At the Risk of Seeming Ridiculous

You undoubtedly know Julian Assange -- the overseer of WikiLeaks and one of the most important information providers of our time. Assange appears in the news May 2, 2011 making a statement that might appear strange to some, sobering to others and quite familiar to those (like us at MF/PL) who have been saying it all along.

The often blunt Assange, started in on Facebook, calling it "the most appalling spying machine ever invented" in an interview with Russia Today.

Let's do a WikiLeaks support campaign: one which WikiLeaks itself may not support but which is good for us all.

My Co-Director at MF/PL Jamie McClelland offers this powerful suggestion: if you have your own domain, build a subdomain pointer for Wikileaks.

Jamie says: "For example: wikileaks.mayfirst.org. Just create an A record that points to the IP address 88.80.13.160." Right? wikileaks.yourdomain and do the pointer. It's simple and powerful.

Then you advertise it. :-)

A bit of backgrounding and ranting.

No, I don't think so. But it's significant as hell.

That this idiot Phil Griffin (the resident right-wing collaborator at NBC) would actually suspend the most popular MSNBC on-air host because he made three public campaign contributions. Well, as the story I will link to below points out, this sort of thing happens all the time and is perfectly acceptable among news people. I was a daily newspaper reporter; I know.

We are, predictably, being battered by the mainstream media's right-wing "analysis" of the mid-term elections. Most people reading this would agree, I speculate, that what we're seeing is a combination of many people realizing that we can't pin their hopes for survival on the guy elected to protect the capitalist system and the electoral system's total separation from the reality of the country.

Our politicians are saying this guy went "too far to the right" and that there is great concern about "taxes"? And this so-called news media is actually mouthing that garbage.

MF/PL member Richard Greeman is a veteran activist, writer, eminent scholar on the works of the great revolutionary Victor Serge and, of instant importance, a resident of France.

We don't frequently get the personal feeling of what it's like to live through a period of working class resistance that has been the French tradition for more than a century. In Richard's words, we do and so I pass those along:

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As Jaime Omar Yassin writes in his latest blog, this Ecuador coup attempt comes as the government is restructuring its oil contracts and renegotiating connected fees. So we can believe that a branch of the military tried to kill the President of the country because they were pissed at how their salaries and benefits were calculated or we can believe that these vitally important economic negotiations were the trigger or, as Jaime seems to imply, both things and probably many more.

Make no mistake: the reaction we are seeing to this attempted coup and the outrageous kidnapping of Ecuador's (twice-elected) President would not be possible were it not for the Internet. We would not have known much about it very soon. We would not be able to actually see it. And Venezuela's Chavez wouldn't have been able to send his mobilizing Twitter message. And I'm watching Telesur's coverage which is excellent.

http://www.telesurtv.net/noticias/canal/senalenvivo.php

See it as it happens!!!

There's one thing that is always true of your life in capitalist society. While you may have developed a personal behavior and our society has developed a culture around it, it's always there like one of those joint pains you learn to live with.

Except this pain is knawing and degenerative and punishing. Each day you live in capitalism, you live in fear.

During these past few days, two of the most important people in the struggle, and in my own life, died.

Lucius Walker, leader of Pastors for Peace and one of the truly great activists who worked on so many issues, including solidarity with the Cuban revolution, died last week. Two days ago, Juan Mari Bras, among Puerto Rico's most respected and accomplished Independentistas passed away.

Bill Weinberg is a very capable progressive journalist who was once a member of May First/People Link. He no longer is and that, just in case you're wondering, was *not* his choice. Anyway...family history belongs in the photo album so we won't say more on that.