Felicitaciones El Salvador! Una Pequena Victoria, y Los Venceran Mas Ojala!

Today when I went out to get a bite to eat I picked up the Spanish language newspaper La Voz Arizona. Eventually I made my way to a column by the Univision news personality Maria Elena Salinas, who was noting the end of an era in El Salvador. The end of Antonio Saca's presidency and the 2o year rule of his right-wing ARENA party, and most importantly the beginnings of the presidency of Mauricio Funes of the FMLN (Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional). Maria Elena Salinas writes:

"El difunto fundador del derechista partido Alianza Republicana
Nacionalista, Roberto D'Aubuisson, se ha de estar revolcando en su tumba."
(Translation: The dead founder of the ARENA party, Roberto D'Aubuisson, is
rolling in his grave)

Good, I hope he never rests in peace another day! Roberto D'Aubuisson was a member of El Salvador' oligarchy and probably a leader of El Salvador's death squads.

Although the FMLN has won the presidency, it looks as though they will have an uphill battle to make any sweeping changes, at least until they can win more seats in the National Assembly. An article at MRZine by Jay Hartling outlines the challenges.

On Monday, June 1, 2009, El Salvador will turn a new page in its history with the inauguration of the country's first left government, joining the ranks of the majority of Latin America. Representing the FMLN (Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional), Mauricio Funes and Salvador Sanchez Ceren, president and vice-president elect, will face a national assembly where the FMLN is
outnumbered by more than 2:1. Out of a total of 84 seats, the FMLN has only 35. This will make broad sweeping changes difficult, though not impossible, and may force Funes to use the power of the presidential veto as a bargaining chip. It is important that those of us observing from a distance understand the complicated environment within which the new government will be operating.

The new government represents a coalition of interests including the FMLN, its national grassroots system of committees, and a broad cross-section of civil society. As June 1 approaches, more and more information is coming to light that despite the glowing picture painted by the outgoing right-wing ARENA party, the country is bankrupt -- the result of twenty years of failed economic andsocial policies and rampant corruption by ARENA and its allies the PDC and PCN. It is likely that the new government will discover the depth of the corruption and mismanagement after it assumes office.

To further complicate matters, the outgoing ARENA government has been very busy over the last few weeks passing a number of laws and renewing contracts for ARENA's allies and supporters to ensure its continued control of the economy. The FMLN won on a platform of priorities created by the people of El Salvador -- through a lengthy, inclusive, and thorough popular consultation process. The priorities expressed by the people are access to adequate food, medicine/healthcare, jobs, affordable energy, and security. The Funes-Sanchez Ceren government will have to be creative in its approach to solving some of El Salvador's many problems, most of which have been exacerbated over the last twenty years. Continues.....

On a personal note. My first political involvement was with the Central American solidarity movement in the 1980s. In those days I was relatively well informed about the history and then present situation in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and I followed the situation closely. Through those activities I traveled to Nicaragua where I built houses for campesinos for four months. In the states I became friends with a Salvadoran refugee whose family was murdered by death squads. In short the events in Central America took on a personal dimension. They were not just poor people in some distant space on the globe. I actually came to know those people as real live human beings.

The situation of these countries educated in so many ways about the nature of revolutions, class, imperialism etc.. The Nicaraguan revolution captured my imagination, and I was hoping for a guerilla victory in El Salvador. Of course history proved to be much more complicated, the Sandinista's lost the 1990 Nicaraguan elections, and the FMLN wasn't able to sieze power. And now, as we look at recent developments in all of Latin America, the horizon is looking brighter for peoples' movements of the left.

So, Buenas Suerte El Salvador, I wish you peace and social justice and a better future. History knows that you have suffered enough for it.

A Doctor who Performed Abortions and was Singled Out by Bill O'Reilly was Murdered Today

A hat-tip to the Daily Doubter blog where I first picked this up. Wichita Kansas doctor George Tiller was murdered at his church today. First news outlet provided by Google news with this story is CNN.

Of further significance is that this doctor had often been singled out by Bill O'Reilly on both his television and radio show. The Daily Doubter has commentary and links to other blog sources documenting and discussing this.

Of course there is no way to directly link what right-wing commentators say with the violent actions of those who decide to take those actions. However, they are indirectly responsible for creating a political climate that encourages actions through their rhetoric.

To the American Working Class (or Sheeple?), Time to Fight Back!

This is an excellent article from the Counterpunch website on the recent history of American working people rolling-over as their employer's cut into their wages, benefits and pensions; and he contrasts that with the behaviour of the French people when faced with similar adversity.

Have We Turned Into Sheep? By DAVID MACARAY

Here are some key quotes:

"Although people joke about France’s laid back, c’est la vie attitude,
let’s give French workers credit for knowing how to respond to an outrage.
When corporations try to tell French workers they’re going to slash their health
care benefits or mess with their pensions, the workers behave the way people
should behave when the wealthy and powerful try to snow them. They go
totally ape-shit."........

"While there are no simple answers, one thing is clear. We’re making
it way too easy for these people. Without resistance, nothing’s going to
change. Without resistance, corporations, politicians and, yes, union
leadership will continue to pacify us with promises and excuses."

A Militant and Inspiring Song from Len Chandler (with Pete Seeger)

Wow! What a militant and inspiring song this is from Len Chandler.

I had never heard of Len Chandler before I saw the film "FTA" (Free/Fuck the Army), about Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland and other entertainer's Vietnam era anti-war show for GIs. Its a good film, available on Netflix, released into theatres for a week in the early 1970s and then buried, and Louis Proyect reviews it here along with the classic documentary about Vietnam, "Hearts and Minds".

Anyway, within "FTA" is Len Chandler singing another great song, "My Ass is Mine" which I take to be a play on an army officer's phrase "your ass is mine". I have looked for a You Tube clip of that part of "FTA", and haven't found one. (FYI, the You Tube clip of Rita Martinson that I posted for Memorial Day also from the file "FTA".) Whatever happened to these great resistance artists?

Anyway, here are some of the lyrics from Len Chandler singing "Move on Over (John Brown's Body)" Enjoy the video below.

"Your jails are filled with black men, and your courts are white with hate,
And with every bid for freedom, someone whispers to us "wait".................,
Move on over, or we will move on over you............
It is you who are subversive, you are the killers of the dream......
In a savage world of bandits, it is you who are extreme........"

Thanks Business Week for Clarifying Some Things

Its been a little grating on the nerves of socialists to hear all these righty-idiots blabbering about Obama and the Democrats enacting a socialist agenda. Finally, we can thank a publication of the bourgeois press for clarifying some things, and letting genuine socialists speak for themselves. Business Week published an article titled "Socialism? Hardly Say Socialists" with interviews with representatives of the Socialist Party U.S.A., International Socialist Organization (ISO), and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), about what a socialist politics and program would actually look like. Here are some choice quotes:

The DSA works within the Democrat Party, by the way, which is what Business Week means by "more inclusive", and doesn't consider itself a party as misrepresented in the article.

"But even to the more inclusive DSA, Obama is no socialist. "The discussion
of socialism that has appeared in the media is surreal," says Llewellyn. "Nobody
in their right mind would think Obama is a socialist if they knew anything
about the meaning of the word. Obama is acting as Roosevelt did, trying to
save capitalism from itself."

The ISO is a bit more radical:

"Sherry Wolf, an activist with the Chicago-based U.S. branch of the
International Socialist Organization (ISO), scoffs at the idea that the U.S. is
at the dawn of a socialist era. "What Marxists mean by socialism is different
from what Rush Limbaugh means," she says. "We believe the class that produces
the wealth should own and control that wealth. That's a far cry from what's
happening now. The state is propping up banks, mortgage, and insurance
companies, while the lives of working people are torn apart by foreclosures,
evictions, and unemployment. It's an effort to save global capitalism from its
own excesses."

Wolf's group sees itself as "revolutionary," meaning it advocates not
incremental changes but rather a "total transformation of society and political
economy."

Finally there is the Socialist Party USA, which is kind of a nostalgic organization for the great World War I era socialist Eugene Debs. (the picture at right is Socialist Party campaign material from 1912, Debs is on the left). Their representative Billy Wharton was quoted as saying:

"You see [Obama] operating as a hedge fund Democrat on health care now,"
Wharton says. "He blocked advocates of a single-payer system from presenting
their case to the Senate Finance Committee."

So there. Finally genuine socialists have gotten a chance to break through the mainstream media silence barrier to actually give their perspective. Although on one level irritating, perhaps the right's false accusations of Obama and his party as socialists has done us genuine socialists a favor. Now the word is on the tongue of many more people, and they might endulge in some curiosity and further research into future socialist possibilities. And the time is right with capitalism entering such a profound crisis. I never thought I would be thinking "Thank you Sean Hannity". I hope he lives to see and regret what he may have done, perhaps opening up a socialist Pandora's box.

"Food Inc.", Another Item in Why Capitalism Sucks

Well here is another quick post and embedded YouTube trailer on a film that looks like it will be very informative, but of course never quite radical enough. I still can't wait to see it, but it probably won't be coming to a theatre near me, as I don't live in the big city with any theatres showing any alternatives to big Hollywood bullshit. But hopefully it will put another chink in the armour of obscurantist illusions about the insane system of profits above people and nature that is capitalism. Louis Proyect over at the Unrepentant Marxist has seen the entire film and has a review, and some excellent commentary.

On a personal note I have lately become more aware the consequences of capitalist factory farming from both an ecological and a healthy diet perspective. Thanks in part to the author Michael Pollan who is a featured commentator in the film. Despite that fact, it is nearly impossible, or at least very expensive and difficult to escape from the system of factory farming produced and overly processed foods. The solution is not simply for us to vote as consumers by shopping at Whole Foods or some other overpriced yuppie-hippy grocery store. Instead, to solve these human and ecological problems requires systemic transformations.

http://

On Republicans Attempting to Re-brand the Democrats as Socialists

Well everybody has heard about the Republicans attempting to brand the Democrats as the "Democratic Socialist Party" or some such silly thing like that. If you haven't here is the link to a YouTube video, but I am not going to clutter up my pretty blog and embed it here, so just click on the link. These guys are just going loopy!

Here is what I had to say in the comments:

First of all, there are already genuine socialist parties like The Socialist Party. This is just bull shit. It was the banks and the auto industry that came begging for bailouts, not a hostile expropriation from the Obama administration! Oh how I wish it had been otherwise though as a genuine socialist!

So how about rebranding Republicans as:

The Republican Greedy White Man (with a few Uncle Toms) Party?

Or how about the Republican Capitalist Pig Party?

Or maybe the War, Torture, and Exploitation Party.

Or maybe just Republican Idiots Party.

Then another commenter said this:

"The GOP are the Party of the Wealthy, the Corporations, and people that don't know any better."

That about says it all. I will have to get back to the subject of the accurate branding of the Democrats as the party of false progressive hope. Another day.

Macro and Micro Levels of Socialist Transformation

In an article at MRZine titled Capitalist Crisis, Socialist Renewal Rick Wolff argues that now the time is right to develop a new socialist program. As part of that new program is a critique of prior socialist projects such as the Soviet Union and China, and their degeneration.

The framework for Wolff's critique of the 20th century's socialist projects is to look at them from the perspective of macro and micro levels of socialist organization. So in contrast to capitalism with its private ownership of the means of production and the anarchy of the market, at the macro level the socialist project focused on the social ownership of productive property and national economic planning. However, at the micro level, within factories and productive enterprises there was no qualitative differentiation between capitalism and socialism.

"Thus, when and where socialists became politically dominant, the basic internal structures of enterprises were not fundamentally altered. Laborers still finished their work days and departed, leaving behind their labors' fruits and leaving to others -- boards of directors -- the decisions about what to produce, how, and where, and what to do with the surpluses/profits. True, socialists emphasized state regulation of those boards' decisions or sometimes replaced private corporate boards of directors with state officials. However, the basic structures connecting workers to enterprise decision-makers remained, where socialists shaped them, markedly like their counterparts under capitalism."

Another way to say this is that at the micro level, the actual "relations of production" were not tranformed despite socialist ownership relations. And this of course has political consequences and dimensions as well, for if actual workers are not in control of their workplaces, then they could hardly be able to exercise real political control at the national level.

Although not mentioned by Wolff, we have seen more in experiments in actual workers control recently in Venezuela as part of the Bolivarian revolution and in Argentina as portrayed in the film The Take , and recently covered further on Democracy Now!

In watching the The Take however, one is struck with the sense that the factory expropriation and worker control movement could go so much further with a national macro level political movement. Regardless, lets hope we are entering a historical period where we can start putting together the pieces of a wholistic macro-micro socialist project. Enjoy the trailor for The Take.

http://

Memorial Day II, Rita Martinson from the Vietnam Era FTA Tour

http://

Memorial Day I, Remembering What War Does to Families

http://

http://

Summer Study Projects: Marx's Capital and David Harvey's Limits To Capital

Recently I became aware of the online course Reading Capital with David Harvey, a radical geographer and Marxist theoretician. The course lectures are delivered through either mp3 audio or various video formats. I downloaded the first two course sections and listened to them on a long drive to a temporary work detail location. After doing so I decided that I wanted to make another attempt at reading and understanding Karl Marx's classic "Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production", that is with David Harvey's assistance. Its tough book to read alone without some direction. There is also an online forum for the course, so one can even hopefully engage in discussion with others reading the text.

In I think the second lecture Harvey mentions that many people give up the attempt at a serious reading of Capital in the very tough third chapter. Come to think of it, thats about where I put it down about four years ago!

I also just ordered and received David Harvey's book Limits to Capital which is a book that attempts to put the theoretical ideas of Marx's Capital in today's historical context. Although I haven't seriously started reading the book, while scanning the pages to the 2006 edition I came upon an interesting factoid.

After Mexico began its program of neoliberal economic restructuring and privatization in 1988, twenty four Mexican billionaires appeared on Forbes' 1994 list of the world's wealthiest. Then of course the North American Free Trade Agreement was passed in the early 1990s. By 2005 Mexico had more billionaires than Saudi Arabia. NAFTA had the effect of massively restructuring the agricultural sector of Mexico's economy, turning small farming campesinos into wage workers. While some of this population was absorbed into the border zone "maquiladora" factories, many of these still could not compete with lower wage labor in China. Ultimately many of these people migrated to the United State to become cheap labor and treated as second class "illegal immigrants". This is one example of the process that Harvey calls "accumulation by dispossession". In the video below Harvey talks further about "accumulation by dispossession" in lecture 12 of the online course.

What Was My Point About America's Memory Hole?

Oh, yeah, and this article by Chomsky published at Alternet (originally at TomDispatch) fits well with my previous post and commentary on America's easy forgetfullness about atrocities committed in our name.

American Amnesia: We Forget Our Atrocities Almost As Soon as We Commit Them
by Noam Chomsky

"The torture memos released by the White House elicited shock, indignation, and surprise. The shock and indignation are understandable. The surprise, less so.

For one thing, even without inquiry, it was reasonable to suppose that Guantanamo was a torture chamber. Why else send prisoners where they would be beyond the reach of the law -- a place, incidentally, that Washington is using in violation of a treaty forced on Cuba at the point of a gun? Security reasons were, of course, alleged, but they remain hard to take seriously. The same expectations held for the Bush administration's "black sites," or secret prisons, and for extraordinary rendition, and they were fulfilled."

More importantly, torture has been routinely practiced from the early days of the conquest of the national territory, and continued to be used as the imperial ventures of the "infant empire" -- as George Washington called the new republic -- extended to the Philippines, Haiti, and elsewhere. Keep in mind as well that torture was the least of the many crimes of aggression, terror, subversion, and economic strangulation that have darkened U.S. history, much as in the case of other great powers.

Accordingly, what's surprising is to see the reactions to the release of those Justice Department memos, even by some of the most eloquent and forthright critics of Bush malfeasance: Paul Krugman, for example, writing that we used to be "a nation of moral ideals" and never before Bush "have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for." To say the least, that common view reflects a rather slanted version of American history."

(continues at link)

The Mainstream Media is Not Even Coming Close to Reporting The Worst of It

On the May 19th edition of Democracy Now! Jeremy Scahill reports on prisoner abuse at Gitmo:

"And while much of the focus has been on the tactical use of torture at Guantanamo, almost no attention had been paid to a parallel force that was torturing prisoners in a variety of ways, including waterboarding them, and that is this riot squad of sorts that you referred to called the Immediate Reaction Force. The prisoners and their lawyers at Guantanamo call it the “Extreme Repression Force.”
And basically what this is is a thug squad that is used to mercilessly punish prisoners who show the slightest bit of resistance or who do things that technically they’re not supposed to do, infractions like having two Styrofoam cups in their cell instead of one.
Guards will call in this goon squad. They come in with their Darth Vader outfits, and they literally gang-beat prisoners. There are five men, generally, that are sent in. Each of them is assigned to one body part of the prisoner: the head, the left arm, the right arm, the left leg, the right leg. They go in, and they hogtie the prisoner, sometimes leaving them hogtied for hours on end. They douse them with chemical agents. They have put their heads in toilets and flushed the toilets repeatedly. They have urinated on the heads of prisoners. They’ve squeezed their testicles in the course of restraining them. They’ve taken the feces from one prisoner and smeared it in the face of another prisoner."

Left-Wing Wacko commentary:
If you only paid attention to reports in the corporate mainstream media, then you would likely think that the whole torture controversy is only about the water-boarding of a few high-level Al-Qaeda detainees that ended years ago. But of course it goes much deeper than that. There have been numerous incidents of torture, some resulting in death, in POW camps in Afghanistan, Iraq, and probably other places. Lets not forget about the extraordinary renditions to secret prisons run by repressive regimes and a whole host of other torture and extra-legal repression techniques that periodically come to light and then disappear down the memory hole. Kudos to Jeremy Scahill for dragging this scary shit into the light!

Deja Vu, U.S. Weapons Fall into the Hands of Insurgents Fighting U.S. Forces

From the May 20th edition of the New York Times:
Arms Sent by U.S. May Be Falling Into Taliban Hands

KABUL — Insurgents in Afghanistan, fighting from some of the poorest and most remote regions on earth, have managed for years to maintain an intensive guerrilla war against materially superior American and Afghan forces.

But military officials, arms analysts and dealers say it points to a worrisome possibility: With only spotty American and Afghan controls on the vast inventory of weapons and ammunition sent into Afghanistan during an eight-year conflict, poor discipline and outright corruption among Afghan forces may have helped insurgents stay supplied.

Left-Wing Wacko Commentary:

If any of this sounds familiar, there have been previous stories about this sort of thing occurring in the Iraq war as well. I am skeptical that the blame can be placed solely on Afghan or Iraqi "corruption". But it is noteworthy that U.S. imperialist forces are aligned with probably significant numbers of people who really don't believe in the cause that they are allegedly being supported in.

You know how right-wing ideologues always have complaints about why various U.S. war efforts go poorly? You know, things like "Our troops have to fight the enemy with one arm tied behind their backs" and which it is usually implied that it is liberal Democrats, or "political correctness" that has done the arm tyeing? Then there is the blaming of the allegedly "liberal" mainstream media or the American anti-war movement that in some way or the other has undermined the war effort. This rhetoric has been commonplace both during the Vietnam era and today during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Remember this story when you hear this bullshit in the future. A good rebuttal will be to remind the right-wing ideologue that the U.S. military was arming its own enemies! Ahh, the follies of empire!

Chomsky and Herman On Ideology

This is a favorite quote of mine:


The beauty of the democratic systems of thought control, as contrasted with their clumsy totalitarian counterparts, is that they operate by subtly establishing on a voluntary basis--aided by the force of nationalism and media control by substantial interests--presuppositions that set the limits of debate, rather than by imposing beliefs with a bludgeon...... Those who do not accept the fundamental principles of state propaganda are simply excluded from the debate (or if noticed, dismissed as "emotional," "irresponsible," etc.)."

Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman

I suppose this quote by Chomsky and Herman also plays into the theme of this blog. Those who step outside of the limits of debate might also be termed "Left-Wing Wackos".

"Every Six Seconds a Child Dies of Hunger"; Yet Anti-Abortionists Hardly Seem to Notice

From Granma (Cuban Newspaper)

Every six seconds a child dies from hunger

"UNITED NATIONS. –Every six seconds, somewhere in the world a child dies of malnutrition, according to Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food. In a UN General Assembly session, the official also stated that there are 1 billion people going hungry in the world, the majority of them women and children, and that the dimensions of the global food crisis are far from having diminished this year."

"The expert indicated that the reasons for global hunger are marginalization, poverty, lack of land and decent employment, along with an unjust international trade system that has sparked a decrease in investment in agricultural projects over the last 30 years."

Meanwhile, here in the United States recently the anti-abortion idiots have amped up their noise level through the MM, mainly in response to the alleged controversy of pro-choice Obama speaking at Notre Dame's commencment. (YAWN)

But anyway, after listening to the anti-abortionists carry on for a little bit about "murdering babies" I have to wonder why the hell they don't pay more attention to the atrocity of millions of children suffering and dying of poverty?

Although I completely disagree with how anti-abortionists perceive the issue of abortion, I actually think that at least SOME of them are sincere in their moral beliefs that abortion actually is "murdering babies."

But I do have to wonder why is so little attention paid to the fact of so many children die of poverty, and why there are not calls for radical action to rectify these horrible conditions?

Employers Depress Wages, Not Immigrant Workers!

I would like to give a hat-tip to the blog Amerikanbeat for getting me started on this rant. So also check out what he has to say.

Nothing annoys me more from the anti-"illegal"-immigrant worker rhetoric than the complaint that "illegal immigrants depress our wages". To paraphrase a caller I recently heard on a talk radio show, her voice dripping with contempt: "These illegal alien Mexicans come in here and will work for anything."

This is patentely absurd. Of course, being that human labor is a commodity to be bought and sold on the market under capitalism, the greater numbers of workers, and the more desperate they are for a wage, the stronger the downward pressure on wages. But the undocumented worker does not get up early in the morning and say to him or herself "I am just an illegal alien, therefore I will accept $5.00 per hour even though I probably could get $8.00 per hour."

Of course immigrant workers are perfectly willing to work for as high a wage as he/she can secure. I saw it for myself recently in a scene in the documentary Farmingville POV, where yes, immigrant workers turn down an offer for $7.00 and demand at least $10.00. (This is actually a pretty decent documentary, also available on Netflix).

It is of course the capitalist employers who depress wages whenever they are able to, given the conditions of the labor market, to maximize their profits. It is the illegal status of the immigrant worker that creates an even more unequal balance of power between employer and worker, undermining the latter's bargaining power. But lets be clear, it is the employer, not the worker who tries to pay as low a wage as possible given the circumstances. And it is the conditions of U.S. capitalism with its dehumanizing divisions of workers into legal vs. illegal that gives the bosses more power to depress wages.

So why on earth would you blame the relatively less powerful so-called "illegal immigrant" for depressing wages? It is simply absurd to blame them for not having all the social and political resources that comes with legal status to demand a higher wage. This kind of thinking is a testament to how dehumanizing patriotic- nationalist and bourgeois ideology is in destroying basic feelings of empathy and solidarity between people based on legal status, race and ethnicity. Makes me angry and sick!

Lenin must be finally buried! - Gorbachev

Lenin must be finally buried! - Gorbachev

So be it! In my humble opinion the socialism of the future doesn't need any Lenin. Regardless of Lenin's contributions to Marxist theory and history, I always thought it was an embrace of the Great Man Theory of History to erect these big heroic statues, when Marxian socialism is supposed to be about the working class taking the initiative for its own liberation.

Oh yeah, and another thing, I just realized this article was dated to 2008. So I guess its old news, as is Lenin.

La Lucha Sigue! Si Se Puede! Tucson's May Day March for Worker and Immigrant Rights!

Today's May Day rally and march on the south side of Tucson was inspiring.

The opening rally was emceed by Isabel Garcia of Coalición de Derechos Humanos who was featured earlier this week on Democracy Now! and who did an excellent job of introducing speakers and speaking herself, seamlessly switching between English and Spanish. In her opening comments Isabel Garcia spoke about the history of May Day as a holiday of workers' struggles internationally, with its origins here in the U.S., and which has been intentionally purged from America's historical memory by capitalists and their state agents. She rightly noted that we have immigrant workers to thank for bring us back our May Day holiday.

Rally speeches, signs, and demands included union organization efforts at Food City, a just pro-immigrant pro-worker immigration reform, stopping the fascistic and repressive tactics of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio (or as they say Arpayaso/clown), passing the Employee Free Choice Act, demanding and end to state budget cuts in education, and other issues and demands.

The crowd was dominated by young enthusiastic Mexicano, Chicano, and other Latino youth who kept the march chants very lively. I think there is good reason to put allot of hope in the future of these young activists who are part of both a civil-rights and labor movement.

A high school group, named Movimiento and M.E.CH.A. passed around a Zine Ollin with short commentary and poetry. As they explained,

"Who We Are: We are young people from Tucson, organizing to create a positive environment free from injustices and oppression. We work to strengthen the power that our community has so that together we can declare ENOUGH of the attacks on our families."

All in all it was a pretty good turnout, and it raised my spirits in reminding me that there are always people fighting back for justice. La Lucha Sigue!

Links: Tucson May 1st Coalition and Coalicion Derechos Humanos