Feb 20, 2008

Taken for Granted

“One very important aspect of motivation is the willingness to stop and to look at things that no one else has bothered to look at. This simple process of focusing on things that are normally taken for granted is a powerful source of creativity...”

Edward de Bono quotes

“In saying that without the power of the state, evil men would rule over the good. It is taken for granted that the good are precisely those who at the present time have power, and the bad the same who are now subjugated. But it is precisely this that has to be proved... In order to get power and maintain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness, but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning and cruelty ”

Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy quotes

“In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”

Bertrand Russell quotes

take for granted

English

Verb

take for granted

To assume something to be true without verification or proof.
To underestimate someone's value, to fail to appreciate.

Feb 18, 2008

DECLARATION AGAINST THE NORTH AMERICAN FREE TRADE AGREEMENT AND THE MIGRA

community organizing | international | zapatismo

To All Communities in Resistance to Exploitation and Oppression.
To All Communities in Struggle for Indigenous Peoples’ Dignity and
Self-Determination.
To All Communities of the World.

We are the Frente Contra las Redadas del Condado de Ventura . We are a network of organizations, collectives and individuals that was formed in 2007, when Union del Barrio, one of the oldest Mexican Liberation organizations north of the U.S./Mexico border called for broad unity and organized resistance against the increased racist laws and Migra-terror against migrants.

Today, January 1st 2008 the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) enters its final stage of implementation. NAFTA, since its inception, was designed to help the rich U.S. Agriculture and Industrial Corporations take over the markets of Mexico and destroy the small farms and national industries. It has caused millions of displaced or unemployed Raza to move to the cities or migrate to what today is the United States and Canada .

According to America’s Policy Program analysts, “Every hour, Mexico imports $1.5 million dollars worth of agricultural and food products, almost all from the United States” While, “In that same hour, 30 people—men, women, and children—leave their homes in the Mexican countryside to take up the most dangerous journey of their lives—as migrants to the United States.” ( America ’s Policy Program Congressional Briefing, “Standing Up to NAFTA”)

For the rich this is good news, but for us, the working poor, it signals more poverty, more repression, and more death. This is why we resist. We resist the oppression and exploitation of our work, our lands, our community, and of our dignity.

Every year over 400 people die crossing the U.S./Mexico border, a border that each day is more militarized. Every day this Wall of Death stretches onward, inch by inch, and everyday more Migra agents are added to the ranks, signed ujp to terrorize and chase down workers like hunted animals. Every day, some racist politician or their lackey, conjures up new legal ways to implement their laws of oppression against migrants, against the workers that come across the
Wall of Death.

The Migra has unleashed a wave of repression against migrants, against workers, men, women and children with laws and plans like Operation Gatekeeper, a plan that forces migrants to cross the border through the deserts to die. At the same time, another vicious plan to repress us is Operation Endgame, a plan that aims to deport 12 million undocumented workers out of the United States by the year 2012.

The cycle of fear and death continues and now the very same campesinos that are forced off our lands in Oaxaca, Guerrero, Chiapas, and other areas of Mexico, are here in the barrios of the United States, waking up at 4 a.m. everyday, to go pick the same crops that are shipped off around the world, making those at the top richer, while we at the bottom get poorer.

Just as our brothers and sisters, the Zapatistas, descended down from the Chiapas Lacandon Jungle on the eve of 1994 when the first phase of NAFTA was implemented, we today, fourteen years later, on this eve of 2008, in one of the oldest Mexican barrios in California , el Barrio de La Colonia, declare Ya Basta! Enough is Enough! We call on all those that stand on the side of humanity to join us and fight for justice and dignity.

We will organize for the next four months in preparation for our March for Dignity that will take place on International Workers’ Day, May 1, 2008 in Colonia Park , here in the city of Oxnard . Meet us here, march with us. If you cannot come, organize a March for Dignity in your community, wherever you are.

But as we march, we must understand that we cannot just march for one day or believe that politicians will solve our problems. We must organize ourselves. As our Zapatista sisters and brothers said in the First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, we must organize and struggle for work, land, housing, food, health care, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice and peace.

We are in the same struggle as our Chiapaneco brothers and sisters, because we are, as we said loud and clear in the Mega-Marchas of 2006 against the racist law HR-4437, One People Without Borders!

Stop NAFTA! Stop Migra-Terror!
El Pueblo Unido! Jamas Sera Vencido!
Frente Contra Las Redadas del Condado del Ventura
January 1, 2008
Chumash Peoples’ Territory

Feb 9, 2008

Then is Now

http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/socrates/ifstoneinterview.html

(This interview was originally published in The New York Times Magazine, April 8, 1979

Stone further developed his ideas about the Socrates trial and published them in his 1988 book, The Trial of Socrates

What’s the puzzle

The Athens of Socrates’s time has gone down in history as the very place where democracy and freedom of speech were born. Yet that city put Socrates, its most famous philosopher, to death. Presumably this was because it citizens did not like what he was teaching. Yet he had been teaching there all his life, unmolested. Why did they wait until he was 70, and had only a few years to live, before executing him

Why should this fascinate an old Washington muckraker like you

Because it’s a black eye for all I believe in, for democracy and free speech. Anyone who starts out to study the problem of free speech in depth – as I did after ill health forced me to give up my Weekly – is irresistibly drawn back to ancient Athens, where it all began

Isn’t that pretty far from home base, from current concerns and difficulties

Not really. All our basic problems are there in miniature. I fell in love with the Athenians and the participatory democracy they developed. Free discussion was the rule everywhere – in the Assembly, the law courts, the theatre, and the gymnasiums where they spent much of their leisure. Free speech – what the Greeks called parrhasia – was as much taken for granted as breathing

But then I was stopped, or stumped, by this contradictory and traumatic spectacle of what they did to Socrates. These people and this city, to which I look back for inspiration – how could they have condemned this philosopher to death? How could so blatant a violation of free speech occur in a city that prided itself on freedom of inquiry and expression

But why should we care at this late date

Because Plato turned the trial of his master, Socrates, into a trial of Athens and of democracy. He used it to demonstrate that the common people were too ignorant, benighted and fickle to entrust with political power. In Plato’s "Apology," the contrast drawn between the nobility of Socrates and the grim verdict of his juror-judges indicted democracy in the eyes of posterity. And thanks to his genius, no other trial except that of Jesus has so captured the imagination of Western man

Plato made Socrates the secular martyred saint of the struggle against democracy. He stigmatized it as "mobocracy." Yet this was the very same "mob" which applauded the anti-war plays of Aristophanes when Athens was fighting for its life against Sparta. (No such antiwar plays were allowed, by either side, during our last two World Wars). This was the same "mob" whose eagerness for new ideas, and its readiness to hear them, drew philosophers from all over the ancient world. It made Athens – in the proud words of Pericles – "the school of Hellas," the university of the Greek world. It is the high repute of Athens that makes the trial of Socrates so puzzling

Do we know the actual charges against Socrates

There were two charges: first, that Socrates violated the law by "refusing to do reverence to the gods recognized by the city, and introducing other new divinities," and second, by "corrupting the youth." But we do not have the text of the laws on which these charges were based, nor the specific allegations

So we do not know just what Socrates is supposed to have said or done that made him seem disrespectful of the city gods. Nor do we know what was meant by the charge of corrupting the youth. Under Athenian legal procedure such specifics were required in a preliminary complaint and hearing before a magistrate, who then decided whether the allegations and the evidence were sufficient to warrant a trial. But we have no account of this preliminary procedure, the equivalent of our grand jury

I. F. Stone

I. F. Stone AKA Isador Feinstein