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NEWS & LETTERS, April-May 2006Readers' ViewsContents
KABUL Over 1,500 women and men participated in an event organized by the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan to celebrate International Women's Day, March 8. Participants included a 12-member delegation of RAWA's Italian supporters and a large number of journalists and guests. Children of RAWA's orphanages, from different ethnic groups of Afghanistan presented patriotic songs in Pashto and Dari. A theatrical play was presented by students of RAWA schools. The Arya musical group came on stage to present songs, but unfortunately the electricity was cut and their performance was interrupted. On behalf of RAWA, Rahima Paenda, a suffering mother whose daughter and son-in-law were killed by a U.S. bombardment in 2001, presented a certificate of honor to the Italians. A certificate of honor was also presented to Mr. Mir Ghulam Nabi, a worker at Kabul Museum. He accepted a big risk during the Taliban regime and took precious museum pieces to his house to save them from the Taliban's drive to destroy all ancient pre-Islamic figures. A RAWA member introduced Mir Ghulam Nabi: "We regard him and his like as real heroes of the Afghan people, we don't need fake heroes made for us by foreign powers." --RAWA * * * CHICAGO We had a wonderful International Women's Day celebration. The theme was "Women Resist." It was in two parts. On March 4 the Chicago Coalition for International Women's Day heard two panels. The first had an international dimension with speakers from Guatemala, a woman who works with mainly South Asian women, a representative from the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement, and a U.S. woman who spoke on how International Women's Day is celebrated globally as a national holiday. A speaker from NARAL Pro-Choice America spoke on the recent South Dakota abortion ban. The second panel was more local and included a former member of JANE, the underground abortion service, who talked about its history when abortion was still illegal. A community activist spoke on how Section 8 and the end of the Chicago Housing Authority is working to improve the bottom line for developers but not the people being displaced. A member of the International Women's Day Coalition and Chicago Peace Pledge spoke on media, specifically the sexist cover of last month's VANITY FAIR. A speaker from Females United for Action told of a success story of having a sexist billboard taken down. On March 8, International Women's Day, we rallied and then marched through downtown Chicago chanting: "Health Care is a Right," "Women demand a fair wage; anything else is an Outrage," and "Money for Education, Not for War and Occupation." --Sue * * * On March 8 the Center for Freedom and Democracy in Iran-Chicago helped to organize a demonstration at Daley Center. In addition to slogans regarding women's rights, other placards demanded "Free political prisoners in Iran" and "No to war and no to foreign intervention in Iran." The group also distributed the resolution provided by the international women's movement, which read in part: "Today Iranian women are facing their most difficult challenge: the fight for basic human rights. Despite the presence of a theocratic regime dictating every aspect of personal and public life, Iranians are witnessing an unprecedented rise of gender-equality awareness... They have joined the global women's rights movement and are demanding the basic rights set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights." --Ali Reza The march here in February celebrating Martin Luther King's birthday revealed the concerns the Black community faces in South Central Los Angeles today. They are not seen in the more affluent community of Hollywood's anti-war movements, where the Black community is rarely present. Its concerns are more than an anti-war stance as could be seen in the signs carried in this march. They included "End Execution," "National Black HIV/AIDS," "Fight War, Racism and Poverty," and "Stop Police Brutality." The message of Martin Luther King's nonviolence was inverted by the presence of military convoys and soldiers in the march. Traffic cones kept the crowd under check. This violent attitude toward a community celebrating the leader of the Civil Rights Movement can be seen recently in the ruling on three white teenagers who savagely violated an unconscious 16-year-old and were given only 21 months of prison. Near-life terms would have been given if Blacks had committed the crime. At the end of the march over 20 police officers were casing the gathering of about 30 teenagers gathered at the corner of Florence and Martin Luther King Boulevard. --Manel, Los Angeles * * * Watching George W. Bush speak at Coretta Scott King's funeral turned my stomach. She spoke up for the end of the death penalty, the right of gays and lesbians to have freedom from discrimination, including the right to marry (in opposition to her daughter Bernice), and for the end of war, especially Bush's war on Iraq. She was a civil rights activist before she married Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr and until her death supported the MLK Center for Non-Violent Social Change in Atlanta, GA. --Women's Liberationist, Chicago * * * I liked having a picture of Katrina on the page with Raya Dunayevskaya's article on "Marx and the Black World" in the February-March issue. It makes you ask what does Marx have to do with Katrina? Katrina shows how racist this country is right now. We are learning that there are still people buried in the muck in their homes. It is difficult to dig through a couple of feet of mud. The government is not helping. It is too expensive. It is a serious problem that a majority of white people still believe that the response to Katrina had nothing to do with race. News and Letters Committees have been trying to engage the movement in how to articulate an alternative to capitalism. You have to turn to Marx. He was opposed to the Marxists in the U.S. who did not support the struggle against slavery. We have to break through some of the misconceptions about Marx that Labor is the only problem and that there is no Black question outside of the labor problem. --Revolutionary, California In my mind there is a very direct relation between Bush's illegal spying and then saying go ahead and pass an anti-torture law. He is clearly not going to be bound by any such law, given his lack of respect for any Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act procedures—as taken up in the February-March issue on how the "Bush agenda spawns crises." That article set an important historic context. Bush reaching for a single party state is a much greater threat than when Nixon aimed for it. Now, when all three branches of government are controlled by Republicans, we have to hope there will be more cracks in their ranks. --Concerned, California The Congressional hearings on mine safety following the Sago mine disaster clearly revealed the delaying tactics of the Mine Health and Safety Administration's officials to avoid taking any action to curb the unsafe practices of mine operators. They were "studying" scores of safety proposals, sent a team of investigators to Australia to learn about mine tracing systems and wanted solutions. But they didn't want to hurry, because many proposals weren't proven. It's the stock action-delaying bureaucratic answer to any call for action. Send it off to study—for years and years and years. The fact is that there are mine safety systems and devices in operation right now in some mines where the union and miners have demanded safety improvements. They don't have to send a team to Australia, they can do it right here, right now--and they know it. But that wouldn't delay action, would it? --Andy Phillips, Detroit, Mich. * * * What I've been seeing from the youth in the midst of all the crises in the world is that they want a direct focus on anti-capitalism. In a discussion of the last issue of N&L for example, they liked the article by Andy Phillips on the miners very much, but some took issue with the end, which referred to the Bush administration gutting health and safety. Some thought it put too much emphasis on Bush, saying that kind of gutting must have been going on before Bush and that capitalism is the real problem. --College teacher, Illinois The U.S. is playing against Haiti in a Wild Card game, and the winner is... ? The U.S. said it had no hand in forcing President Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of office Feb. 29, 2004. That was the first card dealt from the deck. The second card dealt was the new election, but that card kept being held back to allow all the chips (from the UN, IMF and the so-called friends of Haiti) to position themselves for what they want. Finally that second card was dealt. It was the election date, Feb. 7, 2006, 20 years to the day that Baby Doc fled Haiti to France. The third card was to announce the winner of the presidential election, their puppet. "Baby Doc" Bush (who many believe stole the 2000 and 2004 elections in the U.S.) was to take credit for the Haitian election. But the Haitian masses would have none of it. They demanded all ballots be counted and the puppet regime announced the winner. The Haitian masses won with Rene Preval as the new president. The fourth card is the inauguration. The last card is Aristide in Haiti. --Nouveau Toussaint, Chicago In response to protests from Detroit welfare rights activists, the Detroit City Council voted to raise water rates for suburban customers outside the city limits. Learning such a measure was illegal, they then voted to raise rates for all. Now everyone is angry at everyone else. Meanwhile the affordability plan for indigent customers, brought to the table by activists concerned for 10,000 city residents whose water has been shut off, is buried in a mass of rhetoric and political name-calling. Activists need to keep up the pressure on the City Council and Water Deptartment to correct widespread problems which contribute to rising costs. Water shut-offs and collection of bills fall unfairly on residents, when industrial and commercial users get away with flagrant violations. Citizens with broken meters wait months for repairs. Further protests in support of the affordability plan are planned. --Rights activists, Detroit VOICES OF REASON FROM BEHIND THE BARS We must break past the stratification of "free" and "incarcerated" to become one solid block representing a unified goal. Nobody is free under oppressive capitalism. As long as the prison industrial complex continues to practice forced work (legal slavery) the grassroots job sector for the "free" proletariat will be in perpetual competition. Marx said in his economic writings that "labor is a commodity… the capitalist is always free to use labor and the worker is always forced to sell it." Prisoners are forced to work in correctional industries, for pennies on the hour, the same jobs that were once free world industries to free world citizens. How can you compete with us? UNICOR, the federal prison industry, has roughly 22,560 "workers." Some of these prisoners work outside the prison in maintenance positions, receiving the average of 12 cents to 40 cents. The workers produce office furniture, clothing, textiles, etc. In order to challenge this malignancy we must make a protracted effort at unifying, forming a symbiosis of thought and action that pans from the prison workers to the "free workers." As a prison activist I encourage Marxist-Humanist revolutionaries to become part and parcel to the prisoner of conscious class struggle. --Prisoner, Tamms, Illinois * * * I am very grateful for NEWS & LETTERS striving to inform on a perspective which the general media would consider unorthodox, if not profane. News, to me, must be swallowed with a grain of salt, but I find N&L's views coinciding with my own on most subjects it expounds upon. Many would say Marxism is entirely based on an ideology of non-conformity and carping. Yet N&L exposes alternative views that show capitalism and "democracy," as we know them, are not the ideal and especially not the only choice. Thank you for letting me be part of this movement. --Prisoner, Iowa Park, Texas * * * N&L is very educational. Of late, I have been passing my copies on to friends. Then we sit as a group and share our thoughts. You will be receiving requests for order forms in coming weeks from a number who want to have their own copies to study. --Prisoner, Kenedy, Texas * * * When I read my favorite column, "Black/Red View" in the Nov.-Dec. 2005 issue, I was excited to know that Charles Denby and N&L worked with Rosa Parks for the Alabama African American people. What an outstanding woman she was. Actually, there is much good to be said about this country and the Bill of Rights. It is just not being used by the people in power. This is a multiracial country but the only people who seem to be together are the rich who are draining the poor and needy right out of existence. I hope N&L may open up the eyes of others to see what this country has done to its people over so many years. There is a great deal of work for all of us to do. --Prisoner, Florida It was startling to hear that Milosevic had died suddenly of a heart attack in the Hague, especially so because of the possibility that he was trying to cheat justice and history by manipulating his own health. His drawn-out trial before the Hague Tribunal seemed inadequate, in any case, to address Milosevic's crimes against humanity. From the moment in April of 1987 when as a petty bureaucrat he journeyed to autonomous Kosova to decry supposed Kosovar outrages against ethnic Serbs, Milosevic became the face of Serbian narrow nationalism. But his voice was far from alone--he had the backing of public intellectuals, even those like Mihailo Markovic, a prominent Marxist dissident under Tito, to spew forth his justifications for beginning ethnic wars. The drive for a Greater Serbia cemented Milosevic's power at the cost of more than 200,000 corpses. He gained allies in high places, beginning with global powers imposing an arms embargo on Yugoslavia. Just as the embargo imposed on Spain in the 1930s wound up throwing roadblocks in the way of those fighting fascist invaders, it was no different in Yugoslavia. When Bosnian forces, in spite of all obstacles, were driving back Serb forces moving to officially partition Bosnia, the UN and the U.S. under Clinton intervened. Milosevic also made enemies. I am thinking of the international women's movement. While political and cultural leaders in Europe and the U.S. generally dismissed Serbian expansion as "age-old conflicts," women were prominent among those exposing Milosevic's "ethnic cleansing" as an equally evil synonym for genocide that led both to systematic rape as deliberate policy, and the gruesome massacres of all men and boys in places like Srebrenica. I am proud that we in News and Letters Committees, did not remain quiet either. We opposed Serbian narrow nationalism, and our reports in N&L, collected in BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA, ACHILLES HEEL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION, caught the ongoing resistance. We reported how the Bosnian defenders opposed Serbian chauvinism, not with ethnic identity, but with defense of a multiethnic society. Genocide in Bosnia and later in Kosova seems to have conditioned world powers to business-as-usual policies while witnessing genocide on an even more massive scale in Rwanda and now Darfur. We could not have brought Milosevic to justice without uprooting his malignant legacy. He leaves us with the Balkans partitioned, in a world where "ethnic cleansing"--genocide--is just another tool for rulers to consider. --Bob McGuire, Chicago As usual, Terry Moon is right on the money with "For freedom we must stop Alito" (February-March N&L). Alito is the worst of the worst of the worst. Bush and the Republicans over time have deviously stacked the U.S. Supreme Court with a Catholic majority, all of whom are strong supporters of the death penalty. Then, the most horrid problem with Alito is his 1997 pronouncement that innocence is irrelevant to him. (See Lambert v. Blackwell.) The U.S. Constitution is a worthless piece of paper in the hands of judges to whom innocence is irrelevant. --Robert J. Zani, Tennessee Colony, Texas * * * With Alito, Roberts, Thomas, Scalia, Kennedy, we are in big trouble in all areas. Hopefully Bush will be out of office before the next Supreme Court Justice retires. If not, maybe the Democrats or independents can get their act together and take over Congress so that the appointment of a crank like Alito will be a non-issue. One thing that the GOP learned from the Thomas hearing is how to make sure their candidates toe the party line. --Robert T., Wisconsin * * * When NOW founder Betty Friedan died right after Alito was appointed to the Supreme Court, I thought it must have helped kill her to be ill in such reactionary times and see so much of what she worked for being so quickly destroyed by Bush and his cronies in Congress. In times like these, it's good to remember how quickly things can turn around. I hope she knew about the tens of thousands of Italian women who marched in Italy to keep abortion there legal. --Women's Liberationist, Memphis Our local Women's Action Coalition (WAC) is calling for a rally on April 29 "In Defense of Reproductive Rights." We're sick of seeing what is happening to our right to control our own bodies. In Tennessee, just as in South Dakota, so-called "leaders" are drooling to make abortion illegal. The Senate in Nashville voted 24-9 for a resolution to amend the state constitution to specifically state that women's right to abortion is not protected. Showing how fanatical they are, they voted 21-11 against a version that would have allowed abortion for women who were victims of incest or rape or "if their lives were in danger"! We plan to rally at the Shelby County Courthouse. Our leaflet reads in part: "Rally to keep women's right to abortion legal, safe, affordable and accessible. Rally to make over-the-counter contraception legal and available for all women. Rally to make sure women never again have to turn to deadly, back-alley and butcher abortions." Today over 70,000 women die every year and hundreds of thousands more are left maimed because abortion is illegal in the countries in which they live. If you are anywhere near Memphis on April 29, join us. For more information contact: WACmemphis@gmail.com. --Women's Action Coalition, Memphis, Tennessee MAKING THE LIBRARY BILL OF RIGHTS REAL Here at the Alternative Press Center, we're celebrating 36 years of self-sustained indexing for left and progressive publications. We have been enjoying your publication for six years. We want you to know that you can search for your content in the print version of the Alternative Print Index AND on OCLC'S FirstSearch database, in a library near you. Please list us as an indexing service for your periodical. When we are listed in your periodical and on your web site, librarians and researchers know that they can find your content in the print and online versions of the Alternative Press Index. Any donations to support us go directly to everyday operations like printing costs and wages. We would also gladly accept "donations in kind" such as running an ad for the Alternative Press Index or its companion Annotations: a Guide to the Independent Critical Press. Thanks for your support. --Alternative Press Center Collective, Baltimore * * * Editor's Note: We are glad to let our readers know of Annotations which has been called "the best single way to make the Library Bill of Rights real: providing access to the myriad opinions, movements, and activities that the orthodox conventional media either distort or ignore." This new edition surveys 385 periodicals of the Left from around the world and provides detailed descriptions of content, history, noted contributors, contact information, guidelines for writers and detailed statistics for each publication. You can order it for $29.95 from the Alternative Press Center, PO Box 33109, Baltimore, MD 21218, or go online to www.altpress.org. * * * Subscribe to News & Letters... Only $5 per year |
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