Ali LaPointe suggested we post this:

Some supporters of this Black Riders Liberation Party have been charged with gang conspiracy charges. Three of them still face time and their next trial date is July first.

They are having a solidarity summer festival on july 12th in LA. Their site is here

Read this:

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One of the things that always stood out to me in the debate over “homosexuality” (both among communists and more broadly in society) was the very acceptance of that term — and what that acceptance assumed and implied.

I believe this is part of the ways that dominant views of sexuality are still allowed to set the terms of discussion among revolutionaries without being deeply or critically examined.

In fact, humans aren’t simply divided into “homosexual and heterosexual.” That binary view is itself a notion that has conservative assumptions embedded within it.

The Coming Catastrophe?
The finishing touches on several contingency plans for attacking Iran

Global Research, June 23, 2008 (Posted on MarxMail)

David DeBatto is a former U.S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agent, Iraqi
war veteran and co-author the “CI” series from Warner Books and the upcoming
“Counter to Intelligence” from Praeger Security International.

the following are excerpts, the full article is here

If the United States attacks Iran either this summer or this fall, the
American people had better be prepared for a shock that may perhaps be even
greater to the national psyche (and economy) than 9/11. First of all, there will be
significant U.S. casualties in the initial invasion. American jets will be
shot down and the American pilots who are not killed will be taken prisoner -
including female pilots. Iranian Yakhonts 26, Sunburn 22 and Exocet missiles
will seek out and strike U.S. naval battle groups bottled up in the narrow
waters of the Persian Gulf with very deadly results. American sailors will be
killed and U.S. ships will be badly damaged and perhaps sunk. We may even
witness the first attack on an American Aircraft carrier since World War II.

That’s just the opening act.

Israel (who had thus far stayed out of the fray by letting the U.S. military
do the heavy lifting) is attacked by Hezbollah in a coordinated and large
scale effort. Widespread and grisly casualties effectively paralyze the nation,
a notion once thought impossible. Iran’s newest ally in the region, Syria,
then unleashes a barrage of over 200 Scud B, C and D missiles at Israel, each
armed with VX gas. Since all of Israel is within range of these Russian built
weapons, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and virtually all major civilian centers
and several military bases are struck, often with a result of massive
casualties.

The Israeli Air Force orders all three squadrons of their F-16I Sufa
fighter/bombers into the air with orders to bomb Tehran and as many military and
nuclear bases as they can before they are either shot down or run out of fuel.
It is a one way trip for some of these pilots. Their ancient homeland lies in
ruins. Many have family that is already dead or dying. They do not wait for
permission from Washington, DC or U.S. regional military commanders. The
Israeli aircraft are carrying the majority of their country’s nuclear arsenal
under their wings.

Palestinians banned from their own beaches

16 June 2008. A World to Win News Service. A busload of Palestinian children aged 6-12 came from Hebron in the West Bank to see the sea. Cut off from going west to the beaches of the Mediterranean by Israel’s “separation wall”, instead they went east. They had never seen an open body of water. The school outing, coordinated with the Israeli-recognized Palestinian Authority Education Ministry, included teachers and parents as well as the children.

The Dead Sea beaches are lovely, and the children were really looking forward to them. But Israeli soldiers cut off the bus and would not let it pass. The bus left and then came back again later that day, in hopes that the soldiers had just been in a bad mood.

The bus driver, Mohammed Ahmed Nuaga’a, described it like this to the Independent (14 June): “I tried to explain to them that these are young pupils who came from very far to fulfil a big dream – to see the sea,” he said.

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(Thanks to N3wDay.)

Video About Hunger Strike of Indonesian Student Movement against Fuel
Price rice

Hunger strikes in various provinces to demand the cancellation of oil
price rise have succeeded in gaining broad sympathy from students and
people living near the hunger strike posts. These posts put up banners
titled “nationalise mining industries, repudiate foreign debt and
leave any government that is pro-foreign interest (Golkar Dan Demokrat
party)” received good responses.

Protests continues as 28% average fuel price increase has really made
people’s life more difficult. The government still has not shown any
concern on the situation, while progressive activists keep carrying
out protest actions and more hunger strikers fell incapacitated.

There have been mounting reports that the Israelis are determined to knock down Iran militarily — and that they believe it has to happen before a new president takes power. There were open statements from Olmert this month that Iran cannot be allowed to proceed, and more. This report is particularly chilling given that John Bolton is an active representative of forces within the U.S. ruling class who support this approach.

Israel ‘will attack Iran’ before new US president sworn in, John Bolton predicts
By Toby Harnden in Washington
Last updated: 9:50 AM BST 24/06/2008
John Bolton, the former American ambassador to the United Nations, has predicted that Israel could attack Iran after the November presidential election but before George W Bush’s successor is sworn in.

The Arab world would be “pleased” by Israeli strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, he said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.

“It [the reaction] will be positive privately. I think there’ll be public denunciations but no action,” he said.

Mr Bolton, an unflinching hawk who proposes military action to stop Iran developing nuclear weapons, bemoaned what he sees as a lack of will by the Bush administration to itself contemplate military strikes.

“It’s clear that the administration has essentially given up that possibility,” he said. “I don’t think it’s serious any more. If you had asked me a year ago I would have said I thought it was a real possibility. I just don’t think it’s in the cards.”

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Scott wrote to Kasama: The AP report below, which appeared online but likely won’t appear in your local newspaper let alone on TV, shows how well capitalism is doing in Indonesia–especially, it seems, in the orphanage industry.

Indonesian parents facing poverty give up children
By SARA SCHONHARDT 06.22.08, 12:16 PM ET

JAKARTA, Indonesia – Thirteen-year-old Yulianto has spent half his life in an orphanage, but not because his parents are dead.

His mom and dad, he quietly explained as he stared at the ground, were too poor to feed him and put him through school. And he longs to leave Parapattan Orphanage in central Jakarta and return to them.

“I just want to be with my parents, even if it means I cannot get an education,” he said.

Across Indonesia, there are thousands of children like Yulianto. A major survey of the nation’s child care institutions this month found orphanages flooded with children separated from their parents not by death, but because of poverty.

Staff at four Jakarta orphanages and a child protection worker say they expect more of these children as soaring fuel and food prices put greater pressure on already strained families.

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Yesterday, comedian George Carlin died of heart failure at 71.

Although he began his career as a mainstream comedian doing “safe” stand-up routines, he adopted a more direct, free-form comedy style by the 1960’s, which not only transformed comedy but influenced the counter-culture.  One of his most enduring routines remains ““Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” in which he enumerates the profanities that surround us in everyday life but cannot be portrayed to us in popular culture.

Along with other comedians such as Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, he challenged the hypocrisy of American culture, exposed the brutality of power, and the realities of everyday life…and he was goddamn funny.

“America is Tyranny”

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dee suggested we post this piece:

How George Carlin Changed Comedy

When the culture began to change in the late 1960s — when the old one-liner comics on the Ed Sullivan Show were looking pretty tired and irrelevant to a younger generation experimenting with drugs and protesting the war in Vietnam — George Carlin was the most important stand-up comedian in America. By the time he died Sunday night (of heart failure at age 71), the transformation he helped bring about in stand-up had become so ingrained that it’s hard to think of Carlin as one of America’s most radical and courageous popular artists. But he was.

Carlin started doing stand-up comedy in the early ’60s and had fashioned a successful career by the middle of the decade: a short-haired performer with skinny ties, well known to TV audiences for his sharp parodies of commercials and fast-talking DJs and a “hippy dippy weatherman.” But as he watched the protest marches of the late ’60s and absorbed the new spirit of the counterculture, Carlin decided that he was talking to the wrong audience, that he need to change his act and his whole attitude.

So he grew long hair and a beard and began doing different kinds of material — about drugs and Vietnam and America’s uptight attitude toward language and sex. Fans of the old George Carlin weren’t ready for it. Carlin got thrown out of Las Vegas twice for material that today would seem tame (one offending routine was about his own “skinny ass”). At the Playboy Club in Lake Geneva, Wis., he so riled up a conservative crowd with his jokes about Vietnam that he nearly caused an audience riot. Even Johnny Carson banned him as a Tonight show guest for a time because of his reputation as a drug abuser.

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Kasama received the following from Frank Ka.

Press Communique on the Third International Assembly of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS)

By the ILPS International Coordinating Committee June 21, 2008

The International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) successfully held its Third International Assembly (TIA) from June 18 to 20, 2008 in Hong Kong. The assembly carried the theme, “Strengthen the peoples’ struggle, unite to build a new world against imperialist aggression, state terrorism, plunder and social destruction!”

Two hundred sixty-five (265) participants representing 165 peoples’ organizations attended the assembly. They came from 30 countries namely: Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Burma, Canada, China (including Hong Kong SAR and Taiwan province), Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Korea, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, New Zealand, Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand, The Netherlands, Turkey, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and United States.

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