In popular culture football player Tim Tebow has become a major phenomenon. As a quarterback for the Denver Broncos his team up until this past Sunday had won six consecutive games, many of them in very dramatic fashion in the final minutes of games. Part of the allure to journalists and opinion makers about Tebow is his in your face way of pronuncing his religious faith. It should be remembered that during last year’s Super Bowl that Tebow and his Mom appeared in a controversial Focus on the Family advertisement against abortion rights. At the same time an ad by a pro-choice to counter Tebow was rejected by the network carrying the Super Bowl. When someone like Tebow becomes a major phenomenon and a success at that, millions of people are watching. They are objectively being fed a political message. What does it mean when politics (even in the form of right-wing religion) enter into the realm of sports? What effect does Tebow’s open reactionary Christianity have on the political terrain and how should communists respond? How should communists relate to sports culture and how can we encourage more popular athletes to take stands on the side of the people? We need more Muhammad Ali’s and also more Dave Zirin’s. I say this as a communist and a pretty big sports fan.
The following video is a skit done on Saturday Night Live parodying Tebow’s personality and extreme faith. It has been attacked by many right wing media outlets and most recently by Pat Robertson.
The weakening of the Kim dynasty may represent an opening to Korea's people.
note by Mike Ely:
Kim Jong Il is gone. This is breaking news, and the implications of this event will not be immediately known.
Kim Jong Il has long been head of the oppressive and isolated state ruling northern Korea — locked in a seemingly permanent state of war against the southern Korean state (which was occupied by the U.S. after world war 2). The North Korean regime,which calls itself the Democratic Republic of Korea (DPRK), may well be weakened by Kim’s death and by long-brewing power struggles within the North Korean ruling circles.
There is both danger and opportunity in those possibilities of instability.
Certainly the people of northern Korea and their compatriots in the southern Korea’s peninsula have every interest in helping radical changes sweep their peninsula. They deserve the freedom to make their own difficult future choices freed from the interference and domination of great powers.
At the same time, any turmoil or instability in North Korea will signal intense and self-interested interference by the United States, and by those great powers (China, Russia and Japan) that border Korea.
Over and over Korea has been invaded, occupied, colonized, brutalized, exploited and threatened by outside powers — specifically Japan and the United States during the 20th century.
“Heaven and Earth Shake with Cheers for Kim Jong-il!”
North Korea as a Religious State
by GARY LEUPP
All three countries labeled “the Axis of Evil” by President Bush in 2002 are presently religious states. Iran is of course a Shiite theocracy, while the government of formerly secularist Iraq—to the extent it has a government at all—is dominated by Shiite fundamentalists. North Korea has long practiced its state religion, Kim Il-songism.
According to North Korean scriptures, when the Great Leader Kim Il-song died in 1994, thousands of cranes descended from Heaven to fetch him, and his portrait appeared high in the firmament. Immediately villages and towns throughout the nation began to construct Towers of Eternal Life, the main one rising 93 meters over Kim’s mausoleum in Pyongyang. The Great Leader’s son, the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, took power, declining to assume the title of President. The Constitution of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea restricts that title forever to the Great Leader, whom the Dear Leader has proclaimed, “will always be with us.” The Dear Leader himself was born on Mt. Paektu, the highest mountain in Korea and Manchuria long revered by Koreans as sacred and the birthplace of their nation, in 1942. (Unbelievers say he was born in 1941 in Vyatskoye, in Siberia, in the Soviet Union.) His birth in a humble log cabin brought joy to the cosmos: a double rainbow appeared over the peak, a new star rose in the heavens, and a swallow descended to herald his birth. (Thus he is called, among other monikers, the Heaven-Descended General.) When he was 32 years old, the Workers’ Party of Korea and the people of Korea unanimously elected him their leader. When he visited Panmunjom, a fog descended to protect him from South Korean snipers, but when he was out of danger, the mist dramatically listed and glorious sunlight shone all around him. . . You get the idea.
Guantanamo's Camp X-ray -- Cheney's concentration camp is now Obama's concentration camp.
To everyone still trapped in the logic of “lesser evil” please read this article from Salon — and share with us now, early in the electoral circus, the arguments for supporting the empire’s commander in the coming inner-ruling class election contest.
Obama to sign indefinite detention bill into law
by Glenn Greenwald
In one of the least surprising developments imaginable, President Obama – after spending months threatening to veto the Levin/McCain detention bill – yesterday announced that he would instead sign it into law (this is the same individual, of course, who unequivocally vowed when seeking the Democratic nomination to support a filibuster of “any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecom[s],” only to turn around – once he had the nomination secure — and not only vote against such a filibuster, but to vote in favor of the underlying bill itself, so this is perfectly consistent with his past conduct). As a result, the final version of the Levin/McCain bill will be enshrined as law this week as part of the the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). I wrote about the primary provisions and implications of this bill last week, and won’t repeat those points here.
Every minute, 24 people in the US are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner
Nearly 1 in 5 women has been raped.
1 in 4 women and nearly 1 in 7 men have been the victim of severe physical violence from an intimate partner at some point in their lives.
Grim and very painful statistics show how brutal the relations between men and women can be in this society — and how many women are abused in the day-to-day operations of American society. And the fact that these statistics are treated as a surprise and a discover shows how much neglect and coverup accompanies abuse — and how much male right comes with protection of law, police, tradition, social-shaming and old-boy networks of many kinds.
It is worth exploring deeply how such widespread brutality (rape, beating, stalking) is tied to core intimate relations across the world — and the degree to which such widespread abuse is integral to the “normal” operatins of traditional family relations and mainstream norms of male right they embody.
“In their own words… Marines came to view 20 dead civilians as not ‘remarkable,’ but as routine.”
“Troops… grew increasingly twitchy, killing more and more civilians in accidental encounters. Others became so desensitized and inured to the killing that they fired on Iraqi civilians deliberately while their fellow soldiers snapped pictures, and were court-martialed. The bodies piled up… Charges were dropped against six of the accused Marines in the Haditha episode, one was acquitted and the last remaining case against one Marine is scheduled to go to trial next year.”
“That sense of American impunity ultimately poisoned any chance for American forces to remain in Iraq, because the Iraqis would not let them stay without being subject to Iraqi laws and courts, a condition the White House could not accept.”
As the U.S. formally withdraws from Iraq, it leaves behind an army of paid mercenaries, a country on the edge of civil war, hundreds of thousands of mourning families, and the memories of horrific war crimes.
Twenty four civilians were killed in various attacks in Haditha, in 2005, including seven women and three children. No one was punished. Evidence was supposed to have been destroyed. Now the interviews with the soldiers have been discovered and published revealing the events and mentality that murdered Iraqis that day.
These 400 pages lay bare what is usually so hidden (buried along with the bodies) . Here is the reality of U.S. occupations. Here are the actual activities of the ‘boots on the ground” in the town of Haditha — but it is an exposure of the whole larger operation in which the murder of Iraqi people was routine, accepted and “the cost of doing business.”
While the U.S. media talks of soldiers who are so routinely and deceitfully sanitized as “helping the foreign peoples” and “keeping America safe” — the interviews from Haditha reveal what is actually being done.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq was a war of unprovoked aggression, unleashed using a cynical government machinery of complete lies. Iraq was pounded into pieces using a high tech aerial “shock and awe” followed by massive foreign invasion.
Not only were the responsible war criminals Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell kept out of court and prison (why no Hague Tribunal for these war criminals?), but their criminal war policies then pursued by a new President Obama (whose main claim to fame was that he opposed the war from the beginning)! And only a few of the lowest soldiers on the ground have even faced the possibility of trial — which is itself a white wash. And their “trials” are (over and over) leading to acquittal. For those cases that become scandals, “prosecution” is the form of official whitewash.
“It has become clear to me in recent years that, in our current world of immeasurable divisions between the ruled and the rulers, the Liberal approach of nonviolent reform is a naive ideal.
“The system is created by capitalists and it requires, even requests, the forcible ‘overthrow of all existing oppressive social conditions.’”
From time to time, Kasama publishes essays we receive as applications for membership in our organized Kasama network.
by Oliver Jackson
Throughout my childhood and teenage years, before I had developed politics of my own, I was barraged with a baffling mix of propaganda and misinformation, both in vehement support of the communist idea, as well as against it.
At my public Chinese elementary school, we started each day with revolutionary poems delivered under the watchful portrait of Mao Zedong. Every afternoon, in the home of my missionary parents, I heard stories of the brutality of the communist party and Mao’s alleged murder of millions of innocent people.
At the age of 14, my family moved to Boise, Idaho, and, through the clearness of distance, I was able to begin my own analysis of the Communist Revolution in China, of Mao, and of the roles they played within China and the global Communist movement. Through closer observation and critical thought I began to develop a more whole understanding of the context in which the various accomplishments of a variety of revolutions took place, as well as of the failures and shortcomings of those same movements.
Last month ABC’s 20/20 aired a special they called “Children of the Plains,” that portrayed the Lakota Indian reservation as a place that only dealt with crime, unemployment, alcoholism, overcrowded trailers and crumbling schools.
On Monday, young Native American students from Rosebud, South Dakota released a short video that challenged the claims made by “Children of the plains.”
“About 97.3 million Americans fall into a low-income category, commonly defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that is designed to provide a fuller picture of poverty. Together with the 49.1 million who fall below the poverty line and are counted as poor, they number 146.4 million, or 48 percent of the U.S. population.
“That’s up by 4 million from 2009, the earliest numbers for the newly developed poverty measure.”
“Many middle-class Americans are dropping below the low-income threshold — roughly $45,000 for a family of four — because of pay cuts, a forced reduction of work hours or a spouse losing a job. Housing and child-care costs are consuming up to half of a family’s income.”
Nearly half of Americans are low-income as rising expenses, unemployment shrink middle class
WASHINGTON (AP) — Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.
The latest census data depict a middle class that’s shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government’s safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.
“Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses, they are considered too ‘rich’ to qualify,” said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.
“The reality is that prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal,” he said. “If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years.”
Congressional Republicans and Democrats are sparring over legislation that would renew a Social Security payroll tax cut, part of a year-end political showdown over economic priorities that could also trim unemployment benefits, freeze federal pay and reduce entitlement spending.
“Last year, there were as many as 180,000 outbursts of…’mass incidents’: strikes, sit-ins, rallies and violent clashes that have mushroomed alongside China’s breakneck economic expansion. Government figures from the mid-1990s put the number of such episodes at fewer than 10,000…
“Some protests are prompted by worsening pollution, claims of unpaid wages or police brutality. A major source of unrest, including in Wukan, is the seizure of land by well-connected private developers or government officials, which involves forced evictions for meager compensation.”
In Wukan today: Roadblocks, armed farmers, demand for the removal of local officials, arrests, allegations of torture, and an intense underlying conflict over stolen land.
One of the world’s most powerful waves of rebellion has arisen from the resistance of hundreds of thousands of workers and rural farmers to the intense profiteering and merciless “development” conducted by China’s state-capitalist authorities.
BEIJING — A long-running dispute between farmers and local officials in southern China exploded into open rebellion this week after villagers chased away government leaders, set up roadblocks and began arming themselves with homemade weapons, residents said.
The job of summing up the last month of Occupy is right in front of us: Understanding the suppression of encampments in many cities, understanding the role of the Democratic party, local police and federal authorities in that, getting a sense of what comes next (not just tactically, but politically and strategically).
We are not sure how to jump start that discussion. But sharing experiences of the last weeks is an important place to start. And we urge you (from various cities and encampments) to think about sharing with us write-up that sum up specific aspects of the conflict (including where things stand, but also the important debates over racism and its central role in U.S. society).
The following is a piece that speaks powerfully about what happened in LA (where, as in so many cities, the Democratic city government expressed “support” for the goals of Occupy, while they sent in thugs to try to end it.)
My Occupy LA Arrest
by Patrick Meighan
My name is Patrick Meighan, and I’m a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom “Family Guy”, and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica.
I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Being Peace” when 1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I was in a group of about 50 peaceful protestors who sat Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the Occupy movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted “We Are Peaceful” and “We Are Nonviolent” and “Join Us.”
Sometimes life springs from a void and starts to remake everything… and suddenly it is impossible to hide any longer, or ignore, or deny… and so those who rule and oppress must shift gears to manipulating it, absorbing it or crushing it.
How Time magazine puts it:
“‘Massive and effective street protest’ was a global oxymoron until — suddenly, shockingly — starting exactly a year ago, it became the defining trope of our times. And the protester once again became a maker of history.”
Here is how their special issue starts.… by saying the “fall of the wall” negated the 60s, but that those days are now over.
Once upon a time, when major news events were chronicled strictly by professionals and printed on paper or transmitted through the air by the few for the masses, protesters were prime makers of history. Back then, when citizen multitudes took to the streets without weapons to declare themselves opposed, it was the very definition of news — vivid, important, often consequential. In the 1960s in America they marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War; in the ’70s, they rose up in Iran and Portugal; in the ’80s, they spoke out against nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Europe, against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, against communist tyranny in Tiananmen Square and Eastern Europe. Protest was the natural continuation of politics by other means.
And then came the End of History, summed up by Francis Fukuyama’s influential 1989 essay declaring that mankind had arrived at the “end point of … ideological evolution” in globally triumphant “Western liberalism.”
Occupy Activists Try to Shut Down West Coast Ports
by Joshua Holland
On Monday morning, about 500 activists with Occupy Oakland braved a predawn chill to blockade the Port of Oakland, the fifth busiest container port in the United States. The protesters broke up into 3 which which blocked the entrances to several shipyards in the sprawling complex, leaving dozens of trucks idling in line. Police eventually moved in to force open the gates; Oakland Police interim Chief Howard Jordan said that two occupiers were arrested.
The shut-down was part of a coordinated day of action on the West Coast. Protesters also reportedly caused disruptions at ports in Vancouver, Portland and Seattle for at least part of the day (details are sketchy as of press time). Occupiers clashed with police in Long Beach, Seattle Houston and San Diego.
On Monday evening, a second wave of Occupy Oakland protesters, this time numbering around 2,000, again marched to the port. During an impromptu “General Assembly,” protesters agreed to keep their promise to extend the blockade into Tuesday if other occupations faced police violence.
Meanwhile, a solidarity action against Goldman Sachs in New York led to as many as 18 arrests. Goldman owns 51 percent of SSA Marine, a leading shipping company, and Shippers Transport Express, a trucking company.
The goal of the day’s actions was to raise public awareness of the plight faced by dock-workers and truckers. As AlterNet’s Tara Lohan wrote last week, “Between the dock where the cargo is unloaded and the shelf from which you pluck your treasure, there are several critical lynchpins.”
A physicist saw an enigma
And called to his mum “Flying pig, ma!”
She said “Flying pigs?
Next thing you’ll see the Higgs!”
He said “Nah, not until it’s five sigma!”
(limerick by Jon Butterworth)
Reports are trickling in on the possible evidence being found for the Higgs Boson.
“Scientists believe they may have caught their first glimpse of the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle that is thought to underpin the subatomic workings of nature.
“Physicists Fabiola Gianotti and Guido Tonelli were applauded by hundreds of scientists yesterday as they revealed evidence for the particle amid the debris of hundreds of trillions of proton collisions inside the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva.”
The Higgs Boson is so illusive (read: short lived) that its only evidence is the particular shower of resulting particles that follows its momentary existence. Early evidence suggests that such showers may have now been recorded.
The discovery of Higgs would confirm a set of particular theories about how the universe works (and how the particles we are made of acquired “mass”).
Peru’s Shining Path uprising created a bold counterpoint to the Cold War politics of the 1980s. While the U.S. and the Soviet Union squared off — and corrupted countless local movements into their proxies, Peru’s Maoists launched an armed uprising in the most remote Andean highlands of Ayacucho. And then, in a startling way, started to expand throughout the country, slowly encircling the mega-city of Lima from the impoverished and oppressed Indian countryside. Its survival and growth was inspiring for many communists around the world.
The sudden arrest of much of the leadership and then core apparatus of the Communist Party of Peru (Shining Path) in 1992 had a major impact. The worldwide defense campaign to save the life of Abimael Guzman (the Shining Path’s captured central leader) was the instrument used to prepare the Nepali Maoist uprising in the mid 90s. Meanwhile, sharp conflict over Guzman’s prison call for ending the people’s tore apart the fragile Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM) that connected some communist currents internationally. Within Peru, the Shining Path uprising collapsed — it survived mainly in the organized network among imprisoned Maoist guerrillas and in a few scattered military columns in a few corners of the country.
Comrade Artemio was said to be the only original Shining Path leader who had not been captured or given up arms. He was reported to be leading an armed column of the Peoples Guerrilla Army (EGP) in the northern Huallaga Valley. From what is known, his continuation of armed struggle has not been in conflict with Guzman’s call for a negotiated end to the war — in a few rare interviews, Artemio seemed to present his continued resistance as an armed demand for those negotiations.
Now the British Guardian has presented a filmed interview with Artemio — which discuss the current state of the armed struggle, calls for its negotiated end, and sketches some thoughts on the experience of the Shining Path.
Click here or on the image above for that video. Below is the accompanying article which appeared in the Guardian on December 8.
“We want straight people reading this article to understand that the liberation of LGBTQ etc. people is not just about some ‘others,’ but is about their lives too. It is about expanding the realm of freedom and possibility that they live in along with us.
“We’re not trying to carve out a little spaces of tolerance in existing society. We’re trying to overthrow the existing society and create a new one, because the same existing society that is crushing queer people as queer people is crushing just about everyone else, and the planet to boot! This is the same society that is perpetuating imperialist war after imperialist war, or locking people up by the millions!”
The following interview conducted with several participants in the Kasama project and the Voice Collective who have been active in queer politics within Louisiana.
The interview was conducted by a reporter for a university newspaper in Louisiana. It focused on the efforts repeal of the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). DOMA is a federal law which seeks to legally limit marriage and the rights associated with marriage to couples made up of one man and one woman. The attempt to repeal that bill is, therefore, an effort to advance the legalization of marriage between same-sex couples.
Philadelphia's police and this system's authorities have never, ever, given up on killing Mumia Abu Jamal. (Here being arrested thirty years ago.)
MOVE writes
“Officials killed George Jackson in prison, they tried to get several different people to kill Leonard Peltier in prison and MOVE sees the same plan being laid for Mumia.”
The authorities in Pennsylvania have formally dropped their efforts to carry out the official execution of Mumia Abu Jamal — revolutionary journalist, supporter of the radical Move family, and former member of the Black Panther Party. Everyone has been asking what this means.
However, then, the Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams and anti-Mumia crusader Maureen Faulkner held a joint press conference to discuss the dropping of the death penalty for Mumia Abu Jamal. Faulkner is the widow of police officer Daniel Faulkner who Mumia was accused of killing thirty years ago. In a now notoriously racist trial Mumia was then railroaded to a conviction. (For the history of this, please see and circulate our essay “Mumia Abu Jamal: Enemy of the State.”)
Here is what matters now: There was a specific and threatening tone to the way Maureen Faulkner announced that this decision would removed Mumia from his isolation on Death Row. This would, she declared, place him into the general population. She then raved about the dangerous nature of the prisoners who would now surround Mumia. And finally she specifically threatened to denounce any official who made any moves to provide Mumia special treatment.
It was a moment when you could see a sinister hope that it might be possible to see Mumia murdered in a Pennsylvania prison yard. In addition, it is being reported that moving Mumia from Death Row might become a justification for the authorities to deprive him of his current telephone contact with the outside world — which he has used to continue his powerful and respected weekly radio broadcast.
The police of Philadelphia, the authorities of this system, and their eager accomplice Maureen Faulkner have clearly not given up hope of silencing or killing Mumia Abu Jamal.
The blood-thirsty desire to see Mumia dead may well already now be operating through corrupt and racist prison networks. There are vicious prison guards and virulently racist prisoners who might see this as their chance — and authorities who may offer encouragement and protection.
These real dangers must be brought to the attention of everyone.
