Jeron

Thousands turn out to hear Cuban permaculturist

"As news headlines report riots and food shortages in Third World nations, during March and April more than 5000 people on Australias eastern seaboard were able to hear the inspiring story of Cuba's survival when faced with starvation and its transition to ecological sustainability.

Roberto Perez, a Cuban biologist and permaculturist, toured Australia to some of the biggest crowds ever seen for a Cuban activist.

The World Wide Fund for Nature rated Cuba as the only environmentally sustainable country in its 2007 report.

Perez brought a message of immense hope and survival against all the odds. He described how the Cuban people turned to various methods of organic farming after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cubas main trading partner. This resulted in the loss of access to oil, fertilisers and food.

Those who have seen the documentary The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil, in which Perez features, will know just how close Cuba came to mass starvation.

While in Australia Perez addressed more than 30 gatherings, gave more than 20 media interviews and was applauded by radicals and conservatives alike.

Cubas achievements in the wake of its socialist revolution have come despite implacable opposition from the US, including a devastating blockade. Prensa Latina reported in September Cuba's foreign minister, Felipe Perez Roque, said the economic siege, which has lasted close to five decades, had cost the island nation over US$89 billion.

Robyn Francis, one of the organisers for the Perez tour said, People have come in such large numbers to hear Roberto because many have seen the movie Power of the Community and found it empowering and inspiring. They know things have to change they âre looking for a success story. This is an amazing success story in the face of adversity.

Francis said that Perez had spoken in many small country towns like Violet Town, where 130 people came to hear him. Hundreds came to meetings in the capital cities; in Brisbane 550 people attended a meeting on April 16. The Brisbane meeting was opened by Sam Watson, an Indigenous activist and the Socialist Alliance national spokesperson on Indigenous affairs, and was emceed by Jerry Coleby-Williams from ABC TVs Gardening Australia.

In the facilitated panel discussion that followed, Perez highlighted the need for urgent action to turn around climate change. He compared the state of soil degradation in Australia with that in Cuba, which was being regenerated through sustainable agriculture.

Perez explained how Cuban society, based on collective not individual aspirations, with human needs not corporate profits as its motor force was able to
rapidly respond to the peak oil crisis: switching to permaculture and increasing use of sustainable technology. Discussion from the floor raised questions of the potential of such a transformation in Australia.

Even regional centres like Lismore, Geelong and Daylesford attracted more than 200 people to meetings featuring Perez.

One of the more curious stories of the tour involved an address that Perez gave to the Kuringai Council Chambers, north of Sydney. One hundred and fifty people attended, and conservative mayor Nick Elsbeck was moved to proclaim at the end that We've got a lot to learn from Cuba�. Thousands more Australians now agree."

From the page: "The Bush administration tried and failed three prior times to oust Hugo Chavez since its first aborted two-day coup attempt in April, 2002. Through FOIA requests, lawyer, activist and author Eva Golinger uncovered top secret CIA documents of US involvement that included an intricate financing scheme involving the quasi-governmental agency, National Endowment of Democracy (NED), and US Agency for International Development (USAID). The documents also showed the White House, State Department and National Security Agency had full knowledge of the scheme, had to have approved it, and there's little doubt of CIA involvement as it's always part of this kind of dirty business. What's worrying now is what went on then may be happening again in what looks like a prelude to a fourth made-in-Washington attempt to oust the Venezuelan leader that must be monitored closely as events develop.



Since he took office in February, 1999, and especially after George Bush's election, Chavez has been a US target, and this time he believes credible sources point to a plot to assassinate him. That information comes from Alimamy Bakarr Sankoh, president of the Hugo Chavez International-Foundation for Peace, Friendship & Solidarity (HCI-FPFS) in a November 11 press release. Sankoh supports Chavez as "a man of peace and flamboyant champion of human dignity (who persists in his efforts in spite of) growing US blackmail, sabotage and political blasphemy."



HCI-FPFS sources revealed the plot's code name - "Operation Cleanse Venezuela" that now may be unfolding ahead of the December 2 referendum on constitutional reforms. According to Sankoh, the scheme sounds familiar - CIA and other foreign secret service operatives (including anti-Castro terrorists) aiming to destabilize the Chavez government by using "at least three concrete subversive plans" to destroy the country's social democracy and kill Chavez."

Eugene V. Debs
and the Idea of Socialism

We are always in need of radicals who are also lovable, and so we would do well to remember Eugene Victor Debs. Ninety years ago, at the time The Progressive was born, Debs was nationally famous as leader of the Socialist Party, and the poet James Whitcomb Riley wrote of him:

"As warm a heart as ever beat

Betwixt here and the Judgment Seat."

Debs was what every socialist or anarchist or radical should be: fierce in his convictions, kind and compassionate in his personal relations. Sam Moore, a fellow inmate of the Atlanta penitentiary, where Debs was imprisoned for opposing the First World War, remembered how he felt as Debs was about to be released on Christmas Day, 1921: "As miserable as I was, I would defy fate with all its cruelty as long as Debs held my hand, and I was the most miserably happiest man on Earth when I knew he was going home Christmas."

Debs had won the hearts of his fellow prisoners in Atlanta. He had fought for them in a hundred ways and refused any special privileges for himself. On the day of his release, the warden ignored prison regulations and opened every cell-block to allow more than 2,000 inmates to gather in front of the main jail building to say good-bye to Eugene Debs. As he started down the walkway from the prison, a roar went up and he turned, tears streaming down his face, and stretched out his arms to the other prisoners.

This was not his first prison experience. In 1894, not yet a socialist but an organizer for the American Railway Union, he had led a nationwide boycott of the railroads in support of the striking workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company. They tied up the railroad system, burned hundreds of railway cars, and were met with the full force of the capitalist state: Attorney General Richard Olney, a former railroad lawyer, got a court injunction to prohibit blocking trains. President Cleveland called out the army, which used bayonets and rifle fire on a crowd of 5,000 strike sympathizers in Chicago. Seven hundred were arrested. Thirteen were shot to death.

Debs was jailed for violating an injunction prohibiting him from doing or saying anything to carry on the strike. In court, he denied he was a socialist, but during his six months in prison he read socialist literature, and the events of the strike took on a deeper meaning. He wrote later: "I was to be baptized in socialism in the roar of conflict.... In the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed."

More than a million people read Appeal to Reason and other socialist newspapers. In proportion to population, it would be as if today more than three million Americans read a socialist press. The party had 100,000 members, and 1,200 office-holders in 340 municipalities. Socialism was especially strong in the Southwest, among tenant farmers, railroad workers, coal miners, lumberjacks. Oklahoma had 12,000 dues-paying members in 1914 and more than 100 socialists in local offices. It was the home of the fiery Kate Richards O'Hare. Jailed for opposing the war, she once hurled a book through a skylight to bring fresh air into the foul-smelling jail block, bringing cheers from her fellow inmates.

This Land is Your Land

""This Land is Your Land" is probably the best-known song written by Woody Guthrie. Recently, the song has become something of a patriotic anthem. But it's important to remember that Guthrie was a union organizer, and the song would have originally been performed in labor union halls and at rallies for migrant farm workers. In that context, the song is a radical call for the lower classes in American society to take back their country." "Woody Guthrie was born in 1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma. In 1931, the oil boom went bust as the Depression began. In 1935, he experienced Black Sunday, the worst dust storm of the decade. Unable to make a living, he left his wife, three children and his first band to hitchhike to California and look for work. Along the way, he wrote folk songs about the dust bowl, migrant farm workers, corrupt politicians and union organizing. In 1937, he got a job singing on an LA radio station. Gradually, his fame grew. In the late 1940s and 50s, he joined The Weavers, the most commercially successful folk groups of the time. He remarried in 1946 and had four more kids, including singer Arlo Guthrie. In 1954, Woody was diagnosed with Huntington's Chorea, a degenerative genetic disease. He died in 1967"


A brief history of Woody Guthrie and his song "This Land is Your Land." It includes interviews with people that lived in the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.

A thrilling insight into the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, charting the last seven months in the run up to the April 2002 coup d'etat
against him and his dramatic return to power some 48 hours later. Never has such
a range of footage of Chavez, the new icon of the left and the thorn in the side
of the US Administration, been assembled in one documentary.
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"Venezuela remains highly dependent on oil revenues, which account for roughly 90% of export earnings, more than 50% of the federal budget revenues, and around 30% of GDP. Tax collection-Venezuela's primary source of non-oil revenue-is expected to surpass $23 billion in 2006, exceeding the yearend collection goal by more than 20%. A nationwide strike between December 2002 and February 2003 had far-reaching economic consequences - real GDP declined by around 9% in 2002 and 8% in 2003 - but economic output since then has recovered strongly. Fueled by higher oil prices, record government spending helped to boost GDP growth in 2004 and 2005 to approximately 18% and 11%, respectively. Economic growth in 2006 reached around 9%. This spending, combined with recent minimum wage hikes and improved access to domestic credit, has fueled a consumption boom - car sales in 2006 increased by around 70% - but has come at the cost of higher inflation. Despite government attempts to withdraw liquidity from the economy, Venezuela's money supply set a record in June 2006, approximately 70% higher than the previous year. Imports have also jumped significantly."
- CIA World Fact book
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Really enjoyed this documentary about the days leading to the Venezuelan coup of 2002. Does a good job at showing the viewer what actually happened in those 40+ hours.

John Horse and the Black Seminoles


The rebellion
From 1835-1838 in Florida, the Black Seminoles, the African allies of Seminole Indians, led the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history. The uprising peaked in 1836 when hundreds of slaves fled their plantations to join the rebel forces in the Second Seminole War (1835-1842). At the heights of the revolt, at least 385 slaves fought alongside the black and Indian Seminole allies, helping them destroy more than twenty-one sugar plantations in central Florida, at the time one of the most highly developed agricultural regions in North America. Amazingly, one would hardly know any of this from the country's textbooks. For over 150 years, American scholars have failed to recognize the true size and scope of the 1835-1838 rebellion. Historians have focused on the Indian warriors of the Second Seminole War (1835-1842), with some attention to the maroon fighters (the Black Seminoles) but almost none to the plantation-slaves. The omission fits a general pattern in American history. In a trend dating back to the country's earliest national histories, scholars have tended to downplay all incidence of slave resistance. Contemporary scholars may believe that they have overcome this legacy, and yet their failure to identify the country's largest slave revolt speaks to the contrary.



Why did America forget this rebellion? The Black Seminole slave rebellion was not only the largest in U.S. history, it was also the only one that was even partially successful. During the Second Seminole War the U.S. Army could never conclusively defeat the black rebels in Florida. After three years of fighting, the army chose to grant freedom to the holdouts in exchange for surrender -- the only emancipation of rebellious African Americans prior to the U.S. Civil War. It might not matter much that the country forgot a slave rebellion, but why the largest? And why the only one that was partially successful? Certainly in the 1800s, it was never in the political interests of the white South to admit defeat at the hands of black rebels. But how did the censorship of the nineteenth-century become the amnesia of the twentieth? It remains something of a mystery how the country's largest slave rebellion has remained unrecognized for so many years even by the country's leading scholars of African American studies.

Very interesting historical site, lots and lots of information. Haven't had time to read everything.

UNION MEMBERS IN 2006
In 2006, 12.0 percent of employed wage and salary workers were union members, down from 12.5 percent a year earlier, the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of persons belonging to a union fell by 326,000 in 2006 to 15.4 million. The union membership rate has steadily declined from 20.1 percent in 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available. Some highlights from the 2006 data are:



--Workers in the public sector had a union membership rate nearly
five times that of private sector employees.
--Education, training, and library occupations had the highest unionization rate among all occupations, at 37 percent.
--The unionization rate was higher for men than for women.
--Black workers were more likely to be union members than were white, Asian, or Hispanic workers.


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Membership by Industry and Occupation

The union membership rate for government workers (36.2 percent) was substantially higher than for private industry workers (7.4 percent). Within the public sector, local government workers had the highest union membership rate, 41.9 percent. This group includes several heavily unionized occupations, such as teachers, police officers, and fire fighters. Among major private industries, transportation and utilities had the highest union membership rate, at 23.2 percent, followed by construction (13.0 percent). Within the information industry, telecommunications had a 20.7 percent union membership rate. Financial activities had the lowest unionization rate in 2006--1.9 percent. Among occupational groups, education, training, and library occupations (37.3 percent) and protective service occupations (34.7 percent) had the highest unionization rates in 2006. Transportation and material moving occupations (18.5 percent), construction and extraction occupations (17.6 percent), installation, maintenance, and repair occupations (15.8 percent), community and social services occupations (15.6 percent), and production occupations (15.5 percent) also had higher-than-average rates. Sales and related occupations (3.1 percent) and farming, fishing, and forestry occupations (3.5 percent) had the lowest unionization rates.

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Demographic Characteristics of Union Members

In 2006, the union membership rate was higher for men (13.0 percent) than for women (10.9 percent). The gap between their rates has narrowed considerably since 1983, when the rate for men was about 10 percentage points higher than the rate for women. This narrowing occurred be-cause the union membership rate for men declined more rapidly than the rate for women over the period. Black workers were more likely to be union members (14.5 percent) than were whites (11.7 percent), Asians (10.4 percent), or Hispanics (9.8 per-cent). Among age groups, union membership rates were highest among workers 45 to 64 years old (16.0 percent) and were lowest among those ages 16 to 24 (4.4 percent). Full-time workers were more than twice as likely as part-time workers to be union members, 13.1 and 6.3 percent, respectively.

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The Socialist Party and The War
"The Socialist Party of the United States in the present grave crisis solemnly reaffirms it allegiance to the principle of internationalism and working class solidarity the world over, and proclaims its unalterable opposition to the war just declared by the government of the United States. Modern wars as a rule have been caused by the commercial and financial rivalry and intrigues of the capitalist interest in the different countries. Whether they have been frankly waged as wars of aggression or they have been hypocritically represented as wars of "defense," they always have been made by the classes and fought by the masses. Wars bring wealth and power to the ruling classes, and suffering, death, and demoralization to the workers. They breed a sinister spirit of passion, unreason, race hatred, and false patriotism. They obscure the struggles of the workers for life, liberty, and social justice. They tend to sever the vital bonds of solidarity between them and their brothers in other countries, to destroy their organizations and to curtail their civic and political rights and liberties. The Socialist Party of the United States is unalterably opposed to the system of exploitation and class rule which is upheld and strengthened by military power and sham national patriotism. We, therefore, call upon the workers of all countries to refuse support of their governments in their wars. The wars of the contending national groups of capitalists are not the concern of the workers. The only struggle which would justify the workers in taking up arms is the great struggle of the working class of the world to free itself from economic exploitation and political oppression, and we particularly warn the workers against the snare and delusion of so-called defensive warfare. As against the false doctrine of national patriotism we uphold the ideal of international working-class solidarity. In support of capitalism, we will not willingly give a single life or a single dollar; in support of the struggle of the workers for freedom we pledge our all. The mad orgy of death and destruction which is now convulsing unfortunate Europe was caused by the conflict of capitalist interests in the European countries. In each of these countries, the workers were oppressed and exploited. They produced enormous wealth but the bulk of it was withheld from them by the owners of the industries. The workers were thus deprived of the means to repurchase the wealth which they themselves had created."
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From Marxism in Britain and France, to Marxism in Japan. Historical documents on the French and German Revolution. I personally enjoy the American Marxist section.


"This is not intended to be a political website, but rather a historical resource. We all have our own political views in the present; the goal of the historian is to understand the political ideology and actions of others in the past."