and for that one, i'd say 'put up or shut up'. people who work 5 days and are for 4 can give one day to people without. but, that you won't get in general----its all 'lets organize to get Obama to pass a law saying i have to give you one day, and i can't drive to work everyday, or turn the air comnditioner on eveyday...somebody pass the law, please.' (and oh yeah, i'll protest during my free time off of my 40 hours. and, if you are un or underemployedm, then you can protest alot more.)
the other demands seem equally wack. open the borders---go into any inner city with a large immigrant population working under the table, gentrifying the area through fixing up housing for yuppies and displacing long term residents because tyhe are willing to live 20/room without heat or water, and ask the locals (longer term residents) what they think about opening the borders. ok, open them in your neighborhood first, and make sure it includes employment (eg no green card needed to teach college).
abolish prisons? no problem, in madison wisconsin or berkely ca or eugene or takoma park. share the wealth. also, its not going to happen so rather than that lets talk about the reutrn of jesus. or, how about thinking of options for people who otherwise are going ot end up in jail? but that takes more time and xcommitment than running around some pc suburb talking about how prisons are bad. (i already know a bunch of pc types who do alot of advocacy on why closing homeless shelters is cruel, discriminatory, etc. But, you suggest they put one in their neighborhood, or even have them hosue a few homeless people in tjheir often oversized houses, andf they look at you like you are insane---and change the subuject to how cruel the downtown business class they work for is.)
the level of conceptual discussion seems so low its like its been designed by the fbi.
as for foreign aid, i guess i'd look to groups like WSF, oxfam, food first, etc to see whether any wheat can be seperated from the chaff their. (reperations of course is one idea floated, which seems unpopular, unlikely, and also difficult to administer to make sure it doesnt end up in a swiss bank account.
--- On Fri, 8/14/09, Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
> From: Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Trapped in The Present: Part 2
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Friday, August 14, 2009, 5:42 PM
>
> ``is there a punchline? or is just the thrust of the
> argument that
> discussing possible slogans is a way to get a conversation
> started.
> and, is the conversation the point? (sortuh like the
> israeli-palestinian dialogues or peace..'' martin
>
> --------
>
> I think I understand Carrol's intent, but I have other
> views.
>
> The main point I want to make is about the central
> importance of
> speech but speech to be fully political must be linked
> somehow to
> action. Also speech here is more broadly defined. Remember
> books,
> writing, talking, videos, film, radio... All these are
> essentially
> speech--for me.
>
> Entrapment in the present. Imagining the present from the
> future.
>
> My problem with these slogans and their full meaning, is
> that I've
> actually seen, been part of, and shared in some of the
> political
> success of political movements. The first was to open the
> university
> (UCB) to political action, built on the success of Free
> Speech
> Movement (FSM) which succeeded in opening the university to
> political
> speech.
>
> The second movement could be loosely called the disability
> movement. It had several goals. The primary one, was
> independent
> living in the community and not in an institution. The next
> goal was a
> series of civil rights, many of which converged on
> broadening the
> public concept of `access'. For example access to all
> public space,
> like sidewalks, streets, public institutions, especially
> governmental
> institutions...which meant access to the broadly understood
> world of
> political action. Much of these latter gains were
> deliberately
> designed around the de-segregation, civil rights, and black
> power
> movements that preceded and overlaped them.
>
> The disability movements, transported disabled people from
> the silences
> and prisons of back wards in the public hospital system out
> to the
> world so that they could become fully human in Arendt's
> sense of the
> word, activa vita. We had learned that segregation is also
> a form of
> silence, the denial of political speech.
>
> The point is that I have seen what the future is supposed
> to be. I've
> also unfortunately seen how all the work, the time, the
> energy, the
> friends. the solidarities, the struggles for a full life of
> the
> political was destroyed, co-opted, and erased from the
> public mind and
> history. Yet many of the gains remain.
>
> The core ingredient, or the means to accomplish something
> like those
> movements of the past, is some shared sense of solidarity.
> That is,
> the sense we are all in the same boat. I have no idea what
> `boat' we
> are all in here on LBO. I guess the general boat is what we
> are against, i.e
> the US political economy as currently constituted and run.
>
> In the past the boats were created by public institutions
> themselves. For example, the UC system had a rule that
> there could be
> no political speech on its campuses. The institution
> created the FSM
> boat with this rule and many others like it.
>
> The students within FSM understood that without the freedom
> of public
> speech there could be no political action possible.
>
> I wasn't part of the early developments that lead to FSM,
> but I
> listened to the older brother of a friend who discussed the
> events (SF
> HUAC hearings, etc) when he came home to LA for
> Thanksgiving and
> Christmas. I knew immediately, that's were I wanted to be.
> So being a
> student with something to say about the world, and being
> prevented
> from saying it, was the boat we all felt.
>
> The Selective Service system created the mass anti-war
> movement. Every
> male between 18-34 was subject to draft and induction.
> That's a pretty
> big boat.
>
> The few dozen disabled men and women I worked for in the
> UCB student
> hospital were definitely all in the same boat, living in
> an
> institution, completely subject to the tyrannical whims of
> the staff
> and administration. The freedom to come and go, the freedom
> of
> assembly, all the space of the hospital conspired to be a
> prison
> whether that effect was intended or not. We lived in
> Foucault's world.
>
> So, The Boat, is the symbol for solidarity, the shared
> fate.
>
> CG
> .
> .
> .
>
> Last night I turned on KPFA and listened to a full hour of
> news. Every
> story was one I wanted to hear. Many involved all the
> places where
> political struggle is taking place today. Iran, of course,
> and
> Honduras. I had no idea that the Honduran struggle is
> on-going
> everyday and is seriously distrupting the goverance and
> political
> economy of Honduras. A woman reporter phoned in her story
> that was
> recorded and played back. There is talk of strikes. Go here
> to listen
> to her report:
>
> http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/53204
>
> This reminded me of the heady days of yore when KPFA had a
> mobil van
> with local telecom equipment to talk live to the station
> which in turn
> broad cast live from the tear gas and rock throwing on
> Telegraph or on
> campus rallies, or occasionally in downtown Oakland with
> the Panthers
> and other groups. This live radio was a new form of media.
>
> But the political struggles are not just elsewhere. In the
> Bay Area
> today there is going to be a transportation workers
> strike,
> because the BART board wanted too many concessions. This
> strike
> as some real political potential:
>
> http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5igg_jIZm_fSZaKQF5t1kmwixBL2wD9A2E8VG0
>
> Getting back to the Honduran story. I suppose there has
> been a media
> black out. Googling news Honduras gets the usual bland
> pronouncements,
> `Zelaya Supporters Clash with Police'. The empirical facts
> hide the
> political reality.
>
> The first political act is speech. So without news, without
> stories on
> the ground, we have no political world to relate our speech
> to. It is
> the global internet that provides the infrastructure of
> global speech.
>
> In history, among the first acts of either a military coup
> or a
> revolution was to sieze the central telephone exchange,
> e.g. Russia(?),
> China, Spain, then later many other places, also Cuba.
>
> Now days, the US and other militarist states target the
> radio, tv
> stations as well as the telecomm installations. Today it is
> much more
> complicated to control all the methods of public speech.
>
> Public speech is the glue of resistance movements. Speech
> is the
> vehicle to carry demands, to project what should be, from
> what is.
>
> The point here is that we do have something evolving like a
> global
> resistance movement or its potential, but it depends on
> seeing and hearing each
> other and discussing our actions. And that in turn depends
> on the very
> fragile nature of the internet.
>
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>