USA! USA!

Robert Reich
May 2 at 11:55am · Berkeley, CA ·

You will hear today that the American economy is gaining steam, adding 288,000 jobs in April, while the unemployment rate fell to 6.3 percent. What you’ll hear less is that 806,000 people dropped out of the labor force in April, most of them too discouraged to look for work. The percent of the population employed (58.9%) remains the lowest it’s been in over thirty years. Another thing you’ll hear little about is that average hourly earnings didn’t rise at all in April, and the new jobs continue to be disproportionately in low-wage industries – retail clerks, restaurants, hotels, bars, temporary help.

Five years into a so-called recovery, this is a dismal picture, but no one wants to talk about it. The White House and Democrats undoubtedly will talk up the continuing jobs growth. And Republicans will mutter about taxes being too high on the so-called “job creators” at the top. Neither will mention that the poor and the middle class continue to sink. Yet this is the new reality.

Kent State, May 4, 1970. If it had been now would they use drones?

Pink Floyd members strike nerve with call on Rolling Stones to boycott Israel
Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Fri, 05/02/2014 - 11:48
130819-waters.jpg
Roger Waters performs The Wall Live in Barcelona, 2011.

Roger Waters performs The Wall Live in Barcelona, 2011.
(Wikipedia)

Yesterday, Roger Waters and Nick Mason of Pink Floyd urged the Rolling Stones not to go ahead with a planned concert in Tel Aviv this summer.

“With the recent news that the Rolling Stones will be playing their first-ever concert in Israel, and at what is a critical time in the global struggle for Palestinian freedom and equal rights, we, the two surviving founders of Pink Floyd, have united in support of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS), a growing, nonviolent global human rights movement initiated by Palestinian civil society in 2005 to end Israel’s occupation, racial discrimination and denial of basic Palestinian rights,” the pair write in their message, published in Salon.

“Playing Israel now is the moral equivalent of playing Sun City at the height of South African apartheid; regardless of your intentions, crossing the picket line provides propaganda that the Israeli government will use in its attempts to whitewash the policies of its unjust and racist regime.”

“If you wouldn’t play Sun City, back in the day, as you, the Rolling Stones did not, then don’t play Tel Aviv until such time as freedom reigns for all and equal rights is the law of the land,” the pair conclude.

The message has been reported widely in mainstream media, including in The Washington Post and the New York Daily News.
Abuse

It has also been shared via social media thousands of times, and has garnered significant attention on Roger Waters’ Facebook page with almost 10,000 “likes” and 800 comments.

Yet a large number of the comments, apparently from users in Israel, are extremely abusive against Waters and Palestinians, and many are Islamophobic.

If anything, however, the backlash indicates how sensitive many Israelis are to calls that their state should suffer consequences over its systematic violations of the rights of millions of Palestinians.

Waters has become one of the most prominent voices calling for the cultural boycott of Israel, a position he explained in a widely circulated letter to his “family of Rock and Roll” last year.

Waters’ and Mason’s call on the Stones echoes a recent appeal by the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee that the band should abandon its Tel Aviv show.

What is May Day? Workers and Employers and May Day

May 01, 2014


by MOSHE ADLER

Workers

How should people balance their lives between work, tending to their responsibilities (for themselves, for their families, and for their communities), and sleep? The answer that workers all over the world agreed on in the late 1800s gave each equal weight: eight hours of work, eight hours for our familial and civic responsibilities, and eight hours for sleep.

But this is not how it was. The working day extended from sunrise to sunset. In 1884, the convention of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (it would change its name to the AFL in 1886) resolved that unless Congress passed an eight-hour day law by May 1, 1886, the Federation would call for a general strike.[1] Congress did not pass the eight-hour law, and strikes and rallies occurred in many towns, including in Chicago, where some 80,000 workers marched in protest.[2]

The eight-hour workday was only one of the workers’ struggles at the time. In February 1886 the molders of the McCormick tractor factory were out on strike for higher pay,[3] and on May 3rd, just two days after the general rally and strike for the eight-hour day, two McCormick strikers who were challenging strike-breakers were killed by the police.[4] A protest against this police brutality took place in Chicago’s Haymarket on May 4; when the police attacked this rally as well, a bomb went off among the policemen, one of whom was killed.[5]

To this day who planted the bomb remains unknown. But seven labor leaders — Albert Parsons, August Spies, Michael Schwab, Samuel Fielden, Louis Lingg, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer — were sentenced to death, not because they were involved in the bombing but because they supposedly “aided abetted and encouraged” the unknown bomber. Four of the seven were hung; the sentences of two were commuted to life in prison; and one committed suicide. Workers the world over were enraged by the defeat of the struggle for the eight-hour day and the hangings of the Chicago labor leaders and ever since they commemorate the struggle on May 1st. In honor of the spilled blood of the workers they carry red flags.

Employers

The workers’ resistance was put down by the police and after May Day 1886 what employers sought was a way to eliminate resistance before it even started. One obvious solution would have been to improve working conditions; but this solution did not interest them. What they wanted instead was to convince workers that they had no reason to protest — not because their working conditions were good, but because they were fair. In 1899, John Bates Clark, a professor of economics at Columbia University, explained the challenge that employers faced:

The indictment that hangs over society is that of “exploiting labor.” “Workmen” it is said, “are regularly robbed of what they produce. This is done within the forms of law, and by the natural working of competition.” If this charge were proved, every right-minded man should become a socialist; and his zeal in transforming the industrial system would then measure and express his sense of justice.

Workers who worked from sunrise to sunset and made only a meager living knew that they were exploited; they experienced it first-hand. But Clark had another agenda.

If we are to test the charge, however, we must enter the realm of production. We must resolve the product of social industry into its component elements, in order to see whether the natural effect of competition is or is not to give to each producer the amount of wealth that he specifically brings into existence.[6]

The resolution that Clark himself invented was this: in a market system, Clark claimed, every worker gets paid exactly the value of what she or he is worth.

The reception to his theory could not have been better. Unlike the workers of the 1800s, many of today’s workers who are working hard and yet are unable to care for their families believe that the fault is theirs. They believe that the work they do is unworthy, either because it does not require higher education or because it does not require special
skills.

Truck driving does not require a high level education or a lengthy development of skills, yet no society can exist without truck-drivers. But the median wage of tractor-trailer drivers who experience great stress on the job and are away from their families for extended periods of time is $38,700. No society can exist without ambulance personnel and paramedics either, but their median wage is only $31,270.[7] No society can exist without the work that fast food workers or supermarket workers do, yet those workers make $18,470.

Society as a whole is a team, as is every part of it. The contribution a person makes either to society as a whole or to a particular project cannot be measured by the education or skill an individual person has, nor by the job title he or she holds. No building can be built without electricians, but neither can it be built without a financier. It cannot be built without carpenters and plumbers, but it also cannot be built without the real estate agents who will eventually rent or sell it to clients, or without the architects or the engineers.

When it comes to work, we are all members of the same global team. But when it comes to the distribution of the fruits of our common labor, we are being cheated out of our fair share.

On May Day 2014 we demand laws that govern the distribution of power and the distribution of pay in the workplace. We demand worker participation in management and a maximum top to bottom pay ratio of eight to one, so that the highest paid manager earns no more than eight times the lowest paid employee.

Moshe Adler teaches economics at Columbia University and at the Harry Van Arsdale Center for Labor Studies at Empire State College. He is the author of Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science That Makes Life Dismal (The New Press, 2010), which is available in paperback and as an e-book.

What if the Global BDS Movement Were to Achieve Its Goals?

Jerry Haber
April 28, 2014
The Magnes Zionist

In 2005, Palestinian civil society issued a call for a campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights. A truly global movement against Israeli Apartheid is rapidly emerging in response to this call. What is the genius of the BDS movement?



The Boycott Divestment Sanctions Movement, www.inminds.com,



What is the genius of the three calls of the global BDS movement, endorsed in 2005 by over 170 Palestinian organizations?

Very simple: their moderation and eminent reasonableness.

Here are the calls, once again:

Ending [Israel’s] occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 and dismantling the Wall;
Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.

As I have pointed out repeatedly, each one of these calls only makes sense under the assumption that the State of Israel exists. And this is what bedevils the opponents of the BDS movement. They would prefer that the BDS movement call for the demise of the Jewish state . They would prefer that the third call demand explicitly the return of all Palestinian refugees to Israel, and not merely “promoting the rights…as stipulated in UN Resolution 194,” which was overwhelmingly adopted in the UN, including by the United States, after it had recognized the Jewish state. Since there is still a consensus in the world for the legitimacy of a Jewish state (though no consensus for the particular sort of Jewish state that Israel has become), the opponents of BDS would love the movement to say that the goal is the elimination of the Jewish state, or replacement of the Israel by another state in which Jews would be an ethnic minority.

But it doesn’t. And that is not just a tactic. The truth is that there are Palestinians who don’t want’ to live in a secular state with millions of Israeli Jews. They would prefer their own state. But they also want dignity and equality for those Palestinian Arabs who are citizens of Israel as well as the right of the refugees to return to their homeland, as called for by international law and convention, and UN resolution.

These eminently moderate calls befuddle the defenders of the status-quo post 1948, forcing them to say – without a scrap of evidence – that all this is a trick, that there is “hidden agenda,” “implied by the goals,” or, at least, a “possible (negative) implication of the goals.”

Ask a liberal Zionist why she opposes the third call, and she may say, again without a scrap of evidence, that it would imply Israel being swamped by millions of hostile Palestinians. In other words, she would make an entirely nonsensical claim that has nothing to do with the third call.

Let’s make a thought experiment, shall we? Let’s imagine that the State of Israel is so negatively affected by the BDS movement that it ends the occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967, dismantles the Wall, recognizes the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality, and respects, promotes, and protects the rights of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194. And let’s give a specific scenario: the Jewish settlers are resettled within the 1967 borders, the Law of Return and the Citizenship law are amended to allow for full equality between Israeli-Jews and Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel in citizenship and immigration, and all the legislation that discriminates against Arab-Palestinians is abolished. (Indeed, according to most liberal Zionists, there is very little discriminatory legislation to begin with. )

Moreover, let’s assume something really unlikely, that around a million Palestinians opt to return to their homes and properties, a number that far exceeds all current projections in polls of Palestinians. And remember that, according to resolution 194, they return after having declared that they are willing to live in peace with the Israelis and to abide by the laws of Israel.

Under those circumstances, the State of Israel would have a population that would be over 70% Jewish and under 30% non-Jewish. it would be a state of all its citizens. Its official languages and cultures would continue to be Hebrew and Arabic; Judaism, Islam, and Christianity would continue to play a role (too large a one, in my opinion!) in the public sphere. In many respects it would be indistinguishable from Israel today, only less racist and discriminatory.

Now what would be so bad about that? I mean, even from a Zionist point of view?

Yet this democratic Israel is the nightmare scenario that the opponents of BDS really fear. Because they are not interested in a liberal democracy with a a strong Jewish/Hebraic cultural content. They are interested in a state in which Jews qua Jews occupy a position of privilege, a state in which non-Jews are recognized as “citizen strangers.” to use Shira Robinson’s felicitous phrase. The anti-BDS folks want Israel to be for the Arabs like Poland was for the Jews, where Jews were citizens, but not really part of the Polish nation. This is what Israel has been since 1948, and this is what many liberal Zionists defend

And that brings me back to the brilliance of the BDS movement, and why it is gaining traction in the world: More and more people are beginning to understand that its aims are much more moderate and moral than the status quo within 1967 Israel.

And that what provokes many of the opponents of BDS to misrepresent the global BDS movement, or to give absurd arguments against it, such as that the Palestinians should be more concerned with the slaughter in Syria, or human rights violations in China, than their own suffering in Palestine.

After all, by that reasoning, those who protested the treatment of Soviet Jewry in the 1970s were moral hypocrites, since they should have been out protesting the genocide in Cambodia during the same years.

Posted by Jerry Haber

Jeremiah (Jerry) Haber is the nom de plume of Charles H. Manekin, an orthodox Jewish studies and philosophy professor, who divides his time between Israel and the US.

10th Anniversary Gig, Pyeng Threadgill Celebrates "SWEET HOME, THE MUSIC OF ROBERT JOHNSON" a Random Chance Records Release

Pyeng Threadgill Celebrates SWEET HOME: The Music of Robert Johnson, The 10 Year Anniversary
Friday, May 09



ZINC BAR 82 West 3rd Street (btw Thompson & Sullivan) Greenwich Village New York NY 10012 tel. 212-477-ZINC (9462) Open 7 days: 6pm-2:30am weeknights 6pm-3am weekends




$15 for both 9:30 P.M. and 10:15 P.M. sets
9:30 P.M. The Desert Set: featuring Rabbit's Foot (aka Pyeng Threadgill (voice), Brandon Terzic (oud/ngoni), Tim Keiper (calabash/percussion) 10:15 P.M. The Porch Set: featuring Pyeng Threadgill (voice), Ben Tyree (guitar), Kevin Louis (cornet/percussion), Derek Nievergelt (bass), and Evan Pazner (drums)

US states should act against Israel’s denial of entry to Americans

Opinion/Editorial

Mike Coogan
The Electronic Intifada
30 April 2014

On 13 September 2012, an Israeli soldier pointed his gun at an American college student and ordered her to board a bus back to Jordan.

The student, Yara Karmalawy, was attempting to travel to the occupied West Bank and present-day Israel as part of a university-sponsored trip with other students from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Instead of being admitted like the other thirty students, Yara was disparaged, threatened and denied entry because of her ethnicity.

Unfortunately, this type of treatment by Israel is all too common for Americans of Arab and Muslim heritage, as well as those critical of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians. Those affected by Israel’s policies include college students, world-renowned university professors, teachers, architects, clergy, people visiting sick relatives, married couples giving birth, humanitarian workers and human rights monitors.

Even those who can trace their ancestry to signers of the US constitution have not been spared from Israel’s discriminatory policies. George Bisharat, a law professor and descendant of William Samuel Johnson, has been routinely mistreated by Israeli officials, an experience he shared in a powerful 28 April piece for The Los Angeles Times.
Scrutiny

In the last year, Israel’s discriminatory policies have come under increased scrutiny as it attempts to join the US Visa Waiver Program. This program allows citizens from participating countries to visit the US for up to ninety days without a visa and requires that the same privileges be afforded to American citizens visiting countries in the program.

The program has a number of requirements for participating countries, and Israel’s inability to meet at least two of the requirements has thus far thwarted its inclusion.

The main obstacle has been Israel’s violation of the reciprocity requirement, which requires Israel to admit Americans, regardless of their religion or ethnicity.

In recent weeks, the State Department has reiterated that Israel is in violation of the reciprocity requirement, and its spokesperson stated at an 18 April press briefing that “the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State both remain concerned with reciprocal travel privileges for US citizens due to the unequal treatment that Palestinian Americans and other Arab Americans receive at Israel’s borders and checkpoints.”

Last year, a number of lawmakers introduced legislation, backed by the major Israel lobby group AIPAC, known as the United States Israel Strategic Partnership Act of 2013.

It called for Israel’s entry in the Visa Waiver Program but exempted it from the reciprocity requirement, prompting journalist Glenn Greenwald to observe in The Guardian that the bill’s sponsors, including California Senator Barbara Boxer, were seeking to “codify Israel’s discrimination against Palestinian-, Muslim- and Arab-Americans into US law.”

Drafts of the legislation included a reciprocity exemption in both the House and Senate versions, but after wrangling among lawmakers, the reciprocity exemption was removed from the House version.

Over the last year Israeli officials have proffered a multitude of explanations for Israel’s discrimination against and mistreatment of US citizens. At various times the Israeli government has claimed that its discriminatory policies are for security purposes; are necessitated by the 1993 Oslo accords; only occur at Ben Gurion airport; and can be eased if Israel is allowed into the Visa Waiver Program.
Substantial discrimination

Although exact figures are hard to come by, the scale of Israel’s discrimination is by all accounts substantial. According to the Arab American Institute (AAI), an organization that has been challenging Israel’s discriminatory policies for decades, the number of US citizens denied entry could be as high as 120,000. AAI has been collecting testimonies from US citizens who have been mistreated and has been following up with members of Congress and the State Department. A number of the testimonies AAI has collected are also listed on their website.

In New York, lawmakers like Senator Charles Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand have done nothing to challenge Israel’s appalling mistreatment of constituents like Najwa Doughman and Sasha Al-Sarabi.

Instead, many lawmakers have demanded a review of how US tourist visa applications from Israelis are processed, and have pressured the State Department to show more flexibility on the requirement that Israel treat all Americans equally.

While various federal agencies have expressed their concern over Israel’s possible entry into the Visa Waiver Program, state lawmakers should also be concerned that Israel’s treatment of their residents violates local civil rights laws and the terms of economic cooperation agreements that at least 33 US states have signed with Israel.

Israel’s treatment of Missouri resident Sandra Tamari — who was denied entry and deported — would appear to be in direct contravention of that state’s pact with Israel, known as the Missouri-Israel Cooperative Agreement.

Part of that agreement’s purpose is to improve tourism between Missouri and Israel. Given Israel’s systemic discrimination against US citizens, providing Israel with beneficial treatment under the terms of this agreement directly contravenes state lawmakers’ duty to uphold residents’ rights under the Missouri Human Rights Act.

Article five of a similar agreement between Massachusetts and Israel specifically states, “each party shall accord fair and equitable treatment to the individuals, government agencies, and other Entities of the other party engaged in the pursuit of activities under this Agreement.”

Other state officials, including California Governor Jerry Brown, have also enabled Israel’s policies by signing tourism and economic cooperation agreements without first ensuring that the civil rights of California residents are being upheld by Israel.

As US citizens like Yara Karmalawy, Sandra Tamari and George Bisharat continue to face discrimination, Israel should not only be barred from entering the Visa Waiver Program, but state lawmakers should also consider suspending agreements with Israel until its policies comport with local and federal civil rights laws.

Mike Coogan is the legislative coordinator with the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.