A scatterbrained note

"The Draft Is About White People
Sending Black People To Fight
Yellow People to Protect The Country
They Stole From The Red People"

Attributed to Muhammad Ali, Stokely Carmichael,
and numerous other people...

I found it while looking through the massive site The Talking Drum which reminds me of a similar sprawling site that I love Sunrise Dancer which has a sweet library. The Talking Drum is ostensibly a pan-africanist website and has some great stuff like a page for Assata Shakur, whose autobiography Assata is just a wonderful read.

Support the New York City Transit Workers Union's MTA strike. SEIU has already pledged support. I have to say that I think this could be similar to UPS or the notorious PATCO strike. Let's see what happens. The coverage so far has been straight out of Chomsky and Herman's Manufacturing Consent with the TWU just getting ripped and no critique of the Taylor law (which forbids strikes by public employees). Their militancy is treated as boorish behavior. The one quote I liked in the Times piece was about the union's founder's response to a judge declaring the 1966 transit strike in violation of a similar law: "The judge can drop dead in his black robes."
I'm unsure of Local President Toussaint's role, but, like the bushies say, the time for debate has ceased. We are at war. We'll debate later.

P.S. The coverage of the Morales election by U.S. media has been as awful as usual. Which makes me all the more hopeful.