NAME: Ira Grupper
EMAIL: irag@iglou.com
DATE: 03/29/2008

TITLE: Baldwin Speaks to Iraq War, Destruction of Mountains

LABOR PAEANS—March 2008
by Ira Grupper
(published by FORsooth, newspaper of Louisville, Kentucky chapter of F.O.R. [Fellowship of Reconciliation] )

Baldwin Speaks to Iraq War, Destruction of Mountains

When this newspaper column reaches you, the invading U.S. military will have been in Iraq five long years. The reasons for our having bombed, shot, chemically poisoned, water-boarded and otherwise attacked the Iraqi people—rooting out weapons of mass destruction, and presence of Al Qaeda—were long ago proven to be pretext (read: damn lies).

The $120 billion we spent last year on training, arming and bombing could have provided health care for 47 million uninsured Americans, new un-poisoned FEMA trailers for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, and rebuilt the Iraqi infrastructure we decimated.

Pay attention to the words of James Baldwin: The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their 'vital interests' are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death. These people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the 'sanctity' of human life, or the 'conscience' of the civilized world.” ⁽¹⁾

Your columnist thought about all this on February 15. More than 1,000 of us gathered in Kentucky’s capitol, Frankfort, to demand the legislature pass a bill banning the dumping of coal mining residue and rock atop headwater streams. Coal companies, with reckless abandon, shear mountain tops to get at the coal seams—and to hell with the people and the water. Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, sponsor of the anti-strip mine gathering, is planning future action.

Please note: the despised Caterpillar D9 bulldozers used to destroy our mountains are the very same type used by Israel to bulldoze Palestinian homes.

Speaking of ending destructive practices, Earl Butz, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, died recently. In 1976 “Mr. Butz made a remark in which he described blacks… in obscene and scatological terms.” (AP, via NY Times, Feb. 4).

Even the Republican Party had to react to this viciousness, and Mr. Butz was tossed out the door by the president. One can only imagine what Mr. Butz must have said when presented with petitions by African American farmers for fairness under ASCS (federal agricultural) policies.

But we are now in the twenty first century, and surely things have changed. The headline for a piece by Michelle Chen (Women’s International Perspective, Feb. 7) reads: “New Orleans: Vanishing City/Post-Katrina Redevelopment excludes poor and working-class black New Orleanians”.

Ms. Chen writes, concerning rebuilding efforts after the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina: “The pending demolition of the St. Bernard, B.W. Cooper, C.J. Peete, and Lafitte (structurally rehabilitatible city housing) projects has confirmed the fears of the city's poorest, blackest, and hardest hit communities: that New Orleans' 'recovery' in the wake of the storm is built on the city's old demons of racial and class strife.”

And as if the racism in New Orleans were not bad enough, the SNCC listserv, Jan. 25, carried the following: “Today's local news on KPFT, Houston's Pacifica Radio station, detailed the ‘crime’ for which (Olvide) Duncantell is being jailed: seems he happened upon Houston cops beating a handcuffed prisoner and took exception to that. He asked the cops why they were beating the young man and why didn't they just take him downtown and charge him.

“They told him to butt out or they would take him downtown. He told them that they might have to do that because he could not stand silently by or just walk on when seeing injustice occurring. So, they arrested him for ‘interfering with an officer’. He was convicted and courts all the way up the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans have upheld the conviction.”

Note: Mr. Duncantell, Executive Director of the Black Heritage Society, is seventy one years of age.

Truth be told, all is not so bad. In an article on Feb. 1, Bloomberg reports on record oil profits by the heavy hitters. Exxon Mobil’s “profit rose 14 percent to a record $11.7 billion.” Chevron Corp., “the second-largest U.S. oil company, said fourth-quarter profit rose 29 percent as crude prices climbed to a record on their way to topping $100 a barrel last month.”

What about ConocoPhillips? Answer: “…its net income climbed 37 percent to $4.37 billion.” Only Marathon Oil Corp. reported a decline.

So, for most of the oil billionaires things are looking up. But what about other parts of the economy? Well, the housing market is in deep trouble. Big-time lenders lured people who could not afford homes, the sub-prime market, to finance nonetheless with non-fixed rate mortgages.

Nearly one quarter of these home “owners” got way behind on payments or defaulted; mortgages were foreclosed. Then many lenders, themselves buying and selling as a risky investment, took huge losses.

Countrywide Financial, Merrill Lynch, big commercial banks took big losses as well. Other bankers used the tragedy to buy into the sub-prime market as an investment unto itself, and at bargain-basement prices. Yet and still, the 5th annual conference of the American Securitization Forum, the industry whorehouse, recently met in Las Vegas to plan for the future.

Back in January, the U.S. Conference of Mayors released recommendations for Congress and the lending industry to help mitigate the economic distress of the mortgage crisis by reducing the number of foreclosures, helping borrowers facing foreclosures and stabilizing neighborhoods suffering from vacated, foreclosed properties.

“Up to 2 million homeowners face foreclosure this year. The word ‘recession’ is on everyone’s lips. Now is not the time to be timid. We need strong and immediate action from both Congress and the mortgage industry,” said USCM President Douglas Palmer, Mayor of Trenton, NJ, who led a delegation of mayors to Detroit this past November to discuss possible remedies with mortgage lenders and community activists.

During that meeting, the mayors unveiled a report that projected “the foreclosure crisis would result in 524,000 fewer jobs being created this year and a potential loss of $6.6 billion in tax revenues in ten states.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt got the U.S. out of the Depression, during the 1930’s, by creating huge federal jobs programs. This was not socialism; Roosevelt was a capitalist. But he was a smart capitalist.

There are, indeed, a few politicians who speak out against the conglomerates and in favor of ordinary folk. Ohio’s U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich is one. He was rewarded for his integrity by General Electric, thru its NBC television network, “rescind(ing) an invitation to (then Democratic) presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich to appear in its January 15 debate in Las Vegas. (NBC) went all the way to the Nevada Supreme Court to defend its decision--all the while failing to explain its logic to the public (Nation, via FAIR, 1/17/08).

We close with a troubling report distributed by the National Lawyers Guild Anti-Racism Committee: “Parviz Kambakhsh, a 23-year-old Afghani student, has just been sentenced to death after three months of detention under terrible conditions in the state security's detention centre in Marzar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan.

“Now in his third year of a journalism course at Balkh University in Mazar-e-Sharif, Parviz Kambakhsh also works as a journalist for the newspaper/ Jahan-e Naw/.

“The young journalist was thrown into prison after being characterised as an atheist and an opponent of the regime by the NDS, the Karzai regime's security service. He is also accused of having printed atheist articles off the internet and distributed them among his classmates.

“Kambakhsh was tortured continuously during his detention, both physically and mentally, and even threatened with death if he did not admit to the charges leveled against him. “He has not had access to a lawyer. He has not been allowed to see members of his family or friends.

“The death sentence was delivered in his absence and in secret…In 2001, when the war started with the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan under the aegis of NATO, the occupying troops from the United States, France, Italy and Germany talked about re-establishing democracy and democratic rights and freedoms.

“The Karzai regime that was put in place by the occupying forces has reintroduced Sharia law as the basic law of the land, with the support of all the states participating in the occupation and the war. It is precisely in the name of the Sharia law that the young journalist Parviz Kambakhsh has been sentenced to death for circulating documents downloaded from the internet.”

For more information, contact: ilcinfo@earthlink.net Postal Address: Syndicat Général Des journalistes Force Ouvrière, 131 rue Damrémont, 75018 Paris France. Please send your Labor Paeans scribe a copy of your note.

Contact Ira Grupper: irag@iglou.com

*Notes
^{(1) Baldwin, James, Collected Essays (1998), 566;
(2) Devil Finds Work (1976), 489, NY Dial Press;}

March, 2007 Newspaper
http://www.ccds.org/newsletters/labor_paeans_Mar07.html

February, 2007 Newspaper
http://www.ccds.org/newsletters/labor_paeans_feb07.html