Tag Archives: Norway

July 5 protest Starbucks unfair labor

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The IWW Starbucks Workers Union has declared a Global Day of Action to protest Starbucks’ anti-union termination. According to their press release:

Coordinated Actions Across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America Could
Be Largest Ever Against Coffee Chain.

Grand Rapids , MI ( 06-30-2008 )- Union members and social activists are gearing up for what may be the largest, global coordinated action against Starbucks ever. Protesters will decry what they see as an epidemic of anti-union terminations by the world’s largest coffee chain. Starbucks and its CEO Howard Schultz have exhibited a pattern of firing outspoken union baristas ever since the advent of the IWW Starbucks Workers Union (SWU) in 2004 and are demonstrating the same practice against the CNT union in Spain.

“On July 5th people around the world will show Starbucks that we, baristas along with our supporters, will have a voice and Starbucks discrimination and repression of our efforts will not go unchecked,” said Cole Dorsey, a fired Starbucks barista and a member of the SWU.

…Actions against Starbucks will take place in: Argentina, Chile, the British Isles, Italy, Japan, Norway, Serbia, Poland, Slovakia, 4 cities in Spain, 6 cities in Germany. In the US: Phoenix, Philadelphia, Grand Rapids, Boston, Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles.

Hallelujah once again

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Hallelujah was written by Leonard Cohen and first recorded on his 1984 album Various Positions. Since then the song has been recorded or sung by dozens of artists including Willie Nelson, k.d. Lang, Sheryl Crow, Bon Jovi and Bob Dylan to name a few. Bono even did a horrendous spoken version of it to honor American artist Jeff Buckley, a fan of the spoken word, shortly after his drowning death. Of course, Cohen’s version is untouchable, but a few of the other efforts are noteworthy.

I’ve already posted Rufus Wainwright’s beautiful rendition of Hallelujah from the Shrek soundtrack. But this version, sung by a regular-Joe Norwegian Idol winner and a couple friends, apparently on a coffee break, has got to be my favorite. Kurt Nilsen, a gap-toothed former plumber with a beautiful voice, was told by an Idol judge, “You sing like an angel, but you look like a Hobbit.” Well, perhaps, a talented Hobbit about to go off into the blue for a mad adventure.

These four Norwegian lads, casually called the New Guitar Buddies by the local press, embarked on what was to be a low key six-show gig. Their unexpected popularity led to an amended schedule, a 30-show tour for more than 100,000 concert goers. The Buddies then released a live album, not part of the original plan, which became the fastest-selling recording of all time in Norway.

What the hell is it about this song?

Spook Steve Recca wants us to feel safe

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Commander Steve Recca, of the new DoD endowed UCCS Center for Homeland Security, told his Shove Chapel audience last night that Homeland Security is about being safe. That means everything to him from keeping his daughter safe at school to keeping the streets safe from excessive snow fall. Does the DHS want a crack at Climate Change?

Recca also explained that Homeland Security is about community. Yes, community: the local community and the global community. Whatever does he think “homeland” refers to? Manitou? Planet Earth? Before Bush and Ashcroft I’m pretty sure “Homeland” had only ever meant Nazi Germany, needing to be kept safe from Fascist-haters like socialists, anarchists, discontents and others who objected to Nazi land grabs. In the Soviet Bloc security would have been about community: the community of neighbors ready to rat on you.

Steve Recca kept Homeland Security affairs out of Greg Mortenson’s presentation until the end. Then, to cap off the questions from the audience, from the darkened anonymity of the public microphone, Recca asked for everyone’s patience while he read an “email from a Marine at an FOB (Forward Operating Base) in Afghanistan.”

In this “email” a soldier explained how protecting one of Mortenson’s schools was the most important goal of his mission, etc, etc.

The inattentive audience may have become too accustomed to visualizing boiler room letter writing sessions assigned to soldiers in the field, or soldiers laid up in VA hospitals with nothing else to do but hand-write form letters dictated to them by military PR specialists. Those Letters to the Editor sent to newspapers across the country, or emails to Dr Greg in this case, may be outsourced to India for all we know. In any case, the Colorado College audience was bored of it.

I’d like to see Recca explain what role propaganda or jingoism plays in Homeland Security.

Commander Steve Recca is a career spook, now pioneering the post-graduate studying of keeping white America safe. I can understand that DHS might require information sharing with the Intelligence Community. Does it have to be part of that community? Is that the “community” Recca was talking about?

Will Homeland Security be training its airport shoe-sniffers to conduct surveillance and torture too? Steve Recca doesn’t bring transportation or border guard experience to his job. His background is entirely about spying.

1983- graduate (with honors) of U.S. Naval Academy
1990- Master of Arts (with distinction) from Naval Postgraduate School
1990 to 1993- tours on USS YORKTOWN, USS TEXAS, USS AMERICA
1993- Staff, Commander Naval Forces Europe (CNE), in London
    Intelligence Watch Officer, Head of the Current Intelligence Branch.
1994- Certificate in International Political Affairs
    from University of Zurich
1995 to 1997- Special Assistant and Speechwriter
    for the Secretary of the Navy
1997 to 1998- Office of the Director of Central Intelligence,
    speech writer, member on Director’s Long-Term Planning Board
1998 to 2001-American Embassy in Oslo, Norway,
    as Assistant Naval Attaché,
    Joint Staff and Office of the Secretary of Defense
2001- Inman Intelligence Chair, Naval Postgraduate School,
    Senior Intelligence Officer and Intelligence Programs Coordinator
2003- Department of Defense Chief Liaison
    to the German Federal Intelligence Service.
2005- United States Northern Command’s Interagency Coordination
    Directorate, policy planning and technology consultant
2007- UCCS Center for Homeland Security

Here is Steve Recca quoted in the August 24, 2007 Colorado Springs Business Journal about a newly formed COLORADO HOMELAND DEFENSE ALLIANCE:

“The whole point behind the alliance is creating partnerships, networking — collaboration with government, military, university and corporations in the aerospace, defense and security industries.”

Unknown soldier

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CLICK TO ENLARGE -German Waffen SS soldierMy dad grew up in Norway under the occupation. He had a half-brother three years older about whom he was told nothing, who joined the Germans during the war and was killed at the Russian Front. My father wasn’t told when it happened, but remembers his mother getting the telegram.
 
We recently learned the brother’s name, and my uncle has recovered a photograph from the municipal archives.

His name was Martin. I have yet to see the new picture. This is a photograph which caught my eye some years ago, and which I kept, thinking it could be my family’s lost son, just as well as any other. It remains from captured German records, depicting an unnamed soldier, anyone’s. How likely is it that no-one survives to recognize this boy?

Martin was the product of my grandmother’s ill-fated first marriage. Her husband didn’t get along with her parents. He tried to poison her father, and in the attempt killed her mother. He was sent to prison, leaving my grandmother alone with the boy. When she began a new family, the older boy grew to become too much of a reminder of the deviant father, too much apparently for her new husband to bear. My grandmother was prevailed upon to send the boy away to be raised by relatives in the country. Martin disappeared before his half-siblings were old enough to remember him, traces of his memory effaced. My father remembers seeing a family picture which included a young Martin, to which my grandmother pretended, “that’s you.” And so one weekend a month, Gudmor would leave the family to visit her old aunt in the country. In later years my dad and his siblings figured out there was no such aunt. My grandmother died without telling the story.

It’s surmised that Martin grew up unwanted, ostracized by family and extended family, which may explain why on his seventeenth year, the Norwegian boy joined with the occupiers and enlisted with the Waffen SS, the German Army unit reserved for citizens of the occupied countries. He was sent to the Russian Front where he died in 1943.

My father called his younger brother yesterday, on a lark, though sometimes he is psychic. His brother was sitting in his car in Oslo, contemplating the photograph he’d just obtained of their lost brother. My uncle had also learned of Martin’s resting place, a cemetery for German soldiers in present-day Poland. They’re making plans to go visit his grave.

Neocon regalia

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Neocon Bald-faced EagleFor decades after the Second World War, German vets would get together in beer halls to remember the great days of the Third Reich. The Nazi cause may have become perverted, but its ideals were certainly grandiose: a Germany reborn as the worker’s utopia, a master race unshackled to bring order to a never-before united Europe.

My father grew up in occupied Norway. He remembers the incomparable German swagger. To this day he judges the authenticity of war movies based on whether the actors capture the arrogance of the German officers in their walk. I remember reading a Wehrmacht soldier’s autobiography reflecting on the initial ease with which Germany had overrun its neighbors. “It was impossible in those days not to feel immense pride in being a German.”

German regalia is highly collectible now, though my father remembers the days immediately following the war when Norwegians wouldn’t deign to pick up the Nazi medals, ribbons and flags strewn outside the German headquarters in newly freed Oslo.

Of course the German WWII regalia is collected fervently also because it was esthetic. A deliberate malevolence was courted by the fascists, a darkness amplified by the visual design of their uniforms, equipment and printed material. Albert Speer and Leni Reifenstahl were widely condemned for their contributions to the glorification of Nazi culture.

So when old SS veterans are clanging their glasses in memory of Germany’s grab for the brass ring, the nostalgia has quite a bit of pomp and polish. It was an Aryan dream in smart costumes and effective looking machinery.

Are ex-American servicemen going to look back at the U.S. adventures in Fascism with equal nostalgia? What trappings do the Neocons offer to distinguish their racist machinations? Wrap-around Oakleys? Kneepads and leggings? The mercenaries’ gold chains and Hawaiian shirts? And what stateside? Yellow ribbons? Cheap suits? Americans exude nothing but our simpleton arrogance I’m afraid. Yankee Fascism has probably required banality to disguise it. Later Americans will have to own up to our inhumanity and hubris with the additional shame that we couldn’t even transcend our ugliness for the occasion.

Police state

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Ready to pounceIn Norway you can’t speed or run a light anywhere without getting a ticket. In Norway they have cameras mounted sporadically along the roadways so you have no choice but to drive properly. Even on a country road, even if you’re running late, it makes no sense to break the law and that’s rather stress-averting in itself.

As a result there are no police cars in sight. Thus Norway has order and civility, without law enforcement authorities loitering to catch you.

It’s an interesting trade-off. Big brother -in a bureaucratic sense- instead of beat cops. It reduces the possibility of human error, personality clashes, power trips, graft, or whatever other motive led that officer to a career in law enforcement.

British police officers, Bobbies, are required to wear the funny get-ups to counter the natural impulse a law enforcer might get to act too authoritively. Until recently most Bobbies were not even allowed to carry weapons.

In this country, the policemen’s Ray-bans, other masculine accouterments, and the big gun serve to promote machismo power tripping. Good for them, but not so terribly great for you. In American, even when you are behaving yourself, a person can’t help the reflex of holding their breath when they cross the path of law enforcement officers.

Have you noticed that they’re multiplying? More tickets mean greater revenue for police departments, mean more officers, means a police state.