"Fighting for Peace is like Fucking for Virginity" - a 70s Rebel

Let us consider the notion that weapon production fuels much of the american capitalist economy both in the national and global market.

Item: The U.S. is estimated to have received roughly $64 Billion within the global market solely from weapon production and distribution in 2008 fiscal.

Item: In black and white terms, conservative republicans are generally in favor of gun rights and war. In black and white terms, liberal democrats are generally in favor of gun control and peace.

Item: The U.S. feels the need to control the global production, distribution, and free global market flow of weapons of mass destruction (a term the U.S. coined) - aka the U.S. can have them, sell them, use them, but other countries may not.

Item: The U.S. produced and provided al qaeda the weapons they used against the U.S.

Item: Weapons - no matter their level of distruction - kill. People - with high levels of distruction - kill.

Weapons+People=Kill

U.S.+Weapons+Capitalism=U.S. Control of Global Market

U.S. Control of Global Market=American Exploitation

American Exploitation=Global Oppression

Global Oppression=Global Revolt

Revolt=Revolution

Revolution doesn't have to mean war. It usually doesn't. But for people who feel they have no other choice - for the underdog who is sick of being the underdog, who doesn't have the resources to fight peacefully, who doesn't have the energy or the time to wait for equality - revolution can mean war, it can mean taking up arms.

Let us consider a world where the american capitalist economy is not run by war or weapons, where the U.S. does not control the global market (with or without arms), where america does not translate to global oppression, where there is no need to take up arms, to start a world war, to terrorize, to trade weapons.

• There would be no need to create the weapons in the first place.

Peace.

Starting a Revolution, One Bureaucracy At a Time!

Preventative Gynecological Health Care Added to University of Iowa Student Health Insurance Plan Thanks to Students:
http://news-releases.uiowa.edu/2009/september/090309studenthealth.html

http://www.uiowa.edu/be-remarkable/index.html

Laboring Ladies

Happy Labor Day to the men, women, people of color, working-class, socialist, feminists, anarchists, and other political aggitators that created and fueled the Labor Movement(s) and fought for employment equality. We still have work to do. In celebration of the work that has been done and in faith for the work that will continue, I present a small tribute in recognition to the under-credited women who served as labor activists in our nation:

Mother Jones: "My friends, it is solidarity of labor we want. We do not want to find fault with each other, but to solidify our forces and say to each other: 'We must be together; our masters are joined together and we must do the same thing.'"

Susan B Anthony: "Join the union, girls, and together say Equal Pay for Equal Work."



Florence Kelley: "It is fatal for any body of workers to have forever hanging from the fringes of its skirts other bodies on a level just below its own; for that means continual pressure downward, additional difficulty to be overcome in the struggle to maintain reasonable rates of wages."

Florence Kelley: "The workingmen have perceived that women are in the field of industry to stay; and they see, too, that there can not be two standards of work and wages for any trade without constant menace to the higher standard."


Florence Kelley: "This position is untenable, and there can be no pause in the agitation for full political power and responsibility until these are granted to all the women of the nation."


Janeane Garofalo: "To a right-winger, unions are awful. Why do right-wingers hate unions? Because collective bargaining is the power that a worker has against the corporation. Right-wingers hate that."


Helen Marot: "The labor unions are group efforts in the direction of democracy. Like the political efforts in the same direction, they become many times stultified and lead up blind alleys. But the effort creates power. While the economic gains are themselves important and are measures of strength, the significance of the labor union is its assertion of the manhood of labor."


Linda Chavez-Thompson: "The face of labor is changing, and you can tell this by the mere fact that I am a woman ... and a woman of color."

Linda Chavez-Thompson: "Right at the start, the populists believed that the ordinary people were the producers, the people who lived by the sweat of their brow, and the elite were the rich, the bankers and the speculators, who didn’t do productive work but just lived off of everyone else’s labor."


Linda Chavez-Thompson: "Our goal of improving the working and living standards of all workers overlaps with the goals of many other groups in society which do not define themselves by their workplace."

Linda Chavez-Thompson: "We don't want unfair trade agreements. We want a social clause to be included in international trade treaties so that workers' human rights and union rights are protected in those countries we trade with."


Linda Chavez-Thompson: "Together, we can create a community where [all are] treated with dignity, regardless of their sex or skin color or orientation, regardless of whether their family came here on a slave ship or the Mayflower four hundred years ago or through Ellis Island at the turn of the century or from Central America last year."

Dolores Huerta: "Among poor people, there's not any question about women being strong -- even stronger than men -- they work in the fields right along with the men. When your survival is at stake, you don't have these questions about yourself like middle-class women do.”


Lucy Parsons: "Let us sink such differences as nationality, religion, politics, and set our eyes eternally and forever toward the rising star of the industrial republic of labor."

Lucy Parsons: "Never be deceived that the rich will permit you to vote away their wealth."


Lucy Parsons: "Strike not for a few cents more an hour, because the price of living will be raised faster still, but strike for all you earn, be content with nothing less."


Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: "The IWW has been accused of pushing women to the front. This is not true. Rather, the women have not been kept in back, and so they have naturally moved to the front."

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: "What is a labor victory? I maintain that it is a twofold thing. Workers must gain economic advantage, but they must also gain revolutionary spirit, in order to achieve a complete victory. For workers to gain a few cents more a day, a few minutes less a day, and go back to work with the same psychology, the same attitude toward society is to achieve a temporary gain and not a lasting victory."

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: "We believe that the class struggle existing in society is expressed in the economic power of the master on the one side and the growing economic power of the workers on the other side meeting in open battle now and again, but meeting in continual daily conflict over which shall have the larger share of labor's product and the ultimate ownership of the means of life."

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: "What precipitated the big strike in 1912, which is one of the great historical struggles in our country, was a political act on the part of the State. The hours of labor were reduced to 54 hours. You can imagine what they were before. That was only for women and children, but it affected something like 75% of the workers in the mills. On the first pay after the law went into effect, the employers cut the wages proportionately to the cut in hours and the wages were on the average of $7 and $8 a week at that time, and the highest pay to loom fixers and more highly skilled were getting possibly, $15 and $20. It was a margin between mere subsistence and starvation and so there was a spontaneous strike."


Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: "There has been labor protection by law but there has also been labor repression by law."



Women's Labor History Links: http://www.afscme.org/publications/10404.cfm


Women's Labor History Timeline (1765-Present): http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/view/8211/1/361/