Most of all, it's urgent that you oppose war on Iran, defend voter rights, plan for 2014 races now, oppose austerity, support the 'Moral Mondays' in North Carolina, the fight for the Green New Deal, a just immigration policy and the Congressional Progressive Caucus' 'Back to Work Budget'! We're doing more than ever, and have big plans. So pay your dues, make a donation and become a sustainer. Do it Now! Check the link at the bottom...

By James Anderson and Anna Durrett

July 23, 2014 - Several thousand people marched from Cobo Hall to Detroit's Hart Plaza on July 18, decrying the destruction of democracy in Detroit.

The rally, organized in part by the Moratorium Now! Coalition to Stop Foreclosures, Evictions and Utility Shutoffs, took place after a week of actions against the disconnection of water service to households unable to pay their bills.

People previously blockaded to keep Homrich, a private contractor employed by the city, from shutting off people's water on July 10. Another blockade took place the day of the rally, lasting six hours before police arrested a pastor, a veteran journalist in her 70s, welfare rights organizers and others.

The water disconnections constitute a human rights violation if the people affected are genuinely unable to pay, said Catarina de Albuquerque, the UN special rapporteur on safe drinking water and sanitation, in a press release.

Several days after the downtown demonstration, the city suspended the mass shutoffs for 15 days after more than 15,000 households had been disconnected. The Detroit Water Brigade, an advocacy-oriented volunteer-led alliance focused on emergency relief and mutual aid, wrote in an email to their listserv following the announcement "that thousands of families are still without reliable access to water or on the brink of losing it," and added that people are invited to meet at 1514 Washington Boulevard downtown at 11 am every day - except Friday - starting July 22, to help distribute gallons of water, coolers, rain collection barrels and information to affected Detroit families.

The Michigan Welfare Rights Organization (MWRO), a union of public assistance and low-income workers, denounced the Detroit Water and Sewage Department's handling of the situation up to the July 18 demonstration, and appealed to the UN for relief in response to what activists see as initial steps in the takeover of the city's water system by for-profit private interests. Citizens also filed a lawsuit against the city, prompting the halt to the service disconnections declared days after the downtown rally, insisting the shutoffs violate human rights.

Sylvia Orduño, a Detroit resident and activist who has been with the MWRO for 17 years, marched from Cobo Hall to Hart Plaza during the July 18 rally carrying one end of a banner reading, "Stop the War Against the Poor!"

Orduño said the situation is fast becoming a "public health crisis for everybody" and "Detroit is ground zero for a lot of the battles" over the public trust, in response to the DWSD actions and against subservience to Wall Street.

Between the "banks got bailed out, we got sold out" chants from hundreds of people marching down Larned Street and the banners chastising the $537 million given to the banks by the DWSD, which shuts off water for the poor, people's disgust at Wall Street's contribution to the crisis became palpable.

A report from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency overseeing nationally chartered banks found Detroit had a higher rate of foreclosures for subprime mortgages than any other city in the build-up to the housing bubble that burst and led to the global economic crash in 2008.

Some 100,000 homes had been foreclosed by 2012. The population of Detroit decreased from almost 2 million in 1950 when the city was regarded as a major industrial powerhouse to an estimated 688,701 in 2013. The population declined 3.5 percent from 2010 to 2013 in a continued exodus attributable to foreclosures, defunding public services as a result of financial straits and the related job losses and pension cuts for city workers....(Click title for more)

    About 27.4 million Americans work part time. The number of those part-timers who would prefer to work full time has nearly doubled since 2007, to 7.5 million. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, 47 percent of part-time hourly workers ages 26 to 32 receive a week or less of advance notice for their schedule.

    In a study of the data, two University of Chicago professors found that employers dictated the work schedules for about half of young adults, without their input. For part-time workers, schedules on average fluctuated from 17 to 28 hours a week.

    A worker at an apparel store at Woodbury Common, an outlet mall north of New York City, said that even though some part-time employees clamored for more hours, the store had hired more part-timers and cut many workers' hours to 10 a week from 20.

    As soon as a nurse in Illinois arrived for her scheduled 3-to-11 p.m. shift one Christmas Day, hospital officials told her to go home because the patient "census" was low. They also ordered her to remain on call for the next four hours - all unpaid.

    An employee at a specialty store in California said his 25-hour-a-week job with wildly fluctuating hours wasn't enough to live on. But when he asked the store to schedule him between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. so he could find a second job, the store cut him to 12 hours a week.

Armed conflict will only lead to mounting numbers of dead on both sides.

Xinhua News Agency

BEIJING, July 22 -- China and Cuba, two traditional friends sharing a lot in visions and beliefs, are seeking closer ties as Havana moves to update its economy under the shadow of a half-century-old U.S. embargo.

Chinese President Xi Jinping will hold talks with his Cuban counterpart Raul Castro during his ongoing visit to Cuba, the last stop of his four-nation Latin America tour, with a goal to translate the bilateral high-level political relations into rich results of practical cooperation.

In 1960, Cuba took the lead among countries in the Western Hemisphere to establish diplomatic relations with New China, opening a new chapter of China's relations with Cuba and with Latin America.

China-Cuba relationship has since withstood the test of a constantly-changing international landscape.

Also in the 1960s, the United States, one of the world's two sole super powers then, imposed economic sanctions on Cuba to punish its leadership's intention to align itself with the Soviet Union, the other super power, putting the island nation in a sensitive geopolitical position.

As the world becomes more multipolarized, and peace and development have become more important factors in governing country-to-country relations, China-Cuba cooperation has shifted from politics to economy and has been galloping on a fast track.

China has been a rising key foreign investor in Cuba especially after 2012 when world countries, developed and developing countries alike, were battered by a devastating financial crisis.

China granted free assistance and interest-free loans to Cuba to promote bilateral economic and technological cooperation, and undertook several large-scale infrastructure projects in Cuba.

For years, China has been Cuba's second-largest trading partner, while Cuba is China's largest partner in the Caribbean, with bilateral annual trade standing at a little less than 2 billion U.S. dollars.

While China, now the world's second-largest economy, has never been a back-seat driver for Cuba's development, the island nation still faces tough economic and social challenges largely due to Washington's unwillingness to lift its decades-old embargo despite criticism from even its allies.

Though the U.S. sanctions have evolved in various ways, they are outdated and irrational, bringing nothing but sufferings to Cuba's 11 million people.

Against all the odds, the Cuban government has been phasing in a series of economic reforms in recent years to revitalize its stagnant economy, encouraging enterprises and lifting restrictions on such fields as property use, travel and farming.

Havana's reform drive creates new opportunities for deepening its cooperation with China, and the world's other major economies, especially the United States, also need to seriously consider the new developments and rethink their policy toward Cuba.

For Washington, the first step should be lifting its sanctions. Instead of being an obstacle on Cuba's path of development, the United States should join China and other countries to become Cuba's constructive partners in efforts to achieve prosperity, which will benefit not only the Caribbean country, but also the Untied States itself....(Click title for more)

    The places where women's lives are most undervalued largely line up with the parts of the world most plagued by instability, conflict, extremism, and poverty.

Books: "The Counter-Revolution of 1776"

Portside  

July 20, 2014 - In the years leading up to 1776 the British colonies of North America were in flames.  They were not the rebellious flames of settlers chaffing under the yoke of a tyrannical monarchy.  They were the flames of rebellion by hundreds of thousands of Africans who had been uprooted and enslaved to bring hitherto unheard of wealth to the free traders who plied the seas with their cargo of human chattel and their customers, the purchasers of these enslaved men and women and their forced and uncompensated labor.  It was these flames, and the fear thereof, that spurred the growth of political and legal opinion in the English mother country that challenged slavery in these colonies.  It was the fear of these flames that motivated the signers of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

All my life I have been deeply troubled by the hypocrisy of a group of white men who could so nobly set forth the proposition that "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"  while simultaneously owning, trading, and profiting from the unpaid labor of African men and women whom they possessed as they would horses, cows or pigs.  All my life it has gnawed at my soul that in the name of democracy and human progress my country launched and virtually completed the extirpation of the native peoples and nations of the North American continent.  And the vital economic and political connections between these two crimes, committed by these "democrats", completely eluded me.

Well, the mystery is for me no more, and while my soul is no more rested it is greatly strengthened in a fight for justice and freedom for all people in the United States and the world.  Because I have seen the beacon of historical reality that shines from the pages of the latest work by historian Gerald Horne[i]. This is a book that everyone should read, especially every "white" person.

I had known about the 1772 Somerset Decision by the Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Mansfield, who declared that "The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, . and therefore the black [James Somerset] must be discharged" from his enslavement on British soil.  I had read "Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution" by Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen, where I first learned of this decision and it's affect on the slave trading and slave holding settlers in all the North American colonies, who with good reason feared the application of Somerset to their own property in human flesh.

But what I had not known were the dynamic forces the propelled this decision.  The Blumrosens' account makes it sound like it arouse from precedents of British Law and the good will of the British courts.  What Gerald Horne does is demonstrate the international, economic and political forces that virtually required this decision and propelled the movement for abolition in Great Britain.  Not that it was easy - Horne documents the very sharp, life and death contradictions within the emerging British imperialism that lay beneath the surface.  The inspiring story of the steadfastness and tireless work of British abolitionists so well documented in "Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery" by Adam Hochschild tells only part of the story.  What's missing is the untaught history of a countless number of slave rebellions and uprisings throughout North America and the Caribbean that actually propelled it and made it possible.

What emerges from "Counter-Revolution" is a picture of courage, heroism and betrayal.  Most importantly, it is a history that accounts for the fact that so many "advances" of democracy in the United States have been at the expense of Africans and their descendants, people brought in chains to the shores of the United States.  What emerges is a glimmer of understating why white supremacy in the United States is so virulent, so hard to eradicate, so much worse than in any other country.  What emerges is an account of how the very founding of the United States of America was motivated by white supremacy and a rejection of the basic humanity of Black people....(Click title for more)

Solidarity, Carl Davidson, CCDS