UN condemns Cuba blockade…again

For the 16th consecutive year, the UN General Assembly has rejected the U.S. blockade of Cuba.

This is not a few “rogue states” who reject the blockade. The overwhelming majority of the UN supported the resolution to condemn the United States for its meddling. The vote total stood at 184 in favor, 4 against, and one abstaining. So, in other words, only the U.S. and its puppets would vote for to legitimize the stranglehold Washington has placed on the workers of Cuba.

Make no mistake about it. This is not just an embargo, it is a blockade. The United States doesn’t have war ships patrolling the Caribbean Sea, but instead uses economic blackmail to control trade with the socialist nation. No ship which docks in a Cuban port is allowed to drop anchor in the United States within 90 days, so the rest of the world has to make the decision: do we trade with the wealthy U.S., or with tiny Cuba? Thankfully for Cuba, its allies in China and Venezuela won’t bow down to this sort of bullying.

Obviously they’re not the only ones who reject Washington’s blockade which, much to the chagrin of the the imperialists to the north, only steels the resolve of the Cuban people.

Update on Exxon

So apparently the Supreme Court has agreed to hear Exxon’s appeal of the $2.5 billion in damages it is supposed to pay to the victims of its 1989 spill.

As far as I can tell, the question before the court is: do we let them off the hook? It looks like reinstating the original $5 billion in damages is out of the question, despite the fact that they’ve dragged their feet long enough that inflation has done plenty to whittle away the actual worth of the fee they were supposed to have paid 12 years ago.

Their excuses are 1) that they already paid plenty of money to clean up the spill, and 2) the damages awarded to the plaintiffs are far above any ever awarded.

What the fail to mention is that this case is not about cleaning up the spill; it’s about the livelihoods they ruined by trashing the fishery. And although $2.5 billion seems like a huge sum, there are 33,000 plaintiffs. Divided evenly that’s less than $76,000…a tidy sum but hardly “gold digging”. I imagine that the average amount that these folks have lost in income since then far exceeds that figure.

The fact that the Supreme Court is even hearing this case is ridiculous. They’ve already had their damages cut in half. But knowing the bourgeois lackeys that stack the court these days, I wouldn’t be surprised if they let Exxon walk away from this without paying a cent.

Hopefully they will prove me wrong.

Catholic Church embraces Fascist past

During the Spanish Civil War between the elected Republican government of Communists, and the Nazi-backed Fascists of General Franco, the Vatican took a clear stand on one side and against another. The Church was not on the side of the workers, but instead on the side of the Fascists.

Obviously not ashamed of their Fascist past, the Vatican today beatified almost 500 “victims” of the democratic Republican state, who lost their lives during the civil war which saw the rise of Franco’s brutal regime.

Why would the Church do such a thing?

Because the current government, dominated by socialists who have inherited the legacy of the Republicans, has dared to whittle away the Church’s domination of the Spanish state: pushing for laws legalizing divorce and gay marriage, and, most importantly, eliminating the provision by which a portion of each citizen’s taxes were given directly to the Vatican (taxpayers now have the option to subsidize the Church). So what should the Church do? Try to turn the Catholics of Spain against the government by portraying them as monsters.

Of course, no mention is made of the monsters that the Vatican supported all those years ago. Let’s not talk about that, it’s ancient history after all.

Alaska workers vs. Exxon: the final round?

While I’ve made Montana my home as of late, and plan to for the foreseeable future, some of you might know that I am not a native Montanan. In fact, I was born and raised in the great State of Alaska, the land of the frigid north and all that jazz. Before moving to the Big Sky country, I spent a few years living in the Anchorage area, and from time to time I check out the Anchorage Daily News online (mostly to see if they have any news about UAA hockey…go Seawolves!). Well, today something caught my eye and I thought I’d give you all the scoop, because I have to wonder how many people outside of AK are aware of this story.

The U.S. Supreme Court has to decide Monday whether or not it will hear the final appeal of Exxon-Mobil, who have been trying for over a decade to weasel out of a court order which originally would have required them to pay 5 billion dollars in damages to Alaskan workers as a result of the 1989 Prince William Sound spill. If the court decides not to hear the case Exxon will be required to pay out billions in damages to seafood workers and subsistence fishermen.

The seafood industry is a major part of Alaska’s economy, because Alaska seafood is vital to the rest of the country and the world. In 2007 the export value of Alaska seafood products approached $2.5 billion, far more than the energy exports that the state is known for. Aside from that, many people in Alaska still live a subsistence lifestyle, living off the land (or in this case the sea) and fish to put food on the table.

It’s no surprise, then, that a huge number of Alaskan workers lost their livelihoods when a drunken Exxon skipper drove an oil tanker into a reef and dumped 11 million gallons of crude oil into the Prince William Sound fishery. Not only did commercial fishermen lose out, but without their catch coming into the canneries and processing plants many others lost their jobs as well.

A federal jury awarded those workers $5 billion in damages way back in 1995, but Exxon has been dragging its heels ever since, slugging its way through the appeals process with no great urgency. Its reward for procrastinating? Having its liability cut in half to $2.5 billion by an appeals court in San Francisco. All the while, the workers who got screwed by the company are still waiting for the payment that was promised to them 12 years ago.

So Monday is the end of the road. The court can refuse to hear it, and Exxon will have be stuck with the current settlement. Or they could accept the appeal, and charge them more (hah, right) or just throw the whole thing out and let them off scott-free (more likely, in my estimation). But only time will tell!

Ask not what your Union can do for you…

For the past few decades organized labor has been on the retreat: union workers have become the minority in the workforce, contracts have gotten progressively worse and worse in most industries, and as a result many workers have become demoralized. This has led some to see unions in a negative light. They ask, “What good is the union? It’s just another tax on my paycheck.” This reflects a fundamentally flawed view of what a union is and how it works.

Unionism is an expression of class struggle, and they don’t call it a “class struggle” for nothing. The gains that workers win in a Union contract are a result of hard-fought battles between the working class on one side and the bourgeois that run the company on the other. Unions don’t just decide to help workers or not to help workers; they go to battle for workers. Sometimes they win the battle and sometimes they lose, but the outcome of each fight depends on the strength and will of the members themselves and their allies.

As is true with any fight, it helps to have as many people as possible on your side. That’s why “the union” — which, in many workers’ opinion, is some mythical entity separate from themselves — can’t win the fight without the workers behind it. In fact, the union is nothing more than the workers themselves. That’s the point of a union — that instead of every worker competing against each other, fighting for the crumbs the bosses spit out, they band together to fight to improve the job for everyone.

Is it any wonder then that the people who complain, “the union doesn’t do anything for me!” are the ones who never attend a union meeting? “The union” can’t do anything for you. “The Union” is a tool that you have to use to win something for yourself, and for your fellow workers. If everyone just sits back and expects others to do their fighting for them no one will ever get anywhere. That means that those of us who work in union shops need to go to meetings, talk with our co-workers, and support our unions when the time comes to fight. And those of us who don’t work at union shops should try to organize our workplaces, and show solidarity with workers who are already organized.

So next time you hear a co-worker ask, “What has the union ever done for us?”, maybe you should ask them: “what have YOU ever done for the Union?”

Montana Grocery Workers Get New Contract

For a brief period of my life I was employed at a local Safeway grocery store, and became a card-carrying member of UFCW Local 4. Although I have since left the grocery biz and, as such, have fallen out of active participation in the Union, I like to keep tabs on how those folks are doing.

During my stint as a grocer, we were working under an expired contract and it seemed like a strike was just around the corner. The company was trying to sneak scabs in the back door at some stores, and trying to convince workers to decertify the union at others so they could push us into a strike we couldn’t win. But from the looks of things on the Grocery Workers United website a new contract agreement has been reached:

October 16, 2007

Montana Workers Secure Fair Agreement

This Sunday, October 14th, Montana UFCW members’ hard work and solidarity paid off after over a year of negotiations. The negotiating committee for Montana Locals 4 and 8 and local union leadership agreed to fully recommend a new three year contract for members working at Albertsons and Safeway throughout the state of Montana.

The contract offer is a long overdue victory for UFCW members in Montana and contains wage increases each year for journeymen, and significant increases in the progressions for all workers. There are also significant improvements in health care coverage, which will be fully paid by Albertsons and Safeway with no increase cost to the members. In addition, during the life of the new agreement pension contributions will be increased to secure current and future retiree benefits.

One of the most significant accomplishments of the new agreement was to reach a common expiration date for 23 contracts that historically had been staggered over 20 months. This new agreement will provide workers with greater consolidated power at the bargaining table.

The offer will be presented to members for their approval later this month.

Overall this looks like good news. I must confess that I have yet to talk to any actual workers about the new contract since I no longer work at the store and have spent most of my time recently studying, travelling, etc. so there’s a chance that the negotiating committee is attempting to inflate their accomplishments here. But the true test will come when the contract is put before a vote at the locals, so we’ll have to keep an eye out and see how that goes.

Belief in Supernatural “high”?

According to a recent AP poll, approximately 34% of people in the United States claim to believe in ghosts. The accompanying article states that this figure is “high”.

Is it really that high? I personally would have expected more, considering that half the people in the U.S. don’t believe in evolution, or — as this poll points out — half of them believe in ESP.

I’m actually delightfully surprised that a healthy majority, 66%, have a functional enough head on their shoulders to realize that their lights flickering on and off is probably due to faulty wiring (my DSL used to flicker on and off at random, but the phone guy discovered it was due to the fact that I nearly chopped my phone line in half with my weed-eater. Thanks Qwest man!), and that their long-deceased cat Fluffykins isn’t really visiting them in the night. Since it seems that everyone is so eager to embrace the first explanation that is spoon-fed to them by television or church, rather than exploring more logical possibilities, I would have thought the statistic would have been higher.

Unfortunately, the high ESP figure troubles me. I mean, come on. I don’t know how many of you have been successful at bending spoons with your mind but I haven’t had much luck. I guess maybe it’s because I’m not a “true believer” or I “only use 10% of my brain” or some other bullshit like that.

But anyway, way to go non-ghost people. I salute 66% of you for being brighter than I imagined.

Cuba lets Bush speak for himself

The Cuban media, which typically ignores the speeches of President Bush — and for good reason, because he rarely has anything original or thought-provoking to say — has created a stir by rebroadcasting the second half of his recent presentation on Cuba without editing.

A recent McClatchy article (http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/20864.html) has run quotes from various Miami exiles and other opinionated people, most of whom can’t fathom why the Cubans would do such a thing. Why didn’t they try to twist Bush’s words into propaganda? What are those cunning Castroites up to this time? Could this possibly be the beginning of the end for the “Cuban Iron Curtain”?

I had to laugh at all the speculation, but further down the page someone hits the nail on the head: the best propaganda against Bush is to simply let him hang himself with his own words.

“The speech is just not very real, and they’re happy to put it in the paper and show people what he’s saying, because it strengthens their position,” the paper quotes Philip Peters of the Lexington Institute as saying.

One reason for the collapse of the Eastern Bloc countries was that every attempt at propaganda was so over-the-top, so unrealistic that the media had the whole thing blow up in their faces. They did themselves a disservice by sensationalizing certain things to the point of discrediting everything else they had to say. It took a counter-revolution for the average Joes in Eastern Europe to realize that it wasn’t all B.S., and that maybe the whole capitalism thing isn’t that great afterall.

Cuba is wise to step back from this policy. Let the imperialists speak for themselves, and let the Cuban people see just how out of touch with reality the Bushistas really are.

Now the people can see for themselves that it’s not just propaganda, Bush really IS that dim-witted.