From The Half-Red House

My neighbor has a ten-year-old Honda hybrid car that gets 50-plus miles per gallon, hardly pollutes and runs fine, but the state insists that he put thousands of dollars into it or scrap it in order for it to pass inspection. The culprit is the little

The 14-year-old boy who voted illegally in the UK elections last Thursday (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/09/alfie-mckenzie-14-year-old-voter ) has really won my heart. I hope we hear from him again soon. Speaking of a school mock election campaign in which he ran as the Socialist Labour candidate he told the Guardian, “Whilst I didn’t win (far from it), I did manage to get 20 teenagers to grasp the concept of socialism and embrace it. To me that’s a great success.”

The behind-the-scenes battle to determine who governs the UK and how is still on, and decent climate change and electoral-reform planks may yet be included in the platform of whatever coalition emerges. I suspect that the number of Britons who actually want to go back to the days of Margaret Thatcher is vanishingly small, and that, even under the banner of her party, a coalition will have to include progressive, green and socialist ideas.

Alfie McKenzie ended up voting Liberal Democrat as a tactical move when he went to the “real” polls.

We need serious electoral reform in the US as well as the UK, and in the US case, the first step is to get corporate money out of the campaign funding mix, and I’m immensely pleased that my representative, Paul Hodes (Democrat New Hampshire 2nd district) has introduced a bill (H.J.Res.82), named in honor of my old friend Doris ‘Granny D’ Haddock, in Congress to do that by amending the constitution.

I lived in Arizona for many years and my mom grew up there. I love Arizona, her mountains and deserts, and the amazing array of people and animals and plants that live there. Some of my favorite cousins, who grew up in Tucson, are bilingual and of mixed Mexican-American and Anglo backgrounds. The immigration bill that the governor signed into law a few days ago is an outrage, but this move to ban ethnic studies and fire teachers with “accents” (http://thinkprogress.org/2010/04/30/arizona-teachers/) takes the phenomenon of domestic fascist racism to incredible heights. I guess I have to back congressman Raul Grijalva’s call for a boycott (http://grijalva.house.gov/).  The text of the anti-ethnic-studies bill is at http://www.halfredhouse.biz/blog_material/ArizonaNoEtnicStudiesBill.pdf .

Here’s a blog entry from a LiveJournal Friend, Elizabeth Barrette, who has first hand experience of the great things that ethnic studies courses can do : http://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com/1090321.html

A few decades ago, Phil Ochs wrote a song about the ku-klux-klan lynching culture of the Democratic-party white regime in the state of Mississippi at that time, which I think could easily be rewritten to apply to Arizona’s Republican ruling elite today.

We really have to say no to escalation in Afghanistan (and rationales for keeping 50,000 troops in or near Iraq indefinitely). I recommend the article below. Pass it on if you’re so inclined. I especially like note these words: “The war becomes its own rationale for continuing: to go on because it must go on… The government will help veterans with PTSD and traumatic brain injuries to pursue their dreams… how much better it would be if those veterans could pursue their dreams without suffering from PTSD and traumatic brain injuries in the first place.”

A Bomber Jacket Doesn’t Cover the Blood
By Norman Solomon
March 29, 2010

President Obama has taken a further plunge into the kind of war abyss that consumed predecessors named Johnson, Nixon and Bush.

On Sunday, during his first presidential trip to Afghanistan, Obama stood before thousands of American troops to proclaim the sanctity of the war effort. He played the role deftly–a commander in chief, rallying the troops–while wearing a bomber jacket.

There was something candidly macabre about the decision to wear that leather jacket, adorned with an American Eagle and the words

..It just struck me that this week we we have the first April Fools’ day after the landmark Supreme Court decision that granted corporations full status as persons and full free-speech rights.

It should be a really really fun day, since practical jokes are considered a form of free speech and corporations can invest so much more than any mortal (I guess we’ll have to bring that word back into fashion again, since it now not only distinguishes flesh-and-blood people from fairies and sprites, but also from corporations!) in the success of their practical jokes.

Suppose Shaws groceries packaged sugar in all their salt containers and salt in all their sugar containers on that day. I wouldn’t put it past a corporation that mischievously fired 300 warehouse workers last week and replaced them with permanent scabs off the street. That corporation really cracks me up!

Imagine typing “The Panda’s Thumb” into Google and getting “Are you sure you didn’t mean ‘The Panderer’s Bum’?” Type in “robot drone” and get back “Are you sure you didn’t mean ‘robber phone’?”You get the idea. For a day, all knowledge would accessible only to skilled punsters and the like.

And what will Microsoft do with the spell checker? Type in “They put on their gloves.” and “their” would be underlined with the suggested word “there, bear, snare, thorough”. Since nobody knows any of the rules of spelling and grammar anymore, not one dignifiied or correct passage would emerge on April 1.

Oh, unless you use Open Office…. I understand the Supreme Court said non-profits and NGOs didn’t have full free speech rights. Yes, that would be a safe bet. Make Thursday April 1 you day to check out safe, honest nonprofit open-source software… maybe you’ll never go back!

..Last night I heard (and saw too, what a treat it is to watch her expressive face as she speaks!) Arundhati Roy on “Democracy Now” giving advice to peace activists: “You can’t just protest on weekends”. I guess I am not living up to this advice, because though I am out there for an hour or so every weekend, I’m far from being the effective worker for justice that I might be.

This article (http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2010/03/drone-protesters-arrested-at-tucson.html) is inspiring to me. If every person in my generation who wants an end to the warfare state did an action like this and got arrested once every three-to-five years, I bet we could fill the jails in Gandhian style. The occasion of this action and hundreds of others around the world on Sunday was the seventh anniversary of the war in Iraq… the SEVENTH ANNIVERSARY and we are now hearing of plans for fifty-thousand US troops in or near Iraq for decades to come and who-knows-how-many in Afghanistan. Each “troop” committed to these pointless and endless wars, every weapon of mass or not-so-mass destruction, such as these drones, is paid for, not only in dollars, but in lives destroyed or warped.

I wonder how many people even realized there was a worldwide anti-war demonstration last weekend? Five thousand people in Washington can be ignored quite safely, especially when the media are focused exclusively on a single politically-polarizing issue, health insurance reform. For that matter, how many people even noticed that several hundred thousand people marched for immigration reform in Washington earlier in

..If you want a positive life-changing experience of solidarity, now is your opportunity: join the picket lines at a local Shaw’s Market!

Late last week, I got requests from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Boston Branch (and others, including Jobs With Justice) to support the striking workers at Shaw’s Warehouse in Methuen. It seems that negotiations between Shaw’s and United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) local 791 broke down when management made its second insanely substandard contract offer in a row. The contract would require workers to pay so much for their employer-based health insurance that they would have to choose between insurance and food/rent. And that’s not even mentioning what the agreement would do to pensions, seniority, etc.. The roughly 300 workers had no choice but to go out on strike. Those workers who live in New Hampshire would probably lose their insurance altogether if the contract went through, while those in Massachusetts would qualify for a government-subsidized plan after a waiting period. Health insurance is a much bigger issue than wage raises and cuts at this point, because, unlike Europeans and Canadians, US workers do not have national health insurance and mostly rely on employers providing it.

This week, I spent a few hours on the picket line at the Shaws market at Royal Ridge in South Nashua NH as a volunteer from my union. The first time I showed up, I was greeted with one of the warmest hugs I’ve ever experienced. I got to talk with the men about their lives. One had a sick wife, another was raising a child he adopted from the streets. Most were about my age or a few years younger. The problems they described with credit, health care and making ends meet in this economy were quite similar to the ones I’ve experienced in recent years.

I could identify with their work situation, because I had worked as a temporary part-timer at a huge food warehouse in Colorado many years ago and had joined the union workers on the picket line when they went on strike, rather than scabbing, as some of the part-timers did. I was reminded of that experience recently when I read about the attempts, during the last year, of management of the three big food warehouses in Colorado to force acceptance of a bad contract on UFCW local 7 workers. The union there won a few concessions from management during a year of negotiations and avoided a strike, but some workers want to kick the local union president out for accepting contract provisions that hurt workers badly. UFCW has serious flaws as an organization, but it has protected and supported workers in a number of crucial ways, and it needs our help now.

The picket line seemed to be keeping shoppers away from the Shaw’s store quite effectively, and a lot of drivers were pulling over and talking with the workers or honking in solidarity.

There is obviously a national trend at work here, and the aim of management seems to be to reduce the living standards of these highly experienced warehouse workers to the level of Wal-Mart workers. From what the workers on the picket line told me, the company was about to invest millions in upgrades to the warehouse in Methuen. Currently, they have all but emptied the warehouse, which specializes in perishable produce, rather than bring in scabs, but that could change: the proposed contract provides for hiring non-union part-timers, which is obviously meant as a foot-in-the-door. At the moment, the company is obviously taking huge losses in income to pursue this contract action against the union.

The workers are trying to keep up their spirits, but you won’t believe how much the solidarity of people from other unions and the general public means to them. Spending a while on the picket line will open your eyes and will be an unforgettable experience if you just make the small effort of going down to one of the stores in the southern NH or Boston areas and volunteering. Call 774-568-0791 for information on where, other than the Royal Ridge stores, pickets are happening.

While money is needed, and a strike fund has been set up, human presence is even more needed. Whether or not you can spare time to join the picket line, you can send a check payable to the “UFCW Local 791 Methuen D.C. Strike Fund” to

UFCW Local 791
55 Norfolk Avenue
South Easton, MA 02375

and you can send a message of support from this website: http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/supportstrikingshawsworkers..…...