>York. Welfare poor families are less typical of the poor
>than before and many of the problems they now confront--
>jobs, childcare, access to health insurance--are more
>typical of those faced by other poor and near-poor
>families. Reform has cast much of the former welfare poor
>and the working poor in the same boat. They are now fellow
>competitors in the low-wage labor market."
>
>"The problem is," Levitan concluded, "we are telling
>people to climb out of poverty on a downward moving
>escalator."
>
>The motor of that downward moving escalator for workers
>and oppressed peoples is class relations under capitalism.
>The ravenous appetite of capitalism's elite to devour an
>increasingly larger share of the wealth created by the
>collective labor of the working class is making the rich
>richer and the poor poorer.
>
>The overturning of so much of the social ist camp has made
>the appetite of these bosses for super-profits even more
>voracious.
>
>What will turn around this growing gap between wealth and
>poverty? A rising tide of struggles by workers and
>oppressed peoples here and around the world to take back
>all the wealth and tools of production built through their
>labor.
>
> - END -
>
>(Copyleft Workers World Service. Everyone is permitted to
>copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but
>changing it is not allowed. For more information contact
>Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail:
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] For subscription info send message
>to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.workers.org)
>
>
>
>Message-ID: <066201bfc8e3$ddede4f0$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>From: "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: [WW] Olympics protest targets Texas executions
>Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 16:32:38 -0400
>Content-Type: text/plain;
> charset="iso-8859-1"
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
>-------------------------
>Via Workers World News Service
>Reprinted from the June 1, 2000
>issue of Workers World newspaper
>-------------------------
>
>HOUSTON: OLYMPICS PROTEST TARGETS TEXAS EXECUTIONS
>
>By Gloria Rubac
>Houston
>
>On May 14 and 15, the Texas Death Penalty Abolition
>Movement demonstrated outside the Hyatt Regency Hotel.
>Inside, the City of Houston was hosting a media weekend for
>Olympic athletes, corporate sponsors, and world media
>attending the summer games in Sydney, Australia. Houston is
>campaigning to host the next Olympics.
>
>After anti-death penalty flyers mysteriously appeared in
>the official media packets, hotel management and Houston
>police tried to shut down the second day of protest. Cops
>continually harassed the demonstrators. They even tried to
>find an excuse to ban protesters' amplified sound system as
>protesters were informing Olympic participants that Houston
>has executed more people than any other U.S. city.
>
>"If Houston wants to host an international event such as the
>Olympics, then the city must conform to international law,"
>said one activist during an impromptu street meeting outside
>the hotel. "It prohibits the execution of juveniles, the
>mentally challenged, and non-citizens who were not given their
>consular rights, assured under Article 25 of the Vienna
>Convention." Despite U.S. propaganda on human rights, Texas
>violates all these provisions.
>
> - END -
>
>(Copyleft Workers World Service. Everyone is permitted to
>copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but
>changing it is not allowed. For more information contact
>Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail:
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] For subscription info send message
>to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.workers.org)
>
>
>
>Message-ID: <066801bfc8e4$45100640$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>From: "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: [WW] Protesters confront Albright again
>Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 16:35:31 -0400
>Content-Type: text/plain;
> charset="iso-8859-1"
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
>-------------------------
>Via Workers World News Service
>Reprinted from the June 1, 2000
>issue of Workers World newspaper
>-------------------------
>
>GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY:
>PROTESTERS CONFRONT ALBRIGHT AGAIN
>
>By Malcolm Cummins
>Washington
>
>Students at George Washington University weren't about to
>let this opportunity pass: Secretary of State Madeleine
>Albright was being invited to give the commencement address
>on May 21. Albright is probably as hated by the new
>generation of activists as Richard Nixon was during the
>Vietnam War.
>
>To make it even more enticing, World Bank President James
>Wolfensohn was being given an honorary degree by the
>university. One student commented, "Mad banker, mad bomber,
>mad students!"
>
>The students were following the example of UC Berkeley
>students who had protested against Albright two weeks
>earlier.
>
>GWU professor Tom Nagy helped by writing a scathing
>indictment of the U.S. sanctions against Iraq, Cuba, and
>Yugoslavia for a slick folded brochure that cleverly posed
>as the day's program. Able to get close to Albright as she
>left the stage, Nagy challenged her on the sanctions
>against Iraq. Nagy said Albright shot him an "angry and
>surprised look" as she rushed to her limousine.
>
>Fifty additional supporters from the International Action
>Center and the D.C. Coalition to Stop the U.S. War Against
>Iraq brought picket signs and distributed literature.
>
>When the secretary got up to speak, a group of graduating
>students with anti-WTO stickers on their gowns rose to
>leave. But when one young woman with a protest sign was
>pulled out of the crowd by the police, the 10 graduating
>students went to the back instead and stood in solidarity
>until the police released her.
>
>Workers World talked to Afsi Khot, a graduating student
>who is with the GW Action Coalition. She said it was
>"reprehensible that graduating students are forced to
>listen to hypocrites who try to brainwash them. We won't
>stand for it."
>
> - END -
>
>(Copyleft Workers World Service. Everyone is permitted to
>copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but
>changing it is not allowed. For more information contact
>Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail:
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] For subscription info send message
>to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.workers.org)
>
>
>
>Message-ID: <066e01bfc8e4$7bf8b9e0$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>From: "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: [WW] Ho Chi Minh: Liberation fighter & Vietnam's leader
>Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 16:37:03 -0400
>Content-Type: text/plain;
> charset="iso-8859-1"
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
>-------------------------
>Via Workers World News Service
>Reprinted from the June 1, 2000
>issue of Workers World newspaper
>-------------------------
>
>HO CHI MINH: LIBERATION FIGHTER & VIETNAM'S LEADER
>
>[Following are excerpts from a talk by Naomi Cohen on May
>19, at a Workers World Party meeting to commemorate the
>110th anniversary of the birth of Ho Chi Minh and the 75th
>anniversary of the birth of Malcolm X.]
>
>Ho Chi Minh was born on May 19, 1890, in a village in
>central Vietnam. Anyone who ever saw his picture knows he
>was slight in stature. But Ho Chi Minh was a towering
>figure in the history of the national liberation movements
>of the 20th century. His leadership of the struggle against
>colonialism in Indochina inspired and gave confidence to
>millions of oppressed peoples in all the colonial countries
>of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.
>
>>From the time he was a teenager, Ho--born Nguyen Tat
>Thanh--was involved in anti-colonial activities against the
>French colonial regime. Details about his early years are
>sketchy, but it is known that in 1911 he went to sea as a
>kitchen worker on a French ocean liner and thus got to see
>the condition of the working classes and oppressed peoples
>all over the world.
>
>He identified with the struggles of all colonized peoples
>and wrote about their plight in detail. Ho spent some time
>in the United States and saw in the Jim Crow segregation
>system, as well as in the racist terror of the Ku Klux
>Klan, close duplications of the status of the Vietnamese
>under French rule that he knew firsthand. In fact, he wrote
>a number of essays on the KKK and the lynching of Black
>people in the U.S., exposing the hypocrisy of the so-called
>democratic system.
>
>In an essay entitled "Lynching, a Little-Known Aspect of
>American Civilization," written in 1924, Ho wrote:
>
>"It is well known that the Black race is the most
>oppressed and most exploited of the human family. It is
>well known that the spread of capitalism and the discovery
>of the New World had as an immediate result the rebirth of
>slavery, which was, for centuries, a scourge for the
>Negroes and a bitter disgrace for humanity. What everyone
>does not perhaps know, is that after 65 years of so-called
>emancipation, American Negroes still endure atrocious moral
>and material sufferings, of which the most cruel and
>horrible is the custom of lynching."
>
>JOINED EUROPEAN SOCIALIST MOVEMENT
>
>During World War I, Ho Chi Minh worked in London as a
>kitchen helper and also shoveled snow to eke out a meager
>existence, all the while participating in the European
>socialist movement of the time and keeping in touch with
>developments in Indochina. Toward the end of 1917, he moved
>to France where there was a large Vietnamese exile
>community. In November of that year, the Bolshevik
>Revolution triumphed in Russia and there were fierce
>working class struggles in many of the imperialist powers
>in Europe.
>
>Ho joined the French Socialist Party and participated in
>the political debates of the time over the road to
>socialism. But his burning interest remained how to
>liberate the colonial peoples from their imperialist
>masters and how the working-class organizations of Europe
>would participate and assist in those struggles. After all,
>the war was fundamentally an inter-imperialist struggle
>about which of the European and North American powers would
>hold sway over the colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle
>East.
>
>Ho's earliest public document, drafted under the name
>Nguyen Ai Quoc, was an appeal to the Versailles Conference
>of 1919, where the imperialist powers were meeting to re-
>divide the spoils of the war. While U.S. President Woodrow
>Wilson was posing as the champion of self-determination for
>the colonial people, behind closed doors the U.S., France,
>and Britain were actually negotiating over who would get
>which colonies. Wilson refused an audience to the audacious
>Vietnamese man who dared write up a program for the self-
>determination of the Indochinese people and show up at
>Versailles. France remained the colonial power in
>Indochina, which consisted of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
>
>During this same post-war period, Ho Chi Minh immersed
>himself in the debates in the European socialist movement
>over which international grouping would give leadership to
>the struggle. In an article Ho wrote in 1960 about this
>period, he described how he became a Leninist and
>identified with the Third International.
>
>"Heated debates were then taking place in the branches of
>the Socialist Party about the question of whether the
>Socialist Party should remain in the Second International,
>should a Second-and-a-half International be founded, or
>should the Socialist Party join Lenin's Third
>International? I attended the meetings regularly, twice or
>thrice a week, and attentively listened to the discussions.
>First I could not understand thoroughly. Why were the
>discussions so heated? . . .
>
>"What I wanted most to know--and this precisely was not
>debated in the meetings--was: Which International sides
>with the people of colonial countries?
>
>"I raised this question--the most important in my opinion-
>-in a meeting. Some comrades answered: It is the Third, not
>the Second, International. And a comrade gave me Lenin's
>`Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,' published
>by l'Humanit�, to read.
>
>"There were political terms difficult to understand in
>this thesis. But by dint of reading it again and again,
>finally I could grasp the main part of it. What emotion,
>enthusiasm, clear-sightedness, and confidence it instilled
>into me! I was overjoyed to tears. Though sitting alone in
>my room, I shouted aloud as if addressing large crowds:
>`Dead martyrs, compatriots! This is what we need, this is
>the path to our liberation!' . . .
>
>"At first, patriotism, not yet communism, led me to have
>confidence in Lenin, in the Third International. Step by
>step, along the struggle, by studying Marxism-Leninism
>parallel with participation in practical activities, I
>gradually came upon the fact that only Socialism and
>Communism can liberate the oppressed nations and the
>working people throughout the world from slavery."
>
>Until his death in 1969, Ho Chi Minh was to be the guiding
>light for the liberation struggle in Indochina. Under his
>leadership, the combined forces of the Indochinese people
>defeated first the French and then the U.S. imperialists
>over a period of some 40 years.
>
>DEFEATED FRENCH AND U.S. IMPERIALISTS
>
>In September of 1945, Ho Chi Minh was installed as
>president of the Provisional Government in Hanoi, having
>driven out both the Japanese and French occupation forces
>from Vietnam. But, like in Korea, where the revolutionary
>forces under Kim Il Sung also liberated their country from
>Japanese occupation, the imperialists were bent on the re-
>occupation and division of the country. In Vietnam, the
>French were the main occupation force, but the U.S. played
>a key role in supporting French colonialism there.
>
>It took another nine years for the Vietnam People's Army
>to oust the French in the historic battle at Dien Bien Phu
>in 1954. Then the combined forces of the North and the
>National Liberation Front in the South fought for another
>20 years, finally defeating the U.S. in 1975 and driving it
>from its last bastions in Saigon--now Ho Chi Minh City.
>
>Famous for utilizing a type of guerrilla warfare known as
>People's War, Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nyugen Giap, who
>was commander-in-chief of the Vietnam People's Army, led
>the decisive battle against the French forces in 1954. It
>is extremely interesting today to understand how this was
>accomplished. Here is a brief description of how they
>prepared for the battle, from "An Outline History of the
>Viet Nam Workers' Party," published in Hanoi, 1976:
>
>"Our artillery and infantry units, with only rudimentary
>equipment, built hundreds of kilometers of roads through
>forests and mountains to the battlefield, dug hundreds of
>kilometers of communication trenches under intense enemy
>fire, and hauled heavy guns up hill and down dale to the
>battlefield.
>
>"Putting into effect the slogan `all for the front, all
>for victory,' 200,000 volunteer carriers provided more than
>3 million work days to serve the Dien Bien Phu front. Tens
>of thousands of members of shock youth brigades together
>with engineer units valiantly opened new roads and defused
>enemy delayed-action bombs on communication lines. Tens of
>thousands of pack bicycles, buffalo carts, ox carts, horse
>carts and boats were used for the transport of rice,
>foodstuffs and ammunition to the front . . .
>
>"After 55 days and nights of continuous fighting, on May
>7, 1954, our army completely destroyed the Dien Bien Phu
>fortified entrenched camp, annihilating or capturing 16,000
>enemy troops. The entire French command led by De Castries
>surrendered after hoisting a white flag."
>
>The experience of Dien Bien Phu was built upon and used in
>the long struggle against U.S. aggression, where the mass
>of the people were mobilized, North and South, often right
>under the enemy's noses. This is what was done in the Tet
>Offensive in South Vietnam in 1968, which was really a
>nationwide armed insurrection carried out by hundreds of
>thousands of people, not just trained soldiers.
>
>In fact, it turned out that the U.S. ambassador's
>chauffeur was a National Liberation Front fighter who, at
>the time of the Tet Offensive, was able to open the gates
>to the U.S. Embassy compound and let in other guerrilla
>fighters. They took the compound long enough to fly the NLF
>flag from the embassy roof in Saigon.
>
>The example of the struggle in Vietnam gave optimism to
>people around the world. They saw that if an oppressed
>people, armed at first with only bamboo spears or bows and
>arrows, could bring the French and then the mighty U.S.
>colossus to their knees, then there was hope that they,
>too, could challenge the imperialist beast.
>
>The rallying cry of liberation movements from Latin
>America to Africa was, "Two, three, many Vietnams." In the
>U.S. as well, fighters for Black liberation like Malcolm X
>and the youth of the Black Panther Party and Young Lords
>Party were listening and learning from the example set by
>Vietnam and its president, Ho Chi Minh.
>
> - END -
>
>(Copyleft Workers World Service. Everyone is permitted to
>copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but
>changing it is not allowed. For more information contact
>Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail:
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] For subscription info send message
>to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.workers.org)
>
>
>
__________________________________
KOMINFORM
P.O. Box 66
00841 Helsinki - Finland
+358-40-7177941, fax +358-9-7591081
e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.kominf.pp.fi
___________________________________
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subscribe/unsubscribe messages
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
___________________________________
