“Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo” – H.G. Wells

William Lee Brent, a member of the Black Panther party who sought refuge in Cuba to 1969, has died in Havana at the age of 75.

After being accused of robbery and murder, Brent skyjacked a plane with a .38 handgun and fled to Cuba, which was sympathetic to the Black freedom struggle and open to revolutionaries worldwide. After arriving in Cuba, Brent was initially imprisoned for 22 months on suspicion of espionage. After his release, he worked in sugar cane fields, on a pig farm, as a radio disc jockey and as a high school teacher. He eventually earned a degree in Spanish literature and married writer Jane McManus.

Although he never returned to the United States, Brent remained interested and engaged in the Black freedom struggle and the lives of oppressed people everywhere.
Brent, who spent the remainder of his life in Cuba, died Nov. 4 of bronchial pneumonia at a Havana hospital.

May his soul forever rest in peace.

I guarantee that somebody lost their job over this!
According to US and Argentine news sources, President Bush’s daughter had her purse and cell phone stolen while she was dining in a Buenos Aires restaurant. Apparently, thieves took the purse from under a table while Secret Service agents stood guard at a distance.

Argentine police told The Associated Press they had no complaint of any such incident on file, and the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires said it would have no comment. In Washington, the White House, Secret Service and State Department also declined comment.

Of course they did.

The fact that the world’s finest security force stood idly as the President’s daughter was robbed of her belongings by Argentinian thieves is at once embarassing, funny, and scary. Fumbles like these only encourage bigger and meaner thugs to attempt worse crimes under the belief that America is asleep at the wheel.

Critics of “go local” movements warn that buying local deprives people in developing countries of jobs that could lift them out of poverty. But the global economy isn’t that simple.

Buying Local Doesn’t Hurt The Developing World
By Francis Moore Lappe 

There’s only one thing worse for the poor in the Global South, we’re told, than a job in a sweatshop: It’s the alternative — no job. That’s basically what New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof argued recently. If true, then “buy local” campaigns in the North that cut imports could harm the planet’s poorest people.

But before accepting this heart-rending story, let’s ground ourselves in the real global economy.

Shedding corporate-media filters, we see that the poor are not languishing in their sad villages and grimy shantytowns just waiting to be saved by corporate giants from abroad. Many poor people are themselves creating the real job growth in much of the Global South. They are the small shopkeepers, street vendors, and home-based workers whose jobs make up what’s called the “informal economy” not counted by authorities.

In Latin America, 85 percent of new jobs created during the 1990s were in this sector, not the corporate one. Informal jobs account for more than half of all jobs in Latin America and the Caribbean, and as much as 80 percent in parts of Asia and in Africa.

“The informal economy is anything corporations can’t make money on,” social entrepreneur Josh Mailman quipped to me recently. “That’s why it’s invisible.”

Many of the jobs the poor are creating are not what the wealthy minority abroad might imagine — lone individuals scrambling, say, to power a pedicab in Dhaka or sell fruit on streets of Caracas.

For the rest of the story, click here.