`They Sentenced Lynne Stewart'

(chorus)
They sentenced Lynne Stewart
To ten years in jail
They sentenced Lynne Stewart
And they revoked her bail
They locked up Lynne Stewart
For doing her job
And to scare other lawyers
From defending Muslims.

(verses)
She visited a client
In a Minnesota prison
And the government
Made a secret tape
And after she gave her client's
Statement to the press
The Feds came to her home
To make their arrest. (chorus)

The government that bombs
Iraq and Afghanistan
Accused the civil rights lawyer
Of supporting "terrorism"
Attorney General Ashcroft
He declared on TV
That he needed no trial
To find Lynne Stewart "guilty." (chorus)

So an NYU Law prof
And a manipulated jury
Produced a conviction
So she would not go free
And a Columbia Law prof
Said her sentence was "too short"
And they added 8 more years
When they returned Lynne to court. (chorus)

Now they've moved her out to Texas
Far away from New York
Far away from her husband
And her political support
And since she's ill and elderly
And they've disbarred her for life
They hope people won't demand
That Lynne Stewart be freed tonight! (chorus)

From The Theatre Union's 1933 Manifesto

During the 1930s Great Depression, The Theatre Union indicated, in its 1933 manifesto, how the counter-cultural U.S. working-class left's approach to drama differs from the Broadway-Hollywood-Commercial Theatre-Corporate Media Conglomerate Complex's historic approach to drama:

"We produce plays that deal boldly with the deep-going social conflicts, the economic, emotional, and cultural problems that confront the majority of the people. Our plays speak directly to this majority, whose lives usually are caricatured or ignored on the stage. We do not expect that these plays will fall into accepted social patterns. This is a new kind of...theatre, based on the interests and hopes of the great mass of working people.

"We have established a low price sale so that the masses of people who have been barred by high prices can attend the theatre..."

Black Male Worker Jobless Rate: 16.7 Percent Under Obama

Between October and November 2010, the official “seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for Black male workers over 20 years-of-age in the United States increased from 16.3 to 16.7 percent under the Democratic Obama Administration; while the unemployment rate for Black female workers over 20-years-of-age increased from 12.7 to 13.1 percent, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The official unemployment rate for all Black workers over 16 years-of-age also increased from 15.7 to 16 percent during this same period; while the jobless rate for Black youths between 16 and 19-years-of-age was still over 46 percent in November 2010.

Between October and November 2010, the official “seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for Latino or Hispanic workers in the United States also increased from 12.6 to 13.2 percent; while the official “not seasonally adjusted” rate for Asian-American workers increased from 7.1 to 7.6 percent between October and November 2010.

The total number of officially unemployed workers in the United States increased from 14,843,000 to 15,119,000 between October and November 2010; while the “seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for all U.S. male workers over 16-years-of- age increased from 10.4 to 10.6 percent. The official jobless rate for white male workers over 20-years-of-age in the United States increased from 8.9 to 9.2 percent between October and November 2010, while the unemployment rate for white female workers over 20-years-of-age increased from 7.3 to 7.6 percent.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ December 3, 5, 2010 press release:

“The unemployment rate edged up to 9.8 percent in November...Employment fell in retail trade…

“The number of unemployed persons was 15.1 million in November…

“Among the unemployed, the number of job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs rose by 390,000 to 9.5 million in November. The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was little changed at 6.3 million and accounted for 41.9 percent of the unemployed.

“The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) was little changed over the month at 9.0 million. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.

“About 2.5 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in November…These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey

“Among the marginally attached, there were 1.3 million discouraged workers in November, an increase of 421,000 from a year earlier. Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them…

“Retail trade employment fell by 28,000 in November. Job losses occurred in department stores (-9,000) and in furniture and home furnishings stores (-5,000)…”

Revisiting History of Korea--Conclusion

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following about the situation in Korea between 1993 and 2003:

"From 1993 through 1994...the Clinton administration's Pentagon drew up Operations Plan 5027, designed to attack and destroy North Korea's nuclear facilities. It was estimated that such an attack could lead to full-scale war in which `as many as one million people would be killed, including 80,000 to 100,000 Americans...' When Seoul protested strongly and refused any part in the contemplated war, the United States was obliged to negotiate..."

"...William Perry, secretary of defense in the Clinton administration between 1994 and 1997, was appointed...to advise on North Korea policy. After an intensive, eight-month study and a visit to Pyongyang, his report cleared Pyongyang of suspicion over alleged secret nuclear development, confirmed that it had abided by the freeze.

"...The initial and crucial breaches were American ones. The introduction of nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula in the first place, the refusal to take seriously its obligations under the Non Proliferation Treaty to `negotiate in good faith to achieve a precise result--nuclear disarmament in all its aspects' and the inclusion of North Korea on the nuclear target list were all breaches of the Non Proliferation Treaty. The United States was also in breach of the Agreed Framework by its dilatoriness at the planned light-water reactor site...

"...For more than a decade, the United States insisted that North Korea had `one, possibly two' nuclear weapons. In 2003, however, U.S. intelligence shifted to adopt the South Korean, Russian, and Chinese view: that it actually did not have any at all...

"...Until 2003 North Korea did not, apparently, actually enrich any uranium, much less produce any weapons. As for the Yangbyon reactor, the plutonium-generating program and the reactor waste pools were frozen, as promised, between 1994 and 2003..."

Revisiting History of Korea--Part 6

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following about the situation in Korea since the late 1950s:

"North Korea, the more industrialized region of the peninsula prior to the Korean War, surpassed the southern Republic of Korea in growth during the 1950s and 1960s...

"North Korea's uniqueness...lies first of all in the way it has...lived under the shadow of nuclear threat longer than any other nation. During the Korean War it escaped nuclear annihilation by the barest of margins...Just four years later, and in obvious breaach of the Armistice, the United States introduced nuclear artillery shells, mines, and missiles into Korea, and it added periodically thereafter to a stockpile kept adjacent to the Demilitarized Zone and designed to intimidate the nonnuclear North. When these nuclear weapons were finally withdrawn in 1991...the United States openly continued its rehearsals for a long-range nuclear strike on North Korea..."

Revisiting History of Korea--Part 5

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following about the situation in Korea during the early 1950s Korean War:

"...The UN forces flouted the rules of war by allowing or encouraging South Korean forces to engage in widespread massacres and torture, the details of which are as yet only slowly being revealed. The United States itself committed a series of war crimes, only partially acknowledged and never in any way expiated, by attacking civilian population centers, refugee columns, and the North's civil inrastructure including dams and food supplies (crimes for which German officers had been executed only a few years before)...

"...Between three and four million people died, most of them Korean civilians, and ten million were cut off from their families on either side of the cease-fire line. In proportional terms, North Korea suffered greater losses of population than either the Soviet Union or Poland in the Second World War. The American losses were long put at 54,000 men...but in 2000 these figures were mysteriously scaled back to 36,940, with the explanation that by a clerical error all U.S. military deaths during those years had been counted as Korean War deaths..."

Revisiting History of Korea--Part 4

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following about the situation in Korea during the early 1950s Korean War:

"...[U.S.]General Curtis LeMay...boasted later that `over a period of three years or so, we burned down just about every town in North and South Korea both..., we killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes.' Attacks...also included a 500 bomber raid in June 1952 that destroyed a complex of hydroelectric power stations on the Yalu River, knocking out 90 percent of the country's remaining power supply; massive air assaults in July and August 1952 on Pyongyan, the heaviest bombing attack to that date in a capital, which drenched the city in napalm and produced a civilian death toll of 6,000; and finally, in May 1953, the bombing of the irrigation dams on which the agricultural infrastructure of the country depended. That raid was designed to starve the enemy into submission.

"...An overwhelming proportion of the [Korean] war's three to four million casualties were civilians...

"At the outbreak of war in 1950, one of the first acts of the [South Korean] Rhee regime was to order the execution of political prisoners, whose deaths were in due course attributed to atrocities by the incoming Northern forces...Declassified U.S. documents indicated that `more than 2,000' political prisoners were executed without trial in the early weeks, hundreds of them were taken out to sea from the port of Pohang and shot, their bodies dumped overboard...Throughout the country, according to Gregory Henderson, then a U.S. Embassy official in Seoul and later a prominent historian of Korea, probably over 100,000 people were killed without trial or legal warrant. Investigations into all this have scarcely begun...

"When Seoul was recaptured by U.S. and South Korean forces perhaps as many as 29,000 Koreans were executed on suspicion of collaboration with the North...The occupation of Pyongyang and many other cities and villages above the 38th parallel [by South Korean forces] was characterized by atrocities...According to one estimate, 150,000 people were executed or kidnapped...

"The official U.S. Army report at the end of the [Korean] war gave 7,334 as the figure for civilian victims of North Korean atrocities, a small fraction of those now known to have been executed by [government of South Korean leader] Rhee in the first moments of the war alone...

"...The Taejon Massacre...became the centerpiece of the U.S. case for North Korean brutality...A U.S. Army report on the massacre, including graphic photographs, was published around the world in October 1953...

"At Taejon, a town of about 160 kilometers south of Seoul, a massacre undoubtedly occurred...

"...It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the most brutal North Korean atrocity in the South was actually a Southern atrocity in a brutal ongoing civil war...

"...The figure of 1,800 massacre victims was given...Somebody--presumably in either the American military or government--seems to have made the decision to turn this into a Northern massacre, the characteristic, single atrocity of the entire war. The truth seems inescapable: The worst atorcity of the war was committed by forces acting in the name of the United Nations, and a concerted effort was then made to cover it up by blaming it on the North Korean enemy...

"...On the admission of [U.S.] General Ridgeway's Head Office, more POWs died in United Nations camps than in North Korean camps..."