*PROTESTING NUCLEAR POWER
* ** *"Tens of thousands gathered in the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Monday to mark the anniversary of the atomic bomb seven decades ago. As crowds gathered throughout the city, speakers and anti-nuclear activists reminded the crowds that nuclear catastrophe is not a distant memory, but a continual threat owed to nuclear power and disasters such as Fukushima," begins a piece at /Common Dreams/ <http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/08/06-0> this morning. * ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *COLOMBIA STILL SUPPRESSING LABOR UNIONS * ** *"Two months after a free trade agreement between the US and Colombia went into effect, workers continue to face attacks," reports /al Jazeera/ this morning in a piece titled "Assault on Colombian trade unions continues <http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/07/201273175715676335.html>." Colombia has the worst record of violence against labor unions on the planet, which is why the US government, on behalf of the transnational corporations that finance our elections, provides political support for the anti-labor government, ignoring the mass murders of leftists and labor organizers. ** "Obama and (Colombian President Juan Manuel) Santos have clearly delivered for the multinational companies and commercial interests," Sánchez-Garzoli, a rights advocate at the Washington Office on Latin America, says. * ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *GETTING TO KNOW KEVIN ZEESE AND MARGARET FLOWERS * ** *Two of our favorite activists interview each other this week on Clearing the FOG <http://www.mixcloud.com/ClearingtheFOG/show-23-with-kevin-zeese-and-margaret-flowers-what-we-stand-for-and-why/>. Besides going into current events around the mass media and important to the /LUV/ community, this program reveals the backgrounds of these activists, how they got started devoting their lives to making a better world. * ** ------------------------------------------------------------------------ **In order to maintain a state in which the treasury is controlled by the 1% and the taxes are paid by the 99%, control of mass media is essential. Among industrialized nations Americans are as ignorant as any, and the more they watch TV, the more confused they become. Whenever a citizen gets angry from the manufactured ignorance or insanity, military assault rifles with large ammo clips are made available in every town so they may take out their frustration on a school, church, shopping mall or movie theater. Corporate media "journalists" then put their microphone in front of the redneck down the street, for what they call "balance," so that he can express his profound knowledge of the Constitution-- that nothing in the second amendment forbids a citizen from keeping an ICBM equipped with a hundred megaton thermonuclear warhead in case he should wish to go deer hunting. When I heard about the tragic murders of Sikhs in Wisconsin, my first thought was that corporate media did it again, fueling the mass hatreds which bring support to the profitable wars with their unlimited slaughters, through "terrorist" rhetoric. Mass media chant a mantra of evil others, terrorists who dress differently from us, of whom we should be ever watchful lest they blow up the local kindergarten. The dead in this Wisconsin tragedy and their loved ones are merely collateral damage in the bigger scheme of things. The ruling Forces of Greed <http://luvnews.info/FOG.htm> bring in massive profit daily from the wars, so as their "journalists" pretend to be outraged that such a thing as Sikh murders could happen, they sandwich their crocodile tears between phony stories of Iran's weapons of mass destruction and Syria's massacres of innocents, so as to have backup wars in case, heaven forbid, another occupied government asks us to leave, as did Iraq, despite President Obama's ardent pleas to keep troops there beyond the Bush pullout agreement --Jack Balkwill ** **Shooting at the Gurdwara** **** **The Sense of White Supremacy <http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/06/the-sense-of-white-supremacy/> ** ** ** **** **by VIJAY PRASHAD** **** **** **Sunday morning the orgies of the lone gunman took hold in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, a town in the dragnet of Milwaukee. He targeted a Gurdwara, the religious home of the local Sikh community. The gunman entered the Gurdwara, and as if in mimicry of the school shootings, stalked the worshippers in the halls of the 17,000 square foot "Sikh Temple of Wisconsin." Police engaged the gunman, who wounded at least one officer. The gunman killed at least seven Sikhs, wounding many more. He was then killed. A few hours after the shooting Ven Boba Ri, a committee member of the Gurdwara told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, "It's pretty much a hate crime. It's not an insider." ** **The local police smartly said that this is an act of domestic terrorism. The FBI concurred. ** **This is the not the first act of violence against Sikhs in the United States. ** **That story begins in the 19th century, when Sikhs migrated to the US, fleeing British colonialism for far-flung pastures. Many landed along the western coast of the United States, working alongside Japanese, Mexican and Filipino workers to make California into a fruit-producer and Oregon and Washington into major lumber producers. But they were not welcomed. ** **Riots in Bellingham, Washington (1907) and Live Oak, California (1908) targeted the "rag heads," the turban-wearing Sikhs. The mob "stormed makeshift Indian residences, stoned Indian workers and successfully orchestrated the non-involvement of local police." The Bellingham Morning Reveille ran a drawing of a "Sikh" man with the caption, "This is the type of man driven from this city as the result of last night's demonstration by a mob of 500 men and boys." It was a mark of pride to have cleansed the city of the Sikhs. ** **The Sikhs didn't take this lying down. A decade later, one Sikh man bragged, "I used to go to Maryville every Saturday. One day a ghora [white man] came out of a bar and motioned to me, saying, 'Come here, slave!' I said I was no slave man. He told me that his race ruled India and I hit him and got away fast." ** **Anti-Sikh violence does not reside only in the early part of the 20th century. It returned a century later, when, after 9/11, Sikh men and women were targeted once more for their turban and head-scarf. Since Osama Bin Laden wore a turban, it was the turban that attracted the racist to the Sikhs. As I note in Uncle Swami, within the first week after 9/11, a disproportionately large number of the 645 bias attacks took place against Sikhs. ** **The statement on the Oak Creek shootings that came from the activist group South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) drew a straight line between the post-9/11 violence and this attack, "While the facts are still emerging, this event serves as a tragic reminder of violence in the form of hate crimes that Sikhs and many members of the South Asian community have endured since September 11th, 2001." ** **Two quick reactions to the Oak Creek violence raised the hackles of some of the sharp organizers in the South Asian American community: ** *** This was an act of senseless violence. "No," said Rinku Sen, publisher of Colorlines magazines. This is not "senseless," she noted, but "racist." This is the fifty-seventh mass shooting in the past thirty years in the United States. Each one is treated as the work of a freak. Patterns are shunned. Structural factors such as the prevalence of guns and the lack of social care for mentally disturbed people should of course be in the frame. But so too should the preponderance of socially acceptable hatred against those seen as outsiders. ** **Intellectually respectable opinions about who is an American (produced, for example, by Sam Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenge to National Identity) comes alongside the politician's casual racism (Romney's recent suggestion that the US and the UK are "part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage," erased in a whip lash the diversity of the United States and Britain). Racist attacks are authorized by a political culture that allows us to think in nativist terms, to bemoan the "browning" of America. By 2034, the Census department estimates, the non-white population of the US is going to be in the majority. ** **With the political class unwilling to reverse the tide of jobless growth and corporate power, the politicians stigmatize the outsider as the problem of poverty and exploitation. This stigmatization, as Moishe Postone argues, obscures "the role played by capitalism in the reproduction of grief." Far easier to let the Sikhs and the Latinos, the Muslims and the Africans bear the social cost for economic hopelessness and political powerlessness than to target the real problem: the structures that benefit the 1% and allow them to luxuriate in Richistan. ** *** Sikhs are not Muslims. The second argument, now clichéd, is to make the case that this is violence at the wrong address. Sikhs did nothing wrong, they are peace-loving and so on. It assumes that there are people who did do something wrong, are war-mongering and therefore deserve to be targeted. The liberal gesture of innocence has within it the sharp edge of Islamaphobia. It seems to suggest that Muslims are the ones who should bear this violence, since their ilk did the attacks on 9/11 and they are, all two billion of them, at war with the United States. ** **The attack on Sikhs is not a mistaken attack. Sikhs are not mistaken for Muslims, but seen as part of the community of outsiders who are, as Patrick Buchanan puts it in States of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, "a fifth column inside the belly of the beast...Should America lose her ethnic-cultural core and become a nation of nations, America will not survive." Wisconsin's Governor Scott Walker is not far from all this, being a fan of the Arizona anti-human legislation. ** **The Sikh Coalition, an anti-bias group, is fully aware that this is not simply a situation of mistaken identity. Its 2008 report, Making Our Voices Heard, notes that although it is not the case that Sikhs are members of the Taliban or clones of Bin Laden, it is this recurrent identification that has by now "created an environment in which Sikhs are regularly singled out for abuse and mistreatment by both private and, at times, public actors." Strikingly, forty-one percent of Sikhs in New York City reported being called derogatory names, half of the Sikh children reported being teased or harassed because of their Sikh identity and one hundred percent of Sikhs report having to endure secondary screenings at some US airports. ** **Sapreet Kaur of the Sikh Coalition offered her take of the situation, "There have been multiple hate crime shootings within the Sikh community in recent years and the natural impulse of our community is to unfortunately assume the same in this case."** **** **** **http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/06/the-sense-of-white-supremacy/ ** **Vijay Prashad is the author of Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today (New Press, 2012).** **** **** ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *If you wish to be removed from this list, please let us know* ** *To join the Liberty Underground news service email libertyuv@hotmail.comwith "join" for a subject* ** *You may also join our talk group athttp://groups.yahoo.com/group/libertyundergroundtalk/ <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/libertyundergroundtalk/>if you would like to participate* ** *email: libert...@hotmail.com* ** *Tell your friends about /LUV News/ because some people just don't get it* [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:laamn-unsubscr...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:laamn-subscr...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:laamn-dig...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:laamn-ow...@egroups.com?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:la...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/laamn@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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