Views in brief

How they censor King

IN RESPONSE to "Why we're still marching": There is every reason to celebrate and remember Dr. King's landmark speech of August 1963. It was the exclamation mark that closed out the opening heroic years of the modern civil rights movement. The words were inspirational, the message was clear: enough of the legacy of Jim Crow. No to the years of discrimination that kept Blacks as second-class citizens through law in the South and through custom in the North.

However, all too often, especially on the anniversary of Dr. King's birth and assassination, the American media act as if he died in August of 1963 and not in April of 1968. They find the later Martin Luther King too controversial, too embarrassing and too close to the truth about modern America.

The King of the Riverside speech would not stand for drone attacks that kill innocent civilians, or the wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan. The King of the Memphis sanitation workers' strike would be appalled by the attack on the right to organize unions in Michigan, Indiana and Wisconsin. He would have been outraged at the Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act. And, I think it is a safe bet that he would have been standing by Bradley Manning's side and the side of Trayvon Martin's parents when the two unjust verdicts were handed down.

Yes to Dr. King's legacy. No to turning him into a harmless icon.
Guy Miller, Chicago

The deck stacked against U.S. workers

IN RESPONSE to "Who protects workers' rights?": Paul D'Amato points out that while labor law in Bangladesh is atrocious, the situation in the United States is hardly much better.

Ironically, the New York Times editorial that Paul discusses cites Human Rights Watch (HRW) in support of the argument that proposed reforms in Bangladesh are inadequate. What SocialistWorker.org readers may not know is that in August 2000, HRW issued an extensive and damning report titled "Unfair Advantage: Workers' Freedom of Association in the United States under International Human Rights Standards."

U.S. labor laws allow employers to fire, harass and intimidate with impunity workers trying to form unions. The laws allow employers to refuse to bargain seriously with workers when they do form unions and to nullify their right to strike by permanently replacing them.

The HRW report found that "workers' basic rights are routinely violated in the United States because U.S. labor law is so feebly enforced and so filled with loopholes." It concluded that U.S. workers lack the most fundamental internationally recognized rights at the workplace--the basic freedom to organize, bargain and strike.

In the 13 years since the report was first published, the situation in the United States has, if anything, got worse.

Over the past few months, workers in Bangladesh have organized mass demonstrations to demand their rights. Workers in the U.S. need to do the same.
Phil Gasper, Madison, Wis.

How education is pre-packaged

IN RESPONSE to "Mitch Daniels hates people and history": Mitch Daniels censoring the books that teachers can use in the classroom at any level of education is unacceptable. He is a hypocrite of the highest order because he claims he wants to prevent teachers from "force feeding" students Howard Zinn, however he wants to "force feed" the teachers Charles Murray. This is a double standard.

Education cannot survive without academic freedom. Academic freedom cannot survive without the liberty of each educator to choose within reason the textbooks used in especially college-level classes. There are already not choices at the K-12 level. Most teachers at this level do not choose the texts they use; so the alarm over Zinn being introduced in misplaced. Most K-12 teachers use whichever major publisher textbook their district chooses. Even advanced placement and honors courses use textbooks that are recommended by the College Board or even particular college-level textbooks.

Mr. Zinn's work is more likely to be introduced in a 100 or 200 level college history course as supplemental reading because all of the books, even for the first two levels of college, are published by the major publishers.

Books or excerpts from books are often used to spark debate in class, especially in the social sciences and humanities. This is a good way to expose students of any age to different ideas and viewpoints. This is the best method by which to teach them critical thinking and an analysis of ideas which higher-level education and life activities require.
Judith Kratochvil, Chicago

Sending the bigots packing

AUGUST 1, was the first--and long-awaited--day for Rhode Island same sex couples to marry. And they did.

Some 100 counterprotesters drowned out and overwhelmed four members of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, who came to three city halls, the R.I. State House and the Brown University campus to express their hatred of LGBT people.

The bigots were instantly overwhelmed with angry activists who blocked them out, outnumbered them and made them seem like a tiny group of nobodies who wasted lots of time, travel and money to come to our state. Westboro also announced plans to travel to Minnesota, the second state beginning to legally wed same-sex couples that day. We heckled them and told them to leave. Signs included "No hate in our state."

I am proud so many people came out all day long to embarrass the hell out of the isolated and disgraced Westboro Baptist Church.

Everywhere they go, they are a tiny minority.
Greg Morse, Providence, R.I.

Animal liberation as a means to an end

IN TWO recent SocialistWorker.org articles, "Socialists and animal liberation" and "How humans and animals are connected," both Jon Hochschartner and Trish Kahle bring up excellent points for us as Marxists to consider in our relationship between ourselves and animals, particularly in our consumption of them.

However, these articles seems to gloss over a point I wish to address here--that animal liberation and vegetarian/veganism is itself a means, and not an ends, of the overthrow of capitalist relations between ourselves and all animals in the world.

I myself am a vegetarian living in the semi-rural Midwest, but I do however have an exception. I eat both fish and (rarely) deer, but only if I or someone I personally know is the one who killed and cleaned the animal. In this act, my choice to be vegetarian is limited to the realm of capitalism, and unlike over 99 percent of the rest of the meat available to me and the rest of the country, it did not come from factory farms and large corporations.

It is also vital to understand that the amount of meat consumed in the Western diet that has become so important to many people, including those on the left, is in reality much more than needed. Native cultures in the Americas as well as others across the world, adapted to a lack of large domesticated animals such as those found in the West with mostly vegetarian diets that were often healthier and even now readily available to most people.

I do, however, understand there are certain ideas of animal liberation that must be, in a Marxian way, adapted to fit the actual human need in society. The thousand of years of domestication of cows, pigs, goats, chickens and various other animals means we must have a continuing relationship with them, but this must be re-examined from the practice of modern farming, which are often inherently cruel and brutal for both animal and worker.

Hunting, also, is not necessarily an act that we must condone. Alaskan Native tribes have had, in some case, 10,000 years of relations between themselves and caribou herds that migrate through their homeland, but are continuing to fight big oil companies from destroying these vital lands. This is something that must be protected and emulated in a future society.

As for the factory farms, let them fall and rust across the country, like remnants of gulags that serves to mark another brutal treatment of both man and animal that comes from the capitalist drive for profit at the expense of exploitation.
Colton Brandau, from the Internet