Mn-prog-events Mailing List: Progressive Calendar 10.05.11 / 2

[David Shove (shove001]

                  P R O G R E S S I V E   C A L E N D A R  10.05.11

1. 1$ burgers outside 10.05 5pm
2. Copwatch              10.05 6pm

3. Glen Ford - Wall Street as public enemy number one
4. ed            - Bumpersticker

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ed
1$ burgers outside 10.05 5pm

A super spectatular day to be outside!

American Legion Club Rosetown Memorial Post 542
700 W County Road C, Roseville
(actually on Rosetown)
Take 36 to Dale
N on Dale to Cty C
1 block W on C to Rosetown (sign on corner)
1 block S on Rosetown, to circle, down South side of circle
to the parking lot. Bar on the first level.
       |-C-|
       O   |
       *   Dale
           |
-------36----
After you go past the sign, and hit the circle, it may seem as if there's
nothing more. Keep going south, over the south side of the circle, down
the hill to the parking lot.
Burgers for ONE DOLLAR each!
Pizza, pop, beer, mixed drinks available
cheap food and drinks
lots of space/tables
outside seating
cheap food and drinks
full bar, tap and bottle beer
pizza big enuf for 2 at $9
cheap food and drinks
on Wednesday night till 8pm, burgers for one dollar (!)
lots of parking, free and close
in nice area
cheap food and drinks

Look for a table or so of PC readers, from 5pm on.
Burgers available till about 7:30.


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2. Copwatch 10.05 6pm

Copwatch/know your rights training
Wednesday, October 5 at 6:00pm
Location: Walker Church


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Wall Street as Public Enemy Number One
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“99% to 1% is encouraging odds, and an accurate reflection of reality.”
There’s some talk in veteran left circles about the need to politically
“educate” the adamantly leaderless, mostly white young people who have made
Zuccotti Park in Manhattan’s financial district the center of the U.S. lefty
world since September 17. Although there’s a large portion of Yippie-like
mush in the Zuccotti mix – the kind of activism that seems more like aroma
than substance – the core is clearly comprised of serious people determined
to end the rule of the “One Percent.” The 99% versus 1% formula is quite
powerful, directing the people’s anger towards the class that conducts its
oppressive business on Wall Street: finance capitalists.
The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) crew has identified the beast in his lair –
which is a very big deal in the United States, a nation that is the most
politically backward and confused in the industrial world due to the endemic
racism that is its birthright and that has always thwarted the growth of a
strong Left.

The Zuccotti Park campers are eons ahead of the faux radicals and
“progressives” who, in terror of the Tea Party and Republican presidential
clown candidates, will soon return to the Obamite fold in their eternal
search for lesser evils. Given that so many of the “old heads” of the Left
only a few years ago put themselves at the service of Wall Street’s
presidential candidate – a talented and attractive Black man who would
become the far more effective evil in facilitating the dismantling of the
New Deal – it may be best that they keep their political education classes
to themselves.

IIn identifying finance capital as the common enemy, the supposedly
“apolitical” park occupiers are in some ways more advanced than a lot of
folks that call themselves scientific socialists but have not come fully to
grips with what it means when finance capital achieves absolute political
hegemony – the reality that is central to how U.S. imperialism ultimately
collapses. It is a class that produces nothing; that exists solely through
rigging and armed coercion of markets and the destruction of all that cannot
be monetized; that actively suppresses and makes war against human
productive potential, worldwide; and that has now turned, like piranhas,
against the state structures they themselves helped build in Europe and
North America.

The political rule of finance capital is the end game. In the early stages
of the Great Depression, banking baron Andrew Mellon urged President Herbert
Hoover to "liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate
real estate” in order to solve the crisis. Mellon didn’t get his wish
because, even then, the finance capitalist class did not wield hegemonic
power in U.S. society. They do now. With all the other capitalist sectors
totally subservient to Wall Street – including mass communications – they
are financializing the State, seeking to convert many of its components
(Social Security, health care, public education, and much more) into profit
centers, and discarding much of the rest. This is of necessity, because
finance capital can no longer preserve itself in any other way.

Nothing is left standing in the capitalist sector to resist them. For that
reason, there is no Hoover, much less a Roosevelt, to articulate an
alternative capitalist vision, a new compact, an accommodating “reform.”
Finance capital rushes forward, creating conditions in which its own
imminent destruction can only be temporarily averted by frenzied predation
on the real economy and the State, itself. Obama Democrats and the
Republicans, alike, facilitate the pillaging, captives of the hegemon.

To live in the age of finance capitalist hegemony is different than when
Vladimir Lenin said “the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him
with.” Wall Street daily invents and plays fire with its own form of money:
derivatives that are notionally valued at $600 trillion to $1,000 trillion
(no one really knows!), many times the yearly Gross Planetary Product of
Earth. The finance hegemon is disconnected from, yet a parasite on, the real
economy. He is not in the business of selling or making ropes, or anything
else. He is about transforming the world into capital, to feed capital, for
the reproduction of capital. He can no longer coexist with human life.

Therefore, the righteous demonization of Wall Street, the symbolic and
literal headquarters of the class that is the primary threat to human
existence, is a great place begin a mass movement. 99% to 1% is encouraging
odds, and an accurate reflection of reality.

The occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC, starting Oct 6, should
showcase the national government as the domestic and international
superpower servant of finance capital – and Barack Obama as
Servant-in-Chief.

The United National Anti-War Coalition’s (UNAC) October 15 rally at the OWS
encampment marking the tenth anniversary of the U.S. war on Afghanistan,
proclaims that “Wall Street is War Street.”

And the November 5 national conference of the Black Is Back Coalition for
Social Justice, Peace, and Reparations, in Philadelphia, will remind us that
the European war against the rest of the world that began more than five
hundred years ago is till being waged for the benefit of a predatory class
whose primary address is right next to Zuccotti Park.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at
Glen.Ford [at] BlackAgendaReport.com.


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                                                  Defang the Rich
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