over the Venezuelan military. The U.S. has been plotting for years, however, to overthrow the socialist government of Venezuela. Those efforts will continue and so must our vigilance.
Veterans For Peace has endorsed national antiwar marches in Washington, DC (and Los Angeles) on Saturday, March 16; in Washington DC (and Oakland) on March 30; and in Washington, DC, April 3-4 (NATO meeting). VFP members are encouraged to participate in all of these actions, and/or to organize your own.
Hands Off Venezuela!
From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-The Revolutionary Heritage Of Rosa Luxemburg- The Rose Of The Revolution
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for Rosa Luxemburg-the "Rose Of The Revolution".
March Is Women's History Month
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Sprong 1982 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest- for old "new leftists", perhaps. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.
*******
The Revolutionary Heritage of Rosa Luxemburg
The present situation in Poland cries out for a revolutionary proletarian leadership to cut through the disastrous polarization between a particularly vile and utterly discredited Stalinist bureaucracy and the counterrevolutionary nationalist/clericalist Solidarity "trade union" which lines up with U.S. imperial¬ism's bloodthirsty drive to "roll back Communism" throughout the world. The Trotskyist vanguard which must be forged to defend and extend socialized property in Poland will build on the strong traditions of Polish socialism—the party Proletariat, the SDKPiL, the early Polish Communist Party, ruthlessly purged and finally dissolved by Stalin, and above all the revolutionary heritage of Rosa Luxemburg.
It is striking that all sides in the Polish crisis are united in their silence on Rosa Luxemburg, the greatest proletarian revolutionist in Polish history. Certainly the Stalinist usurpers cannot claim Luxemburg; they have had to obscure and slander her revolutionary example for decades.
Still less will Luxemburg, a woman, a Jew and a communist, find defenders among the fans of Solidarity, a "movement" which embraces virulent anti-Semites and ultra-reactionaries. Solidarity program is openly counterrevolutionary—for private ownership of the land, a bourgeois parliament, a dominant role for the Catholic church in government, for turning the nationalized Polish economy over to the International Monetary Fund, the bankers cartel that starves the Chilean masses. That Solidarity', which openly spurns even the word "socialist," disdains Luxemburg and all she stands for, is fully appropriate.
The social-democratic "left" outside Poland embraces Solidarity and wants therefore to separate itself from Luxemburg. At a February 7 forum in Boston, a Socialist Workers Party (SWP) spokesman solidarized wfth Polish "dissident" Marta Petrusewicz when the latter stated, "The problem with Rosa Luxemburg in Polish minds was that Rosa Luxemburg considered... that the existence of the Polish national being was not an important problem for Polish workers."
It is true that Luxemburg incorrectly opposed the right of Poland to national self-determination, for which Lenin took her to task, pointing out that socialists must support this basic democratic right in order to take it off the agenda and expose the underlying class conflicts which national oppression masks. Her error in his eyes lay in not taking the national question sufficiently into account, thereby rendering more difficult the exposure of nationalism as a mortal enemy of the proletariat. Needless to say it is the height of hypocrisy for the SWP and kindred anti-communists to manipulate Lenin's criticisms of Luxemburg in order to make common cause with the deadly enemies of Leninism, the Pilsudskiite reactionaries who hate everything that Lenin and Luxemburg stood for.
Despite errors on the national question (and other questions), Luxemburg was a communist and in Lenin's phrase "an eagle." Leon Trotsky summed up her historic role with these words:
"We can, with full justification, place our work for the Fourth International under the sign of the'three L's,'that is, not only under the sign of Lenin, but also of Luxemburg and Liebknecht."
—"Luxemburg and the Fourth International," New International, August 1935
The Polish proletariat must recover its revolutionary heritage, the socialist heritage of Rosa Luxemburg, hated by the counterrevolutionaries (and feared by the Stalinists) as a revolutionary leader and martyr. We are reprinting below excerpts from some of Luxemburg's works, which with every word breathe a spirit of militant proletarian internationalism. The first selection, from "The Crisis of Social Democracy" (better known as the "Junius Pamphlet," from her penname), written in prison and published in 1916, indeed "saved the honor of the German proletariat" by condemning the German Social Democratic Party's (SPD) historic betrayal in supporting its "own" bourgeoisie in the first imperialist World War. We reprint also an excerpt from Luxemburg's "Socialism and the Churches" (first published in Cracow in 1905 under the penname "Jozef Chmura") because of its almost eerily appropriate condemnation of attempts by the Catholic church to mislead the workers.
We include the last part of her final work, "Order Reigns in Berlin," written when she and Liebknecht were already in hiding during the bloody of the 1919 Spartakus uprising by the Social Democratic hangmen of the German revolution, Scheidemann and Noske. Luxemburg had opposed the uprising as premature; nonetheless she and Liebknecht took their place in the struggle alongside the best of the German proletariat. Finally, we include as well Karl Liebknecht's final rallying cry, "Trotz Alledem" (In Spite of All). The latter two items are taken from J.P. Nettl's biography Rosa Luxemburg, the former two from Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder Press, 1970.
-from the Junius Pamphlet" (1916)
In refuting the existence of the class struggle, the social democracy has denied the very basis of its own existence. What is the very breath of its body, if not the class struggle? What role could it expect to play in the war, once having sacrificed the class struggle, the fundamental principle of its existence? The social democracy has destroyed its mission Its only mission now is to play the role of the gendarme over the working class under a state of military rule… The leaders of the social democracy are convinced that democratic liberties for the working class will come as a reward for its allegiance to the fatherland. But never in the history of the world has an oppressed class received political rights as a reward for service rendered to the ruling classes....
The war has smashed the Second International. Its inadequacy has been demonstrated by its incapacity to place an effective obstacle in the way of the segmentation of its forces behind national boundaries in time of war, and to carry through a common tactic and action by the proletariat in all countries.
In view of the betrayal, by the official representatives of the socialist parties in the principal countries, of the aims and interests of the working class; in view of their passage from the camp of the working-class International to the political camp of the imperialist bourgeoisie; it is vitally necessary for socialism to build a new workers' International, which will take into its own hands the leadership and coordination of the revolutionary class struggle against world imperialism.
To accomplish its historic mission, socialism must be guided by the following principles:
The class struggle against the ruling classes within the boundaries of the bourgeois states, and international solidarity of the workers of all countries, are the two rules of life, inherent in the working class in struggle and of world-historic importance to it for its emancipation. There is no socialism without international proletarian solidarity, and there is no socialism without class struggle. The renunciation by the socialist proletariat, in time of peace as in time of war, of the class struggle and of international solidarity, is equivalent to suicide....
The immediate mission of socialism is the spiritual liberation of the proletariat from the tutelage of the bourgeoisie, which expresses itself through the influence of nationalist ideology. The national sections must agitate in the parliaments and the press, denouncing the empty wordiness of nationalism as an instrument of bourgeois domination. The sole defense of all real national independence is at present the revolutionary class struggle against imperialism. The workers' fatherland, to the defense of which all else must be subordinated, is the socialist International.
— from "Socialism and the Churches" (1905)
The clergy has at its disposal two means to fight social democracy. Where the working-class movement is beginning to win recognition, as is the case in our country (Poland), where the possessing classes still hope to crush it, the clergy fights the socialists by threatening sermons, slandering them and condemning the "covetousness" of the workers. But in the countries where political liberties are established and the workers' party is powerful, as for example in Germany, France, and Holland, there the clergy seeks other means. It hides its real purpose and does not face the workers any more as an open enemy, but as a false friend. Thus you will see the priests organizing the workers and founding "Christian" trade unions. In this way they try to catch the fish in their net, to attract the workers into the trap of these false trade unions, where they teach humility, unlike the organizations of the social democracy which have in view struggle and defense against maltreatment.
When the czarist government finally falls under the blows of the revolutionary proletariat of Poland and Russia, and when political liberty exists in our country, then we shall see the same Archbishop Popiel and the same ecclesiastics who today thunder against the militants, suddenly beginning to organize the workers into "Christian" and "national" associations in order to mislead them. Already we are at the beginning of this underground activity of the "national democracy" which assures the future collaboration with the priests and today helps them to slander the social democrats.
The workers must, therefore, be warned of the danger so that they will not let themselves be taken in, on the morrow of the victory of the revolution, by the honeyed words of those who today from the height of the pulpit, dare to defend the czarist government, which kills the workers, and the repressive apparatus of capital, which is the principal cause of the poverty of the proletariat.
In order to defend themselves against the antagonism of the clergy at the present time, during the revolution, and against their false friendship tomorrow, after the revolution, it is necessary for the workers to organize themselves in the Social Democratic Party.
And here is the answer to all the attacks of the clergy: The social democracy in no way fights against religious beliefs. On the contrary, it demands complete freedom of conscience for every individual and the widest possible toleration for every faith and every opinion. But, from the moment when the priests use the pulpit as a means of political struggle against the working class, the workers must fight against the enemies of their rights and their liberation. For he who defends the exploiters and who helps to prolong this present regime of misery is the mortal enemy of the proletariat, whether he be in a cassock or in the uniform of the police.
*****
— from "Order Reigns in Berlin" (1919)
It was a matter of honour for the revolution to ward off this attack with all its energy, if the counterrevolution was not to be encouraged to further efforts— The revolutions so far have brought us nothing but defeat, but these inevitable defeats are themselves one stepping-stone on top of another to the final victory....
But the leadership has failed. None the less, the leadership can and must be rebuilt by the masses out of the masses… The masses were up to the mark, they have forged this defeat into the chain of those historical battles which are themselves the strength and pride of international Socialism. And that is why a future victory will blossom from this "defeat."
"Order rules in Berlin." You stupid lackeys! Your "order" is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will rear ahead once more and announce to your horror amid the brass of trumpets: be!"
—from Karl Liebknecht's "Trotz Alledem" (1919)
Hold hard. We have not fled. We are not beaten ... for Spartakus—that means fire and spirit, heart and soul, will and deed of the proletarian revolution. For Spartakus—that stands for all the longing for achievement, all the embattled resolution of the class-conscious proletariat... whether or not we shall survive when all is achieved, our programme will live; it will dominate the world of liberated peoples. In spite of all.
March Is Women's History Month
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Sprong 1982 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest- for old "new leftists", perhaps. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.
*******
The Revolutionary Heritage of Rosa Luxemburg
The present situation in Poland cries out for a revolutionary proletarian leadership to cut through the disastrous polarization between a particularly vile and utterly discredited Stalinist bureaucracy and the counterrevolutionary nationalist/clericalist Solidarity "trade union" which lines up with U.S. imperial¬ism's bloodthirsty drive to "roll back Communism" throughout the world. The Trotskyist vanguard which must be forged to defend and extend socialized property in Poland will build on the strong traditions of Polish socialism—the party Proletariat, the SDKPiL, the early Polish Communist Party, ruthlessly purged and finally dissolved by Stalin, and above all the revolutionary heritage of Rosa Luxemburg.
It is striking that all sides in the Polish crisis are united in their silence on Rosa Luxemburg, the greatest proletarian revolutionist in Polish history. Certainly the Stalinist usurpers cannot claim Luxemburg; they have had to obscure and slander her revolutionary example for decades.
Still less will Luxemburg, a woman, a Jew and a communist, find defenders among the fans of Solidarity, a "movement" which embraces virulent anti-Semites and ultra-reactionaries. Solidarity program is openly counterrevolutionary—for private ownership of the land, a bourgeois parliament, a dominant role for the Catholic church in government, for turning the nationalized Polish economy over to the International Monetary Fund, the bankers cartel that starves the Chilean masses. That Solidarity', which openly spurns even the word "socialist," disdains Luxemburg and all she stands for, is fully appropriate.
The social-democratic "left" outside Poland embraces Solidarity and wants therefore to separate itself from Luxemburg. At a February 7 forum in Boston, a Socialist Workers Party (SWP) spokesman solidarized wfth Polish "dissident" Marta Petrusewicz when the latter stated, "The problem with Rosa Luxemburg in Polish minds was that Rosa Luxemburg considered... that the existence of the Polish national being was not an important problem for Polish workers."
It is true that Luxemburg incorrectly opposed the right of Poland to national self-determination, for which Lenin took her to task, pointing out that socialists must support this basic democratic right in order to take it off the agenda and expose the underlying class conflicts which national oppression masks. Her error in his eyes lay in not taking the national question sufficiently into account, thereby rendering more difficult the exposure of nationalism as a mortal enemy of the proletariat. Needless to say it is the height of hypocrisy for the SWP and kindred anti-communists to manipulate Lenin's criticisms of Luxemburg in order to make common cause with the deadly enemies of Leninism, the Pilsudskiite reactionaries who hate everything that Lenin and Luxemburg stood for.
Despite errors on the national question (and other questions), Luxemburg was a communist and in Lenin's phrase "an eagle." Leon Trotsky summed up her historic role with these words:
"We can, with full justification, place our work for the Fourth International under the sign of the'three L's,'that is, not only under the sign of Lenin, but also of Luxemburg and Liebknecht."
—"Luxemburg and the Fourth International," New International, August 1935
The Polish proletariat must recover its revolutionary heritage, the socialist heritage of Rosa Luxemburg, hated by the counterrevolutionaries (and feared by the Stalinists) as a revolutionary leader and martyr. We are reprinting below excerpts from some of Luxemburg's works, which with every word breathe a spirit of militant proletarian internationalism. The first selection, from "The Crisis of Social Democracy" (better known as the "Junius Pamphlet," from her penname), written in prison and published in 1916, indeed "saved the honor of the German proletariat" by condemning the German Social Democratic Party's (SPD) historic betrayal in supporting its "own" bourgeoisie in the first imperialist World War. We reprint also an excerpt from Luxemburg's "Socialism and the Churches" (first published in Cracow in 1905 under the penname "Jozef Chmura") because of its almost eerily appropriate condemnation of attempts by the Catholic church to mislead the workers.
We include the last part of her final work, "Order Reigns in Berlin," written when she and Liebknecht were already in hiding during the bloody of the 1919 Spartakus uprising by the Social Democratic hangmen of the German revolution, Scheidemann and Noske. Luxemburg had opposed the uprising as premature; nonetheless she and Liebknecht took their place in the struggle alongside the best of the German proletariat. Finally, we include as well Karl Liebknecht's final rallying cry, "Trotz Alledem" (In Spite of All). The latter two items are taken from J.P. Nettl's biography Rosa Luxemburg, the former two from Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder Press, 1970.
-from the Junius Pamphlet" (1916)
In refuting the existence of the class struggle, the social democracy has denied the very basis of its own existence. What is the very breath of its body, if not the class struggle? What role could it expect to play in the war, once having sacrificed the class struggle, the fundamental principle of its existence? The social democracy has destroyed its mission Its only mission now is to play the role of the gendarme over the working class under a state of military rule… The leaders of the social democracy are convinced that democratic liberties for the working class will come as a reward for its allegiance to the fatherland. But never in the history of the world has an oppressed class received political rights as a reward for service rendered to the ruling classes....
The war has smashed the Second International. Its inadequacy has been demonstrated by its incapacity to place an effective obstacle in the way of the segmentation of its forces behind national boundaries in time of war, and to carry through a common tactic and action by the proletariat in all countries.
In view of the betrayal, by the official representatives of the socialist parties in the principal countries, of the aims and interests of the working class; in view of their passage from the camp of the working-class International to the political camp of the imperialist bourgeoisie; it is vitally necessary for socialism to build a new workers' International, which will take into its own hands the leadership and coordination of the revolutionary class struggle against world imperialism.
To accomplish its historic mission, socialism must be guided by the following principles:
The class struggle against the ruling classes within the boundaries of the bourgeois states, and international solidarity of the workers of all countries, are the two rules of life, inherent in the working class in struggle and of world-historic importance to it for its emancipation. There is no socialism without international proletarian solidarity, and there is no socialism without class struggle. The renunciation by the socialist proletariat, in time of peace as in time of war, of the class struggle and of international solidarity, is equivalent to suicide....
The immediate mission of socialism is the spiritual liberation of the proletariat from the tutelage of the bourgeoisie, which expresses itself through the influence of nationalist ideology. The national sections must agitate in the parliaments and the press, denouncing the empty wordiness of nationalism as an instrument of bourgeois domination. The sole defense of all real national independence is at present the revolutionary class struggle against imperialism. The workers' fatherland, to the defense of which all else must be subordinated, is the socialist International.
— from "Socialism and the Churches" (1905)
The clergy has at its disposal two means to fight social democracy. Where the working-class movement is beginning to win recognition, as is the case in our country (Poland), where the possessing classes still hope to crush it, the clergy fights the socialists by threatening sermons, slandering them and condemning the "covetousness" of the workers. But in the countries where political liberties are established and the workers' party is powerful, as for example in Germany, France, and Holland, there the clergy seeks other means. It hides its real purpose and does not face the workers any more as an open enemy, but as a false friend. Thus you will see the priests organizing the workers and founding "Christian" trade unions. In this way they try to catch the fish in their net, to attract the workers into the trap of these false trade unions, where they teach humility, unlike the organizations of the social democracy which have in view struggle and defense against maltreatment.
When the czarist government finally falls under the blows of the revolutionary proletariat of Poland and Russia, and when political liberty exists in our country, then we shall see the same Archbishop Popiel and the same ecclesiastics who today thunder against the militants, suddenly beginning to organize the workers into "Christian" and "national" associations in order to mislead them. Already we are at the beginning of this underground activity of the "national democracy" which assures the future collaboration with the priests and today helps them to slander the social democrats.
The workers must, therefore, be warned of the danger so that they will not let themselves be taken in, on the morrow of the victory of the revolution, by the honeyed words of those who today from the height of the pulpit, dare to defend the czarist government, which kills the workers, and the repressive apparatus of capital, which is the principal cause of the poverty of the proletariat.
In order to defend themselves against the antagonism of the clergy at the present time, during the revolution, and against their false friendship tomorrow, after the revolution, it is necessary for the workers to organize themselves in the Social Democratic Party.
And here is the answer to all the attacks of the clergy: The social democracy in no way fights against religious beliefs. On the contrary, it demands complete freedom of conscience for every individual and the widest possible toleration for every faith and every opinion. But, from the moment when the priests use the pulpit as a means of political struggle against the working class, the workers must fight against the enemies of their rights and their liberation. For he who defends the exploiters and who helps to prolong this present regime of misery is the mortal enemy of the proletariat, whether he be in a cassock or in the uniform of the police.
*****
— from "Order Reigns in Berlin" (1919)
It was a matter of honour for the revolution to ward off this attack with all its energy, if the counterrevolution was not to be encouraged to further efforts— The revolutions so far have brought us nothing but defeat, but these inevitable defeats are themselves one stepping-stone on top of another to the final victory....
But the leadership has failed. None the less, the leadership can and must be rebuilt by the masses out of the masses… The masses were up to the mark, they have forged this defeat into the chain of those historical battles which are themselves the strength and pride of international Socialism. And that is why a future victory will blossom from this "defeat."
"Order rules in Berlin." You stupid lackeys! Your "order" is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will rear ahead once more and announce to your horror amid the brass of trumpets: be!"
—from Karl Liebknecht's "Trotz Alledem" (1919)
Hold hard. We have not fled. We are not beaten ... for Spartakus—that means fire and spirit, heart and soul, will and deed of the proletarian revolution. For Spartakus—that stands for all the longing for achievement, all the embattled resolution of the class-conscious proletariat... whether or not we shall survive when all is achieved, our programme will live; it will dominate the world of liberated peoples. In spite of all.
Stop the media war on Venezuela Venezuela: Sanctions, Elections and Attempted Coup Will the crisis lead to a major new war? March 5 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm Community Church of Boston 565 Boylston Street, Boston (Copley station on the Green line
Stop the media war on Venezuela
Venezuela: Sanctions, Elections and Attempted Coup
Will the crisis lead to a major new war?
March 5 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Community Church of Boston
565 Boylston Street, Boston (Copley station on the Green line
The US is trying to overthrow the Maduro government with military threats, economic warfare and diplomatic isolation. But the solutions for the problems in Venezuela are for the Venezuelans to decide. The peace movement must oppose US intervention and support a resolution through peaceful dialogue!
Rev. Mike Clark will speak on “Venezuela vs. the Empire: A Coup 21 Years in the Making“. He is the Recovery Outreach Worker at the Belmont-Watertown United Methodist Church. For the last 17 years, he has sought to be an ally to those struggling with addiction and seeking to live new lives. He has worked with hundreds and hundreds of addicts in a setting where nearly 1,000 men and women in 24 different 12-Step meetings work to stay clean and sober one day at a time.
Ordained in 1975, for much of his career he has focused on peace and justice concerns. From 1965 to 1975 he was active in the antiwar movement in high school, college, and seminary. From 1978-1983 he was the Co-Director of the Riverside Church Disarmament Program, working with Rev. William Sloane Coffin on nuclear disarmament and East-West issues. From 1987-1993 he worked with Witness for Peace, including three years as the Executive Director. During those years, 4,000 US citizens were taken to active war zones in Nicaragua, and the organization expanded its operations to Guatemala and Chiapas. He hs been arrested 14 times over the years in nonviolent direct actions aimed at US nuclear and foreign policy.
From 2004 to 2014 he made seven visits to Venezuela, including two appearances as a guest on the late Hugo Chavez television program, “Alo Presidente.” During these trips, he was able to see firsthand the positive developments of the Chavez years and the manifold forms of US
intervention designed to thwart these developments.
intervention designed to thwart these developments.
Daniel Kovalik currently teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. He also served for over 25 years as Associate General Counsel of the United Steelworkers, AFL-CIO (USW). He began working for the USW after graduating from Columbia Law School in 1993. While with the USW, he served as lead counsel on cutting-edge labor law litigation, including the landmark NLRB cases of Lamons Gasket and Specialty Health Care. He has also worked on Alien Tort Claims Act cases against The Coca-Cola Company, Drummond and Occidental Petroleum – cases arising out of egregious human rights abuses in Colombia. The Christian Science Monitor, referring to his work defending Colombian unionists under threat of assassination, recently described Mr. Kovalik as “one of the most prominent defenders of Colombian workers in the United States.” Mr. Kovalik received the David W. Mills Mentoring Fellowship from Stanford University School of Law and was the recipient of the Project Censored Award for his article exposing the unprecedented killing of trade unionists in Colombia. He has written extensively on the issue of international human rights and U.S. foreign policy for the Huffington Post and Counterpunch and has lectured throughout the world on these subjects.
The books he has written are: The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran; The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Putin, and The Plot to Control the World: How the US Spent Billions to Change the Outcome of Elections Around the World
More information: 617 354 2169
More information: 617 354 2169
Sponsored by Massachusetts Peace Action, Venezuela Solidarity Committee (Boston), Community Church of Boston and the Raytheon Anti-war Campaign. Endorsed by United for Justice with Peace
For Information call 617-354-2169
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Sitting On Top Of The World-“Everest” (2015)- A Short Film Review
Sitting On Top Of The World-“Everest” (2015)- A Short Film Review
DVD Review
By Seth Garth
Everest, starring Jason Clarke, 2015
I am still scratching my head (as was the person I saw this film with) about why seemingly rational people would go to the expense, take the time, and put themselves in harm’s way fighting injury or death in order to place some kind of flag on the summit of Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain. The source of that bafflement is the film under review titled appropriately Everest since in the end as all participants recognized it was about the mountain whether you personally made it or not.
One of the most poignant moments in the film was when a journalist who was on the expedition covering it for a hiking magazine asked point blank the question “Why?.” Lots of individual answers were given from person goals to some kind of testing of the soul. The first collective answer seemed at the conclusion of the film to be the right one-“because it is there.”
By the time of the expedition, the ill-fated expedition which I do not believe is giving anything away, in 1996 thousands of people had been led up to the summit by the Sherpa guides mandatory on such trips. And several hundred had died from causes like oxygen debt, slippage, exhaustion and faltering mental toughness. In the film there were so many separate expeditions trying to take advantage of the “window” to climb to the summit that it looked like a small city. All jockeying for position, including the expedition out of New Zealand led by Rob (played by Jason Clarke) and his hiking operation.
As far as the action of the film goes unlike a documentary where the footage would be about the climb here we got to know the characters, got to care that they got up and back whatever we might think about that goal. There were various styles displayed among the various expedition leaders Rob and his team were “hand-holders” which in the end would be fatal to him. Partly because he gave in to one climber who had failed the year before and who he stayed behind to make sure got to the summit and down. The exhausting down part combined with a horrendous wind storm is what did both men and a couple of others. One man was saved by a heroic effort from Nepalese helicopter pilot. At the conclusion photographs of those who actually perished were shown which added to the sense of danger involved. Yeah, in the end it was all about the mountain. A fast-paced riveting film.
In Honor Of Women’s History Month – Poet Jesse Baxter’s In Pharaoh Times
In Honor Of Women’s History Month – Poet Jesse Baxter’s In Pharaoh Times
In Pharaoh Times
Isis, daughter of Isis major, mother- wife-sister of the human sun god
Awoke, awoke with a start weary from brother couplings; and stray poppy laden abandoned copulations
Configurations only a deacon priest filled with signs and amulets could fathom, or some racked court astrologer
To face the stone-breaking day, a day filled to the brim, overflowing, with portents
Arisen, washed, fragranced, headed to the balcony to observe unseen and to be observed seen beneath the cloudless skies
Out in the ocean sea of whirling sand, out in the endless chiseled stone sun blazing day; her sea visage on down heads, eyes averted
Hittites, Gilts, Samians, Cretans, Nubians, Babylonians all conquered all down heads and averted eyes
Out on the ocean see, a lone sable warrior defeated, defeated with down head and upward eye disturbed the blistering heat day
Isis, daughter of Isis major, mother-wife-sister-child of the human sun king shrinks back in fear, fear time has come
That black will devour Nubian and rise, rise
Yes, rise in Pharaoh times
Jesse Baxter had never been so angry in his black young life as he had been at his, well, let’s call her his lady friend, Louise Crawford, since he was not sure whether girlfriend in the intricate relationship networks of the1960s in quirky old Greenwich Village in the depths of trail-blazing New Jack City was an appropriate designation for their newly flowered relationship. Jesse a budding poet, a very hopeful poet who had just begun to get noticed in that rarified Village air had become one of Louise Crawford ‘s, ah, “conquests” on her way to tasting all that the Bohemian night offered (not quite “beat,” that had become passé by then and not quite “hip” as in hippie that would become the fashion later in the decade so bohemian, meaning out on the cultural outer edge, would do, would do as long as Jesse thought such a term was appropriate).
Jesse had seen Louise around the Village several times at the trendy art shows, upbeat coffeehouses beginning to emerge from “beat” poetry and jazz scenes to retro folk revival stuff, and at a few loft parties large enough to get lost in without having met everybody or anyone, if that was what one wanted. He had heard of her “exploits,” exploits tramping through the budding literati but had only become acquainted with Louise through her “old” lover, Jose, Jose Guzman, the surrealist-influenced painter who was beginning to make a splash for himself in the up and coming art galleries emerging over in nearby Soho. And either she had tired of him (possible) or he had tired of her (more probable since Jose was thrown off right from the beginning by her “bourgeois “command manner and her overweening need to seem like a white hipster under every circumstance although she was quote, Jose, quote, square, unquote but a good tumble, a very good tumble under the sheets) and so one night she had hit on Jesse at a coffeehouse where he was reading and that was that.
But enough of small talk and back to Jesse’s rage. At one up-scale party held on Riverside Drive among the culturati, or what passed for such in downtrodden New York, as they had become an “item” Louise had introduced Jesse as the “greatest Negro poet since Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance.” Jesse was not put off by the comparison with the great Hughes, no way, he accepted that designation with a certain sense of honor, although qualified a bit by the different rhythm that motivated Langston’s words, be-bop jazz, and his own Bo Diddley /Chuck Berry-etched “child of rock and roll” beat running in his head. What he was put off by was that “negro” designation, a term of derision just then in his universe as young blacks, especially young black men, were moving away from the negro Doctor King thing and toward that Malcolm freedom term, black, black as night, black is beautiful. Jesus, hadn’t she read his To Malcolm –Black Warrior Prince. (Apparently one of the virtues of tramping through the literati was an understanding that there was no actual need to read, look, hear, anything that your new “conquest” had written, drawn or sung. In the case of Louise she had made something of an art form out of that fact once confessing to Jesse that she had only actually read (and re-read) his Louise Love In Quiet Time written by him after some silly spat since she was the subject. His other work she had somebody summarize for her. Jesus, again.)
And it was not like Louise Crawford, yes, that Crawford, the scion-ess [sic] of the Wall Street Crawfords who had (have) been piling up dough and gouging profits since the start of the republic, was not attuned to the changes going on underneath bourgeois society just then but was her way to “own” him, own him like in olden times. While he was too much the gentile son of W.E.B. Dubois’ “talented tenth” (his parents both school teachers down in hometown Trenton who however needed to scrimp and safe to put him through Howard University) to make a scene at that party latter in the cab home to her place in the Village (as the well-tipped taxi driver could testify to, if necessary) Jesse lashed into her with all the fury a budding poet and belittled black man could muster. In short, he would not be “owned” by some white bread women who was just “cruising” the cultural and ethnic out-riggings before going back to marry some son of some sorry family friend stockbroker and live on Riverside Drive and summer in the Hamptons and all the rest while he struggled to create his words, his black soul-saturated words.
The harangue continued up into her loft and then Jesse ran out of steam a little (he had had a little too much of high-shelf liquors and of hits on the bong pipe to last forever in that state). Louise called for a truce, said she was sorry, sorry for being a square, and called him to her bed, pretty please to her bed. He, between the buzz in his head from the stimulants and the realization that she was good in bed, if nothing else, followed. And that night they made those sheets sweat with their juices. After they were depleted Jesse thought to himself that Louise might be just slumming but he would take a ticket and stay for the ride and felt asleep. Louise on the other hand, got up and went to the window to look out at her city, lit a cigarette and pondered some of Jesse’s words, pondered them for a while and got just a little bit fearful for her future as she would back to her bed and lay down next to the sleeping Jesse.
Later when he awakened just before dawn Jesse wrote his edgy poem In Pharaoh Times partially to contain the edges of his left-over rage and partially to take his distance from a daughter of Isis…
And hence this Women’s History Month contribution.
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