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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/opinion/12rich.html?em

She Broke the G.O.P. and Now She Owns It

SARAH PALIN and Al Sharpton don’t ordinarily have much in common, but they achieved a rare harmonic convergence at Michael Jackson’s memorial service. When Sharpton told the singer’s children it was their daddy’s adversaries, not their daddy, who were “strange,” he was channeling the pugnacious argument the Alaska governor had made the week before. There was nothing strange abouther decision to quit in midterm, Palin told America. What’s strange — or “insane,” in her lingo — are the critics who dare question her erratic behavior on the national stage.

Sharpton’s bashing of Jackson’s naysayers received the biggest ovation of the entire show. Palin’s combative resignation soliloquy, though much mocked by prognosticators of all political persuasions, has an equally vociferous and more powerful constituency. In the aftermath of her decision to drop out and cash in, Palin’s standing in the G.O.P. actually rose in the USA Today/Gallup poll. No less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for her for president. That overwhelming majority isn’t just the “base” of the Republican Party that liberals and conservatives alike tend to ghettoize as a rump backwater minority. It is the party, or pretty much what remains of it in the Barack Obama era.

That’s why Palin won’t go gently into the good night, much as some Republicans in Washington might wish. She is not just the party’s biggest star and most charismatic television performer; she is its only star and charismatic performer. Most important, she stands for a genuine movement: a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind. Palin gives this movement a major party brand and political plausibility that its open-throated media auxiliary, exemplified by Glenn Beck, cannot. She loves the spotlight, can raise millions of dollars and has no discernible reason to go fishing now except for self-promotional photo ops.

The essence of Palinism is emotional, not ideological. Yes, she is of the religious right, even if she winks literally and figuratively at her own daughter’s flagrant disregard of abstinence and marriage. But family-values politics, now more devalued than the dollar by the philandering of ostentatiously Christian Republican politicians, can only take her so far. The real wave she’s riding is a loud, resonant surge of resentment and victimization that’s larger than issues like abortion and gay civil rights.

That resentment is in part about race, of course. When Palin referred to Alaska as “a microcosm of America” during the 2008 campaign, it was in defiance of the statistical reality that her state’s tiny black and Hispanic populations are unrepresentative of her nation. She stood for the “real America,” she insisted, and the identity of the unreal America didn’t have to be stated explicitly for audiences to catch her drift. Her convention speech’s signature line was a deftly coded putdown of her presumably shiftless big-city opponent: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” (Funny how this wisdom has been forgotten by her supporters now that she has abandoned her own actual responsibilities in public office.)

The latest flashpoint for this kind of animus is the near-certain elevation to the Supreme Court of Sonia Sotomayor, whose Senate confirmation hearings arrive this week. Prominent Palinists were fast to demean Sotomayor as a dim-witted affirmative-action baby. Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard, the Palinist hymnal, labeled Sotomayor “not the smartest” and suggested that Princeton awards academic honors on a curve. Karl Rove said, “I’m not really certain how intellectually strong she would be.” Those maligning the long and accomplished career of an Ivy League-educated judge do believe in affirmative-action — but only for white people like Palin, whom they boosted for vice president despite her minimal achievements and knowledge of policy, the written word or even geography.

The politics of resentment are impervious to facts. Palinists regard their star as an icon of working-class America even though the Palins’ combined reported income ($211,000) puts them in the top 3.6 percent of American households. They see her as a champion of conservative fiscal principles even though she said yes to the Bridge to Nowhere and presided over a state that ranks No.1 in federal pork.

Nowhere is the power of resentment to trump reason more flagrantly illustrated than in the incessant complaint by Palin and her troops that she is victimized by a double standard in the “mainstream media.” In truth, the commentators at ABC, NBC and CNN — often the same ones who judged Michelle Obama a drag on her husband — all tried to outdo each other in praise for Palin when she emerged at the Republican convention 10 months ago. Even now, the so-called mainstream media can grade Palin on a curve: at MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last week, Palin’s self-proclaimed representation of the “real America” was accepted as a given, as if white rural America actually still was the nation’s baseline.

The Palinists’ bogus beefs about double standards reached farcical proportions at Fox News on the sleepy pre-Fourth Friday afternoon when word of her abdication hit the East. The fill-in anchor demanded that his token Democratic stooge name another female politician who had suffered such “disgraceful attacks” as Palin. When the obvious answer arrived — Hillary Clinton — the Fox host angrily protested that Clinton had never been attacked in “a sexual way” or “about her children.”

Americans have short memories, but it’s hardly ancient history that conservative magazines portrayed Hillary Clinton as both a dominatrix cracking a whip and a broomstick-riding witch. Or that Rush Limbaugh held up a picture of Chelsea Clinton on television to identify the “White House dog.” Or that Palin’s running mate, John McCain, told a sexual joke linking Hillary and Chelsea and Janet Reno. Yet the same conservative commentariat that vilified both Clintons 24/7 now whines that Palin is receiving “the kind of mauling” that the media “always reserve for conservative Republicans.” So said The Wall Street Journal editorial page last week. You’d never guess that The Journal had published six innuendo-laden books on real and imagined Clinton scandals, or that the Clintons had been a leading target of both Letterman and Leno monologues, not to mention many liberal editorial pages (including that of The Times), for much of a decade.

Those Republicans who have not drunk the Palin Kool-Aid are apocalyptic for good reason. She could well be their last presidential candidate standing. Such would-be competitors as Mark Sanford, John Ensign and Newt Gingrich are too carnally compromised for the un-Clinton party. Mike Huckabee is Palin-lite. Tim Pawlenty, Bobby Jindal — really? That leaves the charisma-challenged Mitt Romney, precisely the kind of card-carrying Ivy League elitist Palinists loathe, no matter how hard he tries to cosmetically alter his history as a socially liberal fat-cat banker. Palin would crush him like a bug. She has the Teflon-coated stature among Republicans that Romney can only fantasize about.

Were Palin actually to secure the 2012 nomination, the result would be a fiasco for the G.O.P. akin to Goldwater 1964, as the most relentless conservative Palin critic, David Frum, has predicted. Or would it? No one thought Richard Nixon — a far less personable commodity than Palin — would come back either after his sour-grapes “last press conference” of 1962. But Democratic divisions and failures gave him his opportunity in 1968. With unemployment approaching 10 percent and a seemingly bottomless war in Afghanistan, you never know, as Palin likes to say, what doors might open.

It’s more likely that she will never get anywhere near the White House, and not just because of her own limitations. The Palinist “real America” is demographically doomed to keep shrinking. But the emotion it represents is disproportionately powerful for its numbers. It’s an anger that Palin enjoyed stoking during her “palling around with terrorists” crusade against Obama on the campaign trail. It’s an anger that’s curdled into self-martyrdom since Inauguration Day.

Its voice can be found in the postings at a Web site maintained by the fans of Mark Levin, the Obama hater who is, at this writing, the No.2 best-selling hardcover nonfiction writer in America. (Glenn Beck is No.1 in paperback nonfiction.) Politico surveyed them last week. “Bottomline, do you know of any way we can remove these idiots before this country goes down the crapper?” wrote one Levin fan. “I WILL HELP!!! Should I buy a gun?” Another called for a new American revolution, promising “there will be blood.”

These are the cries of a constituency that feels disenfranchised — by the powerful and the well-educated who gamed the housing bubble, by a news media it keeps being told is hateful, by the immigrants who have taken some of their jobs, by the African-American who has ended a white monopoly on the White House. Palin is their born avatar. She puts a happy, sexy face on ugly emotions, and she can solidify her followers’ hold on a G.O.P. that has no leaders with the guts or alternative vision to stand up to them or to her.

For a week now, critics in both parties have had a blast railing at Palin. It’s good sport. But just as the media muttering about those unseemly “controversies” rallied the fans of the King of Pop, so are Palin’s political obituaries likely to jump-start her lucrative afterlife.

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high-ranking white supremacist on the run from US federal authorities was arrested on Monday night in a south Tel Aviv hideout.

Wanted fugitive Micky Louis...

Wanted fugitive Micky Louis Mayon.
Photo: Courtesy

SLIDESHOW: Israel & Region  |  World

33-year-old Micky Louis Mayon, one of America's 100 most wanted criminals, and a member of the Ku Klux Klan, was arrested in a Florentine apartment by the National Immigration Authority's newly formed Oz enforcement unit.

Mayon is wanted in the US on charges of racist assaults, setting fire to vehicles belonging to federal agents, and a host of violent incidents.

The Oz unit was acting on intelligence relayed by Interpol, which informed authorities in Israel that Mayon had entered Israel illegally.

He is said to have often moved apartments in order to evade police, but his efforts proved fruitless on Monday when a delicate operation by the Oz unit saw officers break into his hideout and arrest him.

Oz unit members have the powers of a police officer but can only use them in cases of illegal entry into the country.

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NAACP uses technology to fight racism

The NAACP launched a new system that lets people report police misconduct by video, text and e-mail.

Associated Press

Combining its century-old mission of fighting for equality with the instantaneous reach of modern-day technology, the NAACP has launched a program that lets people use their cell phones to report incidents of police misconduct.

The ''rapid response system'' was officially launched Monday as part of the annual convention for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

This year, the organization is marking the centennial of its founding in New York City in 1909.

The system allows people who capture photos or video of incidents of alleged police misconduct on their cell phones to send it through a Web browser to the organization or upload it through a computer. A form will then be transmitted to the sender, who can use it to provide more information about an incident.

''Technology has basically put a video camera in the pocket of every child in this country over the age of 12 and most grown-ups as well,'' said Benjamin Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP.

He said the information gathered would be used in several ways.

Some video could be used immediately, to present footage for a situation the organization wants to highlight.

Another purpose would be to compile a database of incidents that could show a history of discriminatory patterns and practices in particular law enforcement jurisdictions -- information the group could take to the Justice Department.

Attorney General Eric Holder, praised the NAACP's dedication to championing equality but acknowledged the work left to be done.

''We must resist the temptation to conclude that our nation has fulfilled its promise of equality based on one moment or on one election,'' he said, in reference to Barack Obama being elected president.

''The efforts to harmonize our laws with our best ideals is not yet done,'' he said.

Monique Morris, the group's vice president of advocacy and research, said the ease of reporting an incident will help give a clearer picture of the prevalence of misconduct.

''What this database will provide is a more accurate account in real time of what's happening in our communities,'' she said.

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http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474977031677

Unheralded Warnings from the Founding Fathers to You

 
views: 1424 | rating: 9.5/10 (10 votes) | comments: 9
 

 

 

 

 

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough's book, "John Adams":

"The American Revolution was made by British subjects, individual men and women who, by our modern sense of proportions, were amazingly few in number.  The war they fought was the most important in our history, and as too few today seem to understand, it very quickly became a world war. But the revolution began well before the war. As John Adams famously observed, 'The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.' And it changed the world.

There was no American nation, no army at the start, no sweeping popular support for rebellion, nor much promise of success. No rebelling people had ever broken free from the grip of colonial empire, and those we call patriots were also clearly traitors to the King. And so, as we must never forget, when they pledged 'their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor,' it was not in a manner of speaking.

We call them Founding Fathers, in tribute, but tend to see them as distant and a bit unreal, like figures in a costume pageant. Yet very real they were, real as all that stirred their 'hearts and minds,' and it has meaning in our time as never before.

With change accelerating all around, more and more we need understanding of those principles upon which the republic was founded. What were those 'self-evident truths' that so many risked all for, fought for, suffered and died for? What was the source of their courage? Who were those people? I don't think we can ever know enough about them."

 

From Mike Montagne of People for Mathematically Perfected Economy :

"Usury has existed for thousands of years, and may have been perpetuated by every worldly creed. Untold multitudes have died in the perpetual struggle against usury. Jesus Christ Himself was crucified soon after His famous demonstration at the temple of the money changers.

In a train of events that would eventually inspire the American colonies to revolution, a German-born embezzler, trained by his father in matters of money and trading that he could become a Rabbi, rose from a Jewish slum to become the present world's father of international bankers. He would change his name from Mayer Amschel Bauer to Mayer Amschel Rothschild.

Mayer Amschel Rothschild and his sons -- equally trained in unearned profit (usury) and its vital complements of corruption, subversion, and deceit -- would comprise the House of Rothschild, intervening upon production, consumer and government altogether, to amass, at the expense of everyone but the perpetrators, the greatest forfeitures of prosperity the world could know.

From roots steeped in ferocious concepts of unearned profit, from a very need to subvert every properly administered economy, and by allies who peddled mercenary armies for the causes of plutocracy, untold blood would be spilled, untold injustice would be imposed, and by perpetual deception, usury would succeed in perpetual contradictions to truth, as authored by a seeming untouchable, inexhaustible, evil force.

By the customary accumulations of usury, the House of Rothschild would gain prominent world power in little time. Rothschild, the voracious embezzler, would form the so-called Illuminati -- a pretended, exalted body of useful learning, the purpose of which, by whatever necessary means, were to make the world itself the subject of his unearned confiscations.

The people of every nation therefore would be made both the instruments and the objects of a predominate world power. Powerful nations overtaken by usury would serve to impose usury in every corner of the world. Every organization today which advocates government about a nucleus of 'central banking' is by intention a compliant servant of Rothschild's prescription for usurped power, confiscation of wealth, and the extinguishing of individuality, freedom and justice necessary to his graft.

No truly free nation could exist thereafter, because these central banks would so oppress every nation from the prosperity each would achieve otherwise, that a single nation free of usury would be an outstanding testament to the crime being committed against the rest. Such a truly free nation would threaten the very existence of every central bank and usurer.

For we need them not.

Because the goals of usurers can be perceived, and because the goals of usurers cannot prevail if one important nation succeeds in achieving true economy, the present quest for world government was begun for Rothschild's ends, at Rothschild's command. Look around you and you will see that the central, ostensibly beneficial concept of that quest, is entrenchment of Rothschild's purported 'economic' system.

In his own personal testimony to the implications of his objectives, as the American Colonists fought a revolution to throw off his first imposition of a central banking system on America, Rothschild declared arrogantly, 'Let me issue and control a nation's money, and I care not who writes its laws.'

Certainly not, because he would soon own every politician in the world. Thus, despite the social atrocity of debt multiplied to any magnitude, none of them who ostensibly serve their people would ever hear a plea for perfected economy.

The modern era of financial, political, social, commercial and military strife and subversion had begun."

 

 

Thomas Jefferson speaking on the first attempt to establish a central bank in America:

"The system of banking is a blot left in all our Constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction. I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity is but swindling futurity on a large scale."

"The end of democracy, and the defeat of the American revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of the lending institutions and moneyed incorporations."

"If the people ever allow the banks to issue their currency, the banks and corporations which will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property, until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."

"Paper is poverty... It is not money, but the ghost of money."

"There is an artificial aristocracy, founded on birth and privelege, without virtue or talents... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendency."

"The bank of the United States is one of the most deadly hostilities existing against the principles and form of our Constitution. I deem no government safe which is under the vassalage of any self-constituted authorities, or any other authority than that of the nation, or its regular functionaries. What an obstruction could not this bank of the United States, with all its branch banks, be in a time of war? It might dictate to us the peace we should accept, or it might withdraw its aid. Ought we then to give further growth to an institution so powerful, so hostile?"

 

James Madison speaking on the first attempt to establish a central bank in America:

"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit and violent means possible, to maintain their control over governments, by controlling money and its issuance."

"It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens and one of the noblest characteristics of the late revolution. The free men of America did not wait until usurped power has strengthened itself by exercise and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle."

 

Andrew Jackson speaking on the second attempt to establish a central bank in America:

"If congress has the right under the Constitution to issue paper money, it was given them to use themselves, not to be delegated to individuals or corporations."

"I am one of those who do not believe that a national debt is a national blessing, but rather a curse to a republic, inasmuch as it is calculated to raise around the administration a monied aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country."

President Jackson told the bankers "You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the Eternal god, I will rout you out!"

 

 Abraham Lincoln speaking on the third attempt to establish a central bank in America:

"The money powers prey on the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. The banking powers are more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. They denounce as public enemies all who question their methods or throw light upon their crimes.

I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me, and the bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe. As a most undesirable consequence of the war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow. The money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed."

"The government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be the master and become the servant of humanity."

"Government, possessing the power to create and issue credit and currency as money, and enjoying the right to withdraw both currency and credit by taxation and otherwise, need not and should not borrow capital at interest as the means of financing governmental work and public enterprise."

"The privelege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but it is the Government's greatest creative opportunity."

"No duty is more imperative on the government than the duty it owes the people to furnish them with a sound and uniform currency, and of regulating the circulation of the medium of exchange so that labor will be protected from a vicious currency, and commerce will be facilitated by cheap and safe exchanges."

 

President Woodrow Wilson, after having broken campaign promises and betrayed his country by signing into law the Federal Reserve Act:

"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country.

A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation therefore, and all our activities, are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world. No longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."

 

 

Congressman Louis T. McFadden (Congressional Record, June 15, 1934):

"Every effort has been made by the Federal Reserve Board to conceal its power. But the truth is, the Federal Reserve Board has usurped the government of the United States.

It controls everything here; and it controls our foreign relations. It makes or breaks governments at will. No man, and no body of men, is more entrenched in power than the arrogant credit monopoly which operates the Federal Reserve Board and Federal Reserve Banks.

These evil-doers have robbed the country of more than enough money to pay the national debt. What the National Government has permitted the Federal Reserve Board to steal from the people should now be returned to the people. The people have a valid claim against the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks. If that claim is enforced, Americans will not need to stand in bread lines. Homes will be saved. Families will be kept.

What is needed here is a return to the Constitution of the United States. The old struggle that was fought out here in Jackson's day must be fought over again.

The Federal Reserve Act should be repealed; and the Federal Reserve Banks -- having violated their charters -- should be liquidated immediately. Faithless government officers who have violated their oaths of office should be impeached and brought to trial.

Unless this is done by us, I predict the American people -- outraged, robbed, pillaged, insulted, and betrayed as they are in their own land -- will rise in their wrath and send a President here who WILL sweep the money changers from the temple."



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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/04/MNNL18HJ1S.DTL


Sunday is the 75th anniversary of a day blood ran in the streets of San Francisco - a day of wild rioting on the waterfront that left two men dead on a sidewalk, shot down by police.

Thursday, July 5, 1934 - a day striking labor unions called "Bloody Thursday" - was a turning point in the history of working people on the West Coast.

Though the thought of strikes, riots, tear gas and armed troops on the San Francisco waterfront seems like something out of the dim, dead past, the 1934 strike had an impact that is still felt to this day.

"I think it is still relevant to the Bay Area," said Kevin Starr, the pre-eminent historian of California who wrote about the strike in "Endangered Dreams," a history of California in the Great Depression.

For one thing, the strike led to the creation of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, a major player in the economics of shipping. While San Francisco's port has faded away, ILWU union workers staff all the West Coast ports, including Los Angeles and Long Beach, the busiest ports in the country. A longshoreman who works 2,000 hours a year now can earn $130,000, the union says. They are the aristocrats of labor.

A waterfront strike now would paralyze America's foreign trade.

Today, the world of 1934 seems like another age. "It was a different time," Starr said, "and a very different city." San Francisco was the most important port on the West Coast, and the Embarcadero was full of ships from all over the world, and in many ways it was the economic heart of the Bay Area.

The showdown

The bloody events of that July day - two dead, 109 injured - set off a general strike that rocked San Francisco to its foundations.

National Guard troops, armed to the teeth, patrolled the waterfront and, for awhile, it seemed San Francisco teetered on the edge of revolution.

Mayor Angelo J. Rossi apparently thought so. "I pledge to you that I, as chief executive of San Francisco, to the full extent of my authority, will run out of San Francisco every Communist agitator," he said.

It was clear that he meant Harry Bridges, leader of the striking longshoremen. Never before in the history of San Francisco had the forces of the far left, Bridges and his associates, and the far right, the mayor and the conservative businessmen who backed him, faced off in a showdown like this.

Starr thinks the bitter and violent clashes of those July days 75 years ago pointed out the dangers of what he calls "ideological lines in the sand."

One result was that San Francisco became a union town, where no politician dared to cross a picket line and where unions, even now, still have considerable clout.

The 1934 strike taught the unions that if they pulled together, they could shut down a whole city and they could force management to deal with them.

"It was a pivotal event in San Francisco labor history," said Catherine Powell, director of the Labor Archives Project at San Francisco State University.

The showdown had been simmering for years. An earlier waterfront strike had been crushed in 1919, and the employers formed the Industrial Association of San Francisco, in effect a union of employers to fight a union of workers.

They also had a hand in a company-organized union called the Longshoreman's Association, also called the "Blue Book" union. Longshore gangs were hired by a process known as the "Shape up," where managers, called "walking bosses," picked out who would get jobs.

It was a rotten system; crooked, too. It was easy to bribe a boss; the work was dangerous, and the pay was low.

In May, the longshoremen went out on strike. It was the depth of the Depression; workers had nothing to lose, and soon the strike spread. Pretty soon, the piers and the anchorages in the bay were full of idle ships.

The battle

The employers were determined to break the strike; they brought in strikebreakers, and on July 5, with the help of City Hall and the police, they decided to open the port.

The employers, backed by an army of cops, tried to move cargo by trucks and freight trains. The strikers and their supporters tried to stop them. The cops used clubs and vomiting gas; the strikers threw rocks and bricks.

"Don't think of this as a riot," The Chronicle said, "it was a hundred riots." At one point the strikers were forced back, up Rincon Hill, and fought a skirmish they called "The Battle of Rincon Hill." The site is now occupied by the One Rincon Tower.

In the afternoon, police fired on strikers at the corner of Steuart and Mission streets. Howard Sperry, a striking sailor, and Nick Bordoise, an unemployed fry cook, were shot and killed.

The news shocked the city and nearly brought it to its knees.

Four days after the killings, the bodies of the two men were given a public funeral. "In life they wouldn't have commanded a second glance on the streets of San Francisco, but in death they were borne the length of Market Street in a stupendous and reverent procession that astounded the city," R.S. Clampett wrote in The Chronicle.

Thousands of men followed the coffins up Market to Valencia Street, marching silently, the only sound "the dull roll of muffled drums and the steady dirge of the funeral march" from a union band.

The two were "transformed by death into heroic symbols of labor," the paper said.

The general strike followed, and then, eventually, a settlement. The unions got most of what they wanted. Within five years, San Francisco had turned into a union town; "a place," said historian Chris Carlsson, "where even the coffee shops were organized. The coffee was made by a union cook and served by a union waitress."

For years, the government tried to prove Bridges was a Communist and to have him deported. He was tried four times, finally cleared in 1953.

Back then, as Starr points out, San Francisco was a manufacturing town: Coffee was roasted here, fruit and vegetables were packed in San Francisco, ships were built in the city, San Francisco made steel, door locks, mattresses and metal cans.

It all gradually faded. San Francisco, some said, had turned into a mini Manhattan, but the memory of 1934 stayed alive, with memorials every year.

The legacy

The corner where the two men where shot is now the site of a tourist hotel; the union headquarters is an upscale restaurant. A developer wanted to set up a hamburger place on a waterfront pier and name it for Harry Bridges; instead it was turned into an expensive restaurant serving Peruvian tapas.

Bridges died in 1990 at age 88; he'd served as port commissioner, an honored citizen. "He was a great guy, lean, mean and salty, with a bit of a swagger," Herb Caen wrote of him. "For years he cast a long shadow over the San Francisco waterfront, for better or worse, but definitely for history."

Bridges lived in a different San Francisco.

"One of the centers of world wealth," Starr calls it. "Workers can't afford to live in San Francisco," said Steve Zeltzer, one of the organizers of a festival to commemorate the strike this weekend.

Is San Francisco still a union town? "No," Carlsson said. "The unions are ghosts of what they once were. The union movement has lost the vision."

He says it is still important to remember 1934. "It was an incredible moment in history," Carlsson says. "You can see what was possible." If times get tougher, he says, "It is going to happen again."

 



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giants46

7/4/2009 5:22:30 AM

So much of what is taken for granted in today's work-a-day world was achieved by people who had the courage to stand up against unfair labor practices. It would be a mistake, however, for people to think that those struggles are a quaint piece of history. Clearly, today's economic woes are being used as a wedge to take back the rights and benefits that yesterday's workers fought so hard to attain.


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prolgazinternet

7/4/2009 5:33:37 AM

Governor Schwarzenegger would never understand San Francisco labor history, since his father belonged to the Nazi Party in Austria. Arnold came to California as a tourist but in fact worked secretly and illegally as an undocumented worker. He is now ready to remove the safety net for the working poor in this state. Where is Harry Bridges when we need him?


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orgazmo

7/4/2009 6:09:41 AM

A general strike sounds like a good idea about now. All government employees should cease working (it's almost a depression, what have they got to lose?) and then let's see what how the people of CA get along without government employees, who Ahnold seems to loath with passion. One other thing......."an army of police"...don't ever forget that. When the sh|t jumps off, it will be those guys who are propping up the powers that be...know your enemy.


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We have heard of porno web sites that charge you money for access to video clips.
Hollywood should do the same thing. Go to the movie company site pay a little get a password and download your movie.
Bill it to your telephone.
Movies company's do not realize the fragility of the current level of storage devices.
Most people lose their cherished family pictures all the time and you want to ask them about a movie that they downloaded last month?

People re purchased disks and tapes too. They would download more  frequently as the average user is not very good with computers, and ease of purchase is much greater.

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http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-06-21-craigslistkilling-indictment_N.htm
So this is what the guy looks like

Medical student Philip Markoff is arraigned  in Boston Municipal Court on April 21. It was announced on Sunday that a grand jury has indicted Markoff on charges of first-degree murder, as well as other crimes.

Philip Markoff's indictment on charges of first-degree murder and other crimes moves his case from district court to Superior Court, where he is scheduled to be arraigned Monday. The indictments were returned late Thursday and announced Sunday.

He was indicted for the April 14 shooting of 25-year-old Julissa Brisman of New York, who advertised on the "exotic services" section of Craigslist at the Boston Marriott Copley Place hotel. He was also charged with the April 10 armed robbery of a 29-year-old Las Vegas woman at the Westin Copley Place hotel.

The 23-year-old upstate New York native who had been living in Quincy is being held without bail after pleading not guilty in district court.

Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said the grand jury reviewed dozens of exhibits, including Internet and telephone records, during a two-month investigation.

"Contained in those records was a wealth of information, all of it pointing directly at the defendant," Conley said. Markoff, a second-year medical student at Boston University, was arrested April 20 on Interstate 95 while driving with his fiancee to Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut.

Defense attorney John Salsberg said Markoff would continue to plead not guilty.

The indictment makes no mention of a Rhode Island warrant that accuses Markoff of pulling a gun on a stripper April 16 at a Holiday Inn Express in Warwick, Rhode Island. Markoff faces assault and weapons charges in that case.

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