Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain

It was a rough afternoon.

At 2:00 PM yesterday, I was standing in front of City Hall in lower Manhattan, serving as an extra at a press conference for the Stella D’oro workers. After winning an arduous 11 month strike against concessions, the workers have been fighting plans by new owners Lance, Inc. to move the 78 year old bakery from the Bronx to Ashtabula, Ohio and reopen non-union.

The press conference/mini-rally had been a good one, though major media was thin on the ground, Speakers from the plant, a range of union officials and other supporters gave short sharp statements, demanding that Mayor Bloomberg do something to save Stella D’oro and its union jobs. As we were about to break up, two of the workers got hasty phone calls from the plant. Managers had told the morning shift that when they left at 3:00 PM, the bakery was shutting down!

Maybe a quarter of the 100-plus at City Hall headed up to 237th Street and Broadway, where the arriving shift had been ushered into work to empty their lockers. They were still trickling out at 3:00 when the day shift came out en masse, carrying plastic bags with whatever they had had inside. The three dozen supporters and workers outside the gate clapped as they did and there were chants that had become familiar to all from almost a year of picketing.

but this video from Manchester Pride this year dampened the old retinas toot sweet.

Which is sorta weird because this collective version of Lily Allen’s song is so deeply heartening and inspirational. I guess that what really moves me is people in struggle. So I’m old school; sue me.

Actually, make that EPIC FAIL!

Many of us have seen the rather frightening reports on tear gas and noise generators the cops employed to stop protests during the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh. If that didn’t stop the demonstrations, these bozos sure weren’t likely to…

Denise McNair.

Carole Robertson.

Addie Mae Collins.

Cynthia Wesley.

For many of us who came up in the ’60s, these names will always be instantly recognizable, impossible to read or to hear–no matter how long it has been–without a deep emotional pull, an admixture of sorrow and anger and, most of all, a profound sense of loss.

Forty-six years ago today, a bomb planted by Ku Klux Klan murderers took the lives of four young teenage girls as they prepared for the first ever Youth Day at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. I write this to acknowledge their deaths, sacrifices in the long and painful struggle for Black Freedom, burnt offerings in a conflagration that wound up helping to consume the system of Jim Crow segregation in the Black Belt South.

I write also to memorialize two other young African Americans who died in Birmingham that day. Their names do not have the same resonance, but they died at the hands of white supremacy in this country as surely as did the young women in the basement of Sixteenth Baptist, and their deaths are the kind of deaths that the system still deals out to young Black men in this country.

For all the hold that the Civil Rights Movement’s non-violent ideology had in Birmingham, which had been a battleground against segregation, the killings sparked intense fury in the Black community and the area around the church seethed in near-riot all afternoon. The cars of white gawkers coming past had a hard time of it. When sixteen-year-old Johnnie Robinson saw one marked up with slogans like “Negro, Go Back To Africa,” he chucked a rock at it.

Seeing cops, he fled. As Johnnie ran down an alley, Birmingham cop Jack Parker shot him. In the back. With a shotgun. Johnnie was DOA at University Hospital. An all-white grand jury failed to indict Parker for anything.

The final death was that of thirteen-year-old Virgil Ware, “Peanut” to his family. His father and uncles were coal miners, working at the Docena mine, and Virgil and two brothers shared a paper route. Riding home on the handlebars of his brother James’s bicycle, Virgil crossed paths with Larry Joe Sims and Michael Lee Farley, two sixteen-year-old white Eagle Scouts, who had just attended a rabid segregationist rally where an effigy of Attorney General Bobby Kennedy was burned.

Riding with Farley on his red motorbike decorated with a confederate flag picked up at the National States’ Rights Party headquarters and pieced up with Farley’s pearl-handled pistol, Sims fired at the bike twice.

Virgil fell off the bike and James cried, “Get up, Virge. You trimmin’ me.”

“I’m shot,” Virgil replied. He was, through the lung and the aorta. He died, the sixth victim of a racist murder in Birmingham that day.

The Birmingham press treated it as a tragedy–for the killers. “These two raw, grieved untutored boys who have had this unfortunate thing come into their lives at their age,” was how their high-priced lawyer put it. Both were charged with first degree murder. A Birmingham jury convicted Sims of second degree manslaughter and Farley pleaded to the same. Wallace Gibson, a white judge, the only kind on the bench in Alabama at the time, completed the travesty by suspending their sentences in favor of two years probation.

When we remember Addie, Carole, Denise and Cynthia, it behooves us to remember Johnnie and Virgil as well.

Because young African Americans are still being shot in the back by cops, like Oscar Grant in Oakland last year. Because cops still routinely get a slap on the wrist, if that, for outrageous shootings. Because the “criminal justice system” in the US still treats the killing of a young Black man as a lesser crime than other murders. Because today there are racists every bit as rabid, and as desperate, as those who attended the rally on the day of the church bombing, and they too are burning effigies, waving the Confederate flag and hiding behind talk of states’ rights.

Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain.

Crossposted from the Iraq Moratorium website.

Mike Mullen thinks the U.S. is losing the war in Afghanistan. He calls the situation “serious and deteriorating.” So what? A lot of us think the same thing.

But we don’t run the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the high command of the U.S. military. Mike Mullen does.

His job title isn’t the only difference between Admiral Mullen and the rest of us. More than half of all Americans think the 8-year-old occupation of Afghanistan is a mistake (52% of us according to the latest poll) and want it over with.

Not Mike Mullen! Right now, he’s locked in urgent discussions with administration advisers and his own generals to figure out how many more troops he can get away with asking for to keep the occupation going..

Will sending 15,000 more soldiers and Marines, the lowest number being floated, make the war the kind of liability for this administration that Iraq was for George W. Bush? Will Mullen dare to ask for 45,000 new troops, the number actually requested by General Stanley McChrystal, his top commander on the ground?

This is where WE come in. Follow the hearings when Congress comes back in session. Read the news commentary. The number of young men and women the Pentagon and the White House say must be sent into harm’s way will tell us two things–just how badly the occupation is going and just how scared they are of the American people.

And when they do finally ask for more troops, that will tell us one more thing: they aren’t scared enough of the political consequences to face reality–yet. It is still our job to to protest the escalation; to support the troops by demanding that they be brought home; to talk with our family, friends, neighbors, co-workers; to pressure our Congresscritters.

Because if Admiral Mike Mullen has his way, this war will drag on for years and years to come, and the death toll–of Afghans and occupiers both–will climb and climb.

One thing needs emphasizing about the battles raging during the August recess as Congresscritters return home to visit their constituents and face whipped-up wingnuts: The trade union movement has done a very creditable job in stepping up to the front line and helping thwart efforts to destroy those meetings.

A good example is the the town meeting in Rep. Niki Tsongas’s MA district, which was diaried at Daily Kos by Mike08 a couple of days back. Mike mentions the signs being distributed SEIU members. The AFL-CIO website has a brief report from Rosa Blumenfeld, a young organizer who also attended the meeting.

She says that there were a dozen activists from IUE Local 201 and other union locals in the North Shore Labor Council and another dozen from the Service Employees:

What worked were simple signs with large print slogans like “Real Health Insurance Reform Now,” and “Stop Insurance Company Greed.” During Tsongas’ opening remarks, we applauded forcefully and many in the room cheered. We even had folks countering the extremist amongst the crowd waiting outside.

One of the most effective points during the Q&A happened when one union woman stood up and said:

I think that everyone in this room can agree that we need to stop unnecessary death. My grandmother got sick and died from breast cancer because her insurance company refused to pay for her treatment. The system isn’t working. People are dying. We need this health insurance reform.

She goes on to describe the incredible tension and stress that exhausted the union folks by the end, and offer some insight about how her central labor council is tackling the problem. It’s worth reading.

And then take a moment to reflect on just how important unions are in this country.

Crossposted from Fire on The Mountain.

Golpe (Honduras) — Lyrics & Music by Simon Rios

Oye, Nica, Salvadoreño,

Indio, Garifuna, Brazileiro,

Gringo, Gaucho, y Caraqueño,

Chilango, Cholo, Potorro y Porteño

Esto es una llamada, en nombre de los Hondureños

Hay ke levantarnos todos, por este justo desempeño

Hay que defender ese pueblo, con puño y con cerebro

Hay que defender ese pueblo, con puño y con cerebro

June 28th, 2,009 was the day

When they uprooted los catrachos, from the progresista way.

Mel Zelaya was the president, who’d gone from right to left,

He was a magnate of the old school, but was calling out the theft

& pillage of Honduras, & the whole of the continente

by los gringos asesinos, & their local asistentes.

So they kidnapped Mel at gunpoint, at five o clock in the morn

And America woke that Sunday, said what the hell is going on?

Que carajo esta pasando? Otro golpe militar!

Otro once de septiembre, otro tiempo pa gritar!

This isn’t about Manuel Zelaya, it ain’t about the constitution,

It’s about the oligarchía, and it’s about the revolution.

The Honduran Magna Carta, was designed by the ruling class

With the oversight of Washington, & the rulers of the past

And Zelaya wanted reform, to promote participation

Cuz democracy ain’t about, pulling a lever & waiting patient

It ain’t about a rich criollo, sucking blood out of the nation

Its about power to the people, & the old order is changing

Pues America esta cambiando, por un modelo socialista,

anti-fascista, contra estes malditos golpistas

Tres-cientos mil up en la calle, dicen Zelaya no se va!

Los golpistas dicen democracia, mientras hacen coup d’etat

It’s like saying save the trees, while revving a chainsaw

It’s like saying it ain’t me babe, when you’re the one I saw.

And the golpistas waved a banner, reading we shall overcome

Which side would Martin be on, if Martin could’ve come?



Oxala pudiera cantarte, una rolita mas alegre

But the golpe en Honduras, makes me mutherfucking angry

I wish this was a nightmare, or a skit on cha cha cha

But its real as rigor mortis, cuz they made a coup d’etat

Hay que tener rabia pueblo, Honduras es America

La misma sangre y consigna, desde Ushuaia hasta Merida

Y de ahi para Recife, y de ahi pa Torreón

Desde el bosque de Chapultepec, hasta las minas de Cerrejón.

No importa que pinche dia, no importa en que lugar,

Pues la esperanza comun, es lo quieren asesinar.

And they speak of an invasion by Venezolano agents

Y no aguantamos eso, they say, cuz we’re a sovereign nation.

Sovereign nation? With a gringo base in Chaperola?

You mean sovereign to the people? Or sovereign to Coca Cola?

And you’d be foolish if you thought that the gringos didn’t play a role

You think that the ambassador, Hugo Llorens, didn’t know?

This ain’t the US of Obama, but of Reich & of la CIA

The ones who planned the golpe contra Hugo Chavez Frias

The ones who killed Allende, & who tried to kill Fidel

The ones who speak of freedom, while manifesting hell

The ones who infiltrated the mighty Tupamaros

The ones who drew & quartered, the brave Tupac Amaru

The ones who own la prensa, y las haciendas y maquilas

The ones who stand to profit, from the riches of the minas

And the reporters of the mainstream, are more full of shit & piss

Than the sewage tank at midnight, on the Chinatown Express

Sowing fear of comunismo, and a thousand huevonadas

Cuz la prensa esta vendida, y su gente, comprada

Comiendo baleadas, mientras los pobres comen basura,

And they still can’t understand, why there’s tanta amargura

And you think they give a damn about the starvation of a people?

The disenfranchising of a people? the genocide of a people?

Cuz they’re killing little kids, & they’re killing periodistas,

They’re killing esperanzas, & they’re killing sindicalistas.

Here’s a fist up for Murillo, martyr of Tegucigalpa

Whose death served to make la resistencia stand mas alta

Here a fist up to COFADEH, OFRANEH, y el COPINH

From the pueblo of Geronimo & Martin Luther King.

This is the wakening of Honduras, in the form of a class war

It’s a fight of good & evil, & the good ones are the poor

Nothing more, and it sure ain’t nothing less

And it wont stop till the coup drops, and justicia is addressed.

Caerá la dictadura, como todos los demas

Y llegará un tiempo de justicia, justicia con paz

Pero mientras tanto y los llantos, los molestaré con mi canto

En frente de las marchas, con mas bravura que mil Rambos

Ambos ladosde la izkierda y por debajo

Venceremos Hondureño dale duro pueblo catracho.

The big economic news is all over the place-lately the truly dire unemployment figures which have administration officials suddenly hemming and hawing instead of bragging about “green shoots.”

But the unfolding depression is making its mark in a thousand pinpricks of pain as well. A newspaper that will flesh this point out a bit just rose to the top of one of the piles here at Casa FotM. It’s an issue from last month of The Millbrook Independent–a six page weekly whose masthead proclaims “Serving Millbrook and Stanfordville and the Greater Millbrook Region” in Dutchess County, New York.

Along with coverage of wetlands regulations and high school math scores were two articles that illuminated unexpected aspects of the crunch.

One, on the front page, plugged a new “state of the art” storage facility opening in a former bowling alley in Mabbetsville. It struck me as perhaps an unfortunate business to be starting in this climate, but the owner had a quote which led me to reconsider: “With the huge advent of home offices, people now need to store what was once in that room.”

Sky Saxon of the Seeds joined Farrah and MJ in the checkout line yesterday. B’lieve I know who I’ll miss the most…

There’s been a lot of ink spilled on the death of Farrah Fawcett–even the august New York Times has more than half a page today. Like the rest of the mainstream media, it gingerly avoids the n-word: nipple. But nipples are why Farrah Fawcett signifies; she embodied quite an important cultural shift in US society.

I kinda stopped watching teevee before Charlie’s Angels came out, but I’ve never heard anyone argue that it was one of the great masterpieces of the medium or that, with better politics, the then FFM would have rivaled Vanessa Redgrave or Jane Fonda.

Cultural achievement was not why the red swimsuit poster became ubiquitous in the late ’70s. It was because you could see her nipples right through the damn fabric.

Observers have long noted that American males, the straight ones anyhow, tend to have deep-seated breast fixations, and psychiatrists and anthropologists and creative people in diverse artistic fields have responded in their own ways to this fact. But there have been changes within that general pattern.

In the decades before Farrah Fawcett arrived on the scene, the sexualization of breasts in film and photography was centered on the size of breasts and particularly on cleavage. Think Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield. Cleavage is fairly artificial, the product of confining clothing designed to produce it (or fake it). And it has nothing to with the actual erotic zones on the breasts. It emphasizes the preparation of the female as passive object for consumption by the male gaze.

But the claiming of sexual agency by women was a part of the ’60s upsurge and of the modern women’s movement born during it. The red swimsuit poster marked the mainstreaming of the nipple (and underscored the then-shocking symbolic dumping of painfully restrictive women’s undergarb enacted at the Miss America pageant less than a decade earlier).

This was, I’ll argue, a historic advance for materialism and for democracy. Nipples are, among other things, full of actual nerves which can carry actual sexual sensations. Even in guys. And pretty much everybody is born with them. Even guys.

I make no giant claims that Farah Fawcett ended the sexual objectification of women, nor even that the real advances in sexual enjoyment and equality she symbolized are solid-look what happened to Janet Jackson. But she deserves credit for the role she played, not the pussyfooting around we’ve been treated to since her death.

Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain.

I’m still absorbing the news that the Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company Ltd, one of the giant industrial corporations that characterize present-day Chinese “socialism,” has purchased the Hummer brand from General Motors as the latter shuffles down the path blazed long ago by Studebaker and American Motors.

The Hummer is of course the vehicle sensible people love to hate: ugly, heavy, dangerous, gas-guzzling, polluting, military (in roughly the same sense as camouflage footsie pajamas) and a big fat macho fraud–the damn thing is built on a regular GM SUV chassis, just like a plain old Chevy Colorado.

The psychological makeup of Hummer purchasers has been looked into more deeply, most succinctly by Ruben Bolling, the crackerjack creator of the Tom the Dancing Bug comic. (Won’t embed for some reason–view his hysterical dis of Hummer owners here.]

I, however, have an even more theoretical speculation on the fate of the Hummer, based on the old Marxist precept that changes in people’s consciousness tend to trail changes in material conditions. Let me draw first a brief analogy-when I spent a little time in West Africa in the early ’80s, I met a couple of young guys, Komi and Kasimir, who were adherents of voudon (a/k/a voodoo). We talked about the belief system and they turned out to be followers of a particular fetiche or deity, which forbade them to eat anything cooked in a metal vessel or with metal utensils.

Kasimir and Komi told me of one the most dreaded of the voudon cults, whose fetiche was connected with smallpox, Its adherents would paint their faces white on sacred occasions and were feared for their ability to call disease down on enemies. Now this was only a decade since scientists and medical personnel had finally eradicated the disease in its last strongholds in Africa, so I asked if this group was still as feared as it had used to be. They both thought and said no, actually it was not as powerful and its fetiche not seen to be as deadly. Changes in consciousness trail changes in material conditions!

Back to the Hummer. The military’s HumVee was a star of the last substantial victory for the US military, Operation Desert Storm, the 1991 Gulf War. The Arnold Schwarzeneggers of the US felt uncontrollable lust and a civilian version was soon forthcoming, and became a GM product by 1998.

9/11-fueled war fever sent sales soaring even higher–for a while. But by early 2004 they were declining precipitously. I rather doubt that it was due to sudden environmental concerns among its target audience. I think what happened is that fairly early in the occupation of Iraq, it became clear that this mighty war wagon could be taken out by a couple of Baghdad teenagers with a big artillery round and a garage door opener. Whether people thought about it consciously or not, IEDs had taken the bloom off the rose.

I don’t know what Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company management is thinking. I can’t see a big Hummer comeback in the US and the contribution they’d make to China’s already horrific pollution boggles the mind. Indications are they plan to market these vehicular plug-uglies more heavily in developing nation markets. I can only say I hope they take a richly deserved bath on this venture.



Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain.

No comment needed.