HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY

The Wikipedia tells the real non-Hallmark card history: “The United States celebrates Mother’s Day on the second Sunday in May. In the United States, Mother’s Day was loosely inspired by the British day and was imported by social activist Julia Ward Howe after the American Civil War. However, it was intended as a call to unite women against war. In 1870, she wrote the Mother’s Day Proclamation as a call for peace and disarmament. Howe failed in her attempt to get formal recognition of a Mother’s Day for Peace. Her idea was influenced by Ann Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker who, starting in 1858, had attempted to improve sanitation through what she called Mothers’ Work Days. She organized women throughout the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions for both sides, and in 1868 she began work to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors.”

NEW VIDEO

Special thanks to Michael Blomquist of Northern California who has been fighting for housing justice,political change and financial reform. When I told him, I wanted to do more speaking about the issues raised in my film In Debt We Trust and my new soon-come book PLUNDER, he took the initiative and made this video to help get the word out. It is now up on YouTube. Thank you Michael for caring and helping.

Readers with the ability to invite and fund speakers, please get in touch:

POSTED SUNDAY FOR MONDAY

1968 AT 40: LOOKING BACK, LOOKING AHEAD
HELLO RANGOON: BURMA’S RULES GOVERNING FOREIGN AID
MEET INSURGENT CANDIDATE BYRON DELEAR

Our news agenda is always filled with holidays, and key dates to remember. Today it’s Israel at 60. In New Delhi, they are marking India at 60. Anniversaries, particularly when they are rounded numbers are occasions for celebration, “events” to mark in an event-driven culture.

I have to admit that I am over 60, and still have a micro-memory of people in my Bronx neighborhood dancing the hora when the “Jewish State” was proclaimed.

But, in this May of 2008, I am thinking of another anniversary perhaps more central to my generation and experience. Lets call it 1968 at 40. All of us who lived it remembered what a turning point that year was—riots, assassinations, 30,000 Americans gone in Vietnam (We didn’t count the Vietnamese dead then just as we don’t count the Iraqis now), Hair was on Broadway, and I was living in England through November so I missed the Chicago protests. (I was then protesting the Soviet invasion of Prague.) In this Olympic year, with all the concern about politicizing the games, we might remember what happened then:

I LOVE PARIS IN THE SPRINGTIME

I spent part of this month of May in l968 in Paris as a particapatory journalist, covering and also taking part in the non-stop events or May-June, as they are known now. I was running in the streets, caught up in battles with the CRS riot police, hanging out at the Sorbonne, covering the uprising, (and that was a real one) for underground papers back in a country we then spelled AMERIKKA.

Earlier in the year, I was in Berlin, marching behind Rudy Dutschke and the German SDS opposing the power of the po-war nationalistic and right wing Springer newspaper chain. That is before he was shot down in the streets.

I also knew Danny Cohen Bendit and the leaders of the Paris student movement that sparked the rebellions across France. Abbie Hoffman invited me to join the Yippie protest at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. I was an activist in those years with the civil right s movement, SDS and the Yippies.

Years later Abbie would say something like this, before his untimely suicide due to manic depression, “We were young. We were naive. We were reckless. But we were right.” And so was he in the sense that our generation of activists spoke truth to power, challenged segregation and apartheir, opposed the was in Vietnam, supported women’s liberation and a more diverse America. The values we championed have not been defeated, even the ones that championed, sex, drugs and rock and roll.

We lost JFK and MLK and then RFK. We opposed LBJ when he escalated the war. He fell. Nixon won, but later went down in flames. America is very different country now because of the cultural shifts introduced in the l960s. But the Sixties also sparked a backlash and the culture wars we are still living with. The media shifted from center to center rght and then right right. Yet, opposition to war and injustice has deepened. It ain’t over yet!

So, Abbie, yes we were right but we also we ended up underestimating the power of THE right. We made mistakes. And many of us paid for them. Did we ever.

So, yes I admit it. I was part of it, unashamedly and unapologetically deeply part of it. We tried but we didn’t prevai. I don’t find myself agreeing with much of what Christopher Hitchens says these days, but I was there when he was and was affected in much the same way:

Laugh all you like. You didn’t see the workers in that French plant in 1968, rearranging the big letters of the factory owner’s name (Berliet) so that the sign over the gate now read liberte. And perhaps you don’t recall the strikes in Poland and the accompanying protest from Warsaw intellectuals like Jacek Kuroń (still a bit of a Trotskyite in those days) that gave us the first premonitory shiver of Solidarnosc. I can remember them, all right, because they seemed dialectically congruent with the analysis of my own Marxist faction: that this was another 1848, or maybe 1905, or even conceivably a 1917. (The problem with the 1917 analogy was that most of us preferred Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky to Lenin.)

I’m quite serious about this: it might seem bizarre to you, but it was real enough to us. And almost every morning, my little transistor radio would wake me with seismic tidings: the black ghettos of America aflame; the mighty American army baffled in the Mekong Delta; the Portuguese empire shrinking under the pressure of guerrillas in Mozambique and Angola; the streets of Madrid and Barcelona filled again with anti-Franco protests; the students of Mexico City cut down outside the Olympic stadium. There were just not enough hours in the day.

Much of the protest, as Tariq Ali has noted, was triggered by the rage we felt against the Vietnam war:

A storm swept the world in 1968. It started in Vietnam, then blew across Asia, crossing the sea and the mountains to Europe and beyond. A brutal war waged by the US against a poor south-east Asian country was seen every night on television. The cumulative impact of watching the bombs drop, villages on fire and a country being doused with napalm and Agent Orange triggered a wave of global revolts not seen on such a scale before or since.

Those were great days, heady days. We believed the revolution was coming but, alas, it wasn’t and didn’t. We have to remember what happened afterwards as Geoffrey Wheatcroft reminded us in the Guardian.

What were the actual political consequences of those heady months? The copains believed they would bring down Charles de Gaulle, but they didn’t. When he did resign the next year, he was succeeded by Georges Pompidou, and the Elysée palace has been occupied by the right for 26 of the past 40 years, with the interregnum of François Mitterand and his unfulfilled promise of radical reform very much the rule-proving exception. Likewise, our kids jeered at Harold Wilson, who was duly replaced two years later by Edward Heath, and the Tories were in power for 22 of the next 27 years.

Across the Atlantic, 1968 saw assassination, riot and antiwar protest; the year ended with Richard Nixon’s election, and Republicans have been in the White House for 28 of the 40 years since. It’s true that the US eventually left Vietnam; that country now has an explosive capitalist economy - not quite what those who chanted “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, We will fight and we will win!” had in mind.

Just as 1968 foreshadowed the political and economic victory of the right in the form of Margaret Thatcher (not to mention Tony Blair), Ronald Reagan and the implosion of Communism, it also foreshadowed the cultural - or emotional or sexual - victory of the left. The only serious legacy of the Wilson government may have been the libertarian reforms of the laws on homosexuality, divorce and abortion; and the dramatic changes in society since, for good or bad, really did stem from those times.

WITHOUT NOSTALGIA

The French activist—”Danny The Red”—who I first met in 1966 before he became infamous says he has accepted reality and as a result went into mainstream politics:

“For my part, I accepted the principle of reality long ago, without nostalgia - and without minimizing the importance of what happened. For 68 was, indeed, a rebellion joining two eras. It cracked the yoke of conservatism and totalitarian thought, enabling the desire for personal and collective autonomy and freedom to express itself. From the cultural point of view, we won.

So, revisit 68? Yes, but only in order to understand it, grasp its scope, and retain what still makes sense today. Knowing, for example, that 23 years after the second world war, a multicoloured France demonstrated against my deportation by claiming “we are all German Jews” provides food for thought.”

That world has been replaced by a multilateral world, which includes Aids, unemployment, energy and climate crises, and so on. So let’s permit new generations to define their own battles and desires.”

PARALLELS FOR THE PRESENT?

I reprise these moments today as I prepare to return to Berlin on assignment for a few days, while nurturing the hope that somehow we can find a way not to let all the political energy that has been unleashed in the last months to dissipate, to divide, to create a war between Clinonistas and Obamaites, so that once again the Democrats will self-destruct, as they did back in l968, and give us a new reincarnation of what we have had for the last eight years. What a frightening thought but the venom of our partisans makes unity look elusive. IF everyone is right, nothing will be left.

AROUND THE WORLD

Burma is drowning, Lebanon is erupting again, Italy has returned to the right with an open fascist in charge in Rome, a left politician has been tossed out of the Mayor’s office in London, the war goes on, the economy goes down, there is a plot afoot to divide Bolivia with a Kosovo type solution, Zimbabwe is on the brink of war, and, of course, the war drums here are beating for attacks on Iran.

Can we revere our history and at the same time learn from our mistakes? Will Democrats unite? Will the party implode and divide again? Can we find a way forward? Is it desirable and possible to renew and reignite the spirit of 1968?

THE CHALLENGE TO MUGABE IN ZIMBABWE:

WP: JOHANNESBURG, May 10 — Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai announced Saturday that he will soon return to his country to participate in a presidential runoff election despite a surge in political violence against his supporters.

IRIN: GETTING AID INTO BURMA

NAIROBI, 10 May (IRIN) - Good news: a fast-track customs process is available for to relief deliveries arriving in Myanmar.

The catch? Only if the cargo is consigned to the Government’s Disaster Management Committee.

Aid agencies, donors or well-wishers planning anything else can review the full range of customs and other importation paperwork on a new interagency web resource dedicated to relief logistics for Myanmar.

The short version of how to fly aid to Yangon goes something like this: If planning air cargo not destined for the government, the sender has to get prior approval before landing from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and be ready to present an Import Declaration Form (CUSDEC-1), import license, invoice, bill of lading, packing list and, depending on the goods, “other certificates and permits”. The Ministry of Health should issue a health certificate after inspecting any food imports, for example. To avoid paying tax on the cargo, a Tax Exemption Certificate is needed. Oh, and that is before clearing customs.

Every country has customs procedures. And the logistics departments of relief agencies earn their living getting urgent cargo through the byzantine bureacracies and fearsome terrain.

Nonetheless, UN officials and diplomats have called on the Government of Myanmar to streamline customs and clearance procedures for the massive crisis response needed and to release cargo that has been held so far.

There’s been no major breakthough in that process, judging from the latest reports on the “logistics cluster” website:

Online, humanitarian workers, governments and the private sector can coordinate transport, fuel, supply chain and warehousing in a crisis. Users are checking in for daily updates on the latest issues, whether it be a concept of floating warehouses or the availability of free cargo space donated by airlines.

If the airport procedures sound daunting, road access from neighbouring Thailand has is own drawbacks. A report on the site says that the road from Thailand to Myanmar is so narrow that it operates one way in each direction on alternate days.

Logistics services and coordination form some US$49 million of the $187 million appeal launched by 10 UN agencies and nine non-governmental organisations on May 10. For more details, see:

ORGANIZATIONS TO DONATE TO (LA TIMES)

RED CROSS PLANE LANDS WITH SOME HELP

Geneva / Yangon (ICRC) – A cargo aircraft chartered by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) arrived early Sunday in Yangon. It was carrying 35 tonnes of equipment and materials urgently needed for medical care, drinking water and sanitation, and the safe disposal of bodies. The arrival of the supplies and their subsequent transfer to the ICRC and the Myanmar Red Cross Society was facilitated by the Myanmar authorities.

The medical supplies are sufficient to treat some 250 trauma patients and to provide three months of basic health care for 10,000 persons. The water and sanitation items, which include a mobile water-treatment plant, are intended to provide drinking water for 10,000 persons.

The Burmese Junta is having a referendum Sunday to engineer popular support for its existence. The day was chosen by the official astrologer.

GUARDIAN: The military rulers of Burma went ahead with a constitutional referendum on Saturday despite calls from the outside world to postpone it after the devastation of Cyclone Nargis.

The plebiscite was postponed by two weeks in the hardest-hit Irrawaddy Delta and the city of Rangoon, but voting went ahead in other parts of the isolated South-East Asian country of 53-million.

State-run TV news repeated Friday’s broadcasts urging people to vote, making no mention of the estimated 1,5-million victims of the cyclone without food and shelter or tens of thousands killed and missing in the vicious storm that struck a week ago.

“Those who value the national well-being should go and vote ‘yes’,” MRTV said in a scrolling headline on the screen.