Labor Day: March for Human Rights & Economic Justice

CAUGHT ON TAPE: Tom Friedman's Shocking Admission

By David Sirota, in Eat The Press

La rama robada

Un poema de Pablo Neruda

Greenbridge

They tore down the wartime bungalows
built in rows along the dry spines of glaciers.
The land lay fallow a while, a graveyard
of dirt and weeds locked behind chain link

'til the rains sprouted frames and foundations.
Men appeared with tools in hand, grumbling trucks
moved the earth, and homes the color of Easter eggs
stacked up in the afternoon sun.

Lies stand shoulder to shoulder with little truths.
From the old homes families carried
suitcases and slips of paper
that promise to pay the rent—
at least until the budget’s cut.
As they say, White Center aint so white,
and Greenbridge, well, there’s no bridge either.

But this morning it hardly matters.
First one from the corner has lace curtains,
candles and flowers line the panes.
The sun’s not risen yet
above the park and the lake.
Tea steeps on a countertop
and one bright bulb lights the faces
of a grandmother and child in the window.

At the front door a broom stands guard,
its fight with construction dust now done,
and shoes of all sizes lie in a row,
sound asleep.

"Significant deficit" may force closure of two county health clinics

Public Health of Seattle & King County, where I work, provides essential health care services to county residents, many of whom have no insurance and nowhere else to turn. This year King County insisted that the Public Health department submit a balanced budget for 2007, despite increasing health care costs, decreasing returns as fewer people have health insurance, and an acute need for subsidies to be able to stay in business. Dorothy Teeter, interim director of Public Health of Seattle & King County, obliged the bean counters' request, and proposed closing two of the county's ten Public Health centers in order to break even.

Now it is up to Public Health clients, workers and the community at large to convince King County Executive Ron Sims and the King County Council to go beyond the budget Teeter submitted and fully fund Public Health, without any cuts or closures. Between now and late November, when the council votes on the budget, there's a lot of work to do.

Love, with Trees and Lightning: a poem by Catie Rosemurgy

from versedaily.org

(click on photo to see Scott Alberts' original)

Update from the teachers' movement in Oaxaca

On August 1, several thousand women and girls marched through the streets of Oaxaca city demanding the resignation of state governor, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. Many of these women are schoolteachers who were joined by students, housewives, workers, and campesinas. Many marched in their aprons, carrying pots and pans, spoons and spatulas. Later several hundred women took over the Oaxacan state television station ...

Click headline above to read more at
www.corrugate.org

The voices of raptors

From somewhere among the branches
fall the voices of raptors.
A Cooper's hawk swoops into position
outside the clinic window, interrupting
the business of the day, scaring
a brown-eyed boy balanced
on the scale. The nutritionist gasps,
stops talking of rice cereal and mashed fruit,
startled by the rodent prey dangling from your beak.

The boy curls his toes, jaw dropped,
metal clanks metal beneath his feet.
From somewhere among the higher branches
fall the voices of young hunters
raspy like kittens mewling,
hungry for meat and bone,
sharp talons clamped tight,
awaiting your return.

A bit of Truth and Reconciliation

The Guardian: Spain finally attempts to lay ghosts of the Franco era

Spain's Socialist government yesterday proposed measures to help families of the victims of General Franco's dictatorship dig up mass graves, but refused to annul tens of thousands of summary death sentences handed down by his regime.

A long-awaited proposed law, to compensate victims of the Spanish civil war and the 36-year dictatorship that followed it, also bans the far right from holding rallies at Franco's grave in the Valley of the Fallen outside Madrid ...

My city, on fire again

As Israeli bombs rain down on Beirut, the people of the city are once again living with the horror of war. In an intimate diary, 30-year-old Lebanese artist Zena el-Khalil describes helping foreigners escape, the nightly rocket attacks - and how she couldn't leave her sick friend behind

More than a million march against electoral fraud in Mexico

Candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said yesterday "a fraudulent election cannot be erased even with all the waters of the oceans."

Imagine how different the world might be today if a million Americans had marched in 2000 to protest what happened in Florida and elsewhere ...

Refugee All Stars benefit Thursday!

Thursday, July 13, 2006, 8:00 PM
A benefit concert for NW Immigrant Rights Project

featuring...
The Refugee All Stars of Sierra Leone

Opening...
DJ: Darek Mazzone, Host of Wo'pop on KEXP 90.3
Tickets: available at all TicketsWest outlets for $15, day of $17

Neumos - 925 E. Pike St. - Seattle, WA 98122

Info: (206)957-8609 or Janet@nwirp.org

Emma Goldman again makes the headlines

My pals and former housemates at the Emma Goldman Finishing School somehow ended up on the front cover of the Seattle Weekly. The house is really much more pleasant and friendly than what comes across in the article, as anyone who has been there for a dinner or a party can attest. (I'll admit, however, that I don't miss the three-hour meetings.) Check out these lovelies and their big dreams.

The Seattle Times: From farmhand to farm owner

... Other farm operators, Lopez says, are on their radios all day, issuing orders. "But look," he says, seizing Reinhardt's hand across the picnic table and turning it over to show his friend's dirt-smudged fingers. "This is a hand that works."

Forgotten Sol's new CD release!

My pals in Forgotten Sol are releasing their new CD, Contradiction, at a party July 1st. That's Saturday night, 9pm, at Chop Suey. You in?



www.myspace.com/forgottensol

Catalan voters approve "Statute of Autonomy"

It's not often that a national government agrees to decentralize and allow one of its regions to assume greater powers, but that's exactly what a popular referendum did this weekend in Catalunya.

The power struggle between Spain and Catalunya is of great interest to me for a number of reasons: my sister lives in Barcelona; the region has a rich history of powerful social movements; and because I'm researching the role Catalan soldiers played in occupying California in the 18th century, around the same time Spain laid siege to Barcelona and consolidated its control over Catalunya.

HAPPY SOLSTICE

May the Sun shine upon you all day long.

Quinceañera

Yesterday I saw this movie at the festival, where audiences voted it one of the five best. It is as good as they say. See it as soon as you can.

words like blossoms.

Recently my friend Ms. Tara invited me to be "Guest Poet" at her second grade class at the New School at South Shore. I read the story The Boy Who Loved Words, about a boy who fills his pockets with his scribbled favorites and one night places them at the tips of a tree's many branches. Afterward we had the kids choose some of their own favorites, write them on cards, and paste them onto this illustration ...

Protest Police Attack on Mexican Schoolteachers

PROTEST AT MEXICAN CONSULATE
2132 Third Ave., at Blanchard St., Downtown Seattle
Monday, June 19, 1:00-2:00 PM

Police smackdown on striking Mexican teachers

See Jill Friedberg's Granito de Arena film webpage for updates, or Indymedia Mexico.

Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project

A note from a friend ...

As Project Coordinator for the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, I'd like to bring your attention to a research report recently posted on our web site by an undergraduate at the University of Washington, Jennifer Taylor.

Jennifer did outstanding work looking into the history of the 1965 police shooting of Robert Reese, an unarmed African American, that touched off a direct action campaign of "freedom patrols" that operated as "walking civilian review boards." We recently posted her full research paper about this campaign, along with some scans of associated newspaper articles, here: http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/freedom_patrols.htm

Our web site also features video clips from oral history interviews with two different civil rights leaders-- Bishop John H. Adams, and Judge Charles V. Johnson-- who discuss their leadership of the Freedom Patrols. You can find their interviews (and many more) here: http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/interviews.htm

In addition, you can find a number of other outstanding undergraduate student papers about campaigns for racial justice in Seattle, including one that was reprinted in ColorsNW this past February for Black History Month, here: http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/research_reports.htm

We will be putting much more online in the next couple months, including papers about the Black Student Union, the Christian Friends for Racial Equality, the origins of the internment redress movement in Seattle, desegregation campaigns at Boeing, and new interviews about the local Chicano/a movement and urban Indian movement during the 1970s. Stay tuned,

Trevor Griffey

The big man Berlusconi

April, 2006. The big man Berlusconi, richest in Italy, is feeling desperate in the days before elections. He tells a crowd of shopkeepers: I have too much esteem for the intelligence of Italians to think that they could be such coglioni as to vote against their own interests.

Coglioni. Literally, "testicles." Millions of countrymen and women reduced by their Prime Minister to anatomical unmentionables.

Then something happens. In sunlit piazzas, under stone arcades, where old men in knit caps smoke filterless cigarettes, in country towns where Roman ducts still bring the water, in fashion capitals, everywhere, on people’s lips, on buttons pinned to smart sportcoats, on t-shirts, on stickers adorning the bums of small cars, above the din of motor scooters and factories and loud insistent conversation, the same phrase stands out, steps up, everywhere and everyone together says WE ARE ALL COGLIONI.

Stephen Colbert's guts and glory

I can't think of any other moment in Bush Jr.'s presidency when anyone criticized him to his face for more than 30 seconds. Here, he is seared, roasted, basted, turned on the spit and served with an apple in his mouth. A very satisfying counterpunch to the years of murderous lies.

The truthiness hurts | Salon.com

Stephen Colbert's brilliant performance unplugged the Bush myth machine -- and left the clueless D.C. press corps gaping.