DOWN WITH THE OBAMA/KERRY WAR-HANDS
OFF SYRIA-A STATEMENT
Sunday, September 08, 2013
Saturday, September 07, 2013
Free Private Manning Now!
Featured graphics
These are the graphics that we’re using for posters, billboards, stickers, etc. Most are vector, but some are huge.
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Write a letter supporting PVT Manning’s request for clemency!
Maj. Gen. Jeffrey S. Buchanan
Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Convening Authorities are granted the power to reduce or eliminate a convicted soldier’s sentence. They use this power when they feel the court martial failed to deliver justice. As Commanding General of the Military District of Washington, Major General Jeffrey S. Buchanan is the only other individual besides President Obama with the power to ameliorate WikiLeaks whistleblower PVT Manning’s sentence in the immediate future.
We are now requesting letters from professors, law experts, human rights advocates, politicians, artists, veterans, and concerned citizens urging Maj. Gen. Buchanan to reduce PVT Manning’s sentence. These letters will be submitted as part of an application for clemency from PVT Manning’s legal defense. These letters, once completed, should be sent to nathan@bradleymanning.org
There are a few important guidelines to keep in mind as you compose your letter:
- Your letter should be approximately 1 page long.
- It should be composed on personalized letterhead -you can create this yourself (here are templates and some tips for doing that).
- Pvt Manning’s recently announced that her preferred name is Chelsea, and that folks should use female pronouns. However, she also understands that for efforts such as these, it is most effective for supporters to use her legal name and military rank, “Pvt. Bradley E. Manning”, along with male pronouns.
- The letter should focus on your support for PVT Manning, and especially why you believe justice will be served if PVT Manning’s sentence is reduced. The letter should NOT be anti-military and/or anti-Buchanan, as this will be unlikely to help.
- A suggested message: “Pvt. Manning has been punished enough for violating military regulations in the course of being true to his conscience. I urge you to use your authority as Convening Authority to reduce Pvt. Manning’s sentence to time served.” Beyond that general message, feel free to personalize the details as to why you believe PVT Manning deserves clemency.
- Please send your letter to nathan@bradleymanning.org
by November 1, 2013, and sooner if possible. We will review these letters prior to forwarding them to PVT Manning’s legal defense, and may request that you make changes if necessary.
Courage to Resist, the organization sponsoring the Private Manning Support Network, has successfully convinced Convening Authorities to reduce the sentences of conscientious objectors in the past (see the cases of Travis Bishop and Cliff Cornell). PVT Manning is unjustly imprisoned because the things she witnessed in the Iraq War compelled her to follow her conscience. Now, through creating compelling and personal letters, it is time to call upon Maj. Gen. Buchanan to honor his conscience in turn.
Monday, September 02, 2013
EP Thompson on why history is a weapon
posted by Snowball @ 11:29 pm
02 September 2013
HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 8, 1922-1923
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| Sultan Ahmad Fuad became King Faud I in 1922. Image from Wikipedia Commons. |
The movement to democratize Egypt
Part 8: 1922-1923 period -- Socialist and labor activism flourish despite foreign-dominated monarchy.By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / September 2, 2013
[With all the dramatic activity in Egypt, Bob Feldman's Rag Blog "people's history" series, "The Movement to Democratize Egypt," could not be more timely. Also see Feldman's "Hidden History of Texas" series on The Rag Blog.]
In 1922 “the British decided unilaterally...to allow Egypt formal independence...because of the realistic possibility that the 1919 Revolution could recur,” according to Selma Botman’s Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952.
Yet despite obtaining its formal independence from the UK on February 28, 1922, “Egypt of the pre-Nasser period was dominated by foreigners: the British controlled the upper levels of the military and the government, and people of various European nationalities owned and operated the banks, hotels, textile factories, and insurance companies,” according to the same book.
Although the UK-selected Sultan Ahmad Fuad was now officially the king of a formally independent Egyptian monarchical government in March 1922, the UK government still “retained the right to maintain the security of British imperial communications through Egypt (i.e., the Suez Canal),” according to Jason Thompson’s A History of Egypt; and during the next few decades “more than once Royal Navy warships appeared before the palace windows in Alexandria when the British wanted a controversial decision to go their way...”
A "strong British military presence remained in Egypt, not only in the canal zone but also in Alexandria and in Cairo, where the British army barracks stood in the middle of town on the site now occupied by the Nile Hilton Hotel,” and “a British high commissioner...was quite willing to intervene,” according to the same book.
Despite the monarchical government’s censorship policy, during the next few years “between 15,000 and 20,000 workers” in Egypt “were influenced by” the anti-imperialist Egyptian Socialist Party’s labor activism, according to Tareq Y. Ismael and Rifa‘at El-Sa’id’s The Communist Movement in Egypt: 1920-1988.
Party activists mobilized workers, organized meetings, and recruited new members in the Alexandria and al-Mahulah al industrial districts of Egypt; and one of the Egyptian Socialist Party’s founders, Joseph Rosenthal, organized 3,000 Egyptian workers to become members of the General Union of Workers (Itihad al-Naqabot al-‘Am) before being expelled from the Egyptian Socialist Party in December 1922 for opposing the party’s decision to accept the Comintern’s requirements for being affiliated to the Comintern.
Between August 1921 and April 1922, Egyptian workers in 50 different Egyptian workplaces were mobilized to fight for improved labor conditions in 91 separate strike actions. Tram workers in Alexandria went on strike for 42 days, Cairo’s tram workers went on strike for 102 days, and workers at the Shell Oil Refinery in Egypt went on strike for 113 days.
By late 1922, the Egyptian Socialist Party had recruited around 400 members in its Alexandria branch and about 1,100 members in its branches in other Egyptian cities; and the General Union of Workers -- that Egyptian Socialist Party members led -- now had about 20,000 members.
After affiliating with the Third International’s Comintern, the Egyptian Socialist Party then changed its name to the Egyptian Communist Party; and, led by a Central Committee which Hosni al-‘Arabi’ chaired, adopted the following program for the democratization of Egyptian society in its January 1923 meeting:
- nationalization of the Suez Canal;
- the liberation and unification of Egypt and the Sudan;
- the repudiation of all Egyptian state debts and foreign capitulation agreements;
- an 8-hour workday;
- equal pay for Egyptian and foreign workers in Egypt;
- abolition of land tenancy agreements in which Egyptian peasants had to pay 50 percent of the crop on rented land to large landowners;
- the cancellation of the debts of all Egyptian peasants who owned less than 10 feddans of land; and
- the restriction of landownership by individual landlords in Egypt to no more than 100 feddans.
In addition, a Constitution for Egypt, “written by Egyptian legal experts who were sympathetic to the king and the British,” was also decreed on April 19, 1923, which set up an Egyptian Senate and Chamber of Deputies -- with members elected only by Egyptian men, “except for the two-fifths of the Senate who were appointed by the king” of Egypt, according to Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952.
This same Egyptian Constitution of 1923 also “gave excessive power to the monarch, who was granted authority to dismiss cabinets, dissolve parliament and appoint and unseat prime ministers,” according to the same book.
And besides holding excessive political power under the April 1923 Egyptian Constitution, “the royal family of Egyptian King Fuad also “owned about one-tenth of the arable land in Egypt” in 1923, according to A History of Egypt. Yet, according to the Encyclopedia Judaica, the Egyptian monarchical government’s minister of finance and communications in 1923, Joseph Cattaui, was of Jewish religious background.
[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]
The Rag Blog
03 September 2013
Michael James : Muddy Waters and James Cotton at the Fat Black Pussycat, 1963
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| Muddy Waters and James Cotton at the Fat Black Pussycat in Chicago, 1963. Photo by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul. |
Muddy Waters and James Cotton
at the Fat Black Pussycat, 1963
Music has always been big in my life... In the 1950’s I was all in when Rock and Roll swept the scene, its fans, its makers, and its content crossing racial boundaries. No more Snooky Lanson and Your Hit Parade for me.By Michael James / The Rag Blog / September 3, 2013
[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]
My younger brother Beau was often ahead of me: like having a car with a nice paint job, and knowing what was going on in music. In our early Bedford Junior High years, while I was probably listening to Pat Boone muck up Fats Domino’s "Blueberry Hill," Beau and a little band of hipsters, the Jolly Jazzbos, were down in Norwalk at the Forest Hotel, a black joint where bluesman Jimmy Reed was too drugged-up and drunked-up to perform. They got to see him nod out on stage.
Regarding the paint job: when he graduated from high school, Beau spent the next year working at Kerrigan’s Auto Body, a place worthy of one hell of a sitcom. Beau had a beautiful 1950 Ford convertible. Unfortunately, I backed it out of the shop’s painting bay where it had just received a new paint job, leaving it with a big scratch.
It was only days since I had returned from my motorcycle trip to Mexico City and my eye-mind-heart-opening summer of study and adventure. Then I headed back on the highway with Beau, in his Ford. We headed west to Illinois, to Lake Forest College -- I to be a junior and Beau a freshman. I was glad to be bringing him along. I knew it would be a good year.
While I was now more aware of the world, I was still not old enough to drink legally, and not old enough to vote. I felt more grown up, though: smarter, and certainly cooler. However, I was (and still am) prone to infantile anti-authoritarianism; I refused to sign in for the required all-student-body college convocations. I conspicuously walked on the grass near the administration building that sported “Keep off the Grass” signs. (Hey, grass is for walking on!) I parked Beau’s Ford in the college president’s designated parking space, which seemed sensible since the Prez didn’t use it.
Having experimented with weed in Mexico, I was of course hooked, appreciating how it enhanced my perceptions. And I was looking for more. This quest took me and some friends to a pool hall in Waukegan where we found it, getting a lid from a pool-shooting black kid. Unfortunately, it didn’t have the same effect as the smoke in Mexico City, and I recall I felt burned.
All this said, it wasn’t as if I was going to the dogs: I was a productive young guy. I was getting A’s, going to classes, lectures, and the library. I was involved with student organizations and government, and the college newspaper, The Stentor. I explored religion, and considered becoming a minister. Checking out the religious scene had me going to Quaker meetings, visiting the Bahia Temple, and attending Unitarian services. I was unconsciously developing and nurturing the roots of my own spirituality and future political action.
That process included meeting William Sloan Coffin, the Yale Chaplain. He spoke at Lake Forest and we talked at a reception at President Cole’s home. He was among a growing number of people who influenced and inspired me. A few years later someone reported that he asked, “What happened to that young guy with good ideas?”
Ideas don’t drop from the sky. Humans learn from experience, both their own and others'. Learning: I was being exposed to, participating in, and observing all manner of things. In The Stentor office I heard about the New Left through the College Press Service. It reported on a meeting in Hazard, Kentucky, of unemployed coal miners with members of Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Northern Student Movement. That event caught my interest.
And the events kept coming.
On campus there was a foreign film series, and there were many speakers. I heard Alan Watts talk about Zen. I thought Feminine Mystique author Betty Friedan was great -- though the sorority housemothers and some sorority sisters did not and were bent out of shape by her ideas on women in society.
Classmates Dave Feldman and Penelope Bartok (now Rosemont) started the Jacobin Society, a leftist club that brought liberal and radical speakers to campus. There was Fair Play for Cuba, the American Friends Service Committee, Jay Miller of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Carl Shier, a labor organizer with the United Auto Workers. I really liked him. And the Jacobin Society provided my first encounter with Joffre Stewart, a black beat poet, anarchist, and long-time contrarian-type guy in Chicago’s left political scene. He got someone to burn a draft card at our small meeting!
On the music and political front we brought the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Freedom Singers to campus. I drove the school’s van that brought them back to Hyde Park, to the home of Sylvia Fischer, who called herself a socialist and was a leader in the Chicago Area Friends of SNCC. James Foreman, a SNCC leader and major civil rights movement thinker, was handing out travel money. Willy Peacock said: “I can’t get back to Mississippi on $25” -- to which Foreman gruffly replied: “You have to.”
Music has always been big in my life -- listening, playing, singing, and dancing. In the 1950’s I was all in when Rock and Roll swept the scene, its fans, its makers, and its content crossing racial boundaries. No more Snooky Lanson and Your Hit Parade for me. Beau and I would blast our tunes. Our dad, a Broadway musical kind of guy, would yell up the stairs: “What do you think this is -- a fucking plantation?” Oh, Dad.
I danced my ass off on November 22, 1957, when Bo Diddley came to St Anthony’s Hall in Saugatuck, the Italian section of Westport. The ticket price was $5 a couple. I had a jug of cider brought back from a visit to see Beau at a school named North Hampton, in New Hampshire.
I loosened the cap to let the cider ferment. Apparently Beau had done the same thing, getting kicked out of that school a few weeks later when he got drunk and stole the school’s tractor for a nighttime joy ride into town. I too got drunk, sharing swigs of fermented, hard apple cider with Jerome, Bo Diddley’s maraca player. That was a night to remember!
A friend’s dad drove us to New York for Alan Freed’s rock ‘n roll shows at Lowe’s State and Brooklyn Paramount theatres. I went to shows at the Apollo in Harlem. I listened to Jocko’s Rocket Ship Show on WNJR out of Newark (“Woo-ditty-wop and we’re back with the Jock, back on the scene with the record machine...”). Late at night I listened to tunes on CKLW from Windsor, Ontario, and the Hound Dog Show from Buffalo’s WBLK. I started getting a regular dose of country and western listening to WWVA out of Wheeling, West Virginia.
Doing my time at Lake Forest from 1960 to 1964, the good music kept on coming -- listening to lots of jazz, plus Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Dave "Snaker" Ray, and Spider John Koerner. And Doc Watson, Roscoe Holcomb, The Country Gentleman, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, the Seeger family, as well as chain gang chants and field hollers on Folkways Records.
Active on the Cultural Activities Committee, I met Old Town School of Folk Music pioneers Fleming Brown and George and Gerry Armstrong. We brought Mississippi country bluesmen Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon, a guy named St. Louis Jimmy, and Muddy Waters’ cousin Otis Spann to the College.
I met Mike Bloomfield and Charlie Musselwhite, who were hanging around Joe Segal and Bob Koester’s Jazz Record Mart on Wabash below Roosevelt University. I worked with Bloomfield to put on a little blues show at a high school for the local Junior Chamber of Commerce; attendance at this early production was sparse.
My professor friend Sam Pasiencier, who’d developed the rolls of film from my 1962 Mexico motorcycle trip, took me to a place in Chicago on Broadway north of Diversey called the Fat Black Pussy Cat. There we saw Muddy Waters playing with harmonica player James Cotton and some young white musicians. I got a good shot of Muddy and James.
Early in the summer of 1963 I was heading to the Twin Cities on my motorcycle. Outside of Portage, Wisconsin, the engine blew. I chained the Triumph to a fence, hiked through fields and knocked on a farmhouse door. A big farmer in overalls let me use the phone in his kitchen. That night I took a bus out of Mauston, riding north to meet up with Beau and his squeeze Ellie, daughter of Werner Pese who had been my freshman World History professor -- a smart man and heavy smoker, with a heavy German accent.
A few days later, the three of us returned to the bike, with a trailer hooked to the back of the Ford. Back in Illinois, I sold the Triumph to a motorcycle shop in East Chicago, Indiana.
That summer I participated in an open-air art exhibit in the Lake Forest town square, displaying my welded sculptures, a torso carved from stone, and figures made of clay. Then, still needing language credit, I headed back to Connecticut for another dose of español.
I attended Trinity College in Hartford. Terry Montgomery and Tim Lyons were the two guys I hung with at Trinity. Tim lived in Kent, where we visited his family’s dairy farm. He urged me to climb on the back of a young Guernsey cow. I expected her to buck, rodeo-like, and could only laugh when the frightened beast stood in place, shitting and swinging her tail, decorating my backside.
The civil rights movement and upcoming March on Washington were in the news. The New York Times reported the leaders of the March were forcing SNCC’s John Lewis (now Congressman John Lewis) to cool it on radical demands, weakening his call for jobs and freedom to accommodate the Kennedy Administration. Tim, Terry, and I headed to Washington, D.C. in a green VW bug and spent the eve of the March at the home of a lady friend of Terry’s. He said she was a nymphomaniac; I had to ask what that was.
On the morning of August 23, 1963, we were moving: first in the little green critter of a car surrounded by busloads of people on the freedom road; then we walked -- marching, surrounded by a mass of humanity. And then thousands upon thousands of us stood together as one at the Lincoln Memorial and the Reflecting Pool. We felt a real sense of hope and togetherness, a belief in the future.
To this day I welcome the tears that come every time I hear Dr. King as he declares, “I have a dream... we shall over come, someday... black and white together.”
That day is good forever.
[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]
The Rag Blog
05 September 2013
Johnny Hazard : Mexico City Rocked by Massive Teacher Protest
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| Teachers mobilize in Mexico City, Wednesday, September 4, 2013. Photo by Alejandro Mancilla / The Rag Blog. |
Massive protests continue in Mexico
The actions were a continuation of protests against an education 'reform' package first passed by Congress on new President Enrique Peña Nieto's first day in office.By Johnny Hazard / The Rag Blog / September 5, 2013
MEXICO CITY -- Thousands of teachers, mostly members of the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (CNTE), remain camped out in the center of Mexico City after having initiated a series of protests that have included blocking the airport for a day, blockades at the two major television networks in demand for equal time (they received three and five minutes, respectively), and marches that have forced the closure of various major thoroughfares and Metro stations.
Massive marches took place on Sunday, September 1, and Wednesday, September 4. The actions were a continuation of protests against an education "reform" package passed by Congress on new President Enrique Peña Nieto's first day in office.
There were also actions in other parts of Mexico including an hour-long shutdown of the border bridge by teachers in Juárez. A demonstration by teachers in Los Cabos blocked the airport there.
The actions of the CNTE do not represent, numerically, the biggest demonstrations in recent Mexican history, but have proven to be the strongest; the anti-election fraud movements of 2006 and 2012, and the militant protests after 45,000 electricians were arbitrarily fired by the federal government in 2009, pale in comparison.
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| Federal police mobilize in response to militant teachers' action on Wednesday, September 4. Photo by Alejandro Mancilla / The Rag Blog. |
September 1 is, by law, the day the president delivers his annual report ("informe," similar to the State of the Union address). This year, the teachers planned to interrupt it or block roads leading to the Congress, so the president postponed his presentation until the next day, Monday, and had his top cabinet official hand over the written report to the Congress.
There was a march of about 50,000 teachers, with numbers disproportionately from Oaxaca. Since there were thousands of police and soldiers awaiting them at the Congress building, they began marching instead toward the presidential palace Less than halfway, the rank and file (especially, again, those from Oaxaca) -- after receiving news that the Congress had already begun meeting to pass a remaining set of "reforms" that day -- demanded to go to the Congress.
So the marchers turned back towards the Congress building. As they got closer, some in the crowd -- many of them not teachers -- got into confrontations with police. There were a few arrests of "ultra" protesters -- including young urban "anarquistas" as well as bystanders and independent reporters. Most of these arrests occurred miles from the original march route, as the police had surrounded marchers and forced them to a distant location.
A group of 30 police horses were spooked by loud noise when officers took them out of their trailers near the Congress building and they stampeded through downtown Mexico City, causing quite a stir and substantial damage, especially to cars.in their paths, and a number of horses were injured as a result.
Monday and Tuesday, the Senate met to approve the reforms. Several Metro stations and at least three major avenues were closed all day -- by the cops, not by the protesters -- an example of how the ostensibly leftist city government is cooperating with its federal allies, in this case by creating traffic problems and blaming the teachers.
Wednesday brought a 24-hour work stoppage by teachers, including many in Mexico City, and a massive "insurgent mobilization." Again, about 50,000 teachers and supporters gathered at the national auditorium, near the presidential residence, leading to speculation that the plan was to surround and shut down the residence, known as "Los Pinos."
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| Demonstrators rally in Mexico City on Wednesday. Photo by Alejandro Mancilla / The Rag Blog. |
Tens of thousands of teachers in the states of Veracruz and Oaxaca are already on strike. Teachers -- who have been disproportionately blamed for students' low academic achievement -- are demanding that they be evaluated by means other than simple standardized tests and that, in turn, president Peña Nieto and the television networks also be evaluated.
Among the non-teacher participants Wednesday were a girl of about five years old with a T shirt that read, "Today I didn't go to school. I came here to defend public education" and hundreds of women from the Triqui indigenous group of Oaxaca in their bright red traditional dresses.
Peña Nieto's annual report -- echoed constantly in advertising paid for by the government to promote its agenda -- promised 120 days of major transformations in Mexico. That is probably true, but it remains to be seen whether the changes will be the ones that he has in mind.
Representatives of the CNTE have announced their intention to stay in Mexico City at least until Sunday, September 8, to participate in a rally organized by opposition political leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador against the privatization of the petroleum industry, and it is likely that they will try to hold out until September 16 to impede official Independence Day celebrations that take place every year in the Zócalo (central square) of Mexico City, exactly where the CNTE has its enormous tent city installed.
[A former Minneapolis teacher, Johnny Hazard now lives in Mexico City where he is a professor at the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México and author of Con estos estudiantes: La vivencia en la UACM, a book about that alternative university.]
See earlier Rag Blog coverage of the continuing Mexican teachers' protests by Johnny Hazard and Shirley Youxjeste.
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| The demonstrators included young urban "anarchistas." Photo by Alejandro Mancilla / The Rag Blog. |
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