Friday, May 30, 2008

A New Direction In Latin America: By Shannon O'Neil

A New Direction In Latin America:
From the Council on Foreign Relations
Friday, May 30, 2008; 5:34 PM

Latin America has never mattered more to the United States. The region is the largest foreign supplier of oil to the United States and a strong partner in the development of alternative fuels. It is one of the United States's fastest growing trading partners, and its biggest supplier of illegal drugs. Latin America is also the largest source of U.S. immigrants, both documented and undocumented. No less important, nearly all Latin American nations are now vibrant, if imperfect, democracies. Not only does the United States affect Latin America, but Latin America increasingly shapes the United States as well. Yet despite these deepening strategic, economic, cultural and political ties, U.S. policies toward the region have remained relatively unexamined.

A new Council on Foreign Relations report,
U.S.-Latin America Relations: A New Direction for a New Reality, takes stock of these changes in the Western hemisphere and assesses their consequences for U.S. policy toward the region. It finds that the decades-old U.S. foreign policy trifecta of trade support, drug eradication and democracy promotion is not effectively advancing U.S. interests. Instead, the report identifies four areas that should provide a new basis for U.S. policy toward Latin America: poverty and inequality,public security, migration and energy security.

The region has undergone significant changes in recent decades, making substantial progress but also facing ongoing challenges. Democracy has spread, economies have opened, and populations have grown more mobile. But many countries have struggled to reduce poverty and inequality and to provide for public security. These endemic problems limit economic growth and allow illegal activities and crime organizations to flourish, undermining Latin American governments and U.S. interests in the process.

The United States can help Latin American governments face these challenges. To start, the United States should expand assistance for poverty alleviation and institution-building by fully funding the Millennium Challenge Account and developing new initiatives to reach the poor regions of the larger middle-income countries. This funding should reflect the priorities of Latin American governments and also involve restructuring and integrating the programs of various U.S. government bureaucracies and multilateral institutions. Alongside aid, the United States should approve pending free trade agreements with Colombia and Panama and extend trade preferences to Bolivia and Ecuador, encouraging productive relations and expanding economic opportunities for both Latin America and the United States.

In addition, the United States can aid Latin America in its quest to improve public security. In part, the United States can offer significant support and technical expertise to governments reforming their law enforcement and judicial systems. As important, the U.S. can halt the flow of guns and money across its own border south, reducing the arms that strengthen and fund drug cartels.

While reformulating approaches to traditional objectives, expanding U.S. ties with the region means that new issues -- migration and energy integration among them -- must be part of a comprehensive foreign policy strategy. Comprehensive immigration reform is necessary to create a system that better meets U.S. security, economic and foreign policy interests, and must be a priority for the next administration. While incorporating better security and employment verification systems, it must also address the 12 million unauthorized individuals currently residing in the United States, and provide a flexible program that can adjust to future U.S. labor demands.

In the energy sector, the United States can provide incentives for investment in traditional energy sources and infrastructure to increase supply throughout the region. It can also take the lead in the development of alternative energy sources, boosting energy security through diversification while also promoting environmentally sustainable options in a shared hemisphere.

In redirecting its relations with Latin American nations, the United States needs to recognize the limitations of its traditional policy tools. Latin America is not Washington's to lose; nor is it Washington's to save. Latin America's future rests chiefly in the hands of its own elected leaders. But, the United States can play a positive role, supporting regional efforts and ultimately better promoting U.S. and Latin American interests in the process. By truly beginning to engage Latin America on its own terms, Washington can mark the start of a new era in U.S.-Latin America relations.

Shannon O'Neil is a fellow for Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and director of the CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force on U.S.-Latin-America Relations.

Comment: In the Western Hemisphere the whole mind-set of the United States needs to be transformed. The U.S.A. is not ALL OF AMERICA. There is a South America with its own regional interests,global priorities and vanguard leadership. There msut be joint discussions and negotiations with all elements involved as equal partners with no frozen agenda other than the foundation of respect for a basic humane rights agenda, including humane immigration legislation that recognizes the objective existence of connected reality and the humane rights of immigrants .
~ Peta-de-Aztlan

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Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Read: My Mother the Matriarch

Gracias Hermano Javier ~ She must of been a great woman to know and you are surely blessed. Earth's cry, Heaven's smile~ ~ Hermano Peta

javier rodriguez <bajolamiradejavier@yahoo.com> wrote:
My Mother the Matriarch
By Javier Rodriguez May 27, 2008
Isabel Hernandez de Rodriguez, the Matriarch of our family, passed and moved on to eternity on May 20th 2008 at the age of 94. She was admired as a feminist and a giving strong willed woman who built, guided and was the spiritual pillar of the activist Los Angeles based Rodriguez Family, my family. Through decades she built an enviable network of close friends and adopted sons and daughters, mostly all activists including activist Isaura Rivera, Atty. Alba Marrero, her neighbor Senator Gloria Romero, Senator Gil Cedillo, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Richard Alatorre, Mexican Congressman Jose Jacquez Medina, Union leader Joel Ochoa, Nativo Lopez and many many more.
Like the late Bert Corona, a historical figure and mentor of the immigrant rights struggle, she traveled many years and many miles in her lifetime and was touched by history and truly, she is the history of our family. She was a mother, a friend and a confidant who was with you in all the battles and victories. She raised us in the most difficult of conditions, including extreme poverty. Personally she was an inspiration to me and like magic realism, even in death she handed me historical realizations that had been hovering around the family for years, like transparent but invisible veils.
On two occasions before on her 80th and 90th birthdays I published biographical articles on her in the LA Times and Eastern Group Publications. Then I thought her political awareness commenced here in Los Angeles in 1966. I was wrong. The beginnings of her political formation were in Mexico, our home country. She was born in 1913 in Durango, the birthplace of Francisco "Pancho" Villa, in the midst of the Mexican Revolution. Like Corona, born in 1917 in El Paso, Texas, she lived the rumblings of the war against the tyrant Porfirio Diaz and the rich. In the twenties she saw firsthand the Mexican Civil War against the reactionary right wing Cristeros. Then at the age of eighteen, approximately in 1931, she married my father Antonio Rodriguez, a miner, a union delegate and a Cardenista, who like her had a very limited formal education. With him she lived the revolutionary nationalist years of President Lazaro Cardenas and the epical nationalization of Mexican oil in 1938.
They began their trek northward migrating from the High Sierra of Durango to Torreon and from 1939 to 1948 the family began to grow and lived relatively well off. Then we moved to the border town of Juarez and in the early 1950s she experienced the painful years of the Bracero Program because her husband contracted as a farm laborer in the US. Three years after, my father got his permanent residency. So on August 19, 1956, our family became part of the Diaspora that has migrated by the millions to the land that once belonged to us, Mexican people. This was her background when she crossed into El Norte.
It is no wonder she joined and supported us wholeheartedly when the civil rights movement of the sixties swept our whole family into the social struggle. Along with us she became active in denouncing discrimination and police brutality. She supported the East LA Walkouts of 1968 and 1970. On August 29, 1970 she marched against the war in Viet Nam and 33 years after she was a staunch opponent of the war on Iraq. As an immigrant she became a precursor of the immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles, as an officer of the Autonomous Center for Social Action-C.A.S.A. Since then she fought and marched for immigrant rights and supported many progressive causes. In 1985 she acquired her US citizenship only to vote for her son's candidacy (Antonio) for the LA City Council and since then never missed an election. That same year she was a co-founder of the nationally famous La Serenata de Garibaldi Restaurant.
Her eight sons and one daughter have been activists and movers in LA politics since the late sixties and were key leaders of the mass street movement that led to the 1986 IRCA Amnesty Law that successfully legalized several million immigrants. Again in 2006-2008 they have been motivators and initiators of several of the mega mass street demonstrations that have made history in this country, in the fight for a humane immigration reform and legalization for over 13 million undocumented immigrants.
In the heart of the US, Isabel Rodriguez is a symbol of Mexican pride. She never uttered the words "God Bless America" because like us, she was conscious of the history of this country. Since she entered in 1956, not once did she ever own or display the flag of the US in her home. She was a proud Mexican nationalist till the end.
This memoir of my mother is dedicated to her 76 descendants, to the more than five hundred members of our extended family, to all our friends, to all the women in the struggle and finally to the history of our people.
Javier Rodriguez is a journalist and a media and political strategist. He was the initiator of the historical mega immigration march in Los Angeles on March 25, 2006.
bajolamiradejavier@yahoo.com
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Prisons prepare to integrate cellmates: SF Chronicle

Prisons prepare to integrate cellmates
Tanya Schevitz, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
(05-26) 17:02 PDT -- San Quentin State Prison inmate Lexy Good is white, hangs out with whites on the prison exercise yard and must be careful not to associate with blacks and Latinos. No cards, no basketball outside the color lines.
Those are the unwritten inmate rules of prison life. People stick to their own race.
Good, who's doing a short stretch for receiving stolen property, likes it that way.
"We segregate amongst ourselves because I'd rather hang out with white people, and blacks would rather hang out with people of their own race," said Good, 33, of Walnut Creek. "Look at suburbia. Look at Oakland. Look at Beverly Hills. People in society self-segregate."
Soon that may change in the prisons.
San Quentin and 30 or so other state penal facilities are gearing up to carry out a federal court mediation agreement for integrating double cells and ending the use of race as the sole determining factor in making cell assignments.
Men in California's prisons have long been segregated in cells to quell racial tensions.
But Good, along with California's other 155,700 male inmates, may soon be forced to live in a 4-by-9-foot cell with an inmate of a different race.
A 1995 lawsuit filed by a black California inmate, Garrison Johnson, said that the California Department of Corrections' practice of segregating prisoners by race violated his rights. A 2005 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court led to federal court mediation and the agreement that double cells would be desegregated.
While most inmates and correctional officials agree that it is a noble idea, many fear the worst.
"They should be thinking about what kind of war they are going to start," said a San Quentin inmate who identified himself only as S. Styles, 36, of Vallejo. "It is like putting a cat and a dog in a cell together."
Lt. Rudy Luna, assistant to the warden at San Quentin, said there is some concern among prison officials about the change because much of the violence is already based around racial gangs.
State mandate
"There is always concern, but that is a rule that has been sent down. There are a lot of times we don't like what we have to do," Luna said. "I think we will have a spike in fighting because we have races that don't get along. If it was up to us, we'd keep it the way it is. But it is a state mandate."
Among the state's male inmates, about 28.9 percent are black, 39.3 percent are Latino, 25.9 percent are white, and 5.9 percent are classified as other, according to figures from the state Department of Corrections.
"There are a lot of incidents in prison where you have a group of inmates going against another group of inmates," said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. "You have these groups aligned along race but it is about control. It is about criminal activities."
As currently planned, the cell integration will begin July 1 as a pilot project at two prisons - Mule Creek State Prison in Ione (Amador County) and the Sierra Conservation Center in Jamestown (Tuolumne County). Next year, the plan calls for integration to begin at other prisons.
Interviewing inmates
In carrying out the plan, prison officials will interview and evaluate each inmate. Department of Corrections officials know some inmates cannot be placed with inmates of other races. But those who are deemed eligible and still refuse will face discipline ranging from loss of privileges to solitary confinement.
Guards and staff have also been undergoing training for the past year on procedures and have been told to be alert for signs of abuse or fighting, Thornton said.
"The benefit is for inmates to live how they are supposed to live. It is rehabilitative. This is how we live in the world. It should be the same way in prison too," Thornton said. "It breaks down all of those prejudicial barriers."
Inmate David Johnson said that all the races sit together peacefully in the prison church and they work together with few problems. But he wouldn't socialize with inmates of another race outside of those settings where he is forced to mingle.
Loyal to his race
"Prison politics" dictate that he stay loyal to his race, Johnson said. And the repercussions for a violation are swift and severe.
"You would be taken care of in some way. You could get stabbed or worse," said Johnson, 38, of San Diego. "Whether you agree with the (unwritten) rules or not, you have to follow them."
That's why prison officials said the new plan will help the prisons manage the criminal prison gangs, which are divided racially and strictly control who their members associate with.
"Ninety percent of the gang members don't want to be in a gang but they can't get out. But now we are giving them a way out. It will be an excuse for a white to be with a black and a black to be with a white," Luna said.
The race lines are stark throughout the prisons. One recent sunny afternoon on the exercise yard of San Quentin, a group of two dozen or so African American inmates congregated around the basketball court, shooting hoops or just talking. White inmates were in the middle of the yard, playing ping pong or cards. And the Latino inmates were at the far end of the yard where there was some exercise equipment.
In a nearby courtyard, inmates who had recently arrived sat in small groups, mostly segregated except for those doing an intake exam.
Carnell Bradley, 23, Gregory Ealey, 27 and Wayne Griffin, 22, all of Oakland and all black, sat together and agreed that the integration plan is flawed.
'That is how jail is'
"It is going to cause problems. As soon as the cellmates get into a fight, it will become a race against race thing," said Ealey. "It is going to bring everybody into it because that is how jail is. It is just more comfortable being with your own race."
However, experts say it can work. The Texas prison system integrated its cells in the early 1990s and eventually saw a decline in racial tensions, said Professor Jim Marquart, chair of the criminology department at the University of Texas at Dallas, who studied the transition and is advising California during its process.
"The people said, 'It can't be done, you are going to have helter skelter in the prisons.' On the other side, you had people say it can be done. But basically, it was somewhere in between," said Marquart, who authored a report called "The Caged Melting Pot."
He said there was a spike in interracial violence at first. But after a while it died down, and the levels of interracial violence are now less than in the general population.
"We are not here to say that everybody is holding hands and singing Kumbaya. There is a lot of hate. There is a lot of animosity. But inmates are intelligent and they want to just do their time and they want to go home," said Marquart. "It worked here. It is an uneasy peace and truce, but it worked. I have ultimate faith in their ability to do it in California."
E-mail Tanya Schevitz at tschevitz@sfchronicle.com .
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Comment: Forced integration will cause a lot of problems, that is, ethnic/tribal violence, but I pray the humans will eventually learn to get along, make new alliances and see the common conditions of their situation in order to build up a mutli-ethnic prison justice movement. At least Latinos are number one in percentage somewhere! What does this say about the state of race-ethnic relations in the State of California? Recall: Among the state's male inmates, about 28.9 percent are black, 39.3 percent are Latino, 25.9 percent are white, and 5.9 percent are classified as other, according to figures from the state Department of Corrections. ~ Unidad! ~Peta-de-Aztlan
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Monday, May 26, 2008

Obama's Mixed Blessing for Latin America: by Tom Hayden - The Nation


In Miami recently, Barack Obama called for new Latin American policies in his first major policy declaration towards the region. The speech was classic Obama: substantive, centrist, subtle and pragmatic, above all drawing a sharp difference between Obama's support for "direct diplomacy" versus John McCain's status quo policies towards Cuba and the region. As a measure of how far the anti-Castro Cubans have shifted towards the center, Obama's speech was praised by his hosts, the Cuban American National Foundation.
As a measure of Obama's own evolution to the center from the left, however, Obama committed himself to maintaining the economic embargo of Cuba which he questioned when he ran for the US Senate in 2004. Nevertheless, the speech will be well-received in progressive circles as a breakthrough from past policies aimed at isolation and undermining of the Cuban government.
Obama also cited Franklin Roosevelt's presidency and "good neighbor" policies several times, a course proposed by the Progressives for Obama network*:
What all of us strive for is freedom as FDR described it. Political freedom. Religious freedom. But also freedom from want, and freedom from fear. At our best, the United States has been a force for these four freedoms in the Americas. But if we're honest with ourselves, we'll acknowledge that at times we've failed to engage the people of the region with the respect owed to a partner....
We cannot ignore suffering to our south, nor stand for the globalization of the empty stomach. Responsibility rests with governments in the region, but we must do our part. I will substantially increase our aid to the Americas, and embrace the Millennium Development Goals of halving global poverty by 2015....
We cannot accept trade that enriches those at the top of the ladder while cutting out the rungs at the bottom. It's time to understand that the goal of our trade policy must be trade that works for all people in all countries.
Yet while there has been great economic progress, there is still back-breaking inequality. Despite a growing middle class, 100 million people live on less than two dollars a day, and 40 percent of Latin Americans live in poverty. This feeds everything from drugs to migration to support for leaders that appeal to the poor without delivering on their promises....
That is why the United States must stand for growth in the Americas from the bottom up.
This rhetoric is sure to be welcomed as well, after many years of failed US efforts to impose corporate trade policies on Central and Latin America through NAFTA, CAFTA and the derailed FTAA. However, in the absence of government spending and regulatory measuresfrom Latin America, the US and wealthier nations--the Obama proposals imply a continuation of private sector economic development and modest proposals of micro-loans, education and job-training and small business development.
But while these are positive, if cautious, policy steps, the dangerous flaw in Obama's speech was his apparent commitment to supporting the US counterinsurgency war In Columbia, secretive drug wars across the continent, and a veiled threat against Venezuela:
We will fully support Colombia's fight against the FARC. We'll work with the government to end the reign of terror from right-wing paramilitaries. We will support Colombia's right to strike terrorists who seek safe-haven across its borders. And we will shine a light on any support for the FARC that comes from neighboring governments. This behavior must be exposed to international condemnation, regional isolation and--if need be--strong sanctions. It must not stand.
It should be obvious to Obama that these are likely to become failed policies on a par with the long US embargo of Cuba. But consistent with his pledge to send more troops to Afghanistan and possibly attack jihadists in Pakistan (in violation of that country's declared opposition), Obama proposes to continue US intervention in Colombia's civil war even to the point of supporting cross-border raids into Venezuela or Ecuador, a policy that will inflame tensions across the region.
Towards Venezuela, Obama is burdened with the contradictions of the liberal national security hawks, admitting that Hugo Chávez was elected democratically but asserting that Chávez doesn't "govern democratically." Obama ignores Venezuela's own successful "bottom up" efforts to alleviate poverty with public investments from its national oil company. He further ignores Venezuela's own voter's recent ballot box rejection of a sweeping Chávez initiative. Like many liberal hawks, Obama differs with the Bush Administration's attacks on Chávez because they are ineffective: "Yet the Bush Administration's blustery condemnations and clumsy attempts to undermine Chávez have only strengthened his hand." Not a word about US complicity in the attempted coup against Chávez, nor the remarkable Venezuelan mass movement that resisted that coup.
In the extreme discomfort of American centrists, including the media, at accepting the democratically chosen government of Venezuela with all its various shortcomings, one can see a lingering imperial assumption beneath the rhetoric to the contrary. It can be said, of course, that Chávez, with his own blustering rhetoric, doesn't make liberal centrist acceptance easier. But there is an understandable history here, not only the old history of conquest and the Monroe Doctrine but the immediate history of the 2002 attempted overthrow of Chávez with American complicity. If Barack Obama can ask us to better understand the black anger of his pastor Jeremiah Wright, surely he himself should be able to understand the volcanic rage that echos across Latin America in voices like those of Hugo Chávez and before him, Fidel Castro,.
According to sources in Caracas and Havana, Hugo Chávez himself may privately dismiss all this Venezuela-bashing as mere election-year posturing. "If it helps Obama get elected, okay, we'll talk later," in the paraphrase of one close observer. But Obama could sink himself in a US counterinsurgency quagmire in Columbia, which could spiral into greater tensions with Venezuela and Ecuador. There is a better alternative that Obama and his advisers ignore, the distinct possibility that the anti-government guerrilla movement in Columbia (FARC) may be gradually convinced to evolve into a political force, as the IRA did in Northern Ireland. The FARC emerged in a time of dictatorships across the continent, but in recent years many (former) revolutionary and guerrilla leaders have come to power democratically, from Nicaragua to Uruguay to Bolivia. The conditions for transforming the armed conflict in Colombia into a political one, while difficult, have never been more favorable, but not if an Obama Administration continues backing the Uribe government, riddled with its own death squads and drug traffickers, with American money, arms and Special Forces. (The recent extradiction of several Columbia drug traffickers to the United States was an effort to secure a trade deal, not to change the essential character of our client regime in Bogota.)
To make matters worse, Obama endorses the drug war paradigm that street gangs are the new enemy:
As President, I'll make it clear that we're coming after the guns, we're coming after the money laundering, and we're coming after the vehicles that enable this crime. And we'll crack down on the demand for drugs in our own communities, and restore funding for drug task forces and the COPS program. We must win the fights on our own streets if we're going to secure the region.
This formulation is upside down. Street gangs like Mara Salvatrucha or 18th Street are symptomatic of the overall crisis of poverty, discrimination and repression in which the United States has collaborated in Central and Latin America. These particular street gangs were created in places like Los Angeles among hundreds of thousands of child refugees of the US-sponsored Central American wars. They formed gangs for security and identity, they become involved in the drug trade because there were no legitimate job opportunities for undocumented exiles, and they became violent because they were born and raised in the trauma of war. Of course, it is legitimate both in terms of policy and politics for Obama to defend a law enforcement approach as part of the mix, but a war on gangs, like a war on drugs, is hopeless, counter-productive and immoral without a war on the greed that is devouring hundreds of millions of young people in Latin America. The funding to "win the fights on our own streets" would eclipse any budgets for jobs or education for inner-city youth. The irony should not forgotten either that the United States has been involved in corruption, dictatorships and the drug trade, from the casinos of Havana in the 1950s to the drug sales on the streets of LA that funded weapons for the contras in the 1980s.
Finally, Obama's vision of the region as a more equal partnership will be tested by the ambitious energy development plan dropped into his speech, The rhetoric appears balanced, but in the context of existing power relationships the outcome could deepen Latin America's role, once again, as a resource colony of the United States.
We'll allow industrial emitters to offset a portion of this cost by investing in low carbon energy projects in Latin America and the Caribbean. And we'll increase research and development across the Americas in clean coal technology, in the next generation of sustainable biofuels not taken from food crops, and in wind and solar energy. We'll enlist the World Bank, the Organization of American States, and the Inter-American Development Bank to support these invesments, and ensure that these projects enhance natural resources like land, wildlife, and rain forests. We'll finally enforce environmental standards in our trade deals.
The best that can be said of this speech is that it's a brave beginning, a break from Bush, and that the progressive changes sweeping Latin America hopefully may educate and move Obama towards a far greater partnership project than he now envisions. By contrast, FDR was bolder in his "good neighbor" policy. He rejected US military intervention, and supported Mexico's nationalization of its oil resources against the lobbying pressure of the US oil multinationals. Obama's position seems more reminiscent of the early John Kennedy, who trapped himself at the Bay of Pigs glamorized the Special Forces, and offered a moderate / centrist Alliance for Progress as America's answer to the Cuban model in Latin America. Instead of reform, the mano duro policies of dictatorships and death squads swept the region with US support and training for repressive army and police forces. Now that Latin America, on its own, has swept those dictatorships away and is following its own democratic path, it is presumptuous of Obama to propose himself as the savior of Latin America from Hugo Chávez, guerrillas and drug lords, all of them symptomatic responses to US policies over many decades.
___
* NOTE. In its founding call, Progressives for Obama demanded a new Good Neighbor policy towards Latin America, as follows:
"Nor can we impose NAFTA-style trade agreements on so many nations that seek only to control their own national resources and economic destinies. We cannot globalize corporate and financial power over democratic values and institutions. Since the Clinton Administration pushed through NAFTA against the Democratic majority in Congress, one Latin American nation after another has elected progressive governments that reject US trade deals and hegemony. We are isolated in Latin America by our Cold War and drug war crusades, by the $500 million counter-insurgency in Columbia, support for the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela, and the ineffectual blockade of Cuba. We need to return to the Good Neighbor policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, which rejected Yankee military intervention and accepted Mexico's right to nationalize its oil in the face of industry opposition. The pursuit of NAFTA-style trade policies inflames our immigration crisis as well, by uprooting countless campesinos who inevitably seek low-wage jobs north of the border in order to survive. We need balanced and democratically-approved trade agreements that focus on the needs of workers, consumers and the environment. The Banana Republic is a retail chain, not an American colony protected by the Monroe Doctrine."
About Tom Hayden
Tom Hayden is the author of The Other Side (1966, with Staughton Lynd), The Love of Possession Is a Disease With Them (1972), Ending the War in Iraq (2007) and Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader (2008).
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