Dear Friends,
Rouge Forum Conference, Detroit, First Weekend in March! Remember.
The Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil web page is up to date, with key articles from Robert Fisk, Sy Hersh, and others.
Take note of the color anti-war posters available at cost. And, this week marks the beginning of the many actions to Declare Peace. Check here for your city here.
And, of special interest is this video on military recruiting.
And this classic, repeated by request, of George Carlin on how America works.
OAXACA COMMUNE ALERT: The governor of Oaxaca, whose resignation has been demanded by the massive social uprising initiated by school workers there, has ordered schools to open on Monday. He plans to recruit retired teachers and scabs. Thousands of teachers from Oaxaca are now marching on Mexico City, while others hold their radio station, defending their means of communication. Clear splits have appeared within this struggle, between union leaders who merely want to replace the governor on one side, and radicals and others who seek to fundamentally change an exploitative social order on the other. The federal government has warned they will unleash troops on the strikers.
Oaxaca Communards have carried their struggle, similar in many ways to the Detroit Teachers’ Strike, much farther than nearly anyone expected, demonstrating the Rouge Forum thesis that school workers can initiate social change, if not fully carry it through. The Oaxacans have set up their own communications systems, run the traffic, carried on their own internal education campaigns, fought the police and federal goon squads, deepened already close ties with parents and kids because this fight is truly an all-for-one, one-for-all battle, and, whether this long struggle wins or not, the lessons to be learned from this heroism will be invaluable to educators everywhere. NarcoNews has the best site on this fight, so far. Like the Detroit Strike, it is largely blacked out in mainstream media, even though it has involved hundreds of thousands of people. This is a warning to the militants of Oaxaca, about arriving national trade union sellouts from the US.
DETROIT STRIKE UPDATE: While the DFT sellout of the courageous strike of rank and file educators may be ratified, there is a growing chance that the deal may not be the deal, or that the rank and file will need, because of circumstances, to vote the tentative agreement down. Days after the TA was announced, the Detroit Public School bosses revealed there is a 25,000 student shortfall in attendance, about 16,000 more than projected. DPS claimed to project 123,000 students this year. Predictably, they blamed the shortfall on the teachers. At about $7500 per kid in lost state monies, the district is in real jeopardy.
The 25000 figure may be exaggerated, or it may exist because DPS deliberately lied about attendance figures in the past, but even if the loss is, say, just 16,000, it would be a crippling blow to DPS, and it could put the TA in jeopardy as it would mean a massive layoff.
Here is a piece wrapping up the Detroit Strike as of Friday past.
Follow
