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Rochester, NY. Following Election Day 2008, Rochester Against War, Rochester Students for a Democratic Society, Campus Antiwar Network, Military Families Speak Out, and local Iraq and Afghanistan Veternas stand together to make the following statement:
Click Here to see the Video
Video by Rochester Indy Media (other media outlets didn’t show up)
Article Originally appeared on Rochester Indy Media Website. Link here
None of the candidates represents so-called mainstream America, which has made clear in poll after poll that it wants the normal decencies of jobs, proper housing and health care, and U.S. troops out of Iraq.
To read John Pilger’s article visit SocialistWorker.org
When I first started the Sitch it aimed to just be a blog about whatever I wanted to talk about when I sat at the computer. Slowly I began to think about what I wanted to write about, so that when I got to the computer I can nail some solid reviews, critiques or whatever. My biggest realization, which should have just been a duh!, was that the Sitch was an opportunity to give voice to student activism and radical politics. I’m sure there are plenty of radical blogs out there but so few are devoted to student activism and even fewer to the politics I hold.
It was nice to see month-to-month growth. February saw my biggest day at 17 views!!! It was exciting. March came around and my biggest day was 23 views!! Fantastic. Then April hits and the Campus Antiwar Network East Coast Conference introduced so many new readers. April 8th was my biggest day ever… about 180 views. Today, the Sitch reached 1,000 views. In the last 6 weeks, of those 1,000, 700 people visited the Sitch.
I encourage people who do read the Sitch to give feedback and make comments on posts. The best way to keep this thing alive and interesting is to have some discussion on here. Tell other people about the Sitch. Keeping reading and if you haven’t done so already subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog.
Happy statistics aside, there are 1.2 million Iraqis dead and dying. 4,000+ soldiers dead and dying. Millions of Iraqis displaced. Millions around the world in starvation and dealing with the rise of food costs. Israel continues to hammer the Palestinians. At home, 50 bullets murdering an innocent isn’t enough to punish someone if you’re an arm of the government (NYPD). The Left in Latin America is growing, but so is the agenda of the US to destroy it. $126 for a barrel of oil. $4.00+ for a gallon of gas. Afghanistan is still occupied. The environment is shit and the biggest polluter in the world (us) isn’t doing jack shit about it. Obama, Hillary, McCain are offering the same if not better ways to keep the rich richer and the rest of us dying and broke.
We have a lot of work to do.
No justice. No peace.
There is no question about it… our healthcare system is flawed. Excuse me, perverse. No, no, it’s a disaster. Perhaps maybe even a little bit of very corrupt. These were some of the many words used to describe a healthcare system that has taken in a majority of the people in this country. Yet, also designed to leave out an ever increasing amount people in order to secure grotesque profits. Last night, the Rochester, NY chapter of the International Socialist Organization, held a public meeting on the health issues we face today in this country, titled “Healthcare in Crisis: How Can We Fix This Broken System?”
Unlike normal public meetings, where a member of the ISO will give a political argument supported by historical context, the healthcare meeting featured a panel of speakers. Each speaker gave about 5-10 minute speeches supporting the need for healthcare reform based on their individual reasoning/perspective. In attendence were Ed Bender (physician, Physicians for A National Health Program), Frank S. (president, RIT College Democrats), Tim Engstrom (professor of Philosophy, RIT), and Brian Erway (socialist, ISO).
Ed Bender
Mr. Bender was able to clarify how single-pay universal healthcare works. He used examples of how systems manage to provide care for all in countries where there is a national healthcare program.
Franks S.
Frank (Mr. S sounds weird), contributed by explaining the health plan Barack Obama proposes. He described it as a promising upgrade to what we have now. Comparisons were made with current health management and Hillary Clinton’s plan.
Tim Engstrom
Mr. Engstrom, eloquently was able to debunk some arguments against single-payer healthcare and sort of unite the political spectrum under this one issue. He gave reasons for why the right and the left would benefit from universal healthcare.
Brian Erway
Mr. Erway did his best to unravel the socialist case for single-payer universal healthcare to a crowd filled with a number of new faces. He identified the underlying issue: distribution of wealth/resources. The result was an analysis of how a profit system reduces healthcare to a luxury.
With nearly 50 people in attendance, the audience was hungry for discussion. Those Obama/Hillary debates haven’t been satisfying people’s desire for “change.” You could tell within the angry stories of those in the crowd that they already knew the ‘08 Election wasn’t going to deliver on this front. At one point Mr. Engstrom turned to Frank S. and said ‘With all due respect to Mr. Obama and his representative, his plan is half-assed…’ Mr. Erway, I believe, provided us with a story about local school fundraising that aimed to help provide funds for health coverage for an ailing boy. He expressed his disgust with a system that placed school children in a position to hold a “bake sale” to cover healthcare costs. Children doing the government’s job.
Many questions came from the floor:
Will a socialized program look anything like today’s Medicaid?
Realistically, how severe is the healthcare crisis?
Will socializing healthcare lead to socialism?
Why isn’t our goal a global healthcare relief program?
Are there any initiatives for volunteer hospitals?
Will we have a choice of whether to choose a national system or seek private insurance?
What will happen to jobs if we get rid of insurance companies?
Why are we the one modern country that has yet to make the transition to universal healthcare?
and many many more.
Some questions were answered very well. In fact all of the one’s listed above were answered except the one that mentions if universal healthcare would lead to socialism. I’d imagine that that question alone merits its own discussion. The military is one institution that has socialized medicine and we all know it provides free universal healthcare to detainees at Guantanamo Bay… tortured or not.
Besides the nitty-gritty of what single-payer is, people wanted to know how to get it here. Seeing as our current and future leadership offer what we don’t want, is there a way to convince the leadership? It was suggested a couple of times that we write to our representative in Congress. As pretty as that may sound, these are the same people we’re talking about that for the last couple of decades haven’t listened to their constituency’s phone calls, mail, and email. If ever they cared it was because a massive amount of the voters really demanded it and beat down their door. These are also the same people who continue to keep us in Iraq murdering people every single day. Two members of the ISO placed things in historical context (kind of a habit with these guys), by giving us numerous examples where specific struggles swelled so much that they fought for years to demand justice. It’s the examples of 1968 that Brian L. listed, there were able to remind us that night that during one decade alone movements for justice and equality made significant advances. And Jeff T. added with ideas of what an organized labor force can demand with its power to produce. Unionizing and organizing were the key ideas here. Even the union’s with corrupt leadership and ineffective agendas need to stay in the fight because people within can take the reigns and demand from their union what they expect them to do in the first place.
The meeting was a total success and congratulations are in order. However, I think the goal was to plant the seed for future participation in the healthcare struggle and perhaps even the overall struggle for peace and justice. After the meeting finished, many stayed to speak with panelists, members of the ISO, and student activists of the Campus Antiwar Network and the Global Awareness group. It’s meetings like these that have a diversity of attendance and participation that really get people thinking. Especially for the challenges and goals that the ISO faces, this meeting worked to its benefit as well in being able to show that socialists (not stalinists) work for the same class interests of the working poor.
In solidarity.
Amy Goodman is an independent journalist and host of Democracy Now! on Pacifica Radio and Free Speech TV. This entry is from Amy Goodman’s Weekly Column dated March 5, 2008.
While the Iraq war is off the front pages, and Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama embark on what may well be a scorched-earth primary battle against each other, let’s keep our eye on where the real scorched earth lies: who profits and who dies.
Clinton proclaimed in her victory speech in Ohio on March 4, after winning three of the four primary contests that day, “as goes Ohio, so goes the nation.” She should take note, however, of how goes Vermont. That state might be a better bellwether, especially concerning the U.S. quagmire in Iraq.
While no one was surprised that Obama beat Clinton in the Vermont primary by a landslide, several details of the Vermont vote bear mention. Vermont’s electoral system is based on the town meeting, a storied exercise in direct democracy. In the Vermont town meeting, local issues and ordinances are hashed out in an open forum, with all townspeople who want to speak given time. This is arguably the closest we come in the United States to real democracy. Part of why this is possible is the rural nature of Vermont, which Vermonters prize and protect.
In Brattleboro, the townspeople decided to arrest President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, should they visit. (This may be a moot point, as Vermont is the one state out of 50 that George W. Bush has not visited while president.) The question before the people of Brattleboro read: “Shall the Selectboard instruct the Town Attorney to draft indictments against President Bush and Vice President Cheney for crimes against our Constitution, and publish said indictments for consideration by other authorities, and shall it be the law of the town of Brattleboro that the Brattleboro Police, pursuant to the above-mentioned indictments, arrest and detain George Bush and Richard Cheney in Brattleboro if they are not duly impeached, and prosecute or extradite them to other authorities that may reasonably contend to prosecute them?”
The question passed, after a spirited discussion, by a vote of 2,012 for, 1,795 against.
I asked former Gov. Madeleine Kunin, the only woman ever elected to that position in Vermont, what she thought of the vote. Kunin [a Democrat] said: “I support the fact that these communities were able to do that. That’s Town Meeting in Vermont. Anything can happen. Would I have voted for it? Probably not. But I do respect their speaking out and taking a stand. I think there are a lot of people in Vermont who are frustrated that there’s no impeachment process going on of Bush and Cheney.”
Exit polls in Vermont indicated that the Iraq war remains the No. 1 issue concerning people there. And it isn’t some knee-jerk liberal position. Vermont, the first state to outlaw slavery, has a long Republican tradition, but one that is fiercely independent, more along the lines of the slogan on the Revolution-era flag: “Don’t Tread on Me.”
A central reason that the war hits home in Vermont is that the war touches almost everyone there. Vermont has the highest per capita death rate among U.S. service members, more than twice the rate of most other states. People feel the loss, see the suffering, see the businesses fail as family breadwinners are pulled away for years on multiple deployments. And it is in this elemental crucible of democracy, this Norman Rockwell setting, that anger and frustration find voice.
Ever thought about voting, supporting, or debating the ideas of Ron Paul. Here’s a really great piece that will make you think twice as it deconstructs his politics. It also talks about the unusual alliance of the Left/liberals with Ron Paul. A MUST READ.
Amy Goodman is an independent journalist and host of Democracy Now! on Pacifica Radio and Free Speech TV. This entry is from Amy Goodman’s Weekly Column dated Feb 6, 2008.
As I raced into our TV studio for our Super Tuesday morning-after show, I was excited. Across the country, initial reports indicated there was unprecedented voter participation, at least in the Democratic primaries, several times higher than in previous elections. For years I have covered countries like Haiti, where people risk death to vote, while the U.S. has one of the lowest participation rates in the industrialized world. Could it be this year would be different?
Then I bumped into a friend and asked if he had voted. “I can’t vote,” he said, “because I did time in prison.” I asked him if he would have voted. “Sure I would have. Because then I’m not just talking junk, I’m doing something about it.”
Felony disenfranchisement is the practice by state governments of barring people convicted of a felony from voting, even after they have served their time. In Virginia and Kentucky, people convicted of any felony can never vote again (this would include “Scooter” Libby, even though he never went to jail, unless he is pardoned). Eight other states have permanent felony disenfranchisement laws, with some conditions that allow people to rejoin the voter rolls: Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Mississippi, Nevada, Tennessee and Wyoming.
Disenfranchisement—people being denied their right to vote—takes many forms, and has a major impact on electoral politics. In Ohio in 2004, stories abounded of inoperative voting machines, too few ballots or too few voting machines. Then there was Florida in 2000. Many continue to believe that the election was thrown to George W. Bush by Ralph Nader, who got about 97,000 votes in Florida. Ten times that number of Floridians are prevented from voting at all. Why? Currently, more than 1.1 million Floridians have been convicted of a felony and thus aren’t allowed to vote. We can’t know for sure how they would have voted, but as scholar, lawyer and activist Angela Davis said recently in a speech honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Mobile, Ala., “If we had not had the felony disenfranchisement that we have, there would be no way that George Bush would be in the White House.”
Since felony disenfranchisement disproportionately affects African-American and Latino men in the U.S., and since these groups overwhelmingly vote Democratic, the laws bolster the position of the Republican Party. The statistics are shocking. Ryan King, policy analyst with The Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C., summarized the latest:
About 5.3 million U.S. citizens are ineligible to vote due to felony disenfranchisement; 2 million of them are African-American. Of these, 1.4 million are African-American men, which translates into an incredible 13 percent of that population, a rate seven times higher than in the overall population. Forty-eight states have some version of felony disenfranchisement on the books. All bar voting from prison, then go on to bar participation while on parole or probation. Two states, Maine and Vermont, allow prisoners to vote from behind the walls, as does Canada and a number of other countries.
The politicians and pundits are all abuzz with the massive turnouts in the primaries and caucuses. There are increasing percentages of women participating, and initial reports point to more young people. The youth vote is particularly important, as young people have less invested in the status quo and can look with fresh eyes at long-standing injustices that disenfranchise so many. In this context, one of The Sentencing Project’s predictions bears repeating here: “Given current rates of incarceration, 3 in 10 of the next generation of black men can expect to be disenfranchised at some point in their lifetime. In states that disenfranchise ex-offenders, as many as 40 percent of black men may permanently lose their right to vote.”
The Sentencing Project’s King said: “We are constantly pushing for legislative change around the country. But public education is absolutely key. There are so many different laws that people simply don’t know when their right to vote has been restored. That includes the personnel who work in state governments giving out the wrong information.”
I called my friend to tell him he was misinformed. He hadn’t been on probation or parole for years. “You can vote,” I told him. “You just have to register.” I could hear him smile through the phone
What can I say that hasn’t already been said by just about everyone in corporate and independent media?
If you have a candidate to vote for in the primary, go vote!
If you’re like me and the choices don’t reflect what you believe in, then the best thing you can do is either spread the word about a candidate you do want to vote for or get out there and join a movement. You see, the idea of voting for someone and then sitting back at home doesn’t sit well with me. People are heading to the voting booth to give up their power to change things. They’re placing their faith on an individual who may or may not fulfill his/her promises. In the case that they don’t, which happens more often then you’d like to think, you need to make your voice heard. Attend a rally. Join a grassroots organization. Get involved in local politics to find a more immediate satisfaction or better chance for change.
It’s Super Tuesday because every presidential election year a large number of states hold their primaries and caucuses on this date. Today is the day the American people help determine who will or will not get their party’s nomination.
I’m currently supporting the presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party. She’s a former Democratic congresswoman that left the party because she was tired of the corporate alliance it was building, like their counterparts across the aisle.
