Democracy in Detroit: Week 6 of the Occupation
The questions being raised in Detroit are important for the whole country. Over the last few years we have seen an assault on our shared values, conventions, and civic assumptions unlike anything previously experienced in this country. Except for brief, extreme periods of Marshall Law, declared in emergency situations, no citizens of a city have had their basic rights and responsibilities so perversely violated.
These violations have been done in the name of providing financial security for the city. With each new announcement, it is clear the financial security being created is for corporate, powerful elites to profit from the pain of the people.
The assault on democratic values is so clear that even students in a law school far away notice that “democracy is dead” in Detroit. In a recent article in the Free Press, Adrienne N. Young, follows this pronouncement by arguing that democracy died long before the emergency manager was appointed. Her evidence is the low voter turnout rate in the last mayoral election. She further argues that we should turn the “civic engagement” of protest against the EM and company into efforts at voter registration “to make it less likely any of the “undesired” leaders are re-elected at the state and local level.”
Once Again, Korea!
By Professor/Baba Charles Simmons
Since most of the world's population was not around at the beginning of this conflict, it is important for people everywhere to know the history of this 60-year old struggle between the Western Powers led by the U.S. on one hand, and the peoples of Asia on the other. The U.S. invaded Korea in 1950 in an attempt to stop the Chinese Revolution led by Chairman Mao Tse Tung that had kicked out the Western powers in 1949. The West feared a general independence victory against Western Colonialism throughout Asia that was set in motion in the early part of the 20th century. The U.S. was defeated in its objectives in the mid-1950s especially after Mao Tse Tung sent in Chinese troops on the side of the Korean forces.
However, the U.S. still succeeded in dividing the nation politically into North and South, with a major force of U.S. troops, naval and air forces remaining in South Korea under a puppet U.S. government. The same pattern would play out a decade later in Vietnam following the freedom fighters defeat of the French colonialism in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu led by the revolutionary leader, Ho Chi Minh, who said that one of his major mentors was Marcus Garvey who Ho Chi Minh had heard in Harlem during WWI...