Poverty Kills 50,000 People Every Day

Think about it...

NYC! Stand up for the people of Iran!

Massive National Mobilization in 50 US Cities.



STOP WAR ON IRAN
Saturday, August 2nd 2008 NOON
Rally and March, Times Square, 43rd St & Broadway
New York, NY USA

For more information, please visit:
www.stopiranwar.com

Saving Iceland

http://www. savingiceland. org/

Iceland is being sold to heavy multinational industry for no gain to Iceland, involving numerous risks. Heavy industry is queuing up for cheap energy by using old polluting methods and free from paying Kyoto tax in this environmental paradise. If the existing plans are to be realised, 25% of Iceland will be a dam affected area and this region will be among the most polluted of Europe by 2020! Protest is growing in and outside Iceland.

Yves Saint Laurent Dies

Fashion king Saint Laurent dies

"He was a libertarian, an anarchist and he threw bombs at the legs of society"
-Pierre Berge Saint Laurent's former partner




Yves Saint Laurent, considered by many as the greatest fashion designer of the 20th Century, has died in Paris at the age of 71.
Saint Laurent changed the face of the fashion industry when he became chief designer of the House of Dior at 21.
He designed clothes that reflected women's changing role in society: more confident personally, sexually and in the work-place.
He retired from haute couture in 2002 and had been ill for some time.
Saint Laurent died on Sunday evening in the French capital, the Pierre-Berge-Saint Laurent Foundation announced.
Pierre Berge, the designer's former business and personal partner, said he had died at his home after a long illness. He did not give details.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy paid tribute to Saint Laurent's "creative genius".

'I draw on woman'
"I found my style through women," Saint Laurent once said.
"That's where its strength and vitality comes from because I draw on the body of a woman."
He changed forever what women wear, introducing trouser suits, safari jackets and sweaters, BBC arts correspondent Razia Iqbal notes.
Saint Laurent was a great innovator, helping to revitalise haute couture while making ready-to-wear design popular.
The editor of British Vogue, Alexandra Shulman, said he had helped democratise fashion:
"Before that people had small salons for rich people. Saint Laurent brought it to the people. He was young and groovy. Pop stars were hanging out with him and younger generations related to him."


YSL 'understood what women really wanted'
"Yves Saint Laurent infused his label with his creative genius, elegant and refined personality... because he was convinced that beauty was a necessary luxury for all men and all women," he added. Speaking on French radio, Pierre Berge said his former partner had empowered women. "In this sense he was a libertarian, an anarchist and he threw bombs at the legs of society," he said. "That's how he transformed society and that's how he transformed women."

Famous French embroiderer Francois Lesage, who worked 40 years with the designer, said he was "devastated" by news of his death.
"I have never known a designer who would give so much thought to something when it was proposed to him," he told French TV. "It is a great grief for me."

The Art of the Cunt (Dear Women..)

A response to 'The Art of the Hunt (Dear Men...)

Five or six decades ago, the situation women were placed in from birth was terrible. In exchange for complete submission to their male ‘partners’ and the machismo rule of the patriarch, women were allowed small concessions such as doors being held open and subway seats being given up.

Women had been fighting for over sixty years for rights they never thought would come. Equality was a dream so far away that it was almost comical to mention it. Forty years after the largest feminist swing in politics, I’m seeing the blood and tears of a countless number of progressive women blasphemed.

Why did men hold doors for women? Why did men carry the heavier physical load? Why were men paid to be leaders while women were ‘taken care of’ and placed in a kitchen? Because men wanted women to believe they were weak. This bulletin entitled ‘The Art of the Hunt’ seems to imply that weakness and femininity have something in common. I think it’s sad that after all of the battles that have been fought in the name of equality and all of the media attention feminism has received over the years, women still think that men are ‘designed’ to take some form of initiative. They still don’t understand what equality is.

Being the CEO of a company or a candidate for the presidency doesn’t mean that you’re equal. Freedom is held within, and until you let yourself understand that kindness should be given and initiative should be taken according to circumstances, not gender, women will never be equal.

Before you call men pussies for wondering what a woman is thinking, maybe you should think about the life you’d have if men stopped caring about a woman’s right to be independent. Just because you want to be pampered and flattered on the grounds of anti-woman and anti-progress coziness doesn’t mean that the rest of the women in the world should have to suffer the consequences.

So to those of my friends that reposted this intellectually vacant bulletin: Shame on you. Shame on all of you for begging after all these years to be taken care of because of emotional differences created by hundreds of years of a patriarchy. Do you know who ‘designed’ men to be the providers? Men. The same way they designed you to be helpless.

You can be feminine and strong. You can be feminine and aggressive. You can be feminine and not be a fucking moron.

The Groundwork

This is the beginning. This is the start of a new political organization outside of established party boundaries to unify the North American left.

We are a group of students and young professionals that have banded together for the purpose of reaching our common goal of a socialist United States.

Uniquely, we believe that the liberation of the American people is impossible without focus on the responsibilities of each individual. Along with rights come responsibilities, and the majority of the international left offers too many excuses based on race, gender, sexuality and economic class, taking accountability away from those who actively seek to destroy the free world. While recognizing the added hardships that certain groups face, the North American Left wishes to build a society that will not discriminate against, nor will it neglect the wrong-doings of any person based on race, gender, sexuality, religion, age or national origin.

We wish to form relationships with leftist organizations and political parties across the United States as well as with our Canadian brothers and sisters, and by doing so we hope to create one unified movement for socialism in North America.

This organization is for those who recognize and refuse to tolerate the failures of the neoliberal Democratic party. This organization is for those who do not wish to stand behind established far-left parties who care more about the kitsch of working class movements than about the people in our country who desperately need a revolution. This organization is for every man, woman and youth that is tired of compromises. This organization is for the American people.

An in-depth view of our positions on a variety of issues will be posted soon.

http://www. myspace. com/northamericanleft

Saving the United States

I would like to remind the American people of something that seems to have been completely forgotten: the power of the human being. The power that we have to mobilize ourselves and others in order to throw out the system that has abused our people and raped our environment from the beginning of our country's creation.

Every four years, our countless number of left-wing organizations come together in order to back the Democratic candidate for the American presidency. Wait. Stop there.

Rather than discussing the obscene amounts of money, human labour and other resources that go into attempting to elect a Democrat into the White House, I'd like to point out the most basic and astoundingly obvious flaw of the American left. Election after election, we mobilize ourselves to support the enemy. We volunteer for, give money to and radically vocalize our support for a compromise, not a solution. Former Swedish politician Olof Palme used the term 'pest eller cholera' (the plague or cholera) to describe the situation that the free world is placed into with their national elections. Voting in the lesser of two evils. Choose which disease you would rather have spreading itself across our nation. Compromising our own political ideals and above all sacrificing our own human dignity and our system of democracy to make sure that the cholera wins over the plague. Why would we want either illness?

Why do we accept failure after failure from the Democratic party? Why do we think that we live in a two-party system when that couldn't be further from the truth? As Americans, we have the power to change not only the course of our country, but we have to power to change the course of the world. We have the power to put an end to environmental destruction. We have the power to put an end to world hunger. Politically, we live in the most powerful country in the world. Isn't it time to start stepping up to the plate and taking our social responsibility a bit more seriously?

The Green Party, The Socialist Party USA, The Democratic Socialists...these are just a few of many political organizations that make up a very, very large chunk of America's left. These parties have better solutions, policies of more humanitarian value and have an overall better understanding of humanity and working class issues than the Democrats could ever dream of having. So why don't we spend our time, money and energy into electing a third party to office? Why do we tell ourselves that it's impossible to elect a third party? Ralph Nader showed us that a small party can make a major wave by mobilizing only a tiny fraction of the US population. Would they have won with the support of organizations such as Moveon.org, the Working Families Party and the Democratic socialists of America? I believe they would have had a good shot.

Without our money and labour, it is impossible for the Democratic Party to succeed. Why, then, do we let them? Why do we give them our voices in exchange for anti-human, neo-liberal politics that are destined for failure?

It's a bit late to start working on the 2008 elections, as it will take an enormous nation-wide education campaign in order to secure the support of the more impoverished and uneducated areas of the United States. However, it's not too late (or too early) to start working on the 2012 elections, and I say we had better get started.

We're trapped in a two-party system because we want to be. We're enslaved because we've given our government and media institutions the chains to tie us up with from our own sheds. It's time to fight back and it's time that we show our country and the rest of the world that we haven't forgotten what it really means to live in a democratic society.