Kasama recently received an open letter written by Jeff Weinberger opposing a call by the ANSWER coalition for a government seizure of BP. We will reprint here an extended excerpt from the ANSWER call, and then Jeff’s response.
In ANSWER’s recent call for demonstrations they wrote:
Wednesday, May 12: Seize BP National Day of Action!
Senior executives from BP, Halliburton and Transocean corporations in their testimony before Congress today are saying that the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe is “not our fault.” We cannot allow the giant corporations that have created this disaster and so much suffering to avoid responsibility.
On Wednesday, May 12, demonstrations organized by Seize BP will take place in more than 20 cities to protest the mounting economic and environmental damage from BP’s offshore oil drilling. The Seize BP Campaign is demanding that the government seize BP’s assets and place them in a trust to be used to provide for compensation and damages.
Click for a poetic audio piece by Roxanne Amico about the one-month-old oil hemorrhage in the Gulf of Mexico.
Roxanne writes:
“This is experimental in that it’s not my standard linear journalistic narrative style, and instead is an experiment in the use of my voice as an instrument. I thought originally I would be composing a more complicated piece, with multi-tracking and music. For reasons known to my muse, the composition went in another direction…
“Usually I do this work alone, without input from others, and with very little assistance. This time, for the past month, I’ve had terrific help from a number of friends to whom I owe huge thanks, including Deena Metzger, Nancy Hayes, Annette and Eric Crespo, Derrick Jensen, Stephanie McMillan, Alex Mead, Chris O’Rourke, Carolyn Raffensperger, and especially Doug Lambert. Thank you for listening. If you like this, please share it with others.”
More links from Roxane on the ongoing catastrophe:
Here is Bob Dylan’s searing indictment of the arrogant and clueless — those who go slumming where desperate people strain to create and survive.
In very different time and place, Huey Newton used this song to explain to his comrades of the newly formed Black Panther Party the effect the street can have to other forces in society.
The RCP letter is subtitled, “Observations by a Supporter of that Revolution from a Communist Internationalist Perspective”. However, because Revolution has published it without any comment or criticism, it is fair to assume that it represents the RCP’s position on the revolution in Nepal.
The UCPN(M) Central Committee’s document is entitled “Present Situation and Historical Task of the Proletariat.” Its contents include:
1. A Short Evaluation of Present Situation [Internationally and in Nepal].
2. On the Party Line and Polarization of Revolutionary Communists.
3. From the Latest Peace Process to the Present: on Party’s Problems and Weaknesses.
4. A Rough Sketch of Immediate Plan.
In this article, we want to oppose the anti-revolutionary RCP line and show the importance of building support for the revolution in Nepal. We will look at the RCP’s thesis of ‘revolutionary movement under revisionist leadership’ as well as looking at the realities of the development of the revolution in Nepal.
This report describes the remarkable strike taking place at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR). José first posted this on his blog la más mínima diferencia {the slightest difference. (We earlier posted an much shorter version of this essay.)
Thanks to Carlos A. Rivera for his help. José writes that we also read an earlier piece “The yeast and the oven.”
It is striking how little is known on the mainland about the struggle and conditions of people on Puerto Rico. It is up to us to change this — among progressive and oppressed people.
UPR strike, Day 27: Students regain momentum, look to spark people’s movement
MAY 17 — As the sun rose on Wednesday, April 21, 2010, two hundred students, mostly masked, some brandishing makeshift shields of wood and plastic traffic drums, approached the main vehicular access gate to the University of Puerto Rico’s historic Río Piedras campus, and chained it shut.
Thus began the ongoing campus occupation, which has now spread to all 11 campuses of the UPR system, becoming the first ever system-wide public university strike in Puerto Rico. It is also the longest-lasting strike action of any kind in this U.S. island colony since the Río Piedras student strike of 2005 (which lasted 29 days). With no end in sight, the UPR strike of 2010 will soon boast the longest campus occupation in Puerto Rico’s history.
The students’ three main demands are: repeal Certification 98, which opens the door to eliminating tuition waivers for honor students, athletes, and employees and their families; stop summer term tuition hikes; and fiscal transparency.
The militarized Shock Force of the Puerto Rican Police threw demonstrators to the ground, beat them with riot clubs and sprayed them with tear gas and pepper spray at the Sheraton Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on the evening of May 20. (Photo: Xavier Araújo/El Nuevo Día)
This post is a piece from the Internationalist. It was suggested by José A. Laguarta.
SAN JUAN, May 20 – This evening, there was a picket of several hundred students of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) and workers from a number of sectors, including port workers, university professors and many others. The picket was held in front of a fancy fundraising dinner for businessmen where Governor Luis Fortuño was to give a speech.
When several dozen students entered the luxurious restaurant of the Sheraton Hotel in the Convention Center where the event was being held and tried to go up to where the privatizing, anti-worker governor was scheduled to speak, the notorious Fuerza de Choque (Shock Force) riot squad of the Puerto Rican Police poured in and savagely beat the students, spraying pepper gas in their faces and in some cases directly into their eyes.
The Shock Force brutally beat many students, as well as some older ladies. When the students managed to escape, the police took off after them and charged into the workers who were still picketing the hotel. This militarized police force also fired off large amounts of tear gas, to the point that a cloud of gas hung over the area.
Arizona has become a lightening rod of anger — from those who hate the persecution of immigrants. That is a good thing — an exciting and much needed jolt!
But we all need to ask whether there should also not be much more attention on those actively doing the deporting: I.e. the Obama Administration.
We should ask ourselves if there isn’t some conscious and calculated misdirection involved in the Democratic establishment denouncing specifically a very mean-spirited Arizona law (passed by Republicans), while their team (which after all has power!) has escalated the deportations nationally.
Let’s be clear on a key point:
The White House accuses the Arizona law of unjustly profiling Latinos who are legal — while they themselves escalate the deportation of those who are illegal.
Is that a stand we want to take? No.
We want to stand up precisely for the rights of the undocumented — to demand their legalization. To demand an end to their persecution.To welcome their bold participation in this society. To demand their right to speak and live — and yes have political power. To expose the injustice of combining capitalist exploitation in the fields and sweatshops with street persecution by police and ICE agents.
Sure: there is “collateral damage” as this system attacks the undocumented.
Yes, it means that Latinos generally are insulted and humiliated by police, and yes that will accelerate in Arizona because of their fascist law. Those who are legal face the awful humiliation of being stopped by racist police. But for those who are illegal — that police stop and humiliation is far too often just the beginning of a true nightmare.
“Post-modernism does not make this radical critique to promote the emancipation of individuals and of society through socialism. Instead it proposes a return to pre-modern, pre-capitalist alienations.
“The forms of sociability that it promotes are necessarily in line with adherence to a ‘tribalist’ identity for communities (para-religious and para-ethnic), an antipode to what is required to deepen democracy, which has become a synonym for the ‘tyranny of the people’ daring to question the wise management of the executives who serve the oligopolies.
“Post-modernist critiques of ‘grand narratives’ (the Enlightenment, democracy, progress, socialism, national liberation) do not look to the future but return to an imaginary and false past, which is extremely idealized. In this way it facilitates the fragmentation of the majority of the population and makes them accept adjustment to the logic of the reproduction of domination by the imperialist oligopolies.
“This fragmentation hardly disturbs that domination; on the contrary, it makes the task easier. The individual does not become a conscious, lucid agent of social transformation, but the slave of triumphant commodification. The citizen disappears, giving way to the consumer/spectator, no longer a citizen who seeks emancipation, but an insignificant creature who accepts submission.”
The Battlefields Chosen by Contemporary Imperialism: Conditions for an Effective Response from the South
by Samir Amin
In the art of war, each belligerent chooses the terrain considered most advantageous for its battle for the offensive and tries to impose that terrain on its adversary, so that it is put on the defensive. The same goes for politics, both at the national level and in geopolitical struggles.
May 24, 1990 – Remembering the bombing of Judi Bari
by Mike Ely
Twenty years ago, daring and determined people entered the forests of northern California for Redwood Summer — consciously patterning their campaign on the Freedom Summer of the Deep South. They felt they had found their Mississippi.
In the leadership of this effort was a remarkable woman, Judi Bari, who remains in our thoughts despite the death that took her far far too early.
Judi was fearless, bringing herself into the very front of a confrontation over saving the last old growths of North America — defying mounting death threats from defenders of the relentless corporate logging. She was a revolutionary — spreading radical visions of a new society and breathing wonderful new life into an aging IWW. She was deeply committed to changing the destructive direction of humanity’s impact on earth — helping to found and promote the deep ecology movement, Earth First, one of the most militant direct-action eco-networks.
Perhaps most unusual and important, she was determined to reach out to working people — including the logging workers — to bring them into a dialogue and if possible alliance. She worked bridging the chasm that separated the radical movements of the Northwest from the working people who made up the lumber industry.
She thought that contradictions among the people could be resolved by an outstretched hand, carefully chosen tactics, determined political work and common class interests– without toning down those insights on which a radically different future depends. She had faith in the people in a deep strategic way, that we can all learn from.
Judi Bari was a revolutionary, visionary, a tireless organizer, an artist of song, and a working class militant.
Puerto Rican Students’ Shutdown of Universities Nears Fifth Week
By José Laguarta
As the sun rose on April 21, hundreds of students approached the main gate to the University of Puerto Rico’s historic Río Piedras campus and chained it shut.
Thus began an occupation that has now spread to all 11 campuses of the UPR system and become the first-ever system-wide public university strike. It is also the longest-lasting strike action of any kind in this U.S. island colony since the Río Piedras student strike of 2005, which lasted 29 days.
The students’ three main demands are: repeal Certification 98, which opens the door to eliminating tuition waivers for honor students, athletes, and employees and their families; stop summer term tuition hikes; and open the university’s books to public scrutiny.
Río Piedras strikers have humorously dubbed their own internal struggle as “Vietnam and Disney,” with the front gates controlled by radical humanities and social science students as the former, and the gates at the back of the campus, controlled by more moderate law and natural science students, as the latter. The comparison was overheard from a cop who had been assigned to both gates.
In terms of negotiations, “Vietnam” sees the strike as part of a broader struggle for social change, and tends to favor a hardball approach, seeking concrete successes and guarantees upon which to build a long-term movement. “Disney,” on the other hand, tends to conceive the strike as a necessary evil in the search for a more just, inclusive coexistence with university authorities, and would rather secure the successes at hand than risk them by pushing for more.
“Police have said officers threw a flash grenade through the first-floor window of the two-family home, and that an officer’s gun discharged, killing the girl, during a struggle or after colliding with the girl’s grandmother inside the home.
“There is no question about what happened because it’s in the videotape,” Fieger [an attorney for the family of young Aiyana Jones] said. “It’s not an accident. It’s not a mistake. There was no altercation.”
“Aiyana Jones was shot from outside on the porch. The videotape shows clearly the officer throwing through the window a stun grenade-type explosive and then within milliseconds of throwing that, firing a shot from outside the home,” he said.”
Aiyana Jones, 7-Year-Old Shot And Killed By Detroit Police, Was Sleeping According To Family
COREY WILLIAMS and ED WHITE
DETROIT — Police who carried out a raid on a family home that left a 7-year-old girl dead over the weekend were accompanied by a camera crew for a reality television show, and an attorney says video of the siege contradicts the police account of what happened.
Geoffrey Fieger, an attorney for the family of young Aiyana Jones, said he has seen three or four minutes of video of the raid, although he declined to say whether it was shot by the crew for the A&E series “The First 48,” which has been shadowing Detroit homicide detectives for months.
Police have said officers threw a flash grenade through the first-floor window of the two-family home, and that an officer’s gun discharged, killing the girl, during a struggle or after colliding with the girl’s grandmother inside the home.
But Fieger said the video shows an officer lobbing the grenade and then shooting into the home from the porch.
Controversial Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez said during a visit to Bolivia that he would like to invite Bolivian President Evo Morales and Cuban political leader Fidel Castro to join him on Twitter, according to Reuters.
Chavez joined Twitter on Tuesday, taking the username @chavezcandaga. His arrival on Twitter was a surprise, partly because only 30% of his country has Internet access (though that figure is far higher than it was before he took office) and partly because he called Twitter a potential “tool of terror” just two months ago.
Chavez — who describes himself as a Bolivarian soldier, a socialist and an anti-Imperialist — said he would use the site to spread Bolivarian revolution. Castro and Morales are two of his strongest allies in anti-American sentiment.
Kasama recently received an open letter written by Jeff Weinberger opposing a call by the ANSWER coalition for a government seizure of BP. We will reprint here an extended excerpt from the ANSWER call, and then Jeff’s response.
We received the following essay from the 
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