Between 1950 and 1970, the number of people who lived in Texas increased from 7,711,194 to 11,196,730. Although the percentage of people living Texas who were African-Americans decreased from 13 to 12 percent between 1950 and 1970, the number of African-Americans who lived in Texas increased from 977,458 to about 1.4 million during the same period. And by 1970 the percentage of people living in Texas who were Latino was now 18 percent, as the number of Latino people who lived in Texas increased from about 1 million to about 2 million between 1950 and 1970. But the number of people of Jewish religious background who lived in Texas in the early 1970s was still only about 71,000.
By 1970, 80 percent of all people in Texas lived in urban cities or towns. Between 1950 and 1970, for example, the number of people living in Houston increased from 596,163 to 1,232,802 and the number of people living in Dallas increased from 434,462 to 844,401; while the number of people who lived in Austin by 1970 was now 250,000 and around 43,000 students now attended the University of Texas in Austin . Around 317,000 African-Americans lived in Houston by 1970; and by 1970, around 210,000 African-Americans now lived in Dallas . Of Beaumont ’s residents in 1970, about 30 percent were also now African-American. In addition, over 3 million people who lived in Texas in 1970 had not been born in Texas . But only 1,092,596 of these 3 million “transplants” or migrants to Texas had not been born in the southern region of the United States .
Despite the increase in civil rights movement and New Left student and counter-cultural activism that developed in Texas between 1953 and the late 1960s, during the 1950s some of the ultra-right and/or ultra-rich folks in Texas (who had made big money from Texas’s oil industry in the 1930s and 1940s) apparently began using some of their surplus wealth to both begin building a “New Right” conservative right-wing movement in the United States and to exercise a special political influence over the Republican Eisenhower White House. As Bryan Burrough’s The Big Rich recalled:
“In 1955, with money raised from his father and friend, including a Houston oilman named Lloyd Smith, [William F.] Buckley would found The National Review, which became the crucible for conservative thoughts…The Old family friend confirmed rumors that [former Columbia University and U.S. President Dwight D.] Eisenhower invested with [Sid] Richardson beginning sometime during World War II… Texas oilmen smelled a winner in Eisenhower. By one estimate Richardson funneled about $1 million into the campaign, not including $200,000 to cover Eisenhower’s various stays at the Commodore Hotel in New York or his expenses during the Republican convention in Chicago …”
Coincidentally, in their 1968 book, The Case Against Congress, Jack Anderson and Drew Pearson noted that “the upkeep of the Eisenhower farm” in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania “was paid for by three oilmen,” “during his 8 years in the White House, Dwight Eisenhower did more for the nation’s private oil and gas interests than any other President,” and “he encouraged and signed legislation overriding a Supreme Court decision giving offshore oil to the Federal Government.”
Also coincidentally, Texas Gov. John Connally, who had been employed by Texas oil billionaire Sid Richardson during the 1950s, helped plan JFK’s ill-fated visit to Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 (and was, himself, hit by gunfire on that day). As even the Warren Commission Report noted:
“The basic decision on the November trip to Texas was made at a meeting of President Kennedy, Vice-President Johnson and Governor Connally on June 5, 1963 at the Cortez Hotel in El Paso, Texas…The three agreed that the President would come to Texas in late November 1963…When Governor Connally called at the White House on Oct. 4 to discuss the details of the visit, it was agreed that the planning of events in Texas would be left largely to the Governor…Shots fired from a rifle mortally wounded President Kennedy…Mrs. Connally heard a second shot fired and pulled her husband down into her lap…Governor Connally…cried out, `Oh, no, no, no. My God, THEY are going to kill us ALL.’”
And, a former college roommate of Texas Gov. Connally, Henry Wade, was, also coincidentally, Dallas ’s District Attorney on Nov. 22, 1963. Harrison Edward Livingstone even made the following allegation about the historical role of some influential folks from Texas on U.S. national politics in the 1960s in his High Treason 2: The Great Cover-Up:
“The conspiracy that killed President Kennedy was at least to some extent hatched and operated out of Dallas/Fort Worth. The plotters controlled the police and the city government there. Numerous of their relatives and connections were in the military and in the CIA…Some of them, like General Charles Cabell of Dallas [whose brother Earle Cabell was the Mayor of Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963], had been fired by Kennedy. The Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division, David Atlee Phillips, and numerous others from the CIA were from Dallas or Fort Worth .”
The Big Rich also indicated the long-range impact that H.L. Hunt’s right-wing LIFELINE radio network of the 1950s and early 1960s apparently had on the drift of U.S. domestic politics after the late 1970s:
“…LIFELINE was in many ways ahead of its time. Its wedding of fundamentalist Protestantism and right-wing politics, not to mention its crusade against `big government’ and Wall Street greed, came 20 years before the Christian Right’s emergence in the late 1970s…By the early 1960s its broadcasts could be heard on 354 stations in 47 states…”
By 1973, corporations like IBM, Texas Instruments, Tracor and Motorola were utilizing the labor of a lot of workers in Texas —and often some lucrative Defense Department war contracts—to make a lot of big money in Texas . Motorola, for example, employed 6,000 workers in Austin by 1973; and Texas Instruments “began business in Austin in 1966 with a Defense System engineering operation” and the first TI-owned building in Austin “was completed in 1968 at 2601 North Lamar and continued the expansion of Defense Systems engineering and drafting,” according to David Humphrey's Austin: An Illustrated History. Yet two years later student and non-student anti-war activists in Austin were still able to mobilize over 25,000 people to participate in the then-largest anti-war demonstration in Austin ’s history in May 1970. But as a result of LBJ’s decision to begin a bombing campaign in Southeast Asia and order hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to Vietnam in 1965, 3,415 people from Texas ended up being killed in action during the Vietnam War.
Coincidentally, during the 1970s Texas Instruments was also the third-largest non-unionized company in the USA . And according to the 1980 edition of Milton Moskowitz, Michael Katz and Robert Levering’s book Everybody’s Business: The Irreverent Guide To Corporate America, labor organizers who had “spent 25 years and $3 million trying to make inroads” said there was then no union at Texas Instruments because the company had “one of the most effective anti-union operations in the country;” and during the 1970s, “Texas Instruments employees were paid 25 percent less than comparable IBM workers across town,” “had to work mandatory overtime and 2 Saturdays a month,” and “were afraid to talk about a union.”
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Monday, May 6, 2013
Revisiting History of Korea Again--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 refussed 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..."
"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 refussed 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..."
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Revisiting History of Korea Again--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..."
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Revisiting History of Korea Again--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 infrastructure 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..."
Friday, May 3, 2013
Black Youth Unemployment Rate Jumps To 40.5 Percent In April 2013
The official “seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for Black youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age jumped from 33.8 to 40.5 percent between March and April 2013; while the official jobless rate for all Black workers (youth, female and male) in the United States was still 13.2 percent in April 2013, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ data.
Between April 2012 and April 2013, the official jobless rate for all Black workers in the United States increased from 13.1 to 13.2 percent; while the official number of unemployed Black workers in the United States increased by 62,000 (from 2,388,000 to 2,450,000) during the same period. In addition, the number of Black workers not in the U.S. labor force increased by 147,000 (from 11,526,000 to 11,673,000) between April 2012 and April 2013.
Between March and April 2013, the official number of unemployed Black youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age increased by 46,000 (from 241,000 to 287,000); while the number of Black youths who still have jobs decreased by 49,000 (from 472,000 to 423,000) during the same period.
The official unemployment rate for Black male workers over 20 years-of-age was still 12.6 percent in April 2013; while the number of Black male workers over 20 years-of-age who still have jobs decreased by 51,000 (from 7,370,000 to 7,319,000) between March and April 2013. In addition, the number of Black male workers over 20 years-of-age in the U.S. labor force decreased by 70,000 (from 8,447,000 to 8,377,000) during the same period; while the official jobless rate for Black female workers over 20 years-of-age was still 11.6 percent in April 2013.
Between April 2012 and April 2013, the official jobless rate for Black female workers over 20 years-of-age increased from 10.7 to 11.6 percent; while the number of Black female workers over 20 years-of-age who still have jobs decreased by 15,000 (from 8,440,000 to 8,425,000) during the same period.
The official “seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for white youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age was still 21.8 percent in April 2013; while the official “not seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for Latino youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age was still 28 percent during that same month. In addition, between March and April 2013 the number of unemployed Latino youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age increased by 22,000 (from 269,000 to 291,000), according to the “not seasonally adjusted” data.
The official “not seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for Latina female workers over 20 years-of-age was still 7.5 percent in April 2013; while the number of Latina female workers over 20 years-of-age in the U.S. labor force decreased by 9,000 (from 9,805,000 to 9,796,000) between March and April 2013.
The official “not seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for Latino male workers over 20 years-of-age was still 7.6 percent in April 2013; while the “seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for all Latino workers (youth, male and female) was still 9 percent during that same month.
The official “seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for all white workers (youth, male and female) in the United States was still 6.7 percent in April 2013; while the jobless rate for white male workers over 20 years-of-age increased from 6.1 to 6.4 percent between March and April 2013.
The number of white male workers over 20 years-of-age who still have jobs decreased by 54,000 (from 60,594,000 to 60,540,000) between March and April 2013; while the number of unemployed white male workers over 20 years-of-age in the United States increased by 180,000 (from 3,955,000 to 4,135,000) during the same period.
The official “seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for white female workers over 20 years-of-age was still 5.7 percent in April 2013; while the number of white female workers over 20 years-of-age in the U.S. labor force decreased by 34,000 (from 54,255,000 to 54,221,000) between March and April 2013.
According to the “not seasonally adjusted” data, the number of Asian-American workers not in the U.S. labor force increased by 89,000 (from 4,699,000 to 4,788,000) between March and April 2013; while the unemployment rate for Asian-American workers increased from 5 to 5.1 percent during that same period. In addition, between March and April 2013 the number of unemployed Asian-American workers in the United States increased by 8,000 (from 423,000 to 431,000); while the number of Asian-American workers who still have jobs decreased by 76,000 (from 8,101,000 to 8,025,000) during the same period, according to the “not seasonally adjusted” data.
The total number of all youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age in the United States who still have jobs decreased by 31,000 (from 4,351,000 to 4,320,000) between March and April 2013, according to the “seasonally adjusted” data; while the number of youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age not in the U.S. labor force increased by 32,000 (from 11,103,000 to 11,135,000) during the same period. And the official “seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for all youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age was still 24.1 percent in April 2013.
For all male workers over 16 years-of-age in the United States, the official jobless rate increased from 7.6 to 7.7 percent between March and April 2013; while the total number of unemployed male workers over 16 years-of-age in the United States increased by 127,000 (from 6,255,000 to 6,382,000) during that same period. In addition, the total number of male workers over 16 years-of-age who still have jobs decreased by 90,000 (from 76,329,000 to 76,239,000) between March and April 2013; while the total number of male workers over 16 years-of-age not in the U.S. labor force increased by 56,000 (from 35,619,000 to 35,675,000) during the same period.
Between March and April 2013, the official unemployment rate for all male workers over 20 years-of-age in the United States also increased from 6.9 to 7.1 percent; while the total number of unemployed male workers over 20 years-of-age increased by 125,000 (from 5,519,000 to 5,644,000) during the same period. In addition, the total number of male workers over 20 years-of-age who still have jobs decreased by 69,000 (from 74,228,000 to 74,159,000); while the total number of male workers over 20 years-of-age not in the U.S. labor force increased by 45,000 (from 29,888,000 to 29,933,000) during the same period.
The official unemployment rate for all female workers over 16 years-of-age in the United States was still 7.3 percent in April 2013; while the official jobless rate for all female workers over 20 years-of-age was still 6.7 percent during that same month. In addition, the official unemployment rate for all U.S. workers was still 7.5 percent and 11,659,000 workers in the United States were still officially unemployed in April 2013.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ May 3, 2013 press release:
“…The unemployment rate, at 7.5 percent, changed little in April…The number of unemployed persons, at 11.7 million, was also little changed over the month…The rates for adult men (7.1 percent), teenagers (24.1 percent), whites (6.7 percent), blacks (13.2 percent), and Hispanics (9.0 percent) showed little or no change…
“In April, the number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) increased by 278,000 to 7.9 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…
“In April, 2.3 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier…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 835,000 discouraged workers in April…Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them…
“…Employment changed little over the month in construction, with small offsetting movements in the residential and nonresidential components…Manufacturing employment was unchanged in April.
“Employment in other major industries, including mining and logging, wholesale trade, transportation and warehousing, financial activities, and government, showed little change over the month…”
Between April 2012 and April 2013, the official jobless rate for all Black workers in the United States increased from 13.1 to 13.2 percent; while the official number of unemployed Black workers in the United States increased by 62,000 (from 2,388,000 to 2,450,000) during the same period. In addition, the number of Black workers not in the U.S. labor force increased by 147,000 (from 11,526,000 to 11,673,000) between April 2012 and April 2013.
Between March and April 2013, the official number of unemployed Black youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age increased by 46,000 (from 241,000 to 287,000); while the number of Black youths who still have jobs decreased by 49,000 (from 472,000 to 423,000) during the same period.
The official unemployment rate for Black male workers over 20 years-of-age was still 12.6 percent in April 2013; while the number of Black male workers over 20 years-of-age who still have jobs decreased by 51,000 (from 7,370,000 to 7,319,000) between March and April 2013. In addition, the number of Black male workers over 20 years-of-age in the U.S. labor force decreased by 70,000 (from 8,447,000 to 8,377,000) during the same period; while the official jobless rate for Black female workers over 20 years-of-age was still 11.6 percent in April 2013.
Between April 2012 and April 2013, the official jobless rate for Black female workers over 20 years-of-age increased from 10.7 to 11.6 percent; while the number of Black female workers over 20 years-of-age who still have jobs decreased by 15,000 (from 8,440,000 to 8,425,000) during the same period.
The official “seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for white youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age was still 21.8 percent in April 2013; while the official “not seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for Latino youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age was still 28 percent during that same month. In addition, between March and April 2013 the number of unemployed Latino youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age increased by 22,000 (from 269,000 to 291,000), according to the “not seasonally adjusted” data.
The official “not seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for Latina female workers over 20 years-of-age was still 7.5 percent in April 2013; while the number of Latina female workers over 20 years-of-age in the U.S. labor force decreased by 9,000 (from 9,805,000 to 9,796,000) between March and April 2013.
The official “not seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for Latino male workers over 20 years-of-age was still 7.6 percent in April 2013; while the “seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for all Latino workers (youth, male and female) was still 9 percent during that same month.
The official “seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for all white workers (youth, male and female) in the United States was still 6.7 percent in April 2013; while the jobless rate for white male workers over 20 years-of-age increased from 6.1 to 6.4 percent between March and April 2013.
The number of white male workers over 20 years-of-age who still have jobs decreased by 54,000 (from 60,594,000 to 60,540,000) between March and April 2013; while the number of unemployed white male workers over 20 years-of-age in the United States increased by 180,000 (from 3,955,000 to 4,135,000) during the same period.
The official “seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for white female workers over 20 years-of-age was still 5.7 percent in April 2013; while the number of white female workers over 20 years-of-age in the U.S. labor force decreased by 34,000 (from 54,255,000 to 54,221,000) between March and April 2013.
According to the “not seasonally adjusted” data, the number of Asian-American workers not in the U.S. labor force increased by 89,000 (from 4,699,000 to 4,788,000) between March and April 2013; while the unemployment rate for Asian-American workers increased from 5 to 5.1 percent during that same period. In addition, between March and April 2013 the number of unemployed Asian-American workers in the United States increased by 8,000 (from 423,000 to 431,000); while the number of Asian-American workers who still have jobs decreased by 76,000 (from 8,101,000 to 8,025,000) during the same period, according to the “not seasonally adjusted” data.
The total number of all youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age in the United States who still have jobs decreased by 31,000 (from 4,351,000 to 4,320,000) between March and April 2013, according to the “seasonally adjusted” data; while the number of youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age not in the U.S. labor force increased by 32,000 (from 11,103,000 to 11,135,000) during the same period. And the official “seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for all youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age was still 24.1 percent in April 2013.
For all male workers over 16 years-of-age in the United States, the official jobless rate increased from 7.6 to 7.7 percent between March and April 2013; while the total number of unemployed male workers over 16 years-of-age in the United States increased by 127,000 (from 6,255,000 to 6,382,000) during that same period. In addition, the total number of male workers over 16 years-of-age who still have jobs decreased by 90,000 (from 76,329,000 to 76,239,000) between March and April 2013; while the total number of male workers over 16 years-of-age not in the U.S. labor force increased by 56,000 (from 35,619,000 to 35,675,000) during the same period.
Between March and April 2013, the official unemployment rate for all male workers over 20 years-of-age in the United States also increased from 6.9 to 7.1 percent; while the total number of unemployed male workers over 20 years-of-age increased by 125,000 (from 5,519,000 to 5,644,000) during the same period. In addition, the total number of male workers over 20 years-of-age who still have jobs decreased by 69,000 (from 74,228,000 to 74,159,000); while the total number of male workers over 20 years-of-age not in the U.S. labor force increased by 45,000 (from 29,888,000 to 29,933,000) during the same period.
The official unemployment rate for all female workers over 16 years-of-age in the United States was still 7.3 percent in April 2013; while the official jobless rate for all female workers over 20 years-of-age was still 6.7 percent during that same month. In addition, the official unemployment rate for all U.S. workers was still 7.5 percent and 11,659,000 workers in the United States were still officially unemployed in April 2013.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ May 3, 2013 press release:
“…The unemployment rate, at 7.5 percent, changed little in April…The number of unemployed persons, at 11.7 million, was also little changed over the month…The rates for adult men (7.1 percent), teenagers (24.1 percent), whites (6.7 percent), blacks (13.2 percent), and Hispanics (9.0 percent) showed little or no change…
“In April, the number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) increased by 278,000 to 7.9 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…
“In April, 2.3 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier…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 835,000 discouraged workers in April…Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them…
“…Employment changed little over the month in construction, with small offsetting movements in the residential and nonresidential components…Manufacturing employment was unchanged in April.
“Employment in other major industries, including mining and logging, wholesale trade, transportation and warehousing, financial activities, and government, showed little change over the month…”
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Revisiting History of Korea Again--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 Pyongyang, 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 atrocity 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..."
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Hidden History of Texas: 1954-1973--Part 16
(This article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on April 17, 2013)
Inspired by the early 1960s Civil Rights Movement protests of groups like the Congress of Racial Equality [CORE], the Southern Christian Leadership Council [SCLC], and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC], and in response to the 1965 escalation of the Pentagon’s War in Viet Nam, an increasing number of students and non-students in Austin, Texas, became involved in New Left and countercultural groups like SDS and in underground press journalism during the 1960s.
There was substantial New Left activity in other Texas cities, including Houston where underground newspaper Space City! helped pull together an active movement community, but Austin -- which had always been a center for cultural and political iconoclasm -- would become one of the nation's New Left hot spots.
As Beverly Burr observed in her thesis, "History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin (1960-88)":
“The Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] formed a chapter in the early spring of 1964. From 1964-7, the UT chapter of SDS began to build the local white, radical student movement. Alice Embree, one of the early participants in SDS at UT, said that when she went through registration at the beginning of the Spring 1964 semester, there was an SDS information table. She conjectured that 4 or 5 people started the group.
“The early focus of the group was participating with black student activists in the sit-ins at downtown Austin restaurants... In mid-October 1965, SDS held a death march protesting U.S. policy toward Vietnam. This protest was apparently the first antiwar demonstration on the campus during the 1960s. About 70 students participated in the march and rally... SDS had attempted to get a parade permit to march on the streets during the rally but the permit had been refused by the City Council...
“SDS held its first fall 1966 meeting in late October [1966]... At the same time, students organized an underground newspaper called The Rag... Most of the staffers were SDSers who created the paper not only to publicize issues of importance to the movement but also in reaction to the corporate controlled mainstream media... During the fall [of 1966] 10 SDS and Rag women... held a sit-in protesting the draft at the Selective Service in Austin. In January of 1967 several demonstrations were held against Secretary of State Dean Rusk while he was in town... Over 200 came to the second protest which succeeded in canceling Rusk’s dinner at the UT Alumni Center...
“The first conflict between SDS and the University occurred later in the spring of 1967 during Flipped-Out Week... SDS had planned a week of activities including a speech by... Stokely Carmichael..., an anti-war march to the Capitol, and Gentle Thursday... The activities attracted several thousands... The week after Flipped-Out Week, SDS “distributed flyers... to plan a Monday protest against Vice President Hubert Humphrey who would be speaking at the Capitol... On Monday, about 150 students protested at the Capitol against the war in Vietnam. Later that day, UT withdrew recognition of SDS as a campus organization...
“UT initiated disciplinary proceedings against 6 students involved in the anti-war protest... against Hubert Humphrey... Simultaneously the UT administration... called for the arrest of George Vizard, a non-student. Vizard was arrested by Austin police... The police brutally arrested him in the Chuckwagon, a café and radical hangout in the Student Union... Over 250 outraged students and faculty members... founded the University Freedom Movement [UFM].”
But despite subsequently well-attended free speech rallies and extralegal campus protests by UFM supporters during the rest of April 1967, the six anti-war students who were being disciplined by the UT administration were all placed on probation for their political activity on May 1, 1967. Yet the anti-war countercultural movement in Austin continued to gain more local popular support, and in October 1969, around 10,000 people protested in Austin against the Republican Nixon Administration's failure to end the Pentagon’s War in Vietnam .
African-American student and non-student Movement activists also continued to organize anti-racist protests during the late 1960s in Austin. As the “History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin ” thesis also noted:
“In 1966, the Negro Association for Progress [NAP] was formed... During the spring of 1967, NAP... members converged on the office of... athletic director and... football coach Darrell Royal to find out why UT was not accepting or recruiting black athletes... In October [1967]... NAP held an illegal demonstration for black student rights... In the spring of 1968 NAP was replaced by the Afro-Americans for Black Liberation [AABL]...
"In May [1968]... the owner of a Conoco station... attacked a black musician... Larry Jackson of Austin SNCC and Grace Cleaver, chair of AABL, called on all persons opposed to racism to picket [and to boycott the station]... Jackson requested that SDS participate in the action and the group agreed. The students held several sit-ins at the gas station. City police arrested about 50 in the demonstrations... That fall AABL won 2 academic programs in Afro-American Studies...”
And in a Feb. 1, 2003, speech before the W.H. Passion Historical Society at the Southgate-Lewis House in Austin, former Austin SNCC activist Larry Jackson also recalled how a SNCC chapter came to be formed in Austin during the late 1960s:
“I was born in central East Texas, a little town called Hearne... And that’s the place I first began my activities in civil rights... I first got involved in a lot of civil rights activities when I was in high school in Hearne, Texas. And I was trying to integrate the pool... I left Hearne, Texas because I was involved with so much strife there...
“And in Houston I became very active in school activities at Texas Southern... And what really got me here in Austin was I had previously worked on the Martin Luther King speech day in Houston... And at the music hall, outside of the TSU people and a few whites to hear Martin Luther King speak, there was not 200 people there. And this happened in 1967... And I ended up coming here on a speaking deal with Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown. That’s how I got to Austin , Texas... And so he was speaking out there at the University of Texas. So I stayed on here because I was gonna form a SNCC chapter here in Austin...”
Austin was also a center for the fast-growing women's liberation movement and, according to Jo Freeman in Women: A Feminist Perspective, the landmark Supreme Court decision on abortion, Roe v. Wade, "was the project of a small feminist group in Austin, Texas and the lawyer [Sarah Weddington] who argued Roe before the Supreme Court was one of its participants."
Inspired by the early 1960s Civil Rights Movement protests of groups like the Congress of Racial Equality [CORE], the Southern Christian Leadership Council [SCLC], and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC], and in response to the 1965 escalation of the Pentagon’s War in Viet Nam, an increasing number of students and non-students in Austin, Texas, became involved in New Left and countercultural groups like SDS and in underground press journalism during the 1960s.
There was substantial New Left activity in other Texas cities, including Houston where underground newspaper Space City! helped pull together an active movement community, but Austin -- which had always been a center for cultural and political iconoclasm -- would become one of the nation's New Left hot spots.
As Beverly Burr observed in her thesis, "History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin (1960-88)":
“The Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] formed a chapter in the early spring of 1964. From 1964-7, the UT chapter of SDS began to build the local white, radical student movement. Alice Embree, one of the early participants in SDS at UT, said that when she went through registration at the beginning of the Spring 1964 semester, there was an SDS information table. She conjectured that 4 or 5 people started the group.
“The early focus of the group was participating with black student activists in the sit-ins at downtown Austin restaurants... In mid-October 1965, SDS held a death march protesting U.S. policy toward Vietnam. This protest was apparently the first antiwar demonstration on the campus during the 1960s. About 70 students participated in the march and rally... SDS had attempted to get a parade permit to march on the streets during the rally but the permit had been refused by the City Council...
“SDS held its first fall 1966 meeting in late October [1966]... At the same time, students organized an underground newspaper called The Rag... Most of the staffers were SDSers who created the paper not only to publicize issues of importance to the movement but also in reaction to the corporate controlled mainstream media... During the fall [of 1966] 10 SDS and Rag women... held a sit-in protesting the draft at the Selective Service in Austin. In January of 1967 several demonstrations were held against Secretary of State Dean Rusk while he was in town... Over 200 came to the second protest which succeeded in canceling Rusk’s dinner at the UT Alumni Center...
“The first conflict between SDS and the University occurred later in the spring of 1967 during Flipped-Out Week... SDS had planned a week of activities including a speech by... Stokely Carmichael..., an anti-war march to the Capitol, and Gentle Thursday... The activities attracted several thousands... The week after Flipped-Out Week, SDS “distributed flyers... to plan a Monday protest against Vice President Hubert Humphrey who would be speaking at the Capitol... On Monday, about 150 students protested at the Capitol against the war in Vietnam. Later that day, UT withdrew recognition of SDS as a campus organization...
“UT initiated disciplinary proceedings against 6 students involved in the anti-war protest... against Hubert Humphrey... Simultaneously the UT administration... called for the arrest of George Vizard, a non-student. Vizard was arrested by Austin police... The police brutally arrested him in the Chuckwagon, a café and radical hangout in the Student Union... Over 250 outraged students and faculty members... founded the University Freedom Movement [UFM].”
But despite subsequently well-attended free speech rallies and extralegal campus protests by UFM supporters during the rest of April 1967, the six anti-war students who were being disciplined by the UT administration were all placed on probation for their political activity on May 1, 1967. Yet the anti-war countercultural movement in Austin continued to gain more local popular support, and in October 1969, around 10,000 people protested in Austin against the Republican Nixon Administration's failure to end the Pentagon’s War in Vietnam .
African-American student and non-student Movement activists also continued to organize anti-racist protests during the late 1960s in Austin. As the “History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin ” thesis also noted:
“In 1966, the Negro Association for Progress [NAP] was formed... During the spring of 1967, NAP... members converged on the office of... athletic director and... football coach Darrell Royal to find out why UT was not accepting or recruiting black athletes... In October [1967]... NAP held an illegal demonstration for black student rights... In the spring of 1968 NAP was replaced by the Afro-Americans for Black Liberation [AABL]...
"In May [1968]... the owner of a Conoco station... attacked a black musician... Larry Jackson of Austin SNCC and Grace Cleaver, chair of AABL, called on all persons opposed to racism to picket [and to boycott the station]... Jackson requested that SDS participate in the action and the group agreed. The students held several sit-ins at the gas station. City police arrested about 50 in the demonstrations... That fall AABL won 2 academic programs in Afro-American Studies...”
And in a Feb. 1, 2003, speech before the W.H. Passion Historical Society at the Southgate-Lewis House in Austin, former Austin SNCC activist Larry Jackson also recalled how a SNCC chapter came to be formed in Austin during the late 1960s:
“I was born in central East Texas, a little town called Hearne... And that’s the place I first began my activities in civil rights... I first got involved in a lot of civil rights activities when I was in high school in Hearne, Texas. And I was trying to integrate the pool... I left Hearne, Texas because I was involved with so much strife there...
“And in Houston I became very active in school activities at Texas Southern... And what really got me here in Austin was I had previously worked on the Martin Luther King speech day in Houston... And at the music hall, outside of the TSU people and a few whites to hear Martin Luther King speak, there was not 200 people there. And this happened in 1967... And I ended up coming here on a speaking deal with Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown. That’s how I got to Austin , Texas... And so he was speaking out there at the University of Texas. So I stayed on here because I was gonna form a SNCC chapter here in Austin...”
Austin was also a center for the fast-growing women's liberation movement and, according to Jo Freeman in Women: A Feminist Perspective, the landmark Supreme Court decision on abortion, Roe v. Wade, "was the project of a small feminist group in Austin, Texas and the lawyer [Sarah Weddington] who argued Roe before the Supreme Court was one of its participants."
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