[Marxism-Thaxis] US to Attend Hiroshima Memorial for First Time
US to Attend Hiroshima Memorial for First Time By Shingo Ito August 3, 2010, Agence France-Presse via common Dreams http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/08/03 HIROSHIMA, Japan - Sixty-five years after a mushroom cloud rose over Hiroshima, the United States will for the first time send an envoy this Friday to commemorate the bombing that rang in the nuclear age. Its World War II allies Britain and France, both declared nuclear powers, will also send their first diplomats to the ceremony in the western Japanese city in a sign of support for the goal of nuclear disarmament. Japan, the only country that has ever been attacked with atomic bombs -- first on August 6, 1945 in Hiroshima, and three days later in Nagasaki -- has pushed for the abolition of the weapons of mass destruction ever since. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who arrives in Japan on Tuesday, will be the first UN chief to attend the ceremony. UN spokesman Martin Nesirsky said Ban wanted to draw attention to the urgent need to achieve global nuclear disarmament. In Japan, a pacifist nation since its WWII surrender six days after the Nagasaki bombing, memories of the nuclear horror still run deep. To read more, go to http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/08/03 _ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] non-rightwingers win in Rep and Dem parties
This could be interpreted that the dialectic of Tea Party's impact in Michigan is leftish candidates won in both Dems and Reps parties, i.e. Michiganders rejected the Tea Party move. Snyder is the most centrist of the Republican candidates. Bernero is a slightly throwback type of urban mayor. Charles Snyder, Bernero turn their focus to November Gov race pits GOP's tough nerd against Dems' angriest mayor Mark Hornbeck / Detroit News Lansing Bureau Michigan's race for governor will be a matchup of opposites: Democratic Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero, the experienced politico who has held four different public offices, against Republican Ann Arbor businessman Rick Snyder, the entrepreneur who has never held elective office. Bernero coasted past House Speaker Andy Dillon in Tuesday's Democratic primary while Snyder bested four opponents. Snyder, 51, is a soft-spoken, almost shy Battle Creek native who calls himself one tough nerd. He sailed through the University of Michigan with three degrees, found work as an accountant, ran Gateway computers and then became a successful venture capitalist. From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20100804/POLITICS02/8040370/Snyder--Bernero-turn-their-focus-to-November#ixzz0vdyd685w ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Monopoly Media Manipulation
Monopoly Media Manipulation http://www.michaelparenti.org/MonopolyMedia.html May 2001 In a capitalist “democracy” like the United States, the corporate news media faithfully reflect the dominant class ideology both in their reportage and commentary. At the same time, these media leave the impression that they are free and independent, capable of balanced coverage and objective commentary. How they achieve these seemingly contradictory but legitimating goals is a matter worthy of study. Notables in the media industry claim that occasional inaccuracies do occur in news coverage because of innocent error and everyday production problems such as deadline pressures, budgetary restraints, and the difficulty of reducing a complex story into a concise report. Furthermore, no communication system can hope to report everything, hence selectivity is needed. To be sure, such pressures and problems do exist and honest mistakes are made, but do they really explain the media’s overall performance? True the press must be selective, but what principle of selectivity is involved? I would argue that media bias usually does not occur in random fashion; rather it moves in more or less consistent directions, favoring management over labor, corporations over corporate critics, affluent whites over low income minorities, officialdom over protestors, the two-party monopoly over leftist third parties, privatization and free market “reforms” over public sector development, U.S. dominance of the Third World over revolutionary or populist social change, and conservative commentators and columnists over progressive or radical ones. Suppression by Omission Some critics complain that the press is sensationalistic and invasive. In fact, it is more often muted and evasive. More insidious than the sensationalistic hype is the artful avoidance. Truly sensational stories (as opposed to sensationalistic) are downplayed or avoided outright. Sometimes the suppression includes not just vital details but the entire story itself, even ones of major import. Reports that might reflect poorly upon the national security state are least likely to see the light of day. Thus we hear about political repression perpetrated by officially designated “rogue” governments, but information about the brutal murder and torture practiced by U.S.-sponsored surrogate forces in the Third World, and other crimes committed by the U.S. national security state are denied public airing, being suppressed with a consistency that would be called “totalitarian” were it to occur in some other countries. The media downplay stories of momentous magnitude. In 1965 the Indonesian military — advised, equipped, trained, and financed by the U.S. military and the CIA — overthrew President Achmed Sukarno and eradicated the Indonesian Communist Party and its allies, killing half a million people (some estimates are as high as a million) in what was the greatest act of political mass murder since the Nazi Holocaust. The generals also destroyed hundreds of clinics, libraries, schools, and community centers that had been established by the Communists. Here was a sensational story if ever there was one, but it took three months before it received passing mention in Time magazine and yet another month before it was reported in the New York Times (April 5, 1966), accompanied by an editorial that actually praised the Indonesian military for “rightly playing its part with utmost caution.” Over the course of forty years, the CIA involved itself with drug traffickers in Italy, France, Corsica, Indochina, Afghanistan, and Central and South America. Much of this activity was the object of extended congressional investigation — by Senator Church's committee and Congressman Pike’s committee in the 1970s, and Senator Kerry's committee in the late 1980s. But the corporate capitalist media seem not to have heard about it. Attack and Destroy the Target When omission proves to be an insufficient mode of censorship and a story somehow begins to reach larger publics, the press moves from artful avoidance to frontal assault in order to discredit the story. In August 1996, the San Jose Mercury News, drawing from a year-long investigation, ran an in-depth series about the CIA-contra crack shipments that were flooding East Los Angeles. Holding true to form, the major media mostly ignored the issue. But the Mercury News series was picked up by some local and regional newspapers, and was flashed across the world on the Internet copiously supplemented pertinent documents and depositions supporting the charges against the CIA. African American urban communities, afflicted by the crack epidemic, were up in arms and wanted to know more. The story became difficult to ignore. So, the major media began an all-out assault. A barrage of hit pieces in the Washington Post and New York Times and on network television and PBS assured
[Marxism-Thaxis] Too Big Not To Organize
Too Big Not To Organize An international coalition of unions, led by SEIU, tries to unionize capitalism's core: the banks. By Mike Elk July 29, 2010 In These Times This article is permanently archived at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/main/article/6273/ BOSTON--Through the blare of screeching feedback from portable translation headsets and microphones, unionized bank workers from Brazil, England, Chile, Germany, and Uruguay are encouraging American workers to undertake an unprecedented campaign against a common enemy: Grupo Santander, the global banking giant which last year took control of Sovereign Bank. The largest bank in the Euro-zone, where it is based, Santander is the world's eighth largest banking company by market capitalization. While the company is very good at generating profits around the world (it's the world's fourth largest bank by profits), this international meeting is focusing on something else: how the bank's new U.S. branches might become as unionized as branches in Europe and Latin America. Santander bank branches are on average 75-percent unionized outside the United States, according to UNI Global Union Finance Director Oliver Roethig because most other industrialized nations have unionized banking sectors. In the United States, however, less than 1 percent of all front-office bank workers are organized. In fact, the unionized janitors working for contractors that clean Sovereign Bank's headquarters in Boston, Mass., often make more than the bank tellers and personal bankers, whose average wage is $10-$12 dollars per hour, despite individually producing millions of dollars in profits for the bank each year. But the financial sector, at the center of the U.S. economy, has never been unionized. The international workers and local leaders of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and Communication Workers of America (CWA) gathered in July to use the clout of global union federations like the UNI Global Union to give labor a foothold in Santander's Sovereign operations, and potentially organize the industry from there. If Santander employees are heavily unionized overseas, and corporate profits are so robust, then why shouldn't American workers also join a union? Bank reform from the inside Santander has already responded to the organizing campaign, labor activists say, firing three Boston Sovereign workers in June for organizing activities--Steve Crowley, Janice DeJusi and Gary Rozenas. Crowley, who had worked at Sovereign for 30 years, was honored by the bank this spring for being a top seller, but was fired a week after signing a letter about office problems following Santander's acquisition of the bank. DeJusi and Rozenas were fired after talking to colleagues about forming a union, according to Andy Kerr of CWA. Santander has denied discriminating against employees for union activity, saying Sovereign Bank adheres to all U.S. labor laws. A Sovereign spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment on union-busting allegations. When Santander acquired Sovereign, it immediately laid off 23 percent of its new subsidiary's workers. The company cut pay, slashed hours and doubled the cost of healthcare for workers. Sovereign workers knew they had to do something, so they approached SEIU last spring to help them organize. But why would SEIU, which has risen to prominence during the last 25 years in part by organizing janitors, be interested in organizing bank workers? Well, it started out in the 1980s; we would organize a building [where janitors worked]... and find out that the management firm that owned the building was really owned by a pension fund, which was owned by an investment firm, which was ultimately owned by a bank, says Stephen Lerner, the brainchild of SEIU's Justice for Janitors campaign and now director of SEIU's Banking and Finance Campaign. This began a thirty-year process in which we began to discover how much power the big banks have. The theory is that if workers gain some control over the banks through the power of unions and the ability to strike, they could have a chokehold on one of the economy's key sectors. Our members are facing layoffs as a result of the economic crisis caused by the banks, says Lerner. They are screaming out to do something against the banks...scamming them with outrageous bank fees and sub-prime loans. The large corporations at the center of the subprime mortgage meltdown, such as Countrywide, often based pay for personal bankers on selling risky products. The more money I sold you and the higher the rate, the more money I made, said Donna Feener, a former Bank of America employee who worked in the company's credit card balance transfer department. The more outrageous fees and the higher interest loans they can sign you up for, the more workers who have a base salary of only about $10 an hour make. The Credit Card, Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure (CARD) Act, signed into law last year, banned
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] US to Attend Hiroshima Memorial for First Time
Japan, the only country that has ever been attacked with atomic bombs -- first on August 6, 1945 in Hiroshima, and three days later in Nagasaki -- has pushed for the abolition of the weapons of mass destruction ever since. Which is why the governments of Japan have knowingly allowed/acquiesced to the US storing, transhipping and deploying nukes in Japan, right? Which is why their government never protests the US deploying nukes on the Korean peninsula, right? CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Kiss This War Goodbye
It's hard to say exactly why this crap was released when it was released, but it seems to amount to the same sort of bait and switch we got with the so-called 'Abu Graib' 'revelations'--let's entertain people with SM porn to distract them from our real war atrocities. It could be that some in the 'security' community realize there is no strategic importance to Afghanistan because it is a landlocked country. Certainly deploying 100,000 light infantry with marine airwings isn't going to 'pacify' it. So no doubt some within the national security state are pushing for, at most, an airbase and proxy wars through Kabul and Pakistan puppets, especially if India agrees to it. Meanwhile, they seem to be digging in to rationalize keeping the base-embassy complex in Iraq and 50,000 'trainers' there. Also, the Bushwar Obamaites warpig Demoncrats (along with their Repugnican coalition partners) have to figure out how to keep NATO from falling apart while at the same time financing 1.5 trillion dollars a year on 'national security'. Afghanistan is now clearly not the mission to give NATO a new reason for being. Good luck to them, may they rot in the hell that is the world they create everyday. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
