Embedded

There is a full scale General Strike organised by COSATU for Thursday, May 18th (and probably in effect Friday, too). This action will reinforce the Jobs and Poverty Campaign and create an honest mass basis from which to challenge the politics of back-biting, public relations, obscurity, and smear. It takes the working class to remind the nation where its priorities really are. See the linked announcement, which contains a full schedule of actions around the country. ANC Deputy President Jacob Zuma is fully back in good standing with the movement. See the ANC statement linked below. The SACP rightly and firmly corrected an article that was published as the front page “splash” in yesterday’s Business Day. The incorrect statements are about our comrade Minister Ronnie Kasrils, from whom we are still very interested to hear, however. See the two links below. The following incidental statement also appears in the Business Day article: “Trepidation has also risen in the camp, following indications that the corruption case against Zuma was not as watertight as previously thought.” The corruption case against Jacob Zuma and against Schabir Shaik is a dead duck. The crucial prosecution evidence is gone. Especially the crucial January 2001 SCOPA letter, and the alleged Thint “fax”. The NPA/Scorpions in court yesterday once again failed to produce an indictment against the Thint company after six years of baseless accusations. The scandal is now, and rightly so, turning on the scandal-mongers. Under capitalism, everybody must be paid by somebody. “Independent analysts” are mercenaries like anybody else in the bourgeois state. The food on their tables does not come from heaven. They are already proven liars as soon as they tell us they are “independent”. They are only journalists who don’t admit to being such. None of them can be trusted. Other journalists are “embedded”, as the US armed forces put it. Whether or not they actually sleep with the boss, they are always at the side of the boss, telling the story from the boss’s point of view. Then there a few righteous ones like Jon Qwelane, who speaks truth to POWA. See the link below. Finally, if you can, please rally round the Workers’ Library on May 19th. It may or may not be a disaster for them to have a hotel built next door. But in other ways this is an institution that is certainly in need of rescue. See the last link below. Click on these links: COSATU General Strike, Jobs and Poverty Campaign, 18 May 2006 (1539 words) ANC NEC, Full Resumption of Duties by ANC Dep Pres Zuma (648 words) SACP statement on the article in Business Day of 15 May 2006 (165 words) SACP set to grill Kasrils on role in Zuma trial, Business Day (771 words) Zuma was a victim of conspiracy, Jon Qwelane, News24 (1657 words) Meeting, Future of Workers Library and Newtown, 14h00 May 19 (516 words)