Division Street: America by Studs Terkel (New Press 1967)

I think the poor class of people, both Negro and white, as bad as I hate to say this, being a union man, I believe they've forgotten a lot of these things. In those days, if you had a car transfer, nobody threw away a transfer. They would put it where somebody else could get it. Nobody threw away a cigarette butt. It was awful hard to find a cigarette, but if a guy had one, he would choke it and give it to the next guy. Everybody was very friendly at that time.

Today, based on the war economy and the unions, some people make a few dollars, and the feeling, the atmosphere is different. Labor's respectable now, it's status quo. If you fight against these guys, you're labeled. Fear. A lot of fellas want to know how come George Meany don't walk together with Martin Luther King, you know, in these demonstrations. We evade the question. (Laughs.)

There was a meeting downtown where all the business agents were, labor leaders. I thought they were gonna pull Mayor Daley's pants down and kiss him. These guys go overboard. And they were raising a question of why we wasn't organizin' more. Why there wasn't more than five Negroes out of two, three hundred guys! So I finally got up enough courage to get the floor. (Laughs.)

So I told 'em, "Looking around the room here, you guys got all diamond rings, manicures." Honest, I didn't know Bill Lee* had a telephone in his Mark IV, air-conditioned, chauffeur, everything. (Laughs.) And I said, "The image of so-called labor leaders is not what it was in the old days. Now you can't tell 'em from a businessman." So they accepted the criticism. ('Lew Gibson' speaking to Studs Terkel about the contrast between the hungry thirties and the prosperous sixties.)

* Bill Lee was the President of the Chicago Federation of Labor at the time.

Heinze Meanz Spleenze

I thought in my myopic state that I'd mistakenly spotted Gabriel Heinze getting super pissed after Argentina scored against Mexico earlier today, but Yahoo News is on hand to reassure me that it's only my eyesight which is wonky at the moment.

It'd have been funnier if the camera guy had lamped him back.

'What's German for schadenfreude?

Football's England's coming home.

Sadly for Ingur-land 1966 was 44 years ago and there's no Azerbaijani linesman on hand to award England a goal.

On the bus going home

"For you, Terry, the World Cup is over."

'Face like a slapped arse'

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 155

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 155th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1570 friends!

Recent blogs:

Human Nature and Human Behaviour

Socialism in the 21st Century?

How capitalism moves

Quote for the week:

"The materialistic. realistic, and collectivist conception of freedom, as opposed to the idealistic, is this: Man becomes conscious of himself and his humanity only in society and only by the collective action of the whole society. He frees himself from the yoke of external nature only by collective and social labor, which alone can transform the earth into an abode favorable to the development of humanity. Without such material emancipation the intellectual and moral emancipation of the individual is impossible." Mikhail Bakunin, Man, Society, and Freedom, 1871.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Renaldo Manager

I'm half-blind at the mo' but even I can see the comic value in this YouTube clip from Portuguese TV.

Blood, guts and buckets of swearing. If only the English team were half as stereotypically English as Capello.

Did Stuart Pearce ever let anyone shoulder barge him like that on the football field? Psycho's lost it.

Hat tip to a Guardinista currently living in Lisbon.

World Cup: Argentinian team support for Mothers of the Plazo de Mayo

The following under reported story has already been spotted on Louis Proyect's blog and over at Socialist Unity blog but the text cut and pasted below is from the Shiraz Socialist blog:

Ian W writes:

We are bombarded daily by the World Cup. The organisers of the event claim that it is non-political, yet it is dominated by large multinatonal corporations.

Here you can see a photograph of the Argentine football team holding a banner. This photo has been effectively censored by the international press and Toutube has also blocked it. Why?

The banner simply states that the members of the football team support the call for the for the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Who are these mothers? They are the mothers of young men and women who “disappeared” during the Dirty War carried out by the Argentine Military Junta between 1976 and 1983.

An estimated 30,000 “disappeared”, that is were killed, because they were socialists, communists, trade unionists, community organisers, students, activists and so on who opposed the military dictatorship. Some of these young women had babies, about 500 in total, who were not returned to their natural families to live with their grandparents as their own parents had been killed. The babies were given to military families who supported the dictatorship.

One day a week between 1977 and 2006 the Mothers, now grandmothers, would walk around the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires demanding to know what had happened to their children. They even did this during the dictatorship and for their bravery three of the mothers also disappeared, that is were killed, for daring to question the military dictatorship.

The present football team now supports the call for these mothers to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.

I'm sure you'll agree that it is one of the more heartening stories from in and around this current World Cup.

More info on the story at the following link. (You may have to use babelfish to translate it.)