PNEWS ONLINE [NOV 22]

[Hank Roth]

/* Written 9:10 pm Nov 22, 1993 by pn...@igc.apc.org in igc:p.news */
/* ---------- "PNEWS ONLINE [NOV 22]" ---------- */

PNEWS ONLINE [November 22, 1993]
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These conferences provide an alternative for those interested in
a *LEFT* perspective and "PROGRESSIVE" issues. The objectives of
pnews conferences are to provide a cross-fertilization of
"ALTERNATIVE" progressive and dissident views---to propose and
discuss new world visions, to present ideas that CHALLENGE
PREVAILING DOMINANT VIEWS; and to advance the cause of PEACEFUL
RESOLUTION of matters that greatly concern us.

The primary emphasis for the conferences shall continue to be the
presentation of "PROGRESSIVE" NEWS, VIEWS, and occasionally some
POETRY. "Progressive," meaning that which tends to improve
society, the advancement of knowledge and visions for a better
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Hank Roth,
Moderator/facilitator [pnews conferences]
& PNEWS ONLINE
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*-*-* pnews conferences *-*-*
** Topic: Deja vu all over everything... **
** Written by FT...@acad3.alaska.edu in cdp:p.news.discuss **
From: The Upper Left Corner <FT...@acad3.alaska.edu>

OK, here's the deal:
The last time I looked at a calander it was 1993.
The last time I looked out the window, trans-national
corporations were oppressing people all over the world and
dominating the world economy with capitalistic "free enterprise.'
The last time I looked at a newspaper, President Clinton was
pretending to represent the left in the American system of Un-
Democracy. My so-called "representaives" to that great national
asylum for the criminally helpless in Washington, D.C. couldn't
get through the door because their pockets were bulging so much
with filthy oil money.
I haven't seen Marx, Lenin, Stalin or even the SDS around for a
long time, so it looks like it's up to us.
Lets discuss some relevant issues in the present on how we can
derail this out-of-control capitalist honey wagon from it's
destructive course and onto a path toward a sane future.

******************************
=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Hate Speech
At the time of BIRTH OF A NATION, a movie based on THE KLANSMEN,
was made and shown, hundreds of Black people were being lynched
every year, Jim Crow triumphed and Blacks were disfranchised. It
was a movie vile in its racism and shown to millions of people
and incited the slaughter of Black people. It played a part in
the re-emergence of a Klu Klux Klan of 5,000,000 members. DuBois
and the NAACP demanded the banning of BIRTH OF A NATION and
theaters where it played was picketed to prevent it from being
shown. It wasn't the curbing of human rights that the NAACP was
attempting, but the elimination of oppression contributed by the
showing of this movie.

******************************

<<< Joe DeLassus posted this feed from nytransfer >>>>
The following is an excerpt-----
Subject: LIBERALISM
Written by asta...@oln.comlink.apc.org
Liberalism - The Answer to all Questions?
by Vibeche Holte, University of Oslo
After the breakdown of communism in the former USSR, market
economy has been cheered by western politicians as the new wonder
drug for the whole world. It is appropriate to take a closer look
at how this system works, starting in the country which practises
it the utmost, namely the US.
Has this economic system only led to success in the country? The
answer is that practically all indicators show that the system is
a failure. In comparison to other western countries USA is at the
bottom of the list in every field concerning life conditions for
ordinary citizens.
The tendency is quite clear: The death rate for children is
among the highest in the industrialized world. A number of 40.000
children are expected to die in the US this year due to the lack
of caring and nursing. In the Gulf War less than 100 American
soldiers were killed... (World Policy Institute, New York). One
out of eight children in the US do not have enough to eat, that
is 5.5 million chidren. And there is more: one out of five
children live in poverty, while the richest, due to lower taxes,
increased their income by 39 billion US$. During the same period
the number of poor children increased by 2.2 million (poverty: a
family with less than $ 10.000 to live on in a year). A total
number of 13% of the population is classified as poor and the
number is still increasing dramatically. There are 3 million
homeless in North America and their prospectives are not
promising. In the 1980ies 5% of the population took care of
26% of the country's income (Reich: The Work of Nations).
The schoolsystem is amongst the poorest in the world. One out of
four is functionally illiterate which means the she/he is unable
to fill in a simple form on her/his own. When it comes to
homicide there are eleven times as many in America compared to
Japan. Annually 9 people out of a 100.000 are murdered. In
Atlanta there are seven killings a day, in New York and Detroit
the figures are even higher.
On average an American child watches 150 homicides on TV during
one week! Great numbers of the Americans live in constant fear
for their lives. 135.000 pupils are regularly bringing arms to
school ("Die Zeit" on the 3rd of May 1991). USA is the country
which has the greatest number of its citizens in prison: 426
people out of a 100.000 are behind bars. In the Netherlands the
figure is 40 per 100.000. The life expectancy among blacks in
Harlem and Washington is lower than in Bangladesh, one of the
poorest countries in the world.
Another huge problem is the drug abuse. The country has 15
million cocaine addicts and further 20 million people are
regularly sniffing cocaine. Drugs for 300 billions are consumed
every year. This again effects the country's productivity.
The story isn't finished yet. The country's infrastructure is in
a terrible condition. More than half of all roads, bridges etc.
are in such a bad condition that they are a threat to safety in
the traffic. And a lot of the cities are running the risk of
becoming totally bankrupt. According to The National League of
Cities, representing 1400 of the cities in the country, one out
of four cities is in this situation.
The conclusion drawn from all this evidence (and there is much
more!) must be that this cannot be a coincidence, nor can it be
only temporarily effects of the country's economic policy. The
problems mentioned above are due to failures in the system. We
are talking about a basic system-error which is threatening to
undermine the whole country. To underline this furthermore comes
the fact that the US has become the biggest debtor in the world
with a foreign debt of US$ 4000 billion. When analyzing the
aggressive economic policy led by USA towards the poor countries
through channels as the World Bank. the International Monetary
Fund and others, one has to ask for the reason for the extremely
strong convinction that this economic system eventually will save
the rest of the world.
[...]

******************************

*-*-* pnews conferences *-*-*
From: GROO II <daro...@teaching.cs.adelaide.edu.au>
Subject: RE: Imperialism

Imperialism _does_ benefit the working classes of imperialist
countries, even while they are being exploited. How else can
Australia pay for my dole than by imperialism? Why can I feed
myself for A$20 a fortnight? Partly through low wages for workers
in the countries where this food is grown. As Orwell pointed out,
in the short term the end of imperialism will probably result in
a drop in living standards for ordinary people in western ie
imperialistic countries

***************************GROO II************************************

From: David Westling <U55...@UICVM.UIC.EDU>
Subject: popular inclinations

My point was that just because millions choose something, this
does not mean that something is right about it. History is
filled with instances of masses of people choosing things that
are insane. It does not follow that merely because millions
choose something that it is necessarily insane. It does seem to
me however that the bigger a social phenomenon is the more it
will be infiltrated by general ineptitude and worse. I am not
arguing the point that communism fought for the interests of the
working class. I am taking issue with your statement implying
legitimacy for a phenomenon merely by virtue of the numbers that
it attracts to its cause.
David Westling
*********************************************

From: "GROVER FURR" <FU...@apollo.montclair.edu>

Naturally the communist movement made grave errors in this
struggle. It's impossible to struggle without making errors. And
it's because of their struggle that we are able to understand,
sometimes, what some of those errors were.

*********************************************
From: da...@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com
Subject: Snapshots of a world coming apart at the seams
[Excerpts]

[Feb. 5-11, 1992 issue of "In These Times:]

Snapshots of a world coming apart at the seams
By Eduardo Galeano

Uruguay's Eduardo Galeano is a writer who has long chronicled the
tensions between the Third World and the First World. The
following is excerpted from a longer article that ran in "Le Monde
Diplomatique" late last year. The translation is by Kevin O'Donnell.

We can be like them, proclaims the giant neon sign on the road to
development. The Third World will become the First World. It
will be rich and happy, as long as it behaves itself and does what
it's told.
But, "What cannot be, cannot be, and besides, is impossible,"
as the bullfighter Pedro el Gallo said so well. If the Third
World produced and squandered as much as the rich countries, our
planet would perish.
Already acid rain kills our forests and lakes. Toxic waste
poisons our rivers and seas. In the South, agro-industry rips
both trees and humans from their roots. With delirious
enthusiasm, mankind is sawing the branch on which it is seated.
The average American consumes as much as 50 Haitians. Of
course, this statistic does not represent the likes of Baby Doc
Duvalier or the average resident of Harlem, but we must ask
ourselves anyway: What would happen if the 50 Haitians consumed
as many cars, as many televisions, as many refrigerators or as
many luxury goods as the one American?
Nothing. Nothing would ever happen again. We would have to
change planets. Ours, which is already close to catastrophe,
couldn't take it.
The precarious equilibrium of the world depends on the
perpetuation of injustice. So that some can consume more, people
must continue to consume less. To keep people in their place, the
system produced armaments. Incapable of fighting poverty, the
system fights the poor.
"Life is something that happens while you're doing something
else," John Lennon used to say. In our era, we no longer work to
live. We live to work. Some work ever harder in order to satisfy
their basic necessities. Others work ever harder in order to
squander.
In Latin America, the eight-hour workday pertains to the realm
of abstract art. Moon-lighting, rarely reflected in statistics,
is a way of life for people who have no other way to escape
hunger. But, in the places where development is at its apex,
should humans work like ants?
To be is to have, says the system. But in the end, things are
the masters of people. The automobile, for example, not only
takes up space but also time. Much of the workday pays for the
commute to the workplace. Cars, portable telephones, televisions,
VCRs and personal computers, all conceived to save or to pass
time, actually appropriate time.
Over the last 20 years, the workday has grown longer in the
U.S. The number of Americans suffering from stress has doubled.
According to the World Health Organization, the U.S. consumes
almost half of all tranquilizers sold on the planet.

[...]
***********************************************

HEALTH CARE
Even in the 1880s, under the conservative Junker, Bismarck,
in part as an act of feudal noblesse oblige, and in part as an
attempt to steal the thunder from a rising socialist movement,
sickness insurance came to Germany....and then to the UK in 1911;
yet IT HAS NOT YET COME TO THE UNITED STATES.
Industrial accident insurance became law in Germany in 1884,
in the UK in 1887; but not until 1930 did it become law in the
U.S. A pension system was adopted in Germany in 1889, in the U.K.
in 1908, but not until 1935 in the U.S. Health insurance was
introduced in Germany in 1880, in the U.K in 1948 and never in
the U.S. (except for the elderly and disabled---and it is
difficult to get and inadequate for the disabled) Now every
industrial nation has it, except for the U.S. and South Africa.
If this country is so advanced, why are we always last, and if we
are so great, why do our citizens have the fewest economic and
social rights? What does that say about the ethos of America?
Poverty is not the fault of the poor, but a condition imposed
upon them by this society and economy. We overproduce and then
put people out to pasture without any safety net. That is the way
the system works and it is unfair, unjust, and immoral.
Forty million people cannot afford any health insurance at
all. No one can afford the cost of health care without it. Many
more who have insurance have basic insurance and are inadquately
covered. There is a moral obligation to provide affordable and
equitable access to health care. Socialized, national health
insurance and health care is the only option, and we must have
it.
***********************************************************************

Know that the people who are the richest
are not those who have the most,
but those who need the least.

--ratitor

***********************************************************************

"When fifty men and women, chiefs of their corporations, control
more than half the information and ideas that reach 220 million
Americans, it is time for Americans to examine the institutions
from which they receive their daily picture of the world."
{From: The Media Monopoly
by Ben H. Bagdikian

#####################

From: ea...@carr3.acpub.duke.edu (Carter Butts)

What anarchy is, and is not:
Anarchy is a class of social interaction systems without a
centralized coercive control. Anarchy does NOT mean no rules, it
means no ruler. Anarchy is not one particular system of social
interaction; there are as many types of anarchy as there are
types of governments. Likewise, anarchy is not of necessity a
utopian ideal (one would do just as well to say that government
per se is a utopian ideal). Before you attempt to attack
anarchy, you would do well to know what you are attacking.

#####################

From: aeng...@igc.apc.org
[...]
Why I Still Reject Capitalism

First and foremost, because the predominant moral value of
the capitalist system is unchecked greed. The natural desire of
the individual for a comfortable material life is distorted under
capitalism into a twisted worship of money for its own sake. For
the true believers of "free enterprise" getting rich justifies
everything. Concern for the greater welfare of society is
disdained. Under capitalism, the dominant class has no concern
for the impact of its actions upon the dominated poor and working
people.

[...]

#####################

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
= (ROBESPIERRE) "Enough for all, excess for none." =
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=


#####################

>From theorg...@igc.apc.org
>From The Organizer
4017 24th St. Suite 19
San Francisco, CA 94114 USA
Subscription: $12 1 Year, $30 International
Phone: 415-641-4610

[...]

Of course, the United States is the richest country in the world,
and conditions are not at all comparable to those in Russia. But
here is an item that puts the situation in a nutshell. The U.S.
Supreme Court has just ruled in favor of recognizing the right to
beg, reversing lower courts that sought to outlaw it. Every day
in the United States, millions of homeless have to hold out their
hands just to survive. In New York City alone their number is
estimated at 100,000.

#####################

From: Dubatandum [FidoNet/P_news]

"Liberalism is the credo of those who have no fear of the idea
of change. Its core, as I see it, is a willingness to place
human rights first and property rights second, or as Lincoln put
it: "I am for both man and the dollar, but in case of conflict I
am for man."" (Henry Wallace, NYT "48")

To be liberal means to be free, liberal meaning in its literal
sense, liberty. Liberals have fought for public education and
health care, separation of church and state, replacement of
monarchy with democratic institutions, ending slavery, voteing
rights for women and the disenfranchised, equal rights for all,
free choice of women to have control over their own bodies,
progressive income taxes as opposed to regressive taxes, gun
control, prison reform, academic freedom, desegregation, social
security, right of workers to organize, monopoly regulations,
workman's disability compensation, medicare, medicaisn, food
stamps, school lunch programs, minimum wage law, public works to
aid the unemployed, enviromental protection, aboliton of the
death penalty, ERA, United Nations, etc.

[...]
Whereas, conservatives generally have fought for and favored
censorship, narrow behavioral standards imposed on everyone,
police state measures---such as no-knock entgry and invasions of
privacy, peacetime conscription, anti-abortion measures, tax
loopholes, tariff subsidies, arbitrary distribution of power and
privilege, increased military spending, etc.

The phony liberal is the one who sends his children to private
schools while advocationg segregation and busing. The phony
liberals are the ones who in Orwell's words, "establish their
smelly little orthodoxies," of privilege, and are part of the
oppression of the poor and discriminated against while at the
same time they would appear to be liberals opposing that
oppression. Anotherwords if you are not apart of the solution you
are still a part of the problem.

[...]

#####################


From: SCI...@mitvma.mit.edu
[Maoist Internationalist Movement]

[...]
Why don't they get a clue? Why do intellectuals make useless
criticisms of real world progress? Why don't they get on board
and try to improve successful movements from within? The reason
is that they were trained by the ruling class to get their
acclaim for picking apart intellectual ideas. Create an
intellectual fad and make yourself famous the bourgeoisie has
trained intellectuals to think. Hence, intellectuals are willing
to destroy what is beautiful in the real world for the benefit of
what is beautiful in their heads --and that is in the best case
scenarios. (By the way, for the same reasons many intellectuals
reject democratic centralism; they uphold their individual ideas
as more important than practical unity and capacity to strike at
the reactionaries.)

Many intellectuals and activists are consciously opposed to the
goals of abolishing class, nation and gender oppression. Some
work professionally for the white nation labor aristocracy. It's
a way to make a living. Others are paid to serve bourgeois
interests more directly. Therefore, it is unrealistic to expect a
"unity" of the "left." First we have to define "left" and then we
have to agree on what success is.


#####################

From: aeng...@igc.apc.org

[...]
The grassroots single-issue movements have had many successes and
played an essential role in developing a progressive agenda.
However, they have two main weaknesses. First, in the absence of
a unified progressive alternative, the ruling class has the
luxury of attacking the gains of these movements one by one,
without ever facing the threat of losing power. Secondly, the
single-issue movements tend to rise in periods of crisis, but
then rapidly decline when the immediate issue fades. The left is
constantly put in the position of having to react after the fact,
building up opposition movements from scratch each time. No
wonder we lose so often.

#####################

From: od...@world.std.com
[...]
Reliable and inexpensive medical care should be the right of all,
but most legislators are more concerned with wrapping themselves
in the flag than substantive issues of social welfare and the
wellbeing of its post born citizens. A society is classist and
racist when no federal funding is not available for abortion
counseling, yet provides federal monies to poor people for
sterilization.

[...]
With regard to the handicapped there is never enough public
assistance, if at all, to pay for medical expenses, i.e.,
operations, braces and wheelchairs, or medical emergencies (since
insurance is unobtainable) and vehicle modifications, etc. Many
live from hand to mouth and their families have no hope for
financial security. So why don't these anti-abortionists put
their wallets where their mouths are? Why aren't they as incensed
over the quality of life for the disabled and for poor children
who suffer and for their families as they claim to be for life?
And where is this super morality when it comes to opposing wars
of aggression, i.e., wars for oil?

#####################

From: Ribaud [FidoNet/P_news]
The American folly..........

America is a society of mercenary interlocking exploitive
corporations, an electorate that is notoriously unenlightened and
misinformed by a notoriously phony mass media that is responsive
more to the whims and will of their commercial advertisers than
they are to telling the truth. This is a nation of millions of
used car salesmen, and of real estate barons who practice
medicine [Doctors buy a lot of land with the money they
overcharge you for healthcare.]

This is a country of people with guns who have no qualms about
killing anybody that doesn't look like us, talk like us or
threatens to cut off our oil.

-->Ribaud<---

#####################

FREE TRADE: (from The People's Solidarity Network)

Approximately seven U.S. banks have over 50% of their capital
loaned to Mexico and they are in trouble. (Mexico can't even pay
the interest on these loans.) Free Trade is another way to save
the banks. Bush knew this and his constituency, the super rich
in this country knows it and it is in their best interest to
protect the peso [NOTE: And Clinton knows it too]. Free Trade
will do just that. These banks want Mexico to boost exports and
reduce their imports, and take other austerity measures, which
include further cuts in wages, so Mexican labor would be even
more exploited than it already is. It has been part of the right
wing agenda in this country to establish more free trade global
markets for exactly the reason these same very interested shakers
and movers of capital want FREE TRADE with Mexico: access to
cheap labor, and no safety or environment regulations, all of
which consequently would translate into higher profits. American
Corporations will be shifting jobs to Mexico to take advantage of
lower production and labor costs. That this will happen is
obvious and the reason why our labor unions are so adamently
opposed to free trade. What's more, given the political climate
which exists in Mexico, monopolies will have no trouble
establishing themselves with bribes and kickbacks, much as has
happened with bananas in Latin America. Look for this to happen
with other commodities, including citrus, which will be treated
with pesticides and other poisons, that now have a limited use or
may not used at all in this country because of inherent health
risks to workers and consumers. Free Trade would open the door to
further U.S. domination, and a loss of autonomy for Mexicans
which many are opposed to. And many Mexicans are well aware, even
if most Americans are not, that Mexico already lost one half of
its territory to the U.S. in the War of 1846.

***************************************

PEOPLE BEFORE PROFITS!
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###################################################