Donle’s Daily Dispatches

Volume 1 Issue 158             Today’s News and Views         Sunday, June 4, 2006

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Update of US Casualties in Iraq: 2475

Update of US Casualties in Afghanistan: 296

Figures provided by

the Iraq Coalition Causality website

For Immediate Release                                                                                                June 3, 2006

2500 American Deaths in Iraq are Near:

We say, “Not one more.” Call for Peace Now.

Press Contacts:

Harold P. Donle, Veterans for Peace, Inc. #49, hdonle@insightbb.com 317/698-2450.

Heather Allen-Garde, Hoosiers for Peace, heather@hoosiersforpeace.org, 317/202-9302.

Jim Wolfe, Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center, jwolfe@butler.edu, 317/255-3857.

Members of Veterans for Peace, Chapter 49, Hoosiers for Peace and the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center are asking Indiana citizens to assemble on Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis on the day that the 2500^th American is reported killed to mark this tragic occurrence. The target date at the current rate of KIAs is on or about Wednesday, June 14^th, eleven (11) days from today.

This action is to honor the soldiers who have lost their lives in Iraq and their families, and to give our fellow Indiana citizens a visual representation of what 2500 looks like. We are against war because it kills our family members, wreaks havoc on our national treasury, makes the world a more dangerous place, and psychically damages our humanity.

Hundreds of Hoosiers have been invited to participate in this event that will combine an installation of 2500 flags to honor the dead and a memorial ceremony to call for an end to war. If the number is reached on a weekday (Mon.- Fri.) the group will gather at 6 P.M and if the number is reached on a weekend the group will gather at 4 P.M. at Veterans Memorial Plaza  in downtown Indianapolis. (The Plaza is bounded by Michigan to the south, Meridian to the west, North Street to the north, and Pennsylvania to the west.) At that time, the assembled will a field of flags on Veterans Memorial Plaza. The group will reserve 64 flags to represent the Hoosiers that have been lost in Iraq and they will plant those 64 flags around the base of the obelisk. There will be a period of brief remarks and a memorial ceremony in closing.

For more information contact Harold Donle at (317)698-2450.

Support Our Troops

IMPEACH Bush/Cheney

Hoosiers for Peace requests the honor of your presence…

What: Share Sunday Gravy with Local Progressives at Pasta for Peace. Good Food, Stimulating Conversation, Inspirational Music, Film, and Art and a Silent Auction. Did we mention the pasta was shaped like peace signs? To reserve your seat, call 202-9302 or e-mail heather@hoosiersforpeace.org. Seats are limited and going fast.

When: June 25, 2006 from 1 to 4 p.m. (with dinner at 2 p.m.)

Where: Indianapolis Peace and Learning Center (6040 DeLong Rd.) in Eagle Creek Park.

Why:  Now is the time to spread the word to mainstream America to unite and stand up for peace. Hoosiers for Peace is sponsoring a statewide advertising campaign, which is focused on uniting the community to call for peace. This campaign will cost $14,000. This money will be used to pay for a full-page ad in the Indianapolis Star to ask more than 700,000 Hoosiers to call for peace. To find out more visit www.hoosiersforpeace.org

Cost: Adults $20, Children 5-12 $7, Children under 5 eat free. All proceeds will go towards the advertising campaign. Seats are limited, contact Heather for tickets today: 202-9302 or e-mail heather@hoosiersforpeace.org.

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal. 
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

May 7, 2006

Dear Peacemakers,

Will you help to spread and encourage peace? With a record number of American soldiers dying in April 2006 and possible military action against Iran becoming daily news, now is the time to spread the word to mainstream America to unite and stand up for peace.

Hoosiers for Peace is sponsoring a statewide advertising campaign, which is focused on uniting the community to call for peace. This campaign will cost $14,000. This money will be used to pay for a full-page ad in the Indianapolis Star to ask more than 700,000 Hoosiers to call for peace. We are contacting dozens of organizations to make a proposal to form a coalition to raise funds and send a collaborative message to Hoosiers to Call for Peace. The message is: Call your friends, your family, and your representatives and ask them to support the Call for Peace.

Like most Americans, we oppose war based on the following, which will be reflected in the advertisement:

A.    War Kills. More than 2,400 American Soldiers have died and nearly 1,000 Hoosier soldiers are in harms way.

B.    War depletes our resources. Billions of dollars are going to sustain war efforts while ordinary citizens struggle for social services.

C.    War will not make us secure. Studies have shown that the U.S. is no more secure today than it was before 911.

Hoosiers for Peace, a website sponsored by Progressive Indiana, requests your support to make this advertisement a success. We will use the advertisement to call for peace. Each group in the coalition  working on this project will be listed in the ad. Each group will be asked to raise $1000 by October 1, 2006. Below are some suggestions for fundraising:

1.                Letter Writing Campaign: Contact your family and friends and ask them to support this call for peace. Tell them how many people we can reach and ask them to make a generous donation and spread the word. You may collect the money through your organization or you may refer them to Progressive Indiana. Donations may be sent through our secure online giving by going to www.progressiveindiana.org and click on donate now or log onto www.hoosiersforpeace and click on donate now. Checks may also be made payable to Progressive Indiana and mailed to:

                Progressive Indiana

                P.O. Box 55253

                Indianapolis, Indiana 46205-0253

2.                Host a house party. Go grassroots and organize a pasta dinner or backyard barbecue and ask for a donation from each guest. Play poker and donate half of each pot to the campaign for peace. Have a bake sale through your church or place of employment.

3.                Plan a small event.  Invite your community to an event and ask for donations for the ad. Small concerts, speakers, and socials are some ideas for these events. Get creative and network!

We need at least 14 groups to join the coalition and many more people to join the campaign to help fill in possible gaps. If we join together we can make this happen and we can bring Hoosiers together through this ad. As we Honor the Dead, Heal the Wounded, and call for an End to the War we can stand united for peace. We can make a difference by showing ordinary Hoosiers that there are many people like them working for peace. Please contact us as soon as possible if you would like to participate in this campaign. With a little work and collaboration we can make a large impact on our community.

In Peace,

Heather Allen-Garde

Director, Hoosiers For Peace

heather@hooisersforpeace.org

heatherreneeallen@yahoo.com

317/202-9302

It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it – Eleanor Roosevelt

David Korten

Butler University

June 26, 2006

7pm

Reilley Room

Atherton Hall

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Today's News and Views

At the beginning of the 20th century, a young and vi­brant socialist movement anticipated decades of greatadvances on the road to a world free from capitalist exploitation—a socialist society built on the enduring principles of equality, justice and solidarity among peoples. At the end of the 20th century, such hope and vision seem all but lost.

The unbridled power of transnational corporations, under­written by the major capitalist nations, has created a world economy where the wealth and power of a few is coupled with insecurity and downward mobility for the vast majority of work­ing people—in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. Traditional left prescriptions have failed on both sides of the Communist/socialist divide. Global economic integration has ren­dered obsolete both the social democratic solution of indepen­dent national economies sustaining a strong social welfare state and the Communist solution of state-owned national economies fostering social development.

The globalization of capital requires a renewed vision and tactics. But the essence of the socialist vision—that people can freely and democratically control their community and society— remains central to the movement for radical democracy. Those who see the collapse of communist regimes, for which the rhetoric of socialism became a cover for authoritarian rule, as proof that capitalism is the foundation of democracy, commit fraud on his­tory. The struggle for mass democracy has always been led by the excluded—workers, minorities, and women. The wealthy al­most never join in unless their own economic freedom appears at stake. The equation of capitalism with democracy cannot sur­vive scrutiny in a world where untrammeled capitalism means unrelenting poverty, disease, and unemployment.

Today, powerful corporate and political elites tell us that environmental standards are too high, unemployment is too low, and workers earn too much for America to prosper in the next century. Their vision is too close for comfort: inequality of wealth and income has grown worse in the last 15 years: one percent of America now owns 60 percent of our wealth, up from 50 per­cent before Ronald Reagan became president. Nearly three de­cades after the “War on Poverty” was declared and then quickly abandoned, one-fifth of our society subsists in poverty, living in substandard housing, attending under-funded, overcrowded schools, and receiving inadequate health care.

In the global capitalist economy, these injustices are mag­nified a thousand-fold. The poorest third of humanity earns two percent of the world’s income, while the richest fifth receives two-thirds of global income. And while every middle class house­hold in the developed world aims to own a personal computer, millions elsewhere are forever hungry. Such injustice is not a force of nature, but the logical outcome of the economic domi­nance of transnational corporations backed by the dominant capi­talist governments.

DSA has been in the forefront of this necessary reevalua­tion of Left strategy and program. For five years, DSA has been engaged in a thoroughgoing discussion of a renewed mission and vision for today’s world. No old assumption has been too sacred to be scrutinized, and no new idea has been too provoca­tive to be easily dismissed. Since DSA is a pluralist organiza­tion, no single document can adequately and equally reflect our diverse perspectives. But, at the end of our five-year evaluation, we have established a political center of gravity to ground these diverse views. This is where we stand:

We are socialists because we reject an international eco­nomic order sustained by private profit, alienated labor, race and gender discrimination, environmental destruction, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo.

We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane international social order based both on democratic planning and market mechanisms to achieve equitable distribution of re­sources, meaningful work, a healthy environment, sustainable growth, gender and racial equality, and non-oppressive relation­ships.

A democratic socialist politics for the 21st century must promote an international solidarity dedi­cated to raising living standards across the globe, rather than “lev­eling down” in the name of maximizing profits and economic effi­ciency. Equality, solidar­ity, and democracy can only be achieved through international political and social co­operation aimed at ensuring that economic institutions benefit all people.

Democratic socialists are dedicated to building truly inter­national social movements—of unionists, environmentalists,  feminists, and people of color -that together can elevate global justice over brutalizing global competition.

Gender and sexuality. Our conception of socialism is also deeply feminist and anti-racist. We are committed to full equality for women in all spheres of life, in a world without prescribed sex roles that channel women into subordinate positions at home and at work. We seek a world that no longer oppresses women through under valuation of their work, lack of political representation, the inability to control their own fertility, denial of their sexuality, or violence and abuse. Gender equality requires great changes in social attitudes, in economic and social structures, and in relationships between men and women and adults and children. The socialist society we seek to create will not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. It will value sexuality and all sexual relationships—gay, lesbian, heterosexual—based on mutual respect and the enhancement of human dignity.

Racial equality. Our concept of socialism is forthrightly anti-racist. After more than 350 years, racism is deeply ingrained in our country’s institutions, social patterns, consciousness, and even social movements. The postwar civil rights movement broke the back of segregation and renewed the struggle against its consequences, bringing to the left in America a new moral vision and a more developed understanding of the importance of community, institutional networks, and popular symbols in shaping a political movement. To be genuinely multiracial, a so­cialist movement must respect the particular goals of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans and other communities of color. It must place a high priority on eco­nomic justice to eradicate the sources of inequality; on affirma­tive action and other compensatory programs to overcome on­going discrimination and the legacy of inequality; and on social justice to change the behavior, attitudes, and ideas that foster racism.

Democratic community. Democratic socialists recognize that for individuals to flourish, a society must be grounded in the moral values and institutions of a democratic community that provides quality education and job training, social services, and meaningful work for all. Leaving the provision of such com­mon needs to the private marketplace guarantees a starkly in­egalitarian class system of access to opportunity.

Democratic socialists are committed to political institutions based on one voice, one vote, and to the elimination of the per­nicious and corrupting influence of corporate money from pub­lic political deliberation. Socialist democracy fosters popular participation at every level of decision-making. In an age when global communications technologies are within the reach of hun­dreds of millions of people, such a commitment means equal access to information, increased democratic - and not corporate - control over public policy, and decentralized, democratic insti­tutions wherever possible in workplaces, neighborhoods, and schools.

Liberty

A democratic commitment to a vibrant pluralist life as­sumes the need for a democratic, responsive, and representative government to regulate the market, protect the environment, and ensure a basic level of equality and equity for each citizen. In the 21st century, such regulation will increasingly occur through international, multilateral action. But while a democratic state can protect individuals from domination by inordinately power­ful, undemocratic transnational corporations, people develop the social bonds that render life meaningful only through coop­erative, voluntary relationships. Promoting such bonds is the responsibility of socialists and government alike. Democratic socialism is committed both to a freedom of speech that does not recoil from dissent and to the freedom to organize indepen­dent trade unions, women’s groups, political parties, and other social movements. We are committed to a freedom of religion

and conscience that acknowledges the rights of those for whom spiritual concerns are central and the rights of those who reject organized religion. Control of economic, social, and cultural life by either government or corporate elites is hostile to the vision of democratic pluralism embraced by democratic socialism. The social welfare programs of government have been for the most part positive, if partial, responses to the genuine social needs of the great majority of Americans. The dismantling of such pro­grams by conservative and corporate elites in the absence of any alternatives will be disastrous. Abandoning schools, health care, and housing, for example, to the control of an unregulated free market magnifies the existing harsh realities of inequality and injustice.

Democratic Control of Productive and Social Life

The Capitalist Marketplace

As democratic socialists we are committed to ensuring that any market is the servant of the public good and not its master. Liberty, equality, and solidarity will require not only democratic control over economic life, but also a progressively financed, decentralized, and quality public sector. Free markets or private charity cannot provide adequate public goods and services.

Transnational corporate domination does not result merely from the operation of a pure market, but from conscious govern­ment actions, from tax policy to deregulation, that structure the economy in the interest of corporate power. The capitalist mar­ket economy not only suppresses global living standards but also leads to chronic underfunding of socially necessary public goods, from research and development to preventive health care and job training.

The market and its ideology are rife with internal contra­dictions. While capitalists abhor public planning as inefficient and counterproductive, transnational corporations make deci­sions with tremendous social consequences, including automa­tion, plant shutdowns and relocations, mergers and acquisitions, new investment and disinvestment—all without democratic in­put. They also engage in unrelenting efforts to control the mar­ket, even through illegal means such as price fixing, antitrust violations, and other forms of collusion.

In the workplace, capitalism eschews democracy. Individual employees do not negotiate the terms of their employment, ex­cept in rare circumstances when their labor is very highly skilled. Without unions, employees are hired and fired at will. Corpora­tions govern through hierarchical power relations more charac­teristic of monopolies than of free markets. Simply put, the domi­nation of the economy by privately owned corporation is not the most rational and equitable way to govern our economic life.

Vision of a Socialist Economy

The operation of a democratic socialist economy is the sub­ject of continuing debate within DSA. First it must mirror demo­cratic socialism’s commitment to institutional and social plural­ism. Democratic, representative control over fiscal, monetary, and trade policy would enable citizens to have a voice in setting the basic framework of economic policy—what social invest­ment is needed, who should own or control basic industries, and how they might be governed.

While broad investment decisions and fiscal and monetary policies are best made by democratic processes, many argue that the market best coordinates supply with demand for goods, ser­vices, and labor. Regulated markets can guarantee efficiency, consumer choice and labor mobility. However, democratic so­cialists recognize that market mechanisms do generate inequali­ties of wealth and income. But, the social ownership character­istic of a socialist society will greatly limit inequality. In fact, widespread worker and public ownership will greatly lessen the corrosive effect of capitalists markets on people’s lives. Social need will outrank narrow profitability as the measure of success for our economic life.

Interactions of Economy and Society

Democratic socialists are committed to the development of social movements dedicated to ending any and all forms of non­economic domination. As activists within these movements, with a visible socialist identity, we bring an analysis of how the glo­balization of capital influences racism, sexism, homophobia, and environmental degradation.

Economic democracy alone cannot end the domination of some over others, but it is a prerequisite, especially given how global capital uses racial, national, and gender divisions to di­vide the world’s work force. Yet traditional assumptions about the universal nature of the working class no longer adequately describe who will fight for a radical democracy. People identify with the fight for social justice in many ways. As socialists within the social movements, we bring a vision and politics that argues for the democratic control of transnational corporate power as a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for racial, gender, and economic justice.

Racism, sexism, xenophobia, and resentment of the poor are exacerbated by economic insecurity. Those threatened by economic restructuring and decline may view less privileged people as competitors or even enemies. For example, some have caricatured affirmative action as a system of strict racial quotas and preferences, ensuring jobs for the non-qualified, rather than as a largely successful effort to open up the job market to women and people of color excluded by existing, often prejudicial, meth­ods of recruitment and hiring. Racism, sexism, and homophobia are not the only forms of oppression that both predate capital­ism and are continually transformed by it. The persistence of anti-Semitism, for example, has no single explanation. Discrimi­nation based on age is prevalent and affects both young and old. Discrimination occurs in a myriad of forms, and a socialist soci­ety must eradicate all of them.

Ending environmental degradation and building a sustain­able world—meeting today’s needs without jeopardizing future generations—require new ways of thinking about socialism as well. The depletion of nonrenewable resources and the pollu­tion of our air and water argue for both regulatory protection and reforming market incentives in order to reverse corporate and individual behavior. The victims of pollution are most often people of color and lower income communities. Environmental protection and environmental justice must be part of a demo­cratic socialist agenda.

Social movements have helped democratic socialists to shape a broader perspective of socialism—one that recognizes that economic change is a necessary, but not sufficient condi­tion, for justice. They have guided us toward a deeper pluralist vision of socialism as the humanizing of relationships between men and women, between whites and people of color, and be­tween all of us and the environment.

The Global Economy, Global Politics and the State

The last decade has witnessed massive shifts in global poli­tics and the global economy. These changes have shaped and been shaped by technological change, a new awareness of humanity’s connection to our environment, an increasing recog­nition of the intersection between economics, environment and gender equality; changes in the role of the state and of capital; and much more. Yet the outcome—increasing accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a few, despoliation of the envi­ronment, and individual isolation and alienation, versus enhanced quality of life, sustainable development and strengthened com­munities—remains to be seen.

The Global Economy

In the emerging global capitalist economy, the controlling economic institutions—the transnational corporations—have integrated financing, production, distribution and consumption on a vast scale. They now have the capacity to function as “stateless” institutions, relatively independent of any particular national economy.

National governments, even in Western Europe and North America, have ever more difficulty controlling capital, currency flows, and investment while defending the living standards of working people. The result is that the ma­jority of wage and income earners in the advanced capi­talist nations are now experiencing a long-term leveling down of wages and living conditions tanta­mount to a gradual impoverishment of this vast working class. The extent of impoverishment is in dispute, but many econo­mists now believe that only one-fifth of the population is rising in affluence, while the rest are suffering a gradual or abrupt ero­sion of their living standards.

Through globalization, capital eludes governmental regu­lation. The movement of capital across borders, unlike the move­ment of labor, is all but unrestricted. Indeed, under the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agree­ment, laws protecting the rights of workers can be deemed a barrier to free trade.

Trade is only one aspect of the global economy. Develop­ment fostered by the World Bank and the International Mon­etary Fund has encouraged strategies modeled on the North— resource and capital-intensive—with little regard for indigenous communities or environments. The end result has too often been enrichment of a wealthy few and increased poverty and environ­mental hazards for many. Emphasis on industrial agriculture and cash crops for example, has resulted in the destruction of rain forests and in desertification in some regions.

International development efforts usually ignore indigenous small-scale farming and community development as nonproduc­tive because they fail to generate large amounts of cash, even as they improve living standards. Since such activity is usually the province of women, its displacement has also led to a decline in

women’s position. Today advocates of sustainable and just development recog­nize the important connection of envi­ronmental protec­tion, eradication of poverty, and gender equity.

Global Politics

US dominance of the global economy is buttressed by its political power and military might. Indeed, the United States is engaged in a long-term policy of imperial overreach in a period in which global instability will probably increase. Elements of this instability include national, ethnic and religious conflicts; economic decline and stagnation of subordinate capitalist na­tions; trade rivalries among advanced capitalist nations; and environmental degradation imperiling the quality of life.

Fifty years of world leadership have taken their toll on the US. The links among heavy military spending, fiscal imbalance, and a weakening economy are too clear to ignore. Domestically, the United States faces social and structural economic problems of a magnitude unknown to other advanced capitalist states. The resources needed to sustain US dominance are a drain on the national economy, particularly the most neglected and underde­veloped sectors. Nowhere is a struggle against militarism more pressing than in the United States, where the military budget bleeds the public sector of much needed funds for social programs.

No country, even a superpower like the United States, can guarantee peace and stability, never mind justice. Only a genu­inely multinational armed force can intervene in violent con­flicts to enforce generally accepted standards of human rights and democratic practices.

Such peacekeeping is one important function that must be strengthened within a new global governance. Enforcement of international standards is another. Treaties on human rights, in­ternational labor standards, women’s rights, and environmental protection have all been ratified by many nations (albeit gener­ally not by the US). Enforcement remains problematic. New in­ternational regulatory bodies must ensure that the interests of all the world’s people are protected with the power to tax transnational corporations that can now escape national taxes.

A Strategy for the Next Left

Socialists have historically supported public ownership and control of the major economic institutions of society—the large corporations—in order to eliminate the injustice and inequality of a class-based society, and have depended on the organiza­tion of a working class party to gain state power to achieve such ends. In the United States, socialists joined with others on the Left to build a broad-based, anti-corporate coalition, with the unions at the center, to address the needs of the majority by opposing the excesses of private enterprise. Many socialists have seen the Democratic Party, since at least the New Deal, as the key political arena in which to consolidate this coalition, because the Democratic Party held the allegiance of our natural allies. Through control of the government by the Democratic Party coalition, led by anti-corporate forces, a progressive pro­gram regulating the corporations, redistributing income, foster­ing economic growth and expanding social programs could be realized.

With the end of the post-World War II economic boom and the rise of global economic competitors in East Asia and Europe in the 1970s came the demise of the brief majoritarian moment of this progressive coalition that promised—but did not deliver— economic and social justice for all. A vicious corporate assault on the trade union movement and a right-wing racist, populist appeal to downwardly mobile, disgruntled white blue-collar workers contributed to the disintegration of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in the 1970s and 1980s.

Today, the mildly redistributive welfare state liberalism of the 1960s, which accepted the corporate dominance of economic decision-making, can no longer be the programmatic basis for a majoritarian progressive politics. New Deal and Great Society liberalism depended upon redistribution at the margins of an ever-expanding economic pie. But today corporations no longer aspire to expand production and consumption by raising global living standards; rather, global capital engages in a race to in­crease profits by “downsizing” and lowering wages.

With the collapse of the political economy of corporate liberalism came the atrophy of the very institutions upon which the progressive politics of the New Deal and Great Society had been constructed. No longer do the social bases for a majoritarian democratic politics—strong trade unions, social movements and urban, Democratic political machines—simply await mobiliza­tion by a proper electoral appeal. Rather, a next left must be built from the grassroots up.

Given the globalization of economic power, such grassroots movements will increasingly focus upon building a countervailing power to that of the transnational corporations. A number of positive signs of this democratic and grassroots realignment have emerged. New labor leadership has pledged to organize a workforce increasingly constituted by women, people of color, and immigrant workers. Inner-city grassroots community orga­nizations are placing reinvestment, job creation, and economic democracy at the heart of their organizing. The women’s move­ment increasingly argues that only by restructuring work and childcare can true gender equality be realized. And the fight for national health care—a modest reform long provided by all other industrial democracies—united a broad coalition of activists and constituencies.

But such movements cannot be solely national in scope. Rather, today’s social movements must be as global as the cor­porate power they confront; they must cooperate across national boundaries and promote democratic regulation of transnational capital.

If socialism cannot be achieved primarily from above, through a democratic government that owns, control and regu­lates the major corporations, then it must emerge from below, through a democratic transformation of the institutions of civil society, particularly those in the economic sphere—in other words, a program for economic democracy.

As inequalities of wealth and income increase and the wages and living standards of most are stagnant or falling, social needs expand. Only a revitalized public sector can universally and democratically meet those needs.

Economic Democracy. Economic democracy can empower wage and income earners through building cooperative and public institutions that own and control local economic resources. Eco­nomic democracy means, in the most general terms, the direct ownership and/or control of much of the economic resources of society by the great majority of wage and income earners. Such a transformation of work life directly embodies and presages the practices and principles of a socialist society.

Alternative economic institutions, such as cooperatives and consumer, community, and worker-owned facilities are central to economic democracy. Equally important is t