“Yeah, I support my troops, They wave Black Flags, They wear Black Masks”… Tom Morollo
When the Battle of Seattle happened in 1999 I didn’t get it.
Back then I mistook “globalization” for internationalism and failed to realize how “free trade” pitted the workers of the world against each other in a race to the bottom. Free trade means the rich elites are free to look for the lowest paid labor any place in the world and in doing that maximize the surplus value created between the cost of labor to produce and the price of the end product.
Suddenly Marx’s master piece “Capital” starts looking like the most important difficult book one might ever read.
Particularly when the middle class is being destroyed by this new economic world order where the few at the top control the vast bulk of the wealth while leaving those in the ever growing bottom 80% with an ever shrinking fraction of that wealth.
The new “service economy” is an awful lot like a servant economy where well paying technical and manufacturing jobs are being replaced by retail jobs.
In a free trade economy those who were subject to discrimination based on class, race, ethnicity, sex, sexuality, gender/gender identity/presentation find their grasp on economic survival reduced from tenuous to increasingly marginal. All the while the police state grows insuring that the rich elite will never face a 1917.
“Land and Freedom”…
“Bread and Roses”…
Social Justice and Human Rights. Housing, access to medical care, access to education and decent meaningful employment where ones livelihood is not subject to the constant threat of layoffs, where ones living space is not subject to daily threats of foreclosure and eviction.
It took a while for me to see through all the bullshit that the politicians of both parties were peddling and that the MSM was shoving down our throats.
But I’m fairly bright and I was both SDS and Weather Nation so I still don’t need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows. All I needed was the information and being left alone to study it and evaluate the situation.
I came around and now I too can say…
Yeah… I support my troops… They wave Black Flags… They wear Black Masks
Women Born Transsexual 
June 27, 2010 at 3:34 pm
There are troops, of various kinds… the Taliban wear black masks and would have us all in Burkhas or dead.
GRS… well, people complain about it, but what does it take? A skilled surgeon, and skill can’t be bought only learned, and a sympathetic nursing team, likewise sympathy can’t be bought. So the cost is not too high, only the economy makes it so.
June 27, 2010 at 5:33 pm
The Black Bloc are Anarchists The Taliban are Republicans
June 27, 2010 at 4:40 pm
As a Canadian, I’m ashamed of the violence, less on the part of the Black Bloc, than on the part of the Integrated Security Unit.
Our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is known here for confrontation as his preferred political option–and his decision to have the G20 in downtown Toronto, and spending more than a BILLION dollars on security costs, an alltime record, only leads to the inevitability of today and yesterday.
I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto, the place where the police raided a graduate residence, early in the morning, to haul out those they suspected of compromising the safety of the residents of Toronto, barefoot, like the way Argentine security forces did to their students, many of whom disappeared.
The emphasis of the G20, another Harper victory, on reducing each country’s debt and deficit, will only magnify the suffering of all those not privileged enough to escape the contraction of the middle class. I know many Americans will perversely accept this reduction of their lives and that of their children, even as Pete Peterson and his America Speaks townhalls this very weekend are trying to propagandize..
All of those/us who are marginalized due to the characteristics you have itemized, Suzan, will suffer.
This was foretold in the Port Huron Declaration, among so many other statements, recent and historic.
Not being SDS or Weather Nation, I still don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows; I’m so glad so many, and so many young people, also know.