.TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.2 *** 9/28/92 New Liberation News Service Table of Contents Volume 3, Number 2 September 28, 1992 ISSN# 1060-4227 NEWS AND VIEWS 1. Klan Rally a "Wake Up Call," *The Gainesville Iguana* 2. Debunking the Myths of Welfare Reform, *Woman's Journal Advocate* 3. A History of Grad Student Organizing, *The Other Texan* 4. Christian Identity, Survivalism & The Posse Comitatus, NLNS 5. THE OCA's "Abnormal Behavior" Initiative, *Oregon Witness* 6. Why Davey Can't Drum, *Leaves of Grass* 7. Post-Liberalism and the Politics of "Change," NLNS 8. Letter from Exile, Ray Luc Lavasseur 9. GI Resistance During the Vietnam War, *On Guard* 10. US/Cuba Caravan to Break the Blockade 11. Anti-Racist Skinheads Smash Stereotypes, *The Madison Edge* 12. Movie Exposes "The Panama Deception," Empowerment Project 13. Nationwide Boycott of Steinfeld's and NORPAC Products, PCUN 14. FROM THE VAULT: Allende Overthrown, LNS 15. Demonstration for Native People's Rights How to use this packet: Member publications are free to reprint everything in this packet, free of restrictions, unless otherwise indicated. The only stipulation for use is that you reprint the credits and credit the news service by printing "(NLNS)." Submissions to NLNS PLEASE submit news, opinions, letters, graphics, photos and anything else that is on your mind to NLNS. We prefer items sent to us on 3.5" disks in either Mac or IBM text or graphic files. NLNS cooperates with: Nicaragua News Update, misc.activism.progressive (Usnet/ACTIV- L), Canadian University Press, Peacenet, Asian Student Association News, and many others. NLNS IS... Susan Conrad, Jason Pramas, and Phillip B. Zerbo. Call or write us at: NLNS, P.O. Box 325 Kendall Square Branch Cambridge,MA 02142 (617) 492-8316 Electronic Mail: Internet: nlns@igc.apc.org Peacenet: nlns (c) 1992 Initiative for Grassroots Media -- All writers and artists retain full rights to all their work appearing in this packet. -- The copyright applies only to the form of this publication and any work produced in-house by the NLNS Staff, and does not in any way effect the reprint policy stated above. Statement of Purpose The New Liberation News Service was founded as a non- profit educational project with one goal in mind--to offer small underground and community media outlets a radical alternative to existing international wire services. We strive to provide as much information to such grassroots media as often and as cheaply as possible. We also work as an activist organization to spread the idea of a people's media to every corner of the globe. NLNS is biased in favor of all democratic movements for social change. We do not believe in the so-called "objectivity" touted as the journalistic standard by the mainstream capitalist press. To us, the only honest journalism is one with an admitted bias. Fairness in reportage is the single value NLNS holds above all others. Fairness to all of the people all of the time--not just to multinational corporations and their government lackeys. As long as the day-to-day struggles of everyday people continue to get buried under the endless deluge of "infotainment", NLNS will be here "uncensored and free" for all those who believe that the power of the press should be available to everyone. Not just to those who own one. Peace. --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.2 *** 9/28/92 .TEXT Klan Rally in Florida is a "Wake Up Call" Jenny Brown, The Gainesville Iguana An urgent message to "wake up" and become aware of the toll of white supremacy was issues by Bradford County, FL residents who gathered to counter the Ku Klux Klan's rally in Lawtey, September 5th. The Klan rally drew about 100 Klan sympathizers and 60 anti- racist protesters to this small town 35 miles north of Gainesville. "I came here out of respect for a lot of people that have lost their lives," said Cedrick Johnson. He cited the murderous system of slavery and American apartheid that the Klan has fought a losing battle to maintain in the South. And he reflected on the people who have lost their lives in the struggle for equal rights. "I didn't ask to be Black but I love being Black... We have to continue the struggle. Are we going to quit, or what?" Anti-Klan protesters started arriving shortly after the scheduled 5 p.m. starting time of the rally. We parked in the parking lot of a nearby Handy Way and walked to the rally entrance where a large white sign with black lettering declared, "KKK Rally." Below, in smaller lettering, with the "N" backwards it stated, "WHITES ONLY. NO FIREARMS, ALCOHOL, DRUGS." When we returned to our car, a Wildlife officer asked us if we were going to "make any trouble." When we said no, he said he had seen our protest signs in our car. When we said we didn't think holding signs would cause any trouble, he intimated that that probably wouldn't be allowed. Other anti-racists appeared and said the police had told them they definitely would not be allowed to hold signs. At which point several people promptly got their signs out of their cars, carried them to the sidewalk just north of the rally entrance and held them so that traffic could read them. Local Klan member Jack Bullock had rented the rally site, a field 50 yards west of Highway 301, from its owner for $1. The owner stated to a newspaper reporter that he didn't agree with the Klan but he felt they should have their freedom of speech. When the landowner started to hear Bullock's boasts that thee rally would attract as many as 1000 Kluxers, he tried to pull out of the deal, but Bulllock had gotten him to sign a written contract. According to the analysis of a high school student attending the rally, the Klan's freedom to speak made others think twice about speaking out. Okeima Lee, a Bradford High School senior, said that she wished more people had come to counter the Klan. Why hadn't they? "The reason white people don't come out is that they were scared they'd be looked down on by other whites," said Lee, an African American. Three of the high school students I talked to were apprehensive about what might happen at school when they return to class Tuesday morning. "Bradford County has only one high school," Lee explained. "I hate to see what life is going to be like." And this is only the second week of school. She was angry that the Klan was "allowed to come to our community and turn things upside-down again," after the school had cooled down somewhat after racial incidents that occurred last year. "We have to live here. Most of these people [attending the Klan rally] aren't even from here." Lee recalled the last school year. "We've had riots, like meeting in the middle of the field and everybody start fighting... some white parents have been sending their kids to Keystone Heights," a whiter school. Looking around at the Klan gathering she added, "And people wondered why there's hatred in the school system." By six, about 30 anti-racist protesters had settled on the grassy edge of the sidewalk closest to highway 301, their backs to the Klan, and were waving at cars that responded to their "Honk Against Hate" signs, taking photos and video of the Klan and each other, and shaking their heads as trucks and cars occasionally pulled into the driveway, and were waved through by klan "security." The provisional ban on signs apparently lifted as soon as actual people with signs had appeared, officers from at least five law enforcement agencies moved their cars around for no clear reason, chatted in groups, and warned us in loud voices not to go to the median strip to take photos, and to stay out of the road. Twice, the police moved the anti-racist contingent farther north, away from the rally entrance. "They'll have us in Baldwin pretty soon," someone joked. Despite the Klan's sign, trucks with firearms were admitted with no problem. When law enforcement officers were asked about this, they said Florida Department of Law Enforcement was handling the situation inside. When police asked the driver about two shotguns in his truck, he explained that they weren't loaded. One rally attendee, upon overhearing the conversation, said, "Well my gun's in there and it's damn loaded." The Klan's history as a terrorist group is not as well known as it should be. Some fine documentation of the Klan has beeen written by Jacksonville native Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated the Klan in the 1940s and wrote "I Rode With the Klan" in 1954 (reissued as "The Klan Unmasked"). "Jim Crow Guide to the South"(1959) was originally published in Europe, as no U.S. publisher would print this scathing exposure of Southern race politics. Kennedy writes that the Klan is "the white-robed and hooded terrorist band which originated in the south in 1867 as a means of virtually re-enslaving" African Americans. Hip hop artist sister Souljah gives this description: "The KKK is a terrorist organization that advocates and does perform the murder of African people and has, over a period of 150 years, killed African people, burnt down our houses, blown up our churches, killed our children and hung our men from trees." Still, one black woman said she was more worried about the Klan in black robes on the bench and in silk suits on the stump, than the ones in white robes in the field. "They look like icebergs," one woman commented about the Klan's white robes and pointed hats. It seemed a particularly apt description of the large, round-faced men, because it also called to mind that the Klan is indeed only the tip of a racist iceberg which is largely more subtle in north Florida. Submerged or not, racism is big business in Bradford County. Like Alachua [County, Florida], Bradford hosts several correctional facilities, which employ nearly 50% of the county's workforce. Florida State Prison, the site of Florida's electric chair, is just ten miles south of Lawtey, in Starke. When big money flows in this area, it flows in the form of prison contracts. One quarter of the people working in neighboring Union County work for the corrections system. Sumter County, south of Ocala, had the good fortunme to pull in the contract for a new prison which will boost [its] economy by $30 million a year. Discussing the poor choices African Americans have in the Alachua County Sheriff and prosecutor races this year, David Padgett, writing in the September *FACT*, says, "The prison business is booming in Florida, and it best clientele is African Americans... With any business you want to make sure your best customers keep coming back..." Padgett, minister of education for the Loyal Order of the 99, points out that racism by the police and courts is mostly how Black people get put in the system and ccontinue in the system. "African Americans are over 60% of people in Florida prisons...[and] were over 75 percent of people who went to prison on drug charges despite being only 20% of those being arrested." he cites a Department of Justice report estimating that by 1994 over one-third of Florida's young black males will be in prison. He points out that "corrections" is Florida's largest area of expenditures, even larger that HRS, the state's huge health and welfare section. The uplifting of the black community, and the rehabilitation of those incarcerated are a long way from the interests of the bosses, managers and politicians. White politicians' attitudes reflect this. "I don't see them in my community except when it's time to get elected," Johnson commented about politicians. "That's why I don't vote. They're not addressing my needs. If they're going to improve the way I'm living, then I might vote." Against this background of an unmistakably white supremacist system, the young African Americans who gathered to counter the Klan had no illusions about the police. "If we did what they're doing, burned a cross and called ourselves the BKK, they'd never protect us like that," one man commented about the police protection the Klan was receiving. "I didn't come here to do violence, but if violence confronts me I'm not going to turn the other cheek," Johnson stated, echoing Malcolm X's ststement that 'self defense is a form of intelligence.' As they stood along the sidewalk young people were talking about the Black Panther Party, Amiri Baraka, Egypt. Several more African American youth arrived as dusk fell. A white high school student, Stacy Trimble. held a sign saying, "All People Are Created Equal." As more black people joined the demonstration, the police became more nervous and the crowd became more vocal in response to the Klan's presence. The police tried again to move protesters even farther away from the rally entrance. Stacy Trimble held her ground. Her mother, Peg Trimble, insisted that the police had told them they could be where they were, and that if they stayed there there would be no problems. "If you don't move now, we're going to arrest you," an officer responded, and then fired off orders to other police to intimidate her, "Get her and put her in the car." No one moved. Peg Trimble again argued with the police. "We're not doing anything wrong. We're doing exactly what you said to do," she insisted. After a long, tense standoff, the police managed to threaten, cajole, intimidate and corral everyone into moving yet again. ' After it was over, Stacy Trimble said, "I feel really strongly that my voice should be heard." Melanie Trimble chimed in, "I think it's wrong. They have their freedom of expression, why can't we have ours?" Reflecting on the whole evening Stacy Trimble added, "It scares me that there's so much hate." From the Handt Way parking lot, a crowd of about 30 looked between the trees towards the field where the cross was to be burned. White hoods were visible past the cars parked in the field, and torched, about 15 of them, circled. "They'd better get used to those flames," someone of a religious bent commented. The crowd's feeling was one of revulsion and fascination. Perhaps there was a fascination to see this symbol of race war, etched in all our minds for so long, in real life. "It's the first time I've seen them come here and have a rally like that," Lee said. It was a defeat, and felt like it, that they were able to burn that cross. It should serve also as a wake-up call for those among us who are still sleeping. Twelve years of reactionary racists and S&L looters in the White House have taken an economic and social toll. "There's been so much heartache already," declared Viona Tew, a white woman from Lawtey who makes dolls. "People are struggling so hard, and now something like this comes alomg." "I've already got a lot of problems. I don't need another problem," said Sandra Allen, a middle aged black woman who said her husband was raised in Lawtey. "I felt hurt and then it evolves into a state of anger. We've come too far, fought too hard to go back." She held a sign that said, "There is no safety in exclusion. Share the wealth." Cedrick Johnson added, "Nobody that breathes oxygen should be treated poorly. It's time for people to stop sleeping. Wake up!" The Gainesville Iguana can be reached c/o CISPLA, PO Box 14712, Gainesville, FL 32604 --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.2 *** 9/28/92 .TEXT Debunking the Myths of Welfare Reform Mimi Abramovitz, Woman's Journal-Advocate (NLNS)--Welfare "reform" has become the major focus in the newest backlash against government programs and a hot political issue, with the welfare mother replacing Willie Horton as the new code word in racial politics. Coercive new plans have gained wide support by playing to a host of sterotypes and myths about AFDC and the women who use the program. The following myths, facts and comments can be used to undermine the stereotypes that fuel current welfare "reforms" and to build support for more progressive social policies. In 1988, the Family Support Act transformed the program called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC from a program to enable single mothers to stay home with their children) into a mandatory work and training program. The 1988 legislation, dubbed "welfare reform," was controversial from the start and has remained so as states try to impliment welfare-to-work programs, with only modest results. But the Family Support Act was just the first in a series of "welfare reforms" that use government dollars to dictate the behavior of women on welfare. If work was the first target of the "new paternalism," the second is the family life of the AFDC mothers. States are now rushing to offer "marriage bonuses" and to deny additional benefits for children born to women on welfare. The "Wedfare" or "Bridefare" proposals require women on welfare to marry and have fewer children in order to qualify for aid. Other programs cut benefits to families who fail to see a doctor, to keep kids in school or to pay the rent on time. In the name of monitoring fraud, some states now fingerprint welfare mothers. MYTH: Women on welfare have large families. FACT: The typical welfare family is a mother and two children, slightly less than the size of the average family in the United States. COMMENT: AFDC families, like other families in the U.S., are getting smaller. MYTH: Welfare mothers live "high on the hog." FACT: The average welfare benefit is $367 a month or $4,400 a year. This is almost $9,000 less than the federal poverty line for a family of three. The real (after inflation) value of the AFDC grant fell 42% from 1972 to 1990, 27% if food stamps are counted. In no state of the union do food stamp and welfare benefits together lift a family of three out of poverty. Meanwhile, during the 1980s, the average pretax income of the richest 20% of all families rose 77%, while that of the poorest 20% declined by 9%. COMMENT: Instead of helping poor women and children live high on the hog, AFDC keeps mother-only families living on poverty. But government programs do not have to keep people poor. Cross-national studies show that U.S. income support programs lifted less than 5% of single mothers with children out of poverty in the 1980s, compared to 89% in the Netherlands, 81% in Sweeden, 75% in the United Kingdom, 50% in France, 33% in Germany and 18.3% in Canada. MYTH: Welfare recipients are lazy and to not want to work. FACT: Of the 13 million AFDC recipients, only 4 million are adults, 90% of whom are women--many mothers of young children. In more than half of welfare homes, the youngest child is under 5 years of age. Many adult women on welfare are not able to work due to illness, disability or lack of education or job skills. Many others have worked at some time in their lives and others combine work and welfare. Still other AFDC mothers want to work but cannot find a job (10% of all single mothers are unemployed) or cannot find jobs that pay enough. (The $4.25 an hour minimum wage is $2.75 an hour less than the $7.00 an hour needed to keep a family of four out of poverty. COMMENT: If work paid enough, fewer people would need welfare. If taking care of one's own children were defined as "work," all mothers would be considered to be working. According to a recent calculation, their labors would be worth at least $17,000. MYTH: Few women on welfare are white. FACT: Of all AFDC mothers, 40% are African-American, 38% are white, 16% are Latina, 2.7% are Asian, 1.3% are Native American and 1.5% are of unknown race. COMMENT: Women of color are overrepresented among those on welfare because they are overrepresented among the poor. The idea that AFDC is a program primarily for women of color is used to mask the fact that so many AFDC mothers are white, to divide women from each other and to make welfare a tool in the politics of race. MYTH: Once on welfare, always on welfare. Welfare is a trap from which few escape. FACT: More than half of women on welfare stay on the rolls for less than one year. A quarter leave within four months, and only one-third stay more than two years. Research on intergenerational welfare use has not been able to establish that daughters of welfare mothers necessarily end up on welfare too. Some do, some do not. COMMENT: The biggest cause of welfare seems to be poverty. It is very hard for children of poor women to escape poverty, especially in the current economy with its falling fages and rising unemployment. It's hard to work your way out of poverty. People working at minimum wage jobs earn less than $9,000 a year. Employers pay women 65 cents for every dollar earned by men. MYTH: Women on welfare have "kids for money." FACT: Despite years of research, studies have found no link between the AFDC grant and births outside of marriage. Those births are no more frequent in high benefit states and no greater in states with rising grant levels than in states with flat or falling AFDC payments. The states provide somewhere between $40 and $65 a month per additional child. In contrast, the average taxpayer receives a $2,300 tax deduction (about $190 a month) for dependents. No one claims that taxpayers have more children just to get a larger tax deduction. COMMENT: Neither AFDC nor the tax deduction for dependent children are rewards for having children. Rather, these income supplements recognize the value of children to society and the high cost of raising children. The U.S. is the only industrialized nation other than South Africa and Japan that does not provide families with an automatic grant for every child. MYTH: AFDC encourages family breakup and out-of-wedlock births. FACT: Single-parent households are on the rise but not due to AFDC. While the value of the AFDC benefit fell during the last 20 years, the number of mother-only households rose. Meanwhile, the number of married-couple households in the U.S. fell from 40% in 1980 to 26% in 1990. Of all the women who are eligible for AFDC (poor unmarried women with children under age 18), the proportion who actually used AFDC fell from 60% in 1970 to 45% in 1988. The number of all poor children on AFDC fell from 75 out of every 100 (1972-1978) to 59 out of every 100 in 1988. COMMENT: Unwed motherhood predated AFDC and is due to the rise due to divorce, delayed marriage, changing sexual norms, the falling standard of living and other social conditions. AFDC does not cause families to break up, but does give women an alternative to unsafe and insecure marriages. The country would be better served by an income support program that served individuals regardless of work effort or marital status. MYTH: The AFDC program is costly and bloated, has enlarged the deficit and deepened the recession. FACT: The federal and state governments together spent $23 billion on welfare in 1991. The federal share amounted to 1% of the $1.3 trillion federal budget. The state share equaled 3.4% of the average state budget. Ninety percent of the AFDC budget is spent on benefits, 10% on administrative costs. COMMENT: The costs of AFDC can be compared to the $300 billion in tax dollars received by the Department of Defense and the $130 billion spent in 1991 alone on the savings and loan bailout. MYTH: Mandatory programs are needed to get the welfare poor to behave properly. FACT: Mandatory programs do not work very well. Workfare has produced only modest, if any, increases in employment and earnings, and mandatory programs do not fare any better than voluntary ones. A recent study of California's GAIN program found that workfare participants averaged only $1,902 a year in earned income. The participants earned an average of $271 more than non-participants and received $281 a year less in welfare. A University of Wisconsin study found that Learnfare (the program that docks up to $200 a month from a welfare mother's check if her children miss school without an acceptable excuse) failed to improve the school attendance of welfare children, but do not exacerbate pre-existing family problems. COMMENT: Mandatory programs imply that the poor will not work, marry, plan their families, send their children to school or take them to the doctor unless the government makes them do so. Supporters of mandatory programs for the poor are often the same people who argue that the government should "get off people's backs." But when it comes to the poor, especially poor women, they support government telling people what to do and how to live. MYTH: Female-headed households are responsible for rising poverty rates. FACT: The number of female-headed households have grown only slightly in recent years, but poverty rates have soared. COMMENT: Gender does not make people poor. Rather, the differential treatment of women based on gender has contributed to the povertization of women. Blaming women for rising poverty rates does, however, mask its real causes. MYTH: If poor women only married, they would not be poor. FACT: Family composition does not affect poverty. Although two incomes are clearly better than one, the poor tend to be poor before, during and after they tie the knot. The two-parent household is the fastest-growing poverty group in the United States. The majority of the poor live in households with workers employed full year, full time. Sixty-four percent of all poor children live in families with one or more workers. COMMENT: Marriage is not an effective anti-poverty strategy for women. MYTH: The poor are freeloaders on government programs. FACT: Forty-seven percent of the population receives some kind of direct government benefit, with 5.1% of the population receiving AFDC. In addition, the tax code provides numerous health, education, and welfare benefits to the rich and the middle class and another set of subsidies to corporations. COMMENT: Everyone's on welfare. Abramovitz is a professor at Hunter College School of Social Work and author of *Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy From Colonial Times to the Present*. The Woman's Journal-Advocate can be reached at PO Box 81226, Lincoln, NE 68501. --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.2 *** 9/28/92 .TEXT Who Said It Can't Be Done?! A History of Graduate Student Organizing and Unionization in the U.S. Robert Ovetz, The Other Texan (NLNS)--There is a common myth shared in many circles that graduate students passively accept their fate and do not organize themselves to defend or advance their interests. This is a myth unsupported by history and the recently successful strikes at Yale and University of Massachusetts-Amherst over the last year and the activities of grad students at UT (University of Texas) since the 1970's. This article first examines the various strategies used by graduate students and then details the history of their organizing attempts nationwide and at UT. We can learn from these efforts of graduate students to organize themselves for our own ongoing battles for tuition and fee waivers and a number of other needs of UT graduate students. Shattering the Myth of "Professionalism" Since 1965, graduate students have shed the mystifying labels of "professionals" and "equals" among the faculty and administration and have begun to organize themselves. While the best known and most successful cases have taken the form of union-type organizations, graduate students have also formed ad hoc groups, study committees, protest organizations and used other tactics to fight for more control over their working conditions, fewer work hours, higher wages, health benefits, early and publicly explained notification of appointments, and a number of other needs. One of the most difficult issues confronted by graduate students attempting to organize to protect their interests is a common belief that graduate student employees--e.g., teaching assistants (TA's), research assistants (RA's), assistant instructors (AI's) and instructors--are "professionals" whose jobs are an essential part of their academic training. This ideal does not hold up to our everyday experiences, however, since these positions are often handed out in the form of charity or a gift by department and college administrators who believe they are doing us a "favor," a noblesse oblige. In this way, graduate student employees are implicitly looked down on as patrons of administrators' good will, hardly a "professional" position of equality. In fact, behind this facade of "professionalism," graduate students are doing the unrecognized and underpaid work without which UT could not function. As UT cuts hiring for new faculty and reduces faculty pay raises, sabbaticals, and other necessities, more and more of the work once done by fully-paid faculty are being picked up by underpaid graduate students. This is demonstrated in the composition of the UT faculty over the last decade. Faculty AI's & TA's 1980 2,095 1,816 1986 2,289 2,243 1991 2,373 2,563 In 1980, there were 279 more faculty (full, associate, and assistant professors, and instructors) than AI's and TA's. However, by 1986, there were only 46 more faculty than AI's and TA's. By 1991, we surpassed the 2,373 faculty with 2,563 AI's and TA's. In other words, graduate students made up 70% of the growth in teaching staff in the last eleven years, besides teaching a disproportionally large number of students. As the universities come to rely less and less on full-time faculty and more and more on part-timers, graduate students do an ever increasing amount of the teaching and research on campus for less and less pay. Meanwhile, as selective austerity channels money away from teaching and "education" to entrepreneurial priorities, UT is using low-paid, flexible workers to fill in the gap. We are being looked upon to do more and more of the teaching as instructors or discussion section leaders, counseling, advising, grading, and so on. Except for the few RA's and AI's that actually get to teach or do research in areas immediately relevant to their own research, most of the work we do is far from professional or relevant to our academic preparation, but is rather unfulfilling and underpaid work. Because of the nature of the work, it rarely is limited to the 20-hour assignment it is supposed to be. Some students do less and many do more than 20 hours--often sacrificing their own studies or research and taking incompletes when seminar papers come due at the end of the semester. We are then punished for our incompletes when considered for a position. In addition, the conditions under which we are employed is hardly professional. Most of us have to wait until the end of the previous semester or even just before the semester begins to learn if we received a position. Many are often left on a "waiting list" and do not know if they will be able to pay for tuition or even food and housing until the semester starts. This is often the result of departments using these positions to recruit new students. However, what they are never told is that once they get here they are not guaranteed a job for even the eight to ten semesters which is the maximum number of semesters of employment opportunity. (The number is normally dependent on the department's position on UT's ladder of priority, e.g., profitability.) We are treated no better than farmworkers who wait each morning in a hiring hall to find out if the labor contractor will use them. We are treated a pieceworkers, hired on a semester by semester basis (although they claim it is per academic year), without any protection against arbitrary firings. It need hardly be said that we are not paid professional salaries. Even then, the whole hiring process is kept secret from us "for our own protection from things we shouldn't know," as the outgoing Sociology chair implied to 50 sociology students at a meeting last semester. The students were presenting the results of their survey in which an overwhelming majority supported student involvement in faculty committees, tuition and fee waivers, and other necessities. Even though these jobs are supposedly part of the professional learning experience, we are kept in the dark about how it even works. Meetings in which TA's are chosen are closed to students and the selection process has no set criteria. Although we are constantly assured that there is a fair process at work, it remains mystified. Meanwhile, thousands of grads cower in fear for what they say and do, afraid that they may not get to eat next semester. Although this appears to be an almost insurmountable predicament, since the mid 1960's, thousands of graduate students have come to the conclusion that this situation needs to be confronted and changed. By seeing themselves as workers for the university, they have attempted to do something to not only gain recognition for what they do, but also to reduce the amount of work they do while getting paid more for it. These are only fair demands considering that graduate students are doing the work of fully-paid professors at a fraction of their actual wages. Even worse, during the summer, graduate students receive only their monthly pay for teaching a whole semester in six weeks while faculty pay is pro- rated accordingly. What Can We Do for Ourselves? At this moment, a major effort is underway to unionize UT graduate students around higher wages, tuition/fee waivers and other needs. In the process, there are a number of questions to be asked about how we want to organize. Should we form a union, or are there other ways to go about it? Do we only include graduate students who are actually employed and receiving a salary? Do we limit ourselves to issues of wages and benefits or do we take up the broader issues of the university's priorities and how it is run? Forming a union is far from problem-free. One of the difficulties that has come up time and time again--although they are insurmountable only on occasion--is that organizing a union requires following certain rules and guidelines set out by the National Labor Relations Act that originated in the 1930's. First, in order to be recognized as a union it is necessary to sign up 50%+1 of the TA's and AI's, or TA's, RA's, and AI's, depending on which employees want to be included in the union. After we get 50%+1, we have to request either voluntary recognition of our union by UT as the representative of all graduate employees in order to begin negotiating, or we could go to the state's labor relations board and request that we be recognized and an election be held. We could try either method, although both could take a long time to be settled as we wait out hearings and appeals by UT if we win, as the unions at the University of California (UC) campuses of Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and San Diego are currently doing. If we made it to the election and won we would open negotiations with UT which could also drag on. However, we can easily set a date at which time if there is no collective settlement we could strike, which could also last a long time. Although strikes by state employees in Texas are illegal, that does not mean we will automatically lose as some claim. In fact, the 1975 Michigan strike was illegal but they could not be broken because of their widespread support from undergraduates, faculty and the Teamster delivery drivers. The only reason it is still illegal for us to strike in Texas is because we have not had the power to challenge the law yet. For example, the only reason the National Labor Relations Board included universities after 1970 was because there were enough faculty and grads striking that it forced the board to do something to try to control it. But before we even petition for recognition as a bargaining agent we should be aware about how graduate employees have been defined. In nearly every organizing attempt described in this article over the last twenty years, graduate students have had to challenge the legal definition of graduate employee as being dependent on one's status as a student and thus not an employee. Although graduate students have often been successful in challenging this definition by showing that most work by TA's, AI's and RA's is not directly related to their education, universities have used this time and time again to gum up the process. This is the very problem faced by UC unions who have had their original favorable decision from the state labor relations board overturned, and then lost on appeal this past June. It becomes apparent why the myth that TA's, AI's, and RAs are "professionals-in-training" is so predominant. The flipside of this myth is a legal technicality that is used against us in court if we form a union. There is clearly a symbiotic relationship between the ruling ideology and the law. This myth about grad students is equally dependent on the mystification of students in general. Students are not seen as workers because they are not paid an overt wage for what they do even though students spend most of their time learning to be workers and, in fact, their future work is only possible because of the work they do as students. This mystification of students is being used against graduate students in our attempts to organize. Although one would think graduate student employees are workers because they work and receive a wage, the university and the law would ignore this fact and revert to defining graduate employees as primarily students, and because students are not workers, graduate students cannot be workers. Unions have failed to deal with this myth and have often won in the courts by showing the opposite--that graduate employees do work "unrelated" to their education and role as students. Because their legal defense agrees that students are not working, they reinforce the very myth used to deny them the right to organize: because they are students they are not workers. In effect, by agreeing with the logic of the law they never challenge the very basis that has repeatedly been used against us. Another question that is raised is whether we only organize graduate employees or all graduate students. Since the law already uses the unwaged status of students to say we are not workers because we are primarily students, we should not limit ourselves only to waged graduate students. The fact is that graduate students who do not get a job are still doing the unwaged work of maintaining themselves for the next semester in case they do get hired. If we ignore the concerns of unwaged grads--the need for more flexible grant-based rather than loan-based financial aid--the university could merely replace union members with starving grads of which there are more than enough in some departments. In other words, we need to make the connection between the needs of employees and non-employees or else it could be used against us. Last but not least we need to decide if we are simply trying to improve our standard of living, or trying to transform the university itself. The issues of wages and benefits do not exist in a vacuum but are organized by the priorities of the university. Academic programs resistant or not immediately related to commercialization often have lower salaries, fewer positions, and more women and minorities enrolled. Our wages and benefits cannot be separated from the entrepreneurial organization of UT. As a result, students and faculty in unprofitable academic programs as well as international students, women, gay, lesbian and bisexual, Latino, black, and many ethnic students and faculty are already at a disadvantage and hardest hit by cutbacks. We need to be able to relate our needs to the needs of many groups not because it is "politically correct," but because we need to develop alliances and friends who can work together to achieve our goals. The more friends we have the more likely we are to get what we desire. Too often grad unions have limited themselves to issues of wages and have either failed because they could not organize support or gave up once they were tossed a few crumbs. Even if we won higher wages and waivers, certain commercially-oriented departments and colleges would still be paying their grads more. And even if we had higher wages, that would not help those minority grads who are denied TA positions by their departments and, for example, sent to the Center for Mexican American Studies, which is expected to shoulder supporting most of the Mexican-American graduate students in the College of Liberal Arts. It would also not change the situation of women who are being sexually harassed by students and faculty, or researchers whose ideas are turned into profitable new products by their advisors without the researchers' approval . We need to change the way the university is organized and whose needs it serves. Needless to say, forming a union is not the only way to organize. Signing a membership card is not organizing around meaningful issues that concern us in our everyday lives. Unions are not a substitute for organizing. Signing a card will never get us what we want. The union cannot do anything for us--we have to do it ourselves. And, no matter what we do, it doesn't really matter what we call ourselves. However, this does not mean we cannot do both. While organizing ourselves for tuition/fee waivers, childcare, extended aid, higher pay, etc., we can also ask people to commit to taking action to realize these goals by formally joining an organization. We could form our own unaffiliated union first, and after taking whatever action necessary to win our needs, then carefully select a union to affiliate with, which was the strategy used by the Graduate Employees Organization at Michigan and UMass. They initially formed their own independent union, and then chose from among a number of unions including the Communication Workers of America (CWA). However, as an independent it will be difficult for us to afford the legal costs of gaining recognition. Those involved in the recently begun effort to form a union have been discussing these issues. Although about 150 graduate students have become members of the CWA-affiliated Texas State Employees Union (TSEU), we should fully inform ourselves about the history of this union, its relationship with CWA, and the way it is organized and organizes before we commit ourselves to it. There is much more to organizing a union than just "signing people up" as TSEU organizer Travis Donoho told students at a GPA meeting. CWA is expanding beyond the communications industry as AT&T and the Bell companies increase automation, reducing the union's membership and dues. The recent Austin CableVision strike in Austin was less about wages or working conditions than Time Warner's (which owns Austin CableVision and other cable companies) retribution against CWA for supporting AT&T in its attempts to receive Congressional authority to expand into the information industry, in which Time Warner is active. Paradoxically, CWA is working with AT&T (which is attempting to undermine organized employees with automation) so that AT&T can get new business and hire more potential dues-paying union members. Other graduate student unions carefully researched each union before affiliating. Although it is true that we could switch later, there is no need to decide so soon. We could sign up members for our own union while deciding with whom to affiliate. Making a well- informed decision could be an early boost to our efforts. Yale grads received $100,000 from its union to organize. The amount of support a union offers us can demonstrate whether they take us seriously in our desire to improve our lives or whether they want more dues-paying paper members. Another option is to organize in whatever fashion is needed according to the particular conditions faced, and when those conditions change, organize another way to serve our changed needs. It is possible to strike or take disruptive action without having to go through the legal bureaucracy at all. If we are well-organized and have the power, UT will have no other choice but to give us what we want. This is true of whether we form a union or not. Unions are only one option of many, yet it is an option many grads have used with success. We do not have to form a union but we do need to organize. Don't Do Us Any Favors: Graduate Student Organizing in the 1960's and 1970's In the 1960's and early 1970's, graduate students began to organize around these issues in the midst of widespread student activism around the Vietnam war, military research, racism, sexism, grades, the draft, and other issues of social justice. In 1965, the very first graduate student employee union was formed at the University of California-Berkeley and went on strike for a week in the midst of the Free Speech Movement. After affiliating with the American Federation of Teachers they fought off attempts by departments and the state legislature to fire and de-fund their jobs. Although the union eventually confined itself to issues of wages and benefits, and organized around department concerns, members were heavily involved with other social justice movements. The union was never formally recognized although it did sign an agreement with the university to negotiate over a number of issues. Graduate students quickly began to organize on a number of other campuses in the 1960's. A union at the City University of New York won the right to bargain collectively in 1968 and won a substantial pay raise. TA's also formed union or union-like organizations in Illinois and at the University of Oklahoma, UCLA, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Stanford. The Graduate Federation at the University of Colorado won recognition soon after they threatened to strike in the spring of 1970. In the same year, staff and TA's at San Francisco State College signed a collective bargaining agreement. They had formed the union, according to its president, because they were "underpaid, undervalued, overused, abusedIa dirt cheap, shit work employee... (and) virtually a slave laborer in the campus." In 1968, Cornell TA's and RA's also organized separate ad hoc groups that threatened to strike when the university granted pay raises only to TA's and not RA's. RA's had refused to pay their fees in protest, and attempted to form a union along with TA's in 1969 at the same time black students had taken over the student union. In 1970, the Teaching Assistants Association (TAA) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was formed by graduate students who had originally met in 1966 to oppose the university giving their class ranks to the Selective Service. TAA eventually struck for 25 days in spring 1970, and, even without support from other labor unions and a threat by the university to call in the National Guard, eventually won a number of benefits including a guaranteed period and level of support, health care, grievance procedure, and maximum class sizes, although they failed to win a say over the educational form and content of the courses they taught, which was a popular demand. Although these demands were won after the strike was called off, TAA won the support of many undergraduates. The strike took place about a year after black students had gone on strike as well. TAA's success at UW-Madison influenced about 50-60 other organizing efforts on campuses across the US. To name only two cases, Harvard students struck for a day to protest the planned elimination of the tuition rebate, and Adelphi grads petitioned the National Labor Relations Board for inclusion into the faculty union in 1972. Although many of the strikes and organizing that took place during the 1960's were focused around broader issues of social justice as well as austerity, during the 1970's, graduate students began to organize in response to the disinvestment from higher education that was being deployed to restore control over the insurgent campuses. Then as today, grads organized to block tuition and fee increases, cutbacks, and wage cuts while demanding waivers and pay increases. Yet, TAA's success provided a model for graduate students that flared into an organizing effort at the University of Michigan, continuing to this day. Following a student strike against tuition increases and staff organizing in 1973, graduate students at Michigan responded to the policy of charging non-resident grad employees out-of-state tuition for the first time by forming a new organization called the Organization of Teaching Fellows (OTF). Although various departmental organizations had been formed in the past, OTF signaled a concerted effort to organize university-wide. Although the university eventually set aside $2 million of the tuition increase to cover the increase in grad tuition, OTF accepted the money but agreed with undergraduates that they were being pitted against each other by using undergraduate tuition increases to supplement grads. In 1973, OTF became the Graduate Employee Organization (GEO) and demanded recognition from the university. When this was refused, GEO eventually won a state-sanctioned election and struck for 29 days in 1975, even though it was illegal under state law for state employees to strike, as it is in Texas. The strike received support from hundreds of faculty and from many undergraduates who boycotted classes. When students began returning to class, picketers blocked the incinerator (causing a trash pileup) and trucks delivering supplies. GEO was eventually successful with its demands and won pay raises, tuition reductions, and other benefits. The union did not affiliate with a larger union until after it won the strike, and it still exists to this day. At the same time grads were organizing at Michigan, students were doing the same at a number of other universities in Illinois, and at the University of Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, SUNY-Buffalo and Stonybrook, and three Canadian universities, although SUNY-Buffalo and Cincinnati students did not affiliate with a larger union. University of Oregon-Eugene graduate students won their first collective bargaining agreement in 1978 with the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation as their union, and even had state law changed to reclassify graduate employees as public employees, giving them the legal right to have a union. In Revolt Again: Graduate Organizing In the 1980's and 1990's In the late 1980's, graduate organizing began to pick up again. The strikes at Yale and UMass-Amherst last year were only the tip of the iceberg. In all, there are active graduate student unions on at least 16 major universities, including the University of South Florida, Cornell, Yale, the SUNY System, the University of Pittsburgh, Illinois-Champlain, Rutgers, Temple, and six University of California campuses. Graduate students have fought for and won collective bargaining rights at the University of Michigan, University of Oregon-Eugene, Rutgers, University of Florida-Gainesville, and the University of Wisconsin. Unions at the Universities of Minnesota and Pittsburgh lost certification elections, and SUNY students won approval last fall to hold elections. There is also organizing around the need for health care (such as the University of North Texas), childcare, and a number of other issues at many other universities. These successes have come because of constant organizing and pressure by students at these and other schools. University of California grads at Berkeley, Irvine, Davis, Santa Cruz, San Diego and UCLA are working as part of District 65 of the United Auto Workers (which is composed of mainly "service sector" workers) to win recognition from the state's Public Employee Relations Board so that they can holds representation elections and begin bargaining. Michigan's GEO has been fighting annually to improve their situation since it was formed. Although UC-Berkeley grads top the UT administration's list for having the best standard of living, it is obviously not what it seems because grads have been organizing there since 1987. In the spring of 1989, UC-Berkeley graduate students' District 65/UAW- affiliated Association of Graduate Student Employees (AGSE) struck for two days, shutting down 90 percent of the campus. The AGSE was formed in 1983 during campus-wide resistance to a fee increase that would have resulted in a salary cut of $50. Although the strikers demanded and won some of their demands for affirmative action in hiring graduate student employees, class size limits, tuition/fee waivers, and health care benefits, they were not as successful in circulating the struggle to other movements on campus against military research, multiculturalism, and the defense of People's Park. However, the union is establishing contacts at UC- Santa Cruz and UC-San Diego with other graduate students. The District 65/UAW-affiliated Graduate Employee Organization at UM-Amherst struck in Fall of 1991 for about a week, winning nearly all their demands for wage and benefit increases. In 1979, a group of graduate employees were denied a union election by the state after waiting two years for a decision. However, they did not give up trying to achieve voluntary recognition from the university, which finally came in 1990 after two short strikes and a threat to shut down the administration building. The organizing really took off at UM-Amherst in November 1989 as students, graduate students, and faculty struck for a week to protest $30 million in cuts over the previous 18 months, as well as several tuition and fee hikes (like a proposed $350 curriculum fee and the elimination of over 900 course sections). GEO held a two-day strike, many faculty canceled classes, and the faculty union, the Massachusetts Society of Professors, and the Leadership Coalition which represents all the employee unions and student and faculty bodies, endorsed the strike, although some "minority" groups didn't because they were not included in strike planning. Yale has also become a significant center of conflict. In 1984, dining hall workers struck for 10 weeks. And in February 1992, 1300 of Yale's 2,200 graduate students went on strike. The Graduate Employees and Student Organization (GESO) had been organizing graduate students for union recognition for a little more than a year before receiving majority support, receiving ideas from other graduate student unions at Michigan, Wisconsin, UM-Amherst and UC- Berkeley. Graduate students had been organizing for a while, forming the Teaching Assistants Solidarity in 1987 to demand higher wages. Organizing was spurred again in 1991 by an administration plan to reduce the number of TA's by 20% and limit graduate students to six years of enrollment. Yale was attempting to implement cuts of five to ten percent ($10 million) that semester even though it had recently received $30 million endowments, including $10 million from the Henry Luce Foundation for an international research center, and has a $700 million yearly budget and $2.6 billion endowment (which increased from $676 million in 1980). Their salaries are also some of the lowest in the country. TA's are paid $6,000 a year for 15-hour work weeks. TA's elsewhere make $8,000 and up to $12,000 at UC-Berkeley. The strike, in which 75% of the TA's canceled or relocated their classes off-campus, received faculty and staff support. Faculty were circulating a letter of support, and the staff union, which had settled on a new contract with the university the morning the strike began, wildcatted with about 75% of the maintenance and cafeteria workers, and 30% of the clerical and technical workers striking to show support. The Graduate Advocacy Organization at Cornell has been organizing since a 1987 strike by food and maintenance workers, and won 10% raises two straight years. The Graduate Student Employees Association at Temple struck in 1990, and University of Michigan graduates worked with the Teamsters in the late 1980's by setting up picket lines that the delivery drivers refused to cross, essentially shutting down the campus. Other organizing is taking place at the University of Florida, and at the state university systems of New York and New Jersey. Graduate Students Organizing at UT Graduate students at UT have organized as employees at least as early as the mid-1970's. Graduate students organized a strike as part of the Students Helping Academic Freedom at Texas (SHAFT), a huge student power movement that called for the resignation of interim UT President Lorraine Rogers, the expansion of minority support, the assumption of student and faculty control over UT, and the end of political attacks on faculty and student organizations. The Graduate Student Caucus organized an "Evacuation Day" in October 1975 when TA's and graduate students would hold their classes off campus, call in sick, or postpone their classes. About 250 participated, at a rate of 50% in some departments. The Union of Graduate Student Workers (UGSW), which grew out of these efforts, was organized in 1976 with the following demands: 1) a fair TA workload with adequate compensation, 2) fair and equitable hiring practices, 3) clearly defined, systematic TA rights, 4) reasonable class sizes, 5) relief from forced participation in the Teacher Retirement System and waiving of tuition and building use fees for TA's, and 6) a meaningful voice in educational planning, whereby opinions and involvement of TA's are actively sought and respected. UGSW grew out of the Graduate Student Caucus of SHAFT by students wanting to form a union. Although the union only lasted about a year, they were successful in forcing UT to let TA's out of Teacher Retirement, which charged about $20 a month. In 1980, the organizing began to pay off. In the summer, students in the Economics Department studied the financial needs of TA's, compared them with other departments and schools, and showed that their real wages had dropped 40% in five years. After they presented their findings to the department and the dean, they were given a raise. Economics TA's then went to other departments telling graduate students how they did it. In the fall, about 100 TA's joined the AFL-CIO-affiliated UT Employees Union (UTEU), but were kicked out when the union feared the growing size of TA's among their membership. Although another union, the University Employees Union, formed in January and asked the TA's to join, many were fed up with unions and did not. In February 1980, University of Houston (UH) TA's went on strike after a 5.1% emergency pay increase from the legislature was denied to UH TA's. They were demanding pay raises, tuition and fee waivers, administrative support for academic freedom, and health benefits. After three days, the TA's went back to work after negotiations began. TA's at UT who were involved in UTEU sent a telegram supporting their demands--especially the waivers and $850/month minimum salary. TA's from both UT and UH formed the Houston- Austin Solidarity Coalition (HASC) and held solidarity demonstrations on February 18 on both campuses at the same time. Five hundred attended the UT rally and threatened to strike if they did not receive wage increases. When UH balked on the pay raise, the TA's went back on strike in March. In April, the UT HASC group issued a position paper demanding academic freedom, minimum monthly salaries of $850, full medical and dental benefits, tuition and fee waivers, no increase in workloads, and maintenance of class sizes. In June UT offered a 14% pay increase, but HASC refused and threatened to strike if their demands were not met. In July they got a 20% increase for TA's and AI's, and dental insurance in September. With hindsight, it is apparent why graduate students have yet to win waivers for tuition and fees. If the university were to concede to this demand it would be shutting off a significant source of unreserved capital it has long used for entrepreneurial projects. In 1990, the Graduate Professional Association (GPA) won a the restoration of UT's contribution to premium sharing for graduate student employees after 26 months of fighting and studying UT's financial records. In 1988, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board had declared health supplements illegal under a technical definition that required employees to be part of the Teachers Retirement system. In effect, the state attempted to turn graduate students' earlier victory (removal from Teachers' Retirement) against us to save a few million dollars a year. Although the UT administration eventually pledged support for continued health coverage after much protest by COGS and GPA, they did little to lobby the legislature to fund it. The victory took marches on the capitol and Regents' offices, lobbying, power structure research, and two huge Main Mall rallies. About 70% of the members and the four officers of COGS formed the off-campus group GPA, and organized a huge "teach-in" that attracted almost 8,000 undergraduate and graduate students for classes and office hours. When graduate students discovered that only $1 million was necessary to cover the premium sharing that the coordinating board had eliminated funding for in 1988, the legislature approved the payments but didn't fund it. After continued protests, UT would offer only $90 per graduate student, leaving a potential pay loss of $65 when the total cost of insurance would increase to $155. Yet, during the quiet summer month of June 1990, the Regents caved in under pressure for the full $155. The information used against UT was found by filing Open Record Requests for the "Monthly Reports" that list the activity and number of each of UT's bank accounts. GPA found an account with the necessary amount of money and threatened to expose what it was used for, and even released the account number to the Daily Texan. The day the number was published, Vice President Ed Sharpe called GPA, conceding the supplements. Following the failure of a coalition of 12 student and faculty groups to stop the graduate tuition increases in Fall 1991, last spring GPA and COGS turned their focus to working at departmental levels to promote the idea of waivers, wage increases, and other issues. However, for many years, organizing has taken place quietly on department levels as graduate students have formed their own groups to request more diverse faculty and classes as well as improved working conditions, and to deal with other issues specific to their departments. A number of graduate students from COGS and GPA have currently established a graduate student caucus within the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU) which has about 200 campus members. One of their strategies is to draw the connection between the impact of entrepreneurialization on graduate students in the form of higher tuition and fees, and on custodians who have lost their jobs in the Recreation Sports Center and the PCL library. (The private contractor which was awarded the contract by UT offered to re-hire the workers on a part-time basis without health benefits and other benefits required for all full-time state employees.) As the university entrepreneurializes, staff and students are being targeted for cutbacks, a connection that offers the potential for linking up these different groups. Time to Get Organized No matter how we decide to do it, graduate students need to get organized at UT or continue to face running battles over tuition, health care, fees, etc. that we will not be likely to win very often. Whether we go the way of forming a union or another type of organization depends on more than a handful of people deciding for us. Throughout the U.S., graduate students are working with undergraduates and faculty on a wide range of issues from multiculturalism to wage increases. Students are getting organized to put a stop to the austerity sweeping the universities while attempting to carve out spaces for themselves on their campuses. As long as the cutbacks continue we will be increasingly incapable of devoting ourselves to what we came to graduate school in the first place while faced with the constant worry of tuition and fee increases, rising childcare costs, racial and sexual harassment, and declining wages and financial aid. And as we organize ourselves, we shatter the myth that graduate students are "professionals" who passively accept their own destitution. The Other Texan can be reached at PO Box 49814, Austin, TX 78765; (512) 471-3166; ettib@utxvm.cc.utexas.edu --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.2 *** 9/28/92 .TEXT CHRISTIAN IDENTITY, SURVIVALISM & THE POSSE COMITATUS Chip Berlet, NLNS (NLNS)--The use of deadly force against the family of Idaho white supremacist Randy Weaver was a tragic example of police misconduct and abuse of power by government agencies. But even as the seige was underway, far rightists began manipulating justifiable revulsion over the government's murderous tactics to recruit persons into a brand of populism that avoids overt racist appeals and uses radical-sounding anti-government rhetoric to mask the same underlying fascist goals promoted by former neoNazi and Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Both Duke and Weaver promote versions of Christian Identity, a white supremacist philosophy that mirrors resugent neo-Nazi activism world-wide. "Identity is based on the premise that the Jews are literally Children of Satan - the seed of Cain, that people of color are 'pre-Adamic' mud people - God's failures before perfecting Adam, and that white Christian Aryans are the 'Lost Sheep of the House of Israel' - God's chosen people, and therefore America is the biblical promised land," explains Lenny Zeskind, research director of the Center for Democratic Renewal. "Some Identity members collect weapons and ammunition in expectation that the Biblical "End-Times" are near," says Zeskind who wrote a monograph on Christian Identity for the Division of Church and Society of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. "Identity theology binds together a number of previously isolated groups... Important sections of the Ku Klux Klan, the neo- Nazi movement, the Posse Comitatus, the Aryan Nations, and other groups have adopted Identity theology," Zeskind reports. Identity is based in part on an earlier religious concept called "British Israelism." The group most responsible for spreading Christian Identity in the 1980's was the Posse Comitatus, a loosely- knit survivalist movement which grew out of the Christian Identity teachings of Col. William Potter Gale in California. Survivalists believe the collapse of society is imminent, and thus they collect weapons and conduct field exercises in armed self-defense and reconnaissance. Some survivalists store large quantities of grains, dried foods, canned goods, water and vitamins in anticipation of long-projected economic or political collapse and racial rioting. Many have moved to isolated rural areas. Not all survivalists are part of the white supremacist movement, but many are. Randy Weaver was a survivalist as well as a promoter of racist Christian Identity. The Posse Comitatus, Latin for "power of the county" but more accurately transliterated as "to empower the citizenry," is the legal concept used by sheriffs in Hollywood westerns to round up a posse and chase the varmints. In modern legal terms it means the right to deputize citizens to carry out law enforcement functions, and it also is the basis of a federal law preventing the use of federal troops in civilian law enforcement without the express consent of the President. Members of the Posse Comitatus, however, promote an unsubstantiated belief that the Constitution does not authorize any law enforcement powers above the level of county sheriff, and that state and federal officials above the county level are part of a gigantic conspiracy to deny average citizens their rights. Many Posse and Identity adherents believe Jews, Blacks, Communists, Homosexuals and race-traitors have seized control of the United States. They refer to Washington, D.C. as the Zionist Occupational Government (ZOG). They read the novel "The Turner Diaries" in which an underground white army leads a revolution against ZOG. In 1969 H. L. "Mike" Beach in Portland, Oregon began issuing "Sheriff's Posse Comitatus" charters and handbooks. Soon Gale began issuing his own charters and a handbook called the "Guide for Volunteer Christian Posses." Early factionalism gave way to an informal political and religious movement which began to grow. In the early 1970's a Posse manifesto was issued in booklet form. In late 1974 a national Posse convention was held in Wisconsin with 200 - 300 attending. The most visible and active branch of the Posse for many years was in Wisconsin. The press gave much attention to Wisconsin Posse leader James Wickstrom, although his claims to hold some vague national leadership post was flatly contradicted by the autonomous and anarchistic nature of the Posse itself. States where Posse activity was reported in the 1980's included: California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. The most violent Posse confrontation involved the mishandled attempt to serve legal papers on Posse activist Gordon Kahl. Two federal Marshalls were killed, and several persons wounded. Kahl fled underground and was later killed in another mishandled attempt to flush him from a fortified bunker. Kahl and other white supremacists killed or jailed by the government have become martyrs to Posse adherents and other racists. After the Gordon Kahl incident, many Posse and Christian Identity members decided to carry out activities in secret or through front groups. While the Posse was growing in the midwest and west, members of Ku Klux Klan and Nazi groups joined together for a deadly assault on an anti-Klan rally in Greensboro, North Carolina on November 3, 1979. Five members and supporters of the Communist Workers Party were killed in the shootout. Following the Greensboro shootings and the death of Gordon Kahl, a number of previouslyantagonistic racist groups in America began to make contact with each other, and began to establish informal means of communication and information sharing. Christian Identity was the glue than held the groups together. Not all Klan groups accepted the new Identity-based coalition, but those that did began to call themselves the Fifth Era Klan to demark what they hoped would be the fifth period of growth by the Klan since its inception. The Fifth Era Klan adherents sought to forge ties with other racist groups across the nation. One concept hotly debated was the idea of a mass movement of white supremacists to the pacific northwest where there were relatively few minorities and a low population density. The idea was to create a racially-pure Aryan bastion, an idea that attracted Randy Weaver. Cooperation among racist groups was in the 1980's by the establishment of several racist computerized bulletin board systems and the distribution of a cable TV program "Race and Reason" hosted by California's Tom Metzger, head of White Aryan Resistance. Racist groups staged joint activities, sometimes built around survivalist encampments. As this cooperation became more formalized, what emerged was, in effect, a white racist alliance which shared a belief in Identity. One of the leaders of the movement in the northwest was Identity Pastor Richard Butler of the Church of Jesus Christ - Christian which operated out of a compound called Aryan Nations in Hayden Lake, Idaho, near the Weaver family home. The members of the group variously called The Order, White American Bastion, or The Silent Brotherhood, who were convicted in Seattle for staging armed robberies and mudering Denver talk show host Alan Berg, were predominantly adherents of Identity. According to the Klanwatch Intelligence Report of the Southern Poverty Law Center: "A look at the backgrounds of some of the 23 Order members prosecuted in Seattle illustrates the cooperation between radicals that now permeates the extremist right: Five had Klan ties, one had been a Nazi party member, a half-dozen were Aryan Nations, one was a veteran tax protester, four CSA's [Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord] five National Alliance membersI.Many of the 23 were united by IdentityI" "Aryan" or "White" as used by Identity ostensibly refers to persons of Nordic, Anglo-Saxon or Germanic stock, or at the very least, persons stemming from Northern or Middle European ancestors. The Identity definition of "Aryan" is more closely related to mythological or operatic reality rather than any scientific or anthropological definition of Indo-European peoples. Aryan actually is a term used by linguists to trace the common roots of the Indo-European languages. Christian Identity borrows paranoid conspiratorial beliefs from reactionary groups such as the John Birch Society. Birchers claim that secret cabals run most world governments under orders from wealthy elites such as the Rockefeller family acting through groups such as the Trilateralist Commission, the Bilderberger banking conference, the Council on Foreign Relations, and officials of the Federal Reserve Bank. From ultra-right Christian fundamentalists comes the idea of a secular humanist conspiracy involving liberal elites such as radical academics, teachers union leaders, journalists and network television programmers and gay men and lesbians who pave the way for leftists, socialists and communists. These are the core beliefs of persons such as Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Academia and Accuracy in Media, and Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum. Pat Robertson, leader of the Christian Coalition, recently wrote a book attacking president Bush's New World Order and echoing many paranoid conspiratorial charges of the reactionary and fascist right. Robertson also throws in a discussion of sinister networks of Masonic lodges and the shadowy Illuminati group. It is these reactionary forces that made TV appearances during the Republican convention. White supremacists add to the bizare brew a list of racial enemies such as Jews, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Indians, indeed all non-Aryans. The Posse Comitatus also sees as agents of the conspiracy all state and national elected politicians, and all law enforcement officials above level of county sheriff such as game wardens, Internal Revenue Service agents, federal marshalls, and the FBI. Christian Identity wraps all the conspiracy theories together and adds the myth that white Christian Americans are God's Chosen People fighting a religious war against satanic forces. Identity combines the worst aspects of Hitlerian racial theories, the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades. Persons who believe in Christian Identity generally: * Support White Power & Aryan Supremecy; * Believe in Black genetic inferiority; * Possess Romanticized notions of Aryan culture; * Are virulently anti-Communist; * Manifest a jingoistic patriotism a la "Rambo;" * Mistrust government & law enforcement; * Fear Black power & Black pride; * See media coverage of non- Aryans as a Jewish-Communist Plot; * Resent Black job gains in the working class & professions; * Think Black politicians are pawns of Jews; * Believe Black activism is directed from Moscow or Tel Aviv; * Practice armed survivalism as a defensive necessity. Identity theories permeate the Populist Party. Currently running for President under the Populist Party banner is Bo Gritz, who served as the negotiator who brought Randy Weaver out of his cabin to surrender to authorities. Gritz has called for right and left to join forces to smash the government. The fascist right has targetted for recruitment members of tax protest groups, farm and ranch organizations, former or current members of the Ku Klux Klan and various nazi groups, supporters of Lyndon LaRouche, persons organizing against government repression or covert action, alternative health care advocates, antiwar organizers, and persons concerned about peace in the Middle East. Gritz, however, primarily seeks to build networks of support in reactionary and far-right circles. He made a presentation on "MIA/POW & Government Drug Dealers" at the Third Christian Heritage National Conference held in November of 1990 in Florida. Among other featured speakers were Bob Weems, Pete Peters, Col. Jack Mohr and other persons who promote Christian Identity. Also speaking were Eustace Mullins, who provided the "Total Conspiracy Update," and A.J. Barker, national chairman of the Populist Party which ran David Duke for President in 1988 with Gritz as the original vice-presidential nominee. Gritz later dropped off the ticket to run for local office, and now makes excuses for his earlier affiliation with Duke. Gritz claims he opposes racism and is trying to clean up the Populist Party. But as Zeskind of the Center for Democratic Renewal explains, "Gritz's standard stump speech is an amalgam of themes popular among white supremacists and others on the far right: the Federal Reserve System (FED) is unconstitutional and should be abolished and a vast conspiracy of "internationalists" are taking over the world." Pastor Pete Peters, a leading proponent of the Christian Identity religion, helped publish and distribute Gritz's book "Called to Serve," which is used to promote the Gritz presidential campaign. In a speech at Peter's Colorado headquarters, Gritz acknowledged Peters' assistance. In his book Gritz writes that "Eight jewish families virtually control the FED." In the past the KKK and other racist and fascist groups in the U.S. intertwined with the political and law enforcement power structure of the communities in which they operated, especially in the rural South. The new racist Identity movement, however, is openly hostile toward most law enforcement officers because they are seen as collaborating with the Zionist Occupational Government. Thus Identity's critique of government miscoduct is central to their ideology, and has resulted in repeated armed conflicts with government agencies which in turn have used questionable tactics to target this sector of the racist right. Police brutality should be opposed whether it is used against Rodney King or Randy Weaver, but persons fighting government misconduct must also ensure they do not become pawns of fascist political movements using anti-government appeals to mask their underlying white supremacist goals. Chip Berlet is the director of Political Research Asssociates and can be reached at 14 Beacon St #407, Boston, MA 02108; (617) 661-9313; cberlet@igc.apc.org --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.2 *** 9/28/92 .TEXT The OCA's Abnormal Behaviors Initiative from a Campaign for a Hate Free Oregon release The Oregon Witness (NLNS)--The Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA), a far right political group, has proposed an amendment to the Oregon constitution that would legalize discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The effects of the initiative would reach into our schools, libraries, work places and daily lives. The OCA's initiative would invalidate existing laws, including Oregon's Hate Crimes law which has penalties for intimidation on the basis of sexual orientation, and Portland's Civil Rights ordinance which protects against discimination in housing, public accommodations, and employment. If this initiative passes, it would be the first time in United States history that a constitution has been amended to take rights away. WHAT DOES IT SAY? The measure has three primary requirements: --The state cannot "recognize" phrases such as sexual orientation; --State and local governments cannot "promote, encourage or facilitate" homosexuality; --Public schools, colleges and universities must teach that homosexuality is "abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse" and should be "discouraged and avoided." WHAT WOULD IT MEAN FOR GOVERNMENT AGENCIES? The initiative has two parts that would affect government. First, all levels of government--state, regional and local--including all their departments, agencies and other entities cannot use their facilities or money to "promote, encourage homosexuality." This language legalizes discrimination. Any government agency could deny services to any individual or group thought to promote, encourage or facilitate homosexuality. Use of facilities such as parks or meeting rooms could be denied solely on the basis of sexual orientation. Second, every agency at all levels of governemnt--state, regional and local--would be required to play an active role in setting a standard for Oregon's youth that says homosexuality is abnormal, unnatural and perverse and should be avoided. This means that all agencies from highway construction, to fire departments to sewage treatment would be required to spend public funds to teach children about the "evils" of homosexuality. GOVERNMENT SERVICES AND PROGRAMS The OCA is comprehensive, covering every agency in every level of government. It forbids government from using any public funds or facilities to "promote, encourage or facilitate homosexuality." The initiative also defines homosexuality as "abnormal, unnatural and perverse." The combined effect of these two components of the measure would be far-reaching, affecting dozens of government programs and services. A few are listed below: Public Facilities Groups and associations of all types would have their purposes and agendas scrutinized to determine if their meeting may "facilitate" homosexuality. If so, these associations would be prohibited from meeting on public property. Permits for use of city, county or state parks could not be granted to any group that is perceived to "promote, encourage or faciliate" homosexuality. This would include Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon, labor unions, the Oregon Bar Association and dozens of other groups that have taken positions against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Public Libraries Libraries would be required to remove from their shelves any book, magazine or art that has any positive reference to homosexuality. Books like the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Color Purple" would be banned. All new library acquisitions would have to meet a constitutionally mandated standard of morality. Public Television Oregon Public Broadcasting would have to censor any program that appeared to "promote, encourage or facilitate" homosexuality. In addition, the agency would be required to take an active role in teaching Oregon's youth that homosexuality is perverse and should be avoided. State Licensing State licensing agencies would be allowed to discriminate against any person who is perceived to either be homosexual or who wants to run a business that may cater to homosexuals. Businesses, restaurants and bars would be scrutinized to determine whether they promote, encourage or facilitate homosexuality or have a business clientele deemed "abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse." If so, business and liquor licenses would be revoked and new licenses not granted. State Boards State licensing boards would have to revoke or refuse to grant licenses to practice such professions as doctor, lawyer, accountant, chiropractor, nurse, barber, hairdresser, naturopath, physical therapist and so on, if an applicant is determined by law to be abnormal, wrong, unnatural or perverse on the grounds of sexual orientation, or perceived sexual orientation, or if that applicant appears to "facilitate" homosexuality. Tax Deductible Contributions Charitable contributions to social, religious, educational, or civic groups deductible from state income taxes could be disallowed on state returns if that group is deemed to "encourage, promote or facilitate" homosexuality. Counseling Students from high school to college who seek counseling and advice in coming to terms with issues of sexuality would not be provided with the support and assistance they need. Instead, they would be taught to perceive themselves as abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse. This would likely result in low self-esteem, self-hatred, and an even higher suicide rate among lesbian and gay youth. Child Custody During child custody battles, a court would be required to take away custody or parental rights from any parent who is, or who is perceived to be, homosexual. WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR SCHOOLS? The initiative would apply to colleges, universities and all public schools (K-12), in Oregon. It would require teachers at all grade levels to tell their students that homosexuality is "abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse" and that these "behaviors" should be discouraged and avoided. Teachers would required to "assist in setting a standard for Oregon's youth" that conforms to the OCA's standard of moral behavior. The OCA initiative would require Oregon colleges, universities and public schools to teach things that would not be taught anywhere else in the United States. University professors would not be allowed to assign any text book or reading materials that showed homosexuality in a positive light. College level psychology or sociology classes could not use text books or sexuality if they do not discourage homosexuality, even though the American Psychiatric Association has a 19-year-old position deploring discrimination against homosexuals. Medical schools would be required to teach students that homosexuality is perverse "behavior," even though new medical evidence suggests that sexual orientation is not a learned behavior, but is genetic. Schools and universities--including their libraries--would be required to review books, magazines, videotapes, records, tapes, works of art, and photographs to determine whether to ban them or censor them if they provide a positive reference to homosexuality. Every professor, teacher, speaker, performer, artist, or writer who wishes to teach, speak or perform at a public school, college or university will need to ensure officials that he or she does not "promote, encourage or facilitate" homosexuality. HOW WOULD IT AFFECT PORTLAND, OREGON'S CIVIL RIGHTS ORDINANCE? The OCA's statewide initiative would overturn Portland's civil rights ordinance. The Portland City Council unanimously passed an ordinance on Oct. 3, 1991 that bans discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and source of income in housing, employment and public accommodations. The ordinance is similar to civil rights protection in more than 30 other cities across the United States. The decade old annual Portland Gay Pride Parade would no longer be allowed. Gay and lesbian organizations or individuals would not be allowed to use City facilities such as meeting rooms or parks. WHAT CAN I DO TO KEEP THIS INITIATIVE FROM PASSING? There are many opportunities for involvement in this Campaign to oppose the OCA's initiative. For more information and to find out how you can get involved, call the Campaign for a Hate Free Oregon office: (503) 232-4501, or write us at: PO Box 3343, Portland, Oregon 97208-3343 The Oregon Witness is the journal of the Coalition for Human Dignity. They can be reached at: CHD, Box 40344, Portland, OR 97240; (503) 232-5070. --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.2 *** 9/28/92 .TEXT Why Davey Can't Drum Dave Running Gopher McCleery, Leaves of Grass (NLNS)--I've never liked guys who drummed. When I was in the fifth grade the drummer was always the kid who insulted your shirt and then smacked you on the arm, real hard. The drummer was the kid who just couldn't sit still during the slide show, the kid who was always caught picking his nose. And now I'm supposed to believe that drumming is good for your soul? Last time I went to a "men's meeting" it seemed a little too close to those Cub Scout meetings I dreaded when I was eleven years old. Meetings in which everybody pretended they were just like everybody else, which from the reading material they presented suggested that us Midwestern boys were in fact Native Americans. We had our own Indian name. Mine was "Running Gopher" or something like that. How embarassing. At men's meetings I went to, when they pulled out their drums, all I got was a headache and a sore wrist. Each guy spoke about his special drum, compared his drum to everybody else's, and told a cute little story about it. I found it hard not to just blurt out, "Just drop your drawers and let's settle it!" But if I did, I'm sure somebody would have smacked me on the shoulder and insulted my Chicago Art Institute t-shirt. I've got nothing against music, mind you. But a bunch of overweight middle class white guys sitting around in what had been a Joe's "den" twenty years ago is not my idea of a jam session. Anyway, most of these guys never wanted to be drummers back in the fifth grade and they probably wouldn't be drummers now if they hadn't read it on the cover of *New Age Journal*. I know these guys, too. They were the kids in the fifth grade who always had what was "in." You know, the kid with the Monkees lunch box even though his mother never let him watch the show. The kid who followed the fashion. When I'd see him carrying the same box as me I knew it was time to head into the frontier. They were the kids who got all serious at Cub Scout meetings while Darrell Bernhardt and I goofed in the corner and asked their mothers rude questions. But why drum? What's the point? Why not play an accordian, or the bagpipes? Why not find something on your own, instead of jumping on every self-help shlock that comes down the media pike? Finding your own way is what it's about. Finding your own way is hard and lonely. When you find your own way there's no one around to approve. And approval's what these guys want. *I beat on the drum, and there's Joe beating on his drum, and Robert, and if I beat hard enough I'll fill this little soul of mine with something, even if it's for an evening.* But it doesn't work. If you take somebody's culture, say that of Native Americans, and put a white middle-class sheen over it, and call it deep and meaningful, it's like taking bologna, dipping it in sauce and calling it barbecue. It don't fill you up, and after a few months it makes you sick. I hope reading this might make some of those Cub Scouts think about their spirit instead of just playing follow the leader. And I know I should be saying these things to their faces, but I tried that in fifth grade and it didn't work then. I don't know what these guys can do to feel better. And if I did I wouldn't tell them even if they smacked me on the shoulder and called me a weenie. Sorry, boys, but I march to a different drummer. Leaves of Grass is the world's only publication devoted to lawn care, poetry, and the human spirit! Dave can be reached at 2746 Everett, Lincoln, NE 68502. --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.2 *** 9/28/92 .TEXT Post-Liberalism And The Politics Of "Change" David Jarman and Jason W. Moore, NLNS (NLNS)--Our economic decline has finally reached such precipitous slopes that everyone (well, almost) is now aware that something is quite wrong. Even the most conservative analysts--Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, for example--acknowledge our disastrous state of affairs. Across the political spectrum, there is widespread agreement that we are going nowhere fast, and President Bush has proved incapable of formulating any kind of economic strategy other than "Stay the course." Understandably, people have come to desire, if not quite demand, Change--something Bill Clinton (having learned from Ross Perot) has eagerly seized upon. Ask a typical Clinton supporter how the candidate is a vehicle for Change and doubtless they will point to his economic plan: "Jobs. Investment. Education. Infrastructure. Research and development. High-skill high-wage economy. Bla bla bla." Clinton's socalled New Covenant, if anything, pushes all the right buttons. Clintonomics does little more. While addressing the effects of the economic crisis, Clinton's plan fails to address any of the structural causes. It attempts to deal with the detritus of 12 years of supply-side economics in a way that may well bring about temporary success through cosmetic tinkering but leaves untouched the systemic problems which underpin the steady decline ongoing since the early 1970s. The problems of that decade--stagnation, unemployment, inflation, and a marked increase in speculation at the expense of productive "investment"--seem insignificant with the problems faced by the U.S. heading into the 21st century. For the most part, the differences are simply one of degree (even more real unemployment, homelessness, poverty, and social decay); the critical break with the past is in the development of a truly internationalized economy--economics and politics, in a qualitatively new way, are interconnected at a global scale. For the U.S., this has meant, above all, loss of jobs to capital flight. The Clinton plan responds to the negative impacts of economic globalization, but fails to come to grips with its basic causes. On the positive side, Clintonomics talks about improving the lives of working people through investments--bringing the U.S. workforce up to speed through increased expenditures in education, infrastructure and public works, and research and development. Indeed, all these proposals will stick nice bandages on the wounds inflicted on the U.S. by the internationalized economy-- education addresses ongoing de-skilling, R&D keeps us apace with the Japanese and Europeans in the technological race, public works projects deal (albeit inadequately) with the increasing numbers of unemployed resulting from capital flight and the middle class squeeze. Yet, these proposals are oriented only towards the most visible effects of an economic process which is tearing the U.S. economy apart at the seams. The theoretical basis for Clintonomics emerges out of the work of such liberal academics as Harvard professor Robert Reich and former Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall. Reich, in Work of Nations (1991), and Marshall, in Unheard Voices (1987), both argue for the need to pursue a cohesive national economic strategy which stresses the importance of job training and advanced technology--the so- called "high-wage, high-skill, high-tech" strategy. The strategy relies on a revitalized labor bureaucracy (neither are great admirers of shop floor militancy) and in general a revival of the state- business-labor partnership strongest in the quarter-century after World War II. Marshall and Reich part ways, however, on the issue of trade and protectionism, although both reject traditional protective measures. Marshall's proposals remain vague, other than asserting that we would do well to emulate certain aspects of the Japanese or European labor relations and national-level economic planning mechanisms. Marshall's most central argument is a half-demand, half-plea to all competing nations to bring up wage levels and democratic standards -- essentially creating a level playing field by calling for internationally-recognized standards for the protection of the environment, working people, and human rights. Basic to Marshall's understanding of the U.S. role in the global economy is a nationalism which succeeds in going beyond traditional protectionism and its simplistic focus on trade barriers. In its place, he introduces idealistic notions of being able to encourage "upward harmonization," i.e. good behavior on the part of our foreign competitors, by using tariffs and import quotas as both carrot and stick. Marshall's real problem, however, is that the global misbehavior has, at its roots, the transnational corporations; foreign governments, like our own, are only guilty of complicity. Expectations of global morality on the part of increasingly powerful, and mobile, corporate entities driven entirely by the bottom line are, to say the least, fanciful. Reich's analysis of the international economy has much to say for itself. He is astute in his understanding of the long-term ramifications of globalization. In the economy of the future, deindustrialization, compounded by the growth of the "information economy," will continue to such an extent that industrial strength and economic competitiveness will be rendered virtually meaningless. Only those nations with enough intellectually high- skilled professionals--"symbolic analysts"--will be able to survive. The erosion of the modern nation-state, with its influence over social and economic processes at a national level, is giving way to the power of a new type of corporation -- the "global webs." The bottom three-quarters of any nominally "national" population, Reich correctly observes, will be consigned to the low-wage service sector. We can already see this trend at work in the erosion of the middle class and the Reagan-era assault on redistributionary mechanisms, to the detriment of the working class and poor. For Reich, there simply is no alternative to this rather grim future. Here the Marshall and Reich views overlap--both call for national economic planning and investment in education in order, supposedly, to transform the U.S. into a high-wage, high-skill paradise. Really, they seek to carve as much of a niche as possible out of a global economy with room for only a small percentage of the global populace, all this in the hopes of guaranteeing the remnants of the U.S. middle class a certain degree of security (and thereby, continued political support for the Reich-Marshall-Clinton economic program). Predictably, this plan leaves untouched the rapid polarization of rich and poor nations, consigning those at capitalism's periphery to the very low-wage, low-skill oblivion Marshall and Reich so vigorously abhor. This economic polarization at a global level, ironically, is mirrored within the U.S. and throughout the industrialized world, a development which they dutifully ignore in their obsession with the plight of the middle class. For example, this dual polarization will be accelerated by the impending finalization of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which Clinton hesitantly supports. As Reich's analysis would indicate, U.S.-Mexican economic integration does not mean more jobs for anyone outside of the information economy. For supporters of the Marshall view, the evidence seems to point towards "downward harmonization." Corporations regularly flaunt even the flimsiest of environmental regulations, and labor and human rights violations are the rule, not the exception. If anything, the behavior of U.S. business--those upon whom Marshall relies to press for a "level playing field"--indicates that it is basically incapable of the "good behavior" demanded of our Third World competitors. Clintonomics essentially takes up where Reich leaves off. The centerpieces of his Plan are not oriented towards bringing economic empowerment to the working class and the poor, who, if one is to accept Reichian fatalism, are doomed anyway. Clinton's proposals of education, high-tech research, high-tech infrastructure improvements, ad nauseam, are designed primarily to shore up the rotting timbers holding our continually shrinking middle class in place. Just as the Reagan Administration had its looney-tunes like James Watt who figured we could sell off all the national parks because the Rapture was nigh and our children wouldn't be around to enjoy them, the upcoming Clinton Administration seems to have its fatalistic visionaries in place, ready to write off three-quarters of the population simply because the inevitable New Economic Order has no room for them. It is a view as callous as it is short-sighted, a short bit of economic thuggery which ought to be challenged for the millenarian dreck that it is. The overall trends toward globalization are inevitable; that much is true. For all his correct diagnosis, Reich chooses not to deal with structural basis for the present crisis. His, and Clintonomics', shortcut to prosperity will ultimately prove incapable of delivering the goods to the vast majority. What, then, is a more pragmatic, and necessarily humane, strategy for a return to prosperity? The question is not how do we stop globalization, but how do we humanize it? We can deal with the crisis in more productive ways than Clinton's demands that welfare mothers go find jobs which don't exist. Only a social and economic program which confronts the ominous centralization of power and wealth, both at home and abroad, can create the basis for a return to prosperity. The new social movements which emerge to challenge the disastrous future Reich envisions must take aim not at convincing capitalists to be good or else, or at winning power solely through the ballot box, but in working outside capitalism's economic, political, and cultural paradigms. Pressure for a new society must come not from the upper reaches of power, where realizations like Reich's only lead to so many shoulder-shrugs, but in both the community and workplace, where everyone can play a part in ensuring his or her own well-being and, ultimately, their own survival. --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.2 *** 9/28/92 .TEXT Letter from Exile Ray Luc Lavasseur (NLNS)--Remeber Eugene Debs? One of the first Socialists I ever read, before I moved on to the hardcore. I used to quote him in letters--"where there is a lower class I am of it, where there is a criminal element, I am in it, where there is a soul in prison, I am not free." I don't know if he wrote this before or after his stint in Atlanta, but it always impressed me. Enough so I named a cat after him. I don't think prisoners and their struggle need to be romanticized, but what phase have we entered when the liberals/left, including that hightly suspect group "progressives," make no mention of prisons? They write enough about police and police repression--check that--not enough, but more than about prisons, and then let it die on the vine as if humanity ceases to exist after booking. I don't think this lack of consciousness problem is so much that predominantly white, middle class leftists/liberals have never experienced prison. It's more a case of their not being personally or politically threatened by it. They go on and on about Big Brother, civil rights violations, suppression of dissent, etc., but they all go past "go" and collect their $200. They can play monopoly like the rich folks--without the Get Out of Jail Free card. That wasn't the case in the past. At the turn of the century through the '20s, radicals, Wobblies, immigrants, union organizers, felt the crunch. Communists and unionists in the '30s. Reds in the '50s. Enough radicals and militants in the '60s-'70s to make people think. Black, radical and otherwise, have long been held in the revolving door. And Latinos the last few decades. Nowhere do you come up against the power of the law and naked force as blatantly as it's wielded in prisons. A virtual slavocracy as embodied in the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. We have barely any rights the State is bound to respect. If the Left did have any consciousness about the issue--and some Leftists do--they're not likely to act on it because they lack the strength and resource to wage a vigorous struggle. In their publications, Leftists often refer to the risk of imprisonment due to their activities, but I wonder how many would remain active if they seriously thought their actions carried the risk of imprisonment or bodily harm. Prisoners often mirror-image what is happening in the street. With the exception of "criminal justice" issues, the general level of political consciousness among prisoners is low. They are ripe for new ideas and alternatives, but don't see any. Which is understandable given there is no organized movements presenting any offerings. This is a period of near total abandonment of prisoners. Combine that with the condition of survival and it tends to breed an unhealthy cynicism. Many Marion prisoners have been involved in individual and group acts of resistance over the years. For their efforts, they have been subjected to beatings, torture, transfers, isolation, more time- -the whole nine yards. They see nothing positive coming out of it other than maintaining their integrity while staring down the worst abuses. They get no support outside and solidarity is lacking inside. Their hopes hinge on one more crack at the street. One more payday or payback, and hell hath no fury like an enraged ex-con. For five years now, prisoners have been sentenced under the new rule of mandatory sentences with no parole. Young dudes are coming in with big time. You can't do time on the installment plan anymore--the sentences are too steep, with no parole release. You do more than a couple of bits and your whole life is gone. So, the prevailing attitude is next time why show any consideration to cops or witnesses since you're coming back for 20 to 30 after doing 10 to 15. The prevailing informational exchange is based on methods of criminal operation. So while a totally unsuspecting and scammed soul takes refuge in the fact that 1.2 million women and men are locked away, the next generation is slipping up to the back door, and ex-cons come out of their own frightful situation without a pot to piss in and no prospects. The reason there was such a high level of political consciousness among prisoners of an earlier era was because they reflected what was happening on the streets of the country at an earlier time, and to a lesser degree, internationally. Prison conditions are such that confrontations and rebellion will continue regardless of the existance of external movements. The lowest common denominator with us, without significant outside support, is how much suffering and bleeding we will endure before we are willing and able to turn the situation around. Or has the current situation become a permenant and expanding part of a larger nightmare we are all getting sucked into? Ray Luc Lavasseur can be reached at 10376/016, Box 1000, Marion, IL, 62959. --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.2 *** 9/28/92 .TEXT *A Matter of Conscious: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War* by William Short and Willa Seidenberg, photos by William Short; Addison Gallery of American Art, 84pp. Judith Rew, On Guard (NLNS)--At first *A Matter of Conscious* seems a little too lovely and brief to be what it is: a serious account of GI resistance to the Vietnam war that grew into an international movement, most recently manifest in Persian Gulf resistance. Each of the 27 oral histories is tightly edited to fill just one airy page and accompany one coffee table-quality portrait of the storyteller, stiffly posed against a black background. There is certainly so much more to say about each painful and dangerous decision to go AWOL, sabatoge operations, refuse orders, speak publicly, and in every other imaginable way resist the war that all grew to believe was wrong, most after participating firsthand. But the logic of the format soon becomes apparent. As the photos stare back, we are reminded that no matter how many thousands of words and pictures comprised oppossition to the Vietnam war, finally every resister had to commit one personal and lonely act in one decisive moment. The cover is the key to how this book must be read. It has no title, just one large enlarged detail from a photo--huge hands holding a timy snapshot of a GI in uniform. Look carefully, this cover says, study the details. Each account describes the event in the teller's military service when resistance became inevitable. But the photo, taken 20 or 30 years later, finishes the story. William Short, who himself is one of the resisters, asked each to bring some samll, important object to the photo session. Paul Attwood, the first storyteller, holds not his but his father's Marine decorations, which he describes as "radioactive" as they touch unexpected feelings in him again. Charlie Clements, the medical doctor who as a Navy pilot refused to fly ccombat missions in Vietnam and years later treated wounded rebels in El Salvador, carries his own book, *Witness to War*. One wears what appears to be a gay pride button, many wear political tee-shirts, union caps, etc. that hint of lifelong activism. Susan Schnall, a Navy nurse who leafletted a San Francisco-area base with anti-war flyers from an airplane, carries a stack of file folders reminding us of just what hard work resistance is. Others carry framed discharge notices or stacks of legal documents. Peter Hagerty ironically holds a diary-like book called *Our Trip Abroad* and some Vietnamese money. Greg Payton, a black man who had to "develop a racist attitude" in the military because "he never was raised that way," carries nothing. Just his large frame and defiant face add enough to one of the most poignant accounts of violence and racism in the military. But most newspapers and books are edited, wrote, or read-- *Free Press, Left Face, Fatigue Press*, and others--often at great personal risk. Sometimes the books and newspapers link the resisters to each other. Donald Duncan, a Green Beret from 1954-64 who resisted in opposition, carries his book, *The New Legions*. Dave Kline carries the same book, which apparently inspired his own opposition years later. For many, like Terry Irwin, the issue became free speech and free press. We learn that some GIs were court martialled for distributing copies of the Decleration of Independence. The military had good reason to repress free speech. For many GIs it was words, spoken or written, that gave them the courage and coherence to resist. Dave Blalock holds the *New York Times* ad that inspired his unit to organize a black armband protest. He writes, "that was the influencce of a full page ad in the *New York Times*. It gave us the opportunity to do something bigger than just killing an officer or something like that." Finally, this book is a distillation of the thousands of words written and spoken throughout the years of resistance to the war. The authors interviewed 58 people and included only 27 stories, plus photos of several more resisters. But the careful linking of stories gives us a good picture of how big the movement grew. Many of the resisters, themselves, only vaguely aware of what they were part of. Nearly every reason a GI chose to resist is conveyed in this slim book: personal experience with the particular horrors of war, military corruption and disinformation, racism, lack of democracy in the military, growing understanding of the North Vietnamese, the wholesale destruction that turned Vietnam into a "living hell." If we skip a paragraph here and there we might miss an important detail. We learn in the short biographies in the back, for instance, that the man to whom the book is dedicated, ex-GI Clarence Fitch, died of AIDS. Without the book saying another word about it, we are reminded of the drugs, homelessness, etc. to which many veterans fell victim. The one page devoted to Persian Gulf resistance (very widespread for such a short war) brings the book firmly into the present. This is obviously important to the authors. Although *A Matter of Conscience* serves as a kind of class reunion of resisters with this yeabook-like format, it is clearly more than memorabilia. This is a spare but amazingly complete "look" at the Gi resistance movement, presented in a beautiful, dignified way. Short, a talented photagrapher, and Seindenberg should be commended and supported. *On Guard* is published by Citizen Soldier, 175 Fifth Ave., Suite 808, New York, NY 110; (212) 777-3470. --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.2 *** 9/28/92 .TEXT The US/Cuba Friendshipment: A Caravan to Break the Blockade (NLNS)--The Berlin Wall is gone, the USSR is being sold off to the highest Western bidder, but the Cold War lives on in new and insidious ways. At the same time, the 33 year old US imposed embargo against Cuba continues prohibiting the US from trading any items with Cuba including much-needed medicines, food and fuel. The US is the world's largest producer of medicines, but Cuba cannot even buy aspirin or essential medical diagnostic equipment from our country. The US government exerts pressure on other countries to halt trade with Cuba as shown recently when they approached a Swedish medical company persuading them not to ship a child's heart monitor to Cuba. This year President Bush further tightened the embargo when he ruled by executive order that any ship from another country that docks in a Cuban harbor is prohibited from docking in a US harbor for six months. The US/Cuba Friendshipment Caravan leaving for Cuba in November is the first-ever public mass challange to the US blockade. The caravan will question the legitimacy of "The Trading with the Enemy Act" and travel ban by transporting bicycles, medicines such as AZT and other much needed supplies to Cuba. Over 100 vehicles and 200 drivers will travel along 8-10 routes through the US, stopping each day in a different city for educational presentations, press conferences, prayer vigils and aid collections. The caravan will arrive at El Paso, Texas where together with the Mexican solidarity movement, demonstrations against the US blockade will be held on both sides of the border. >From there the caravan will travel to the port of Tampico, Mexico, where it will be met by a Cuban freighter. The caravan participants will spend a week in Cuba touring hospitals, schools and work places. They will further challange the embargo by purchasing rum, cigars and other products of the Cuban economy to redistribute on their return to the US. Caravan participants believe we can't change policy unless we challenge it. Spokesperson Tony Newman had this to say: "The US blockade has caused immeasurable losses to the Cuban people and is harsh punishment for a third world nation that's made tremendous advances in the areas of healthcare, education, illeteracy, racism, women's rights, hunger and poverty. In Cuba they have a saying, 'Defendemos la esperanza' ('we defend hope'). The Cuban people are an example of a formerly colonized, underdeveloped country fighting against all odds to build a system that humanizes rather than dehumanizes and we really need to support that." The US/Cuba Friendshipment, sponsored by a coalition headed by Pastors for Peace, is currently working all over the country to bring together potential drivers, passengers and the donations necessary to pull off the caravan. For more information, please contact: National Office: Pastors for Peace 331 17th Ave. SE Minneapolis, MN 55414 (612) 378-0062 --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.2 *** 9/28/92 .TEXT Anti-Racist Skinheads Smash Stereotypes John Barkdull, The Madison Edge (NLNS)--Tim and Brian are friends--intelligent, politically aware and committed, they have consciously devoted themselves to the task of combatting racism. Tim and Brian are skinheads. Tim and Brian call themselves anti-racist skinheads, saying that they believe that street-level "skinhead justice" is the best means of combatting racism and of fighting for the underdog. They are willing to put their bodies on the line, to "kick ass." as they put it, to silence and disempower racists, including other skinheads. They accepts that this means they risk injury, life, and imprisonment for what they believe. Tim says, "You have to be a man, stand up for yourself." Brian agrees. Tim has spent time in jail, been assaulted verbally, with blows, and even once with a knife. He has seen his complaints ignored by the police. He has been left bleeding and unconscious in the street after a confrontation with some "jocks" who had been too outspoken in their bigotry; he woke up in the hospital. He has done his share of damage, too--not surprising given his impressive size and build. Brian is younger, still in high school. He tells fewer war stories, but he is sharp, articulate, and committed as Tim. Both young men express a well-developed understanding of the historical roots of racism in America, of its pervasiveness, and of the political choice they have made. The sophistication comes unexpectedly from two so young, and all the more so because of the image skinheads have been given in the mass mind. Their view is that the racist hate groups have been around for a long time, always willing to use terror and violence. Tim and Brian argue matter-of-factly that such tactics require a commensurate response. They are committed to a street-level fight against racism, one seeking equality for all minoritiees, "by any means necessary." The means are simple: if someone expresses racist opinions, "we kick his ass." The skinheads, they say, began as a working-class lifestyle in England, marked by short hair, boots, and rugged clothing. The dress is intended to prepare in a most visible way for street-level combat. The genre migrated to the United States, where the skinheads split into two warring factions by 1988. Around this time, the Klan and neo-Nazis--some associated with Tom Metzger, the notorious leader of White Aryan Nation--found a few adherents among the skinheads. Previously, all of the skinheads had considered themselves defenders of the disadvantaged, and the arrival of such haters became cause for open struggle. Tim and Brian claim that the anti-racist skinheads far outnumber the Nazis and the Klan members. They consider the few who do associate with the white supremacists to be pawns in the racist game, the foot soldiers who dish out and take the knocks for others. The Klan, behind various fronts, now seek respectibility, but relies on right-wing skinheads to do its dirty work. What keeps the connection alive, despite the opposition of other skinheads, is money, including funds for legal help when foul deeds bring the police. The skinhead with links to the Nazis and the Klan also get more attention than the anti-racist skinheads, Tim says, because "hate sells," a blunt statement to which David Duke gives considerable credence. Adopting the anti-racist skinhead identity allows entry to a social network spanning the country. A skinhead can expect to find in most major towns and cities a place to stay and friends who will help. In the Midwest, this social network has a name: The Syndicate. It reaches from Detroit to Nebraska, including Madison, Milwaukee, and LaCrosse. The skinheads, says Tim, are "like family," of which 15 to 20 serious members live in Madison. Certain signs are used to differentiate Nazi from anti-racist skinheads. "Laces and Braces," or shoelaces and suspenders of certain colors, are identifiers: White laces and red suspenders indicate a Nazi, yellow laces a cop-hater. Patches are used to signal an anti-racist skinhead. What effect do the anti-racist skinheads have? Tim and Brian believe that they are especially good at persuading Nazi skinheads to change their way. They find that most of the right-wingers join up out of a desire to belong to a group of toughs, or due to the noteriety arising from attention from such shows as Geraldo. This is far from a deep-seated committment, say the two. The Nazi skinheads, they say, will accept anyone who will go along with their ideas, however superficially. Yet, "if they are lying on the ground bleeding," they often change their minds, says Tim. "They wont fight for it. Beat them up and they aren't what they think they are." Brian says anti-racist skinheads are made of different stuff. "I'd rather stand my ground and not lose my pride or self-respect," he says. Sexism or sexual assault also bring out the crusader in these young men. They tell of a compatriot whi is now in jail for defending a woman subjected to rape. The rapist, they say, bragged of his exploit, gaining him a sound beating. This, Tim and Brian say, is an example of skinhead justice. (Learning the details of the story, the judge sentenced the skinhead to one year in the county jail rather than three in a state prison.) Tim and Brian emphasize that they do not pick fights, that they are not bullies or vigilantes. They do intend to finish fights thrust upon them, and they will initiate confrontations if in a good cause. Further, they expect their activity to increase when a prominent Madison Nazi skinhead leaves jail. "We'll be brawling a lot when he gets out," says Tim. They see this as merely a continuation of a long struggle. They've read widely on the history of racism in America, on the Black Panthers, on Malcolm X, an Bobby Seale, and this literature has helped to shape their committment. Some form of revolution is needed to eradicate racism, they say. The Klan has been here for over a hundred years, and racism for longer yet. Such groups are more than willing to use violence, so, they say, "we need to use violence and we need to use it now to stop racism." The Madison Edge can be reached at PO Box 845, Madison WI 53701- 0845; (608) 255-4460. --- 30 -- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.2 *** 9/28/92 .TEXT New Movie To Expose "The Panama Deception" (NLNS)--Witnesses in Panama say that the protests during George Bush's visit to Panama on June 11, during which he was tear gassed and rushed off the stage of Panama City's Parque Porras, involved an estimated 1000 to 2000 Panamanians from various walks of life, equaling the number of Bush supporters. This contradicts officials reports that only a small group of "leftists" accounted for the disruption. In addition, 100 Panamanians were arrested during the June 11 demonstrations, and some Panamanian human rights workers and opposition leaders have been threatened or forced into hiding to avoid arrest and political persecution. A new film being released by the Empowerment Project hopes to expose the atrocities committed in Panama by the Bush Administration since the 1989 invasion of that country. According to Barbara Trent, director of the soon-to-be- released feature-length documentary, The Panama Deception, "Thousands of Panamanians were killed during the invasion and countless bodies were buried in mass graves. Fourteen of these graves have already been identified." Despite the struggle of Panamanian activists to exhume the graves, only three have been dug up thus far. Trent continues, "Since the invasion, hundreds of individuals have been forced underground to escape arrest and political persecution. What has happened to [them] is indicative of the oppression and human rights violations which continue in Panama as a result of the US military invasion, and which have been furthered by US government policies." "We know that most Americans have no idea what really happened during the invasion of Panama, and what has gone on there since," said Joanne Doroshow, a producer of The Panama Deception. "Our film uncovers this alarming story. It shows how the US military ravaged and bombed entire neighborhoods in Panama, killing thousands and creating a massive new population of homeless and refugees in Panama. It traces the United States' historical, exploitative relationship with Panama and exposes the true motivations for the invasion, which had little to do with Noriega. It discusses the longstanding relationship between Noriega and Bush. And it explains how and why the US government and the major US media have censored information and deceived the public. "Some of our footage has never been seen before in this country, including shots of ongoing demonstrations and major social unrest in Panama since the invasion. People in Panama are disgusted with George Bush and with the corrupt Endara government, which we installed on a US military base just hours before the invasion. Knowing what we know, it is incredible to us that George Bush would even consider going there. Even the US military Southern Command in Panama advised him against the visit. He apparently needs to see our film," said Doroshow. The Panama Deception's producers, the Empowerment Project, producers of the award-winning 1988 film COVERUP: Behind the Iran Contra Affair, have organized September openings for the film in over 20 cities around the US. For more information about when the film is coming to a theatre near you, or how to arrange a showing, please contact: Empowerment Project 1653 18th St. Suite #3 Santa Monica, CA 90404 (310) 828-8807 [Eric Castillo] fax:(310) 453-4347 or on the East Coast (212) 251-0817 [Joanne Doroshow]. --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.2 *** 9/28/92 .TEXT Nationwide Boycott of Steinfeld's and NORPAC Products Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN) Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United (NLNS)--On Sunday, September 13, some 200 farmworkers and farmworker supporters gathered at PCUN headquarters in Woodburn, OR and enthusiastically endorsed PCUN's call for a nationwide boycott of Steinfeld's products (pickles, saurkraut, and relishes), and NORPAC's frozen and canned fruits and vegetables, sold primarily under the "FLAV-R-PAC" and "Santiam" labels. PCUN has called this boycott because a major NORPAC and Steinfeld's supplier, Kraemer Farms, refuses to negotiate with Kraemer workers, represented by PCUN, about wages and working conditions. First to speak at the rally was Timoteo Lopez-Garcia, a leader of the 1991 strike at Kraemer Farms and one of the many former strikers whom the Kraemers refused to rehire for the 1992 season. "We have returned year after year to Kraemer Farms and worked hard, but we're paid wages which don't support our families and we're fired if we speak up. The boycott is the only way we will win the respect and better working conditions we deserve." PCUN Vice President Ramon Martinez invoked the spirit of Mexican Independence Day (September 16): "Like a nation's struggle for independence, the boycott may take years, but we're determined to win *our* independence from the explotative labor system in agriculture." On August 10th, PCUN wrote to Steinfeld's and NORPAC requesting that they take steps to sever ties with Kraemer Farms in thirty days if Kraemer Farms failed to negotiate. Both Steinfeld's and NORPAC declined, claiming that Kraemer Farms' labor practices were not their concern. "The canneries' responses tell us that they care only about the condition of the vegetables they buy and not about the condition of the people who pick those vegetables," said PCUN Secretary-Treasurer Larry Kleinman at the Rally. "As consumers, we need to exercise our economic power and send Steinfeld's and NORPAC the message that we believe that people are more important than vegetables." In less than four weeks, more than 250 farmworker supporters--some as far away as Florida, Wisconsin and New Jersey--have mailed postcards to Steinfeld's, NORPAC and Kraemer Farms, declaring they would support the boycott. Most also promised to work in their areas to build the grassroots movement which is essential to the boycott's success. PCUN's Steinfeld's/NORPAC Boycott was immediately endorsed by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an international inter-faith organization, and by the National Farmworker Ministries, comprised of 45 religious groups. In the coming months, we expect many more local, regional and national organizations--labor, religious, environmental, political and community groups--to declare their support as well. We also plan to widely circulate boycott pledge cards and to leaflet retail stores, starting in Woodburn and in selected Portland, OR neighborhoods. PCUN has worked with Kraemer workers for three seasons, helping them organize themselves to seek solutions to the injustices which they have identified. Kraemer Farms is one of the Willamette Valley's largest agricultural enterprises, covering some 2,000 acres, producing at least sisteen comodities, and operating nine labor camps. In June, 1992, Kraemer Farms workers formed a *five point plan:* 1) increased wages; 20 establishment of a grievance procedure; 3) firing and discipline only based on just cause; 4) respect for seniority; and 5) creation of a workers' council to participate in the administration of company-owned housing. On July 1st, Kraemer Farms attorney, Doug Brown ignored our call for negotiations and summarily rejected the plan. Federal and state collective bargaining laws exclude farworkers, meaning that *we have no access to government-supervised elections, nor to sanctions proceedings against an employer who refuses to bargain in good faith or retaliates against workers for supporting or engaging in union activity. To express solidarity and get further information on the boycott, cantact Larry Kleinman at Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN), 300 Young St., Woodburn, OR 97071; (503) 982-0243. --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.2 *** 9/28/92 .TEXT RIGHT WING GENERALS OVERTHROW CHILE'S U.P. GOVERNMENT; ALLENDE DEAD, RESISTANCE CONTINUES >From LIBERATION New Service #553, September 15, 1973 SANTIAGO, Chile (LNS)--Right-wing Chilean military forces overthrew the Popular Unity (UP) government of Salvador Allende on September 11. The four-man junta announced that Allende had committed suicide rather than surrewnder to them. The coup came only a few weeks after the third anniversary of the Allende government--the first elected Marxist government in Latin America--which had three years left to its term. Soon after the coup began, communications and travel in Chile were cut off, leaving the outside world to rely on the reports of the rebellious military who took control of all communications, radio and TV installations. However, through reports from the Chilean diplomatic community outside Chile, many of whom are still loyal to the UP government, some details of the coup were learned. The Chilean embassy in Mexico reported on September 12 that "several thousand" people had been killed so far. Cuban diplomats, expelled from Chiloe by the junta on September 12, said that they saw the military carry out "summary executions" in the streets of Santiago. These sources, as well as others, also challenged the junta's claim that Allende's death was a suicide. The Chilean ambassador to Mexico said that Allende had died fighting a platoon of soldiers who came to arrest him. Killed along with Allende were his friend and press attache, Augusto Oliveras who also headed Chile's TV netowrk, and two other aides. The Mexican ambassador also reported that an autopsy had established that Allende had died of wounds caused by machine-gun fire. However, along with the accounts of brutal repression by the junta came evidence that Chile's workers and peasants, who had formed the U.P.'s base of support, were fighting to defend the elected government. While the junta persisted in reporting that everything was under control, and warned foreign journalists not to report anything which was not cleared with the junta, other reports claimed that resistance throughout Santiago was strong. Two missionaries, quoted in a CBS news broadcast, reported that in the area where they worked in Santiago, the people swore that "they'd never give up." Chilean "ham radio" operators reported a large workers demonstration in Santiago on September 11, the first night of the coup. Radio Havana reported organized defense groups and workers' committees fighting in many places. In response to this opposition, the junta declared a state of seige, prohibiting all gatherings, imposing a total cerfew, and threatened to "severely crush" any resistanceI In addition, the junta ordered all foreigners to report ot the police. THere are nearly 10,000 political refugees in Chile who have fled from repressive regimes in Latin America, especially Brazil, Uraguay, Bolivia and Paraguay. Many face death or torture if they are forced to return to their countries. About 2500 Americans reside in Chile, of whom only 100 work with the U.S. government. The junta has also moved to crush the Chilean left, arresting 100 leftist leaders in Santiago and Valpraiso in the first two days of the coup. Included in this group are two of Allende's cabinet ministers, and leaders of the Socialist Party, Clodomiro Almeyda and Orlando Letelier. There are at least 68 warrants out for labor and political leaders including Socialist Party leader Carlos Altamirano and Luis Figueroa, leader of the Chilean Labor Federation. The coup came after a series of right-wing formented disruptions aimed at Allende's political and economic programs. Most recently, a seven week transport lockout by Chile's truckers and a shutdown by its shopkeepers had hit the country. Early on September 11, Naval and Marine units took over the cities of Valpraiso, Quillota, Quinteros (the port of Concepcion) and Talcahuano. Informed of this, Allende rushed from his home to the presidential palace, known as the Moneda, where he had begun broadcasting to the country. He announced that the military had demanded his resignation. "I will not resign," he said. "I wish to make clear my irrevocable decision to continue defending Chile. I indicate my intention to resist by all means, even at the cost of my life." Meanwhile army and national police units had surrounded both the Moneda, other government officces, and Allende's home. A three-hour gun battle ensued and the military used fighter-bombers to repeatedly bomb the Moneda and Allende's home. The junta, made up of General Delaire Gustavo Liegh Guzman (Air Force), Admiral Jose Torbio Merino Castro (Navy), General Augusto Pinochet (Army), and General Cesar Menudoza Frank (National Police) were formally installed in a midnight ceremony on September 12. There were reports that the generals had asked Gabriel Valdes, a Christian Democrat and Allende's appointee to Chile's U.N. delegation, to serve as head of state. Valdes, upon hearing the report in New York, replied, "Do you think I would be party to assassination to become President of Chile?" --- A major question occuring to many who heard of the coup is; "What role did the U.S. play in it?" Recent revelations of ITT's offer to pay the CIA $1 million to prevent Allende's election, plus the fact that the U.P. government had nationalized several U.S. firms, make it difficult to avoid wondering. The Nixon administration is apparently aware of the close scrutiny it is under, judging from the vigorous and sometimes testy denials of U.S. involvement made by State Department officials. However the facts speak differently. Although the first reaction of the State Department was to deny any knowledge of the coup, on September 12, an Undersecretary of State revealed that the State Department had known of the plans for a coup at least 48 hours in advance. They said that they did not inform Allende because they were not sure it would come off. Apparently the State Department had known of several coup plans which did not come off as scheduled including the abortive coup last June which precipitated the truckers strike and a wave of right- wing terrorism. In addition to this admission, observers point to the activities of the U.S. ambassador to Chile, Nathaniel Davis. Davis, who was a high advisor to the National Security Council in 1966-68, and served as U.S. ambassador to Guatemala during the repression of leftist geurrillas there, came to Washington on September 6, only to return to Chile on September 9, two days before the coup. Observers have also pointed to the presence of U.S. ships in the waters off Valpraiso. While the U.S. insists that it called off the planned joint Chile-U.S. naval maneuvers when it learned of the coup, many feel that the maneuvers were called to serve as a cover for the mobnilization of naval forces in Valpraiso where the coup began. As soon as the coup was under way, and a disguise no longer needed, the U.S. ships returned to Peru where they had been stationed. The presence of U.S. naval vessels is even more interesting when one considers the solicitous treatment the U.S. has given the Chilean military. In contrast to the policy of cutting off economic credit and reducing aid to $2.5 million, the Nixon administration had been only too happy to court favor with the generals, giving them more than $12 million in military equipment alone in 1973. --- The response around the world was quick and angry. With the exception of the U.S., Brazil and Uraguay, most nations issued statements of outrage at the overthrw of the Allende government. In Latin America alone, Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, and even Venezuela and the Dominican Republic called for mourning periods after Allende's death. In all those nations, as well as in Europe, the U.S. and Canda, demonstrations were held to show support and solidarity for the UP government. In New York City 500 people gathered to hear Angela Davis speak. In Milan, Italy, a bomb exploded in the Pan Am building. A message was left behind condemning Allende's "assissination," and charging the U.S. with responsibility for it. In Argentina more than a million people gathered in Buenos Aires while in Mexico City thousands of students rallied to protest the coup. The parallels between Chile, 1973, and Spain 1936, were drawn by many. On eNew York journalist pointing to the fact that Spain's General Franco received aid from the Nazis and predicted that Chile's generals would receive quick endorsement and help from the Nixon administration, commented "We've come a long way." Brazil and Uraguay have already recognized the junta. Of course, there are some, like the New York Times, who have taken the opportunity presented by the coup to criticize Allende's experiment once again. The Times editorial on Chile accused Allende of refusing to compromise. However, the Manchester Guardian pointed out, "The forces had no excuse for this drastic action. President Allende was not the first Chilean president elected on a minority vote--36%. Furthermore he increased his suppport to 43% in March's Parliamentary election. Hundreds of thousands were out in the streets to celebrate the third anniversary of his election earlier this month. Dr. Allende was still looking for a way out, notably compromise with the Christian Democrat opposition party which controls congress. It is easy to claim that Allende should have been more moderate in his exercise of power. But in fact he did no more than to try to fulfill the program on which he was elected. For the first two years he did indeed make sweeping structural changes in the country's economy--as he had promised to." --- Now, on September 13, three days after the coup, news from Chile is still scattered and mostly from junta sources. However, in addition to the continued reports of fighting in Santiago there comes the hint of what is to come. According to reports in Reuters, General Prats, who was commander of the Chilean Armed Forces until August, and who was Allende's most ardent supporter in the military, is leading a division of infantry, as well as columns of armed workers, from Concepcion to Santiago. That distance is about 200 miles. And yet it is not known if Prats and his army have met with any resistance, or what resistance they will meet in Santiago. But, one thing is clear: in Chile, it's not over yet. --- 30 --- .TOPIC NLNS Packet 3.2 *** 9/28/92 .TEXT DEMONSTRATION AT UNITED NATIONS, NEW YORK CITY! DEMAND VOTING SEAT AT U.N. FOR INDIGENOUS NATIONS! SOVEREIGNTY & SELF-DETERMINATION FOR NATIVE PEOPLES! FREE LEONARD PELTIER! OCTOBER 12, 1992 12 - 5:00 p.m. On October 12, 1992, Native American Solidarity Day, Indian People from throughout the Western Hemisphere and their supporters will assemble at noon in Dag Hammersjold Plaza at the United Nations Building to condemn 500 years of genocide, and to demand a voting seat for Indian People in the United Nations General Assembly. The League of Indigenous Sovereign Nations of the Western Hemisphere (LISN) is raising long overdue demands of sovereignty and selfdetermination for millions of Indian People threatened by the wanton theft of the sacred lands by resouce hungry multinational corporations. Only the complete unification of all Indian Nations into one great alliance can prevent the ongoing rape of native land. Indian People from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic Circle are standing together to say "NO" to genocide and exploitation, and to demand an independent voice in the international community. LISN was established May 24-27, 1991, on Piscataway Nation Land, when native peoples came from throughout the Western Hemisphere to draft a preliminary Declaration of Principles. Since then there have been additional LISN gatherings at Rosebud, Lakota Nation, and Kahnewake Mohawk Nationa, generating great enthusiasm. A week-long gathering is planned in New York City to coincide with the October rally. LISN is a political organization of allied Indian Nations. It has facilitated forums for nation building by creating a Treaty Alliance Conference among native nations. To date, it has lobbied many Indian nations and the idea of a "United Nations of Indian People" is blazing like of forest fire in the wind. LISN's efforts will ultimately expose the 500 years of genocide, and establish an international alliance of Warrior Societies to resist the continuing plundering of Mother Earth and the brutal disregard for the lives of the elders, women and children. Non-native sisters and brothers are encouraged to show support for Native American self-determination by assisting LISN in organizing the October 12, 1992 Demonstration. Contributions can be made to: LISN c/o Piscataway Indian Nation, Inc. Washington Peace Center 2111 Florida Avenue, N.W. Washington D.C. 20008 (202) 234-2000 Leonard Peltier Support Committee (to work for his release) P.O. Box 583 Lawrence, Kansas 66044 The Washington Peace Center will provide Bus transportation from Wash, D.C. to New York for the October 12 Demonstration. Info: (202)234-2000 (or above address). --- 30 ---