Thoughts on the Events in Iran

The elections as a whole were not democratic. The Mullahs, the Guardian Council, decided who can run and who couldn’t; this excluded most people who wanted to run. Those who were allowed to run were all people who the Mullahs could support. Mousavi is not much of a radical or moderate and not someone deserving of our support.

In many ways, this is like the election between Kerry and Bush. Kerry would have carried out Bush’s agenda as is Obama because they are all representative of the Capitalist class. All the candidates in Iran are representative of the theocracy that rules there.

In the US, it is not the Mullahs, but the capitalist class that decides who can run. In the US it is not done by decree, but through money, as is the preferred way in a capitalist democracy.

Although the elections in Iran were rigged from the start, the Iranian system is more democratic than in other countries that the US does support such as Egypt or Saudi Arabia.

Although the Iranian elections were rigged, I think there is mass support for Ahmadinejad. I think he probably won the election. This is not like the case in Mexico in 2006 where Calderon was declared the winner but most observers felt that Obrador won. In the Mexican case there were huge demonstrations for a long period of time but they were not looked at favorably by the US government or the US media unlike the Iranian demonstrations that are looked at favorably by both. In the case of Mexico, the opposition was deserving of our support.

This is also unlike the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. There, the 2 candidates got about equal vote in the election but the US had a lot of influence in that country and was interested in furthering the break-up of the Soviet Union. The US played a crucial role in the Ukraine organizing demonstrations for the pro-western candidate and financing the opposition. As a result, today, the Ukraine is pro-US imperialism and supports the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the US is pushing to have them join NATO. In the Ukraine I think it would have been better for the Pro-US candidate to lose.

In Iran, neither candidate is pro-US. In fact, Mousavi, who was the prime-minister in Iran during the 1980s, has been one of the biggest advocates for pushing Iran’s nuclear program. I don’t believe that the US wants to see him in any more than Ahmadinejad. Also, the US does not have the same influence in Iran as it had in the Ukraine. The US cannot direct the mobilizations as it did in the Ukraine. I think this is why the US response has been muted, unlike in the Ukrainian situation.

Also, I think that the US assessment of the situation in Iran is that Mousavi will not be put in office and will not win this round with Ahmadinajad. So, by giving him support, they will not gain. All the US can hope for in Iran is to use it for propaganda value to build more support for invasion.


The main point about the US and the Iranian situation is that the US government would love an excuse to invade Iran. We, in the US, must build opposition to any moves to invade. This is one of the reasons that it is important to maintain a strong anti-war movement in the US. War will continue to be an ever-present part of US foreign police.

I think it is important for us to point out the hypocrisy of the US in this situation. It was the US government who overthrew the democratically elected, secular Mossadegh government in Iran and installed the brutal Shah in power. When the Iranian people went out into the streets and overthrew the Shah, his forces shot them down by the thousands but we saw no outcry from the US politicians or the media.

So, I think the position of the US left should not be in support of the Ahmadinejad regime because they “won the elections,” or because they will be more anti-imperialist than Mousavi. I think neither is true. The elections were not democratic from the start, and Mousavi will stand up for the theocracy and against the US to the same extent as Ahmadinejad – and maybe as a better representative for them than Ahmadinejad. And the theocracy running the country makes Iran a not so good anti-imperialist power in any case. Eventually the Iranian people will need to overthrow the theocracy, but that is not the fight going on in Iran today regardless of the fact that many in the streets want to overthrow them.

Similarly, I don’t think that the left should support the opposition because it will not lead to change for the Iranian people and it will be wrong to imply that it will.

That said, I think that many people in Iran who are opposed to the repression in Iran have been drawn into the demonstrations. It is always possible that people in motion can take a situation further than it was intended to go. I think it is important to watch this process in Iran as it develops.

Joe Lombardo

Who are the Terrorists?

I was unable to find the word “terrorist” in my local paper, the Times Union, in the AP article on the murder of Dr. George Tiller. I was terribly shocked at this brutal murder of a man who devoted his life to helping women, but I was also shocked to see his killer described as “An activist abortion opponent.” Why not terrorist?

Is this word reserved only for Muslims? Is the murdering of doctors who perform abortions terrorism? Is the bombing of abortion clinics terrorism? Was the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics terrorism? What about the bombing of the federal building in Okalahoma city or the bombing of Black churches in the South or the killing of gays because they are gay? Are these acts terrorism? Is it because these perpetrators are Christians that they are not called terrorists?

The most terror that this world has seen has been from Christian groups like the Nazi’s and fascists in Europe, like the inquisitions of the Catholic Church or the cross burnings of the KKK or the killings and bombings of US troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Swine Flu and Economic Meltdown

There is a connection between the economic meltdown that is bringing the economies of the world to their knees and the swine flu. The connection is deregulation. Many are now calling the swine flu the NAFTA flu because it is believed to have started on a pig farm in Mexico owned by the US pork giant Smithfield Farms. The first known case of the swine flu was in the Mexican town of La Gloria, near the farm. Hundreds of other people in that town were infected.

In 1985, Virginia-based Smithfield Farms was fined by the EPA for dumping toxic hog waste into the Chesapeake Bay. In 1994, soon after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed, Smithfield Farms moved its operations to Mexico, where it would not have to follow strict environmental regulations. This move not only cost the US jobs but may now have cost us our health.

The Smithfield Farms facility in Mexico is an environmental nightmare. A Mexican paper described it as, “Clouds of flies emanate from the rusty lagoons where the Carroll Ranches business tosses the fecal wastes of its pig farms.”

Deregulation similarly affected the financial industry in the US and brought down the rest of the world’s economies. It was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act in 1999, a law geared to protect bank deposits from the speculative activity of investment bankers that contributed to the present economic crisis. It was congressional legislation forbidding the regulation of exotic financial dealings like Collateralized Debt Obligations(CDOs) and Credit Default Swaps (CDS) that put our economy at risk.

Yet, there has been no move to repeal NAFTA, reinstate Glass-Steagall, or outlaw CDOs or CDSs. Instead we ask working people to weather the flu and give our tax dollars to bail out the financial institution, so they can keep doing what caused the crisis in the first place. Instead of stopping the evils of unbridled capitalism, we ask state workers to accept layoffs, pay lags, and wage freezes. Perhaps its time to rethink these policies.

Pirates, Terrorists and War Lords

Although we are all relieved by the release of Captain Richard Phillips from his Somalia captors, there seems to be much more to the story than is being reported. First of all, Captain Phillips' ship, the Maersk Alabama, is part of the fleet owned by the Denmark-based Moller-Maersk company, which is one of the US Department of Defense’s primary shipping contractors. However, according to the DoD, it was not under contract at the time it was overtaken. But the Maersk Alabama, a ship used by the US DoD and carrying an all American crew, was supposedly delivering food aid to Kenya and going right through the so called pirate infested waters off Somalia. Why did they not simply avoid those waters? Some have suggested that it was a provocation, done as a prelude to a US military intervention on the horn of Africa. As former UN Ambassador John Bolton said on April 11, we need a “coalition of the willing” to invade Somalia.

Other important questions are, who are these pirates? Why do other countries not have such bands of pirates? Recently, a New York Times article quoted one of them, Sugule Ali, as saying, “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits...we consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump wastes in our seas and carry weapons in our seas.” Every country claims 12 miles beyond its shores as its territorial waters and an additional 250 miles as its “exclusive economic zone.” Each country is allowed to control all economic activities in these waters.

After the Somali civil war in the late 1980's, the central government was no longer able to patrol and control activity in these waters. Fleets from other countries started fishing in this area, devastating the Somalia fishing industry; other countries started dumping industrial waste off the Somalia coast, including nuclear waste that sickened the coastal populations. Around that time, the Somalia fishing cooperatives banded together to patrol their waters and save their industry and people. Instead of the US and other advanced countries' condemning and stopping the illegal activities of other countries off the Somalia coast, they branded the Somalian protectors as "pirates," and they are now on a full scale campaign to stop them.

The word pirate is just one in a growing lexicon used by our government and the media to sway public opinion. If we don’t like a government, its leaders are "war lords." If a band of people don’t like what the US is doing in their country and try to stop it, they are "terrorists," and if fishing cooperatives band together to protect their territorial waters, they are "pirates."

Certainly, some of these so called pirates are out for their own economic gain. But there is illegal activity in all devastatingly poor areas around the world, including in inner cities of the US. Using strong-armed tactics against the Somalian people will never correct the situation, because it doesn’t deal with the underlying problem of the wealthy nations taking advantage of the poor.

Protests on the 6th Anniversary of the Iraq Invasion

The March 21 anti-war rally in Washington was an important success, but smaller than past rallies. It was very important that it happened because if not, there would have been no national action on the 6th anniversary of the war in Iraq in the country that is responsible for the war, the US. Actions also took place in San Francisco and Los Angeles as well as several other places. Other important features of the march were the diversity and youthfulness of the demonstrators.

We had a bus from Albany. There were also a few from Albany who could not get on our bus and went with a bus from Kingston, some left from the Yankee Trails bus barn in East Greenbush. Other area buses that I am aware of are 2 from Rochester, 1 from Ithaca, 1 from Syracuse and 3 from Hartford. Our bus included a number of students from SUNY, Siena and Bethlehem High School. About half of our bus was students. A number of others from our area came down by their own means and I saw several at the rally.

The march was very long and took us past a number of corporate war profiteers where we left coffins to show the effects of their work.

At the demonstrations there were provocations, ostensibly organized by anarchists. Below is a quote from a report by Jerry Gordon, a central leader of the National Assembly, based upon a discussion with Brian Becker, a leader of the ANSWER coalition.

“In D.C., San Francisco and Los Angeles, there were planned provocations ostensibly conducted by anarchists but actually the work of police agents and the Feds. In D.C. this group put up a mesh fence which prevented marchers from passing without doing a detour around the obstruction. Those participating in the provocation yelled out slogans denouncing and redbaiting ANSWER and other forces as racists. But when the march reached the corporate headquarters of one of the big plane manufacturers, five of the "anarchists" showed their police credentials and were admitted into the building. Pictures of this were taken by demonstrators and when this was discovered, a frantic but unsuccessful effort was made by the cops to seize the pictures. In the course of this, a cop had a gun pointed only inches from Brian's face. ANSWER has the pictures and will launch an initiative to pull together a coalition of civil liberty groups to cope with and expose an evolving trend of federal law enforcement and local police activity designed to disrupt peaceful antiwar demonstrations”



Besides the importance of the national peace movement demonstrating on the 6th anniversary of the war, I believe that building the demonstration was essential for the peace movement. It was difficult to build the rally even though sentiment in this country against the wars has never been greater. People organizing the rally nationally like ANSWER and the National Assembly, which I was working with, understood that the rally would be smaller because of the political period that we are in. Obama is still in his honeymoon period with the American people who are convinced, in their majority, that he is ending the war in Iraq. There also appears to be less violence in Iraq. The government and media attribute this to the surge; however, most observers in the peace movement understand that it has to due with other factors including the success of US government’s tactic of divide and rule. This has manifested itself in Iraq through outright bribery of Sunni leaders outside of Baghdad and ethnic cleansing in Baghdad. The ethnic cleansing has reduced the population of Baghdad from roughly 50% Sunni to 10% Sunni. It has caused millions of refugees and thousands of deaths. Additionally, I think other factors contributed to the size of the rally including the economic meltdown which has dominated the media and the thinking of the American people. Also, as you know, the divisions in the anti-war movement have had an effect as UFPJ moves away from the issue of the wars and the bitter split between ANSWER and UFPJ continues. It will take some time for these factors to play out.



If there was no national demonstration on the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the anti-war movement would become invisible. It would go into retreat and have to be rebuilt at a future date. As it stands now, the organizing for this demonstration has kept the issues in front of the American people and helped build a new young leadership for our movement that is beginning to step forward. In July, the National Assembly will hold its second nation conference. All national and local anti-war groups will be invited. As with the first conference anyone who comes will have voice and vote. Here we hope to assess where the anti-war movement is and how to move forward. If you are interested in coming to this conference in Pittsburg, please let me know.


Peace,
Joe Lombardo

Battered Women, Child Custody and the Progressive Movement

Over the weekend of January 9th – 11th, 2009, I attended the 6th Annual Battered Mothers Custody Conference in Albany, NY. I had also attended the previous five conferences. Each conference was organized by my partner, Dr. Mo Hannah, a professor of psychology at Siena College, near Albany.

I have been a political activist all my life. I grew up in a family of political activists, and I have devoted my entire life, as my parents did, to making the world a better place. During my journey, I have learned much that is deplorable about our government and its institutions. Yet even I had a hard time believing the cruelty and injustice of the family court system toward battered mothers and their children, which this conference is dedicated to exposing. Today, I am a believer.

The stories I heard each year at the conference go something like this:

I was in an abusive marriage and finally found the courage to leave. I was living in fear of my husband but afraid to leave. I didn’t know what he would do to me and I had no means to live on my own. But, when I discovered that he was abusing our daughter, I knew I had no choice. I came to the shelter and I filed for divorce.

In the course of the divorce hearing, when I told the judge of the abuse that my daughter and I suffered at my husband’s hands, he seemed skeptical. Although he seemed to understand that there was some abuse, he said that he did not see a “pattern” of abuse and thought I was “overreacting.” I was accused of “parental alienation,” meaning he thought that I was trying to keep my child away from her father out of vindictiveness. As a result, my husband was given custody of our daughter and I was given supervised visitation.

When they came to get my daughter and bring her to her father, she tried to hold onto me and she cried and begged me to not let her go. I tried not to cry and told her I would do everything I could. When she left, I did to cry, and I still cannot stop crying. How can they prevent me from protecting my daughter? How can I survive knowing what she is suffering at the hands of her abuser, and I am not allowed to help her?

You can hear some of these mothers telling their stories at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5viwjaIorU8

One such story at this year’s conference was told by Jennifer Collins (http://americanchildrenunderground.blogspot.com/). Jennifer is a 22 year old woman who survived this kind of experience as a child. When she told her mother that her father was hurting her and her brother, her mother, Holly, told this to the judge. The judge told Holly that she was “overreacting,” probably because she was abused herself as a child. Jennifer, who was seven years old at the time, and her brother were taken from their mother and given to their father. Jennifer described the abuse in her father’s home including the time her father broke her brother’s skull by knocking his head against the wall. Holly was given supervised visitation. At one visit, when Jennifer told her mother that her father was hitting her and showed her mother the bruises, the supervisor told Jennifer that she cannot talk to her mother about that. After 18 months, Jennifer and her brother snuck out of their father’s home and found their way to their mother’s house. Their mother took the kids and ran. Eventually, she was discovered in the Netherlands. The US demanded Holly’s extradition in order to prosecute her for child kidnapping. For three years, she fought the extradition while she and her kids lived in a Dutch refugee camp with refugees from Somalia and other repressive governments. After three years, the Dutch government granted them asylum.

Jennifer is now a 22-year old adult who travels throughout the United States speaking out against family court injustice. She has formed an organization of adult children who have “aged out” of the court system’s jurisdiction. The name of her organization is “Children Against Court Appointed Child Abuse – CA3” (www.ca3cacaca.blogspot.com/ ). A similar organization called Courageous Kids (www.courageouskids.net) was formed several years earlier by other adult child victims. Several members of the Courageous Kids group were at this and previous conferences.

Why?

For many who hear about these travesties the question is, why? Why would the courts respond to domestic violence victims this way? The question of “why” is always difficult to answer because those running the courts, and judges, like other abusers, deny the abuse and therefore see no need to explain their actions.

The most important thing allies of abused women and children can do for them is to keep on believing them. It took a very long time for the criminal courts to believe the victims of domestic violence or rape. They would often blame the victim or dismiss the case as a “domestic situation,” telling the parties to go home and resolve their issues. This has changed somewhat in the criminal courts over the past two decades, largely due to the women’s and domestic violence movements. But the family courts still have a long way to go.

In custody situations, the presumption once was that the mother would get custody because she was the primary care giver for the children. That has now changed. In the overwhelming majority of cases the mother is still the primary care giver but the courts have changed from the presumption that the mother should have custody to a presumption that it is better for the children if both parents have equal access to the children. This is fine when there are two loving and caring parents, but when the children are used as pawns in on-going disputes between the divorcing parents or when there is domestic violence or child abuse involved, equal access and joint custody are the exact wrong solutions.

We live in a country facing tremendous economic and social pressures, a society that glorifies violence and remains in a state of almost perpetual war. These features have contributed to the epidemic of domestic abuse we see today. However, family courts continue in their refusal to acknowledge this reality, and judges with no understanding of domestic violence continue to re-victimize battered mothers and their children with their disastrous court decisions.

A woman who has been abused is not only hurt physically but also mentally and emotionally. Many display symptoms similar to the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms that soldiers returning from war zones exhibit. When these women go before a judge and are confronted with the possibility that their children may be taken from them and given to their abuser, they often become emotional. The abusive partner, on the other hand, may come across as cool, calm, and logical. While the mother’s emotion may be taken as a negative, if the father shows emotion it is usually viewed far more sympathetically as if it shows he is a good father and cares about his children. The judge may, therefore, see him as the better parent.

All through the family courts there is a double standard that works against mothers. If she is emotional, it's a negative; if she is not emotional, it's also a negative. If she has a job, she cares more about her work than about her children; if she doesn't work for a living, she's seen as unable to adequately provide for her children. If she does not fight to keep her children away from the abuser, she is accused of "failure to protect"; if she does fight for them, she is seen as trying to alienate the children from their father or not being open to his having "equal access" to them. Protective mothers find themselves in a Catch 22 hell in family court.

Parental Alienation Syndrome

The rationale often used for taking children away from a protective mother and giving them to an abusive father is called "parental alienation syndrome" (PAS). Parental alienation syndrome is the invention of an anti-Semitic, quack, now-deceased psychiatrist named Richard Gardner. PAS is based on pseudo-science and not accepted as a credible syndrome by any of the relevant psychiatric or psychological associations. While it is possible for one parent to speak badly of the other in the course of divorce proceedings and probably happens often, to claim that this is a psychological syndrome, a "disorder" that makes its sufferer an unfit parent is both fraudulent and absurd. Gardner actually claimed that PAS does more damage to children than real physical and sexual abuse.

PAS is almost never used against men. It is not uncommon for abusive fathers to claim that they are not abusive and that the mother is only saying so to discredit them in the course of the custody hearing. According to an American Psychological Association's report of a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s study, “Fathers who batter the mother are twice as likely to seek sole physical custody of their children than are nonviolent fathers.” Various other studies report that these men will get custody in anywhere from 33% to 70% of the cases, depending on the study. In these cases PAS is typically used to support their position.

The Father Supremacy Movement

PAS is championed by the so called Fathers Rights movement (FRs), also known as the Father Supremacy movement. These groups claim that men are as likely as women to be victims of domestic violence--this despite U.S. Dept. of Justice statistics that show women as the victims of domestic violence in 86% of cases. FRs claim that most reports of domestic violence are false and that these false claims, rather than domestic violence, are the real problem. However, numerous studies have shown that false claims of rape or domestic violence are uncommon. The Father Supremacy groups direct batterers towards legal services that will help them build a PAS argument in their cases and teach them how to use their typically superior financial positions to harass their former partners through the court system, driving them into bankruptcy in their quest to hurt these women the most--by taking their children away from them.

Many men who have gone through a divorce, including this author, are repulsed by the belligerent, vindictive, anti-women tone of these organizations and their many web sites. These groups are organized remnants of the fight against equality for women. They are throwbacks to a time when women and children were considered the man’s property. These men become incensed when “their” woman stands up to them on behalf of herself and her children. This anger is what drives these groups: one of the last vestiges of male supremacy in our society. Unfortunately, these men all too often find a receptive ear in the family court system.

The case of Barry Goldstein

Sometimes family court judges go so far as to discipline lawyers for vigorously defending protective mothers. Such is what happened to attorney Barry Goldstein, who has defended many victims of domestic violence and has been a tireless advocate for them inside and outside the courtroom.

Barry was, for awhile, the attorney for Genia Shockome, a protective mother living in Dutchess County, New York. Genia is a Russian born engineer whose ex-husband, Tim Shockome, had two prior foreign brides before he married Genia. They had two children together before Genia filed for divorce and custody of the children, stating that he had been abusing her for years. At one point, he was convicted in criminal court for harassing her, but in family court, he was able to use Parental Alienation against Genia, and he eventually won sole custody of the children. The case was described in an article in Newsweek magazine (http://www.newsweek.com/id/35157).

At one point, while 8 month pregnant, Genia was appearing on her own behalf in front of the family court judge, who ruled that her ex-husband could move away with the children to Texas. After Genia persisted in objecting to the judge's ruling thinking she was establishing a record for an appeal, the judge ordered her jailed for one month. Barry then posted an article on an internet blog criticizing the judge’s action.

In retaliation, this same judge filed attorney disciplinary charges against Barry, claiming that his statements on the blog were false. The appellate court of the State of New York convicted Barry of this and other charges and suspended Barry's license to practice law for an astonishing five years. The message this sends to other attorneys in these cases is don't defend your clients too strongly and you don't have first amendment rights to speak to the public if the court disagrees with what you are saying.

At the Sixth Battered Mothers Custody Conference, a resolution supporting Barry Goldstein and condemning the decision of the appellate court was proposed and passed. The text of the resolution, signed by the Battered Mothers Custody Conference, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, and NOW New York State, was sent to the justices of the appellate court, the New York State Attorney General and the Governor of New York.

The Progressive Movement, Domestic Violence, and Child Custody

The issues addressed by the Battered Mothers Custody Conference that are affecting thousands of women today are not typically addressed by the progressive movement in this country but ought to be. Some may believe that these issues are personal, not political. The same justification was used by many progressives in the early days of the women’s movement. Today, however, we understand that much of what is considered personal is political. Those of us who fight for social justice are motivated by the image of a society where there is true equality. We envision a world where people are not driven by economic needs, fear and insecurity, which play a big part in divorce proceedings. In such a society human relations will change; Violence would be an anathema. In such a society, the need of the small elite, who rule today, to divide and conquer, will wither away and equality for all will become the norm. In such a society, the concept of the family will change as will divorce and custody issues. However, the fight to achieve such a society is embodied in each and every struggle for equality and justice--including the struggle on behalf of protective mothers and their children.

The web site for the Battered Mothers Custody Conference is http://www.batteredmotherscustodyconference.org/. I urge those in the peace and justice movement and other progressive causes to go to the web site, consider attending the next conference and to use the weight of your organizations to support women in your community who are facing this abuse from their partner or the family court system.

Joe Lombardo

A program to save the working people of New York

The following is flyer that I and others wrote and handed out at a mass rally of New York State workers opposing the Governor's Budget cuts.

New York, thanks to the worldwide economic crisis, faces a projected state budget shortfall of over $13 billion. In a move worthy of Herbert Hoover, Governor Paterson wants to cut education, healthcare and local government and levy new taxes on everything form haircuts to cable TV.

Working people already bear the brunt of this crisis. A trillion-dollar “bailout” of our tax money has already gone to the titans of Wall Street. Yet the Governor wants New York’s public employees to shoulder more than others. He wants to confiscate a week’s pay, a “lag,” meaning we work a week but don’t get paid for it until we die or retire. He wants us to re-open union contracts to give back what we won at the bargaining table and earned through hard work.

The gap between the rich and the poor in the United States has never been so severe. Today the top 1% of the population is wealthier than the bottom 95%. The richest 400 people possess more wealth than the bottom 150,000,000 people, combined. But the rich are not being asked to pay for the crisis their own greed created -- we have bailed them out. Now Governor Paterson asks us for further sacrifice. Instead, we can make New York a better place to live and work!

A 4-point plan to solve the state’s fiscal crisis:

Tax the Rich!
Those with top incomes in the state previously paid over 15% in taxes. Today they pay less than 7%. More than 400 New Yorkers make over $35 million per year. By requiring those who make over $250,000 per year to pay their fair share in taxes, and with an additional 1% income tax surcharge for those with incomes over $1 million per year, the state would erase the projected budget shortfall.

Tax All Financial Transactions!
When you buy a new shirt you pay sales tax (8% or more for 85% of New Yorkers). However, when a Wall Street investor buys or sells $1 million in stocks or futures or bonds or interest rate swaps, he pays no tax. All financial transactions should be charged a minimum tax, for example a national tax of one-half of 1%, an amount estimated to yield over $150 billion in national revenue. This would also deter the day trading and speculation that exacerbates wild price swings. New York would completely rescue its state budget with a tiny state tax of just 5/100ths of 1% per financial transaction.

End the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan!
The Iraq war costs around $5,000 per second. The US plans to further escalate the war in Afghanistan. New York National Guard members fight in Iraq and Afghanistan and US troops are stationed in over 120 countries around the world. We can no longer tolerate spending trillions for war. New York’s share for the war in Iraq alone has been more that $66 billion, $12 billion this fiscal year. If the taxes paid by New York residents for war in Iraq and Afghanistan went into the state treasury instead, it would balance the state budget.

Single-payer healthcare!
When we lose our job we lose our health insurance. A single-payer health system, like proposal in Congressional bill HR 676, will insure that ALL people have ALL necessary medical care. It would also yield a massive economic stimulus, liberating money that now goes to out-of-pocket health expenses and creating healthcare jobs. It would remove the confusion, waste, advertising and profit of private health insurers. A single-payer medical care system would reduce health spending in New York by at least $20 billion annually.