<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
	<channel>
		<title>People Before Profit blog</title>
		<link>http://politicalaffairs.net/April-2009-39017/</link>
		<atom:link href="http://politicalaffairs.net/April-2009-39017/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
		<description></description>

		
		<item>
			<title>Vigil Mourns Teen Bullying Victim</title>
			<link>http://politicalaffairs.net/vigil-mourns-teen-bullying-victim/</link>
			<description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;p class='ezhtml'&gt;&lt;font size=1&gt;4-29-09, 8:49 am&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;Original source:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href='http://www.atlantaprogressivenews.com' title='The Atlanta Progressive News' targert='_blank'&gt;The Atlanta Progressive News&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
(APN) DECATUR -- A standing-room only crowd packed the sanctuary at the First Christian Church here Tuesday night, April 28, 2009, to hold a vigil for a Stone Mountain teen who committed suicide.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Jaheem Herrera, an 11-year old student at Dunaire Elementary School, hanged himself on April 16 after enduring persistent bullying over his perceived sexual orientation and ethnicity.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
According to CNN, Herrera had complained that students had called him ugly, virgin [he's from the Virgin Islands], and gay, despite the fact that Herrera did not identify as homosexual.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Herrera's mother told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper that in addition to name calling, she had previously complained to school officials because other students allegedly tried to choke him in the bathroom. Other parents have since complained that their children have also faced verbal and physical bullying at the school.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'I am devastated that someone at 11 years old could feel like they were out of options,' the Rev. Paul Turner, founder and senior pastor of Candler Park's Gentle Spirit Christian Church, said.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'We completely agree that something of this nature should not go unnoticed,' the Rev. Dennis Meredith, pastor of the Tabernacle Baptist Church in the Old Fourth Ward, said.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The Rev. Josh Noblitt, Deacon in Residence at the Saint Mark United Methodist Church on Peachtree Street, led the audience in prayer and lighting candles to honor Herrera.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Many speakers noted Tuesday that adults should lead children through example, teaching them tolerance and respect for their peers.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'Words matter. Words carry weight,' the Rev. James Brewer-Calvert, pastor of the First Christian Church, said. 'Therefore, we need to lower the rhetoric.'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'Children and youth model what they see adults doing and saying,' he continued. 'Anti-gay and anti-immigrant comments... contribute to the teardown of society.'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'All of us... must work together to address the serious problem and [maintain] constant vigilance,' Rene J. Sanchez, co-president of Parents, Friends, and Families of Lesbian and Gay (PFLAG) Macon, said.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Sanchez pointed out that four pre-teens across the nation have committed suicide this year under similar circumstances as Herrera.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Only 10 days before Herrera, Massachusetts 11 year old, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, hanged himself after enduring taunts and bullying at school. A note he left for his family did not explain why he did it, according to an April 20 report in The Boston Globe newspaper.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'We as a society must stop demonizing gays and immigrants for short-term political gains,' Sanchez said.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Georgia Equality, which sponsored the vigil along with the Faith and Community Alliance, PFLAG, and the Refugee Resettlement and Immigration Services of Atlanta, urged the community to send letters and emails to state lawmakers to support anti-bullying legislation in 2010.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
In 2008, the Georgia Senate and two House committees unanimously passed such legislation but it never made it to the full House for a vote. In 2009, the legislation did not come up.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Jeff Graham of Georgia Equality lamented this fact in his remarks Tuesday. 'We as a community have failed Jaheem,' he said.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Graham said now is the time to build a coalition, not just in Metro Atlanta, but all across Georgia in favor of such legislation.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'I hope when we have a lobby day to discuss anti-bullying legislation we don't have 15 people show up; we have 1,500 people show up,' he said. 'This is legislation that truly and without exaggeration saves the lives of young people.'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'Our vigil happened tonight when it came to our backdoor,' the Rev. Mareesa Pendermon, a founding member of the Atlanta Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Coalition, said. '[I am] thinking about our negligence, our lack of outrage when it happened at somebody else's door.'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'I want to say to young people to be authentically yourself because God knows everything about you and God loves you,' she added.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Representatives of Lambda Legal, a national organization that supports the legal rights of LGBTQ Americans, were on hand to provide assistance to anyone who might be facing troubles of their own.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'We pledge to continue to stand up for students,' Simone Bell, community educator at Lambda's Southern Regional Office, said. 'We have to arm ourselves. We have to be willing to speak out.'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Herrera's family held his funeral Tuesday in St. Croix in the Virgin Islands.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
--Jonathan Springston is a Senior Staff Writer for The Atlanta Progressive News and is reachable at jonathan@atlantaprogressivenews.com.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
 
&lt;/p&gt;</description>
			<pubDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2009 01:02:00 +0000</pubDate>
			
			
			<guid>http://politicalaffairs.net/vigil-mourns-teen-bullying-victim/</guid>
		</item>
		
		<item>
			<title>We Can Recover Prosperity With New Vision of Economy</title>
			<link>http://politicalaffairs.net/we-can-recover-prosperity-with-new-vision-of-economy/</link>
			<description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;p class='ezhtml'&gt;&lt;font size=1&gt;4-29-09, 8:43 am&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The present global financial crisis is more than an “economic downturn” or an economic depression. It signals the coming of a new age. Astounding technological advances in production, communication and transportation have driven the capitalist system to the verge of moral and financial bankruptcy. The levels and kinds of resource consumption threaten ecological calamity. These forces have accelerated the conflict between individual profit and the social good, between short-term economic gains and long-term social and ecological sustainability. Derivatives and debt swaps are mere symptoms of a deeper existential crisis. A global crisis of this magnitude requires a new paradigm, a new way of envisioning our future. Without it economic and social disintegration are probable, if not inevitable.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The market economy depends on continuous economic growth. Yet this growth is neither equitably shared nor ecological sustainable. Billions of people live on less than a few dollars a day. At the same time, populations in North America and Europe – less than one-sixth of the world’s 6.5 billion people – consume sixty percent of the world’s resources.  While this material affluence has brought prosperity to a relative few, the global economic system has sharpened disparities, destabilizing entire countries and regions as people seek to feed, clothe, shelter and educate their families with limited access to basic amenities and opportunities.  The failure of national and international governments and institutions to address the global economy’s profound injustice guarantees civil strife and the recruiting success of nihilistic millenarian movements promising divine justice.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
We can begin today the process of building a greener, fairer national and global society. It will require governments to establish policy priorities based on sustainable economic development and to determine and manage the levels of social investment and regulation. Citizens will have to be actively engaged in this process. Participatory democracy and greener production and consumption are dynamically connected. Investment in conservation, recycling and new technologies based on renewable resources compel everyone to be more conscious of his or her role in society. At this historic moment, we must bring into public office voices outside of the mainstream, voices that articulate fundamental change and greater popular participation in the way economic health and stability are conceived. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
We must retrain workers and professionals as we retool industry.  We can formulate regulations that require new environmental standards in construction and engineering that fuel environmentally safer industries. The financial system will restructure and recover most quickly if these new industries and jobs are supported by public investment. Pouring trillions of dollars into the financial system, though, will not lead us in this direction. Doing so only strengthens the very values, practices and institutions that are committed to the old corrupted regime of production and consumption. Bloated financial institutions will do little, moreover, to stabilize the immediate housing crisis threatening so many families or create the greener economy we need. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
In addition to using the stimulus package to jumpstart a greener economy at the grassroots, a significant portion of this money could be lent directly to at-risk homeowners at low-interest rates. Another portion could be made available to buyers of first homes at similar interest rates. All homeowners, old and new, could be given tax incentives to meet the new environmental standards of residential construction and improvement. This reverses the hackneyed “trick-down” theory to a “trickle-up” theory that, in the well-worn words of political conservatives who may oppose this idea, will create jobs and wealth and eventually more tax income for governments. Moreover, the volume of toxic mortgage-related assets in the US and other countries would be systematically reduced, as average citizens retain more of their income and stimulate the economy through direct purchases of basic goods and services they habitually require.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
An economic blueprint for sustainability should be financed in three ways. First, a truly progressive tax structure that applies to wealth as well as income would shift resources from those who benefit most from the old and new economy to those who benefit least. This would provide significant public funds for day-care, healthcare, education from kindergarten to universities, and vocational retraining, all measures that would ease the transition to a greener economy. Second, a national healthcare plan will save hundreds of billions of dollars in healthcare expenditures that now consume 17 percent of our gross domestic product and produce national healthcare results that are inferior to Great Britain where a national healthcare program exists. Here, too, savings would be available for other forms of investment.  Third, systematic cuts in the military budget over a series of years would make hundreds of billions more dollars available without sacrificing national security. In the next national budget we will spend approximately $600 billion on our military complex. That is more than the next ten military powers. Russia, for example, will spend less than a $100 billion in 2009. Moreover, we would reduce potential and actual military conflict thereby spending less on military debt and veterans medial care in the long run.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The conversion to a greener economy must be financed with the long-term goals of greater social equity and ecological sustainability foremost in our minds. The private sector will obviously still have a significant role to play in this new economy but it will have to function within a matrix of public regulation designed to encourage social goals as well as individual advancement.  If we begin this economic conversion now, in five years we will have a more vibrant economy, a less degraded natural environment,  and a generation of young people who are more committed to social and ecological goals and who will pursue their individual careers in a healthier, more just, and more sustainable world.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
--John Ripton teaches history at Rutgers University.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
 
&lt;/p&gt;</description>
			<pubDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:55:00 +0000</pubDate>
			
			
			<guid>http://politicalaffairs.net/we-can-recover-prosperity-with-new-vision-of-economy/</guid>
		</item>
		
		<item>
			<title>The Financial Bailouts: Secrets, Lies and Democracy</title>
			<link>http://politicalaffairs.net/the-financial-bailouts-secrets-lies-and-democracy/</link>
			<description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;p class='ezhtml'&gt;&lt;font size=1&gt;5-01-09, 10:00 am&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
It is a step forward that the Obama administration plans to lift some of the secrecy surrounding US war crimes committed under the Bush administration. Those crimes include secrecy and lies, which violate the foundations of democracy.  &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
There is another area where Bush-era secrecy and dishonesty needs to be lifted now. This is in the ongoing, massive bailouts of the handfuls of families who own most capital in the US.  &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Elizabeth Warren heads the Congressional Oversight Panel, charged by the US Senate and House with overseeing some of the financial bailouts. She recently lashed out at the US Treasury for withholding key information. The Boston Globe published an extraordinary, and extraordinarily angry interview of Warren on April 12.  &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The interviewer asks Warren, “What troubles you most about what [information] you're getting and what you're not getting?” Warren replies, “There's no discussion of the overall policy. Instead, there are specific programs that are announced, and from that, it's necessary to reason backwards to figure out what the goal must have been… It's frustrating because without a clearly articulated goal and identified metrics to determine whether the goal is being accomplished, it's almost impossible to tell if a program is successful.”  &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The interviewer then asks, “Do you have a clear sense of what the overall [bank bailout] plan is supposed to do? Are you capable of summarizing what it's supposed to be doing?” Warren replies tersely, “No. And neither is Treasury… The minor problem is documentation. I've spent four weeks now looking for someone who can give me the details of the stress test [supposedly to see if the largest US banks can withstand an economic downturn], so that we can do an independent evaluation of whether the stress test is any good.  &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
“We get: 'someone will call you right back,' Warren continues. “Only the call doesn't come. The major problem is that Treasury has not articulated its goals…” Warren then accuses Treasury of outright dishonesty: “Treasury specifically designed a program that had the effect of subsidizing the financial institutions, and simultaneously represented to the [Congressional Oversight] panel and to the American people that there was no subsidization.”  &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
“So,” asks the interviewer, “they weren't really telling you the truth?” “They said one thing,” Warren replies, “and did another.”  &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
By some estimates, the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve and other agencies may have already spent or committed over $10 trillion to bail out the owners of capital. Warren's office is charged with overseeing less than 10 percent of that amount; much of the rest has been spent or committed by a few people at the Federal Reserve. (Because of the secrecy, the exact amount is difficult to determine.) &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs was an architect of the secret, top-down “shock therapy” that resulted in a precipitous decline in wages and the standard of living in the former USSR. Sachs is well-connected. Yet on April 7, Sachs complained about the bailouts, 'What is incredible is the lack of the most minimal transparency so far about the rules, risks and procedures…”  &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The secret Treasury-Fed bailouts are setting the stage for terrible declines in the standard of living not only in the US but worldwide. Domestically this could take the form of assaults on wages, education, health care, Social Security and Medicare, and jumps in regressive taxes, such as sales taxes, fees and fines, which hit the poorest hardest. Currencies are effectively being debased. Internationally, the bailouts are setting the stage for wars, the break-up of the European Union into competing blocks and collapse of its currency.  &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Capitalism today is facing a crisis akin to those that led to the first and second world wars, and the accompanying destruction of many trade unions and working class parties. But those wars also opened the path for some of the greatest victories in working class history, including the Russian and Chinese Revolutions. One important democratic demand raised by Communist Parties in those victories was for an end to capitalist secrecy.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
 
&lt;/p&gt;</description>
			<pubDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:48:00 +0000</pubDate>
			
			
			<guid>http://politicalaffairs.net/the-financial-bailouts-secrets-lies-and-democracy/</guid>
		</item>
		
		<item>
			<title>Equal Pay Day: Gender Gap Harms Working Families, Needs Remedy</title>
			<link>http://politicalaffairs.net/equal-pay-day-gender-gap-harms-working-families-needs-remedy/</link>
			<description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;p class='ezhtml'&gt;&lt;font size=1&gt;4-28-09, 4:59 pm&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
April 28th is Equal Pay Day. Because on average women earn about 78 cents for every dollar men earn, it took the average working woman from January 1st of last year until April 28th of this year to earn the same income the average man earned in 2008 alone.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'The jury is in, the studies are done and the conclusions are consistent. The gender pay gap is alive and well,' said National Organization for Women President Kim Gandy in a press statement. 'The disparity between what women and men are paid stubbornly persists, even after controlling for years of education, work experience and type of occupation.'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
To mark the day and to tout the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, the first piece of legislation signed into law by President Obama, the White House hosted a teleconference with reporters that included Lilly Ledbetter, Wednesday, April 28th.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
It was Ledbetter's lawsuit against her former employer Goodyear Tire that sparked the struggle to pass the Fair Pay Act. After 19 years at the company, Ledbetter, 71, received an anonymous note from a co-worker saying that she was being paid 30 to 40 percent less than her male co-workers for doing the same job.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
When she sued the company for discrimination, the jury agreed that the company had violated the law and owed her back pay and damages. But in 2007, the US Supreme Court threw out the jury award, ruling that Ledbetter was required to file the suit within six months of the first discriminatory paycheck, even if she did not find out about it until many years later.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Ledbetter said that her fight began when she found out how much she had been short-changed by her employer. 'I had to stand up for what was right,' she told reporters. She also said that unequal pay not only harmed her family's ability to have the necessities of life and a decent standard of living but it also adversely impacted things like her pension and her Social Security benefits, which were based on her wages. Even if Ledbetter had been able to keep the jury award, it would not have made up for the amount she lost overall.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Because of the Supreme Court decision, Ledbetter will never be able to recover the money she lost due to discrimination.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'We women and minorities, we're not asking for anything,' Ledbetter said. 'We just want what we earned and what we're rightfully entitled to.'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
In 2008, the House of Representatives passed the Fair Pay Act to amend the law to give workers who have been discriminated against the right to sue within six months of the last discriminatory act. A Republican filibuster in the Senate blocked final passage.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The bill passed both houses in January of this year and was signed into law by President Obama shortly thereafter.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
In discussing her story, Ledbetter, 71, said her employer warned employees not to discuss their pay with each other. 'We were told where I worked when we hired in that you will not discuss your pay with anyone or you will not work here.' The company also refused to post the pay scale publicly for the position she held.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Civil rights and workers' rights activists note that the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is an important first step toward equality, but if employers can force employees to hide details about their wages, they could continue to discriminate. 'Clearly some employers will keep discriminating if they can get away with it,' said Gandy. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The Paycheck Fairness Act, which is pending before Congress, is one remedy to that problem because it would protect women from retaliation by employers for discussing their wages openly.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
President Obama has expressed support for passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act, but the White House could not offer a timeline for its final passage. 'It's legislation he supports, and it's legislation he thinks is needed,' said Jocelyn Frye, director of Policy and Projects for First Lady Michelle Obama.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
 
&lt;/p&gt;</description>
			<pubDate>Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:11:00 +0000</pubDate>
			
			
			<guid>http://politicalaffairs.net/equal-pay-day-gender-gap-harms-working-families-needs-remedy/</guid>
		</item>
		
		<item>
			<title>Hate Crimes Prevention Act Goes to House Floor</title>
			<link>http://politicalaffairs.net/hate-crimes-prevention-act-goes-to-house-floor/</link>
			<description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;p class='ezhtml'&gt;&lt;font size=1&gt;4-28-09, 3:40 pm&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Democratic House leaders are expected to bring to the House floor the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, also known as the Matthew Shepard Act, Wednesday, April 29th. If passed this bill would provide local law enforcement agencies with additional resources to investigate hate crimes motivated by race, color, gender, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The law would provide federal agencies with a means to participate in local hate crimes cases when local agencies can't or refuse to adequately investigate serious bias-motivated crimes. In addition, funds would be made available to local agencies for training purposes.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
A central provision of the law would be to expand federally protected categories to include sexual orientation and gender identity. Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, noted that federal hate crimes statistics show that one in six hate crimes are committed against an LGBT person, and that number is on the rise. In addition, he pointed out that the large majority of Americans support passage of hate crimes legislation. 'The nation cannot wait any longer to protect all of its citizens,' he said. 'We should all be able to walk the streets without fear.'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington Bureau, described the need to address hate crimes and expand protections as the nation's 'unfinished business.' Shelton rejected the idea that the law would limit free speech or religious rights. 'Nothing in this bill prevents people from saying what's on their minds in the streets and certainly not from our nation's pulpits,' he said.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Echoing this remark, Caroline Frederickson, director of the ACLU's Washington legislative office, explained that her organization's support for the bill is based on its protections of free speech. She pointed out that local or federal authorities would have the authority to investigate issues of speech only when the speech act in question is directly linked to the crime under investigation. 'This bill has the strongest protection against the misuse of a person's free speech that Congress has enacted in the entire federal criminal code,' Frederickson argued.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The hate crimes prevention act is needed to stem the rising tide of violence against Latinos, said Janet Murguía, president of the National Council of La Raza. FBI data suggests that violence against Latinos accounts for some 40 percent of the rise in hate crimes since 2003. A recent Southern Poverty Law Center study revealed that 48 percent of new hate-based groups have mobilized mainly around hatred of immigrants from Latin American countries, Murguía pointed out. 'Passage of this bill is a civil rights priority, and if passed it will help vulnerable groups,' she stated. 'People should not live in fear simply because they are Latino.'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism,  said that this legislation speaks directly to core democratic values. 'It is time as a nation to say that crimes based on gender, disability, sexual orientation, on gender identity just like those committed on the basis of race, national origin or religion are crimes against all of us, crimes against our communities, crimes against entire groups of people, crimes against our nation's value, crimes against humanity.'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Michael Lieberman, an attorney for the Anti-Defamation League, added that the bill does not create additional penalties for hate crimes. It's main goal is to provide additional resources and to provide a 'gateway' for federal authorities to assist in difficult investigations.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), urged swift passage of the bill and expressed confidence in the House vote scheduled for Wednesday, April 29th. 'In the Senate, we'll enjoy broad support there as well,' he explained. LCCR, among other groups, have urged their members and supporters to call their congressional representatives and ask for their support on the measure.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Over 300 civil rights, civil liberties, faith-based and law enforcement organizations have endorsed the bill.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
 
&lt;/p&gt;</description>
			<pubDate>Wed, 29 Apr 2009 07:53:00 +0000</pubDate>
			
			
			<guid>http://politicalaffairs.net/hate-crimes-prevention-act-goes-to-house-floor/</guid>
		</item>
		
		<item>
			<title>Top Senate Democrat Calls for Additional Torture Investigations</title>
			<link>http://politicalaffairs.net/top-senate-democrat-calls-for-additional-torture-investigations/</link>
			<description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;p class='ezhtml'&gt;&lt;font size=1&gt;4-28-09, 10:24 am&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The Senate Armed Services Committee released its report on its investigation into the torture of US military prisoners earlier this week and prompted further calls for additional investigations to determine who should be held accountable. Though written and approved by the members of the committee in both parties last November, the Department of Defense just gave its approval for the report's declassification this month.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
According to Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chair of the committee, the report 'represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse, which occurred at places such as Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan, to low ranking soldiers.' Levin, in a recent statement accompanying the release of the report, noted that the committee rejected Bush administration claims that the abuses of detainees had been unauthorized and could be attributed to a 'few bad apples.'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
In fact, the report traced Bush administration efforts to discard the US government's prohibition on torture all the way back to September 16, 2001 when Vice President Dick Cheney suggested turning to the “dark side” in our response to 9/11. White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales then called parts of the Geneva Conventions “quaint.” Soon after, President Bush ruled that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees captured in the newly minted 'war on terror.' &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Senior officials followed the President and Vice President’s lead, authorizing policies that included 'harsh and abusive interrogation techniques,' the report found. The Senate Armed Services Committee investigation discovered that senior Bush administration officials sought information on and authorized the use of torture during interrogations. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The committee's report also discovered that 'senior officials bear significant responsibility for creating the legal and operational framework for the abuses,' Levin's statement noted. In fact, authorizations of torture by senior Bush administration officials resulted in abuse and conveyed the message that torture was an appropriate treatment for prisoners held by the US military.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Both the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos that gave a legal veneer to torture methods, released earlier, and the Armed Services Committee report showed that Bush administration officials used a military program, known as SERE, designed to help service members resist torture techniques, to actually train interrogators to torture.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The Senate committee's investigation uncovered e-mails warning top leaders and administration officials that the implementation of such a torture training program violated the law and would be an ineffective method of securing information from prisoners. In June 2004, one military psychologist warned: “What is done by SERE instructors is by definition ineffective interrogator conduct… Simply stated, SERE school does not train you on how to interrogate, and things you ‘learn’ there by osmosis about interrogation are probably wrong if copied by interrogators.”&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Another top US Army psychologist warned interrogators at Guantanamo as early as 2002 that '[T]he use of physical pressures brings with it a large number of potential negative side effects… When individuals are gradually exposed to increasing levels of discomfort, it is more common for them to resist harder… If individuals are put under enough discomfort, i.e. pain, they will eventually do whatever it takes to stop the pain. This will increase the amount of information they tell the interrogator, but it does not mean the information is accurate. In fact, it usually decreases the reliability of the information because the person will say whatever he believes will stop the pain.'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
More than faulty interrogation techniques, the use of torture violates international and US laws.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Both the OLC memos and the Senate committee investigation discovered that torture techniques approved by the administration were aimed at finding a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, a major Bush administration justification for launching the invasion of Iraq. No such link was ever found by US military or intelligence community interrogators using torture techniques authorized by Bush administration officials. In fact, intelligence agents, using traditional spy work, never found such links either, a point of fact ignored or downplayed by the Bush administration prior to and during the war.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Notably, the other Bush administration rationale for war – Iraq's supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction – was ever shown to be true either.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Sen. Levin stated that the results of his committee's investigation warranted additional investigation by the US Department of Justice or an independent body 'of whether high level officials who approved and authorized those policies should be held accountable' and 'to recommend what steps, if any, should be taken to establish accountability of high-level officials, including lawyers.'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
 
&lt;/p&gt;</description>
			<pubDate>Wed, 29 Apr 2009 02:37:00 +0000</pubDate>
			
			
			<guid>http://politicalaffairs.net/top-senate-democrat-calls-for-additional-torture-investigations/</guid>
		</item>
		
		<item>
			<title>Why We Need Municipal Internet</title>
			<link>http://politicalaffairs.net/why-we-need-municipal-internet/</link>
			<description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;p class='ezhtml'&gt;&lt;font size=1&gt;4-28-09, 9:25 am&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href='http://www.markturner.net/2009/04/21/why-we-need-municipal-internet/' title='Original source' targert='_blank'&gt;Original source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Imagine, if you will, a world where the streets in this country are privately owned by the country’s shipping companies. In our more modern example, Let’s say your particular street is owned by a company called FredEx.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Now let’s say you want to order a CD from a far-away retailer. Realizing that it owns the street in front of your house and that few other options exist, FredEx chooses to triple the shipping rate it charges to deliver your CD. And why shouldn’t it? FredEx knows it has the best delivery path available to your house, if not an outright monopoly.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Sure, you could always choose to have your CD delivered by your postman, Mo Dem, but his is a walking route so it’s painfully slow. On the other hand, you could ship your CD by the “competing” shipper, U Pay Us, but FredEx still gets its cut for its road.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
What once looked like competition is anything but. You’re trapped.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
This is what’s happening with the 21st century street known as the Information Superhighway. Billion-dollar telecoms own the digital streets leading to our homes and are not keen to share. Cozy duopolies have arisen that sing to high heaven how “Internet competition has arrived in North Carolina” and yet this so-called competition has only brought higher prices. Where’s our promised benefit?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Fed up with the major telecom’s inaction and unwillingness to invest in the technologies of the future, enterprising North Carolina communities like Wilson, Salisbury, and Morganton have taken steps to control their digital destiny. Faced with this competition, the telecoms are working the state legislature, seeking to pile on as many restrictions on these public initiatives as they can. That’s what the “Level Playing Field” Act (H1252/S1004) gives us. It’s a step backwards in every sense of the word.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Wilson’s Greenlight system provides Internet, TV, and phone service at prices the telecoms wouldn’t. This successful system is the envy of geek citizens across the state, and the last lifeline available to our communities still reeling from the collapse of the state’s furniture and textile industries. By investing in their own digital roads, these cities are investing in their future.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The bill is largely redundant anyway with most of these restrictions already present in the state statutes. Enterprises funded by revenue bonds cannot be funded with property tax money. Proposals and meetings are fully open to the public and debated in a public forum. What’s more, the leaders of these enterprises are held accountable by the voting public.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Want to truly level the playing field? Why not hold our private enterprises to the same standards we do with our public enterprises. Let’s start by making our telecom executives subject to public election. Make the telecoms’ business strategy and planning meetings subject to the Open Records law. and invite the public in. And open their books as well, just like the municipalities. Maybe then we’ll see how subscribers living in areas with real competition get sweet deals financed by those of us who aren’t. I also suspect those obscene executive salaries will be the first thing getting leveled on a truly level playing field.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Like the public highway and aviation systems that make it possible to ship a CD across the country, the Internet was built with public funds. In fact, for many years commercial players weren’t even allowed on the Internet. In light of this, the notion that the government has no business being in the Internet business is absurd on its face. And just as the U.S. Postal Service has no right to drive 100 MPH on our federal highways, nor should a municipal Internet system have to favor a public service over a private one: they can both be equal partners.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The roads of tomorrow are not made of asphalt and concrete: they are made of fiber. Like the roads that are equally accessible to any entity, public or private, so should our “fiber streets” be shared by all. And that can truly only happen if those connections are open to all, as public as our city streets.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
 
&lt;/p&gt;</description>
			<pubDate>Wed, 29 Apr 2009 01:38:00 +0000</pubDate>
			
			
			<guid>http://politicalaffairs.net/why-we-need-municipal-internet/</guid>
		</item>
		
		<item>
			<title>Correa Triumphs in Ecuador</title>
			<link>http://politicalaffairs.net/correa-triumphs-in-ecuador/</link>
			<description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;p class='ezhtml'&gt;&lt;font size=1&gt;4-28-09, 9:10 am&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;Original source:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href='http://politicalaffairs.net/www.coha.org' title='Council on Hemispheric Affairs' targert='_blank'&gt;Council on Hemispheric Affairs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Ecuadorian President, Rafael Correa, was re-elected yesterday with an impressive 51.7 percent of the vote, in a large field, to serve another term as head of state. Illustrating his widespread popularity in the country, his untainted presidential victory comes as the first such electoral triumph since 1979 that did not require a later run-off vote. His closest contender, Lucio Gutiérrez, managed to command only 28.4 percent of the ballot. Finishing in third with the lowest level of support in his four bids for the presidency, banana magnate, Álvaro Noboa saw his right-leaning electorate seriously dwindle.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
It could be argued that Correa is one of the most successful contemporary Latin American political leaders of the era. Since taking office, he has come forth with a very specific socio-political program which has significantly alleviated the country’s political instability and hobbling strategic and economic conditions, while at the same time advancing his overt leftist platform aimed at job creation and lifting the country’s living standards. “Socialism, of course, will continue. The Ecuadorian people voted for that,” he exclaimed after his victory Sunday. “When have we concealed our ideological orientation? We are going to emphasize this fight for social justice…”&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Despite having expelled a pair of U.S. diplomats stationed in Quito this year on allegations of their “unacceptable meddling” in Ecuadorian matters, Correa has generally avoided going out of his way to flail at the U.S. At the same time he did not fawn over seeking Washington’s goodwill when he announced that the U.S. lease on the military and anti-drug base at Manta would not be renewed in November. The same cannot be said of his left-leaning counterparts, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and Evo Morales of Bolivia, who never avoided exchanging pot shots with the Bush White House, but seem more interested in re-establishing a diplomatic relationship with Washington now that a new incumbent is occupying the White House.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Having been largely effective at maintaining relatively good relations with Washington while still holding his own, Correa appears keen on continuing his social and economic programs. Although he does expend a good deal of time on political dickering and forming non-productive alliances, he is not anything like a regional visionary in the mold of Chávez or Morales. Correa’s pragmatic, hands-on nature and his genuine preference for domestic matters over foreign affairs, and being his own man rather than fabricating a satellite personality is a decided asset. Correa’s feisty performance has improved the myth or reality that the Ecuadorian poor believe that their president has drastically improved the lives of everyday Ecuadorians, including themselves.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
 
&lt;/p&gt;</description>
			<pubDate>Wed, 29 Apr 2009 01:23:00 +0000</pubDate>
			
			
			<guid>http://politicalaffairs.net/correa-triumphs-in-ecuador/</guid>
		</item>
		
		<item>
			<title>Western Powers not to Hand Over Leadership to China</title>
			<link>http://politicalaffairs.net/western-powers-not-to-hand-over-leadership-to-china/</link>
			<description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;p class='ezhtml'&gt;&lt;font size=1&gt;4-28-09, 9:07 am&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
&lt;strong&gt; Original source:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href='http://en.huanqiu.com/' title='The Global Times' targert='_blank'&gt;The Global Times&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
China was suddenly catapulted by certain Western countries into the center of the world stage, as the deepening economic crisis spread from the US to Europe. Recent days have witnessed an increasingly urgent appeal for China to salvage the declining international economy. But excessively pressuring China to tackle the global turmoil is impractical. China does not serve as a 'savior,' and won't recklessly plunge into the maelstrom because of flattery lavished by Western countries.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The intention of Europe and the US to engage China in negotiations on the financial crisis is primarily aimed at demanding China's contribution and undertaking of responsibilities in international affairs. The push to give China increasing obligations comes from the 'China Responsibility Theory' which holds that China's benefits from economic globalization automatically result in a corresponding responsibility for the downturns.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
A thorough analysis proves this argument groundless. The financial recession was triggered by speculation practiced by Western countries, the consequences of which China has fallen victim to.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Advanced nations won't hand over leadership to China to shape the international landscape. It is impossible for Chinese to assume the presidencies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, two vital positions which determine the world economic hierarchy and which have long been chaired by Westerners.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Essentially, both Europe and the US seek to use China for their own benefits. Europeans criticize the US for its dictatorial dominance in the financial sector and its responsibility in the current financial catastrophe. The recent feverish performances staged by European leaders, Britan and France in particular, reflect their desire to grab control in the global arena dominated by the US. Europe's high-profile appeal for China's participation, which included both the intimidation of force and the lure of profits, aims to integrate China into a Europe-centric regime.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
China must seek a sound strategy for the extent of its participation and devise a plan accordingly. If China has to become involved in establishing a new international system, it should take into account the interests of developing countries instead of the Western powers, as the present financial and economic downturn originally stems from the predatory practices implemented by these powers.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
It is those emerging economies rather than a handful of developed countries that were most negatively impacted by this crisis. While advanced powers are plagued by financial decline, economic slowdown and a jeopardized social welfare system, emerging nations are fighting for survival.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
China should prioritize negotiating with emerging economies on restructuring the global economic system and formulating international political and economic regulations. This would conform to the moral principles upheld by other nations. The world can't be dominated by hegemonic powers forever, and strengthened solidarity with weak and underdeveloped nations will ensure widespread support in the world.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
On the other hand, emerging economies, not advanced ones, will catalyze China's economic development in the future. Natural resources, crucial for China's sustainable growth, are primarily concentrated in developing countries, and the expansion of markets in these regions could mitigate the trade and economic risks brought by excessive dependence on markets in advanced nations.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
China, as a rising nation, should contribute to reshaping the international structure by strengthening supervision over taxation exemption practices and promoting rights for rising nations to protect their farm products to benefit emerging economies.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
--The author is a Beijing-based scholar. This article was translated by Liu Dong&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
 
&lt;/p&gt;</description>
			<pubDate>Wed, 29 Apr 2009 01:19:00 +0000</pubDate>
			
			
			<guid>http://politicalaffairs.net/western-powers-not-to-hand-over-leadership-to-china/</guid>
		</item>
		
		<item>
			<title>Editorial: Federal Anti-bullying Policy Needed</title>
			<link>http://politicalaffairs.net/editorial-federal-anti-bullying-policy-needed/</link>
			<description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;p class='ezhtml'&gt;&lt;font size=1&gt;4-27-09, 1:59 pm&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The following exchange took place on a teleconference with reporters hosted by the White House last week on education reform. On that call Education Secretary Arne Duncan spoke with the media about the president's plan to overhaul student loans and to make college more affordable.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
But one West Coast reporter threw the Secretary a curve and asked this:&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'With at least three suicides of kids taunted by (anti-)gay slurs just in the past month, what specific plans do you have to make schools safer for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) and other students?'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Secretary Duncan's response:&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'Obviously that's a different topic, but the more we're teaching tolerance, the more we create climates that are inclusive and where students are listened to and supported, that is critically important to do that. And I want to do whatever I can to foster those environments that are not hostile and where students feel supported and have a chance to be who they are, to not be threatened, to not be bullied and to be in a situation not only where they feel comfortable but also where they can be very very successful academically.'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Obviously, Secretary Duncan didn't answer the question entirely. He avoided providing the details for which the reporter asked. Thankfully, however, he didn't resort to re-hashing his 2003 proposal as Chicago Public Schools CEO to create an LGBT high school into which the city's self-identified LGBT students could be moved. Though his intentions then were good – he wanted to help create an environment in which LGBT students could thrive, succeed, feel safe and 'to be who they are' –  everyone from LGBT activists to the city's mayor saw the proposal as little more than segregating LGBT kids.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
To be fair, after Duncan's meeting with LGBT student activists earlier this month, Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) Executive Director Eliza Byard told &lt;link href='http://www.chicagopride.com/news/article.cfm/articleid/7107201' text='ChicagoPride.com' target='_blank' /&gt; that 'Secretary Duncan showed great compassion for their experiences, respect for their perseverance and dedication to identifying effective responses to school climate issues. I am confident that we will see growing engagement with these issues at the Department of Education and truly positive change.'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
More than Secretary Duncan's personal gaffes on and history with this issue is the urgent need for clear national policies on bullying aimed at LGBT kids. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
A hopeful sign is Secretary Duncan's obvious deep concern for America's kids. One would expect any Education Secretary of any political party to express disapproval of bullying in schools. But Duncan's comment went beyond just promoting safety. He asserted his concern that LGBT kids could thrive in a supportive environment that allows them to 'be who they are,' not ignored, not simply tolerated.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Such an environment should exist in every public school.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
As the campaign heats up to pressure Congress to pass hate crimes legislation that includes sexual orientation and identity as protected categories, Duncan's comment is timely. His statement on protecting LGBT kids and creating a nurturing space lays a new philosophical groundwork for an effective policy, even as Republicans stake their opposition to a new hate crimes law on the archaic and cruel notion that hate-based violence is protected by free speech rights.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
It's time that Secretary Duncan's enlightened remarks be turned into substantive national policy.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
 
&lt;/p&gt;</description>
			<pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2009 06:12:00 +0000</pubDate>
			
			
			<guid>http://politicalaffairs.net/editorial-federal-anti-bullying-policy-needed/</guid>
		</item>
		
		<item>
			<title>Re-Visiting Race And Class in Post 9/11 USA</title>
			<link>http://politicalaffairs.net/re-visiting-race-and-class-in-post-9-11-usa/</link>
			<description>&lt;p&gt;Recently appointed Attorney General Eric Holder, whose parents hail from the Barbados, aroused instant ire when he remarked last February 18 that the U.S. remains a &amp;ldquo;nation of cowards&amp;rdquo; for not talking enough about things racial. But is this why he thinks the polity remains &amp;ldquo;voluntarily socially segregated&amp;rdquo;? And what does he mean by &amp;ldquo;voluntarily&amp;rdquo;&amp;mdash;do the majority of citizens choose segregation as a way of life? As a result of the Civil Rights struggles in the sixties, Holder thinks that the U.S. is &amp;ldquo;more prosperous, more positively race-conscious and yet is voluntarily socially segregated&amp;rdquo; (Thomas and Ryan 2009). This ABC News item is then followed by polls showing that more whites reported having more friends who are black, and vice versa. And reminiscent of a famous movie, the 2005 poll also showed that 48 percent of whites and 63 percent of blacks said someone had brought a friend of the other race home for dinner. However, still, three-quarters of African Americans say they&amp;rsquo;ve personally experienced racial discrimination.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Holder praises Pres. Obama&amp;rsquo;s speech about race and looks forward to &amp;ldquo;healing&amp;rdquo; the racial division. The medical organic metaphor is revealing, as though the &amp;ldquo;body politic&amp;rdquo; was invaded by some virus or germ that needed to be purged, thus restoring the purity and health of the body. We can guess what this means in terms of what is considered the immigrant problem, with the USA Patriot Act and Bush&amp;rsquo;s Homeland Security State still in place &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; More revealing is Holder&amp;rsquo;s planned visit to Guantanamo to inspect the facility for torturing &amp;ldquo;unlawful combatants,&amp;rdquo; which incidentally was partly built by cheap Filipino labor (Filipino contract labor also built US military barracks in Iraq. Guantanamo remains a symbol of what the U.S. stands for many &amp;ldquo;third world&amp;rdquo; countries or peoples who are considered enemies of democracy, the free market, and Samuel Huntington/Arthur Schlesinger&amp;rsquo;s &amp;ldquo;Western Civilization.&amp;rdquo; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; In spite of all the &amp;ldquo;post-racial&amp;rdquo; babble by pundits and academics, it is difficult to disavow the fact that, as African American political scientist Prof. Melissa Harris-Lacewell has noted, Pres. Obama is more white than John McCain in many respects, which partly explains his gaining the votes of whites who would otherwise not vote for an African American candidate like Jesse Jackson. What these qualities or signifiers are, they all point not to race&amp;mdash;the phenotypical, physical or somatic indices that constitute the classifying categories of past racist theories&amp;mdash;but to class. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; The meaning or reference of the conceptual term &amp;ldquo;class&amp;rdquo; has been so obfuscated and muddled as a result of the Cold War and its association with Marxism, communism and the &amp;ldquo;axis of evil&amp;rdquo; that it will take herculean efforts to clarify the term. It has been so demonized that perhaps it is impossible to rescue it for discussion. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; This is just my way of introducing the crux of the debate or controversy in this field: the issue of whether to jettison the term/concept &amp;ldquo;class&amp;rdquo; in favor of race, racial formation, racial discourse, or some version of intersectionality: the mantra of race, gender, class&amp;mdash;which is quite fashionable still, despite the end of the Cold War, the massive protest against the unilateral, barbaric Bush &amp;ldquo;global war on terror,&amp;rdquo; and the collapse of free-market fundamentalism and global economic crisis today. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Intervention from the Sixties&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Several years ago, 1992 to be exact, I wrote a book entitled RACIAL FORMATIONS/CRITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS. Among other books, I was influenced by Howard Winant and Michael Omi&amp;rsquo;s 1986 book RACIAL FORMATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES, which impressed me then because it seemed to complement or supplement something missing in the first book which inspired me to venture forth from the traditionally conservative field of literary studies (modern British and American literature) into social theory and criticism. I am referring to Robert Blauner&amp;rsquo;s 1972 book RACIAL OPPRESSION IN AMERICA. This I read in the years after the end of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986, when my energies were chiefly focused on fighting a fascist neocolonial dictatorship supported by successive US administrations. Those were years that also expanded and deepened my acquaintance with the Marxist classics&amp;mdash;apart from the works of Marx and Engels, those of Georg Lukacs, Mao Zedong, Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg, the Frankfurt Critical Theories, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Fredric Jameson, and so on, together with cognate thinkers like Jean Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, C.L.R. James, Amilcar Cabral, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paulo Freire, and many others. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; In sum, my critical framework&amp;mdash;I like to think&amp;mdash;can be described as historical materialist in that, first, life and individual experience can be understood only in the material-historical process and as a totality; and second, that social reality&amp;mdash;more precisely, social relations of production--shapes, if not ultimately accounts, for social consciousness; and third, that human agency/creativity in its variegated collective forms can be deepened, sharpened and mobilized to transform social life for the better. The axiom I like to cite often is from Marx and Engels&amp;rsquo; Critique of the Gotha Program: &amp;ldquo;the full development of one person depends on the free and equal development of all.&amp;rdquo; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Due to various historical and ideological circumstances (too long to recite here), Omi and Winant&amp;rsquo;s book rejected &amp;ldquo;class&amp;rdquo; and &amp;ldquo;class analysis&amp;rdquo; as reductive, economistic, and too simple to explain racism in the United States. In an essay posted in 2003 in the electronic journal, Cultural Logic, &amp;ldquo;Marxism and the Race/Class Problematic: A Re-Articulation&amp;rdquo;), I criticized their own reductive and simplifying method of dismissing Marxism, identified with economism and mechanical/vulgar materialism. To sum up drastically my conclusion: O/W located class in the sphere of market-exchange, not production relations. Second, it is subsumed into status and life-chances, following Max Weber&amp;rsquo;s sociological formula. Third, it is finally placed in the economic domain chiefly determined by political and ideological forces, I quote myself: &amp;ldquo;Race, or racial dynamics, is ultimately elevated as the principal explanatory instrument for comprehending social actors&amp;hellip;.Racial politics displaces the political economy of class struggle and class functions as the metanarrative of postmodernity.&amp;rdquo; The end result is philosophical idealism, the opposite of historical-materialism. Class struggle and social structures operating in historically specific dimensions are all thrown into the dust-bin of Cold War history. That includes the possible solutions to racism, hence the permanence of racism, race, racial formations, racial state, and so on. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Let me review this argument here from another angle, a critique indebted to Gregory Meyerson&amp;rsquo;s (2008-9) unpublished work on this subject. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Deconstructing Racial Formations?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; O/W&amp;rsquo;s concept of &amp;ldquo;racial formation&amp;rdquo; and its cognate, &amp;ldquo;the racial state,&amp;rdquo; intends to connect the individualism of identity politics and the presumed reification of Marxist functionalist structures of class. By mixing problems of identity politics with a distorted structural analysis, the diagnosis results into liberal pluralism and its own racial functionalism. O/W dismiss the objective primacy of class division in society, the structural inequality of wealth and power in society, into economic determinism&amp;mdash;a negative label. Objective class analysis does not rule out political agency, nor social and historical construction, which O/W privileges as their special focus. They argue that class interests are &amp;ldquo;never objective, never simply given.&amp;rdquo; In short, objective social structures (class antagonisms, the complex ideological and political contradictions in society) are deconstructed and falsely equated with the obvious, the given, the transparent facts, thus Marxist class analysis is confounded with empiricism and positivism. In this empiricist reading, &amp;ldquo;race&amp;rdquo; and &amp;ldquo;racism&amp;rdquo; become epiphenomenal, so that racial categories and racial discourses are rendered secondary or less important than fundamental class conflicts, functions, etc. The charge is entirely false and misleading. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; When one says class is an objective process/fact, a dynamic interaction of multiple groups and sectors, one doesn&amp;rsquo;t deny its historical constructedness. Race is an ideological concept, whereas class is objective &amp;ldquo;in the sense of carrying explanatory weight.&amp;rdquo; Both race and class are historical; as historical processes they are objective and capable of being gradually understood by a structural totalizing explanatory method. However, for O/W, history, including class antagonisms, can only be grasped in the epistemological and political languages of contingency. This is why O/W claim that Marxism, or historical materialism, reduces racism simply as a functional instrument of class exploitation and therefore do not recognize how racial categories are framed, how they change over time and vary comparatively, their centrality to key discourses in science, religion, politics, culture, etc. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Race, racial formation, and racial discourse, with their associated concepts, ccan explain nothing because &amp;ldquo;race&amp;rdquo; is not an explanatory concept but an ideology. What happens is that most academics posit questionable, baseless dualisms: structure/class/objectivity versus subjectivity/history/contingency, the open and complex versus the closed and totalizing system. So we confront the following dichotomies: class structured societies with no class struggle, sites of structureless struggles whose nature depends on what people decide in articulating or interpellating the popular, common sense, etc (Laclau and Mouffe). The antinomian concepts of structure and struggle vitiate the concept of &amp;ldquo;the racial state. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; For O/W, the &amp;ldquo;racial state&amp;rdquo; functions to produce and reproduce white supremacy, a racial dictatorship (now blown apart by Obama&amp;rsquo;s election). This racial functionalism tied to a racial state becomes contested terrain, an unstable equilibrium in which the racial state (Reagan&amp;rsquo;s administration then) is opposed by racially based groups and progressive forces who might be able to seize the state apparatus and re-articulate it in a leftward direction. But this will not happen. Why? Because, for O/W, the racial state can absorb, coopt, marginalize or suppress anti-racist resistance.&amp;rdquo; They assert that it is almost impossible to break &amp;ldquo;the supposedly consensual aspect of U.S. politics: the logic and justice of the free enterprise system, anti-communism, the morality and truthfulness of government&amp;hellip;a hegemonic domain from which challenges are effectively excluded and within which basic political unity is preserved.&amp;rdquo; But O/W refuse to label this &amp;ldquo;racial state&amp;rdquo; a capitalist state. O/W rhetorically emphasize contingency and hegemony, while they dilly-dally and say it&amp;rsquo;s possible the next elections might end racism, on the other hand the hegemonic domain will persist and strengthen. In short, racism is merely verbal, whether or not we say &amp;ldquo;nigger&amp;rdquo; or &amp;ldquo;kike.&amp;rdquo; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; In his next book, Racial Conditions (1994), Winant suspects that all arguments pro or con regarding identity politics are muddled and counterproductive. He therefore shifts from racial discourse to structures, macro analysis and micro analysis. He wants to connect race and articulate it with class, but he thinks institutions are like discursive meanings, so institutions and other macro processes become sites of contestation. In articulating class with race, his definition of class is a plulralist one. In short, he avoids talking of a ruling class, for that would be too structural or Marxist. He may mention a &amp;ldquo;racial dictatorship,&amp;rdquo; but that is not the same as a ruling class with control if not ownership of the means of production and all the political institutions required to maintain a system of class domination and privilege. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; The concept of race then is a reification. To explain the concept of racialization, you need class analysis. Class analysis explains processes of racialization (to quote Meyerson), &amp;ldquo;class analysis explains processes of racialization whereas the theory of race&amp;rsquo;s relative autonomy merely notices racialization (while claiming falsely that Marxism must be blind to it).&amp;rdquo; Marxism recognizes and understands racialization of class identities. Class is not like an economic base &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; which exists prior to race, like a ground foor to which one adds a second floor, following the now erroneous reading of the &amp;ldquo;base/superstructure&amp;rdquo; metaphor. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Obscurantist Pragmatism in the Age of Obama&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; By denying the existence of ruling classes, Winant perceives no structural barriers to democratizing society. He celebrates Clinton&amp;rsquo;s victory and Clinton&amp;rsquo;s populist platform as marking the drift towards a &amp;ldquo;democratic solidarity granting equal access to all the institutions of society, recognizing difference and carrying out the commitment made so long ago to rid this nation of the last vestiges of racial dictatorship.&amp;rdquo; It is silly and utterly misleading to talk of &amp;ldquo;racial dictatorship&amp;rdquo; in lieu of &amp;ldquo;class dictatorship.&amp;rdquo; In capitalist USA, racism has played and will continue to play a central role, with its forms varying and changing depending on anti-racist resistance. &amp;ldquo;Herrenvolk democracy&amp;rdquo; is an ideology, not a reality. For Winant, racial dictatorship (the macro racial project) will last considerably longer than the shifting and contingent micro racial projects&amp;mdash;his dialectic of structure and subject mimicking the marxist dialectic that Winant already repudiated in Racial Formations. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; But there is a profound, irredeemable incoherence in Winant&amp;rsquo;s dialectic of necessary racial dictatorship and contingent racial projects, between the invariant and the constantly shifting. Here Winant becomes part of the post-marxist crowd that strives to supplement their theory with essentialist psychoanalysis, a contradictory or inconsistent practice of this group. The language of racial context and change is formulated with an essentialist psychoanalysis which characterizes the long duration of the racial project. Winant utilizes a psychohistorical framework derived from Joel Kovel&amp;rsquo;s stages of white racism in order to explain the permanence of race. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Racism, finally, is explained as originating from &amp;ldquo;the white male normalizing gaze which ranks, scales, hierarchizes bodies&amp;mdash;this scaling of bodies is in turn derived from Kristeva&amp;rsquo;s concept of the abject, where the very formation of the self requires a kind of reaction-formation or ritual of purification that becomes the precondition for all hierarchies, all scales.&amp;rdquo; By a resort to psychoanalysis to explain the particularities of racism, Winant and his associates have abandoned the theory of ideology, as historical-mateialists use it, to demonstrate how the capitalist ruling class maintains hegemony/dominance in a class-divided polity. In rejecting the concept of ideology as elitist, Winant and other post-marxists accept the main premises of a liberal pluralism and its corollary methodological individualism, the cornerstone of capitalist ideology. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; This is clearly confirmed in the latest manifestation of O/W&amp;rsquo;s thinking, its bankruptcy and mystifying role: their adoption of pragmatism, albeit radical, as their master-narrative, paradigm, philosophy, world-view, methodology, etc. Perhaps aware of the serious inadequacies of their previous thinking, they repeat &amp;ldquo;color-blind racial ideology,&amp;rdquo; structure, politicization of the social, structural racism, and intersectionality. This gestural acknowledgement of the macro level, however, does not offset their obsessive emphasis on &amp;ldquo;racialized experience&amp;rdquo; and identity, whether multiple, performative, etc. They bring in Dewey&amp;rsquo;s &amp;ldquo;situated creativity,&amp;rdquo; &amp;ldquo;racialized self,&amp;rdquo; Du Bois&amp;rsquo;s &amp;ldquo;double consciousness.&amp;rdquo; They bring in intersectionality and relativism of methods and fields. While insisting on structural racism, they never explain what its function or purpose is, as though it was a given, self-evident ingredient of the politics of identity. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; The politicization of the social has now become more enigmatic with the complicating factors of gender and sexuality, war and peace, as well as citizenship, a whole slew of factors making the tie-up between personal experience and institutions much more difficult to tease out or disentangle. But the means of clarifying the tie-up and explain the racial dynamics, &amp;ldquo;racial project,&amp;rdquo; continues to mystify race into &amp;ldquo;racialized structure&amp;rdquo; in the long term, and its product, racial subjects. This final formulation is telling: &amp;ldquo;The linkages between racial signification and racialized social structure are ongoing and intrinsic as well as unstable and conflictual.&amp;rdquo; The recurrent motif of &amp;ldquo;self-reflective action&amp;rdquo; and &amp;ldquo;self-activity&amp;rdquo;&amp;mdash;the hypothetical &amp;ldquo;self&amp;rdquo; here is color-blind, even as it acts colorlessly-- signals the strong nominalist pragmatism (quite at odds with C.S. Peirce&amp;rsquo;s critical realism, but in harmony with Rorty and other chauvinist neopragmatists) which now legitimates their updated discourse, post 9/11 and at the point of global finance&amp;rsquo;s collapse. Even so, &amp;ldquo;structural racism&amp;rdquo; can only be reduced, not finally terminated. Everything also becomes mixed up in a relativistic brew of politicizing the social: structural racism, neoliberalism, masculinism, nativism, white racial nationalism, etc. Eventually and ultimately, everything boils down to &amp;ldquo;taste,&amp;rdquo; which is especially true for &amp;ldquo;racial studies.&amp;rdquo; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; &amp;ldquo;Color-blindness,&amp;rdquo; structural racism, etc. cannot be understood and remedied without paying attention to the reality in which we live: global capitalism&amp;rsquo;s endemic crisis, imperialist military interventions by the U.S. State, sharply intense inequality of nation-states and peoples, classes within national polities, regional conflicts, etc. Only a historical-materialist critical framework, attentive to the social relations of production and the political class-conflicts taking place within it, the political and social contradictions of each society at every historical period and conjuncture, and the international or global framework of political economy that subtends this ongoing crisis of capitalism&amp;mdash;I think this is the only tried and tested way in which we can make sense of racism, racial inequality, and other problems connected to race and ethnicity in the contemporary world. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Historical Background&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; It might be instructive to review how the dialectics of race/class unfolded in the history of US imperialism in the last century. The colonial annexation of the Philippines is an exemplary point of departure. The Filipino-American War of 1899-1902 was a brutal war, the 'first Vietnam,' for many historians. However, most textbooks devote only a paragraph, if at all, to this period--a crucial stage in the construction of the American national identity. Over 1 million Filipinos died, more than 8,000 American soldiers perished, for the sake of 'manifest destiny.' &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Then president McKinley didn't know where the islands were--officials joked whether the Philippines was a brand name of canned goods or some kind of pineapple. McKinley justified the forcible annexation of the Philippines to a delegation of Methodist Church leaders in 1899 with these words: Since the natives were 'unfit for self-government,&amp;rdquo; McKinley intoned,&amp;rdquo; &amp;hellip;there was nothing left for [the United States] to do but to take them all, &amp;hellip;and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.' Samples of these natives who would be uplifted by the Puritan work ethic and individualist self-help were exhibited in the St. Louis Exposition of 1904, one of a series of industrial fairs intended to project the global stature of the United States as the fit successor to the European imperial powers. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; One of the scandalous if censored incidents of the U.S. campaign to pacify the islands was the defection of some African American soldiers to the side of the 'enemy,' the revolutionary Philippine Republic. Soldiers fresh from the campaigns against the Plains Indians considered the Filipinos savages and 'niggers' that needed taming and domestication; reservation-like hamlets had to be set up to cut short a guerilla war that was becoming costly. Right from the beginning, it was a thoroughly racialized war. The rhetoric and discourse of that 'civilizing mission,' which had earlier legitimized the genocide against the Native Americans, slavery of Africans, and violence against the Mexicans, continued up to the time when thousands of Filipinos were recruited for the Hawaiian Sugar Plantations after the entry of Asian migrant labor then--Chinese and Japanese&amp;mdash;was banned. Objects of the policy called &amp;ldquo;Benevolent Assimilation,&amp;rdquo; Filipinos, the new 'nationals' who were neither citizens nor aliens but a hybrid of sorts&amp;mdash;postcolonial denizens avant le lettre, were attacked by white vigilantes in Yakima Valley and the entire West Coast in the thirties and forties. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; We should insert here a reminder that the famous Plessy v. Ferguson judgment took place in 1896, two years before the outbreak of the Spanish American War. The system of apartheid--not to be altered for half a century--was finally given its legal imprimatur. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Calling attention to the gap between the idealized representation of democracy in foreign adventure and its actual operations in the heartland reveals the authentic character of the expanding nation-state as a racial formation. It is one constructed on the basis of racial segregation, hierarchy, and violence. While the claim of 'Manifest Destiny,' the American messianic mission, and the reality of a racialized system may appear incompatible, from a larger historical perspective, that discrepancy is itself the condition of possibility for the justification of empire. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Genealogy of Racial/Class Politics&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; A review of the political formation of the United States demonstrates a clear racial, not simply ethnic, pattern of constituting the national identity and the commonality it invokes. As many historians have shown, the U.S. racial order, following the logic of the expansion of the free market, evolved from three or four key conjunctures which, I submit, should be studied as the core of any general education program: first, the suppression of the aboriginal inhabitants (Native Americans) for the exploitation of land and natural resources; second, the institutionalization of slavery and the postCivil War apartheid or segregation; third, the conquest of territory from the Mexicans, Spaniards (Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam), and Hawaiians, and the colonization of Mexicans, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans; and, fourth, the subordination of Asian labor. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; In the shaping of the national formation, the necessary element has been the norm of racial stratification, the sociopolitical construction of racial hierarchy. I think all questions of citizenship and individual liberties hinge on the theorizing of 'race' and its deployment in various political and ideological practices of the State and civil society. While chattel slavery is gone, &amp;ldquo;wage slavery&amp;rdquo; is still with us. I am not denying progress on the civil rights front. However, the legal scholar Lani Guinier argues that race continues to be an organizing principle of the democratic nation state. She holds that 'majority rule is not a reliable instrument of democracy in a racially divided society&amp;hellip; In a racially divided society, majority rule may be perceived as majority tyranny.' &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; While vestiges of scientific racism exist, the political use of race as a biological/anthropological concept is no longer tenable. Ever since I came to this country in 1960, people always ask me: Where are you from? Where do you come from? I believe that Darwin has given that question a generic answer. On second thought, the question may be diagnosed as a symptom of the need to affirm a measure of common value in the modern milieu of alienation and reification. Identity politics has arrived. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Today, the problem of cultural ethos or ethnicity has become the major site of racial conflict. The notion of cultural diversity implies that there is a norm or standard&amp;mdash;call it the American Way of Life, the common culture, the Great Books, the canon, whatever&amp;mdash;compared to which the other is different, alien, strange, weird. Some people become problems by the simple fact of their existence. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; No doubt, racial thinking still pervades the consensual procedures of our society--from the categories of the Census to the neoconservative attack on Affirmative Action and the gains of the Civil Rights struggles. It has acquired new life in the sphere of public, especially foreign, policy whenever officials rearticulate the binary opposition beween us (citizens of Western civilization) and them (the barbaric fundamentalists, rogue states, terrorists of all kinds). The common life or national identity rises from the rubble of differences vanquished, ostracized, and erased. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; The twentieth century that ended with wars in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans, thus began with the entry of the United States as competitor in the game of colonial plunder. Defeating Spain in a few unspectacular engagements, the United States seized territories in Asia, the Pacific and the Caribbean inhabited by peoples with their own cultures, economies, and histories. The imperative of modernization covered up for their loss of sovereignty. The century began with the United States becoming an imperial power that would, after World War II, displace its old European contenders and declare a pax American of the free market on the ruins of fascist Germany and Japan. This peace, however, rested also on a neocolonial discourse in which the Western democracies legitimized their mastery of the &amp;ldquo;Free World&amp;rdquo; in the crusade against Communist despotism. But, as historians have shown, this hegemony over nation-states (especially among formerly colonized and now neocolonized countries) is always already predicated on the continuation of the European narrative and vision of world domination, on white supremacy. W.E.B. Du Bois questioned the presumed universality of American nationalism when he wrote in 1945, in an essay entitled 'Human Rights for all Minorities,&amp;rdquo; that black people in the United States were 'a nation without a polity, nationals without citizenship.' Liberals like Nathan Glazer and Michael Walzer condemn any talk about national autonomy, collective rights, or empowerment of communities, as inimical to the unity and stability of the country. The 'national question' involving people of color in the United States, which I think is the key to unlocking the race question, remains still unanswered by all participants in the culture wars, by relativists and law-and-order folks alike. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Global Ideological War&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Meanwhile, the theme of global ideological conflict has now been revitalized. It moves up to center-stage in a recasting of the Cold War as, in Samuel Huntington's words, a war of civilizations. Primarily a war between the West and &amp;ldquo;the Rest.&amp;rdquo; We need not prophesy the details of this coming 'war' within one world-system of transnational corporate business. In fact we all live in one world where the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund occupy pride of place in the pantheon. We are confronted everyday in the media with scenes of ethnic cleansing, earlier in Bosnia, now Kosovo, all over what was formerly the Soviet Union, in Afghanistan, in Ruwanda and earlier in apartheid South Africa. Racialized antagonisms smolder in various parts of the world, in Quebec, in Los Angeles, Indonesia, Haiti, and elsewhere. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; With the propagation of the Murray-Herrnstein notion of genetically defined intelligence, we are once more surrounded with ideas first synthesized by Comte Joseph de Gobineau in his book Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1953-55) and later elaborated by Social Darwinism, eugenics, and pragmatic utilitarianism. Its latest manifestation is, in my view, the theory of common culture--the heritage of Western civilization. It inheres in all philosophies and policies that legislate a scheme of general education for everyone based on a narrative of development framed by the classics of the canon, from Aristotle to Rorty and Lacan. Whether formulated in terms of modernity, progress, Enlightenment, competency, or individual self-fulfillment, the old belief in 'our civilizing mission' persists despite claims of tolerance, liberal latitude, respect for cultural diversity, and so on. The aim of the cultural literacy espoused by E.D.Hirsch, for example, and assorted schemes of 'general education' is to reproduce the liberal self, now assuredly more sophisticated and cosmopolitan, founded on centuries-old strategies of domestication and devaluation of Others. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; I express here a view that may outrage defenders of tradition and the accepted disciplinary boundaries--perhaps evidence that despite changes and modifications on the surface, the deep structures of habitual thought and feeling remain entrenched. But what are teachers for, asked James Baldwin, if not to disturb the peace? While critical of the metanarrative of modernizing progress (courtesy of the IMF/World Bank), I should also say here that I do not count myself as one of those postmodernist skeptics who believe that everything is a manifestation of pure power, discourse or textuality, arbitrary social constructions whose truth-claims cannot be adjudicated. After all, reality is what hurts&amp;hellip;. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Multiculturalism is celebrated today as the accompaniment to the fall of the Evil Empire and the triumph of liberal capitalist democracy. Ishmael Reed, among others, has trumpeted the virtues of 'America: The Multinational Society.' His term &amp;ldquo;multinational&amp;rdquo; continues the thought of Dubois, the proponents of La Raza Unida, and the theories of internal colonialism. Ironically, however, Reed declares somewhat naively that 'the United States is unique in the world: The world is here' in New York City, Los Angeles, and so on. Reed, I suspect, doesn't mean that the problems of the underdeveloped peoples have come in to plague American cities. With this figure of subsumption or synecdochic linkage, America reasserts a privileged role in the world--all the margins, the absent Others, are redeemed in an inclusive, homogenized space where cultural differences dissolve or are sorted out into their proper niches in the ranking of national values and priorities. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; We thus have plural cultures or ethnicities coexisting peacefully, without conflict or contestation, in a free play of monads in 'the best of all possible worlds.' No longer a melting pot but a salad bowl, a smorsgasbord of cultures, the mass consumption of variegated and heterogeneous lifestyles. There is of course a core or consensual culture to which we add any number of diverse particulars, thus proving that our principles of liberty and tolerance can accommodate those formerly excluded or ignored. In short, your particular is not as valuable or significant as mine. On closer scrutiny, this liberal mechanism of inclusion&amp;mdash;what Herbert Marcuse once called &amp;ldquo;repressive desublimation&amp;rdquo;--is a mode of appropriation: it fetishizes and commodifies others. The universal swallows the particulars. And the immigrant, or border-crosser like Guillermo Gomez Pena or Coco Fusco, our most provocative performance-artists, is always reminded that to gain full citizenship, unambiguous rules must be obeyed: proficiency in English is mandatory, assimilation of certain procedures and rituals are assumed, and so on and so forth. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Cultural pluralism first broached in the twenties by Horace Kallen has been refurbished for the needs of the 'New World Order.' What the multiculturalist orthodoxy (of left or right varieties) of today elides, however, is the history of the struggles of people of color--both those within the metropolis and the peripheries. While the political armies of racial supremacy were defeated in World War II, the practices of the liberal nation-state continue to reproduce the domination and subordination of racialized populations in overt and subtle ways. The citizen-subject, citizenship as such, held to be the universalizing virtue of the liberal nation-state, remains defined by the categories that govern the public sphere and the marketplace, categories of race, geopolitical location, gender, nationality, sexuality, and so on. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Meanwhile, the highly touted concept of civic nationalism, a framework for harmonizing ethnic differences, is bound to reproduce the racialization of identity and the processes of stigmatization and marginalization witnessed in the history of the sociopolitical formation. Others who are different, inferior or subordinate to us, are constructed to define the rights-bearing subject of the liberal nation-state; these Others are excluded or exteriorized--undocumented aliens, etc.--to establish the boundaries of the nation-state. In the process, a fictive ethnicity of the nation as its primordial guarantee emerges to validate its legitimacy and naturalness. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Opposed to those who insist on conformity to a uniform monolithic culture, I am for the recognition of the integrity and importance of peoples' cultures and ways of life, and for their right to exist and flourish. But how can this recognition of multiplicity be universalized? &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; I believe it cannot happen within the existing global logic of corporate accumulation. I believe that multiculturalism, as along as it is conceived within the existing framework of the hegemonic nation-state or bloc of states founded on inequality and hierarchy, cannot offer the means to realize justice, fairness, and recognition of people's singular identities and worth around the world. The multiculturalist respect for the Other's specificity may be the appropriate form of asserting one's own superiority. This paradox underlies multiculturalism as, in fact, the authentic 'cultural logic of multinational' or globalized capitalism. So I am afraid the race question will be with us in the next millenium as long as the conditions that produce and reproduce it are the sine qua non of the prevailing social structures and institutional practices of our everyday lives. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Class Struggle Against Racial Politics&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; The goal of a class-less communist society and strategies to attain it envisage the demise of racist ideology and practice in its current forms. But progressive forces around the world are not agreed about this. For example, the World Conference against Racism World Forum of Non-Governmental Organizations held before September 11, 2001 in Durban, South Africa, publicized the global problem of racism but was unable to formulate a consensus on how to solve it. Its final declaration highlighted the historic origin of racism in the slave trade, colonialism, genocide, and the possibility of reparations for its victims, but did not offer a concrete program of action (see Mann 2002). &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Given its composition, and the pervasive climate of reaction, the Forum could not of course endorse a radical approach that would focus on the elimination of the exploitation of labor (labor power as commodity) as a necessary first step. Given its limits, it could not espouse a need for a thoroughgoing change of the material basis of social production and reproduction&amp;mdash;the latter involving the hegemonic rule of the propertied bloc in each society profiting from the unequal division of labor and the unequal distribution of social wealth&amp;mdash;on which the institutional practices of racism (apartheid, discrimination, genocide) thrive. &amp;ldquo;Race is the modality in which class is lived,&amp;rdquo; as Stuart Hall remarks concerning post-1945 Britain (Solomos 1986, 103). Without the political power in the hands of the democratic-popular masses under the leadership of the working class, the ideological machinery (laws, customs, religion, state bureaucracy) that legitimizes class domination, with its attendant racist practices, cannot be changed. What is required is a revolutionary process that mobilizes a broad constituency based on substantive equality and social justice as an essential part of the agenda to dissolve class structures; any change in the ideas, beliefs, and norms would produce changes in the economic, political and social institutions, which would in turn promote wide-ranging changes in social relations among groups, sectors, and so on. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Within a historical-materialist framework, the starting point and end point for analyzing the relations between structures in any sociohistorical totality cannot be anything else but the production and reproduction of material existence. The existence of any totality follows transformation rules whereby it is constantly being restructured into a new formation (Harvey 1973). These rules reflect the dialectical unfolding of manifold contradictions constituting the internal relations of the totality. Within this conflicted, determinate totality, race cannot be reduced to class, nor can class be subsumed by race, since those concepts express different forms of social relations. What is the exact relation between the two? This depends on the historical character of the social production in question and the ideological-political class struggles defining it. In his valuable treatise, The Invention of the White Race, Theodore Allen has demonstrated the precise genealogy and configuration of racism in the U.S. It first manifested itself when the European colonial settlers based on private property in land and resources subdued another social order based on collective, tribal tenure of land and resources, denying the latter any social identity&amp;mdash;&amp;ldquo;social death&amp;rdquo; for Native Americans. We then shift our attention to the emergence of the white race and its system of racial oppression with the defeat of Bacon&amp;rsquo;s Rebellion in 1677 and the establishment of a system of lifetime hereditary bond servitude (for African Americans): &amp;ldquo;The insistence on the social distinction between the poorest member of the oppressor group and any member, however propertied, of the oppressed group, is the hallmark of racial oppression&amp;rdquo; (Allen 1997, 243). In effect, white supremacy defining the nature of civil society was constructed at a particular historical conjuncture demanded by class war. The result is a flexible and adjustable system that can adjust its racial dynamics in order to divide the subordinates, resist any critique of its ideological legitimacy, and prevent any counter-hegemonic bloc of forces from overthrowing class rule. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Class struggle intervenes through its impact in the ideological-political sphere of civil society. Racial categories operate through the mediation of civil society which (with the class-manipulated State) regulate personal relations through the reifying determinations of value, market exchange, and capital. Harry Chang comments on the social mediation of racial categories: &amp;ldquo;Blacks and whites constitute social blocks in a developed setting of &amp;lsquo;mass society&amp;rsquo; in which social types (instead of persons) figure as basic units of economic and political management&amp;hellip;The crucial intervention of objectification, i.e., relational poles conceived as the intrinsic quality of objects in relation, must not be neglected here. Racial formation in a country is an aspect of class formation, but the reason races are not classes lies in this objectification process (or fetishization)&amp;rdquo; (1985, 43). Commodity fetishism enables the ideology of racism (inferiority tied to biology, genetics, cultural attributes) to register its effects in common-sense thinking and routine behavior in class-divided society (Lukacs 1971). Because market relations hide unequal power relations, sustained ideological critique and transformative collective actions are imperative. This signifies the heuristic maxim of &amp;ldquo;permanent revolution&amp;rdquo; (Lefevbre 1968, 171) in Marxist thought: any long-term political struggle to abolish capitalism as a system of extracting surplus value through a system of the unequal division of labor (and rewards) needs to alter the institutions and practices of civil society that replicate and strengthen the fetishizing or objectifying mechanism of commodity production and exchange (the capitalist mode of production). If racism springs from the reification of physical attributes (skin color, eye shape) to validate the differential privileges in a bourgeois regime, then the abolition of labor-power as a commodity will be a necessary if not sufficient step in doing away with the conditions that require racial privileging of certain groups in class-divided formations. Racism is not an end in itself but, despite its seeming autonomy, an instrumentality of class rule. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Reification of nature and all social relations is the distinctive logic of the political economy of bourgeois domination. Racial differentiation and class antagonism converge in the revolutionary process when, as C.L.R. James states in a gloss on Lenin&amp;rsquo;s thought, the colonized subalterns (e.g., the Irish in 19th century Britain) and racially oppressed peoples/nations (African Americans, indigenous communities) begin to act as the &amp;ldquo;bacilli&amp;rdquo; or ferment that ushers onto the international scene &amp;ldquo;the real power against imperialism&amp;mdash;the socialist proletariat&amp;rdquo; (1994, 182). Socialist revolution is thus the requisite precondition for ending racism. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; &lt;strong&gt;REFERENCES&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Allen, Theodore. 1997. The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America. Vol. 2 of The Invention of the White Race. New York: Verso. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Chang, Harry. 1985. &amp;ldquo;Toward a Marxist Theory of Racism: Two Essays by Harry &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Chang.&amp;rdquo; Ed. Paul Liem and Eric Montague. Review of Radical Political Economics 17.3: 34-45. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Harvey, David. 1973. Social Justice and the City. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; James, C.L.R. 1994. C.L.R.James and Revolutionary Marxism. Ed. Scott McLemee and Paul Le Blanc. New Jersey: Humanities Press. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Lefebvre, Henri. 1968. The Sociology of Marx. New York: Vintage. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Lukacs, Georg. 1971 (1923). History and Class Consciousness. London: Merlin Press. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Mann, Eric. 2002. Dispatches from Durban. Los Angeles, CA: Frontlines Press. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Meyerson, Gregory. 2008-2009. &amp;ldquo;NeoMarxism as Compromise Formations.&amp;rdquo; Unpublished paper. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Solomos, John. 1986. &amp;ldquo;Varieties of Marxist conceptions of &amp;lsquo;race,&amp;rsquo; class and the state: a critical analysis.&amp;rdquo; In Theories of Race and Ethnic Relations. Ed. John Rex and David Mason. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; Thomas, Pierre and Jason Ryan. 2009. &amp;ldquo;Stinging Remarks on Race from Attorney General.&amp;rdquo; ABC News (Feb. 18). http://abcnews.go.com/print?id+6905255&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;</description>
			<pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2009 02:03:00 +0000</pubDate>
			
			
			<guid>http://politicalaffairs.net/re-visiting-race-and-class-in-post-9-11-usa/</guid>
		</item>
		
		<item>
			<title>PRO RELI versus  PRO ETHIK</title>
			<link>http://politicalaffairs.net/pro-reli-versus-pro-ethik/</link>
			<description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;p class='ezhtml'&gt;&lt;font size=1&gt;4-27-09, 9:49 am&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The religious struggle in Berlin which ended Sunday with joy for some and great disappointment for others was primarily a political battle, even though it dealt with schools and religious lessons. Many Berliners never did understand the complicated issue. For an outsider to even try, a few German peculiarities need explaining.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
 First of all, church and state are not separate here. The state helps support theology students preparing for the clergy, it subsidizes church-run kindergartens and homes for the aged, it helps pay for the repair of some churches. Most surprising, perhaps, the government finance office automatically takes a tax, usually 8 or 9 percent, out of every pay check and transfers it to the churches. When you are hired you check off Roman Catholic, Evangelical, which means Lutheran here, or (very rarely) Jewish. You can also check “none of the above” but if you were ever baptized you get taxed, unless you go to the town clerk and quit the church (which also means no church weddings, churchyard burials or other perks). This assistance to the churches goes back to 1827.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The other main surprise: schools have religious classes as part of their regular curriculum, taught by teachers designated and trained by the Roman Catholic, Evangelical, Jewish or Moslem churches (or, theoretically, Free Thought advocates, which means atheist). Parents make the choice. And these classes are graded on report cards just like History or Arithmetic.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
But not in the two city-states, Bremen and Berlin, which opted out of this practice. In Berlin, religious classes in the different faiths, though still offered from the first grade on, are completely voluntary. Then, three years ago, Berlin’s coalition government of Social Democrats and The Left introduced a new course called Ethics, as a part of the regular curriculum for seventh  to tenth grade students. Inspired in part by the “honor killing” of a young Turkish woman by her brother because of her supposed immorality, Ethik aimed at free, open discussions of questions like moral values, tolerance, equality and solidarity. It also intended to discuss all major world religions, encouraging open-mindedness towards other faiths and overcoming prejudices between Christian children and those of immigrant, usually Islamic background, currently 43 percent of the Berlin total. The courses were also seen as antidotes to all such forms of hatred as anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Most students seemed to like the classes. But since they were mandatory, while additional courses with the religious teacher of their own faith were voluntary, many considered the two weekly hours of Ethics as sufficient and did without the others. This applied to about half of all 7th to 10th graders, many of them not religious at all in a city often scorned as Germany’s “atheist capital.” This is largely true because one third of the city was part of the GDR, where religion was taught only at church Sunday schools and never in the schools. After East Germany was annexed to West Germany in 1990 (known as “reunification”), the churches expected a rapid increase in membership by “oppressed” East Germans, whom they believed  had been forcibly kept from religion. But the surge was very disappointing, only about a third of the East Berliners are willing to face the steep church tax on their pay checks, and the trend has been seeping into western Germany. Both main churches are seriously strapped for cash and fear losing the hearts and minds of even more young Berliners. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Not a few progressive pastors favor the Ethics lessons, so do the Greens, although they oppose the present Berlin government. It is an open question whether even the very conservative church leaders would have initiated the kind of struggle which just came to at least a temporary end. The man who started it, a largely unknown Catholic lawyer named Lehmann, was an unsuccessful figure in the local Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the party of Angela Merkel, which was thrown out of office in Berlin after a financial scandal and is passionately interested in regaining popularity and power.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
 The first main effort utilized Berlin’s very liberal laws on initiatives and referendums. Last year the CDU collected enough signatures to force a referendum on saving Tempelhof Airport. Situated dangerously in the middle of town and a potential if minor rival to the huge new airport being built outside the city, it conjures up nostalgic western visions of its key role in the 1948 Berlin Airlift, a major event in the early cold war era. (For some it conjured up older visions as a major Nazi propaganda landmark.) Hinting broadly at the cold war angle, the Christian Democrats hoped the referendum would discredit the coalition government of Social Democrats and the Left by reviving and strengthening the antagonism of many West Berliners toward “those dreadful Reds in the eastern boroughs”, once the capital of the (East) German Democratic Republic. In the end, few East Berliners gave a hoot about the old airport and didn’t vote. So many West Berliners also stayed home that the required quorum of voters was not met and the referendum failed.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
This new attempt, known as Pro Reli (for religion), basically repeated the same strategy, first with an intense petition campaign calling for free choice between Ethics (pupils together) and Religion (pupils divided by faith).  Although the existing rules, which would be maintained by a “No” vote, never prevented a single student from going to separate religious classes if desired, it did require that all pupils join together in the Ethics course, in a conscious move to overcome prejudices. But the Pro Reli forces plastered the whole city with posters and billboards (later partly balanced by the Pro Ethik posters) stressing “Freedom of Choice” and, since this was a bit complicated, simply “Freedom.” Election Sunday was even called “Day of Freedom” on some billboards, and TV interviewers quoted elderly voters insisting that “This is a Christian country after all, with Western Christian traditions.” Thus, a tacit message, at least for some voters, was directed against “Easterners”, atheists, leftists in the state government, but also Muslims, Jews and other “non-Christians” (although the Berlin Jewish congregation, like Chancellor Angela Merkel, supported the Pro Reli referendum). One surprising supporter of religious classes as an alternative to Ethics was the moderator of the German equivalent of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
But alas for all such supporters, Sunday was a beautiful sunny day. Most people went to the park, the many lakes, two zoos or other outdoor sites. Many admitted to TV interviewers that they didn’t understand the complicated business and didn’t really care. Only about a third of all citizens went to the polls and the required quorum was not obtained. In most West Berlin boroughs bout 60 percent voted Pro Reli, in most East Berlin boroughs about 70 percent voted Pro Ethik, but the total sum was too small. To the dismay of Pro Reli supporters, even among those who did vote the “Ja” Pro Reli side won only 48.5 percent, while the Pro Ethik “Nein” voters got a majority of 51.3 percent.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Lehmann and the Roman Catholic Cardinal admitted their disappointment but refused to give up. The right-wing crowd has already begun to think up new attacks. But although many millions of Euros were spent in their effort, the antagonism, passions or even hatred which might have resulted were luckily absent, and most people simply enjoyed a beautiful day. The status quo remains, and it will be up to both Pro Reli and Pro Ethik advocates to make their school courses as attractive as possible.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
--Victor Grossman lives in Berlin.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
 
&lt;/p&gt;</description>
			<pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2009 02:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
			
			
			<guid>http://politicalaffairs.net/pro-reli-versus-pro-ethik/</guid>
		</item>
		
		<item>
			<title>Green Gutter Options</title>
			<link>http://politicalaffairs.net/green-gutter-options/</link>
			<description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;p class='ezhtml'&gt;&lt;font size=1&gt;4-27-09, 9:36 am&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;EarthTalk
From the Editors of E/The Environmental Magazine &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Dear EarthTalk: We will need to replace our house gutters soon. What are our best options from an environmental perspective?      -- Jodie Green, Dallas, TX &lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
First understand clearly why your gutters need to be replaced. Are they rusted or broken? Are the fasteners no longer holding them in place? Or have the gutters leaked and failed to keep water out of your house? Answers to these questions will help you decide which type of gutter to choose. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Use a material that is the most durable for your climate; ultimately the longer your gutters last, the less environmental cost there will be in the product lifecycle, from manufacturing to recycling. A cheaper product that degrades twice as fast as another would not be the best choice, even if it does have a greener production process: The extra cost of having to fix your water-damaged home—and the health problems that could arise from exposure to mold—would make a “cheaper” gutter in reality much more costly. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
“Galvanized steel, copper and aluminum are preferred gutter materials,” reports Austin Energy, the Texas capitol’s community-owned electric utility. Copper is a more expensive, high-end gutter material, as are stainless steel and wood, although wood is used mostly in historical restoration. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
According to home improvement expert Don Vandervort, who writes for ThisOldHouse.com, steel and aluminum each have big pluses. Steel is sturdy, while aluminum will not rust. Copper and stainless steel are sturdy and lasting, too, says Vandervort, but they can cost three to four times as much as steel or aluminum. “Steel gutters can stand up to ladders and fallen branches better than aluminum,” he says. “But even thick galvanized steel eventually rusts.” He advises buying “the thickest you can afford.” Austin Energy says that gutters should be a minimum of 26 gauge galvanized steel or 0.025 inch aluminum. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) is also used for gutters, but “can get brittle with age or in extreme cold,” says Vandervort, and cannot carry as much snow load as metal gutters. PVC is also not a very green-friendly choice. The Center for Health, Environment and Justice (CHEJ) calls PVC plastic “one of the most hazardous consumer products ever created…dangerous to human health and the environment throughout its entire life cycle.” When produced or burned, says CHEJ, PVC plastic releases dioxins, a group of potent synthetic chemicals that can cause cancer and harm the immune and reproductive systems. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Replacing your gutters can be an unfortunate expense, but it can provide an environmental opportunity, because the way you handle your roof’s water is important. Consider linking your gutters to a “rooftop catchment system” that captures rainwater in a cistern or rain barrels and can then be used to water non-edible plantings. Efficient water use is a guideline in the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) for Homes standard for certifying green-built homes. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Finally, if you have a problem with debris, consider a RainTube. This recycled-plastic gutter insert (which won the 2008 Sustainable Product Award from Green Building Pages) keeps gutters clear of debris, preventing overflow into your house. Of course, cleaning your gutters now and then is probably the best environmental option in that it may head off any need for replacement or modification. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
CONTACTS: Austin Energy, www.austinenergy.com; U.S. Green Building Council, www.usgbc.org; RainTube, www.raintube.com; Green Building Pages, www.greenbuildingpages.com. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
SEND YOUR ENVIRONMENTAL QUESTIONS TO: EarthTalk, P.O. Box 5098, Westport, CT 06881; earthtalk@emagazine.com. Read past columns at: www.emagazine.com/earthtalk/archives.php. EarthTalk is now a book! Details and order information at: www.emagazine.com/earthtalkbook.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
 
&lt;/p&gt;</description>
			<pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2009 01:49:00 +0000</pubDate>
			
			
			<guid>http://politicalaffairs.net/green-gutter-options/</guid>
		</item>
		
		<item>
			<title>Left 'Turning Points': Exploring New Ideas, Seeking Common Ground</title>
			<link>http://politicalaffairs.net/left-turning-points-exploring-new-ideas-seeking-common-ground/</link>
			<description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;p class='ezhtml'&gt;&lt;font size=1&gt;4-27-09, 9:27 am&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;Original source:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href='http://progressivesforobama.blogspot.com/' title='Progressives for Obama' targert='_blank'&gt;Progressives for Obama&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
New York City's annual 'Left Forum' this year was a solid success. Under the theme 'Turning Points, it drew more than 2000 participants to Pace University April 17-19, to take part in some 200 panels featuring around 600 speakers.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
For something on this scale, I won't even pretend to give a comprehensive overview. No one person can. Instead, in what follows, you'll get my personal diary-like account as I wove my way through the crowds, met up with old and new friends, and faced a dizzying array of choices every time a new round of panels were set to start.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Pace University was an oddly appropriate place for the forum, located next to City Hall in New York City's financial district. The artifacts of the two major crises shaping our last decade were in your face. Wall Street, den of the derivative speculators, was a few blocks away; and you could tour 'Ground Zero,' the site of the destroyed WTC Twin Towers, with less than a 10 minute walk. Pace had a memorial plaque on its grounds for its own faculty, staff and students that perished on 9/11.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
I arrived a few hours before the opening plenary. The New York City Labor Left Project, a grouping of socialist and communist trade unionists from several left organizations, set up a small early-bird session with Bill Fletcher, Jr, former AFL-CIO Education Director, co-author of 'Solidarity Divided: The Crisis of Organized Labor,' and a founder of Progressives for Obama. About 25 people showed up, from half-a-dozen unions.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
This was important. Most events like the Left Forum over the years, this one included, have been a 'gathering of the tribes' of the left intelligentsia, serving as both common ground for every trend to talk with each other, and a trade fair of sorts, where left groups and publishers display their wares. Labor activists usually are notable by their absence, so this panel, even though small, was a step forward.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Fletcher hit hard on the need for an organized left in the union movement. He used some example from the early 1930s to explain that he didn't mean just the more militant and left-leaning staffers, but a socialist and communist left that brought a wider political perspective and array of tactics than what was likely to emerge within the trade unions themselves. 'People often talk about the great achievements of the 1930s,' he said, 'but they often fail to mention and take into account, even among themselves, the political forces that helped bring them about, political forces that were later pushed out.' A lively discussion followed, covering everything from the current 'Civil Wars' in labor, to the failure to mobilize adequately around the economic crisis.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The Fletcher talk ran late, so by the time we made it to the auditorium for the opening plenary, it was completely packed, not even standing room. Luckily, the forum organizers had an extra side hall with a giant screen and speakers. That room quickly filled, too.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The first speech was the best, in my book. Richard Wolf, from the Economics Dept at the New School for Social Research, laid out a lucid and high-level Marxist explanation of the current crisis, but spanning 150 years of capitalist development in the U.S. His most important point: the U.S. working class was able to maintain its living standard over the past 30 years only by adding women to the work force, working longer hours, and going deep into debt. By the same token, U.S. capital survived on the speculative bubbles rooted in that debt. Now the wreckage is in front of us, and it's way past time to put socialism on the table.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
While Wolf was clear and forceful, Adolph Reed, political science at the University of Pennsylvania, who followed him, was opaque and hesitant. He seemed to argue that because the left lacked institutional strength in the labor movement, and because that strength was not in the cards anytime soon, just about anything anyone did was going to be co-opted by neoliberalism, especially by what he termed 'the fetishism of electoral politics.' In a time of hope, he offered 'politically correct' gloom and pessimism.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Arlie Hochschild, sociology from UC Berkeley, stressed that the left needed to get over it 'mistrust of government, which she suggested was borrowed from Ronald Reagan. It was groundwork to convince people to work for social-democratic state-centric solutions, but it didn't go over too well with this crowd. Katjia Kipping from Die Linke, the Left Party in Germany, did better. Faced with 'class warfare from the top down,' she outlined her party's stand in parliament of refusing to have the working class pay for the crisis, to bloc its further development with 'anti-cyclical reforms,' and to tie them all together with a more strategic campaign for worker control and ownership of the economy.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Walden Bello from the Philippines was the final speaker, but unfortunately, I had to miss him. I had a more important engagement with my young grandson and two daughters, who live in New York City, at a nearby restaurant. First things first!&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Saturday promised to be jam-packed, and I was on two panels myself. I arrived earlier than usual because City Hall Park in across the street from Pace, and my grandson, along with all the other Little Leaguers, with their new team uniforms, were preparing for an early-morning season-opening parade. I couldn't miss this, so I had my morning coffee in the park, meeting other proud parents and grandparents.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
But Pace was open by 9am, and batches of people wrestled with boxes and carts filled with books, getting their displays up on time. I studied the program, and picked 'The Trend of Chinese Marxism in the 21st Century.' Where else would I have the opportunity to listen to three Chinese philosophy professors from Fudan University, having travelled half way around the globe to get here? Since the presenters weren't comfortable with their English skills, the presentations were read to us by a young Chinese woman. The key point: because China was now a transitional society with a socialist market economy, and problems arising from capitalist modernization, it needed some 'Western Marxism' to battle backward trends and keep it on the socialist path. The discussion was difficult, with translation back and forth, but still very lively.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
I had to quickly get to the next panel, since I was on it, and there was only about five minutes between sessions. 'Building a Progressive Majority and Advancing a Vision of Socialism' was the title, and it was pulled together by my group, Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, and chaired by Pat Fry, an SEIU staffer. I led off by presenting Van Jones's program for Green Jobs for inner city youth, but framing it as a larger structural reform project that could, if done right, unite a progressive majority and help get us out of the current crisis. At the same time, we had to unite a militant minority around socialist tasks, so I offered the solidarity economy movement and its projects as practical examples of cooperative forms that could, within the capitalist present, point to a socialist future.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Carl Bloice from Black Commentator followed, with a warning that the problems of inter-imperialist rivalry still existed in a multipolar world, as did the problem of militarism and the need for disarmament as a path to greater global equity. He also stressed the need for popular resistance to Obama's Afghan-Pakistan escalation. Renee Carter, a physician from Virginia and CCDS NCC member, described some to the practical organizational work in the South, including a recent conference in Charleston, SC. 'It showed people are very hungry for socialist ideas and groups like ours.'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Mark Solomon, CCDS Co-Chair, presented a very practical organizational model for organizing the progressive majority, based on the Majority Alliance Project in Boston, which was pulling together dozens of existing organizations 'to work wholistically' on a range of project where progressive majorities exist-such as ending the wars and green jobs. At the same time, they worked to take issues with large minority support, such as Palestine self-determination or gay marriage, and develop new ways of thinking to get them to become majorities. Critical to both sets of work was building wider alliances with the labor, youth and community forces that emerged as activists in the Obama campaign.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Our session filled the room with about 40 or more people, most of whom knew little about us. They learned more in the discussion, which covered a lot of bases, from rightwing populism to community base-building, and we got everyone's email address. Other groups did likewise throughout the conference, revealing one of the stronger points of the Left Forum: providing a venue for organization building.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Lunchtime was for networking. While my fellow panelists took off with some folks from the French Communist Party, I decided to spend some time with a young and very sharp organizer from New Jersey, doing some significant organizing with the Obama volunteer bases in the inner city.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Next up was a panel dubiously titled 'Obama and the Politics of Hype,' pulled together by Lauren Langman, an old friend and sociology professor at Loyola in Chicago. I didn't no what to expect, and Langman got double-booked, so he made a quick speech and left, turning over the chair to Tom Ponniah of Harvard. It was in a large room, and many people, mainly young, kept pouring in until we had about 100. Besides me, Laura Flanders of Grit TV made up the remaining panel.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Flanders was very good, outlining the strengths and weakness of both Obama and the left, with an emphasis on new media, of which she is a rising star. I took the view that the real 'politics of hype' around Obama came from conservative talk radio and rightwing populism. My examples were very concrete, arising from the campaign work we did in Beaver County, Western PA, exposing the hype of the right on a daily tit-for-tat basis. Some of the participants would have none of it, however, and wanted to lash out against Obama for almost everything. One even accused him of declaring racism was over, and that he was the key enabler of Black oppression.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
I couldn't let that stand, and fired back that she needed to read Obama's Philadelphia speech, and that Obama, his family and his base were under racist fire from the far right, and part of our task was to defend him and expose them on those matters, even as we opposed him on the wars. Several members of the Revolutionary Communist Party went ballistic over that, and the battle was on. I think Flanders and I, together with the chair, did a fairly good job. But the polemics served as a microcosm for an overall division at the forum, which I'd make an educated guess as divided with one-third being critical supporters of Obama, one third see him as the main enemy, and the rest in between somewhere, still making up their minds.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
After all that excitement, my next pick was a little more subdued. Titled 'The Challenge of Rightwing Populism in Northern Core Capitalist Countries,' it was presented by two academics from York University in Canada. One was German, Ingar Solty; the other Canadian, Sam Putjina. Solty gave an overview of the various 'National Front' parties in the European countries, while Putjina unfolded a sociological study tracking the rise of rightwing populism with the decline of trade union membership. He made a pretty good case, but the dozen or so people in the room saw the matter as more complex, a had an interesting discussion, pulling in matters of identity and religion.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
My panel picks had all served as preparation for the big evening session. 'The Obama Campaign and Presidency: Lessons for the Left' was the theme, and it featured Stanley Aronowitz, CUNY; Frances Fox Piven, CUNY; Barbara Epstein, UC Santa Cruz; and Gihan Perera, Right to the City Alliance; with Bill Fletcher as moderator.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Fletcher ran the panel in an interesting way. Rather than have them each deliver a speech, he decide to 'interview' them, as if it were a news show. They were to answer, and also comment on each other's answers. He started by asking them if they though there was 'a movement' around the Obama election, or whether it was just a slightly more jazzed-up mass campaign. All four of the academics hedged their bets on that one, and gave convoluted answers. (My opinion was that there was definitely a mass movement, several in fact, and some of the movement is still around). The community organizer, Perera, said he didn't know how they were using terms, but he called it 'an electoral riot,' meaning a mass insurgency from below.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
This set some of the dynamic-the academics making points rather removed from grassroots struggles, even when lucid, as was Frances Scott Piven. Then Perera, as counterpoint, making substantive comments anchored in mass struggle. At one point, Fletcher asked whether they had voted or worked for Obama. All had done so, with the exception of Aronowitz.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Once questions and comments were opened to the floor, things got a little livelier. The RCP, clearly noticeable in their uniformed red-on-black T-Shirts, launched the calls for 'revolution,' pretty much denouncing the panel and challenged Fletcher to a debate to boot. He firmly said 'No,' and kept charge of the session. At one point, after some outbursts, he announced that the hallway was available to anyone who wanted to debate the RCP, but this discussion would continue.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Pro-Obama and anti-Obama is something of an oversimplification. Those opposed to Obama mainly stressed issues, and saw Afghanistan and foreign policy as decisive, together with the fact that he was for capitalism, and working with former neoliberals to rescue Wall Street. Anything positive in Obama's efforts was just blowing smoke.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Those who had voted for Obama mainly stressed organizing opportunities, new allies at the base, and the opening of political space for more protracted efforts. They supported Obama's measures that were right, and opposed those that weren't. In that sense, the debate was never really engaged. People talked past each other.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
One feature of the Left Forum is the ''after parties.' There were several; I was invited to one held by the Socialist Party, and another at the Brecht Forum. It had been a long day, so I settled for a late dinner with the organizers of the 'Politics of Hype' panel at a nearby bar.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Sunday is usually a light, wrap up day at weekend conferences. I was surprised the next morning to see the place packed once again.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
To start the morning off, I picked 'In Praise of Socialist Planning' to attend. It featured a good friend, David Schweickart, author of 'After Capitalism' and a leading theorist of Marxism and worker-controlled market socialism. The other speakers were Bertell Ollman, an expert on Marxism from New York University and a decidedly anti-market socialist, and Raymond Lotta, from the RCP and self-described as a Maoist political economist. The session was chaired by Anwar Shaikh from the New School.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Schweickart led off with a condensed outline of his theories, and how they related to both classical Marxism and today's conditions. He favored planning, but not of the old anti-market, centralized Five-Year-Plan type. He was for macro planning where markets failed, but favored moving the decisions downward. He mainly argued for public control of social investment funds, and deploying these locally as a form of democratic planning. Ollman was a little more abstract, describing the creative potential unleashed by revolution. Interestingly, he conceded Schweickart was right about Marx and the market, and that classes and the market would be around for a post-revolutionary period. He simply asserted that this would only last about two years! Ray Lotta basically asserted the primacy of revolutionary politics at every step of the way, and declared there was no need for 'technical economic blueprints.' In that sense, everything was a plan determined by the constant mobilization of the masses, who consciousness could trump economic backwardness-a classic 'voluntarist' deviation from Marxism, and one Mao was prone to at various times as well.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
I moved on to another smaller session, about a dozen people, where the topic was 'The Green New Deal.' It had an interesting lineup: Victor Wallis from the theoretical journal, Socialism and Democracy; Mario Candeais, from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation; and Freider Otto Wolf, from the Free University in Berlin, and one of the original German Greens. Wallis gave a succinct explanation of the old FDR New Deal, and described the character so far of the current one. It was positive, but whether it, or anything, would resolve the crisis was still open. I was a bit taken aback by Candeais. He attacked the Green New Deal because it included more 'infinite economic growth,' which he saw as civilization-destroying. Wolf answered him, supporting the Green New Deal as a 'Red-Green Project,' one that worked best with transitional demands of structural reform take could open a path to socialism.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Needless to say, I became an immediate fan of Wolf, but decided to cross swords with Candeais on his opposition to 'infinite growth.' I argued we needed infinite growth, especially in high design technologies and the growth of knowledge, and that these were critical to both a green and socialist future. In this way, economies could grow in sustainable ways, however large they became. He simply wouldn't accept my framework, and clung to a vision of growth as accumulating garbage heaps. We had to agree to disagree.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The last panel was one where I was the chair, 'Solidarity Economy: Building Alternatives for People and Planet.' Our panelists were Pasqualino Columbaro of the Global Economic Alternatives Network, Maliha Safri of the Center for Popular Economics, and Peter Ranis, Political Science, CUNY. We had the final 3-5pm slot Sunday afternoon, and I didn't expect much. I was surprised when about 30 people showed up, so I quickly passed the sheet and got everyone's emails, a critical task for organizers these days.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The purpose of our panel was to introduce activists to the concept of a solidarity economy, which is still relatively new in the U.S. Columbaro described many of the principles, and the various organizations, together with a good description of the Emilia-Romano region of Italy, where hundred of thousands of workers are involved in thousands of interconnected cooperative enterprises. Safri gave an overview of the US Solidarity Economy Network, and the achievements of some of the groups in it, ranging from food coops and credit unions, to worker coops and public schools like the Austin Polytechnical Academy in Chicago, focused on high tech manufacturing with a worker-ownership component to the school's outlook. Ranis stressed the importance of connections with trade unions, and getting them to partner in joint collaboratives, and put the capital in union pension funds and banks to good use.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Most of the discussion here was more in the form of questions than debate, with the participants wanting to learn more. I pointed out that the solidarity economy was value-centered, but than so were all schools of political economy-Marxism's core value was the emancipation of the working class, the economics taught in school had private accumulation of wealth as the core value, while the green economy was focused on sustainability and harmony with the environment. In the solidarity economy, obviously, the values of solidarity and mutual aid are at the center.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Since I had an eight-hour drive back to Western PA, I had to leave and miss the final plenary. Too bad for me, since I was told later that one of the speakers had quoted from a paper of mine negatively, where I made the point that if we were going to move forward as a more dynamic and broader left, within a wider progressive majority, we had to make a decisive break with a semi-anarchist and ultraleft mindset. I would have loved to debate the point since, from just my experience at the Left Forum, I though my case was fairly evident, to those who cared to think it over in some detail. A clear majority of groups calling themselves socialist and communist in our country, not even mentioning the anarchists, had solidly opposed Obama and his movement every step of the way, and as far as I could see, it hadn't helped them one bit. Those who had engaged that movement in a positive way, however, were making some solid advances. Maybe next year, we can revisit the topic, hopefully with a little more clarity and, also hopefully, from positions in the class, anti-imperialist and democratic struggles that are a little further down the pike.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
--Carl Davidson is webmaster for 'Progressives for Obama' and SolidarityEconomy.net, a national committee member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, and a coordinating committee member of the US Solidarity Economy Network. Together with Jerry Harris, he is author of 'Cyber-Radicalism: A New Left for a Global Age, available at http://stores.lulu.com/changemaker If you like this article, go to 'Keep On Keepin' On at http://carldavidson.blogspot.com and make use of the PayPal button. Email him at carld717@gmail.com.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
 

&lt;/p&gt;</description>
			<pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2009 01:40:00 +0000</pubDate>
			
			
			<guid>http://politicalaffairs.net/left-turning-points-exploring-new-ideas-seeking-common-ground/</guid>
		</item>
		
		<item>
			<title>You and What Movement? A Response to Naomi Klein</title>
			<link>http://politicalaffairs.net/you-and-what-movement-a-response-to-naomi-klein/</link>
			<description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;p class='ezhtml'&gt;&lt;font size=1&gt;4-27-09, 9:23 am&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;Original source:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href='http://www.narconews.com/Issue57/article3498.html' title='Narco News Bulletin' targert='_blank'&gt;Narco News Bulletin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Naomi Klein is suffering, along with some other sectors of the academic North American left, an existential crisis.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
In a recent column she published in The Nation and in The Huffington Post, she complained about “the awkward in-between space in which many US progressive movements find themselves” now that Barack Obama is president of the United States.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Revealing a bizarre contempt and college-educated condescension toward a vast multi-racial swathe of progressive supporters and sympathizers of Obama and his movement, Klein seeks to explain us away as dupes. We (I use the first person plural proudly and without hesitation) are, according to Klein, part of a “superfan culture,” that, she says, believes we can “save the world if we all just hope really hard,” and that suffers from the following psychological ailments: “Hopeover… hoper coaster… hope fiend… hopebreak… and hopelash.”&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Her theory, that progressive Obama supporters are now inflicted by buyer’s remorse, flies contrary to all objective measurement. The pollster.com aggregate of all recent public opinion surveys finds that 61.8 percent of Americans view Obama (less than 100 days into his presidency) favorably, compared to 32.9 percent that view him unfavorably. As Gallup notes, President Obama’s first-quarter average favorability of 63 percent exceeds that of the first three months of his eight immediate predecessors: Presidents Bush II, Clinton, Bush 1, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon or Johnson.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Ah, but Klein is talking about “progressives,” so let’s take a look at the hard data that is available. Separate out the crosstabs, and those numbers are even sky higher among progressive demographic groups. Among Democrats, according to an early April Pew survey, 88 percent view the young president favorably, so it’s not really clear who Klein is talking about, imagining or inventing out of thin air when she devotes an entire column to claim a non-existent demographic trend.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Among African Americans (without which there can be no successful “progressive movement” in the United States), a towering 94 percent approve of how the president is doing his job, according to the Quinnipiac survey. Among Hispanic Americans (just as important to any progressive future in the US), 73 percent feel the same way. Among Americans that earn less than $50,000 a year (the working class and the poor), a solid 60 percent approve. The question must be asked: What “movement” does Klein thus imagine? An exclusively white and college educated one? I fear that the truth may not be far from it if she is so quick to insult and dismiss such a large bloc of people who skew non-white, poor and working class.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
There is currently no quicker way for white progressives to further divide themselves from African American, Hispanic American, working class and poor Americans – all sectors without which serious and successful progressive movements in the US would be impossible – than to invent derogatory psychobabble terms for us because we do not share Klein’s tendencies to feel somehow demoralized by the country’s first African American head of state, and demonstrably its most progressive since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
That such complaint comes after less than 100 days, when the President has just eased the Cuba embargo that was foolishly embraced by Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, is nothing less than pathetic. In the same week, Obama made the classified torture memos public (and as any working journalist or investigator knows, every department of his administration now responds quickly – usually overnight – to our Freedom of Information Act requests for information; a sea change from all previous administrations). The passage of Obama’s economic Stimulus bill marked the single largest expenditure ever on jobs and social programs like unemployment insurance, Medicaid and public education in the history of any country. He has already made the orderly withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq official policy with a timeline that has most of it done before the 2010 midterm elections. And in three short months, Obama has restored the principle of progressive taxation to the United States.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Yesterday, at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad [Ed. – this article first appeared on April 18th], the US president extended a long overdue hand of friendship to his Venezuelan counterpart, a democratically elected leader that suffered an attempted military coup d’etat that was cheered, if not planned, by Washington. The President, in short time, has already defused an entire string of similar policy time bombs left by previous administrations (Republican and Democratic alike). Will there be more tensions between Chávez and the US? Very likely the answer is yes, but the gravity and context of them has shifted positively. This hemisphere is already a safer place for dissident journalists, community organizers, governments of the left and other grassroots change agents. That, alone, makes it more possible for us to organize and make bigger and better changes – of the kind for which we do not need any government’s permission – in the days and years ahead.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
I quite agree with Klein’s belief that “demanding” is better than “hoping” when it comes to changing public policy. But where I get off her bus is upon her inference that we who are supportive of – and more happy than not about – Obama’s presidency somehow believe differently. Her claim only demonstrates her gross ignorance toward the important sector of the left (including parts of the Obama movement) that are community organizers. “Demanding” is necessary but without “organizing” to back it up it is merely an act of intellectual masturbation. It accomplishes nothing. It never has won a single battle. And that’s why, until 2008, the US left in particular – so busy demanding without doing the hard work of organizing – went through at least three “lost decades.”&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The problem with too much of the “activist left” in North America is that so many of its adherents don’t really want to do the hard work of community organizing. I wonder: when was the last time that Klein went door-to-door, or staffed a phone bank, or otherwise reached out directly to real people demographically different from her? Any journalist or writer that hasn’t, at minimum, accompanied organizers doing that real work of change should shut the fuck up when it comes to opining about “the people.” They don’t have a clue as to who “the people” are. Activism that doesn’t involve one or more of those tasks does not rise to the level or effectiveness of organizing. And those that don’t do it really have no idea where the public is at: the masses (or “the multitude” in current jargon) are imaginary cartoon characters to these people. Their view of us is as elitist as it is condescending.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
They can complain about, for example, US policy toward Israel and Palestine, seemingly oblivious to how US public opinion on the matter keeps those very bad policies in place. If they got off their duffs and knocked on doors to ask real people about it, they’d get a lesson in civics, and perhaps learn better ways to move public opinion in a better direction. They can bemoan the “bailouts” (essentially government loans to financial services industries) ignorant of the fact that when big corporations fall they land hardest on the workers and the poor, as would a 1929-level crash of the kind that nearly occurred last October. They can demand “nationalization” of the banks, without offering any detail as to what that would look like. I live in Mexico where the 1982 bank nationalization proved disastrous for the country’s workers, and helped destroy its middle class. The devil is always in the details.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
I am not a member of the Democratic Party, and I did not vote for twelve years prior to 2008 until Obama’s candidacy gave me a reason to do so. While the academic North American left went jet-hopping from summit protest to social forum across the globe, I went to Latin America, lived, worked and reported alongside the authentic social movements that many of them came to visit for a weekend or maybe a month. I’m more comfortable with an anarcho-syndicalist view of the kind of society that I daily work toward than I am with electoral politics. Socialist, although it’s a moniker that seems a bit statist and conservative for me, is still a term that I’m more comfortable with than “Democrat.” And yet every day I see the President moving the United States closer to my own version of utopia, after a lifetime of watching each of his predecessors pull it farther away. More importantly, for me, as a journalist and an organizer, the Obama presidency has created much more space for people like us to get out there and do this hard work without the repression and marginalization that we have struggled under for decades.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Here’s what the academic left – hopping mad, frustrated and now, like Klein, lashing out at those of us in the working left – doesn’t get: It was Obama – not Klein’s post-Seattle ’99 milieu of “anti-globalization activists” – who opened the doors of the American left for the first time since the Civil Rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s to the building of an authentically multi-racial movement. It was Obama – not Klein and her colleagues – that got working class whites struggling alongside working class blacks and Hispanics in the United States, and who turned a new generation onto the art of community organizing that the activist left had abandoned.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
When colleagues like Klein so summarily insult Obama supporters and sympathizers, they are driving yet another stake between their white college-educated ghetto and the 94 percent of African-Americans, and the 73 percent of Hispanic Americans, and the 60 percent of the entire American working class, that is pleased, as I am, that this unique historic figure is, for the next four years at least, the President of the United States.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
I’m reminded of the scene from the Martin Scorcese motion picture, The Aviator, in which Kathryn Hepburn (Cate Blanchette) brings Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) home to meet her family. “We’re socialists,” the mother tells Hughes. And then, when she thinks Hughes is speaking ill of President Franklin Roosevelt, she nearly runs him out of the house. FDR, like Obama, wasn’t a socialist (and unlike Obama, he was born into privilege). But a great many socialists, communists and even anarchists of the era understood that their work was made so much more possible by his presidency. And that cultivated an intense synergy, not to mention a renaissance of labor and community organizing during that epoch. In retrospect, that synergy between the working left and the FDR presidency brought with it many of the 20th century’s most progressive advances.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The same is happening now – although Klein and others haven’t done the investigative or organizing spadework to recognize it – and that (even without the many progressive policies enacted by the Obama administration already, and those important ones like immigration reform yet to come) makes me an unabashed, eyes wide open, Obama sympathizer, guilt-free, without any of the feelings of remorse Klein seeks to assign to me and millions like me. That enthusiasm hasn’t turned us into blind followers: these pages are already filled with hard-hitting critiques when the Obama administration has been wrong; on Plan Mexico, on the drug war, and other deadly serious matters. And yet even on those fronts, our ability to push back and serve as a check and a break on the extremities of those bad policies vastly outweighs what we were able to do for many previous decades.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
But I’m not going to sit back silently while some white progressives – dripping with the nastiest forms of envy because, truth be told, the Obama movement succeeded at resurrecting community organizing and multi-racial struggle whereas their tired tactics and strategies had failed again and again to do so – try to claim to me or anyone else that they’re the ones doing the demanding while we’re somehow sitting back and thinking we can “save the world if we just hope really hard.”&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Memo to Ms. Klein: Go back to the only school that ever got the left – in which I take no back seat to you in either mileage or scar tissue – anywhere: that of community organizing. We’re doing it. You’re not. And when you go to give your next speech at some university or activist hall, look around at the white, privileged faces that occupy more than half those seats. Study how many of them choose to self-marginalize from workers or racial minorities with their freak-show narcissistic – and yet humorless! – antics. You know what I’m talkin’ about. And you probably wince regularly as they ask you to sign your book for them.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Ask yourself, “are these the so-called masses that are going to make a progressive movement succeed?” You know damn well, in your heart, that they’re not. They do buy hardcover books though, a lot more than the workers and the poor ever will. With all due respect I must ask: Have you become an intellectual prisoner of what you think it takes to pander to your own college-educated consumers?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
No thank you, Ms. Klein: When it comes to the United States, I’ll take my chances with the multi-racial community organizers of the Obama movement, and the tens of thousands of young organizers they’ve inspired and trained, at least until the non-electoral North American left gets its shit together, which, after reading a column like yours, seems still a long and far away struggle.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
 
&lt;/p&gt;</description>
			<pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2009 01:35:00 +0000</pubDate>
			
			
			<guid>http://politicalaffairs.net/you-and-what-movement-a-response-to-naomi-klein/</guid>
		</item>
		
		<item>
			<title>Cuba Announces Preventive Measures against Swine Flu</title>
			<link>http://politicalaffairs.net/cuba-announces-preventive-measures-against-swine-flu/</link>
			<description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;p class='ezhtml'&gt;&lt;font size=1&gt;4-27-09, 9:09 am&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
HAVANA, Cuba, April 27 (acn) Cuba´s Health Ministry issued a press release on Monday announcing a package of preventive measures following the presence of the Influenza A virus subtype H1N1 in Mexico and in other countries.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The information says that the Cuban Public Health Ministry has been following reports by international health organizations and by authorities in Mexico and the United States about humans affected in those countries with the new Swine Influenza A virus, H1N1.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The virus has infected 20 people in the United States and over 1, 000 in several Mexican states, where 80 diseased persons have already died. Canada and some European countries have already reported the first cases of the virus in their territories, explains the release.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Cuba´s Health Ministry, the Civil Defense, the Veterinary Institute and other entities in the country have been working, over the past few years, in a program to prevent an epidemic stemming from the bird flue and in that direction those entities have applied some measures in the fields of diagnosis, risk reduction and in the capabilities to face such an epidemic in all the Cuban national territory.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
In the case of the current virus, which is transmitted from person to person and with many possibilities to spread around the world, Cuba is adopting a package of necessary measures in all air and maritime terminals, with a strong limitation on flights from and to Mexico,  plus local preparedness to take further necessary steps. Also included is the updating of all surveillance capabilities of clinical and epidemiological kind as well as those related to the assistance given to  the population by the National Health Care System. All actions scheduled to be taken in different circumstances linked to the evolution of the current situation have been considered by the Health Ministry in coordination with the National Civil Defense and other entities, explains the press release.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The Cuban Health Ministry also asks the population to intensify all personal and collective hygienic measures and timely medical assistance when necessary.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The Cuban Public Health Ministry and its entities count on all necessary material and human resources throughout the country, organized in an attention system that is accessible to all the Cuban population, the press release concluded.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
From the Cuban News Agency&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
 
&lt;/p&gt;</description>
			<pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2009 01:21:00 +0000</pubDate>
			
			
			<guid>http://politicalaffairs.net/cuba-announces-preventive-measures-against-swine-flu/</guid>
		</item>
		
		<item>
			<title>Atlantans Return from Three Year Global Peace Walk</title>
			<link>http://politicalaffairs.net/atlantans-return-from-three-year-global-peace-walk/</link>
			<description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;p class='ezhtml'&gt;&lt;font size=1&gt;4-26-09, 11:46 am&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;Original source:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href='http://www.atlantaprogressivenews.com' title='The Atlanta Progressive News' targert='_blank'&gt;The Atlanta Progressive News&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
(APN) ATLANTA -- Atlantan, Audri Scott Williams, had a vision in April 2005. She and the Spirit of Truth Foundation wanted to spread the message of global peace. Armed with the vision and word of mouth, six people agreed to sell their worldly assets and start out on a march across six continents doing public service work. The march took three and a half years, and covered 17 countries and six continents.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
What began at the King Center in Atlanta on October 21, 2005, ended on the anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King in April 2009.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'What happened was when I had the dream, every place that we were to go came forward in the dream as well as the timeline. That made it really easy because I didn't have to think about what we were doing. In terms of visas and stuff, because we didn't have the money to do everything up front, most things happened right in the moment as it was time to move from one place to another,' Williams told Atlanta Progressive News.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'We all had passports and we did our visa just as we got into one country we would start working on the next country,' Williams said.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The peace walkers visited cities in the United States, as well as Mexico, Canada, Fiji, New Zealand, India, Egypt, Greece, Holland, Morocco, the Caribbean, Peru, Pakistan, Guatemala, Austalia, Spain, and Turkey.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The group put their money together to start the march, including retirement saving and pensions. As they walked they were able to get contributions and often what was needed would appear, Williams said.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'I received this email... if you come to Australia if there is anything I can do let me know... we were two hours away from her with no place to stay that night... with that relationship we met the aboriginal communities.'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
They would do community service wherever they went. 'It was very much in our nature to always be mindful of being in service of a team as well as the community,' Williams said. They helped Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans. They worked at food banks, ranches, and spoke at churches, schools, and other community organizations.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The march included Williams's own mother 79 year-old Natalie, in a wheel chair. Of the original six walkers, one had to leave because of family issues; a young woman and her four year old joined the group for a year and a half in the Netherlands; and they were joined by an Australian woman in the final march from New York back down to Atlanta.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Much of their work was in keeping themselves centered believing peace begins within. First while advocating no religion there was a belief that the walkers had to be connected to something greater than themselves. They considered this 'the energy that helped us to move forward,' Williams said. They emphasized what they called detraumatization, being supportive of one another and able to communicate.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'We take everyone in the moment where we are and allow like a relief valve... without any expectation and identifying what is most pressing to them and to help them find a space of comfort even in the midst of the chaos,' Williams said. The group held circles once a day to discuss all issues large and small.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'We could confront anything when we were centered,' Williams said.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'Humor was very important in our group circle; every morning we laughed a lot... We also used it just to keep the energy at a certain level. Whenever we would get too heavy with things we would say, 'OK stop and drop. Get out of your head, get in your heart.' We had these little trigger sayings that we would use with each other.'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The members of the group were asked to spend at least 20 minutes not just walking through, but becoming conscious of nature and things around them.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
In the worldwide communities the group found they could only help by meeting people where they were at and understanding their boundaries and those of the community. 'Really getting to know... what works and what doesn't work. At the same time we have to know what is the time to shift those boundaries,' Williams said.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'When we got [to the Hawaiian tent city] we realized here was a community stressed to the hilt trying to provide services... these were families living in tents... we ended up... creating this venue where we would just sit and meet with the administrators and service providers and hear their stories... in Hawaii it was just listening, and we listened and we listened. That in itself created a bridge,' Williams said.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The Trail of Dreams World Peace Walk was created to focus attention on peace and global transformation as the group moved around the planet. The group wanted to meet people and establish relationships. 'We were not trying to be political or social; we were not trying to be anything other than moving people to people heart to heart. In order to get to that level to attract human relationships we had to find that within ourselves,' Williams sai&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
--Alice Gordon is a Staff Writer for The Atlanta Progressive News and is reachable at alice@atlantaprogressivenews.com.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
 
&lt;/p&gt;</description>
			<pubDate>Mon, 27 Apr 2009 03:59:00 +0000</pubDate>
			
			
			<guid>http://politicalaffairs.net/atlantans-return-from-three-year-global-peace-walk/</guid>
		</item>
		
		<item>
			<title>Why Do So Many SOA Grads Become Death Squad Killers?</title>
			<link>http://politicalaffairs.net/why-do-so-many-soa-grads-become-death-squad-killers/</link>
			<description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;p class='ezhtml'&gt;&lt;font size=1&gt;4-26-09, 11:40 am&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
If the Pentagon’s instructors didn't teach assassination at the School of the Americas (SOA) in Fort Benning, Ga., is it just coincidental that so many of its star pupils graduate to become mass murderers?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Take the strange case of Francisco del Cid Diaz, an SOA-educated second lieutenant in the El Salvadoran army who ordered his unit to drag 16 people out of the Los Hojas cooperative of the Associacion Nacional de Indigenas, beat them, shoot them, and dump their bodies into the Cuyuapa River.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Not content with his SOA undergraduate studies, Diaz re-enrolled after the massacre and was accepted again in 2003. By then the Pentagon had renamed SOA The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, (WHINSEC) as Latins joked SOA stood for “School of Assassins.”&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Perhaps the most infamous Salvadoran SOA grad was Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, who ordered the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and who operated a death squad that used blowtorches on his victims. D’Aubuisson might not have learned to use this device at SOA, of course, as he also attended the CIA-run International Police Academy in Washington, one of the classier D.C. 'finishing' schools. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
It might just be that some weird metaphysical force beyond human understanding has been attracting thousands of criminally insane military officers like Diaz from all over Latin America to Ft. Benning – and that they were psychiatric basket cases before they flocked there. That’s unlikely, of course, as a WHINSEC official claims “only personnel of unquestionable character” are admitted to study.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Yet, it’s odd that case after case – hundreds of them, really – keep popping up in which perfectly mentally competent SOA/WHINSEC alumni after leaving Georgia have gone stark raving berserk once they got home, overthrowing governments and filling elected officials full of bullet holes. Didn’t Georgia’s “old sweet song” mellow them even a teensy-weensy bit?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Two of SOA’s more notorious alumni, Generals Roberto Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri, both of whom trained at SOA in 1981, went on to become dictators during the “Dirty War”, in which 30,000 Argentines were put to death. The generals were assisted by five other SOA grads and when civilian rule was restored Viola was sentenced to 17 years for his crimes.  Who’s to say, though, that he learned his grisly trade from the Pentagon?  He could have gotten his ideas just as well from studying Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” right?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Then there’s Bolivia. In 1980, SOA alumni General Garcia Meza Tejada assaulted the National Palace and forced the president to resign. His top aide, Luis Arce Gomez was also an SOA alum as were seven other coup criminals. In Brazil, the human rights group Torture Never Again linked 20 SOA graduates and two SOA instructors to crimes including false imprisonment, and torture methods such as electric shock, suffocation and other methods too nauseating to iterate.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
In Colombia, half of some 250 officers cited for human rights violations in 1993 took advanced education at SOA. After his involvement in the 1988 Uraba massacre of 20 banana workers, the massacre of 19 business executives, and the assassination of a city mayor, General Faouk Yanine Diaz was a guest speaker at SOA in 1990, apparently so good he was brought back for an encore next year.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Another SOA grad, General Jorge Plazas Acevedo, was tried for the 1998 kidnapping and murder of Jewish business leader Benjamin Khoudari, and Col. Jesus Maria Clavijo, another SOA grad, stands accused of 160 murders during 1995-98. Yet another SOA grad, General Montoya Uribe, ran a “scorched earth” campaign in Putumayo.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
It is well known that after the CIA overthrow in 1954 of Guatamala’s president Jacobo Arbenz, more than 200,000 civilians were killed. Not as well known is that SOA graduates there created vigilante squads responsible for starring roles in the slaughter. One SOA grad, General Efrain Rios Montt, who seized power in a coup, wiped out more than 400 Mayan villages, killing thousands and forcing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. Involved also were SOA grads General Angel Rodriguez, defense minister, and Colonel German Barahoma, National Police director.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
In Peru, six officers educated at SOA were among those that burst into the men’s dorm at La Cantuta and dragged off six students and a professor that were “disappeared.” One of the SOA goons, Vladimiro Torres, went on to run the notorious “Colina” death squad and became head of the National Intelligence Service (SIN). His boss, Alberto Fujimori, of course, has just been convicted of humanitarian rights abuses, including massacre.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The above treatise is a short list of the achievements of SOA/WHINSEC which, for my nickel, President Obama could shut down tomorrow on suspicion that it has been teaching militarists how to turn their homelands into living hells. Of course, maybe the new forward-looking president might consider reviewing the alleged crimes of the SOA grads repetitious and boring.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
It does seem ironic, though,  that the U.S. military, which preaches bravery, should be instructing officers in how to assassinate unarmed archbishops and priests whose principal “crime” has been advocating for Latin America’s poor – the banana pickers, copper miners, and tillers of the soil, etc.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Information for this article was taken from legal documents submitted to a Federal judge by Louis Wolf, a resident of Washington, D.C., currently under six months’ house arrest for his disrespectful, non-violent trespass at Ft. Benning, Ga., last November. Sentenced to prison at the same time by Federal Judge G. Mallon Faircloth of the U.S. District Court of Columbus, Ga., were Father Luis Barrios, of N. Bergen, N.J., an Associate Priest at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Manhattan; Theresa Cusimano, J.D.; seminary student Kristin Holm, of the Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago; Sister Diane Therese Pinchot of the Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland; and Viet Nam war veteran Al Simmons, a retired pre-school teacher of Richmond, Va.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
It’s a curious society that imprisons pacifists for trespass on military property where murder and torture allegedly are being taught to thousands of future Latin killers while a past president apparently guilty of a million murders walks free. Of course, the Pentagon may not be teaching  anything criminal at Ft. Benning: the outcomes could all be one big coincidence, no es verdad?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
--Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based public relations consultant who formerly worked for the Chicago  Daily News  and wire services. To support the work of  his  Anti-War News Service, reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
 
&lt;/p&gt;</description>
			<pubDate>Mon, 27 Apr 2009 03:52:00 +0000</pubDate>
			
			
			<guid>http://politicalaffairs.net/why-do-so-many-soa-grads-become-death-squad-killers/</guid>
		</item>
		
		<item>
			<title>Obama's Education Reform Immune to GOP Filibuster</title>
			<link>http://politicalaffairs.net/obama-s-education-reform-immune-to-gop-filibuster/</link>
			<description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;p class='ezhtml'&gt;&lt;font size=1&gt;4-25-09, 11:11 am&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
President Obama's education reform proposals received a huge boost Friday, April 24th, when Democratic lawmakers announced they would include them along with health care reform in the appropriations process under rules that would prevent a Senate Republican filibuster. Instead of requiring 60 votes for passage in the Senate, the reform packages could be passed by a simple majority.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters on Friday, April 24th, that the decision to include the education reform package in the reconciliation process is an important victory. 'It's a good sign that we're moving in the right direction,' he said.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Promoting his education reform package this past week, President Obama met with working families struggling to pay college expenses for their children. During that meeting at the White House Friday, April 24th, the president announced a number of measures his administration has already taken and will propose this year to make college more affordable and to save taxpayer dollars in the process.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
First, the president's economic recovery act provided a new $2,500 tax credit for families with children in college and set aside $17 billion to boost the number and size of Pell Grants awarded to college students in 2009 and 2010.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
These new Pell Grant funds are set to expire in 2011 along with the economic recovery act, however. To make the new program permanent, the president has proposed 'to make Pell an entitlement,' according to a White House press statement. The administration wants to tie the Pell Grant to the rate of inflation and to invest up to $116 billion in the program over the next 10 years to ensure its financial strength.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The president's package will also help pay for the new Pell Grant system. The administration plans to expand the Department of Education's Direct Loan program. This move is expected to eliminate the current dominant system of paying taxpayer dollars to subsidize banks who make student loans. The White House estimated this move alone could save taxpayers almost $100 billion over the next decade.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
On this piece of the reform package, Education Secretary Duncan told reporters, 'There's some controversy on what business we should be in. I fundamentally think we should not be in the business of propping up banks.'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'I'd much rather be investing in our country's young people,' Duncan said.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The current subsidy program pays banks and other lenders a guaranteed rate of return and reimburses them for defaults, giving them large profits set by the political process rather than won in a competitive marketplace, the White House press statement said.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The president's proposal earned swift opposition from major banks who have profited enormously from the subsidy program, especially Sallie Mae.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
President Obama offered a sharp response. “The banks and lenders who have reaped a windfall from these subsidies have mobilized an army of lobbyists to try and keep things the way they are,' he pointed out.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'They are gearing up for a battle. And so am I,' the president told the families he met with. 'They will fight for their special interests. I will fight for America’s students and their families.”&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
As part of its PR campaign to counter the Obama administration's momentum on the issue, Sallie Mae claimed that the measure would cost thousands of jobs. Ironically, this claim comes after several years of Sallie Mae outsourcing thousands of jobs overseas.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Secretary Duncan countered on the jobs issue by noting that expanding the Direct Loan program would likely offset any job losses that might occur as a result of the shrinking subsidized loan market dominated by Sallie Mae.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The Direct Loan program has a much lower rate of default and expense than the subsidized loan market. And interest earned on the loans would be returned to taxpayers not to boosting the profit margins of banks like Sallie Mae.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Another piece of the president's reform package included a $2.5 billion investment in programs to help students stay in and finish college. 'Obviously getting students into college in the front door is very important,' Duncan stated, 'but when they're not coming out the back end with their diploma, we're not changing the prospects for their future that much.'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Duncan also stated that the Education Department plans this year to revise the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), the application students use to get Pell Grants, student loans and other forms of college payment assistance. The complexity and length of the form discourages many students from applying for assistance and even keeps some people from applying to college at all. In addition, the administration will review ways to alter rules that require children of undocumented immigrants to pay the same tuition rates as foreign-born students, which are often much higher and sometimes exclusionary.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
 
&lt;/p&gt;</description>
			<pubDate>Sun, 26 Apr 2009 03:25:00 +0000</pubDate>
			
			
			<guid>http://politicalaffairs.net/obama-s-education-reform-immune-to-gop-filibuster/</guid>
		</item>
		
		<item>
			<title>Vietnam: Fighting to Grow</title>
			<link>http://politicalaffairs.net/vietnam-fighting-to-grow/</link>
			<description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;p class='ezhtml'&gt;&lt;font size=1&gt;4-25-09, 10:46 am&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;Original source:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href='http://politicalaffairs.net/www.irinnews.org' title='IRIN News' targert='_blank'&gt;IRIN News&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
HANOI, 24 April 2009 (IRIN) – When it comes to reducing poverty and eradicating hunger, few other countries have made the kind of dramatic gains that Vietnam has. Not only have income levels doubled every few years since 1990, but Vietnam is now a major food exporter. So in a country that is rapidly rising out of poverty why are one third of Vietnamese children malnourished?&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
In some areas, particularly in the mountainous regions where large numbers of ethnic minorities live, poverty is still to blame. But government health officials say that even in wealthier urban areas, poor eating habits, ignorance and a failure to cook nutritious food are the main culprits.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
“Now parents are richer, but it doesn’t mean they know how to feed their children in the right way,” said Truong Hong Son, secretary of the National Program on Malnutrition.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Parents have good intentions but the typical Vietnamese diet is heavy in rice, which does not provide the vitamins and protein that children need. “Traditional meals in Vietnam only meet 60 percent of nutrition demands of school-age children,” said Le Nguyen Bao Khanh, who heads the School and Work Department at the National Institute of Nutrition (NIN).&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;Stunting&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Government studies indicate that 32.6 percent of Vietnamese children under five – about 4.6 million of them – are so malnourished that their growth is stunted.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Poor nutrition is the reason why Vietnamese youth are much shorter than their peers in the region, said Duong Nghiep Chi, a senior adviser to the Vietnam Sport Science Institute, the government agency tasked with raising heights.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Following the end of the US-Vietnam war, when food was more available, there was a national growth spurt. But Chi said, despite this past 10 years of rising incomes, children did not grow as tall as health experts predicted.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
'The height of the Vietnamese people has improved, but too slowly,' said Chi. He argues it is not simply an aesthetic issue. Taller and stronger people are healthier and more productive. The Vietnamese are “now shorter than other people in the world, and even in Asia,” according to Chi. “Low height and poor health affect the quality of our labour force and the advancement of our people.'&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
According to NIN in Hanoi, the average Vietnamese man is 163cm tall and the average woman 152cm. A Japanese man, by comparison, is 171cm tall, and a Japanese woman 158cm.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
Achieving those heights will not be easy. With help from UNICEF and the Asian Development Bank, the government already funds nutrition programs that provide pregnant women and infants with vitamins and food supplements. Son, of the National Program on Malnutrition, says unfortunately government programs only reach 40 percent of those who need help.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
But money is not the only issue, Pamela Wright, country representative of the Medical Committee Netherlands Vietnam (MCNV), told IRIN. Tackling malnutrition is not like eradicating polio or other public health problems, she said, where a national military-style campaign, which Vietnam excels in, works well.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;“Tailor-made approach”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
“The problem with nutrition is that it requires a tailor-made approach in each area according to the issues there,” said Wright. Some districts remain very poor and there is simply not enough food. In others, food is not distributed evenly. Then there is not using the food that is available, she said.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
MCNV staff say there is no “magic bullet” when it comes to tackling malnutrition. For severe cases, they have come up with a soy bean-based nutritional powder which can be added to food – one that the Vietnamese like. But they are also experimenting with programs that teach women to cook more nutritious meals with the food that they already have. MCNV also promotes more home gardening and raising of pond fish.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
The government plans to launch a new offensive to address the problem. Concerned about people’s short stature, a new five-year program to spur growth rates is slated to start this year. The $33 million campaign will educate parents about the importance of nutritious meals, introduce fitness classes in school and provide nutritional supplements where necessary. The long-term target is to add four centimeters to the average Vietnamese citizen by the year 2020.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
 
&lt;/p&gt;</description>
			<pubDate>Sun, 26 Apr 2009 02:58:00 +0000</pubDate>
			
			
			<guid>http://politicalaffairs.net/vietnam-fighting-to-grow/</guid>
		</item>
		

	</channel>
</rss>