Never Change Your Ideals, Just Your Expectations

There was a short-lived television show in the 1985-86 CBS season called "Foley Square", set in the New York City District Attorney's office.  A quote from one of its episodes has stuck in my head for all these years, and has helped me get through some tough social and political times.

Hector Elizondo, playing the DA, says to his Assistant DA, played by Margaret Colin:

"Never change your ideals, just your expectations."

Sandy Pope For Teamsters President

While the news media focuses on the daily ups and downs of the Republican candidates vying to run for President of the United States in 2012, a different type of Presidential election kicked off this week.

Ballots were mailed out yesterday (October 6) to the 1.4 million members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) labor union, and will be counted beginning on November 14. General President James Hoffa, in office for the last 12 years, is running for reelection, but is being challenged by reformer and democracy advocate Sandy Pope, currently serving as President of Local 805 in New York City. A Pope victory would be a victory for bottom-up democratic decision-making over the top-down autocratic rule exemplified by Hoffa, and would also put a woman in charge of the Teamsters for the first time in their history. Both of these symbols could help improve the image of the Teamsters, and of unions in general, in the eyes of the rest of the country.

For many of us, our image of the Teamsters union was formed by their controversial President in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jimmy Hoffa, father of the current President. The McClellan Committee of the U.S. Senate held public hearings on allegations of corruption and dealings with organized crime by Hoffa and his predecessor, Dave Beck. John F. Kennedy, then a Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, was a member of the committee, and his brother Robert F. Kennedy was its chief counsel. After JFK was elected President in 1960, RFK continued investigating Hoffa and the Teamsters as Attorney General, eventually convicting Hoffa of jury tampering and fraud. Hoffa was released from federal prison in 1971 when Republican President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence; he disappeared in 1975 and is presumed to have been murdered, although his body has never been found.

Around that same time, groups of rank-and-file Teamsters who felt they had no voice in contracts being negotiated for them by top officials formed a reform group called Teamsters for a Democratic Union. TDU organized members across the country around a set of basic reforms aimed at making the officers more accountable to the membership and less prone to corruption. They also worked hard to rid the union of its connections to organized crime. One of TDU's major points was that the President should be directly elected by the members, rather than by delegates to a convention. The fact that Sandy Pope is today campaigning for the votes of those members is a direct result of TDU having won that democratic reform. TDU is an enthusiastic supporter of Pope's candidacy, and her view of unions being democratically run by its members is consistent with TDU's mission.

Sandy's belief in democratic unionism isn't limited to just the Teamsters. She has a long history of reaching out to members of other unions to share her vision and experience. In 2008 I attended a conference in Dearborn, Michigan sponsored by Labor Notes magazine. Sandy led a workshop I attended on contract negotiations, covering elements of the process from how the negotiating committee should act in front of management at formal sessions to how to rally the membership to support your negotiations. After the workshop was over, she took names and addresses of people who were interested in more resources, and then mailed each of us a package of articles and sample contract language. As a member of my engineering union's negotiating team, I had the opportunity to put some of Sandy's lessons into practice the following year as we successfully negotiated several significant improvements in one of our collective bargaining agreements. This willingness on her part to share what she's learned with members of other unions demonstrates her commitment to helping workers everywhere negotiate for better conditions, and having someone with that mindset leading the Teamsters would certainly have a positive impact on the state of organized labor in this country.

We'll have to wait until mid-November to see if Sandy succeeds in her election bid. In the meantime, you can help by sending her a donation. Current Teamster members can contribute to the campaign's General Fund, while nonmembers can contribute to the Legal and Accounting Fund, as I have done. In addition, if you know or come into contact with any Teamsters (e.g., your local UPS driver), encourage them to cast their vote for Sandy. Just as citizens around the country are demonstrating in favor of more participatory democracy - the right to participate in decisions that affect them - so should our brothers and sisters in the Teamsters demonstrate their support for greater internal democracy.

Republican Strategy Explained

Have you noticed that the only consistent theme in Republican position statements appears to be opposition to whatever it is that President Obama proposes? Time and time again, whether the topic is healthcare, foreign policy, budget deficits, or unemployment, we see Republicans in Congress make their proposals, after which President Obama endorses some elements of those proposals (to the chagrin of many Democrats), only to see the Republicans reverse their positions and back away from their own proposals, for no apparent reason other than to distance themselves from the President.

This scene from the 1932 Marx Brothers movie "Horsefeathers" pretty well sums up this sophisticated Republican strategy, and may well have been its original inspiration:

Troy Davis, Rest In Peace

Troy Davis (October 9, 1968 - September 21, 2011)

The state of Georgia proceeded with the execution of Troy Davis tonight; official time of death was declared to be 11:08 p.m. Eastern time. Death was by lethal injection.

The execution had been scheduled for 7:00, but was postponed while the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed a request for a stay of execution. At 10:43, according to Richard Kim's live blogging at The Nation, the Supreme Court issued a one-line statement denying the request to stop the execution. It was also reported that there were no dissents - not a single one of our nine Supreme Court justices chose to intervene in this case.

Joining the Supreme Court in its unwillingness to stop the execution of a potentially innocent person was President Barack Obama; his Press Secretary Jay Carney said "it is not appropriate" for the President to "weigh in on specific cases like this one", according to ABC.

I watched online as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! reported live from outside the prison in Jackson, Georgia, interviewing NAACP President Benjamin Jealous as they both received news of the execution and of Davis' death.

Many people, in this country and around the world, tried to stop this madness. There are many compelling reasons to believe that Troy Davis was innocent of the crime for which he was just executed, which would mean not only that we just killed an innocent person but also that the real killer of off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail is still at large. Beyond the question of guilt or innocence, though, is the barbarity of this state-sponsored killing. Killing a murderer does not bring the murder victim back, and certainly does not demonstrate to the rest of us that killing people is wrong; it only increases the number of people being killed.

Sadly, there appear to be many people in this country who are immune to these arguments against the death penalty. Last year, when Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison ran unsuccessfully against Texas Governor Rick Perry in the Republican primary, her campaign considered making Perry's zeal for executions an issue to use against him. However, as reported by Salon, when her campaign asked a focus group of likely Republican primary voters about the possibility that Perry had ordered the execution of innocent people who were wrongfully convicted, they found that it didn't bother them at all. "It takes balls to execute an innocent man", said one registered Republican.

If that's our new national slogan, forgive me if I don't join people like that in chants of "USA!" tonight.

Ten Years of Living in a "Homeland"

"Videogames of the tower's fall

Homeland Security could kill us all"

- Green Day, "21st Century Breakdown"

For the last ten years, we've been told by government officials and the media that we're living in a "homeland". We're constantly reminded that the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon buildings on September 11, 2001 were attacks on our "homeland", and that our Homeland Security officials are working vigilantly to protect us from further attacks.

Before 2001, however, "homeland" was a term that was rarely, if ever, used to describe the US. We spoke of living in a country, nation, or republic, not a homeland. The US Constitution states that our goals are to "form a more perfect Union", "insure domestic Tranquility", and "provide for the common defense"; there's nothing in there about "securing the homeland". In fact, for many of us, the term "homeland" sounds uncomfortably similar to "fatherland" ("Vaterland" in German), a term that stirs up images of violent militaristic nationalism and fascism from the first and second World Wars.

So how did the United States of America become a Homeland?

One of the first official uses of the term, which received little public notice at the time, appeared in a series of reports by a bipartisan governmental commission. The US Commission on National Security/21st Century was created in 1998 under Democratic President Bill Clinton to perform a review of national security policies and strategies as we entered the 21st century. The commission was co-chaired by former Democratic Senator Gary Hart and former Republican Senator Warren Rudman, and included former Republican House Speaker (and 2012 Presidential candidate) Newt Gingrich, former CEO of Lockheed Martin (and its predecessor Martin Marietta) Norm Augustine, and Leslie Gelb, head of the Defense Department study group on the history of US involvement in Vietnam whose report became known as the "Pentagon Papers" after being leaked to newspapers by Daniel Ellsberg. The Hart-Rudman Commission's final report, released in February 2001 (seven months before the 9/11 attacks) was full of references to our "homeland"; the first major section was titled "Securing the National Homeland", there were warnings that attacks upon our homeland were becoming increasingly likely, and its recommendations called for several changes in governmental organization, including creation of an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Security as well as a National Homeland Security Agency.

The report seemed to languish under the just-inaugurated Republican administration of President George W. Bush, until the 9/11 attacks seemed to make the report more relevant. Within days, President Bush announced the creation of a new Office of Homeland Security, and use of this new term spread rapidly in the media. A little over a year later, in November 2002, Congress created a new Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, transferring existing organizations such as the Coast Guard, INS, Secret Service, TSA, and FEMA from other Executive Branch departments.

All of this begs the question: if the creation of a new Department of Homeland Security was necessary for the defense of the United States against attacks, then what is the purpose of the Department of Defense? Shouldn't an organization called "Department of Defense" be responsible for the defense of the homeland?

Unfortunately, that department's activities are probably better described by its former name, the War Department, as it was known from 1789 through 1947. After the end of World War II in 1945, the US public was weary of being at war, and so eliminating our Department of War and replacing it with a benign-sounding Department of Defense probably seemed like a popular move. The new name was also in line with the developing Cold War mindset, in which the Soviet Union was cast in the role of a belligerent warmonger while the United States was portrayed as only using its military for defense. In reality, the history of US military actions since World War II seem to have more to do with a projection of power, and protection of US business interests, beyond our borders than with an actual defense of those borders. Our "Defense" department invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965, Cambodia in 1970, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003, in addition to sending ground troops, bombers, or both to Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Haiti, and Libya, among other places.

Given the Defense Department's preoccupation with military adventurism abroad, perhaps there was a need for a new department to focus on defending the United States, but please, let's use a different name. "Homeland" seems to have been deliberately picked to stoke the public's feelings of nationalism, hatred of foreigners, and willingness to do almost anything in order to defend our "home". Use of the term "Homeland" has probably made it easier for the government to chip away at our civil liberties, increasing the scope of activities such as wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping (signals intelligence, or SIGINT), intrusive body searches and other invasions of privacy, and indefinite detainment without being charged. In short, the more we talk about securing a homeland, the more we move towards living in a national security state rather than a free and open democracy. As Benjamin Franklin wrote, "those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

After ten years of talking about securing a "homeland", let's drop the hyperbolic language and get back to just providing "for the common defense", as it says in the Constitution. While we're at it, why not set up a new Department of Domestic Tranquility?

Capital Goes On Strike

For the first time in history, the creditworthiness of the United States Treasury was downgraded yesterday. Standard & Poor's dropped its AAA rating of US debt down a notch, to AA+.

During the last few weeks' arguments over negotiating a deal to increase the debt limit, both the Obama administration and members of Congress warned that a bill needed to be passed before hitting the debt ceiling on August 2 in order to avoid a credit downgrade. Well, they got a deal, it was signed into law on August 2, but our credit has been downgraded anyway.

Far from being an unprecedented or unexplainable move by a jittery rating agency, this instead seems to be part of a pattern of actions by finance capital to sabotage the US economy.

Corporations have large amounts of cash reserves - nearly $2 trillion, according to some estimates - but rather than using that cash to hire more employees, they're either using it to buy back their own stock (to pump up the price) or just sitting on it. Similarly, banks have nearly $1 trillion in cash, but they're reluctant to actually lend it to potential home buyers or startup businesses.

Just as workers use the withholding of their labor (a labor strike) to change unfavorable conditions, the financial industry is withholding its capital to change what they perceive as unfavorable conditions. We appear to be in the grip of a capital strike.

U.S. corporations have engaged in this sort of behavior before, sometimes with the cooperation of the U.S. government, to undermine social democratic governments in other countries. During the 1970s, Chile under President Salvador Allende and Jamaica under Prime Minister Michael Manley were both victims of capital strikes by U.S. companies as well as local businesses. Allende was overthrown in 1973 by a U.S.-backed military coup, while Manley's party was merely voted out of office in 1980, but in both cases capital began to flow freely once again under new conservative governments.

Not that President Barack Obama should be mistaken for a social democrat; Obama's policies pale in comparison to the wide-ranging reforms of Allende and Manley. Moreover, Obama did nothing to stop the overthrow of elected President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, where business interests welcomed the coup. Nevertheless, it appears that even the possibility of an occasional finger-wagging or public shaming from a Democratic President is more than our financial industry is willing to tolerate.

President Obama needs to stop worrying about being accused of "fomenting class warfare" if he targets wealthy individuals or corporations. The class war is already underway, instigated by the wealthy against the rest of us; yesterday's credit downgrade should be seen as a declaration of war. It's time for President Obama to be clear about what's happening, and stop trying to appease the markets, because that's clearly not working.

The United States can either return to the democratic rule of one person, one vote, or we can continue on the current path towards an oligarchy of one dollar, one vote.

Which side are you on?

"Battle In Seattle" Governor Approved As Ambassador To China

The nightly news has given us the impression that Congress has been unable to accomplish anything for weeks as they argue over whether or not to raise the debt ceiling before August 2. But yesterday, July 27, the Senate confirmed Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to be the next U.S. Ambassador to China.

Gary Locke, a Democrat, was Governor of Washington when Seattle hosted the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) conference, which famously drew tens of thousands of protesters opposed to the WTO's corporate agenda. As dramatized in the 2007 film Battle In Seattle, Governor Locke called out the National Guard to help the Seattle police clear protesters off the streets of Seattle so as not to tarnish his pro-business image.

It's bad enough that President Obama picked Locke to be his Secretary of Commerce, but now he's being sent to represent U.S. interests in China. Presumably his responsibilities will include keeping the shelves of our Wal-Mart stores stocked with products made by Chinese sweatshop labor, as well as convincing the Chinese government to continue funding our federal debt - assuming, of course, that Congress agrees to authorize more of that debt.

In honor of Locke's promotion, here's the classic 10cc song "Rubber Bullets" from 1973, set to video of protests at a G20 meeting. Hey, maybe Ambassador Locke can advise the Chinese government on crowd control methods!

Republicans To US: If You Don't Cut Social Security & Medicare, We'll Kill This Dog

Well, actually, what they're threatening to do is refuse to increase the debt ceiling, essentially forcing the federal government to shut down, which is about as insane as shooting a dog (thanks to National Lampoon for this classic magazine cover).

I'm not really a government economist, and I don't play one on TV, but let me see if I understand the sequence of events that has led us to the brink of this abyss.

By the end of the administration of President Bill Clinton (D), the federal budget actually had a surplus. Then President George W. Bush (R) took over, and federal budgets started running deficits again. First came tax cuts for the rich, which reduced the amount of money coming in. Then came invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, resulting in increased spending. The Medicare prescription drug plan, which obligates the federal government to pay whatever prices are set by pharmaceutical companies for seniors' prescriptions, has also increased spending.

Now, however, that there's a Democratic President, the Republicans in Congress have suddenly declared that deficit spending must be stopped immediately. The logical approach would be to undo the Bush-era policies that contributed to the national debt, right? Raise tax rates on wealthy individuals and corporations to where they were ten years ago, bring the troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq, and allow Medicare to negotiate lower prices on prescription drugs as is done in most other countries. That would be the logical approach.

Logic, however, seems to be in short supply in DC these days. Instead, Republicans in Congress are demanding deep cuts, or even a dismantling, of Social Security and Medicare. Somehow, they want us to pay for ten years of corporate tax breaks, military operations, and subsidies to for-profit drug companies by cutting back on our parents' and grandparents' income and making it more expensive for them to go to the doctor or hospital.

Never mind killing the dog in the above photo; the Republicans are trying to kill Grandma.

Bobby Kennedy's Inspiring Vision

Last summer, during a vacation drive through New England, I convinced my family to make a stop at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston. While browsing through the museum shop, I came across a pile of paperback copies of a fascinating book by JFK's brother Bobby. These were not newly published versions of the book, but leftover copies printed during his 1968 Presidential campaign (in fact, the library's website still has copies available for sale). I bought a copy, initially as a collector's item, but having now read it several times, I'm impressed by its high-minded vision as well as its continuing relevance today.

"To Seek A Newer World" was not intended to be a campaign book. When it was first published in November 1967, Bobby Kennedy was not a Presidential contender, only a United States Senator from New York, where I lived at the time. The book is essentially a series of essays and excerpts from speeches covering his Senate term, to which he had been elected in 1964. Although some of his positions, particularly on the U.S. war in Vietnam, put him at odds with President Lyndon Johnson, everyone expected Johnson to seek re-election in 1968, and Bobby was at first unwilling to challenge his fellow Democrat in the primaries. It took another Democratic Senator, Gene McCarthy of Minnesota, to mount a campaign and demonstrate Johnson's vulnerability in the early primaries. By March of 1968, Bobby changed his mind and declared his own candidacy for the Presidency. On March 31, President Johnson announced on TV that he was dropping out of the election, suddenly making it a very real possibility that Senator Kennedy might be the Democratic candidate in the November general election. "To Seek A Newer World" was quickly updated with some more recent Kennedy statements on Vietnam, as well as the text of his campaign announcement, and rushed out as a "Special Campaign Edition" discount paperback. Sadly, that campaign was cut short less than three months after it began. On June 4, 1968 (43 years ago today), Kennedy won the California and South Dakota Democratic primaries. Moments after finishing his victory speech in Los Angeles, he was hit by gunfire, fell into a coma, and died on June 6. Vice President Hubert Humphrey became the Democratic candidate at the party's August convention, but his earlier reputation as a champion of civil rights and desegregation had by then been irreparably tarnished by his unquestioning support of Johnson's Vietnam War policies, and he was defeated in November by Republican Richard Nixon.

Reading "To Seek A Newer World" today provides some insight into how the course of history, and of the world, might have been different had Bobby lived to contest the election with Nixon.

The chapter on America's cities contains some frank discussion of past mistakes in the areas of public housing and urban renewal. "We rarely asked", wrote Kennedy, "those whose homes we leveled whether they liked the plan, and we thought too little about what would become of them after their homes were gone." Kennedy pointed to his own efforts in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, NYC as an alternative approach, where residents of the community held seats on the boards of the organizations making development decisions.

Bobby also devoted a chapter to the Alliance for Progress, the comprehensive program for Latin America that was a high point of his brother John's Presidency. After JFK's 1963 assassination, his successor Johnson did not give the Alliance a high priority, and Johnson's covert support of the Brazilian military's overthrow of the democratically elected Goulart administration in 1964, as well as the overt invasion by the U.S. Marines of the Dominican Republic in 1965, seemed to run counter to the Alliance's aims. RFK, however, displayed admirable insight into the root causes of the region's situation. Kennedy wrote empathetically of Latin Americans' "feeling with regard to foreign owners in the extractive industries - oil, minerals, metals - which are also criticized as depleting resources essential to their future. Few Latin Americans can fail to be sensitive to their history, to the centuries in which their mineral wealth was taken by a small privileged minority, to be sent abroad to the coffers of Spanish kings and then to the banks of Europe." This is precisely the theme of Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America, the book which Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave to U.S. President Barack Obama in April 2009 in order to help Obama understand the region. Galeano first published his book in 1971, yet here was a U.S. Senator making some of the same points three years earlier.

Kennedy also stressed that the Alliance for Progress had always been underfunded. In a footnote, he pointed out that even if the current annual Alliance spending for all of Latin America were to be doubled, that total amount of money would be equal to the cost of what the U.S. was then spending for only two weeks' worth of the Vietnam war. Think about that - an amount of money that could have been spent for constructive purposes for all of Latin America for a year was instead being squandered in only two weeks for bombing, burning, and strafing a single country in Southeast Asia. Even when writing about Latin America, Bobby couldn't help bringing the subject back to the disastrous war being waged in Vietnam.

At several points in this book, Bobby complained about stubbornness and a lack of leadership: "there is no courage or discipline involved in following failure down the road to disaster"; "the courage to admit a mistake and retreat is not a universal characteristic of national leaders". He probably had then-President Johnson in mind when he wrote these words, but they could equally be applied to many of our Presidents since then.

Kennedy even reached back to a Shakespeare play to point out that governments frequently use wars to distract the people from problems at home. He quotes a line from Henry IV in which the king advises his son to "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels". Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya seem to be doing a great job of "busying giddy minds" these days, leaving less time for serious debate about our domestic economy.

The book ends with a more hopeful and upbeat Postscript, containing perhaps one of Bobby's most quoted lines: "Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

Bullets may have stopped Senator Kennedy's quest for the Presidency, as well as his too-short life, but they could not stop the "ripples of hope" he set into motion. Go back, as I did, and revisit Robert F. Kennedy's remarkable writings; you'll find yourself inspired by his vision of hope for the future, and moved by his ripples.

The Bin Laden Trial That Wasn't

I realize this probably puts me in the minority, but I am not rejoicing over the May 1 death of Osama bin Laden. President Obama claimed that "justice has been done" with the execution of bin Laden by special forces, but I'm not so sure. I think that justice would have been better served by capturing bin Laden alive and putting him on trial.

It's not as if apprehending an evil mass murderer and putting him on trial would have been unprecedented, with all sorts of insurmountable logistical problems. It's actually been done before. For example, 50 years ago, the entire world watched as former SS officer Adolf Eichmann was put on trial in Israel for his role in organizing mass deportations of Jews to death camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe during World War II.

After Israeli intelligence found Eichmann living under an assumed identity in Argentina, agents from Mossad and Shin Bet kidnapped him and brought him back to Israel. The trial began in April 1961, with Eichmann in a booth made of bulletproof glass to protect him from possible attacks. The trial was broadcast live, so that people around the world could hear the prosecution's case as well as the former high-ranking Nazi's efforts to defend himself. The three-judge panel found Eichmann guilty on all counts, and sentenced him to death; Eichmann was hanged in 1962.

Wasn't that a better way to bring this murderer to "justice" than if the Mossad agents had just executed Eichmann on the spot in Argentina?

Another effort to bring a mass murderer to trial ultimately failed, to the disappointment of many, when Augusto Pinochet died of natural causes in 2006. Pinochet led a military overthrow of the democratically-elected government of his native Chile in 1973. On September 11 of that year (the same date on which New York and Washington would later be attacked in 2001), the Chilean military bombed and strafed La Moneda, their equivalent of the White House, as part of their coup. Thousands of citizens were rounded up, tortured, and killed, as was vividly portrayed in Costa-Gavras' 1982 film Missing. When Pinochet finally yielded power in 1990, he ensured that an amnesty law was in place to shield him from future prosecution, but the Chilean justice system was in the process of removing that amnesty and bringing Pinochet to trial for his crimes when he died. The families of his victims felt robbed of their chance to see the man who ordered the deaths of their loved ones brought to justice.

Sadly, the families of the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks have also been robbed of a chance to see Osama bin Laden brought to trial. Instead, we have the United States setting an example that vigilante justice and extrajudicial killings are acceptable.

I'm deeply disappointed that President Obama, a former lecturer in constitutional law, doesn't see this difference.

I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night

My wife and I went to see a one-night-only showing of a new documentary about the 1960s folk singer Phil Ochs called "There But For Fortune" (www.philochsthemovie.com). The DVD is scheduled for a July 19 release, and I highly recommend purchasing this film.

Phil Ochs wrote topical songs, often using news articles from The New York Times or Newsweek for inspiration. The title of his first album, "All The News That's Fit To Sing", was a pun on the Times' debatable claim to contain "all the news that's fit to print". In some ways, Ochs was a musical version of Mort Sahl, who used newspaper articles as his jumping-off point for standup comedy routines (or, to update the analogy, think of Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show"). He was also an active participant in the movements to educate the public about those events, including the civil rights movement and U.S. military intervention in Vietnam, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. He performed at the street demonstrations outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and became angered and disillusioned by the violent reaction against those protests by the police, ordered by Democratic Mayor Richard Daley and endorsed by Democratic Presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey. Phil's next album cover featured a tombstone giving his place and date of death as Chicago, 1968.

The movie offers a wealth of Phil's musical performances, taken from TV shows as well as film from rallies, protests, and marches. Also featured are interviews with Joan Baez and other musicians. Tom Hayden, cofounder of Students for a Democratic Society and one of the "Chicago Eight" indicted by the Nixon administration for "conspiracy to riot" at the 1968 Democratic convention, puts Phil's politics in perspective with the times. Billy Bragg, the British singer/songwriter who wrote new lyrics for the tune "Joe Hill" as "I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night", is also interviewed in the film.

The film is an inspiring tribute to an overlooked artist who needs to be remembered, because his lyrics, sense of irony, and commitment to making this country live up to its claimed ideals are sadly needed as much today as they were during the turbulent decade of the 1960s.

Here's the official trailer for the movie:

May Day Greetings 2011

May 1, or May Day, is recognized by many around the world as Labor Day, in honor of the large demonstrations held by workers in Chicago in May 1886 for the 8-hour day. Many symbols of the labor movement, including the May Day holiday and songs such as "The Internationale", were hijacked by the Soviet Union and other countries whose forms of government were more correctly described as "bureaucratic collectivist" than "worker-controlled".

British musician Billy Bragg updated the lyrics to "The Internationale" in 1990; here's a video with his recording set to images of workers' struggles throughout the years. Happy May Day!

Armistice Day Message from Veterans for Peace

In honor of Veterans' Day, I am reprinting here the 2010 "Armistice Day Message" from the Veterans for Peace website:

November 11 is a cause for mixed emotions among those former members of the military who wish to permanently halt the horror of war.

A holiday in our name is indeed an honor, as was our service itself, but “Armistice” somehow still sounds more suitable. That word refers to the end of a conflict, the end of the killing, the maiming, the destruction, the inhumanity, the erosion of civilized personal behaviors that have taken centuries to mold. While “Armistice” does not connote lasting peace, at least it does connote a chance for societies to grasp hold of themselves and, if able, to pull back from the abyss.

Veterans For Peace, while grateful for the parades recognizing our duty and the ultimate sacrifice of our fallen comrades, would prefer a time of reexamination of the jaded justifications and obscene outcomes of the military causes we served. All too frequently those justifications have been morally insufficient to vindicate the malevolent international conflicts to which they gave such ignoble birth.

For these reasons Veterans For Peace gratefully acknowledges the heartfelt recognition which our nation solemnly offers us today. But we fervently urge that tomorrow our great nation devote its equally heartfelt and solemn attention and talents to the cessation of existing wars and to the prevention of similar calamities in the decades to come.

Kurt Vonnegut, the internationally acclaimed author from our country and a POW in Dresden during the Allied firebombing of that city in WWII, gives us something to think about on this day of remembrance.

"…November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy all the people of all the nations which fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I've talked to old men who were on the battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veteran's Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veteran's Day is not…Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things."

The Wellstone Files

Senator Paul Wellstone, the progressive Democratic Senator from Minnesota, tragically died in a plane crash eight years ago this month, just before Election Day, as he was running for a third term. Minnesota Public Radio has obtained hundreds of pages from the FBI's file on Wellstone, beginning when he participated in protests against the Vietnam War in the early 1970s. The files go right up to the plane crash and its aftermath, as the FBI investigated tips indicating the crash was a result of sabotage.

Read the full story here: The Wellstone Files | Minnesota Public Radio News

Coal Baron Fuels Toomey's Senate Race

Pat Toomey, the Republican running for the open Senate seat from Pennsylvania currently held by retiring Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Specter (?-PA), says on his website that "Washington is threatening new and heavy costs and burdens on businesses", and that government instead should be "cutting taxes and decreasing regulation." This has apparently attracted the interest, and money, of a multimillionaire coal executive who normally confines his political activity to West Virginia.

Don Blankenship is the Chairman and CEO of Massey Energy, a job which paid him $17.8 million in 2009. Massey was in the news this past April when an explosion at their Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia killed 29 mine workers. Although the investigation is still ongoing, it appears that high levels of methane gas inside the mine may have led to the explosion. The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) had repeatedly fined Massey for violating safety regulations, including those requiring proper ventilation to prevent the buildup of methane. Presumably these are among those pesky regulations that Toomey wants to decrease if he's elected to the Senate.

According to the Federal Election Commission website, Blankenship gave a personal contribution of $2,000 to Toomey's campaign in September 2009. He is also a director of the National Mining Association, whose two political action committees COALPAC and MINEPAC have also contributed to Toomey.

Blankenship has a history of involvement in his native West Virginian politics. In 2004 he spent $3 million to help defeat state Supreme Court justice Warren McGraw. He was photographed vacationing on the French Riviera with another state judge, Elliot "Spike" Maynard, who later voted to set aside a $76 million judgement against Massey Energy. Having lost his re-election to the court, Maynard is running this year for Congress against Democratic Rep. Nick Rahall. Blankenship, of course, is listed among Maynard's contributors.

Blankenship's newfound interest in Pennsylvania campaigns may have something to do with Massey Energy's expansion into the state. In May 2010, Massey got permission to buy the Mathies coal mine near Pittsburgh, which is now the first Massey-owned mine in Pennsylvania. Given Massey's record of safety and health violations, many people living near the Mathies mine are concerned about this takeover.

Blankenship claims he cares about the safety of coal miners, as well as creating more mining jobs. If that's so, then you would expect the coal miners to follow his political priorities. However, the United Mine Workers of America labor union, through its PAC, has contributed not to Toomey but to Joe Sestak, the Democratic House representative from the Philadelphia suburbs who defeated Specter in the primary. It seems that the mine workers know that Sestak is more likely to be on their side than Blankenship's friend Toomey.

Hopefully, when Pennsylvania voters go to the polls on November 2, they will remember the song "Which Side Are You On?", written by the wife of a UMW coal miner in Kentucky, and vote against the candidate funded by a coal CEO who profits while his employees are killed on the job.

Coexist

In memory of those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001, as well as all people who have lost their lives since then in wars, bombings, and other acts of senseless violence.

Keep The Trains A-Rollin'

This train's got the disappearing railroad blues.

- "City of New Orleans", by Steve Goodman

Power outages along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor this morning caused delays and cancellations, not only for Amtrak trains but also for trains operated by regional agencies NJT (New Jersey Transit), SEPTA (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority), and MARC (Maryland Area Regional Commuter) which use Amtrak's tracks and power lines.

The reaction of most people in the New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington metropolitan areas to this news was probably, "what, again?". Entering "Amtrak power outage" or "Amtrak signal problems" into your search engine will give you an idea of how often this seems to happen.

Unfortunately, each time an incident like this occurs, it reinforces the idea that train travel is unreliable, and makes people more likely to use their cars. "Better pull your car out of the garage if you need to get to work on time", chirped one local TV newscaster this morning.

With the growing recognition that we, as a country, need to break our oil addiction, we need to find ways to encourage more, not less, train travel. Our overconsumption of oil, fueled in part by daily reliance on the personal automobile for commuting to work, has given us the Deepwater Horizon disaster (killing 11 workers and ruining the Gulf coast ecosystems), global warming, and military operations aimed at ensuring the steady flow of petroleum from the Arabian peninsula and the Persian Gulf. Encouraging more people to ride the train to work is an essential part of changing our energy use, but this can only work if the trains actually run on time. For this reason, funding for mass transit must be part of the equation whenever bills dealing with energy or climate change are debated; the issues are inextricably linked.

Government funding was used to build the interstate highways (beginning under the Republican Eisenhower administration in the 1950s), and continues to subsidize travel by car and plane. Government funding is now needed for capital improvements to our existing rail lines, as well as to build new lines, to give people more reasons to leave their cars in the garage each day and take the train to work.

Hiroshima - The Original Ground Zero

Sixty-five years ago, on August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima in Japan. Three days later, on August 9, our military dropped another atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki. These were the first, and so far the only, uses of nuclear weapons in attacks against people.

The official story promulgated in the U.S. is that these two A-bomb attacks were necessary to force a recalcitrant Japanese government to finally surrender and bring an end to World War II; without them, a high-casualty land invasion would have been necessary. My father, an Army Corporal serving in the Pacific at the time, was one of the soldiers being prepared for this invasion force, and was relieved that this use of atomic weapons had cancelled that invasion and probably saved his life.

Others, however, were horrified by these new weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and called on governments to limit their use and stockpiling. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had led the Manhattan Project scientists in developing these A-bombs, spoke out publicly against starting a nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which led to the loss of his security clearance and thus his ability to continue any government employment. U.S. physicist Albert Einstein and British philosopher Bertrand Russell coauthored a manifesto in 1955 which stated, in part: "In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them." In 1957, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dr. Benjamin Spock (author of "Baby and Child Care"), Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Norman Cousins and others formed The Committee For A SANE Nuclear Policy.

Governments eventually began to listen. On August 5, 1963 - the day before the 18-year anniversary of the first atomic bomb attack - the governments of the United States, Soviet Union, and United Kingdom signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which limited testing of nuclear weapons to underground tests, out of rising public concerns over radioactive fallout from testing on the ground, in the atmosphere, or in the Pacific Ocean. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed in 1968, was intended to prevent non-nuclear countries from developing or acquiring these weapons, although the refusal of India, Pakistan, and Israel to sign the treaty and their development of their own nuclear arsenals has weakened the treaty, as has the glacial pace of the promised disarmament by the established nuclear "club". The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), completed in 1996, was signed by President Clinton but failed ratification in the U.S. Senate.

The time may be right, though, for a new round of efforts to abolish nuclear weapons once and for all. For the first time, the U.S. government sent an official representative (John Roos, our Ambassador to Japan) to the annual August 6 memorial service at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park near Ground Zero of the 1945 detonation. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was also there, along with representatives of nuclear powers Britain and France. Peace groups, including the Quakers' Friends Committee on National Legislation, are recommending we contact our Senators to push for ratification of the CTBT as well as the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) signed in April by U.S. President Obama and Russian President Medvedev.

The fact that this would put peace advocates on the same side of this issue as Henry Kissinger, who has been preaching nuclear abolition since 2007, should not deter us. Military hawks and their armchair cheerleaders initially welcomed atomic/nuclear bombs as the epitome of efficiency; they meant that a city could now be destroyed by a single bomber dropping a single bomb, rather than the multiple bombers dropping hundreds of incendiary bombs it took to destroy Dresden and Tokyo during World War II. However, they soon grew frustrated as political leaders refused to authorize the use of nuclear weapons in Korea and Vietnam; what's the use of having such a great weapon, they grumbled, if we're not allowed to use it? Kissinger is probably just continuing his practice of realpolitik, deciding that if the U.S. and its allies can never actually use the darned things, we might as well just ban them forever.

This may be the first time in my life that I've ever agreed with Henry Kissinger on anything.

Arizona's "He Don't Look Right To Me" Law

There's one in the spotlight, he don't look right to me,

Get him up against the wall!

- "In The Flesh", Pink Floyd

Arizona's Senate Bill (SB) 1070, the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act", was scheduled to go into effect tomorrow, July 29. Although a federal judge issued a last-minute temporary injunction blocking key portions of the bill, including those requiring police to check the U.S. citizenship status of anyone they suspected of being in the country illegally, other portions of the bill will still become law tomorrow, and further judicial action could lift the injunction. Moreover, the judge apparently didn't question the constitutionality, let alone the morality, of asking some people, but not others, for ID based on their appearance; the judicial proceedings appear to be more of a pissing contest between state and federal governments than a real debate about human rights.

SB 1070 is usually referred to as an "immigration law", but that's misleading. It's really an identification law, intended to permit authorities to categorize people based on their nationality or ethnic background. While allegedly passed out of frustration and alarm over "illegal immigration", in practice the law would most certainly have been used more against some immigrants than others. For example, chances are that the au pair from Ireland or the college student from Sweden who overstayed their visas would not have been forced to produce their identification papers. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of neighboring California, whose still-thick accent from his native Austria ought to make passing police officers wonder about his citizenship status, would also probably be spared from producing ID on the spot. The Arizona law was clearly targeted against the brown-skinned Hispanics who are imagined to be pouring over Arizona's southern border from Mexico, Central America, and South America. What's more disturbing than the specific mechanics of the law is the motivation behind it.

Is it merely coincidence that this law was drafted and passed during the term of this country's first non-white President? The news is frequently full of all-white protest groups who clearly hate the fact that Barack Obama is President, question whether he was actually born in the United States ("papers please, Mr. President"), and insist that they want "their" country back, presumably taking it back from those people in Washington who don't look the same as they do.

It's also interesting to note that this law was passed in Arizona, which as a territory during the Civil War requested, and was granted, membership in the Confederate States of America and swore their allegiance to CSA President Jefferson Davis. Back in the good ole days of the Confederacy, you didn't need to rely on papers to determine a person's status, other than to find out which white person legally owned a particular black slave.

Going even further back in history, the Arizona territory was originally formed out of land taken by the U.S. military from Mexico by force, in the Mexican-American War (which, interestingly, Abraham Lincoln opposed as a member of Congress). Arizona is also home to many native Americans, who might have been better off if they had taken the SB 1070 approach to illegal immigration when the first ships arrived from Europe.

When I was in the 12th grade, my high school German class took a trip to Munich, in what was then called West Germany. We took a train to Salzburg, Austria, and as we approached the border between the two countries, the porters walked up and down the train cars saying "Papiere bitte" (papers please). We all froze at the sound of that phrase, which immediately conjured up images from countless movies about World War II in which Jews and other refugees from the Nazi German authorities got caught without proper identification. On that same trip, we also visited the museum on the site of the Dachau concentration camp, where many of those people without the right papers ended up. Is this where we want to end up as a country?

My two daughters were both born in Peru, and adopted by me and my wife when they were infants. They are now naturalized U.S. citizens, but those official certificates from the federal government which prove that status are not among the items carried in their pocketbooks on a daily basis. If our family decided to take a vacation in Arizona, and SB 1070 were allowed to be fully implemented as originally planned, would my daughters be stopped and questioned, and perhaps taken away from us, because their brown skin makes them look like they don't belong?

A judge may have temporarily blocked this specific law, but not the underlying racism behind it. SB 1070 wasn't really the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act". It should have more properly been named the "Support Our White Neighborhoods Act."

Peace and Love, from Ringo to the World

Today is the 70th birthday of Richard Starkey, a.k.a. Ringo Starr. One could say he's had a pretty successful life: fame and fortune as drummer with The Beatles, successful solo recording and acting careers, even marrying a "Bond girl" (Barbara Bach). So whenever he's asked what he wants for his birthday, his answer is simple: "Peace and Love".

As explained on his website, each year on his birthday (July 7, or "the seventh day of the seventh month", as he explains in Muddy Waters fashion), Ringo asks people to flash peace signs at 12:00 noon, local time wherever they are, and say "Peace and love". If enough people do this each year, he figures, maybe we'll actually get it.

Ringo seems to be echoing the sentiments of a former bandmate from Liverpool, who asked us to "Give Peace A Chance" and reminded us that "All You Need Is Love". It certainly seems to be what the world needs now.

So here goes:

PEACE AND LOVE

Happy birthday, Ringo.