Chinese Regime Developing Military to Defeat US, Says Report

By Joshua Philipp, Epoch Times

While U.S. officials continue to attempt to conduct business with the Chinese regime, behind the scenes, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is building a military intended to defeat the United States.

“It is clear that we are dealing with a military that is focused and serious about finding ways in which to defeat us should a conflict occur,” states a testimony given to the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission, by Roger Cliff of the RAND Corporation, on Jan. 27.

“Although the ongoing conflicts in Southwest Asia will rightly remain the emphasis of U.S. military resources and planning for the time being, we also need to engage in an effort to acquire the capabilities to counter those that China is acquiring that are at least as focused and systematic as those which China is engaged in,” states Cliff.

The CCP military strategy is designed to defeat a military that is superior using “anti-access” strategies. It is developing ways to disable or destroy the elements that would give the United States an upper hand on the battlefield without having to engage them directly in combat.

Ambitions are very clear when it comes to the regime’s overall goals. One report, “Global geopolitical changes and China’s strategic choices” by Li Limin, describes China’s desire to disrupt relations between the United States and Japan, control Taiwan and the South China Sea, and keep its own military strength hidden.

 

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Labor Movement in the United States

By Alice Kessler-Harris, Jewish Women's Archive

Jewish American women have played a central role in the American labor movement since the beginning of the twentieth century. As women, they brought to trade unions their sensibilities about the organizing process and encouraged labor to support government regulation to protect women in the workforce. As Jews who emerged from a left-wing cultural tradition, they nurtured a commitment to social justice, which would develop into what is often called “social unionism.” From their position as an ethnic and religious minority, as well as from their position as women, they helped to shape the direction of the mainstream labor movement.

Jewish mass immigration reached the United States just as the ready-made clothing industry hit its stride at the turn of the century—a circumstance that provided men and women with unprecedented incentives to unionize. In the Old Country, where jobs were scarce, daughters were married off as fast as possible. But many immigrant women had learned to sew in the workshops of Russian and Polish towns, and in America, where families counted on their contributions, they were expected to work. Girls sometimes immigrated as teenagers, seeking out an uncle or older sister who might help them to find a first job so that some part of their wages could be sent back to Europe. The wages of other young women helped to pay the rent, to buy food and clothing, to bring relatives to America, and to keep brothers in school. When they married, young women normally stopped working in the garment shops. But, much as in the Old Country, they were still expected to contribute to family income, sometimes by taking in clothing to sew at home.

In early twentieth-century New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and other large cities, only the exceptional unmarried woman did not operate a sewing machine in a garment factory for part of her young adult life. Factory or sweatshop work before marriage and the expectation of some form of paid labor afterward fostered a continuing set of ties to the garment industry for this first generation of urban Jewish American women, encouraging a community of understanding around its conditions and continuing support for the ever-changing stream of workers who entered it. Women who worked long hours at extraordinarily low wages, in unsanitary and unsafe working conditions, and faced continual harassment to boot, found succor in their communities and benefited from a class-conscious background.
To be sure, competitive individualism and the desire to make it in America could hinder unionization efforts. But a well-developed ethic of social justice played an equally important role, producing perhaps the most politically aware of all immigrant groups. Socialist newspapers predominated in New York’s Yiddish-speaking Lower East Side. Jews were well represented in the Socialist Party after 1901. Though their unions were weak, Jews were among the best organized of semiskilled immigrants. In the immigrant enclaves of America’s large cities, as in Europe, women benefited from the shared sense that women worked for their families, as they absorbed much of their community’s concern for social justice. This did not deflect the desire of working women to get out of the shops, but it did contribute to the urge to make life in them better.

Still, even under these circumstances, it could not have been easy for a woman to become politically active. A number of small unions dotted New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the century. There, where the boss was almost always an immigrant like oneself and sometimes a relative, and where shops were small and vulnerable, unions sprang up and flowered, or withered, as trade picked up and declined. Organized largely by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and members of a socialist umbrella organization called the United Hebrew Trades, they reflected the weakness of a labor movement rooted in an industry of poorly paid workers and undercapitalized ventures.

The men in these unions did not, at first, welcome the women, placing them in a dilemma. In order to improve their working lives, incipient activists found themselves choosing between a conservative trade union movement hostile to women in the workforce and a women’s movement whose members did not work for wages. A young and inexperienced Rose Schneiderman, for example, was turned away from the cap-makers’ union to solicit the signatures of twenty-five of her coworkers before the union would acknowledge them or provide aid. Her friend Pauline Newman recalled that when she and her friends “organized a group, we immediately called the union so that they would take the members in.” Despite the early devotion of women—despite the fact that women were often baited, beaten, and arrested on picket lines—the ILGWU insisted that women, destined for marriage, were unorganizable. Even those who managed to enter were badly treated. During the 1905 cap-makers’ strike, for example, married men got strike benefits but even women who were supporting widowed mothers and young siblings received nothing.

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IMAGINE PEACE 2011 by Yoko Ono Lennon

Dear Friends,

Today, February 18th, 2011, I am 78.

I know you are asking many questions on Twitter and elsewhere about what I am really like. It's something I would love to know, too! One day it will suddenly dawn on us …maybe.

The world situation is too urgent for us now to discuss trivial things, like what I eat for breakfast.

We are at a point in human history when we have to wake up and realize that the only people who can save the world are us.

Every hour that goes by without us doing anything about it affects us, and affects the world that we love so much.


In his State of the Union Speech, President Obama said we should do "big things." Well, we are already doing the biggest thing anybody in the human history could ever hope for.

Together, we are creating a world of Peace, Love and Freedom, all while the negative forces try their hardest to stop us.

With their power, they want to control the whole world. But we will not let them.

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Hip Hop as Resistance: Planeta Rock from the South Bronx to South America

From Toward Freedom:

In 1982 Afrika Bambaata dropped the track Planet Rock, a song that brought the words of the Bronx-based Zulu Nation to all audiences and was, as hip hop historian Jeff Chang describes it, a “hypnotic vision of one world under one groove, beyond race, poverty, sociology, and geography.” Twenty-eight years later, in 2010, Bambaata's message was alive and well in Santiago, Chile in the form of a week long Hip Hop Festival aptly named Planeta Rock. Planeta Rock celebrated all the five elements of hip hop; knowledge, break dancing, graffiti, mc'ing, and djaying. While knowledge is often the forgotten element, it was clear that at Planeta Rock it was central pillar, where commercialization has yet to influence its form and content, and the lyrics bombast the powers that be.

The festival opened with the Fiesta Zulu and a message from Afrika Bambaata, sending shout outs from the Bronx down to Santiago and all those that are following in the footsteps of the Zulu Nation. Breakdancers abounded, rocking Six Step, Zulu Spins, and Windmills. This setting could have been anywhere; the break beat pulsed throughout the crowd and hundreds of youth continued to rock it till the wee hours of the night. The political nature and uniqueness of Chilean's political hip hop scene became more apparent during a release of a book entitled From Message to Action that chronicles political hip hop in Chile. Films shown at the gathering included a smattering of graffiti, music, and break dancing videos from Latin America that were juxtaposed among short political documentaries highlighting land occupations throughout Chile, the plight of political prisoners and the struggles of the indigenous Mapuche people.

At a similar film event at Planeta Rock, a highlight of the night was the music video 1500 días, which held a match to all the false campaign promises of the presidential candidates. Just the week before this gathering, the right-wing candidate and media mogul Sebastian Piñera had won the elections. The song lays into the neoliberal policies that all the presidential candidates have pushed, proclaiming that they won't participate in the elections of the rich, and that the 1500 days between elections should serve as 1500 days of organizing and struggle. In a country where 40% of the population is not even registered to vote, these lyrics have widespread resonance.

In Chile, as in many parts of the world, hip hop is its own form of independent media – the people's resistance to the right-wing controlled media. Regarding this, Dj Erko, one of the organizers of Planeta Rock 2011 referenced a quote by old school NY political group Public Enemy “As Chuck D said, rap is the CNN of black folks. In our cases it’s the CNN of the neighborhood, the barrio of the oppressed. Hip Hop has had the capacity to be a tool of contra-information, propaganda, education and knowledge.”

In 2011 rappers Subverso and Portavoz, who wrote 1500 days, have taken their political critique to the next level with the project, Memoria Rebelde, or Rebel Memory, which seeks to teach Chilean history through hip hop and multimedia. Portavoz says the inspiration for this project goes back to the origins of hip hop. “In the Bronx, Harlem or whichever ghetto, there were many Latin American immigrants and black people who used hip hop to denounce what was happening and also as a way to share their experiences as black people, as immigrants, and as oppressed people. We are trying to rescue this form of popular education and use rap as a powerful tool to tell the story of our people.” They released a Memoria Rebelde video at Planeta Rock declaring their refusal to celebrate Chile's bicentennial while thousands of people continue to be oppressed. They also pointed out the government’s hypocrisy of celebrating the rescue of 33 miners who had been trapped when the country’s history is stained with massacres of miners organizing for workers rights. Subverso says they wrote the song so that people can “recognize the true history of our land and its people” and thank all the “true historians of the people who have been illuminating the dark corners where the poor have struggled to forge their own project of liberation.”

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Babes, booze and Buddhism

Film explores the atypical lifestyle of Naropa founder

By Adam Perry, Boulder Weekly

Of all the films featured at the 2011 Boulder International Film Festival, the most Boulder-centric is Crazy Wisdom. The 90-minute documentary is Los Angeles filmmaker Johanna Demetrakas’ stunning tribute to the late Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the Tibetan Buddhist who founded Naropa University in 1974. Demetrakas will be on hand for a Q-and-A after the BIFF screening of Crazy Wisdom,which sadly, for such a profound (and profoundly Boulder-related) film, is occurring at 2:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 18, at the First United Methodist Church, rather than enjoying prime-time billing at the Boulder Theater.

Demetrakas, who teaches at the University of Southern California in addition to directing both dramatic and documentary films, met Trungpa in 1971 and kept in touch until his death in 1987. Subsequently, Demetrakas — through four-and-a-half years of active filmmaking and five years of research — was able to capture perhaps the first truly intimate and honest picture of Trungpa’s controversial life.

Watching Crazy Wisdom in Boulder recently with a gathering of current and former Naropa students, it was obvious that Demetrakas succeeded in not only delineating Trungpa’s fascinating escape from Chinese tyranny in Tibet and the meat of his “Shambhala” vision — a peaceful, mindful community amid a dangerously chaotic world — but also what it was like to know “the bad boy of Buddhism” personally. For Naropa students, who are fed a PC version of Trungpa’s life — which notoriously included excessive drinking and sex — Demetrakas’ unflinching portrayal of her former spiritual guide is refreshing.

“The film was not so much about his teachings as it was about him,” she says. “One of the directions that I made to myself was that I wanted to make a film where my audience gets to experience his mind, even a glimpse. I feel like if you experience that, if you go through your own changes, questioning him, questioning his life, questioning where Naropa’s at right now or whatever …  you go beyond that and just be there. I wanted you to experience what being around him was for me. So I hope I got that done a little bit.”

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