July 19, 2014

A message from "God" on Facebook (meme)

July 19, 2014

An unheard of provocation

Fidel Castro Ruz (Havana. July 18, 2014)

An unheard of provocation

THIS morning the cables were full of reports about the unheard of news that a Malaysia Airlines passenger plane had been hit at an altitude of 10,100 meters as it flew over Ukrainian territory, along a route controlled by the war-hungry government of chocolate king, Petro Poroshenko.

Cuba, which has always stood in solidarity with the Ukrainian people, and in the difficult days of the Chernobyl tragedy provided medical care to the many children affected by the accident’s harmful radiation, and is always willing to continue doing so, cannot refrain from expressing our repudiation of the action of the anti-Russian, anti-Ukrainian and pro-imperialist government.

At the same time, coinciding with the Malaysian aircraft crime, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, head of the nuclear state, ordered his army to invade the Gaza Strip, where, over the last several days, hundreds of Palestinians have died, many of them children. The President of the United States supported the action, describing the repugnant act as legitimate defense ...

More here: http://www.granma.cu/idiomas/ingles/cuba-i/18julio-fidel.html

July 18, 2014

Big Oil Meme

Posted by MoveOn on Facebook

July 18, 2014

Remembering the Sandinista Revolution -

(I was in college in the mid-80s when Reagan's Contras were "freedom fighting" )

Nicaragua Vive! 35 Years Since the Triumph of the Sandinista Revolution
Written by Chuck Kaufman
Friday, 18 July 2014 12:03

July 19, 2014 marks the 35th anniversary of the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. On that day, the Sandinista troops led by the nine commanders of the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN) entered the capital city of Managua where they were greeted by hundreds of thousands of jubilant Nicaraguans. The triumphant guerrillas found a country in ruins. The previous ruler of the country, dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, had bombed the cities during the final offensive. When he fled the country two days earlier, he took not only the caskets containing his parents’ remains, but all the money in the national treasury as well. The Sandinistas were left with no money and a $1.9 billion international debt.

Despite these handicaps, the Sandinistas set up a nine member National Directorate and five member Junta de Reconstrucción as the executive branch, and a Council of State which included political parties and popular organizations as the legislature. They launched an ambitious and revolutionary political program. Their Literacy Campaign reduced literacy by 37 percent and was given an award by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for its triumphant success. The Sandinistas also provided citizens with free health care, started farm cooperatives, and used land confiscated from the Somoza and his close government and military supporters for state-owned farms. The successful “Revolution of Poets,” many of the country’s poets were revolutionaries and politicians, made Nicaraguans proud and the social advances made them hopeful for the future.

In 1981 Ronald Reagan took office as president of the United States. The CIA, under his direction, immediately began training former members of Somoza’s brutal National Guard who had escaped across the border to Honduras. The famous CIA manual taught at the School of the Americas and captured after a battle in Nicaragua, showed how they were trained. They were taught to assassinate teachers, health care workers, and peasant cooperative leaders. There was also a “Freedom Fighter Manual” authored by the CIA and airdropped into the country which encouraged Nicaraguans sympathetic to the dictatorship to sabotage the Sandinista government and cause social disorder by employing methods such as bombing police stations ...

Much more here: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/nicaragua-archives-62/4942-nicaragua-vive-35-years-since-the-triumph-of-the-sandinista-revolution

July 18, 2014

#Mandela Day

What is Mandela Day?

“What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead” – Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela International Day was launched in recognition of Nelson Mandela’s birthday on 18 July, 2009 via unanimous decision of the UN General Assembly.

It was inspired by a call Nelson Mandela made a year earlier, for the next generation to take on the burden of leadership in addressing the world’s social injustices when he said that “it is in your hands now”.

It is more than a celebration of Madiba’s life and legacy. It is a global movement to honour his life’s work and act to change the world for the better.




http://www.mandeladay.com/content/landing/What-is-Mandela-Day

July 18, 2014

Malcolm X meme re The Newspapers

Posted by the Christian Left and Blue Nation Review on Facebook ...

July 16, 2014

The Lighter Side: Tony Kushner’s Play

Tony Kushner’s Play: “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures ”
by: Frank Rubenfeld on July 16th, 2014 | No Comments »

Today I saw a matinee of Tony Kushner’s “An Intelligent Homosexuals’ Guide…” with a full house attending at the Berkeley Rep. The play first opened in Minneapolis in 2007, and then played briefly in NYC at the Public Theater but did not have its West Coast opening until now.

Most of the more than three hours of the play takes place in a marvelous two-layered set, showing the ground floor and upstairs bed room of the patriarch, seventy-two year old Lou Liberatore, a card carrying member of the Communist Party USA and retired union organizer once active in the Longshoreman’s Union. He has two sons and a daughter, (one son and the daughter are gay), who are presently spending time with him since he’s informed them that he plans to commit suicide soon and wants to settle accounts with them. A year prior, he had made an unsuccessful attempt by slitting his wrists in a bathtub (Roman style). This engendered much upset and anger among his children. The plot line that carries the play forward is whether or not he will follow through on his plan despite the anguished, fervent entreaties of his kids not do so.

That is the structure that Kushner erects, and we can focus on one side or the other in the suicide debate, but the play holds so much more. Kushner’s consciousness is vast, and he has us bouncing back and forth from the individual to the all-encompassing societal and historical forces present in early twenty-first century America ...

More here: http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2014/07/16/tony-kushners-play-the-intelligent-homosexuals-guide-to-capitalism-and-socialism-with-a-key-to-the-scriptures/


Has anyone seen this?

July 16, 2014

The Data of Hate

(Interesting article here - the author analyzes the young membership of Stormfront. It begs the question of what communists can do to reach youth).


The Data of Hate
JULY 12, 2014
Oped by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

I recently analyzed tens of thousands of the site’s profiles, in which registered members can enter their location, birth date, interests and other information. Call it Big Hatred meets Big Data. Stormfront was founded in 1995 by Don Black, a former Ku Klux Klan leader. Its most popular “social groups” are “Union of National Socialists” and “Fans and Supporters of Adolf Hitler.” Over the past year, according to Quantcast, roughly 200,000 to 400,000 Americans visited the site every month. A recent Southern Poverty Law Center report linked nearly 100 murders in the past five years to registered Stormfront members.

The white nationalist posters on Stormfront have issues with many different groups. They often write about crimes committed by African-Americans against whites; they complain about an “invasion” of Mexicans; and they love to mock gays and feminists. But their main problem appears to be with Jewish people, who are often described as super-powerful and clever — the driving force, generally speaking, behind the societal changes they do not like. They sometimes call the Holocaust the “Holohoax.”

Stormfront members tend to be young, at least according to self-reported birth dates. The most common age at which people join the site is 19. And four times more 19-year-olds sign up than 40-year-olds. Internet and social network users lean young, but not nearly that young ...

Entire article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/13/opinion/sunday/seth-stephens-davidowitz-the-data-of-hate.html?_r=0

July 16, 2014

The Monetary System

Not a long article - just a tidbit from the Venus Project facebook page this morning. To be clear Fresco is not a Paulite, he is an engineer who has tirelessly advocated for moving beyond capitalism to a resource based economy. More about Venus Project Here: http://www.thevenusproject.com/about/resource-based-economy

The Venus Project - Global
Wednesday, July 16 at 7:00am ·

"People say that the monetary system produces incentive. This may be true in limited areas, but it also produces greed, embezzlement, corruption, pollution, jealousy, anger, crime, war, poverty, tremendous scarcity, and unnecessary human suffering. You have to look at the entire picture." - Jacque Fresco

July 15, 2014

Why I’m Not a Liberal

Why I’m Not a Liberal
7.15.14 ~ by Robin Marie Averbeck

To many liberals, injustice is a product of misunderstanding, the result of faceless processes that no one really benefits from.

I was standing in the National Mall, surrounded by nearly a quarter million people, when I realized I wasn’t a liberal. I had come to Washington, along with 215,000 others, to participate in Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity,” an event inspired by Glenn Beck’s “Rally to Restore Honor.” The festival reached its height as the spectators were treated to a video montage of fire-breathing pundits from all the major news networks denouncing their political opponents. The message was clear: Those who tell you there are fundamental differences between Americans that are worth getting emphatically angry about are lying to you. This divided America — an America that contains people with radically different values and radically different ideas of what a just, moral society looks like — does not exist. If it seems otherwise, it is simply because, as one sign at the rally put it, we fail to use our “inside voices.”

< snip>

Yet lost in all of these festive roastings of the Tea Party was the fact that the right-wing “crazies” were closer to the truth than the liberals. After all, as many a leftist columnist pointed out and celebrated, Mandela did at one point advocate the use of violence as a means to liberation, did participate in communist politics, and was, at least earlier in his career, a radical.

< snip >

Remaining undisturbed, however, is the assumption that the solution to poverty is to push as many poor people as possible into the job market — to “fix” poor folks rather than restructure the economic institutions that place them in such a quagmire. The fact that this charade of a debate often involves yelling creates the illusion that a fundamental difference is being discussed — but it’s merely the means that are being disputed. At the same time, identifying fundamental disagreements that do exist becomes extremely difficult when one cannot even name what is being struggled over — power. For at the root of the liberal denial of conflict is the liberal denial of power. And on this falsehood, all attempts to honestly confront conflict run afoul. To say that liberals struggle with the concept of power is so familiar that it seems like a truism at this point. Indeed, even liberals themselves – on their leftmost flank, at least – often engage in this critique. Yet as G.E. Lessing once wrote, even those who mock their chains are not always free, and even self-conscious liberals still continually ignore or downplay power ...

Much more here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/07/why-im-not-a-liberal/