The lastest BAYAN-USA podcast is out, hosted by myself and the Secretary-General of BAYAN-USA Rhonda Ramiro.

You can check it out on iTunes here.

According to the San Jose Mercury News:

[T]housands of Kaiser employees walked off the job to protest stalled negotiations over a new contract.

Kaiser brought in replacement workers and planned to keep all of its hospitals and medical offices open during the one-day action, which ends at 7 a.m. Wednesday.

But some drop-in services such as optical sales may be closed in certain locations, Kaiser noted in a letter to patients.

The strike was called by the 4,000 members of National Union of Healthcare Workers, representing mental health clinicians, clinical psychologists, licensed social workers and opticians. The union began bargaining for a new contract in 2010.

Two other unions agreed to walk out in sympathy — up to 17,000 registered nurses with the California Nurses Association/ National Nurses United, and 650 members of Stationary Engineers Local 39.

Also the NUHW website has the latest coverage of the strike here.

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Video found via Hossam.

On my blog The Excerpt Mill I post a quote from an essay on Mao Zeodong’s philosophical  thought by Richard Johnson:

Because, relative to that of the Communist, the socioeconomic persona of the proletariat is limited–and, give the empirical existence of political vicissitudes, may remain so indefinitely–the chance that from such a basis alone will be launched a coherent, direct, and enlightened politics, is slight.  Understandable then, in this light, is the enigmatic logic of the Manifesto, where, inscribed among the historic character of communists, is the task of the “formation of the proletariat into a class.”  The apparent paradox that an entity that is already a class, must be made to become a class, is comprehensible when it is remembered that the historical process of consciousness is not identical to the consciousness of the historical process; that, moreover, “ideological forms” have a historical depth related to, but not immediately determined by, material development.  It is thus by this logic that the qualitative transformation of empirical, perhaps sporadic, political action into direct, and conscious, class-based political programs exists within the historical scope of an organizing medium led by a group of enlightened elites, vis Communists).

Click on the pic for full and timely updates by Hossam el-Hamalawy (Photo by Moises Saman)

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Over at my blog The Excerpt Mill I quote philosopher Jacques Derrida on the idea of logocentrism within European philosophical thought:

Within this age of metaphysics, between Descartes and Hegel, Rousseau is undoubtedly the only one or the first one to make a theme or a system of the reduction of writing profoundly implied by the entire age.  He repeats the inaugural movement of the Phaedurs and of De interpretatione but starts from a new model of presence: the subject’s self-presence within consciousness or feeling.  What he excluded more violently than others must, of course, have fascinated and tormented him more than it did others.  Descartes had driven out the sign–and particularly the written sign–from the cogito and from clear and distinct evidence; the latter being the very presence of the idea of the soul, the sign was an accessory abandoned in the region of the senses and the imagination.  Hegel reappropriates the sensible sign to the movement of the Idea.  He criticizes Leibniz and praises phonetic writing within the horizon of an absolutely self-present logos, remaining close t itself within the unity of its speech and its concept.  But neither Descartes nor Hegel grappled with the problem of writing.  The place of this combat and crisis is called the eighteenth century.  Not only because it restores the rights of sensibility, the imagination, and the sign, but because attempts of the Leibnizian type had opened a breach within logocentric security.  We must bring to light what it was that, right from the start, within these attempts at a universal characteristic, limited the power and extent of the breakthrough.  Before Hegel and in explicit terms, Rousseau condemned the universal characteristic; not  because of the theological foundation which ordained its possibility for the infinite understanding of logos of God, but because it seemed to suspend the voice.  ”Through” this condemnation can be read the most energetic eighteenth-century reaction organizing the defense of phonologism and of logocentric metaphysics.  What threatens is indeed writing.  It is not an accidental and haphazard threat; it reconciles within a single historical system the projects of pasigraphy, the discovery of non-European scripts, or at any rate the massive progress of the techniques and deciphering, and finally the idea of a general science of language and writing.  Against all of these prussures, a battle is then declared.  ”Hegelianism” will be its finest scar.

Image from Lenin's Tomb

While I have a lot to write on about the Occupy Wall Street actions that have been going on all over the United States I will leave it to the venerable blogger Richard Seymour as he more or less puts the whole thing into perspective.  One thing I will be watching out for is how the emerging leading sections of Occupy Wall Street treat the question of monopoly capitalism as being tied to US imperialism and how to focus on taking the system of US imperialism down instead of solely focusing on financial institutions.

Richard blogs:

Where does Occupy Wall Street fit into this?  It is not my objective to pigeon-hole it as either a revolutionary or reformist strategy – it is neither, in fact.  To put it in what will sound like uncharitable terms, it is baby-steps, the experimental form of a movement in its infancy, not yet sufficiently developed theoretically or politically to be anything else.  There is a sort of loose autonomism informing its tactics, while its focus on participatory democracy is redolent of the SDS wing and the Sixties ‘New Left’, but it is not yet definite enough to be reducible to any dominant strategy or perspective.  It is, however, potentially the nucleus of a mass movement, and how it relates to the problems addressed by both reformists and revolutionaries now will make all the difference in the future.  At a certain point, the severity of the state’s response to it will force a theoretical and political clarification on its (official or unofficial) leadership.  Recall how the high watermark of Sixties radicalism in 1968 was also the moment at which the state got serious in its repression.  This was the year in which the term “police riot” was invented to describe Chicago cops’ response to protesters outside the Democratic convention, where police mercilessly assaulted protesters and bystanders alike, while students chanted “The whole world is watching”.  This was the year in which the FBI murdered several black leaders.  It was in the years that followed that the movement was forced to crystalise politically, to become a much more grim undertaking – though with the unfortunate drawback that many of the leaders were drawn into the most ultra-Stalinist politics while others simply took their ‘community organising’ schtick into the Democratic fold.  So, I would say that if a mass movement emerges from this, the early orientation of Wall Street occupiers to the major strategic questions will make a big difference.

Click on the photo for the article (photo by Associated Press).

“The Marcos dictatorship was ended by people power more than 25 years ago but many essential remnants of fascism have remained, buttressed by the continuation of the same old, rotten semi-feudal and semi-colonial system and rule,” Jazmines said.

Karapatan’s Enriquez shares the same view, saying that the Aquino government continues the practice of arrest and detention of those who criticize the government’s inaction on soaring prices of basic commodities, unabated oil price increases, and the government policies and programs on land reform, urban poor housing, mining and budget cuts on basic services such as health and education.

“Beneath the Oplan Bayanihan’s slogan of ‘adherence to human rights and peace and development,’ political repression remains,” Enriquez declared, citing as example the killing of Rabenio Sungit, a member of the United Church of Christ of the Philippines (UCCP) on Sept. 5 in Quezon, Palawan, and the death of seven-year-old Sunshine Jabinez, on Sept. 2, due to indiscriminate firing of members of the 71st Infantry Battalion of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (IBPA).

Presidential Spokesman Lacierda said:” We frown on extralegal killings.” But under the Aquino administration, there are already 55 victims of extrajudicial killings and eight victims of enforced disappearances, based on Karapatan’s documentation.

Over at my other blog The Excerpt Mill I take a quote from Richard Edward DeLeon’s classic text, Left Coast City, on the challenges that left-winged “progressives” would have in being able to take control of the San Francisco government apparatus while still holding onto their progressive politics under a capitalist regime:

A…reality progressives must face is that a small business economy by itself is inadequate to support a progressive regime…[T]he city’s small businesses are not always beautiful, and its petty bourgeoisie will never be the economic vanguard of radicalism.  Leftist arguments that romanticize small business and demonize big business fail to capture the diversity and complexity of San Francisco’s business community.  In the city’s service economy, what most small service firms serve are big businesses.  To discount the economic importance of large corporations or to view them simply as objects of expropriation is to validate claims that progressives are unable to think strategically about the city as a whole…

Yet the progressives are onto something in their love affair with small business.  Their emphasis on preserving and promoting small firms and neighborhood shops follows logically from a slow-growth perspective on land use and physical development…