Legendary Detroit Activist Grace Lee Boggs on the US Social Forum and her 95th Birthday.
Democracy Now! broadcasts from Detroit on the opening day of the US Social Forum, where thousands of people have gathered for one of the largest gatherings of grassroots activists and community organizers in the country.
In honor of the 2010 U.S. Social Forum and in light of the ongoing economic/social crisis in California, we invited the attendees and all other citizens of the world during the week of June 20 to join us in developing a set of initiatives or ‘propositions’ for debate and consideration for adoption via the ballot initiative process in the State of California.
These initiatives might emerge from one (or more) of three central areas of shared concern:
• Re-Education
• Strategy/Tactics (Occupation, Evacuation, etc)
• Resources
(updated June 28, 2010)
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Click here to download the ‘QR’ Code image that links to this page. Please feel free to distribute as widely as you’d like.
Thank You.
With the economy in shambles and with wars and occupations continuing, the challenge to change these conditions confronts us all. More than a year ago, millions placed their hopes in Barack Obama and the Democrats to solve these problems. But after months of broken promises and concessions to conservatives, jobs are scarce, health care reform is on life support, and full equality for LGBT people remains elusive.
Socialism 2010—to be held in both Chicago and Oakland—will provide an unparalleled opportunity for new and veteran activists and scholars to explore questions about how we got into this mess and how we can get out of it.
Last year, more than 1,800 people turned out to explore the history of struggles of ordinary people, to learn about radical figures who led social movements and to debate theoretical questions that can help us change the world.
Don’t miss the chance to meet, talk and socialize with hundreds of others like you who want to build an alternative to a system of greed, racism, war and oppression.
Greece is a microcosm of a modern class war rarely reported as such.
from The New Statesman
As Britain’s political class pretends that its arranged marriage of Tweedledee to Tweedledum is democracy, the inspiration for the rest of us is Greece. It is hardly surprising that Greece is presented not as a beacon, but as a “junk country” getting its comeuppance for its “bloated public sector” and “culture of cutting corners” (Observer). The heresy of Greece is that the uprising of its ordinary people provides an authentic hope unlike that lavished upon the warlord in the White House.
The crisis that has led to Greece’s “rescue” by European banks and the International Monetary Fund is the product of a grotesque financial system that itself is in crisis. Greece is a microcosm of a modern class war rarely reported as such, but waged with all the urgency of panic among the imperial rich.
What makes Greece different is that it has experienced, within living memory, invasion, foreign occupation, military dictatorship and popular resistance. Ordinary people are not cowed by the corrupt corporatism that dominates the European Union. The right-wing government of Kostas Karamanlis that preceded the present Pasok (Labour) government of George Papandreou was described by the sociologist Jean Ziegler as “a machine for systematically pillaging the country’s resources”.
The machine had infamous friends. The US Federal Reserve board is investigating the role of Goldman Sachs, which gambled on the bankruptcy of Greece as public assets were sold off and its tax-evading rich deposited €360bn in Swiss banks. This haemorrhaging of capital continues with the approval of Europe’s central banks and governments.
At 11 per cent, Greece’s budget deficit is no higher than America’s. However, when the Papandreou government tried to borrow on the international capital market, it was effectively blocked by the US corporate ratings agencies, which “downgraded” Greek debt to “junk”. These same agencies gave triple-A ratings to billions of dollars in so-called sub-prime mortgage securities and so precipitated the economic collapse in 2008.
What has happened in Greece is theft on an epic, though not unfamiliar, scale. In Britain, the “rescue” of banks such as Northern Rock and the Royal Bank of Scotland has cost billions of pounds. Thanks to Gordon Brown and his passion for the avaricious instincts of the City, these gifts of public money were unconditional, and the bankers have continued to pay each other the booty they call bonuses and to spirit it away to tax havens. Under Britain’s political monoculture, they can do as they wish. In the US, the situation is even more remarkable. As the investigative journalist David DeGraw has reported, the principal Wall Street banks that “destroyed the economy pay zero in taxes and get $33bn in refunds”.
In Greece, as in America and Britain, the ordinary people have been told they must repay the debts of the rich and powerful who incurred them. Jobs, pensions and public services are to be slashed and burned, with privateers put in charge. For the EU and the IMF, the opportunity presents to “change the culture” and to dismantle the social welfare of Greece, just as the IMF and the World Bank have “structurally adjusted” (impoverished and controlled) countries across the developing world.
Greece is hated for the same reason Yugoslavia had to be destroyed physically behind a pretence of protecting the people of Kosovo. Most Greeks are employed by the state, and the young and the trade unions comprise a popular alliance that has not been pacified; the colonels’ tanks on the campus of Athens University in 1967 remain a political spectre. Such resistance is anathema to Europe’s central bankers and regarded as an obstruction to German capital’s need to capture markets in the aftermath of Germany’s troubled reunification.
In Britain, such has been the 30-year propaganda of an extreme economic theory known first as monetarism, then as neoliberalism, that the new Prime Minister can, like his predecessor, describe his demands that ordinary people pay the debts of crooks as “fiscally responsible”. The unmentionables are poverty and class.
Almost a third of British children remain below the breadline. In working-class Kentish Town in London, male life expectancy is 70. Two miles away, in Hampstead, it is 80. When Russia was subjected to similar “shock therapy” in the 1990s, life expectancy nosedived. In the United States, a record 40 million cannot afford to feed themselves.
In the developing world, a system of triage imposed by the World Bank and the IMF has long determined whether people live or die. Whenever tariffs and food and fuel subsidies are eliminated by IMF diktat, small farmers know they have been declared expendable. The World Resources Institute estimates that the toll reaches between 13 and 18 million child deaths every year. This, wrote the economist Lester C Thurow, is “neither metaphor nor simile of war, but war itself”.
The same imperial forces have used horrific weapons against stricken countries where children are the majority, and approved torture as an instrument of foreign policy. It is a phenomenon of denial that none of these assaults on humanity, in which Britain is actively engaged, was allowed to intrude on the British election.
The people on the streets of Athens do not suffer this malaise. They are clear who the enemy is and regard themselves as once again under foreign occupation. And once again, they are rising up, with courage. When David Cameron begins to cleave £6bn from public services in Britain, he will be bargaining that Greece will not happen in Britain. We should prove him wrong.
http://socialistworker.org/2010/05/24/no-surrender-in-greece
Antonis Davenellos, a member of International Workers Left (DEA), reports from Athens on the May 20 general strike and workers’ growing radicalization.
WITH A mass general strike on May 20 in the private and the public sector and a large demonstration in Athens and other cities, the workers of Greece continued the struggle to overturn an austerity program imposed by the Greek government, European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Participation in the strike was equally big in the private sector as in the public sector, which is the target of most of the austerity measures.
The strike rally in Athens was somewhat smaller compared to one held during the May 5 general strike, but far larger than union mobilizations of just a month ago. Plus, on May 5, the subway and bus drivers union decided to work between 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. to facilitate attendance at the rally. That wasn’t the case this time.
In fact, the continued mass participation of workers on May 20 put an end to attempts by the government to create a climate of fear and panic. Politicians and the media had attempted to exploit the tragic death of three bank workers, who lost their lives when a bank was set on fire during the May 5 demonstration. As many union leaders emphasized from the stage of the rally, the May 20 protest proved false all the predictions of a climate of violence.
Hear Antonis Davenellos at Socialism 2010 in Chicago, speaking on “Crisis and Response in Greece.” Check out the Socialism 2010 Web site for more details. See you at Socialism!
An atmosphere of self-confidence among striking workers dominated throughout the rally, despite provocations by police. In Athens, for the first time in many years, police carried out “pre-emptive arrests,” mostly of young demonstrators as they were approaching the rally site. Among those arrested were four members of the delegation of the youth section of the French Communist Party, who were here in solidarity with the Greek workers, as well as five members of DEA.
But the campaign to intimidate workers failed miserably. More than 50,000 workers took part in the demonstration.
There were many well-organized contingents: teachers, hospital workers, mass transit workers, municipal workers, and water, electrical and bank workers, along with many union locals from the private sector, marching under their own banners. Also marching were many young workers from sectors most affected by “flexible” work conditions—such as courier services, restaurants, etc.
The chants taken up on the march once again showed the anger and growing politicization of the people: “They talk of profits and losses, we talk of human lives”; “This is not people’s Europe, it is Europe of capital and the bosses”; “From Athens to Brussels, listen to us well, the popular rebellion is already here.”
Again, as during the May 5 demonstration, thousands of angry protesters gathered in front of the parliament, this time behind the banner of the bus drivers union, angrily shouting “thieves, thieves” and other insulting epithets.
This climate continues to put pressure on the union leadership. At the rally, the chairman of the public-sector union federation ADEDY, Spiros Papaspiros, demanded an immediate end to the policy of “supervision” of the Greek economy—and he called for the “troika” (the EU, European Central Bank and the IMF) to be kicked out.
The unions called for another rally May 29, at which workers which will surround the parliament building to demand that their representatives vote down the proposed counter-reform of the new pension plan.
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THIS WIDESPREAD popular anger is being fed by successive austerity measures by the government, but also by the sense that the policies are absolutely ineffective.
The cuts will plunge the economy into a deep recession—the shrinkage is estimated to be between 4 to 5 percent this year–resulting in waves of layoffs and widespread misery. But even these drastic cuts in wages and social spending haven’t made a dent in the public debt, which continues to grow. It has already shot up to 130 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or 310 billion euros.
This is the direct result of fierce, unbridled neoliberal policies followed blindly by previous governments of the right wing, as well as the social democratic governments of PASOK, which was voted into office late last year.
One sign of the scale of the crisis was the move by Germany to ban “naked short selling,” the practice among financial capitalists of selling shares or bonds not yet in the seller’s possession in the hope of buying them back later at a lower price, finishing the deal and making a profit. The German government wants to prevent speculators from “shorting” EU government bonds, which have dropped in value as the Greek crisis has driven the euro lower on world markets.
Yet the Bank of Greece allowed naked short selling for an extended period of 10 days, feeding the ruthless clique of speculators. This move led to protests even by members of parliament of the ruling PASOK party.
News like this is sharpening people’s anger against private banks, hedge funds, the stock market and other institutions of neoliberalism that previously had been allowed to carry on with their speculating, away from public attention.
The subject of public debt has emerged at the center of debate. In both the demonstrations of May 5 and May 20, the workers made their views loud and clear: We didn’t benefit from all this debt, we don’t owe a single euro to anybody, and we aren’t going to accept any sacrifice for the well-being of euro.
For some time now, among broad sections of the population, there has been a growing demand for debt cancellation–for not a euro to be paid to rentiers and usurers–and to instead use our resources for the needs of the people. These demands go hand in hand with widespread slogans to nationalize the banks, tax capital heavily and finally end the madness of military spending (Greece is fifth in the world in military spending in conventional weapons!).
Workers, in the course of the struggle to defend wages, pensions, public health and education, are discovering more general “transitional” demands at each successive demonstration. In other words, they are searching for answers and moving in the direction of more general anti-capitalist politics.
Along the same lines, news of large mobilizations in other EU countries like Romania (where 50,000 public workers demonstrated against new wage cuts), Portugal and France–with workers taking up slogans of solidarity with Greek workers in each case–has spread enthusiasm and joy.
The coming months will be of crucial importance for the movement and the left in this small country. The fight here can be a spark for the great struggles needed by the working class of all Europe.