The Mason MIssile, September 30, 2012

Greetings, freedom fighters! I have been celebrating the High Holy Days, Rosh haShona and Yom Kippur; I bid everyone within the sound of my newsletter a happy, sweet, and prosperous new year, with all abundance in good things coming to you and your loved ones. The beauty of the High Holy Days is that we can reflect on the past, without being enslaved or trapped in what when on then. We’ve made mistakes, sure, but we can move beyond them. Good news to you I'll tell-I have been accepted for Masters' work in labor studies at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst-YAY! It will be a two-week-per-semester program aimed at union activists and officials. Labor education in very important; we have to know what our predecessors went through for future generations of workers to have decent wages, medical benefits, occupational safety and health, etc. It’s at the work site, the shop floor, where social justice issues become concrete, they go from the abstract to the practical. How can I not say anything about the presidential election? I have no other choice but to endorse for President of the United States-Barack Obama. I also worried whether he gave in to easily to the Republicans, such as the departure on his officials Van Jones and Shirley Sherrod, over lies concocted through the rightist media machine; also with his trying to reason with the Tea Party affiliated congress-idiots, hell bent on bringing him down, no matter what damage it does to the nation’s reputation and credit rating. But he has stood up, with his repeal of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” rule concerning LGBT service members, his support of same-sex marriage, and of reproductive rights for women. Hopefully, he can overcome the idea, within the wall Street faction of the Democratic party (exemplified by Clinton-era Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin), on concentrating on making the banks happy and ignore everyone else. The fight to retain voting rights goes on. People have braved police assaults, fire hoses, and lynching for the right to peaceably change their government and affect policy. Republican state legislators have rammed through bills, signed by Republican governors-how convenient!-to have only certain forms of identification acceptable to show at voting stations. Certain demographic groups, such as students, the elderly, and minorities may not have the appropriate ID to show on election day-and, quite conveniently for SOME, these groups tend towards Democrats. Fortunately, there have been fights in the courts to legally invalidate these laws, along with efforts to see that the affected people do have appropriate ID; the labor movement, I’m proud to say, has taken a lead in this work. But beware! There is a group out, called True The Vote, affiliated with the Tea Party “Astroturf” thing-I won’t all it a movement-that would go to voting stations and, like some sort of self-appointed police, demand to see voters’ IDs, to intimidate them. Let’s be aware of this, and be ready to stand up to these types. I urge us to meet and set up a plan to fight this. The idea of a Mitt Romney presidency should chill everybody’s back. Here is a man who has spoken with scorn about the same people whose votes he would need, mocking them as moochers for government handouts (thank you, Mother Jones); whose whole career has been finding troubled companies, loading them with debts they could never pay off, bankrupting them, and laying off workers; and whose entire life has been one of ignorance of the lives of people not as well off as he has been, and who has caused suffering to people less powerful, like the supposedly Gay kid in his prep school. His running mate Paul Ryan, (still running for his Wisconsin House seat while running for Vice-President-huh?), proclaimed his adherence to the writing of Ayn Rand, even ordering his staff to read Atlas Shrugged, a terribly written fantasy of rich people going into hiding because the lower orders don’t like them-that is how Ryan gets his economic doctrine. Passivity and apathy, brothers and sisters, are not in order. We must get our minds together, get our IDs ready, and take the time out to VOTE. We CAN and WILL win this thing! Bye!