Francois Ponchaud

Father Francois Ponchaud

Francois Ponchaud was a newly ordained Catholic priest when he arrived in Cambodia in 1965 from a small village in France.

Francois Ponchaud said refugees’ accounts of the genocide “went beyond my wildest imagination.”

 He was sent to do missionary work. But within a decade he would become a crusader against the worst genocide since the Holocaust.

“I was staying by the Cambodian people’s side,” Ponchaud said, “through the good and the sadness and the suffering.”

When he arrived at age 26, Cambodia was a peaceful place: a bucolic land of villages, peasants, rice paddies and Buddhist monks. Ponchaud studied Cambodian history and Buddhism, became fluent in Khmer, made friends and immersed himself in the culture — falling in love with the country and its people.

But the peacefulness was short-lived.

By 1970, Cambodia was descending into chaos as the Vietnam War spilled across its borders. In the countryside, the Americans were carpet-bombing Vietcong outposts. In the capital, Phnom Penh, Washington was propping up a corrupt government.

From the jungles, a sinister and brutal communist rebel group called the Khmer Rouge was fighting to overthrow Cambodia’s U.S.-backed regime.

On April 17, 1975, Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge. They began to reinvent Cambodia according to an insane blueprint. They emptied the cities, including some 3 million in the capital, forcing all the residents into the countryside — and toward a dark future.

“As of noon, all the people started leaving,” Ponchaud said. “Then I saw all my friends who were leaving. … There were hundreds of thousands of people who were trudging along a few kilometers an hour. It was truly a staggering sight. Incredible.” Watch Ponchaud describe the exodus from Phnom Penh »

Ponchaud was told to stay at the French Embassy, where thousands fleeing Phnom Penh desperately sought asylum. One of the few foreigners able to communicate with the Khmer Rouge, he spent days at the embassy gate, trying to negotiate. Watch Ponchaud discuss the significance of the embassy gate »

In the weeks that followed, the Khmer Rouge let him leave the embassy twice. Both times he searched for clues about what was happening in the country. But Phnom Penh was empty. Read a reporter’s notebook of his journey through Cambodia’s killing fields »

Ponchaud was expelled from the city in the last evacuating convoy, as the Khmer Rouge forced all foreigners onto trucks and out of the country. At the border, Ponchaud broke down, weeping.

“It was as though we had gone mad,” he said. “We were getting out of a country of the living dead.”

With the country sealed, the Khmer Rouge went about creating their new Cambodia — and the killing began in earnest.

The Khmer Rouge envisioned a return to Cambodia’s medieval greatness — a “pure” nation full of noble peasant farmers.

For that, though, they had to purge everyone else: the rich, the religious, the educated, anyone from a different ethnic group.

“All those who were opposed to the government were killed,” Ponchaud said. “And all those who didn’t work quite hard enough were killed.”

Hundreds of thousands were worked — or starved — to death. “Perhaps a good chunk — a solid half — died from sickness and lack of health care,” he said.

By September 1975, Ponchaud was back in France and ready to resume his work. His missionary society in Paris asked him to keep track of events in Cambodia. He quickly became the “go-to” person for Cambodian refugees arriving from Thailand, and he began documenting their stories.

At first, Ponchaud had a hard time believing the accounts of execution, torture, deportation, forced labor and starvation. Read how a Khmer Rouge survivor is documenting the genocide

“They were burning villages … sending people into the forest without giving them anything to eat,” Ponchaud said. “It went beyond my wildest imagination.”

Horrified, Ponchaud devised a plan to gather more information: A friend living on the Cambodian border would record and send him broadcasts from Radio Phnom Penh — the official voice of the Khmer Rouge — in which the government described its transformation of the country. Read a former Khmer Rouge member’s account of the killings

Ponchaud found that the broadcasts substantiated the refugees’ claims. As unbelievable as those claims were, the broadcasts told of the same policies. What the refugees were saying was true.

“I decoded the radio — the official declarations. And then the refugees would give me the ‘experienced’ side. It matched up,” he said. “On one hand, the ideology, and on the other, the lived experience.” Watch Ponchaud describe how he was able to decode the Khmer Rouge ideology »

For months, Ponchaud gathered and documented information, repeatedly denouncing the Khmer Rouge. His testimonials appeared in the French press as early as October 1975.

He also wrote to the president of France and Amnesty International, and appeared before the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. Watch Ponchaud discuss his efforts to alert people to the genocide »

In 1976, angered by inaccuracies in Le Monde’s reporting on the Khmer Rouge, Ponchaud fired off a letter to the newspaper’s editor — along with a dossier of refugee accounts and radio transmissions. He was contacted immediately and asked to write for the newspaper. His articles were published in February 1976. Watch Ponchaud tell the Le Monde story »

Though few accounts of Cambodia’s nightmare were appearing in the press, the U.S. government was receiving frequent briefings about what was happening there. In a meeting in November 1975, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger acknowledged the brutality of the Khmer Rouge. But he also knew that they shared an enemy with the U.S. — Vietnam.

“Tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them,” Kissinger told an official in the region, according to a declassified State Department account. The Khmer Rouge “are murderous thugs,” he said, “but we won’t let that stand in our way.” Read Kissinger’s words in the declassified State Department document (pdf)

By 1977, the Khmer Rouge had been in power for two years, and much of the world remained unaware or uninterested. Many who did hear accounts of Khmer Rouge brutality found them hard to believe. Even prominent liberals and intellectuals doubted that a supposedly egalitarian peasant movement would perpetrate such horrors on their own people.

Ponchaud then published a startling book called “Year Zero.” It was one of the first to expose the brutal totalitarian regime of the Khmer Rouge to the world. Still, no help came for Cambodia.

“I was pretty frustrated,” he said. “The governments did not react. You know, countries don’t defend human rights. They are always subservient to politics.”

In January 1977, the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter promised a change. Carter vowed to put human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy. But it would take 15 months for him to publicly condemn the Khmer Rouge as the world’s “worst violator of human rights.”

Even then he took no action to stop the slaughter. Invasion, he said, was not an option for a country still recovering from the Vietnam War.

Instead, in December 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia after years of cross-border skirmishes. The Vietnamese quickly overthrew the Khmer Rouge, who fled back into the jungle.

The world would finally start to see that all Ponchaud had said was true. More than 2 million Cambodians were dead. The scope of the catastrophe quickly became clear. In the fall of 1979, Carter responded, raising $32 million to help the refugees.

Today, Ponchaud is back in Cambodia, continuing his efforts for the Cambodian people, building schools, holding Mass and working on local projects. Often referred to as “the friend of the Cambodians,” he is considered an expert on the country. But this time he has no illusions.

“No one defends human rights,” he said. “Governments are cold beasts looking out for their own interests.”

Raphael Lemkin

Paris, 1948. In the shadow of the Holocaust, the fledgling United Nations meets to adopt one of its first human rights treaties.

 
Raphael Lemkin asked, “Why is the killing of a million a lesser crime than the killing of a single individual?”
 Applause shakes the room, cameras flash — and at the center, a single, tired, unassuming man: Raphael Lemkin.

It was, at last, a victory for a tireless crusader who had fought for his entire life against genocide — and coined the term that describes the world’s most heinous crime.

“This new official world made a solemn pledge to preserve the life of the peoples and races of mankind,” Lemkin later wrote.

Sixty years ago this month, the U.N. voted unanimously to adopt the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It was ambitious, serious, far-reaching — and largely the result of Lemkin’s lifetime of effort.  Watch more about the impact of the Genocide Convention »

A Pole and a Jew, Lemkin had watched in horror as Hitler nearly succeeded in his plan to exterminate the Jews. Six million Jews — including 40 members of Lemkin’s family — died at the hands of the Nazis.

Today, we call what happened at Auschwitz and the other death camps “genocide.” But at the time, there was no name for the Nazis’ crimes. The word “genocide” did not exist.

In 1944, Lemkin wrote a book about the Nazis. In it, he combined the Greek “genos” for race with the Latin “-cide” for killing: Genocide. Lemkin had named the crime he spent a lifetime trying to prevent.  Watch more about the importance of the word »

As a child in Poland, Lemkin was inspired by the stories his mother told him at the fireside — stories of history and heroism, of suffering and struggle. As a Jew he witnessed cruelty and persecution firsthand: from the bribes his parents were forced to pay, to a pogrom that killed dozens nearby.

From his mother, and from his circumstance, Lemkin developed early a strong desire to better the world and protect the innocent and the weak.

“The appeal for the protection of the innocent from destruction set a chain reaction in my mind,” Lemkin later wrote. “It followed me all my life.”

As a teen, Lemkin learned through news accounts that the Turkish government was slaughtering its Christian Armenian citizens. The government claimed it was putting down an Armenian revolt. Over 8 years they killed a million Armenian men, women and children in massacres and forced marches. To this day, Turkey denies a genocide took place. Few of the perpetrators ever faced justice.

“I was shocked,” Lemkin wrote. “Why is a man punished when he kills another man? Why is the killing of a million a lesser crime than the killing of a single individual?”

Lemkin didn’t have an answer to the question. But, as a young man, he devised a bold plan. He would write an international law that would punish — and prevent — racial mass murder.

By October 1933, Lemkin was an influential Warsaw lawyer, well-connected and versed in international law. At the same time, Hitler was gathering power. Lemkin knew it was time to act.

He crafted his proposal making the destruction of national, racial and religious groups an international crime and sent it to an influential international conference. But his legal remedy found little support, even as anti-Semitism was becoming Germany’s national policy. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, Lemkin knew his worst fears were about to be realized.

“Hitler had already promulgated … his blueprint for destruction,” Lemkin wrote. “Many people thought he was bragging, but I believed that he would carry out his program.”

Lemkin fled Warsaw with only a shaving kit and summer coat. He survived months in the forest, traveling furtively, dodging falling bombs and fighting for the Polish resistance.

He managed to reach his parents one last time — only to say goodbye.

“Do not talk of our leaving this warm home. We will have to suffer, but we will survive somehow,” Lemkin said his parents told him. “When their eyes became sad with understanding, I laughed away our agonizing thoughts, but I felt I would never see them again. It was like going to their funerals while they were still alive.”

Reluctantly, Lemkin left his family to their fate and became one of the lucky few to reach the United States, where a friend arranged a job at Duke Law School. Though now safe, Lemkin remained anxious.

“I had not stopped worrying about the people in Poland. When would the hour of execution come? Would this blind world only then see it, when it would be too late?”

Troubling letters arrived from home. His father said they were surviving on potato peels and nothing else. His mother assured him, “What counts is that we are all together, alive and healthy.”

“Something … told me they were saying goodbye,” Lemkin later wrote, “in spite of my parents’ effort not to alarm me.”

Days later, the Nazis took eastern Poland — a death sentence for Lemkin’s family.

By 1942, the U.S. had entered the war, and the Germans had accelerated their deadly work. Concentration camps ran day and night, like assembly lines. At Auschwitz, more than a million perished.

Even though word of the slaughter was reaching America, it seemed of little interest to the press and politicians. Lemkin was outraged.

“The impression of a tremendous conspiracy of silence poisoned the air,” he wrote. “A double murder was taking place. … It was the murder of the truth.”

Lemkin tried everything he could to stop the killing, even writing to President Roosevelt.

Roosevelt responded, urging patience.

“Patience,” Lemkin wrote. “But I could bitterly see only the faces of the millions awaiting death. … All over Europe the Nazis were writing the book of death with the blood of my brethren.”
Jewish groups pressed Washington to bomb the camps or rail lines. The Americans refused. Although Allied planes took photos of Auschwitz in 1944 as they scouted nearby targets, the U.S. didn’t want to divert military resources from winning the war.

Frustrated, Lemkin decided to take a different tack. He would use the Nazis’ own words to prove their depravity.

Taking hundreds of pages of Nazi laws and decrees, Lemkin wrote a comprehensive book that laid bare the Nazis’ brutal plans. And he invented a word for the crime the Nazis were committing. Genocide.

With the crime named, he hoped the world could no longer turn away. But no help came.

Even the Nuremberg trials were a grave disappointment for Lemkin. They did little to codify genocide as an international crime — and did nothing to prevent it from happening again.

But Lemkin knew he must keep trying. He revived his 1933 proposal and set his sights on the fledgling United Nations. He hoped this new world body, born out of the ashes of World War II, could create and enforce an international law against genocide.

Lemkin put everything aside and made the passage of a genocide convention the focus of his life. He wrote and rewrote the text of the convention, lobbied delegates, wrote to leaders worldwide in their own languages — Lemkin was fluent in more than 10 — to gather support.

On December 9, 1948, the U.N. met in Paris and voted unanimously to adopt the Genocide Convention.  Watch more about Lemkin’s work at the United Nations .
Days later, Lemkin fell gravely ill and was hospitalized. For nearly three weeks, the doctors struggled with a diagnosis. Lemkin finally offered one himself: “Genociditis,” he said, “exhaustion from working on the Genocide Convention.”

A decade later, Lemkin would die from a fatal heart attack, penniless and alone, having given his life to the fight against genocide.

Revolutionary Bookshelf

The writing itself is not as important as the ideas presented. With that in mind I place the first three titles on The Shelf

Out of This Furnace is an historical novel and the best-known work of the American writer Thomas Bell (1903–1961).

The novel is set in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a steel town just south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania along the Monongahela River. It was first published in 1941 by Little, Brown and Company. Based upon Bell’s own family of Rusyn and Slovak immigrants, the story follows four generations of a family, starting with their migration in 1880 from Austria-Hungary to the United States, and finishing with World War II. The novel’s title refers to the central role of the steel mill in the family’s life and in the history of the Pittsburgh region.

Long out of print, the novel was rediscovered in the 1970s by David P. Demarest, Jr., a professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, who convinced director Frederick A. Hetzel at the University of Pittsburgh Press to reissue it in 1976. The book quickly became a regional bestseller. By the 1980s, however, it found an even larger readership on American college campuses. Out of This Furnace is regularly used as required reading in universities to introduce students to the history of immigration, industrialisation, and the rise of trade unionism, as well as to the genre of the American working class novel.

The Fountain at the Center of the World: A Novel By Robert Newman

 

 

Everyone is looking for Chano Salgado… High-flying corporate PR executive Evan Hatch is dying. Dying not of a rich man’s disease, but of chagas, a beetle-born disease endemic to Latin America. Desperate for a cure, Evan travels to Mexico in search of the bone-marrow tissue-match that only the brother he has never met can provide.

Reclusive young widower and political apostate, Chano Salgado’s work sterilizing bottles in a tiny, smoky shack comes to an end when he is persuaded to blow up the pipelines of Ethylclad, a toxic-waste plant sucking the local groundwater dry.

Police and soldiers across Tamaulipas, Mexico’s northeasternmost state, are hunting Chano Salgado the terrorist saboteur; while teenager Daniel Salgado, boards a Costa Rican fishing-smack knowing only the name of the Mexican village where he was born.

An epic novel about loss and hope, identity and belief, the story takes us, via container-crate and conference-suite, assassination and passport-theft, from refugee detention centre and Rio Bravo to the Seattle WTO protests. And here on the streets of Seattle, amid tear gas and rubber bullets, the destinies of Chano, Evan and Daniel are changed forever.

The Army of the Republic by Stuart Archer Cohen

n an America stretched by crisis to the breaking point, billionaire entrepreneur and government insider James Sands is riding high. Over the protests of civic groups and the increasing alienation of his wife, Anne, Sands is poised on the brink of an immensely risky and controversial deal that will give him control of all public water in the Pacific Northwest. But when his business partner is murdered by a radical group called The Army of the Republic, Sands finds himself losing control of his business and his life. Desperate, he turns to Whitehall Security, a private intelligence firm with far-reaching political connections. For a steep monthly fee, Whitehall will hunt down and eliminate any threats to Sands’s enterprise.

 

Meanwhile, in Seattle, a young guerrilla named Lando leads The Army of the Republic into a dangerous war of ideals. Charismatic and cunning, Lando is obsessed with the goal of saving the country from its corrupt ruling alliance by any means necessary. His reluctant ally is political organizer Emily Cortright, coordinator of a network of civil, religious, and labor groups. Bound together in a web of common aims and conflicting loyalties, the two plan a massive peaceful protest against a conference of national business leaders, which they hope will stagger the Regime.

 

Beyond his control, through, Lando’s Army of the Republic has already unleashed a chain of events that will electrify and frighten an uneasy nation. Hemmed in by their lethal compromises, Emily, Lando, James, and Anne struggle to redeem or destroy those whom they love most.

 

Thrilling and unforgettable, The Army of the Republic is a brilliant, provocative novel about what it means to live in a democracy.

 

stress reliever from the Daily Kos

Stress Break

Find a comfortable chair to sit in, or lie on the floor. Remove your shoes. Close your eyes but not too tightly.

Take a deep breath: Inhale blue…  Hold it.  And exhale red… Repeat.

Now tense up every part of your body, really really tight. Hold it…hold it…  Now relax. Feel your body melting into your chair or into the floor.  Again: Tense tense tense…  And relaaaax.

Now I want you to picture yourself lying on a gorgeous, secluded beach. Breathe in the fresh air. Feel the warmth of the sand. Hear the rhythmic lapping of the ocean and the palm trees swaying in the gentle breeze. You have no worries. No cares. Your 401(k) is flush with cash. You feel completely relaxed. You are at peace and everything is fine.

Oh, look. John McCain is walking by. Without opening your eyes, gently raise your hand and wave. “Hi, Senator,” you say. “Sorry you lost the election in such a massive landslide. Too bad, so sad.” He waves back and says, “Thank you, my friend. In the end, the best man won. By a hundred and fifteen electoral votes.”

And here comes Sarah Palin, wearing her Miss Congeniality sash. Again, you lazily raise your hand. “Hi, Sarah. Too bad the Troopergate report got ya booted from office,” you say. She replies, “Oh, that’s okay. Now I can spend more of my time monitoring that sneaky Putin over there in Russia. I hear he’s training an army of judo experts.” She trips over a piece of driftwood. You let out a relaxing sigh and take a sip of your margarita.

Oh, and here’s Dick Cheney, trolling for spare change with his metal detector. “Hey, Dick,” you say. “Takin’ a break from the war crimes tribunal?” “Yep,” he replies. “They got Rumsfeld in the dock now. If things go according to schedule, I should get my life sentence later this afternoon. Oh look…I found a nickel.” He wanders out of sight. You take another cleansing breath.

Just as you’re about to drift to sleep, a group of former senators approaches. Coleman. Dole. McConnell. Collins. Cornyn. Stevens. Chambliss. Roberts. Smith. Sununu. “Hey, folks,” you say. “Whatcha been doin’ since your massive losses?” They reply as one: “Beach volleyball!!” You nod. They get swallowed by a rogue wave.

And now, very slowly, count backwards: 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… Open your eyes.

Repeat as needed.

because I don’t feel like copying and pasting everything over

http://dberg04.blogspot.com/

Enough is Enough!

http://www.keatingeconomics.com/?source=sem-pm-google&gclid=CI6ev5SmlZYCFQOjFQodCwUhEA

 

For More Background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keating_Five

Please watch the video and think about it. We have been watching the McCain campaign swinging the smear stick without any thought about their own history. During the Vice-Presidential debate Palin admonished Joe Biden for “looking back” rather than forward, and yet a week later she brought up the old Hillary Clinton character attack about Obama and William Ayers, and also Rev. Wright. I found this interesting that Palin brings these things up and yet never mentions her and her husbands involvement in The Alaskan Independence Party which advocates SECEDING from the United States of America. Here is a wonderful quote from the parties founder Joe Vogler:“I’m an Alaskan, not an American. I’ve got no use for America or her damned institutions.” or how about this one?

“You get to think why the hell do I owe them anything and then you get mad; and you say to hell with them; and you renounce allegiance; and you pledge your efforts, your effects, your honor, your life, to Alaska; that is how I do it; I am an Alaskan; they know it; I’ve told them to go to hell in every way I can in a nice way; I took a case to the Supreme Court believing in the Supreme Court, but I’d rather be tried in a whorehouse with the madam as the Judge; there is more Justice in a whorehouse than in the Supreme Court; and if they don’t like they know where they can go; ….. and if you think I am ever going to forget that, the fires of Hell are glaciers compared to my hate for the American Government, and I won’t be buried under their damn flag; I’ll be buried in Dawson and when Alaska is an independent nation they can bring my bones back to Alaska, back to my country.

http://www.akip.org/

I Find it interesting that she brings up Jeremiah Wright while both she and the “liberal media” never mention that she was in attendance at her church when the founder of Jews For Jesus said that Israelis murdered by Palestinians died because God judged them for not accepting Christ.

 

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/13098.html

 

Or even the small fact about Palins association with a pastor who accused a woman of being a witch!

http://www.alternet.org/election08/99118/sarah_palin_linked_her_electoral_success_to_prayer_of_kenyan_witch_hunter/

 

But, like the McCain campaign I digress. John McCain’s campaign while hurling these old attacks around have cried foul about the mini-doc about McCain’s involvement with Charles Keating. Is there is a difference? If you have any time of intelligence at all there is a HUGE difference. Not even McCain’s campaign has been stupid enough to suggest that Obama was secretly conspiring with Ayers to blow things up, but guess what? McCain DID conspire with Keating! He also took his money. In fact even though he got the lightest punishment out of the Keating Five he was the one who had taken the most money from Keating. Not only that but his wife and father in law were investors in one of Keating projects. If that was not enough McCain and Keating were personal friends. So the reality here is you have Obama’s association with an old hippie who did really dumb things, and McCain’s friendship with a guy who helped start the first wave of what has brought our economy down around our ears. Which is a character assassination and which is a valid reflection of current issues?

 

Finally! In the middle of all this chaos a sign of truth!

 

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/living/2008/09/25/dnt.ghostly.images.on.tape.kshb

Almost One Year To The Day

I originally posted this on Blogspot October 1st 2007. Read it and weep for a lost opportunity. Just imagine if we had done it …

Specific suggestion: General Strike

From Harper’s October 2007 Issue by Garret Keizer

Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust.
—Isaiah 26:19

1.
Of all the various depredations of the Bush regime, none has been so thorough as its plundering of hope. Iraq will recover sooner. What was supposed to have been the crux of our foreign policy—a shock-and-awe tutorial on the utter futility of any opposition to the whims of American power—has achieved its greatest and perhaps its only lasting success in the American soul. You will want to cite the exceptions, the lunch-hour protests against the war, the dinner-party ejaculations of dissent, though you might also want to ask what substantive difference they bear to grousing about the weather or even to raging against the dying of the light—that is, to any ritualized complaint against forces universally acknowledged as unalterable. Bush is no longer the name of a president so much as the abbreviation of a proverb, something between Murphy’s Law and tomorrow’s fatal inducement to drink and be merry today.

If someone were to suggest, for example, that we begin a general strike on Election Day, November 6, 2007, for the sole purpose of removing this regime from power, how readily and with what well-practiced assurance would you find yourself producing the words “It won’t do any good”? Plausible and even courageous in the mouth of a patient who knows he’s going to die, the sentiment fits equally well in the heart of a citizen-ry that believes it is already dead.

2.
Any strike, whether it happens in a factory, a nation, or a marriage, amounts to a reaffirmation of consent. The strikers remind their overlords—and, equally important, themselves—that the seemingly perpetual machinery of daily life has an off switch as well as an on. Camus said that the one serious question of philosophy is whether or not to commit suicide; the one serious question of political philosophy is whether or not to get out of bed. Silly as it may have seemed at the time, John and Yoko’s famous stunt was based on a profound observation. Instant karma is not so instant—we ratify it day by day.

The stream of commuters heading into the city, the caravan of tractor-trailers pulling out of the rest stop into the dawn’s early light, speak a deep-throated Yes to the sum total of what’s going on in our collective life. The poet Richard Wilbur writes of the “ripped mouse” that “cries Concordance” in the talons of the owl; we too cry our daily assent in the grip of the prevailing order— except in those notable instances when, like a donkey or a Buddha, we refuse to budge.

The question we need to ask ourselves at this moment is what further provocations we require to justify digging in our heels. To put the question more pointedly: Are we willing to wait until the next presidential election, or for some interim congressional conversion experience, knowing that if we do wait, hundreds of our sons and daughters will be needlessly destroyed? Another poet, César Vallejo, framed the question like this:

A man shivers with cold, coughs, spits up blood.
Will it ever be fitting to allude to my inner soul? . . .
A cripple sleeps with one foot on his shoulder.
Shall I later on talk about Picasso, of all people?

A young man goes to Walter Reed without a face. Shall I make an appointment with my barber? A female prisoner is sodomized at Abu Ghraib. Shall I send a check to the Clinton campaign?

3.
You will recall that a major theme of the Bush Administration’s response to September 11 was that life should go on as usual. We should keep saying that broad consensual Yes as loudly as we dared. We could best express our patriotism by hitting the malls, by booking a flight to Disney World. At the time, the advice seemed prudent enough: avoid hysteria; defy the intimidations of murderers and fanatics.

In hindsight it’s hard not to see the roots of our predicament in the readiness with which we took that advice to heart. We did exactly as we were told, with a net result that is less an implicit defiance of terrorism than a tacit amen to the “war on terror,” including the war in Iraq. Granted, many of us have come to find both those wars unacceptable. But do we find them intolerable? Can you sleep? Yes, doctor, I can sleep. Can you work? Yes, doctor, I can work. Do you get out to the movies, enjoy a good restaurant? Actually, I have a reservation for tonight. Then I’d say you were doing okay, wouldn’t you? I’d say you were tolerating the treatment fairly well.

It is one thing to endure abuses and to carry on in spite of them. It is quite another thing to carry on to the point of abetting the abuse. We need to move the discussion of our nation’s health to the emergency room. We need to tell the doctors of the body politic that the treatment isn’t working—and that until it changes radically for the better, neither are we.

4.
No one person, least of all a freelance writer, has the prerogative to call or set the date for a general strike. What do you guys do for a strike, sit on your overdue library books? Still, what day more fitting for a strike than the first Tuesday of November, the Feast of the Hanging Chads? What other day on the national calendar cries so loudly for rededication?

The only date that comes close is September 11. You have to do a bit of soul-searching to see it, but one result of the Bush presidency has been a loss of connection to those who perished that day. Unless they were members of our families, unless we were involved in their rescue, do we think of them? It’s too easy to say that time eases the grief—there’s more to it than that, more even than the natural tendency to shy away from brooding on disasters that might happen again. We avoid thinking of the September 11 victims because to think of them we have to think also of what we have allowed to happen in their names. Or, if we object openly to what has happened, we have to parry the insinuation that we’re unmoved by their loss.

It is time for us to make a public profession of faith that the people who went to work that morning, who caught the cabs and rode the elevators and later jumped to their deaths, were not on the whole people who would sanction extraordinary rendition, preemptive war, and the suspension of habeas corpus; that in their heels and suits they were at least as decent as any sneaker-shod person standing vigil outside a post office with a stop the war sign. That the government workers who died in the Pentagon were not by some strange congenital fluke more obtuse than the high-ranking officers who thought the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea from the get-go. That the passengers who rushed the hijackers on Flight 93 were not repeating the mantra “It won’t do any good” while scratching their heads and their asses in a happy-hour funk.

An Election Day general strike would set our remembrance of those people free from the sarcophagi of rhetoric and rationalization. It would be the political equivalent of raising them from the dead. It would be a clear if sadly delayed message of solidarity to those voters in Ohio and Florida who were pretty much told they could drop dead.

5.
But how would it work? A curious question to ask given that not working is most of what it would entail. Not working until the president and the shadow president resigned or were impeached. Never mind what happens next. Rather, let our mandarins ask how this came to happen in the first place. Let them ask in shock and awe.

People who could not, for whatever reason, cease work could at least curtail consumption. In fact, that might prove the more effective action of the two. They could vacate the shopping malls. They could cancel their flights. With the aid of their Higher Power, they could turn off their cell phones. They could unplug their TVs.

The most successful general strike imaginable would require extraordinary measures simply to announce its success. It would require sound trucks going up and down the streets, Rupert Murdoch reduced to croaking through a bullhorn. Bonfires blazing on the hills. Bells tolling till they cracked. (Don’t we have one of those on display somewhere?)

Ironically, the segment of the population most unable to participate would be the troops stationed in the Middle East. Striking in their circumstances would amount to suicide. That distinction alone ought to suffice as a reason to strike, as a reminder of the unconscionable underside of our “normal” existence. We get on with our lives, they get on with their deaths.

As for how the strike would be publicized and organized, these would depend on the willingness to strike itself. The greater the willingness, the fewer the logistical requirements. How many Americans does it take to change a lightbulb? How many Web postings, how many emblazoned bedsheets hung from the upper-story windows? Think of it this way: How many hours does it take to learn the results of last night’s American Idol, even when you don’t want to know?

In 1943 the Danes managed to save 7,200 of their 7,800 Jewish neighbors from the Gestapo. They had no blogs, no television, no text messaging—and very little time to prepare. They passed their apartment keys to the hunted on the streets. They formed convoys to the coast. An ambulance driver set out with a phone book, stopping at any address with a Jewish-sounding name. No GPS for directions. No excuse not to try.

But what if it failed? What if the general strike proved to be anything but general? I thought Bush was supposed to be the one afraid of science. Hypothesis, experiment, analysis, conclusion—are they his hobgoblins or ours? What do we have to fear, except additional evidence that George W. Bush is exactly what he appears to be: the president few of us like and most of us deserve. But science dares to test the obvious. So let us dare.

6.
We could hardly be accused of innovation. General strikes have a long and venerable history. They’re as retro as the Bill of Rights. There was one in Great Britain in 1926, in France in 1968, in Ukraine in 2004, in Guinea just this year. Finns do it, Nepalis do it, even people without email do it . . .

But we don’t have to do it, you will say, because “we have a process.” Have or had, the verb remains tentative. In regard to verbs, Dick Cheney showed his superlative talent for le mot juste when in the halls of the U.S. Congress he told Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy to go fuck himself. He has since told congressional investigators to do the same thing. There’s your process. Dick Cheney could lie every day of his life for all the years of Methuselah, and for the sake of that one remark history would still need to remember him as an honest man. In the next world, Diogenes will kneel down before him. In this world, though, and in spite of the invitation tendered to me through my senator, I choose to remain on my feet.

“United we stand,” isn’t that how it goes? But we are not united, not by a long shot. At this juncture we may be able to unite only in what we will not stand for. The justification of torture, the violation of our privacy, the betrayal of our intelligence operatives, the bankrupting of our commonwealth, the besmirching of our country’s name, the feckless response to natural disaster, the dictatorial inflation of executive power, the senseless butchery of our youth—if these do not constitute a common ground for intolerance, what does?

People were indignant at the findings of the 9/11 Commission—it seems there were compelling reasons to believe an attack was imminent!—yet for the attack on our Constitution we have evidence even more compelling. How can we criticize an administration for failing to act in the face of a probable threat given our own refusal to act in the face of a threat already fulfilled? As long as we’re willing to go on with our business, Bush and Cheney will feel free to go on with their coup. As long as we’re willing to continue fucking ourselves, why should they have any scruples about telling us to smile during the act?

7.
Between undertaking the strike and achieving its objective, the latter requires the greater courage. It requires courage simply to admit that this is so. For too many of us, Bush has become a secret craving, an addiction. We loathe Bush the way that Peter Pan loathed Captain Hook; he’s a villain, to be sure, but he’s half the fun of living in Never-Never Land. He has provided us with an inexhaustible supply of editorial copy, partisan rectitude, and every sort of lame excuse for not engaging the system he represents. In that sense, asking “What if the strike were to fail?” is not even honest. On some level we would want it to fail.

Certainly this would be true of those who’ve declared themselves as presidential candidates and for whom the Bush legacy represents an unprecedented windfall of political capital. One need only speak a coherent sentence—one need only breathe from a differently shaped smirk—to seem like a savior. Ding-dong, the Witch is dead. Already I can see the winged monkeys who signed off on the Patriot Act and the Iraq invasion jumping up and down for joy. Already I can hear the nauseating gush: “Such a welcome relief after Bush!” Relief, yes. But relief is not hope.

How much better if we could say to our next administration: Don’t talk about Bush. We dealt with Bush. We dealt with Bush and in so doing we demonstrated our ability to deal with you. You have a mandate more rigorous than looking good beside Bush. You need a program more ambitious than “uniting the country.” We are united—at least we were, if only for a while, if only in our disgust. If only I believed all this would happen.

I wrote this appeal during the days leading up to the Fourth of July. I wrote it because for the past six and a half years I have heard the people I love best—family members, friends, former students and parishioners—saying, “I’m sick over what’s happening to our country, but I just don’t know what to do.” Might I be pardoned if, fearing civil disorder less than I fear civil despair, I said, “Well, we could do this.” It has been done before and we could do this. And I do believe we could. If anyone has a better idea, I’m keen to hear it. Only don’t tell me what some presidential hopeful ought to do someday. Tell me what the people who have nearly lost their hope can do right now.

Joseph Yablonski

 

Joseph Albert “Jock” Yablonski (March 3, 1910 – December 31, 1969) was an American labor leader in the United Mine Workers in the 1950s and 1960s. He was murdered in 1969 by killers hired by a union political opponent, Mine Workers president W. A. Boyle. His death led to significant reforms in the union.

 

 Early life and union career

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1910, Yablonski began working in the mines as a boy. He became active in the United Mine Workers after his father was killed in a mine explosion. He was first elected to union office in 1934. In 1940, he was elected as a representative to the international executive board, and in 1958 was appointed president of UMW District 5.^[1]

He clashed with W. A. “Tony” Boyle, who became president of the UMW in 1963, over how the union should be run and his view that Boyle did not adequately represent the miners. In 1965, Boyle removed Yablonski as president of District 5 (under reforms enacted by Boyle, district presidents were appointed, not elected). In May 1969, Yablonski announced his candidacy for president of the union. As early as June, Boyle was discussing the need to kill him.^[1]

 

 UMWA presidential candidacy

The United Mine Workers was in turmoil by 1969. Legendary UMWA president John L. Lewis had retired in 1960. His successor, Thomas Kennedy, died in 1963. From retirement, Lewis hand-picked Boyle for the UMWA presidency. A Montana miner, Boyle was as autocratic and bullying as Lewis, but not as well liked.^[2][3]

From the beginning of his administration, Boyle faced significant opposition from rank-and-file miners and UMWA leaders. Miners’ attitudes about their union had also changed. Miners wanted greater democracy and more autonomy for their local unions. There was also a widespread belief that Boyle was more concerned with protecting mine owners’ interests than those of his members. Grievances filed by the union often took months—sometimes years—to resolve, lending credence to the critics’ claim. Wildcat strikes occurred as local unions, despairing of UMWA assistance, sought to resolve local disputes with walkouts.^[2][3][4]

In 1969, Yablonski challenged Boyle for the presidency of UMWA.^[3] In an election widely seen as corrupt, Boyle beat Yablonski in the election held on December 9 by a margin of nearly two-to-one (80,577 to 46,073).^[1] Yablonski conceded the election, but on December 18, 1969, asked the United States Department of Labor (DOL) to investigate the election for fraud. He also initiated five lawsuits against UMWA in federal court.^[5][6]

 

Murder

On December 31, 1969, three hitmen shot Yablonski, his wife Margaret, and his 25-year-old daughter Charlotte, as they slept in the Yablonski home in Clarksville, Pennsylvania. The bodies were discovered on January 5, 1970, by Yablonski’s son, Kenneth. The killings had been ordered by Boyle, who had demanded Yablonski’s death on June 23, 1969, after a meeting with Yablonski at UMWA headquarters degenerated into a screaming match. In September 1969, UMWA executive council member Albert Pass received $20,000 from Boyle (who had embezzled the money from union funds) to hire gunmen to kill Yablonski. Paul Gilly, an out-of-work house painter and son-in-law of a minor UMWA official, and two drifters, Aubran Martin and Claude Vealey, agreed to do the job. The murder was postponed until after the election, however, to avoid suspicion falling on Boyle. After three aborted attempts to murder Yablonski, the killers did their job. But they left so many fingerprints behind, it took police only three days to catch them.^[2][1][2][7]

A few hours after Yablonski’s funeral, several of the miners who had supported Yablonski met in the basement of the church where the memorial service was held. They met with attorney Joseph Rauh and drew up plans to establish a reform caucus within the United Mine Workers.^[8]

The day after the killing, 20,000 miners in West Virginia walked off the job in a one-day strike, convinced Boyle was responsible for the murders.^[9]

 

 Aftermath of Yablonski’s murder

Yablonski’s murder sparked action. On January 8, 1970, Yablonski’s attorney waived the right to further internal review and requested an immediate investigation of the 1969 union presidential election by DOL. On January 17, 1972, the United States Supreme Court granted Mike Trbovich, a 51-year-old coal mine shuttle car operator and union member from District 5 (Yablonski’s district), permission to intervene in the DOL suit as a complainant—keeping the election fraud suit alive. The Department of Labor had taken no action on Yablonski’s complaints while he lived, as if preserving the rights of union members were not important or urgent. But after his murder, Labor Secretary George P. Shultz assigned 230 investigators to the UMWA investigation.^[2][7][10]

The Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) of 1959 regulates the internal affairs of labor unions, requiring regular secret-ballot elections for local union offices and providing for federal investigation of election fraud or impropriety. DOL is authorized under the act to sue in federal court to have the election overturned. By 1970, however, only three international union elections had been overturned by the courts.^[11]

Gilly, Martin and Vealey were arrested days after the assassinations and indicted for Yablonski’s death. Eventually, investigators arrested Pass and Pass’ wife. All were convicted of murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Two of the three assassins were sentenced to death; Martin avoided execution by pleading guilty and turning state’s evidence.^[12]

Miners for Democracy (MFD) formed in April 1970 while the DOL investigation continued. Its members included most of the miners who belonged to the West Virginia Black Lung Association and many of Yablonski’s supporters and former campaign staff. MFD’s support was strongest in southwestern Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, and the panhandle and northern portions of West Virginia, but MFD supporters existed in nearly all affiliates. The chief organizers of Miners for Democracy included Yablonski’s sons, Joseph (known as “Chip”) and Ken, Trbovich and others.^[13][2][14]

DOL filed suit in federal court in 1971 to overturn the 1969 UMWA election. After several lengthy delays, the suit moved went to trial on September 12, 1971. On May 1, 1972, Judge William Bryant threw out the results of the 1969 UMWA international union elections. Bryant scheduled a new election to be held during the first eight days of December 1972. In addition, Bryant agreed that DOL should oversee the election to ensure fairness.^[15][16]

On May 28, 1972, MFD nominated Arnold Miller, a miner from West Virginia who had challenged Boyle on the need for black lung legislation, as its presidential candidate.^[2][17]

Balloting for the next UMWA president began on December 1, 1972. Balloting ended on December 9, and Miller was declared the victor on December 15. The Labor Department certified Miller as UMWA’s next president on December 22, 1972. The vote was 70,373 for Miller and 56,334 for Boyle.^[2][18]

Two of the convicted murders accused Boyle of masterminding and funding the assassination plot. Boyle was indicted on three counts of murder in April 1973 and convicted in April 1974. He was sentenced to three consecutive life terms in prison. He died in prison in 1985.^[19]

Here is a Puzzler

 How is that Mr. McCarthy was in an advanced enough MBA class to take a ”fieldtrip” to Juarez but was stunned by the living conditions of the people who live and work there?

I think its wondeful that some of the youth of today raised during the Bush years (three out of the four partners would have been in their early teens when Bush was sworn in) have worked hard to find a way to make money off of people working for starvation wages, without making the connection that perhaps they could use their education to HELP those workers earn a decent wage and buy a REAL house …

 

CORRALES, New Mexico (AP) — It was a side trip through a destitute, ramshackle neighborhood in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, that detoured Brian McCarthy from building houses in Albuquerque to an idea to offer the very poor a chance to own a home.

Shipping containers, such as on the left, will be converted into tiny homes, as seen on the right.

1 of 2

His answer lies in a humble steel shipping container, 40 feet long, 8 feet wide, 81/2 feet tall.

McCarthy, 30, and three partners, Pablo Nava, 22; Kyle Annen, 23; and Mackenzie Bishop, 22, have made a prototype out of a standard shipping container that hauls goods worldwide — a 320-square-foot home with a kitchen, bath with toilet, sleeping areas, windows and a bright blue door. The exterior is painted with a white epoxy coating that has light-reflecting properties to prevent the sun’s heat from penetrating.

Each small house includes hookups for air conditioning, ventilation, electrical and water systems — and the units ideally could be set up in small communities to make accessing utilities more efficient.

The idea began to take shape several years ago, when McCarthy went to the Mexican border city on a field trip as part of an executive MBA program. He found himself impressed by the sophistication and rapid growth of industry in Juarez, but shocked when the bus cut through a poor neighborhood on the way out of the city.

“We saw hundreds of homes that are made out of wood pallets and cardboard and scrap metal and scrap building material,” McCarthy said. When he questioned the bus driver, “he said, ‘Well, all the people who live here work in the places you just visited.”‘

“It was amazing to me that in an area where there was such growth and economic prosperity, that these employees of Fortune 1000 companies were living in such poor conditions.”

With Juarez growing by 50,000 to 60,000 people a year and wages low, it was evident traditional homebuilding couldn’t respond, said McCarthy, who’d worked in various facets of building homes in Albuquerque.

An idea began taking shape about a year and a half later when he saw an article about a shipping container converted into guest quarters.

“They talked about the merits of the construction, how strong they are, how affordable they are, and how plentiful they are,” McCarthy said.

He called Nava, his cousin, with the low-cost home idea. A year later, Nava, then a junior at Notre Dame University, suggested entering the university’s business plan competition.

Their initial three-quarter page concept expanded as they advanced in the contest. Along the way, Nava invited his roommate, Annen, to join. As the group’s acknowledged computer graphics whiz, Annen added drawings to give the presentation more life.

Eventually, they won the contest with a 55-page document, illustrated by renderings and floor plans.

In July 2007, the partners formed PFNC Global Communities — PFNC stands for “Por Fin, Nuestra Casa,” which roughly translates as “Finally, our own home.” They operate out of a back room in a Corrales realty firm but eventually expect offices in Juarez or adjacent El Paso, Texas, and a Juarez plant to manufacture shipping container homes.

The house faces two constraints: designing in only 320 square feet and keeping the price to around $8,000 to be affordable for the average worker at maquiladoras, manufacturing plants in Mexico along the U.S. border, McCarthy said.

The partners looked at clever designs for small condos and lofts, travel trailers and even private jet planes, adapting ideas they felt would work.

“We started with a kitchen and bathroom because they’re the most necessary and most basic ingredients of a home,” McCarthy said. They designed a galley-style kitchen with a stove, sink, refrigerator and dinette, and a 48-square-foot bathroom with a pedestal sink, shower and commode. Adjacent to the kitchen is a bunk area for children; separate sleeping quarters for the owners lie behind the bathroom wall.

The house may be sparse by U.S. standards, but Nava said it’s a huge improvement in safety, security and health over where many now live.

When drawings and color pictures of the prototype were shown around a poor Juarez neighborhood, people said, “You know it’d be like a dream to live in one of these,” Nava said. “You know, just the thought of having nice fresh air ventilating through the house, a large bed … a normal kitchen and a safe home that locks and closes each night was more than appealing.”

Annen cites modern architectural design, with bare metal and piping. “This would fit right in any major city,” he said.

The company has received a commitment for equity investment and is in the process of finishing details and closing its first round of funding. The partners anticipate starting production early next year, with the capacity to produce 3,000 homes in the first year and later ramping up.

They figure a half million people could benefit from such homes in Juarez alone.

PFNC doesn’t intend just to build shelter. It wants to build communities, and McCarthy said the group expects to have the first pilot community on the ground late next year.

“That was our goal, more than just four walls and a roof but to kind of raise the standard of living in Juarez and other places,” Nava said.

The shipping containers, which can be hauled by truck, rail or ship, are designed to stack. PFNC envisions a cluster arrangement, eight side by side and four high, with apartment-type balconies and staircases in the corners.

Clusters could be arranged into squares, creating “a safe little plaza in the middle where we hope to build a soccer field or a playground, some safe area for families to be,” Nava said.

PFNC wants to set up programs with maquiladoras to offer housing as an employee benefit, helping cut the high rate of worker turnover, now between 7 percent and 10 percent a month, McCarthy said. The company is working with a Mexican law firm that has handled work-to-own housing programs.

“This is not a rental-type situation or free housing while you work here,” McCarthy said. “Rather, the employer takes on some of the burden in setting up the financing program to transfer ownership to the employee.”

That’s important because PFNC needs large orders to keep costs down so low-wage workers can afford the home. The incentive for employers: Studies show housing for employees dramatically increases retention, and having more workers in a given area will reduce the number of buses maquiladoras run to take people to and from their jobs.

PFNC doesn’t view its homes as the last stop.

“With our design and with our price point, we think we’ll at least be able to take the first step of getting more families into more homes” and formal property ownership, McCarthy said.

“We fully anticipate that people will move into our homes, build up some equity, sell this home,” he said. “We see this is a stepping stone to get into a bigger or more comfortable home.”