Rouge Forum Update—Happy Bastille Day! (July 14, 2006)

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Dear Friends,

The Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil web page is updated.

Of immediate interest are selected articles addressing the wars now involving Israel, Lebanon, and Palestine. Below we sought to select articles that are significant, yet not so widely spread that many people have already received them. There is a full complement of works on the page linked above.

Stratfor Red Alert on Hezbollah

Financial Times on the New Crisis in the Making

Sandy Tolan, author of Lemon Tree, on The Palestinian Crisis

Stephen Cohen on the New US Cold War on Russia

At the same time, it is important to remember the massive outpouring on May Day 2006, what was really a general strike in some areas and industries, and the underlying struggles, as well as community building, that made the huge demonstrations possible.

Here is one indicator of this ongoing piece of hope.

All over the US, border agents, ICE cops, and Homeland Security personnel are steadily attacking immigrant workers with raids on camps, work places, even homes and apartments. Here is a link on the recent LA police riot, attacking anti-racist demonstrators protesting the Minutemen.

At the same time, steady symphonies of deception coming from both parties of wealth seek to lure immigrants into the nationalism inherent in “get out the vote” projects, confusing elites’ “get out” enforcement projects with “get in with us,” shell games.

We are reworking our page on Immigration/Worker Rights, linked here.

On this page are several reports from colleagues in Oaxaca.

In addition, Glibert Gonzalez’s new book, Guest Workers or Colonized Labor?, Mexican Labor Migration in the U.S., offers important historical background. For those who come into this list from a literary view, see B. Traven‘s Jungle Novels.

Most of us, of course, face the question: What should school workers do? That’s taken up in this criticism of Jonathan Kozol’s recent “Education Manifesto.” It’s the most widely read piece on the Rouge Forum site so far this year.

Surely, the unions are dead-ends. At its July Representative Assembly, where NEA agreed to support, critically, the No Child Left Behind Act, delegates voted by a factor of at least three to one, NOT TO DISCUSS the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world; this from an educators’ union charged with feeding children to the war machine. An agreement to silence discussion is beneath contempt.

Here is a link to a Rouge Forum Broadside on why NEA supports the NCLB

Justice demands organization. New kinds of organization.