Colombia : Rebels Accused in High Profile Political Assassination

Posted on December 24, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Above, Governor Luis Francisco Cuellar of Caquetá state in Colombia, who was kidnapped Monday and killed by alleged rebels. Below, relatives and friends carry coffin containing his body as people wave white flags during his funeral service in Florencia, southwestern Colombia, Wednesday. Photo by William Fernando Martinez / AP.

Assassination of Governor Cuellar Carvajal
Believed to be work of Colombian rebels

By Marion Delgado / The Rag Blog / December 24,2009

CARTAGENA DE INDIES, Colombia — Armed men kidnapped and killed the governor of the south Colombian Departamento (state) of Caquetá on Monday evening. Authorities think the rebel group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC; Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) is behind the most high-profile political assassination in many years.

According to local media reports, a group of 10 heavily armed men attacked Governor Luis Francisco Cuellar Carvajal’s home in the center of Florencia, the capital of Caquetá. Cuellar was taken out of his home and pushed into a car.

Late Tuesday, the getaway vehicle was found in an isolated area a few miles from Florencia. It had been driven off the road and burned. In a nearby field the body of the Governor was found, his throat cut. There was some delay in recovering the body as the field had been mined with explosive devices.

One policeman, part of the governor’s security detail, was also killed, in the initial attack at Cuellar’s home, authorities say.

The state’s Secretary of Government, Edilberto Ramon Endo, told reporters that the governor had felt threatened by the FARC, and had requested increased government protection against possible attempts to kidnap or kill him. Although no group has yet to take responsibility for the attack, Endo was quick to blame the FARC. “There is no other group active here but the FARC, it is highly likely it was they who kidnapped him,” he told newspaper El Tiempo.

According to television station Caracol, President Alvaro Uribe has sent National Police director Oscar Naranjo to Caquetá to coordinate the kidnapping investigation. The national government had offered a reward of $500,000 (U.S. dollars) for information leading to his safe return before the grim discovery on Tuesday.

According to Defense Minister Gabriel Silva, the army sent 300 troops to look for the kidnapped governor. Silva also told the press on Tuesday that the kidnapping seems to be the work of the FARC, specifically the mobile Teofilio Forero column. “This illustrates how narco-terrorists are looking to show their strength and how they want to disturb democracy, but the state is ready to confront them,” Silva said. There were unconfirmed reports that “heavy fighting” had broken out between state troops and guerrillas in Caquetá.

Assassinations are commonplace in Colombia. Just this year 25 union leaders have been killed, as have human rights activists and indigenous leaders, and there have even been wholesale massacres of suspected FARC sympathizer. However, this is the highest profile murder in recent history. The assassinations and massacres are carried out by all sides, paracos, police, Colombian Army (COLAR), FARC, M-19 and others.

The FARC had not kidnapped any high-profile politicians since 2002, when they were able to kidnap presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, former Defense minister Gilberto Echeverri, and twelve deputies from the state of Valle del Cauca. The rebels had released the last politician in their captivity, Sigifredo Lopez, exactly one year ago.

Caquetá is in the Amazonas region of Colombia. The capital, Florencia, is in the north, bordering on the state of Huila. It lies on the steppes of the Cordillera Oriental mountain range, part of the Andean chain. To the south of the city lie the Amazon jungle and the departmentos of Putumayo and Amazonas.

The FARC’s Southern bloc operates about 16 fronts along the borders with Ecuador and Peru it. It covers the Colombian departments of Caquetá, Huila, Putumayo, and parts of Cauca.

Up to 90 specialized Southern bloc militants form the Teofilio Forero Mobile Column, operating mostly in Huila and Caquetá, with a lot of urban activity. In the FARC organization, a column consists of two or more companies, commanded by a Captain, in this case by “El Paisa” (the raisin), whose real name is Oscar Montero. A front is two or more columns and is commanded by a Lt. Colonel.

Oddly, the Teofilio Forero Mobile Column had been reported as dismantled by the previous Minister of Defense, Juan Santos, in 2005, as a result of Plan Patriota.

At the same time the 3rd and 14th Fronts were also reported as dismantled.

It has been believed that the remnants of the Column were later melded into the 3rd and 14th Fronts to become the Yesid Ortiz Mobile Column. The 14th Front was a command Front, and included the Southern Bloc commander, a Brigadier General. Why the Teofilio Forero Mobile Column has been named as the perpetrator of Monday’s assassination is unclear at this time.

Uribe vows state troops will continue to fight the FARC and find those who are responsible for the kidnapping and death of Cuellar.

The governor’s son, Luis Fernando Cuellar, told Caracol Radio he also believes the FARC is guilty of his father’s assassination, criticizing the government for failing to protect him, despite his already having been kidnapped four times since 1987. He was held for 2-7 months on each of those occasions and released when a ransom was paid. Cuellar’s wife, Himelda Galindo, claimed she couldn’t remember the amount of the ransoms paid. According to the governor’s son, the victim was protected by only three policemen when he was kidnapped.

  • For previous reports from Colombia by Marion Delgado, go here.

.The Rag Blog

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FILM / Cheap Thrills? ‘Avatar’ Kicks Butt

Posted on December 24, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer


Avatar is shallow, predictable
And totally awesome!

By Pollyanna O’Possum / The Rag Blog / December 24, 2009

Avatar, the new, multi-million dollar James Cameron’s 3-D sci-fi flick, opened to mixed reviews on Dec. 18, with some criticizing the film’s length (2 hours and 45 minutes with pre-show trailer at the Bob Bullock Museum of Texas IMAX Theater in Austin) and its shallow, predictable plot, while allowing that the special effects are pretty awesome.

Well, reviewers get paid to find fault, don’t they? Pretty decent??? This is the most fun movie in decades, see it, and by all means see it in 3-D!

The plot is shallow and predictable; guess what, the good guys win; sorry if I ruined the suspense! What the reviewers aren’t saying, largely, and what Cameron, director of Titanic, Alien, and other mega-hits, is apparently denying, is that the plot is based pretty firmly on a 1957 Poul Anderson short story, “Call Me Joe.”

Patterson has been quoted as saying that his movie is based on “every science fiction story I ever read as a child”; well, Polly bets a cracker “Call Me Joe” was one of ’em! (To be fair, my viewing companion said Avatar also has the same plot as the Western classic A Man Called Horse; there are similarities, but Pollyanna is unconvinced. Still, if you’re a fan of Star Wars‘ adorable little Ewoks and their forest world of Endora, you’ll feel right at home at Hometree!)

In Anderson’s tale, a paraplegic future space Marine is offered the chance to “drive” a genetically linked “avatar” on a distant planet being mined to benefit Earth’s still-rapacious industry. Avatars are artificially grown beings, physically the same as the planet’s indigenous “humanoids,” intended to survive in an environment inhospitable to earthlings, and to gain the confidence of (and “study”) the natives.

While the operator is at work, his “real” body is in a kind of suspended animation; when the “real” Marine is awake — he must record his experiences for the expedition’s egghead scientists and confer with its military leader, played to gung-ho perfection in Cameron’s film by Stephen Lang — his avatar is unconscious on the planet, Pandora. Inhabiting his avatar, 10 feet tall and perfectly physically developed, is the big attraction for the sidelined Marine, an action-type guy.

Anderson’s story and Cameron’s movie diverge there, with the film offering, for example, a plummy role for Alien star Sigourney Weaver, now a still-stunning 60-something who looks good with and without her avatar suit. But you can probably figure it out anyway, from the ubiquitous trailers being shown on the tube; again, the movie really isn’t rocket science.

Trust me: it’s going to win a lot of prizes and be seen on television for decades to come.

Why see it in the theater, then?

Cheap thrills, first and foremost: for flying through mist and floating rocks on the back of a prehistoric raptor that might also be a butterfly. Until you have a 30 foot high screen and home 3-D? Oh, baby!

For a phosphorescent forest, Chihuly-like ferns, and seed pods like aerial jellyfish that float before your eyes, just out of reach.

For a gigantic, inhabited, multi-trunked tree, the World Trade Center of trees.

For butt-kicking action involving a variety of fast, fanged, furry, finned, flying, and/or fortified creatures. Many things about the Marines remain the same in this Future as in our day: Boo-rah!!

This is, in fact, a Future that seems as hauntingly near as the floating embers you’ll want to brush away, to snuff — there’s reference to a “past war” in Venezuela, and its “mean bush” — and of a valuable mineral, “unobtanium,” whose presence drives the destruction of paradise and its “terrorist” inhabitants. (Read Marion Delgado’s article on coltan in the Rag Blog, about a similar Present Day “terror”!)

See Avatar, too, for the fierce jungle creatures and the almost Disney-esque web of life linking them with Pandora’s people, trees, and ancestral wisdom. Listen to hero Jake Sully’s description of his home planet, where the people killed the earth, their Mother, and nothing green remains. Have we, today, any ancestral wisdom left in us? Listen to the sighs of the people sitting with you in the theater; there’s not one of them who doesn’t recognize that this is a Future near enough, indeed, to feel, as thoroughly as Jake feels his avatar’s powerful legs, and his toes digging into Pandora’s earth. We are the web of life here.

For the film, Cameron had an actual language, Nav’it, developed, as was the case years ago with Star Trek‘s Klingon. Nav’it’s use in Avatar is limited, and subtitles but sparingly required. As Jake learns the ways of Pandora’s people, he finds that there is really only one important thing to say: “I see you.“

Added extra attraction: Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter.

An added attraction to this screening of Avatar was the trailer for the upcoming Tim Burton 3-D version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, with Johnny Depp as the marvelous Mad Hatter. My companion pointed out that with both of these films, we have entered our own Wonderland: the technology now exists to bring the most imaginative author’s vision directly to the screen, no adaptation or compromise necessary. When Alice falls down that rabbit hole, honey, you will grab your seat!

BTW, if you, like Pollyanna, were disappointed in the recent AMC miniseries re-make of Patrick McGoohan’s classic 70s British television series The Prisoner, do check out Sy Fy Channel’s Alice! I had never before realized how similar these stories are, and Sy Fy’s Alice is much more faithful to the original Prisoner‘s ongoing ambiguities than the stiffly conclusive mini-series. (Well, “They” do say there are only a few actual plots; everything else is in the variations!) Even without 3-D, Alice‘s effects are pretty awesome.

For photos and trailers from Avatar, go here.

The Rag Blog

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Some ‘Renaissance’ : Big Win for ‘No Nukes’

Posted on December 24, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Nine Mile Point nuclear facilities in Oswago, New York, near the shore of Lake Ontario, at sunset . A new facility, to be built by UniStar, has been delayed. Photo by Mike Greenlar / The Post-Standard.

Success for grassroots movement:
Nuclear power biz suffers another big blow

Throughout the U.S., while the corporate media hypes a ‘renaissance’ of new nukes, facts on the ground say the opposite is happening.

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / December 24, 2009

In the wake of Copenhagen, an unheralded but hard-fought “No Nukes” victory has moved us closer to a green-powered Earth.

It has happened in upstate New York, where the UniStar Nuclear Energy front group asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to delay its application to build a reactor at Oswego, near Syracuse.

Meanwhile, in Texas, the San Antonio city council’s deliberations over building two new reactors have disintegrated into recriminations, resignations, and firings over a multi-billion-dollar price jump in projected cost estimates, a furor that could doom reactor construction there as well. And in Vermont, Entergy has threatened to shut its Yankee reactor if the legislature does not approve a complex maneuver that would allow its owners to escape certain financial liabilities.

Throughout the U.S., while the corporate media hypes a “renaissance” of new nukes, facts on the ground say the opposite is happening. The longer that trend continues, the more likely we are to win a world powered by the Solartopian technologies that really work, including wind, solar, geothermal, sustainable bio-fuels, increased efficiency/conservation, and more.

The Oswego postponement stems from the successful national grassroots campaign sparked by NukeFree.org and others dating to late 2007. When the Bush Administration asked for $50 billion in loan guarantees to build new reactors, a well coordinated campaign rose up, complete with a music video from Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, K’eb Mo and Ben Harper.

With help from key Congressional Democrats, a wide range of organizations and individuals rallied to get the $50 billion package out of proposed energy legislation. Grassroots opposition has since beaten the proposed guarantees two more times.

It is as yet unclear what new reactor funding will come from Washington in the near future. There is still an $18.5 billion loan guarantee fund left over from the Bush era. But the Department of Energy has run into serious political and procedural problems in administering the money. It may soon announce one or more new reactor projects designated to get the money, possibly including one in Georgia, where ratepayers have been put on the line to underwrite construction even if the plant never opens.

Republican proposals for virtually unlimited future loan guarantees are now being targeted for a Climate Bill and other legislation that may or may not make it through Congress in the coming months. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and other industry supporters are pushing hard for major federal financing. The Obama Administration has made some pro-nuclear rumblings, but remains elusive in terms of firm commitments.

Because the reactor industry cannot get private financing for new reactors, all the pro-nuke rhetoric in the world will mean nothing without federal subsidies. After 50 years, the industry doesn’t have Wall Street’s backing. Nor can it get private liability insurance in case of a major disaster. And it still lacks a solution for its radioactive waste problem.

Most critically of all, the longer new construction is delayed the less competitive the industry becomes. Cost estimates are literally all over the map, with $7-9 billion for a 1000 megawatt reactor being current used as a benchmark. But even that is not expected to last.

The Oswego project involves a design financed by the French government. This latest setback indicates even they may not be as bullish on reactors as the hype would indicate. As Michael Mariotte of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service puts it, “Unistar’s postponement is just another indicator that new reactors will not be built unless American taxpayers are forced to take the financial risk.”

Thus as the dust settles from the failures in Copenhagen, the U.S. might look to the conference’s host country. In the 1970s a powerful Green movement stopped the Danes from going nuclear. Instead, as even the New York Times’s pro-nuclear Thomas Friedman has recently acknowledged, Denmark successfully focused on wind power. Today the wind industry is one of Denmark’s top employers, and is a major source of both clean green energy and significant financial profit.

Throughout the world, the cost of renewables is plummeting while reactor prices soar. So if America’s thus-far successful grassroots campaign against massive federal loan guarantees and other nuclear bailouts can continue, we just might find ourselves on a parallel path to a green-powered Earth.

[Harvey Wasserman’s Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.harveywasserman.com , as is Harvey Wasserman’s History of the United States. Wasserman is senior advisor to Greenpeace U.S., and senior editor of www.freepress.org]

The Rag Blog

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2010 : A New Year and New Hope for Social Change

Posted on December 23, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

“Solidarity.” Pastel by genevievemc / photobucket

After 2009’s dashed hopes:
A progressive movement in motion

By Jack A. Smith / The Rag Blog / December 23, 2009

With a new year around the corner, let’s look at the year now ending, and then the year ahead.

The year 2009 began with great hopes by many Americans with liberal, progressive or left views. Republican George W. Bush and his neoconservative clique were finally gone after eight dreadful years of right wing governance at home and rampant imperialism abroad.

Many people with hopes for substantial change thought that despite the recession important political and social progress would accompany the new Democratic administration led by President Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress with large majorities in the House and Senate.

Many hoped for an end to the unjust wars, militarism and ever increasing war budgets; the replacement of economic teams that favored the wealthy, the banks and Wall Street; a reversal of the growing gap between rich and poor and the disproportionate economic inequality experienced by African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans; implementation of adequate measures to mitigate foreclosures and create jobs for the swelling ranks of the unemployed; a halt to erosions of civil liberties; no more cover-ups of the Bush Administration’s war crimes; and serious advances on climate change.

Now, as we are about to enter 2010, many of the high hopes entertained last January have been dashed. President Obama, with his political caution and penchant for compromising with the right wing, hasn’t lived up to his advance billing. The Democratic Congress has terribly few accomplishments to its credit because of the large number of Blue Dogs and other conservatives in its own ranks, determined to undermine progressive legislation.

We understood from the beginning that the optimistic talk about the new administration governing from the center/center-left or even from dead center was political daydreaming. Much of what is emanating today from the White House and Congress isn’t even from the center but the center-right. This was not the change many people believed in and voted for.

So what about 2010? There will be more of the same unless the liberals, the progressives and the left — and there are many millions of us in America — begin to make a lot of noise. We need democracy in action to bring about social change — and that comes first from the people, not the politicians.

Nothing beats mass movements in motion for pushing political parameters toward the left, after decades of having them moved toward the right. There are scores of people’s movements, independent of the ruling parties, that need more people behind them in order to make an impact on the political system.

We think every liberal, progressive and leftist who is disappointed with the way things are going should join up with one or another of the mass movements and left organizations in 2010 and push for real change — for peace, or climate change, or single-payer/public option, or protection of civil liberties, or economic justice, or a score or so of additional categories where the power of the people can make a real difference.

That’s our wish for the new year — a wish for many more people and movements in motion for progressive social change. Happy new year, friends.

Iraq veteran Ryan Endicott protests against the escalation of the War in Afghanistan in Los Angeles December 2, 2009. Photo by Jim Ruyman / UPI.

New movements for social change

The widening war, economic recession, and serious policy disappointments from the White House and Congress are negative developments, but this situation also creates opportunities for the growth of progressive oppositional movements.

True, the political life of the country remains enveloped in a choking fog of conservatism emanating from the right-to-center “consensus” of the two ruling parties. The positive aspect of this situation is that social movements are growing in America, and are demanding fairly substantive change — not the vague “change” articulated by centrist politicians during last year’s elections.

We speak largely of the new citizen’s movement for single-payer/public option healthcare reform, and the regenerated people’s environmental movement demanding significant progress in countering climate change, though each has a way to go organizationally, politically and in demonstrating they have staying power.

These movements are specifically challenging the inadequate, half-way measures emanating from the White House and Congress in response to the demand for severe reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and for building a healthcare system that finally puts people before profits. Working in concert with existing health-related and environmental movements, these newer forces have the potential to transform into energetic mass movements.

Photo by Casey Bisson / All American Patriots.

Obviously, given the Obama Administration’s continuation of America’s aggressive military posture, its glorification of the military, and an international perspective based upon extending Washington’s hegemony wherever possible, the antiwar movement is of exceptional importance.

All three of these large movements are articulating demands that go beyond what the present powers in Washington will accept, much less the neoconservative yahoos of the previous administration. And they are joined by other grassroots organizations growing around such pressing needs as jobs and foreclosures, financial regulation and progressive immigration reform, to name a few.

These movements will be strengthened by the gradual shedding of political illusions by millions of progressives and liberals who assumed the Obama Administration would pursue a center-left reformist agenda. A process of political awakening is gradually taking place.

We think the progressive healthcare and climate change movements have the potential for real growth because their goals — public healthcare for all, and the survival of our planet — are irrefutably essential for the well being of society. As it becomes evident that Washington disdains their demands, participants will learn valuable lessons that advance their political consciousness — namely, that insurance companies rule the healthcare debate, big business controls the climate change agenda, and many American politicians are in liege to corporate and financial interests.

The antiwar movement has experienced hard times in the last couple of years, largely because the movement’s main constituency by far — Democratic voters — began drifting away when their party gained Congress in the 2006 elections. This process accelerated when Obama was elected last year. A majority of Democrats told opinion polls they opposed the Afghan adventure, but now that it’s Obama’s war a great many have not yet returned to the peace movement.

But this is changing, not least because of Obama’s decision to significantly escalate the Afghan war.

We think the antiwar movement is going to bounce back, especially as the Obama Administration increases the violence and the financial costs in Afghanistan while expanding the war into Pakistan. The protests set for the seventh anniversary of the Iraq war on March 20 in Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and other cities will help determine the movement’s future.

A stronger antiwar movement, combined with growing movements for healthcare, climate change and, hopefully a movement dedicated to the welfare of the working people of our country, can become an important factor in American politics. The combination of several movements in action for different progressive objectives is quite powerful. We had that during the 1960s and early 1970s, and it produced many important reforms — so many, in fact, that a conservative backlash against them still reverberates today.

Photo from Cinie’s World.

This struggle between right and left views has been brewing for a long time, but it is growing more intense now that the Republicans are out of power and increasingly tilting to the far right. Who’s going to prevail? Will it be the right/far right, with its reactionary anti-government populism, religious-right social/cultural views and neoconservative imperialism? The nation got a taste of some of this during the summer at the town hall confrontations. Will it be the vacillating center now in power, the first instinct of which is to compromise with the right? Or the center-left and left with their people-first policies and far more rational international views?

Influencing this outcome are the very progressives and liberals who played an important role in electing Obama because they thought he’d govern from the center-left. Many now are distressed because their candidate is actually doing so from the center-right — a major political difference. What will they do now?

At the same time the needs of the majority of American people have been coldly ignored by both ruling parties for 40 years, and this majority is today experiencing the most extreme ravages of the current recession. These people are situated in the working class, the lower to mid-sector of the middle class, the poverty caste, and the African American, Latino and Native American minorities who suffer cruelly disproportionate hardships.

The political duopoly has done nothing of significance to improve the lot of the masses of people in the years before and during the Great Recession, and it will do nothing when the economic crisis is declared over in a year or two. Both left and right are contending to provide leadership for this marginalized majority of the American people. So what is to be done?

We need big social, political and economic reforms in America that will attend to the needs of working families. We certainly need solid healthcare and climate change policies. And we need to end these endless wars — almost seven years in Iraq and over eight years in Afghanistan. And much more.

This can only happen if the center-left and left are stronger. Clearly, their clout within the two-party system is negligible. Progressive power, and the power of the American people, today resides in the social and activist and alternative political movements for progressive change, most certainly including the peace movement.

One way of becoming stronger is for the progressives and liberals who are dismayed by the shortcomings of the Congress and president they elected to join in these center-left social movements and fight hard for social change from an activist — as opposed to an almost entirely electoral — orientation. This will simultaneously put pressure for change on the Obama government, stand in strong opposition to the active right wing, and build for a progressive future.

[Jack A. Smith was editor of the Guardian — for decades the nation’s preeminent leftist newsweekly — that closed shop in 1992. Smith now edits the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter, where a version of this article also appears.]

The Rag Blog

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Yes, Virginia : The Truth About Santa Claus

Posted on December 23, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Does Santa exist? Coke thinks so.

The truth about Santa Claus

The hope of us all is not that children will finally learn that Santa Claus is not real but rather that adults will finally realize that he is very real.

By Carl R. Hultberg / The Rag Blog / December 23, 2009

Now they tell me.

But what, exactly, is the truth? Is it true that something we believe in doesn’t actually exist? What about the belief itself? Isn’t that a reality? What about religion? What about faith in the goodness of humanity? Are these just wishful thinking projections upon a hardcore downbeat materialist reality? If that is really true, then how did we get this far as humanity?

Cynicism may be a good defense in today’s competitive male dominant human environment, but if you can feel secure enough dropping your guard momentarily, consider for a minute with me, somewhat objectively, a few of the myths that have sustained us so far.

Like, Christmas, for example. Everyone knows that this day in December is the day that the baby Jesus was born miraculously in Bethlehem some 2,000 years ago. The Wise Men, one of whom is traditionally portrayed as a Black man, came from the East bearing gifts. Obviously the gifts had some special significance. Never mind that the historical Jesus, if (H)he existed at all, wasn’t born in December according to the New Testament.

You can add that to the fact that he also was never chosen to be the Messiah by the Jewish people (Bob Dylan and Jews for Jesus excepted), and that the whole scope of Christianity is an attempt to assume the identity of the historical Jews to usurp their place in “Heaven,” a concept totally alien to Judaism to begin with.

If you can get beyond all those factual problems, then the Christian faith may work for you. Most “God” fearing folk concede some or all of these inconsistencies but see local spirituality held in common and the teachings and good works of the Christian churches as adequate compensation. So is the fact that Christmas is in reality an ancient Pagan holiday an embarrassing anachronism or is it really the essence of the matter?

Like for example, why is it that in our materialist culture the only two days you are expected to give gifts are Christmas and on someone’s birthday? Isn’t it true that in many so called “primitive” cultures, gift giving is pretty much universal? You wouldn’t dare fall out of the gifting cycle in one of these communities for fear of social stigmatization. Who do these people think we all are? Santa Claus?

This gift giving thing can be just about as oppressive as our system of selfish self gain, but the social benefits in terms of personal and familial intertwining ties are immeasurable. Maybe this is why Christmas is both so important and so seemingly alien and hypocritical in our society. The tokenism of a single day of generosity stands out like an ancient monument. This is the day we are to behave like Christians for once, like the Wise Men, like Jesus (H)himself. Like Santa Claus for Christ’s sake.

So maybe like a day of fasting, of abstinence from eating flesh, or the vestiges of the Kosher Laws proscribing cruelty towards animals, Christmas is just that ancient monument. Like Stonehenge we ponder what its significance might have been. All the while we try to maintain our respective competitive advantages in the present day rat race, perhaps put aside for the day, perhaps not. But what if we were to ponder the true meaning of Christmas, ignoring for a moment the religious and commercial overtones, what are we left with?

The food, the family reunion, the delight of children, the sacred tree. The tradition of gift giving, though buried under layers of familial obligations, useless throwaway items, capitalistic “Yankee Swaps,” etc., is still there. Children and, potentially, even jaded often defrauded adults can see the glimmer of hope, for a day, maybe just for a second.

Still such a vision may be hard to shake. The hope of us all is not that children will finally learn that Santa Claus is not real but rather that adults will finally realize that he is very real. He is one of the Wise Men who once carried the knowledge forward to us. He has a gift to give and in that gift we learn to give ourselves.

Of course the man with the beard in the red suit exists. It is the rest of humanity whose future existence is questionable. The sooner we all start believing in Santa Claus the better.

[Carl R. Hultberg’s grandfather, Rudi Blesh, was a noted jazz critic and music historian, and Carl was raised in that tradition. After spending many years as a music archivist and social activist in New York’s Greenwich Village, he now lives in an old abandoned foundry in Danbury, New Hampshire, where he runs the Ragtime Society.]

The Rag Blog

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UT’s InCite : Documenting a Diverse Community

Posted on December 23, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Patience and attention to detail go into producing a fine quilt. See story about Austin’s Blackland Quilting Group, below. Photo by Priscilla Villarreal / InCite.

InCite into Austin:
Online publication kicks UT journalism up a notch

By James Retherford / The Rag Blog / December 23, 2009

See ‘Binding the community: Austin’s Blackland Quilting Group,’ by Patricia Villarreal, Below.

If you have had the misfortune to be exposed to University of Texas student journalism on a daily basis — as I was during my 17 years at UT — you probably learned to downsize your level of expectation. Day in, day out, Daily Texan editorials and Letters to the Editor — the editors and the readers — locked horns in spirited competition to achieve new depths of banality, and the university spends mega-bucks on a slick 48-page four-color magazine called burntORANGE in which to showcase student writers offering advice on “the best place to catch a nap on campus” or “how not to look like a freshman.”

Is this what Walter Cronkite means when he says about UT: “What starts here changes the world?”

Therefore it is an unexpected surprise to find that UT students are indeed capable of producing thoughtful, mature, and probing reporting and then packaging it in a compelling and highly readable format. Students of Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte’s Alternative Journalism (J349) class currently are putting the finishing touches on the second issue of InCite, an exceptional web publication researched, written, and produced by students.

Below the website’s masthead is a short mission statement stating: “InCite seeks to provide another dimension to news by exploring the complexities of events. To do so, InCite draws across perspective and upon intellectual diversity for contextualization while anchored within independent thought.”

The course syllabus further describes J349 as an “interdisciplinary survey course for graduate and undergraduate students” exploring “the journalistic, sociological and historical role of the alternative press.” Students are challenged to bring to the publication of InCite the same kind of intellectual diversity which drives the truth-seeking traditions of The Nation, In These Times, The Progressive, Mother Jones and other similar independent publications.

Obviously the concept of “intellectual diversity” is important here, and the work featured in the two issues of InCite so far produced indicates a maturity and depth of understanding that transcends various “diversities du jour” occupying so much discussion in academic and governmental circles these days.

In addition to The Rag Blog’s featuring of Priscilla Villareal’s extraordinary photo essay about a group of elderly East Austin quiltmakers, the current issue of InCite has Mary Tuma’s well-researched and sensitively written report of the social effect of a digital inequality separating gender, race, and class demographics in Austin; a timely piece by Jazmine Ulloa on how credit card companies prey on students; Gregory Brandt’s in-depth report on the May 2 Global Marijuana March in Austin; and DC Tedrow’s gripping narrative of Iraq and Afghan veterans reliving the horrors of war.

Both issues of InCite can be found here.

Friendship and caring were part and parcel of the quilting process for this circle of friends. Photo by Priscilla Villarreal / InCite.

Binding the community:
Austin’s Blackland Quilting Group

By Priscilla Villarreal

The eight women who spend their Tuesdays and Thursdays at the Blackland Neighborhood Center enter full of purpose. One flips on the CD player that produces the familiar tunes of gospel artists Kirk Franklin and Chester D.T. Baldwin. Up goes the large quilting frame to hold the coverlet they work on together. Another relaxing session begins.

The Center at 2005 Salina Street in East Austin serves a number of community purposes. Neighborhood residents turn there for food, transportation services, employment information and even entertainment such as bingo.

But the quilters — Martha Coleman, Bessie Futrell, Willie Mercer, Carrie Henderson, Royce Pryor, Annie Watrous, Patsy Dearborn and Hazel Weathersby — are steady Center participants, ranging in age from 62 to 104, who have outgrown the back room space where they meet. They crowd into the room already jammed with boxes of fans, stacks of chairs, and filing cabinets. A full bookcase clings to one wall. Located next to the food pantry, the room also stores surplus food. The women can barely gather around the frame which is supported by two carpenter horses.

To ease the crush, volunteers are renovating the Stewart House, a nearby dwelling that will serve as a center annex. The quilters expect to move into it later this year. Carrie Henderson, one of the younger women says they don’t really want to go, but will if they must. She worried about handicap access to the “rescued” home. But Bo McCarver, organizer of the non-profit Blackland Neighborhood Group, said that the house will definitely be outfitted for use by the disabled. Neighborhood activites, he added, now need more space.

The women work steadily while workers stop by to chat or to tease.

“Oh is that the drunkards’ path?” asks Sandra Taylor Harris, an administrative assistant at the Center, while she sneaks a peek at Henderson’s sheet of patterns. “Yeah I know that pattern,” she jokes. Harris likes to tease them saying that the reason their quilts are completed so quickly is because she comes in after they’ve left and sews for them — like the shoemaker’s elves in the classic Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale.

She admires the quilters efforts. “You really have to have patience to do that, and these women have patience,” she says.

Binding the community: Austin’s Blackland Quilting Group at work (and play). Photo by Priscilla Villarreal.

At lunchtime, they share food from home. These women enjoy each other’s company, never running out of conversation or jokes. They know each other well — five are related either by blood or marriage.

Sometimes, concentration on the quilt brings periods of silence before they return to discussing current news, church events, family happenings, and even pop culture, like who was eliminated the night before from American Idol. When they begin to “roll” (folding the completed outer portions of the coverlet and working closer to the quilt’s middle ) laughter erupts if someone lets the frame fall.

These gatherings provide gratifying pastime and the comfort of community. Watrous, one of the newest members, says it’s the best thing that has happened to her, because everyone is so congenial. “It’s nice to have somewhere to go and to be around such pleasant people,” she says. Watrous is one of two in the group who is not related to any of the other members, but that does not mean she is an outsider. She says she has made pretty good friends and they “treat her like a relative.” Like Watrous, Weathersby says the other quilters have also “adopted” her into their family.

The ladies don’t sell their quilts, but give them to family members and old friends. Watrous gave one of the most recently completed works to a church friend.

The quilts also go to a select few organizations, like the George Washington Carver Museum, which once exhibited the ladies’ collection. The museum’s biannual exhibit, “By Bits and Pieces,” showcases African-American quilters. It displayed these women’s quilts from October to December 2006. Bernadette Phifer, Carver Museum curator, contacted them and collected their patchworks. Faith Weaver, former exhibit coordinator for the museum, says they chose them because “they demonstrated the functionality, creativity, and the ability to serve to record family history that quilts were in the black community.”

Weathersby, another newcomer to the group, says that quilts were used during the times of the Underground Railroad in coded ways that gave directions to those who fled. Henderson even made one on display at the museum that told the story of Railroad’s escape system.

Not only did the community enjoy seeing these coverlets, but Weaver believes the women got something else out of it. “It was an intimate celebration and self-appreciation of their work,” she says.

The exhibit also brought some unwanted commercial attention. “After the exhibit ended, people came by the Center and had lists of requests to make quilts and would ask how much,” says Pryor.

Bob Jones, the current exhibit coordinator for the Carver Museum, said they are thinking of displaying the ladies’ handiwork again next fall.

The women have set guidelines for quilt requests. The person who wants a quilt made must bring the top (pattern), batting (cotton filling), lining (bottom sheet of quilt), needles and thread. When that’s done, the effort becomes one of community building. They invite the petitioner to stay to help make the quilt — and then to agree to stay long enough to help others with theirs.

Five years ago, Center workers asked if they could display the quilts for Juneteenth. Since, they cheerfully drape their quilts around their workspaces.

Susie McDonald, Georgia Medlock, Rena Martin Leonard, and Henrietta Jackson were among the group’s organizers during the Civil Rights era. Martha Coleman, who turned 104 in July, is McDonald’s sister, and joined the group in 1971 after their mother passed away.

Once the Blackland Neighborhood Center opened in 1984, Pryor, Coleman, and two of her sisters joined the group. Henderson estimates that since 1971 they have steadily made two quilts per week, or almost 4,000 quilts total.

“Anyone is invited to come and sew with us,” said Royce, “it just happened that it’s the same ones that stick with us.”

Source / InCite / Volume I, Issue 2

Go here for photo gallery.

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New Years Wish List : Forrest Gump Congressional Reform

Posted on December 23, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

First Continental Congress.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators who serve their term(s) and then go home and back to work.

New Year’s wish list:
Forrest Gump’s Congressional Reform Act of 2010

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / December 23, 2009

A friend sent me an email containing the idea below and instead of reading and deleting it, it occurred to me that, since all our long-serving career politicians in both houses up in Washington would see this as simplistic folly, fraught with potential problems for the “good of the American people,” and on and on, I would therefore post it for all to read.

It is sort of a Forrest Gump wish list for the New Year, unhampered by the reality of today’s political madness. It is a back to basics call for a housecleaning in the nation’s capital. Things have gotten so incestuous in national politics over the past century or so that these eight new laws would, of course, never be passed today. But use your imagination… like Forrest.

Our founding fathers certainly did not intend “representative government” to mean representation by the same folks decade after decade. Today’s congressmen and senators spend a goodly portion of their time in office away from the office traveling all over fundraising from moneyed interests so they can campaign to stay in office. So “representative government” more and more means politicians representing big business and wealthy contributors, not necessarily their constituents back home.

We as Americans have also gotten used to our rich uncles or aunts up in Washington. Especially those who have gotten us to vote for them year after year and who have become pompous and powerful. They use their tenure and positions on various committees to sneak in obscure, tailor made bills like one that would only apply to building a billion dollar bridge in our hometown, onto the coat tails of a major piece of legislation. These are the shameless stealth appropriations, not voted upon based on their merits. The habit-forming “earmarks” of course, which have become a Congressional ATM.

Try, for a moment, to imagine an America operating under the eight laws below. Certainly there would have to be an accompanying set of elaborate qualifiers that would retain a continuity and strict oversight of the various departments of government.

This would probably reduce top-end white collar crime and crowding in Federal prisons too!

Congressional Reform Act of 2010

1. Term Limits: 12 years only, one of the possible options below.

A. Two Six year Senate terms
B. Six Two year House terms
C. One Six year Senate term and three Two Year House terms

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators who serve their term(s) and then go home and back to work.

2. No Tenure / No Pension:

A congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when out of office.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators who serve their term(s) and then go home and back to work.

3. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security:

All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system. Congress participates with the American people.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators who serve their term(s) and then go home and back to work.

4. Members of Congress can purchase their own retirement plan just as average Americans do.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators who serve their term(s) and then go home and back to work.

5. Members of Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will be tied to the lower end of the Consumer Price Index or 3%.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators who serve their term(s) and then go home and back to work.

6. Congress loses its current health care system and members participate in the same health care system as the American people.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators who serve their term(s) and then go home and back to work.

7. Members of Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators who serve their term(s) and then go home and back to work.

8. All contracts with past and present congressmen are void effective 1/1/11.

The American people did not make this contract with congressmen, congressmen made all these contracts for themselves.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators who serve their term(s) and then go home and back to work.

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

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Health Care Reform : Framing the Issue

Posted on December 23, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

FDR signs the Social Security Act. Photo from Felton M. Johnston Collection / University of Mississippi Libraries.

Historical thumbnail:
Insurance reform and social security

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / December 22, 2009

For the past few weeks Americans who consider themselves leftists have been arguing among ourselves about whether we should declare any support for the medical insurance reform bill that the Senate passed early Monday.

I have nothing to add to the dispute, except 133 words from the January 1937 issue of the Southern Worker, a newspaper published by the Communist Party, USA with a Birmingham, Alabama dateline from 1930-37:

Already… workers are beginning to realize that the Roosevelt social security program does not offer them real security and to demand something better. The old-age pensions offered under the present act are inadequate. They are based on wages and would run as low in some cases as $10 a month. And they will not begin to be paid until January 1, 1942.

No pensions are provided for persons who are already 65, or who will be 65 by 1942. To be eligible a person must have earned at least $2,000 during that time. Thus the very neediest cases will be among those who will not get pensions. No pensions are provided for agricultural workers, domestic servants, casual laborers, marine workers, government employees… and employees of charitable, educational or other non-profit organizations.

[Dick J. Reavis — a former Austin activist and journalist who wrote for The Rag in the Sixties — is an assistant professor at North Carolina State University. His latest book, Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers, will be published in February by Simon and Schuster. He can be reached at dickjreavis@yahoo.com dickjreavis@yahoo.com.

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After Copenhagen : Lighting a Candle for Climate Change

Posted on December 22, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Hundreds of climate activists gathered in Copenhagen December 17, in a candlelight vigil. Photo from tcktcktck.org.

After Copenhagen:
Vigils shine a light on emerging movement

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow / The Rag Blog / December 22, 2009

I am writing from the midst of a great winter storm. It is at moments like this that it is hard to convince our kishkes, our innards, that global “warming” is dangerous. That’s one of the reasons I insist on talking about “global scorching” — more honest to the geological reality and more evocative of the emotional reality.

Copenhagen is over: At the official leadership level, it was a dismal failure. At the grassroots level, it brought another stage of growth.

Which narrative controls the future — top-down failure or grassroots growth — depends on us.

What went wrong in Copenhagen? The officials came up with a vague agreement among five major nations, no binding decisions, a too slowly approached process toward a too-limited target for even the non-binding decisions, anger among many other nations about both being ignored in the process and short-changed in the results, and a very tentative possible success in beginning the creation of a world fund to aid poor nations make the shift into non-fossil economic development.

Four major culprits: Big Oil and Big Coal, which have blocked effective action by the U.S.; the U.S. government (President and Congress), which has kowtowed to them and failed to commit a serious level of money to meet the needs of poor nations; and the Chinese government, which rejected effective outside verification of its promised cuts in CO2 emissions.

Pressure for deeper commitment, coming from African and Latin American nations and small countries most vulnerable to global scorching through drought and flood, fell short because they had too little power to force the rich and large nations to meet the world’s needs.

On the streets in Copenhagen and around the world, however, the summit sparked much more action and much more coherent connection. A true transnational movement is emerging, as will have to happen if the human race is to prevent utter disaster.

In the U.S., attention now turns to the Senate where debate continues on the Kerry-Baker cap-and-trade climate bill and the pressures to water it down. Perhaps most crucial: Will the bill allow the Environmental Protection Administration to establish strong regulations on emitting CO2? If the Senate strips EPA of that power, as some senators are trying to do, it will be better to defeat the bill and get EPA to act.

There will have to be many more people going beyond their own households to address public policy, with much greater effort from those people. In the U.S. especially, climate activists will have to make much closer alliances with health-care, anti-war, and pro-jobs activists if climate healing is to prevail.

One example of grassroots energy that brought together people of different religions and generations: Last Saturday night (12/12), was both the second night of Hanukkah and the night 350.org, a transnational climate-activist network, had urged worldwide candle-lighting vigils to impact Copenhagen.

Around the world, there were more than 3,000 such vigils. Tens of thousands of people gathered in the bitterly cold streets of Copenhagen in night after night of nonviolent demonstrations.

In Philadelphia that evening, about 60 people from various Jewish congregations, some interfaith environmental groups, the local climate-crisis 350.org, and the Philadelphia (high school] Student Union gathered at Independence Hall to light Hanukkah menorahs and other candles as a message to Copenhagen to get serious about a fair, strong, and binding agreement to stop the worsening of the climate crisis.

[Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director of The Shalom Center and is co-author of The Tent of Abraham; author of Godwrestling, Round 2, Down-to-Earth Judaism and a dozen other books on Jewish thought and practice, as well as books on U.S. public policy.]

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James Howard Kunstler : A Blue Christmas with Avatar and Tiger

Posted on December 21, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer


Blue Christmas

What is most amazing about Mr. Cameron’s holiday blockbuster is the explicit message that America is a society that deserves to be punished (and humiliated!) by others who manage their own relations with reality better than we do.

By James Howard Kunstler / December 21, 2009

As the end-credits rolled for James Cameron’s new movie, Avatar, the audience burst into rowdy applause. It seemed to me that they were applauding the sheer computerized dazzlement of the show — but in the story itself they had just watched the U.S. suffers a humiliating defeat on a distant planet. In the final frames, American soldiers and the corporate executives they had failed to protect were shown lined up as prisoners-of-war about to embark on a death march.

More to the point, the depiction of our national character through the whole course of the film was of a thuggish, cruel, cynical, stupid, detestable, and totally corrupt people bent on the complete destruction of nature. Nice. And the final irony was that Cameron had used theatrical technology of the latest and greatest kind to depict America’s broader techno-grandiosity — as the army’s brute robotic warriors fell to the spears and arrows of the simple blue space aliens.

Altogether, it was a weird moment in entertainment history, and perhaps in the American experience per se. No doubt audiences overseas will go wild with delight, too, but perhaps with a clearer notion of what they are clapping for than the enthralled masses of zombie Americans.

The infatuation with technology, and the disgusting cockiness that goes with it (so well-captured in Avatar), is but one facet of the psychosis gripping the nation — and by that I mean the profound detachment from reality. We have no idea what is happening to us and, naturally, no idea of what we are going to do.

I sat in a bar Friday evening with a financial reporter from a national newspaper, trying to explain the peak oil situation and what it implied for our economy. He had never heard it before. The relationship between energy resources and massive debt was new to him. (It also came up in conversation that he could not tell me what the Monroe Doctrine was about, despite a history degree from Yale.) There you have a nice snapshot of the mainstream media in this land.

This year, America can look for a nice lump of coal in its Christmas stocking. That lump will be called “the recovery.” This recovery consists of a massive self-deception, made up of accounting tricks and falsified statistics, with a sugar-coating on top of sheer disbelief that the outcome could be anything but a particular happy ending — namely, the continued levitation of the unsustainable.

What is most amazing about Mr. Cameron’s holiday blockbuster is the explicit message that America is a society that deserves to be punished (and humiliated!) by others who manage their own relations with reality better than we do. I wonder how much that will secretly account for its popularity. I wonder what the leaders of China will make of it.

The other current embodiment of national character failure, Tiger Woods, golfer, has also dazzled the American public. Personally I find it much more interesting to learn that he was a really lousy tipper than that he got a lot of action on the side with opportunistic bar girls, porn stars, and other denizens of the sports-entertainment netherworld.

Is it not also amusing that golf is even taken seriously as an athletic pursuit? I mean, why not pancake-flipping? Or dice? Or shooting rats at the landfill? This is the kind of knucklehead culture we have become after six decades of the softest life imaginable. Anyway, I’m not shedding any tears for Tiger. Even if all his endorsements dry up and his ex-wife takes him to the cleaners for a hundred million or so, he’ll still be left with enough cash to pay for porn stars and lobster tails until the end of time, especially if he keeps his tipping policy at its current level.

Source / Clusterfuck Nation

Thanks to Roger Baker / The Rag Blog

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Mexico City : Christmas not so Merry for Out of Work ‘Electricistas’

Posted on December 21, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

At top, Mexico City’s giant Christmas tree. Photo by Gary Denness / Creative Commons. Below, members of the electrical union protest the government’s decision to dissolve the state-run electricity company Luz y Fuerza del Centro in Mexico City on Oct. 11, 2009. Photo by Miguel Tovar / AP.

Feliz Navidad:
Hardscrabble holidays for Mexico’s underclass

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / December 21, 2009

MEXICO CITY — The Christmas season is in full flower in this monster megalopolis. “The World’s Tallest Christmas Tree” (dixit Mayor Marcelo Ebrard) which looks suspiciously like a huge bottle of Pepsi Cola (the sponsor of this Xmas kitsch) towers over the elegant Paseo de la Reforma. Ice skaters pirouette on the great rink that floors the Tiananmen-sized Zocalo plaza — at the heart of the Mexican body politic, Zamboni machines now rule. There is even a dollop of snow on the surrounding volcanoes.

As is traditional, the government has shut down until after January 6, the Day of the Kings, and hordes of glassy-eyed shoppers stampede through the downtown streets. Ersatz Santa Clauses cadge coins on the corners of the Centro Historico and each evening neighborhood Marias and Joses knock on doors pleading for posada, a safe place for Mary to birth the Christ child. The pilgrims are treated to ponche (high-octane alcohol splashed with fruit punch) and piñatas stuffed with candy to the delight of sugar-crazed moppets.

Navidad should be a moment of respite in the hardscrabble lives of the vast majority of Mexicans (80%) who live in and around the poverty line but in a year where the underclass, trapped in a seemingly bottomless downturn has suffered grievously, the holiday season has become a cruel hoax.

The hoax is even crueler for 42,000 members of the Mexican Electricity Workers Union (SME) who two months ago were pushed out of their workplaces at the Luz y Fuerza del Centro (LFC), the state-subsidized enterprise that supplied electricity to Mexico City and five surrounding states. Under orders from President Felipe Calderon, the company was dissolved. Military police continues to occupy the installations.

For the union and the combative social movement that accompanies it, the coup d’grace may have come December 11, two months to the day of the takeover, when the Conciliation and Labor Arbitration Court denied the SME’s request for an injunction to reverse the shutdown. Judge Guillermina Coutino, a young and malleable jurist in her first year on the bench, ruled that the executive branch was in its rights to close down a government enterprise if it imperiled the national economy.

By 2009, Luz y Fuerza del Centro, decapitalized by zero investment during the administration of the past four neo-liberal Mexican presidents, was turning increasingly negative numbers. Calderon argued that the shortfall was costing the federal government billions of pesos in subsidies that could be better used to alleviate the suffering of 26,000,000 Mexicans living in extreme poverty.

One reason why LFC was running so deep in the red: the company was forced to buy its electricity from the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) at exorbitant prices – 35 to 40% of CFE electricity is now generated by the private sector, particularly transnationals like the Spanish Iberdrola, despite constitutional prohibitions that restricts energy generation to the state. With the shuttering of Luz y Fuerza, energy distribution in Mexico City and adjoining states will be overseen by the CFE.

Despite Calderon’s insistence that he had no option but to close down LFC, many observers see this slight of hand as a pretext for privatization and the installation of a fiber optics network on the old Luz y Fuerza lines to be contracted with W Communications, another Madrid-based transnational fronted here by two former Mexican energy secretaries — Calderon himself is an ex-energy secretary.

The denial of the union’s request for an amparo (injunction) was a critical wound for the SME, which seemed to have put all its eggs in the legal basket and was delusionally confident that the takeover would be deemed an unconstitutional exercise of Calderon’s authority. SME lawyers vowed to appeal the turndown to an unsympathetic Supreme Court.

The union has been further weakened, perhaps mortally so, by the voluntary liquidation of more than half its members — 27,000 out of 42,000 workers, 61% of the membership, have caved in to Calderon’s entreaties to cash out. Despite sugar-coated comeons by hardnosed labor secretary Javier Lozano that liquidated workers would be re-contracted by the CFE, only 3% of the ex-SME members have been signed on — those who have are forced to abandon the SME and affiliate with a company union, the SUTERN, whose charro (sell-out) leaders have a baleful track record in defending workers’ rights.

Older workers were bamboozled into liquidating by Calderon’s promises that they would be first in line for fast food franchises in which to invest their pay-out checks but the cheapest buy-in was reportedly 190.000 pesos to sell ready-made tacos (tacos de canasta) in the street.

In 1914, at the height of the Mexican Revolution with Pancho Villa and the great Zapata occupying the capital, the city’s electricity workers struck the transnational Canadian Light & Power Company, paralyzing trolley car transit over demands for the recognition of a union. The SME was born into social turmoil and has not been a stranger to struggle in its near-century on the march. Always a bastion of working class solidarity, the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas has traditionally sent tens of thousands of its workers into the streets to back up citizens’ demands for justice from a government once described as a “perfect dictatorship.”

In 2006, the SME incurred Felipe Calderon’s undying wrath when it backed leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in the presidential race the right-winger was later dubiously awarded, and urged its members to vote for AMLO. Retribution is one of the subtexts of Calderon’s takeover of Luz y Fuerza del Centro.

Since the October putsch, those SME members who line up with firebrand secretary general Jorge Esparza have mounted nonviolent civil resistance 24-7. Three mass mobilizations have drummed out nearly a million marchers. On October 15, just four days after Calderon’s takeover, a quarter of a million incensed citizens filled the Zocalo. On November 11th, the SME spearheaded another huge turnout that was billed as a national strike — telephone workers shut down Information services for an hour but no other work stoppages were reported.

Although the “strike” was supported by some public employees unions and unions representing workers at former government enterprises grouped together in the National Union of Workers or UNT, it was pointedly ignored by pro-government unions like the Education Workers (SNTE), with 1.3 million members the largest labor organization in Latin America whose leader Elba Esther Gordillo, the virtual czarina of public education, is a Calderon crony. Nonetheless, dissident teachers have provided bulwark back up for the SME.

A third public outpouring December 4, a symbolic takeover of the capital to commemorate the day Zapata and Villa rode into Mexico City (Mexico will celebrate the 100th anniversary of its revolution in 2010) brought out tens of thousands of supporters who marched into the center of the city from the four cardinal directions and tied traffic in knots all day and all night. Indignant at the biased reporting of Televisa, the nation’s television kingpin — Calderon runs spots on primetime news urging SME members to go scab and accept liquidation — workers staged a rare nighttime march on the communication conglomerate’s headquarters to demand airtime. A tense standoff ensued and was only resolved when the SME’s Esparza offered to buy time to present the workers’ side of the story.

The militancy of the SME rank and file has been unrelenting. Eleven electricistas were jailed for a week after they blocked the federal highway from Queretero into the city. Fifteen workers endured a 17-day hunger strike in front of the CFE offices demanding reinstatement. Two women hunger strikers, Cielo Fuentes and Monica Jimenez, are fourth generation SMErs who remember being rocked to sleep at union meetings when they were babies.

Ex-LFC workers shake cans in the subway and on the buses to keep their families fed. Many workers’ families have been forced to sell in the street to make ends meet. “There’s not enough corn in Mexico to supply all the new quesadilla makers Calderon has created,” one union member joked.

On December 12, the day Mexico sets aside to honor the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Aztec nation’s patron saint, Samuel Ruiz, the liberationist Bishop emeritus of San Cristobal de las Casas, conducted Mass at the union hall, imploring the Dark Madonna to help the workers get their jobs back and condemning the corruption of the mal gobierno (bad government.)

As the movement enters into its third month with no resolution in sight, the Virgin of Guadalupe may be one of the few assets the SME can rely on.

International support for the embattled union has not been spectacular. U.S. and Canadian labor federations have made perfunctory pilgrimages to Mexico City in solidarity. Stan Gacek, speaking for Richard Trumpka, the new AFL-CIO chieftain, accused the Calderon government of violating the terms of the labor side-agreements signed along with NAFTA in 1994 and offered to take the matter to the U.N.’s World Labor Organization (OIT by its Spanish initials.) Calderon’s vituperative labor secretary Lozano responded that the North Americans “know nothing about Mexican labor laws” and accused Gacek of interfering in Mexico’s internal politics, a charge that could have gotten the AFL-CIO rep booted out of the country under Article 33 of the Constitution.

Lozano, who has engaged in a long-standing personal feud with the SME’s Esparza, refusing even to validate the union leader’s re-election last spring, has reason to gloat these days. Not only have the electricistas lost their last, best chance for redress with the denial of the injunction but the Conciliation and Arbitration Court also nullified the SME secretary-general’s victory by 300 votes over union treasurer Alejandro Munoz (who has since turned government stooge) and declared the elections null and void. Lozano also accuses the SME of sabotaging the electricity grid after major blackouts in Mexico City and surrounding states plunged the region into darkness.

As labor secretary, Lozano, a Calderon unconditional, has repeatedly lashed out at unions that reject the government’s privatization plans. His never-ending vendetta against Mine and Metal Workers’ union boss Napoleon Gomez Urrutia, now in self-exile in Canada, continues to trouble the industry — miners have been on strike at Cananea in Sonora, the world’s eighth largest copper pit and in Taxco Guerrero and Sombrerete Zacatecas for two years. This week, the miners’ union sent urgent alerts to its locals to be on guard against a Calderon takeover during Christmas week.

Like the electricistas, for many postal workers this is going to be a miserable Christmas. Nearly 3,000 were fired for the holiday season, a moment of maximum volume, and forced to sign off on liquidations far below those guaranteed by law. Meanwhile, the Mexican postal service, always untrustworthy, has undergone a costly makeover — logos and uniforms are now lime green and raspberry sherbet instead of the drab national colors — but service is just as abysmal. The makeover suggests that Calderon is sprucing up the postal service for sale to the highest bidder — DHL is frequently mentioned.

The SME celebrated the 95th anniversary of its founding December 14, 1914, in times that were no less treacherous than they are today, with militant speeches and half-hearted fiesta. A few thousand gathered at the well-worn union hall downtown. Members’ kids competed in potato sack races and rowdy troubadours sang songs of past peoples’ struggles. Workers’ wives dished out homemade tamales and rummaged through piles of old clothes collected by the civil society, looking for warm coats for their kids.

The walls of the SME offices were plastered with hand-scrawled cardboard signs calling Calderon every kind of creep on the books and the floor littered with old leaflets and tamale husks. Every once in a while, exuberant chants – “Aqui Se Ve La Fuerza del SME!” and “Lucha, Lucha, Lucha No Dejan de Luchar!” — would burst forth from the auditorium where proletarian performers serenaded the faithful. But despite the samples of enthusiasm, exhaustion stalked the room.

The next day, the SME announced that it was suspending resistance activities until the holiday season was done with after January 6. Until then, the movement will be immobilized. Whether there will be enough energy to rekindle the struggle remains to be tested.

Can social movements still modify egregious government policies? The SME has carried out months of wall-to-wall fightback and is increasingly ignored by the public and the government. Millions marched after Calderon stole the 2006 election from Lopez Obrador and three years later Calderon is still very much the president. A survey of conflicts during 2008 done by Bishop Ruiz’s non-government think tank SERAPAZ is revealing.Sixty four percent of the conflicts under review went unrecognized by public authorities. In 31% of the incidents, security forces waded in to disperse the protests. Only 4.6% of these conflicts resulted in dialogue or mediation.

Such a dismal success rate indicates that nonviolent civil resistance is not very efficient at sparking change, a conclusion that must bring holiday cheer to those who advocate the armed option.

[John Ross’s new cult classic El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City is now available at your independent bookseller — “(El Monstruo) is addictive!” complains the Ft. Worth Star Tribune. Ross will be launching a monster book tour from sea to stinking sea February-May. Suggestions for venues will be cheerfully accepted at johnross@igc.org. The author extends his best wishes to readers for their viable survival in 2010.]

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Grannies to Toys’R’Us : War is Not a Game

Posted on December 21, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Granny and grandpa at Times Square. Photo by Bud Korotzer / NLN / The Rag Blog.

Grannies at Times Square:
‘No more war toys, no more war’

By Fran Korotzer / The Rag Blog / December 21, 2009

NEW YORK — On December 4, the Raging Grannies and the Granny Peace Brigade created a wonderful holiday peace event at the crossroads of the world, Times Square. The purpose was to send the message: No more war toys and no more war.

They met near the Recruiting Station where two NYPD officers, polite but not particularly interested in the first amendment, told them that they had to move on. Debate was futile. So, they moved to the huge Broadway Toys”R”Us where several grannies had entered minutes earlier, got on the three story high Ferris wheel in the store, and unfurled large yellow banners that read “No More War Toys — No More War.”

The other grannies — and a few grandpas — stood in a central area and sang peace versions of traditional Christmas songs. By then the number of demonstrators had grown to about 25 people — many were wearing peace signs. Shoppers stopped to photograph the happening.

After about 10 minutes the Ferris wheel was stopped and the Grannies were asked to get off while three very respectful and courteous young men were dispatched to ask the demonstrators to either stay and shop without their signs or sing outside the store — as long as entrances were not blocked. And that is what they did.

The weather outside was sunny and mild. Since that area of Broadway was turned into a pedestrian mall last spring, the area in front of the store was full of strolling tourists and people just sitting and relaxing. Educational leaflets were distributed urging people not to buy war toys (many being extremely violent) and military infused clothing (like camouflage prints) for their children. At the same time the Grannies sang their songs, for example:

Rudolph’s Dream

(Tune: “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”
Words by Corinne Willinger)

Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer
Had a very shiny nose.
Children thought he looked crazy
Because they said that his nose glows.

Rudolph was playing Star Wars
Shooting at strange warrior drones,
He fell and hurt that bright nose
War games made him accident prone.

Then one sunny Christmas day
Santa came to town.
He said war toys can instill
The idea it’s OK to kill.

Santa said that we need practice
In having fun without a fight.
Learn to solve all your problems
By talking about what is right.

People stopped to listen, took pictures, and applauded. The response was extremely positive. It really seemed that people’s hearts and minds welcomed the peace message in the season of peace.

[Fran Korotzer is an independent journalist and a contributor to Next Left Notes, where this article also appears.]

Grannies tell it (and sing it) like it is. Photos by Bud Korotzer / NLN / The Rag Blog.

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