Mn-prog-events Mailing List: Progressive Calendar 09.11.09

[David Shove (shove001]

            P R O G R E S S I V E   C A L E N D A R   09.11.09

1. 9/11/NYCCAN/KFAI   9.11 11:30am
2. Journey of hope    9.11/12/13 2pm Owatonna/Austin/AlbertLea
3. Palestine vigil    9.11 4:15pm
4. 9/11 film/new/free 9.11 5:20pm
5. Paulsen/3CD/health 9.11 6pm
6. Pray for peace     9.11 6:30pm
7. Oxfam/movies/park  9.11 7:30pm
8. NOW/Obama/Gitmo    9.11 8:30pm
9. Moyers/Obama??     9.11 9pm

10. Internationalist Group - Honduras: the first Obama govt coup
11. ed                     - Speaking up for the big guy  (poem)

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From: Catherine Statz <statz001 [at] umn.edu>
Subject: 9/11/NYCCAN/KFAI 9.11 11:30am

Manny Badillo will be interviewed by Don Olson on KFAI radio, 11:30 AM.
He is a 9/11 family member working with NYCCAN.

NYC CAN is non-partisan organization comprised of 9/11 Families, First
Responders, Survivors and proud, concerned citizens committed to bringing
about an independent, impartial investigation into the events of September
11. New York City voters have the power to legally mandate the formation
of a new investigation with subpoena power by petitioning to place a
referendum on the ballot in the November 2009 General Election.

In September 2008, the petition reached a milestone of 30,000 signatures,
the minimum number required to submit the petition to New York City
Council for its approval. By June 2009, NYCCAN will eclipse the 45,000
signatures required to bypass City Council, ensuring its placement on the
ballot.

With the passage of this referendum New York City will take the first
giant step towards truth and justice. On Friday, September 4, the New York
City Coalition for Accountability Now (NYC CAN) submitted 28,000 petition
signatures as a supplement to the 52,000 signatures submitted on June 24
calling for a citywide referendum on the creation of a local, independent
commission to investigate 9/11.


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From: Stephanie Bates <Stephanie.Bates [at] americas.org>
Subject: Journey of hope 9.11/12/13 2pm Owatonna/Austin/AlbertLea

Join the Journey of Hope: March for Just and Humane Immigration Reform
September 11-13

As part of the Journey of Hope an ongoing campaign to promote fair, humane
and comprehensive immigration reform as well as keeping the light of
justice and dignity alive and burning. Centro Campesino, Minnesota
Immigrant Rights Action Coalition, Minnesota Immigrant Freedom Network,
Jewish Community Action, Interfaith Immigrant Coalition, Minnesota SOL
(Strengthening Our Selves), Resource Center of Americas, Minnesota
Advocates of Human Rights, Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota and Family &
Childrens Services are organizing the MARCH FOR JUSTICE, OPPORTUNITY, AND
AGAINST RACISM.

The march will begin at 2pm in Owatonna on Sept 11 and will head to Austin
on the 12th and Albert Lea on the 13th.

Workshops put on by the Advocates for Human Rights and the Resource Center
will take place in Austin on the 12th from 1-5pm and Albert Lea on the
13th from 1-5pm.  Following the workshops in Albert Lea there will be a
march through town followed by speakers.

Workshops each day will include:

1-2:30 pm Resource Center of the Americas presents Latino Voices Latino
Voices brings the human side of immigration to life through real stories
of people living and working in our community. Through discussion of the
reasons for immigration, successes and challenges immigrants face, and how
as a community we help and interact with our immigrant neighbors, the
three-member panel and facilitator works to educate the public about the
contributions and impact that immigrants have on our community.

2:45-4:15 The Advocates for Human Rights offers Immigration 101 In this
interactive workshop, participants will explore our countrys immigration
laws and their impact on immigrants, citizens, and communities. Through
activities, role plays, and group discussion, we will examine common myths
about immigration and present the facts on the ways that immigrants
contribute to our economy and our nation.

4:30-5:00 Taking Action in Our Communities and Organizing for Reform
Inspired by personal stories of immigration and armed with information, we
will collaborate to generate ideas for taking action in our own lives.
Workshop participants will be given useful tools and resources to create
welcoming communities and to join their neighbors in organizing for
reform.

We are currently arranging transportation from the Twin Cities to
Owatonna, Austin and Albert Lea. If you are interested in participating in
any or all of the days, please contact Stephanie at
Stephanie.Bates [at] americas.org. Please indicate how many people will need
transportation and which days you would like to participate.  The cost for
transportation will be $10 to cover van rental and gas.


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From: Eric Angell <eric-angell [at] riseup.net>
Subject: Palestine vigil 9.11 4:15pm

the weekly vigil for the liberation of Palestine continues at the
intersection of Snelling and Summit Aves in St. Paul.  the Friday demo
starts at 4:15 and ends around 5:30.  there are usually extra signs
available.


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From: Women Against Military Madness <wamm [at] mtn.org>
Subject: 9/11 film/new/free 9.11 5:20pm

Movie Screening: "9/11: Blueprint for Truth"
Friday, September 11, 5:20 p.m. The Riverview Theater, 3800 42nd Avenue
South, Minneapolis.

In this 60-minute director's cut edition of "9/11: Blueprint for Truth,
the Architecture of Destruction," San Francisco Bay area architect,
Richard Gage, AIA, provides a series of abridged versions of the full
research copy. The stunning multimedia presentations will deliver
myth-shattering scientific evidence surrounding the explosive demolition
of all three World Trade Center buildings. This screening is free and open
to the public.

Sponsored by: the family of Patricia J. Statz, who died in the Pentagon on
09/11/2001. Endorsed by: the Minnesota Alliance of Peacemakers (MAP), the
War Resisters League Minnesota, Veterans for Peace, Ground Zero Minnesota,
MN 9/11 Truth, and We Are Change Minnesota. WAMM is a member of MAP. FFI:
Contact Statz, 651-698-1308 or Bruce Stahlberg, 612-558-5959


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From: Blanche Hall <blanche.hall [at] gmail.com>
Subject: Paulsen/3CD/health 9.11 6pm

Congressman Erik Paulsen/3rd District Constituents
Town Hall Meeting
Friday, September 11th, 2009
6-7:30pm
Maple Grove High School Auditorium
9800 Fernbrook Ln N, Maple Grove, MN

ATTEND MY TOWN HALL MEETING THIS FRIDAY!
First of all, I wanted you to know I am having a town hall meeting THIS
FRIDAY AT 6:00PM at Maple Grove High School.  It will be a great chance
for me to hear your concerns and ideas on health care and other issues of
concern to you.  For more information on my town hall meeting, click HERE.
Any questions please contact me at mn03townhall [at] mail.house.gov.

HEALTH CARE I'e spent a lot of my time talking about health care and the
current House health care bill, H.R. 3200, which I do not support.  Over
the past few months - and especially the last few weeks - I've had a wide
variety of health-care related events throughout the District. I've heard
ideas and concerns directly from constituents, small businesses, health
professionals and many others.

The proposed bill has a $1 trillion price tag at a time when the
nation is already over $11 trillion in debt, and a proposed "public
option" that would establish a new government-run plan has proven to
be very unpopular with the American people. [Yeah, right. So you know
where he's coming from. -ed]


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From: Erin Parrish <erin [at] mnwomen.org>
Subject: Pray for peace 9.11 6:30pm

September 11: Earth Partners Working Group of the Justice Commission of
the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet and Consociates 11th day Prayer
for Peace "Peace for the Earth." 6:30 PM at Presentation of Our Lady
Chapel, St. Paul.

[Since the old prayers seem not to have worked very well, new ones need be
invented, ones with increased firepower. Perhaps a cluster prayer that on
impact would blossom into hundreds of tiny hot adhesive talking
prayerlets. -ed]


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From: Oxfam Action Corps - MN <minnesota [at] oxfamactioncorps.org>
Subject: Oxfam/movies/park  9.11 7:30pm

Get inspired this Friday. Join Oxfam Action Corps - MN and ONE Twin Cities
for Movies in the Park (...that make a difference) at 7:30 PM on Friday,
September 11th at Matthews Park (2318 29th Ave. S., Minneapolis).

This free community event features two empowering films and a call to
action. First, watch a preview of Oxfam America's Sisters on the Planet,
which tells the story of four inspiring women living on the front lines of
climate change. The evening's feature film is Sons of Lwala, the
critically-acclaimed documentary of two brothers who, after earning
medical degrees in the United States, return home to Kenya to finish
establishing a health clinic started by their father who has fallen ill to
AIDS.

Volunteers from Oxfam and ONE will be on hand with opportunities for you
to get active on these important issues.

More information at http://minnesota.oxfamactioncorps.org


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From: t r u t h o u t <messenger [at] truthout.org>
Subject: NOW/Obama/Gitmo 9.11 8:30pm

NOW | Is Obama Tossing Out the Constitution With His New Anti-Terror
Plan?
http://www.truthout.org/090909G?n

"NOW," PBS: "Closing Guantanamo Bay's prison will do little to close the
debate on what we should do with alleged terrorists. 'NOW,' as part of a
collaboration with the nonprofit investigative unit ProPublica,
investigates the controversial tactic of 'preventative detention,' a
government plan that may detain suspects indefinitely without trial or
even formal charges."


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From: t r u t h o u t <messenger [at] truthout.org>
Subject: Moyers/Obama?? 9.11 9pm

Bill Moyers Journal | Obama at the Crossroads
http://www.truthout.org/090909Y?n

Bill Moyers Journal: "With a landmark speech on health reform behind him
and tensions rising in war-torn Afghanistan, Bill Moyers Journal looks at
President Obama's next big fights. Global health specialist and incoming
president of Dartmouth College Dr. Jim Yong Kim shares his expertise in
public health. And, the Journal takes a hard look at the state of affairs
in ever-divided Afghanistan with McClatchy DC Pentagon correspondent Nancy
Youssef."


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Sweep Away the Coup Plotters, Generals and Capitalists!
Fight for a Workers and Peasants Government!
Honduras: The First Coup of the Obama Administration
The Internationalist Group
August 2009

An abbreviated version of this article appeared in The Internationalist
No. 29 (Summer 2009). This is a full translation of the Spanish-language
article from the El Internacionalista supplement (August 2009).

AUGUST 6 - The ouster of President Manuel Zelaya Rosales by Honduran
generals at the end of June sent shudders through Latin America. Leftists
and trade-unionists bitterly recalled the dark days of the 1970s and
1980s, when much of the region was ruled by military juntas, thousands
were murdered, tens of thousands fled into exile and those who remained
were terrorized into submission.

Even "center-left" bourgeois governments such as in Argentina, Bolivia,
Chile, Ecuador and elsewhere felt threatened, as they all have tenuous
relations with their militaries. Below a thin veneer of "democracy," the
officers who carried out the "dirty wars" and ran the death squads are
still there. The "moderates" looked to the new administration in
Washington to solve the problem. Even Hugo Chvez in Venezuela appealed to
the U.S.: "Obama, do something". But more than a month later, the
putschists are still in charge in Tegucigalpa, the death toll among the
protesters is rising, and Zelaya is cooling his heels at the border.

We warned the day after the military takeover that those fighting against
it should beware of U.S. intervention (rather than appeal for it), and
demand "Yankee Imperialism, Hands Off!" (see "Honduras: Coup d'tat in the
Maquiladora Republic. in The Internationalist no. 29 [Summer 2009]). We
called on workers to "fight against the coup while offering no political
support whatsoever to the right-wing president". In fact, Honduran unions
have played a key role in resistance to the coup. But while protesters
call for Zelaya's return with full powers, the ousted president has agreed
to terms that would make him a figurehead. Either way, the coup plotters
would still be in place, ready to strike again.

What's needed is not negotiations but a mobilization of the workers and
peasants to sweep away the military gorilas and the capitalists and
bourgeois politicians behind the coup, through revolutionary struggle for
a workers and peasants government that would expropriate the oligarchs and
the entire capitalist ruling class, as part of workers revolution
throughout Central America, and beyond.

Today resistance is being organized through bodies such as the National
Front Against the Coup d'etat (FNCGE, according to its initials in
Spanish). This is a "popular front" formation which unites labor groups
and leftists with the Democratic Unification Party, a minor bourgeois
formation. Today tens of thousands of Hondurans are courageously
protesting in the face of the guns of the military. But should opponents
of the coup succeed in any degree in pushing back the coup plotters, this
bourgeois opposition coalition will be a barrier blocking any struggle
against the Honduran ruling class which spawned the coup. To overcome this
roadblock to revolution it is necessary to begin organizing the nucleus of
a revolutionary workers party that is politically independent of all
capitalist politicians, parties and coalitions.

                 Washington's Hand in the Coup

An old joke in Latin America goes, Question: Why has there never been a
coup d'tat in the United States? Answer: Because there is no American
embassy in Washington. Of course, there was the 2000 judicial coup in
which the Supreme Court, by a vote of 5 to 4, placed George Bush in the
White House despite losing the popular vote.

Whether Republicans or Democrats are in power, U.S. imperialism is still
the power behind the most reactionary forces in the hemisphere. Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton clucked her tongue criticizing the putsch, but
pointedly did not call it a coup d'etat, as that would have required a
cutoff of U.S. aid to the very forces that carried out the coup. She
called on Costa Rican president Oscar Arias to "mediate". This amounted to
de facto recognition of the de facto "government" headed by the puppet
Robert Micheletti. Clinton also sharply criticized Zelaya as "reckless"
for attempting to go back to Honduras. So the military-backed regime is
simply doing nothing, hoping to run the clock out until "elections" this
fall.

We wrote in our first article that "the Honduran army doesn't move a
finger without the Pentagon and the CIA knowing about it," and "at the
very least, Washington is tolerating the coup". Soon information began
coming out that U.S. "diplomats" were up to their necks in the coup
plotting. The New York Times (30 June) reported that: "As the situation
in Honduras worsened, Assistant Secretary of State Thomas A. Shannon Jr.,
along with Hugo Llorens, the American ambassador to Honduras, spoke with
Mr. Zelaya, military officials and opposition leaders.... 'There was talk
of how they might remove the president from office, how he could be
arrested, on whose authority they could do that,' the administration
official said. But the official said that the speculation had focused on
legal maneuvers to remove the president, not a coup."

So Washington was discussing for weeks with the plotters about how to
"remove" Zelaya, even "arrest" him ... and then the U.S. acts surprised
when, after getting the okay from the Honduran Congress, the Honduran
Supreme Court and the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, the military goes ahead
and ousts him! The U.S. just objected that the job was done so crudely.

Then, after the coup, and the wave of denunciations in Latin America, the
Obama administration decides it has to do something, so it brings in
Arias, an old pal of the Bushes (father and son) and an old hand at
dousing conflagrations in Central America that threaten the stability of
the empire. When the representatives of coup "president" Micheletti showed
up in San Jos, they brought with them an "adviser," one Bennet Ratcliff, a
San Diego-based political consultant with ties to the Clintons. The New
York Times (13 July) reported: "an official close to the talks said the
team rarely made a move without consulting" Ratcliff. "Every proposal
that Micheletti's group presented was written or approved by the
American," said another official close to the talks, referring to Mr.
Ratcliff".

In Washington, the Honduran Business Council hired lobbyist Lanny Davis to
represent the coup "government," arranging meetings with Republican
Congressmen and testifying before Congress. Davis was Bill Clinton's
personal lawyer during the Monica Lewinsky affair. During last year's
primary elections, he was a surrogate for Hillary Clinton (whom he met at
Yale, along with George W. Bush) making some of the harshest race-baiting
attacks on Obama. (Davis is also a "senior advisor and spokesman" for The
Israel Project, a Zionist PR operation. Israel, incidentally, is the only
country to have recognized the coup "government" in Honduras.)

Meanwhile, the U.S. ambassador to Honduras, Hugo Llorens, is a Cuban
gusano exile who was in charge of Andean affairs on the National Security
Council at the time of the 2002 coup that briefly seized Hugo Chvez, in
which the U.S. was heavily involved. As in that case and the 2004
ouster/kidnapping of Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide by U.S.
forces, the Honduran coup plotters produced a supposed "resignation
letter" from Zelaya that was quickly revealed to be a phony. On top of
this, various long-time Reagan/Bush operatives have been active in
Honduras recently, including Otto Reich (another gusano) and John
Negroponte (known as The Proconsul when he was U.S. ambassador in the
1980s), both heavily involved with Nicaraguan contras and Salvadoran death
squads.

Various leftists have used the Clinton ties to argue that that was
"Clinton's Soft Coup" and an "attempt to torpedo Obama's effort at detente
in Latin America, including with Cuba. (Guillermo Almeyra in La Jornada, 2
August). All this shows is that illusions in Barack Obama are still
strongly held in Latin America (and the U.S.). The Honduran coup plotters
may have figured they could force the U.S. president's hand. They are
certainly identified with extreme right-wingers. Hillary Clinton may be
particularly hostile to Zelaya and Chvez. But this is the Obama
administration, not the Clinton administration, and the U.S. government as
a whole, not just one putative faction, was preparing the ouster of
Zelaya.

           Honduras's Capitalist Oligarchy and the Coup

Frequently in Latin America, reformist leftists refer to the ruling class
as an oligarchy, and label repressive regimes fascist. Often there is an
implicit political program attached to these descriptions. If it is an
oligarchy (rule by a select few), then the struggle against it should be
for a democracy (rule of "the people"), they argue. Similarly, if a
government is fascist, they seek to organize a popular front along with
"democratic" bourgeois politicians and parties to combat it. The purpose
is to constrain the struggle to a bourgeois-democratic framework. In
contrast, we Trotskyists of the League for the Fourth International fight
for a socialist revolution against capitalism.

In contrast to some other, more advanced capitalist countries of Latin
America, Honduras really does have an oligarchy, a very narrow ruling
circle consisting of a few clans who tightly control the country's economy
and politics. Honduran sociologist Leticia Salomn identified key coup
backers as media magnate Carlos Roberto Facuss (former president, palm oil
monopolist, owner of La Tribuna), the Continental Group of Jaime Rosenthal
and Gilberto Goldstein (owners of El Tiempo), and including the Ferrari,
Canahuati, Atala, Lamas, Nasser, Kattn, Lippman and Rafael Flores
families, who between them control "90% of the country's wealth" (Pblico
[Spain], 30 July).

But that leaves aside the huge sectors of the economy, producing most of
the exports, directly owned by the imperialists: Chiquita Brands and Dole
Foods for bananas; U.S. and Canadian mining companies; Nike, Adidas and
The Gap for maquiladora (free trade zone) clothing and shoe manufacturers.
Their profits and exports have been hard-hit by the two national work
stoppages, the constant highway occupations, the curfew and other side
effects of the military seizure of power.

The generals who carried out the coup recently went on national television
to explain how they were really "defending democracy". One said of
Zelaya"s government: "Central America was not the objective of this
communism disguised as democracy.... This socialism, communism, chavismo,
we could call it, was headed to the heart of the United States". It seemed
like a throwback to the rhetoric of the anti-Soviet Cold War, when Ronald
Reagan warned of a "red tide" washing up from Central America. But the
capitalists really did consider that Zelaya was toying with "communism".
After all, he raised the minimum wage by 60 percent. This caused great
consternation in the board room of the imperialist fruit monopolies:

"Chiquita complained that the new regulations would cut into company
profits, requiring the firm to spend more on costs than in Costa Rica: 20
cents more to produce a crate of pineapple and ten cents more to produce a
crate of bananas to be exact". -Nikolas Kozloff, 'Chiquita in Latin
America," Counterpunch, 17 July

The Honduran capitalist rulers are a clannish, insular, racist lot who
have supported military dictatorship, except for the occasional
"democratic" interlude, since they hardly have the social weight to
dominate the country themselves. An example of their mentality came from
one of the top officials of the coup regime, Enrique Ortez, who referred
to Barack Obama as a "black boy" (negrito), which is the closest Spanish
equivalent to the "n word". Ortez's remarks were so racist that the U.S.
media glossed over them, and didn't quote the whole statement. According
to El Tiempo (7 July), Ortez said in an interview televised a week before
the coup:

"I have negotiated with queers [maricones], prostitutes, with pinkos
[ngaras, an insulting Honduran term for leftists], blacks, whites. ... I
don't have racial prejudices, I like the black boy from the hood [negrito
del batey] who is presiding over the United States".

And the day after being named "foreign minister" Ortez said on TV:
"The president of the republic [the U.S.], with all due respect to the
black boy, doesn't know where Tegucigalpa is".

Eventually the coup plotters were forced to withdraw his appointment as
head diplomat, and instead named him chief of staff for the dictator
Micheletti. Finally, due to pressure from Washington they had to drop him
altogether. But the fact that he could say that publicly shows the mindset
of the Honduran capitalist ruling class, for whom such renarks are
absolutely normal, reflecting their racist contempt toward the substantial
black (and indigenous) population of Honduras.

               Smash the Coup - Workers to Power!

The Honduran coup was not some local matter but an event of continental
importance. It was clearly intended to send a message to the presidents of
El Salvador, Mauricio Funes of the FMLN (Farabundo Mart National
Liberation Front), and Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega of the FSLN (Sandinista
National Liberation Front). These former leftist and guerrilla groups have
become bourgeois parties carrying out "free-market" capitalist economic
policies. Ortega, now a born-again Christian, even outlawed abortion under
all circumstances. But that is not reactionary enough for the likes of the
antediluvian Central American right. (In El Salvador, ARENA, the party of
the death squads, ran a full-page newspaper ad calling to recognize the
Honduran regime and telling Funes the same could happen to him.)

For the past month, Honduran trade unions, peasant and indigenous groups
have been insistently mobilizing in the streets against the
civilian-military dictatorship. The teachers unions have been one of the
strongest points of resistance, shutting down schools for three weeks,
then participating in two national work stoppages, and now back on
indefinite strike following the cold-blooded assassination of two
teachers, Roger Vallejo and Martin Riviera, the second stabbed 25 times as
he left the wake for Vallejo. The brewing and bottling industry union
(STIBYS), has also been prominent, with its union hall acting as an
organizing center for protests. The union's general secretary, Carlos
Reyes, an independent candidate for president, was badly during the second
national work stoppage.

So far the "civic work stoppages" have been largely limited to public
sector workers, as the maquiladora operators keep their employees under
tight control. A real general strike that shut down the maquiladoras,
banana and mining sectors, cutting off Honduran exports would have a
considerable impact. But that represents a whole different political
orientation, organizing on a program of internationalist class struggle
rather than on the bourgeois-democratic and nationalist basis that has
dominated so far.

As we have noted, Honduras has a considerable history of leftist and labor
agitation. It was in order to crush communist union organizing that the
military took power in a previous coup, in 1963, when the liberal Democrat
John F. Kennedy was in the White House. Many leftists are taking part in
and leading protests. The FNCGD issues appeals to the world working class.
Yet their program is to reinstall "Mel" Zelaya in the Presidential House.
The demonstrations wave the Honduran flag and chant, "Mel amigo, el pueblo
est contigo" (Mel, friend, the people are with you). Yet Zelaya is taking
his marching orders from Washington, and if he does return it will be to
bury any hopes that poor and working people may have had in his
presidency. The referendum on holding a constituent assembly, a key issue
that triggered the military takeover, is a dead letter.

Various would-be socialists and even self-proclaimed communists argue that
it is necessary to subordinate everything to the fight to restore Zelaya's
presidency, even though he is no radical and certainly no representative
of the impoverished working people. (He is a certified oligarch whose
father, Manuel Zelaya Ordoez, was a wealthy businessman who was convicted,
and pardoned, for murdering 15 peasants, students and religious leaders
and dumping their bodies in a well on his ranch in the 1975 Los Horcones
massacre.)

This was not the program of the revolutionary Bolsheviks Lenin and
Trotsky, who in the lead up to the 1917 October Revolution called to
defeat a coup attempt by the tsarist general Kornilov, without defending
the bourgeois government of Kerensky. As Lenin wrote,

"in these circumstances, a Bolshevik would say: 'Our workers and soldiers
will fight the counter-revolutionary troops if they start an offensive now
against the Provisionial Government; they will do so not to defend the
government . . . but to independently defend the revolution as they pursue
their own aim, the aim of securing victory for the workers, for the poor,
for the cause of peace, and not for the imperialists or for Kerensky.
-"Rumors of a Conspiracy," August 1917

It was Stalin, the "great organizer of defeats," who sacrificed the
Spanish Revolution (and murdered the revolutionaries) on the altar of the
Popular Front, massacring the Barcelona workers on the grounds that they
threatened the bourgeois Republic. Yet it was the Spanish Republican
government and its Stalinist-controlled police and army that prevented a
victory over the reactionary militarist Franco, by blocking the workers
and peasants from carrying through the revolution that had begun to
expropriate the capitalists and landowners.

In Honduras today, revolutionary Marxists would mobilize to defeat the
coup regime, but on a program of organizing workers revolution, not making
political alliances with Zelaya and other bourgeois political forces. The
important participation of the unions in the resistance should be used not
to restore conditions to what they were on June 27, but to fight against
all the capitalist politicians and their system that has condemned 75
percent of the population to a life of misery. Honduras has the lowest
wages in Central America, with teachers earning US$130 a month and
maquiladora workers US$140 a month (for 12-hour days). That is the main
reason the clothing apparel and shoe manufacturers have come there in the
first place.

Clearly such a fight takes preparation. It can begin in the course of the
present battles, seeking to transform "civic" work stoppages into a
nationwide strike by workers and their allies. It is crucial to extend the
struggle to the workers in the maquiladora manufacturing plants, the fruit
plantations and transport sectors. Working people in El Salvador,
Guatemala, Nicaragua and Costa Rica should mobilize, including with strike
action, to oppose the Honduran coup, which is a direct threat to them as
well.

Workers outside Central America should seek to implement the call by the
International Transport Workers Federation to refuse at this key moment to
load or unload Honduran-flag ships, a ban which should be extended to any
cargo from or to Honduras. Demonstrations in the United States, Mexico and
elsewhere in Latin America should demand release of the hundreds of
Hondurans being held in the dictatorship's jails. Teachers unions should
solidarize with their valiant sisters and brothers in Honduras who have
risked all to defeat the gorilas. And we must continue to demand that the
U.S. government get out of Honduras, that the Soto Cano military base at
Palmerola be shut down, and that it cut off all aid to Honduras.

Mobilization against the capitalist coup must be on a class basis, forming
councils of workers, peasants and the urban and rural poor, drawing in the
oppressed black and indigenous populations. Such councils that can provide
the basis for sweeping away the entire class of capitalist exploiters.
Above all, what is needed is a struggle to forge the nucleus of a
revolutionary workers party in Honduras and throughout Central America.
Such a party can only be built on the program of permanent revolution, of
Leon Trotsky's Fourth International, namely that in the imperialist epoch
even basic democratic demands including agrarian revolution, national
liberal and democracy for the exploited and oppressed in semi-colonial
countries like Honduras can only be achieved by the workers taking power,
at the head of the peasantry and poor and led by their communist party, to
establish their own class rule, and extend the revolution internationally.

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth
International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup [at] msn.com


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 Rich men are out there
 now wronging rights and speaking
 up for the big guy.

 In their spare time, they
 organize the overdogs
 and turn out the lights.


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   - David Shove             shove001 [at] tc.umn.edu
   rhymes with clove         Progressive Calendar
                     over 2225 subscribers as of 12.19.02
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                          vote third party
                           for president
                           for congress
                          now and forever


                           Socialism YES
                           Capitalism NO


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