The following is a trailer for a soon-to-be-released 28-minute video called A Darker Shade of Green: REDD Alert and the Future of Forests which looks at the potential impact of the Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation on indigenous communities and forests. From the producers:
"As policies and programs to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and
Degradation (REDD) and to enhance forest carbon stocks (REDD+) are
promoted around the world by global and national elites, Indigenous
Peoples and other forest-dependent communities are raising the alarm that
these programs will have serious negative impacts and will not reduce
the cascading threats of the climate crisis. This 28-minute documentary
introduces the many concerns about REDD from the perspective of the people
who are most impacted, featuring interviews and testimonies from Mexico,
Brazil, Panama, Philippines, Indonesia, Nepal, Uganda, India, and
California."
Want to spread the word? Here are some steps you can take:
Email your members and followers with links to the Youtube posting of the video when they launch it next week;
Post the trailer and the video on your Facebook page, Twitter feed, blog, etc.;
Plan a screening or house party with the video -- contact the folks at globaljusticeecology.org and they'll get you a copy of the DVD and promo materials, if you're interested.
In a six-month period, there were two alleged suicides of young US-born Chinese men serving in the US military occupation of Afghanistan.
Marine Lance Corporal Harry Lew died in Helmand province. Army Private Danny Chen died in Kandahar province. The first was from California. The second was born and raised in New York City’s Chinatown, the son of a cook and a garment worker.
Before they died, each of them was subjected to physical abuse and brutal humiliation, not from the people of Afghanistan who they were sent to fight and subjugate by the US ruling class, but from their fellow troops in the US occupying forces. In Danny Chen’s case, it has also come to light that he was the victim of racist and anti-Chinese harassment by his army superiors, one of them with a record as an attempted rapist.
Who Is the Real Enemy?
Who is the real enemy? Danny Chen signed up to fight for his country (he thought) against enemies in Afghanistan (he thought) and ended up dead by the actions of racist US troops. It wasn’t Afghans who dragged Danny from his bed across a floor. It wasn’t Afghans who made Danny crawl on the ground while pelting him with rocks. It wasn’t Afghans who tortured Danny, forcing him to hold water in his mouth while hanging upside down.
Danny Chen met the real enemy in Kandahar. He discovered that this enemy isn’t from Kandahar and isn’t Afghan. This enemy isn’t Iraqi or Palestinian. Danny learned that the real enemy is born from the same country where he was born, speaks the same language he spoke, wears the same uniform he wore, and salutes the same red-white-and-blue American flag he saluted.
Our comrades on the Ecology Work Team have sent us this excellent piece on permaculture at the Occupy Wall Street protests. While Zuccotti Park may not be occupied at the moment, there are nonetheless many lessons here.
Confrontation of the criminal class responsible for the corporate coup
of the US, is vital and long overdue. But there is also a need to take
responsibility and design intelligent, local strategies, to prevent the
same problems of scale from repeating themselves. The notion of self
sufficiency is key. We can only properly protest something, when we have
reduced our dependancy on it. Permaculture offers a vast resource of
practical solutions for sustainable, self sufficient living. Permies
were sure not to miss the exciting opportunity to share their knowledge
with those who can use it most.
This is the first in a series of poems we will be publishing by the author over the coming months.
written at the coal face of US Steel’s Morton Mine
There is more to the battle to stop Mountaintop Removal than stopping environmental destruction. The fight is also against destruction of people and community.
IN THE PIT
A tightening of senses
The descent begins
Slowly
The mountain's weight becomes real A crouching beast of prey
One false step
Flesh
Becomes one with The mountain's Stone Heart
If the Occupation movement is about uniting the overwhelming majority of oppressed people against the minority of exploiters, then it’s no wonder that it has taken root and flourished in the city of Oakland. A working-class city built by Asian and Black labor, Oakland has seen median wages fall by $2000 since the recession began; about 40% of the population lives in economic hardship. Meanwhile the city has continued closing schools, shutting down libraries and cutting services, with no end in sight.
So it’s no surprise that hundreds of people came down to take part in the first gathering of Occupy Oakland on October 10. They came with stories of lost jobs, foreclosures and unbearable debt. They came to talk about political corruption, corporate domination, and the ruthless behavior of the Oakland Police Department -- a group whose brutality costs the city almost $6 million/year in legal settlement costs.
In the hundred and fifty year history of workers in the San Francisco Bay Area, the watershed event was one that happened 70 years ago – the San Francisco general strike. That year sailors, longshoremen and other maritime workers shut down all the ports on the west coast, trying to form a union and end favoritism, low wages, and grueling 10- and 12-hour days. Shipowners deployed tanks and guns on the waterfront, and tried to break the strike.
At the peak of this bitter labor war, police fired into crowds of strikers, killing two union activists. Then workers shut down the entire city in a general strike, and for four days nothing moved in San Francisco. The strike gave workers a sense of power described in a verse in the union song Solidarity Forever: “Without our brain and muscle, not a single wheel can turn.”
The strike marked the end of a period in which, for seventy years, the efforts of workers to form unions were met with violence and firings. By the end of the 1930s, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union was one of the strongest in the nation, workers had a hiring hall instead of a humiliating shapeup in which they had to beg for jobs, and workers on both sides of the bay were busy building other unions, as well as political organizations that eventually elected mayors and sent pro-worker candidates to Congress. The strike marked the beginning of our modern labor movement.
One product of the rising power of unions was the development of the workers compensation system to ensure that injured and sick workers would receive enough compensation from employers to survive.
This article was written by Moonanum James and Mahtowin Munro and published at People of Color Organize.
By Moonanum James and Mahtowin Munro. Mahtowin Munro (Lakota) and Moonanum James (Wampanoag) are co-leaders of United American Indians of New England.
Every year since 1970, United American Indians of New England have organized the National Day of Mourning observance in Plymouth at noon on Thanksgiving Day. Every year, hundreds of Native people and our supporters from all four directions join us. Every year, including this year, Native people from throughout the Americas will speak the truth about our history and about current issues and struggles we are involved in.
Why do hundreds of people stand out in the cold rather than sit home eating turkey and watching football? Do we have something against a harvest festival?
Of course not. But Thanksgiving in this country — and in particular in Plymouth –is much more than a harvest home festival. It is a celebration of the pilgrim mythology.
According to this mythology, the pilgrims arrived, the Native people fed them and welcomed them, the Indians promptly faded into the background, and everyone lived happily ever after.
A most hilarious and stinging articulation of the white chauvinism of Thanksgiving and ideas about American Indians, from the Addams Family II (it includes a surprise and off-script monologue from Wednesday Addams, forced to play Pocahontas, which begins: "Wait. We cannot break bread with you. You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now, my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations; your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs...");
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Our Texas comrades recommended this article from the Left Labor Reporter as an update on the Occupy movement in Austin. Have local updates? Send 'em our way! Reprinted with the author's permission.
Five hundred union members marched through downtown Austin Sunday chanting, “What do we want? Union jobs” and “They got bailed out, we got sold out” during the Occupy Austin Labor Solidarity March. Ironworkers, sheet metal workers, electricians, telecom workers, and transit workers marched alongside teachers, state and local government workers, and EMS technicians.
Postal workers carried signs reading, “Save Our Postal Service, Save Saturday Deliveries” in reference to the United States Postal Service’s proposal to cut mail delivery services and lay off thousands of postal workers. Teamsters carried signs reading “Stop the War on Workers.”
Phil Bunker, vice-president of Teamsters Local 657 explained to me how the war on workers is affecting local Teamsters who work for Yellow Freight, a regional trucking company. Recently, the company threatened to file bankruptcy unless the union agreed to re-open and re-negotiate the contract. When the union reluctantly agreed, the company reduced wages by 15 percent, stopped making contributions to the workers’ pension fund, and reduced their health care benefit. “The members are very demoralized now,” Bunker said.
Written by the National Executive Committee of FRSO/OSCL
Sunday, 30 October 2011 17:09
It may be a bit of a cliché, but it bears saying: a single spark has in fact lit a prairie fire. An enormous one.
The last year has witnessed what appears to be the beginning of a new historical period. From the ferment in the Arab world; to the upsurge in Wisconsin; to the outpourings in Greece, Chile, Spain and other countries; and now to the Occupy movement that has spread across the US and beyond, we have clearly left the period that started with the fall of the Soviet Bloc. The last twenty-plus years was characterized by the supposed triumph of capitalism and the crisis of socialism, what the Right called “the end of history”. We have now entered a new worldwide era of popular upsurge. One of the indicators of how pregnant the moment is with possibility is the fact that the Occupy movement spread across the country even while it was still quite modestly sized for a New York City protest. It was only after it started to become a nationwide movement that we started to see many thousands of people hitting the streets of NYC.
This new period was actually in development a decade ago with the brief rise of the global justice movement. However, the 9/11 attacks short-circuited that motion and threw the world into war and repression for ten long years. One result of this decade-long sidetrack is that the contradictions developing within capitalism that the global justice movement sprang up to combat, grew even deeper and more profound, culminating in the current grave economic crisis. This is why the worldwide motion we’ve seen over the last year has been so sudden and broad.
In retrospect, it’s not surprising that it took three years from the beginning of the current crisis for large-scale protest to kick off. The Great Depression began with the stock market crash of 1929, but it wasn’t until 1932 that massive political struggle began to flare up. When a crisis begins, people’s first response is in fact to lower their expectations in the face of the new conditions. It takes time for the new situation to be absorbed as the new normality and for the contradiction between reality and people’s expectations to open wide. We have now reached that point.
Here are some great suggestions for ways to directly engage with your local Occupy movement from a comrade who has been participating with Occupy Las Vegas, which is currently a permitted encampment protest with about 20 tents and 40-100 participants at any given time. He's
been a part of the group, participating in general assembly meetings and
sleeping in a tent, but still going to work during the day.
Here are his ideas for socialist participation:
Make LEFT signs: We used dumpstered cardboard and cheap paint to
make about 50 signs for the last march with slogans like "class war/
end capitalism before it ends las vegas", "Occupy Wall St not Palestine",
"We can't afford billionaires", "They took our houses, let's take their
power", etc. Our signs were the only ones that were explicitly
anti-capitalist and they were well received. Many people took them
and used them in the march. This is a quick and easy way to shift
messaging to the left.
Stock the people's libraries: A common feature of the camps are
library booths or tents. We printed off some classics — The Communist
Manifesto, The Mass Strike by Rosa Luxemberg, etc.; some resources on
anti-oppression strategies, some random radical stuff like the
Zapatista declarations and Left Turn articles. The local news
reported on the alarming presence of the Communist Manifesto at the
camp!
As the world careens towards an uncertain future, this much is certain: if a genuine revolutionary alternative to capitalism is not realized, we may witness the emergence and dominance of a global regime of horrendous barbarism, the end-of-days festival heralding the death of Mother Earth.
We are already witness to portents of the ecological barbarism which an unrestrained capitalism inevitably produces: in unprecedented series of droughts, floods, wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes -- all the inevitable result of an atmosphere choking on a geometrically-increasing carbon burden, of a systemic pollution and toxicification of lakes, rivers, aquifers, waterways, and oceans destroying both the food and water supply necessary for the sustenance of all life, the erosion and pestilential chemical destruction of arable lands, or their conversion (a la China) into gated and militarized playgrounds for a hedonistic bourgeoisie; the apocalyptic species loss, greater than anything witnesses by our Earth Mother in 65 million years (most of the planet’s fisheries have been depleted by over-fishing or destroyed by pollution), the polar icecaps and other massive frozen water supplies are melting at a rate even the most highly-advanced computer systems have failed to predict.
This unprecedented and interconnected series of environmental events constitute what is referred to as the global ecological crisis, or what we might call the death throes of Mother Earth. The ecological crisis is itself intertwined with the global economic crisis, whose Marxist terms “stagnation due to the declining rate of profit” fails completely to capture the horror of a system that causes 24,000 children to die each day due to hunger or completely avoidable illness.
The following is an excerpt from an article on Ask a Socialist
I made a living working for non-profits for nearly 20 years doing community organizing and blah blah blah, so you could well accuse me of biting the hand that has fed me. But you could also say the same of a union member exposing the damages done by their company.
In this case, it’s a whole sector that needs examination, especially by those who choose to work in it. “Non-profits.” Makes it sound like, hooray, they are outside of the capitalist system doing good for the little people. So we progressives and radicals, particularly those of us who are not from the working class, flock to jobs that purport to do God’s work or Marx’s work or Alinsky’s work or whomever – at least it’s not Mammon’s work. (And while organizing jobs may not make you rich, they pay better than working at a nursing home or McDonald’s, jobs working class people are more likely to be stuck with.) Other countries don’t call it the non-profit sector, they call it the non-governmental sector, which may be more clear: this sector is not some third way, outside of the capitalist system.
There have always been “voluntary” organizations, groups of people banding together for common projects. Like providing services. Like political change. Like revolution. Organizations that didn’t need anyone’s permission for anything. Non-profits are a form of voluntary organization, but they are defined by their federal tax status, exempt since their work does not financially benefit private individuals. To get the exemption, the tax code also puts in place numerous rules that an organization must follow, including allowing government scrutiny. “While the idea of exempting charitable organizations from paying taxes is old, it was in 1954, the year of the McCarthy hearings which aimed to root out and destroy communist sympathizers and progressives through defamation and scare tactics (after successful anti-capitalist organizing by the above throughout the 30s and 40’s) that the tax code was revised to say that no political activities (except an “insubstantial amount” of non-partisan education on issues) were allowed by organizations seeking tax exemption. The main upshot over time has been the growth of social service not social change organizations. There’s a political history, as with all laws, in 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Code.”
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. As a communist who has been working as a domestic violence hotline counselor for two years, I believe it is incredibly challenging but also imperative that we bring domestic violence into the public sphere. We need to do this to create communities in which we all have power over our own lives and feel safe and supported in our homes.
During the process of training to be a hotline counselor, I learned the importance of active listening and creative thinking. I believe, in accordance with my politics, that my purpose as a counselor is to push for the self-determination of the caller. In my role within the non-governmental organization (NGO) I work with, I am there to listen and encourage the person experiencing violence to think through her1 solutions. My instinct may be to tell her to leave the relationship, but her experiences may tell her something else. Her kids, her finances, or her own emotional vulnerability may depend on the relationship surviving. It is not my life and not up to me to judge.
As an active listener, I sharpened the skill of choosing words and phrases carefully. Women tend to be better at that because they are often trained, through oppression and socialized gender roles, to be tactful and perceptive of social cues. Men have a harder time being considerate of others' feelings because they are socialized to speak their mind, and society tends to encourage that behavior. But I believe that everyone, comrade or counselor, should be careful with their words. Words can damage and abuse, or words can affirm and liberate.
If you haven't been living under a rock for the past month you've probably heard about the wave of protests across the United States set off by Occupy Wall Street on September 17. By now you've probably seen them in your own city: Occupy Together lists events in more than one thousand cities in North America and elsewhere around the world. Some have spoken of a new movement like the anti-apartheid and anti-globalization movements of the '80s and '90s; others look back to 1968 or beyond for comparisons.
For socialists and leftists of all stripes these "occupations" have been both exciting and challenging, raising new questions every day. Can this movement grow and sustain itself until it can challenge the political status quo in the US? What are the politics of the occupations and their likely political trajectory? As socialists, as members and leaders in mass organizations, as community members and victims and resisters of the Wall Street parasites and their system -- how do we take part in the movement and in this rare historical moment?
Here are a few things that we've been reading to help sharpen our thinking around some of these questions.
Occupy/unoccupy: Many people have written about the contradictions of a movement calling for "occupations" on land which was stolen from its inhabitants -- and is still being occupied by the descendants and beneficiaries of that theft. Michelle Merrill writes about it in Occupied Lands, and "Tequila Sovereign" writes more about the history of Manhattan and the Lenape who were its original inhabitants in her post Manna-hatta. Another challenge to the perceived whiteness of Occupy Wall Street comes from Occupy The Hood, as Julianne Escobedo Shepherd reports at AlterNet.
International solidarity: As Occupy Wall Street was inspired by the wave of revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa and movements against austerity in Europe, so in turn it has inspired solidarity actions across the globe. The Maoist website Utopia reports on a gathering in Zhengzhou, China, where protestors called for "Determined Support for the American People's Great 'Wall Street Revolution!'" (Summary in English here, original full report in Chinese here.) Participants in the movement of the indignados in Spain have linked their struggle to that in the US and called for a global day of action on October 15.
Politics and prospects: Many arguments about this movement center on the "demandlessness" of the occupiers. Should they have a list of specific demands? What should they be? This leads to even bigger questions: where is the movement going? What should it strive for and what can it achieve? Vijay Prashad offers some analysis of the movement and its place in the politics and society of the US in Zombie Capitalism and the Post-Obama Left. Matt Sledge writes about occupiers resisting co-optation in a piece for the Huffington Post. At Fire on the Mountain, Jimmy Higgins admits he was wrong about Occupy Wall Street and looks to the bigger picture.
We want to hear your thoughts too. Send us an email at
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-- or better yet, find us in the streets.
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Confrontation of the criminal class responsible for the corporate coup
of the US, is vital and long overdue. But there is also a need to take
responsibility and design intelligent, local strategies, to prevent the
same problems of scale from repeating themselves. The notion of self
sufficiency is key. We can only properly protest something, when we have
reduced our dependancy on it. Permaculture offers a vast resource of
practical solutions for sustainable, self sufficient living. Permies
were sure not to miss the exciting opportunity to share their knowledge
with those who can use it most.
If the Occupation movement is about uniting the overwhelming majority of oppressed people against the minority of exploiters, then it’s no wonder that it has taken root and flourished in the city of Oakland. A working-class city built by Asian and Black labor, Oakland has seen median wages fall by $2000 since the recession began; 
In the hundred and fifty year history of workers in the San Francisco Bay Area, the watershed event was one that happened 70 years ago – the San Francisco general strike. That year sailors, longshoremen and other maritime workers shut down all the ports on the west coast, trying to form a union and end favoritism, low wages, and grueling 10- and 12-hour days. Shipowners deployed tanks and guns on the waterfront, and tried to break the strike.
I made a living working for non-profits for nearly 20 years doing community organizing and blah blah blah, so you could well accuse me of biting the hand that has fed me. But you could also say the same of a union member exposing the damages done by their company.
OWS in 
