The Biggest Victory of 2013

As the year ends, the temptation to dust off the hands and say "Well, maybe 2014 will be better" is a strong one. But as we look ahead, it can't hurt to remind ourselves of some of the victories won in this country over the last twelve months.

There were victories won by the courageous efforts of individuals, like Edward Snowden who followed in the footsteps of Chelsea Manning and ripped the lid off the massive snake pit of government spying on US residents and peoples and leaders around the world.

There were local victories whose impacts created national ripples, notably the election of longtime fighter Chokwe Lumumba as mayor of Jackson MS. His victory in one of the old strongholds of Jim Crow racism gave heart to many in the Black liberation struggle.

Social Movements Pick Up Steam

Flourishing social movements at a national level have not yet won decisive victories, but their growing strength and impact alone signify celebration-worthy accomplishments:

• The immigrants' rights struggle, spearheaded by young "dream warriors" has kept the issue to the fore and caused serious splits in the most reactionary wing of US bourgeois politics.
• Low wage workers, with organizational help from unions like the UFCW and SEIU and from local workers center-type outfits, have set back Walmart, McDonalds and their ilk and created public opinion for a higher minimum wage.
• The environmental movement has ramped up the struggle against fossil-fuel caused global warming. Both the national drive to block the Keystone XL pipeline and the locally-based anti-fracking struggles have drawn strength from closer links to First Nation activists like those in Idle No More.

• Resistance to the "education reform" steamroller took a big leap, undermining the billionaire-funded drive to privatize and industrialize education and crush teacher unions.

The Big One
The biggest victory of 2013, though, is one that is too easily overlooked. For the first time, the people of the US stopped an imperialist war before it could start! The Obama administration and a substantial chunk of the ruling class were hellbent on an unjust and unjustifiable attack on Syria. Popular opposition stalled, then killed, their plan. 
To be sure, there were favorable circumstances. George W. Bush's catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq tainted any push toward further imperialist adventures in the Middle East. The people of the UK, whose rulers had walked in lockstep with ours on Iraq, forced Parliament to vote No on this one. Racist hatred for Obama by Congressional Republicans and their teahadist supporters back home dried up what would normally have been a deep pool of support.

Most importantly, the anti-war movement during the preceding decade had reminded the people of the US of the bitter lessons of the Vietnam War and drawn new ones from Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite a morale-sapping decline since the powerful days of 2003-7, anti-war forces rallied heroically in the crisis and provided the spearhead of resistance.

But what did the trick was ordinary everyday people. Polls showed that opposition to even the promised "limited attack" on the Assad regime ran as high as 80%. Local protests were backed up by a rapid outburst of rejection, with literally millions of calls, emails, petition signatures and letters to the editor bombarding the White House, politicians and the media. The message was simple: Don't Do This Thing!

And we won. There was no attack on Syria, no subsequent escalation, no new quagmire. The civil war in Syria grinds brutally on, fuelled by money, arms and combatants from outside the country, much of it from the US and close allies like Saudi Arabia and Turkey. But who can doubt that direct US intervention would have made things worse for the people of Syria and the whole region?

On To 2014!

Read more!

Keep Your Christmas! It's Maosday For Me!

I don't celebrate Christmas. I suppose I could be said to observe it: since the early '80s, I don't think I've missed a December 25 family gathering, but thematically they have zero Christianity.

I don't celebrate Hanukkah, and I consider it a kind of fake-y holiday, puffed up over the last century, in the US especially, as an alternative Christmas (or Christmas Lite) to help Jewish parents keep their offspring from being tempted into the more commodified Christian camp.  

I don't celebrate the various attempts to revive solstice-based pagan festivals. True, the originals gave rise to all of the religious yearend observances, but since Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo we know the cycle of seasons is lawful and its recurrence doesn't require a lot of hoopla.

I don't celebrate Kwanzaa for a number of reasons. While I am of African descent (we all are—it's where humanity came from, after all), I am not part of the more recent African diaspora the holiday is intended for. And I'm not much on single day rituals myself; ones that last seven are definitely tl;do (too long; didn't observe). Mostly, though, I came up in the '60s and find it hard to warm up to any project of Ron Karenga's. I remember John Huggins and Bunchy Carter.

(Still, you have to give Karenga some credit. It's no small feat to make up a holiday celebrated by millions and observed by the US Postal Service with a fresh release of new Kwanzaa stamps every year.)

Yet I prefer not to be left out of the seasonal festivities entirely. And by great good fortune, it happens that Chairman Mao was born on December 26 (in 1893). Hence Maosday, a splendid holiday for proletarians of all nations. A celebration of revolutionary history and struggle.

We can simply emulate the Christian clerics who over the last two millennia appropriated all manner of practices from previous winter festivals—trees from Scandinavia, carols from the British Isles, feasting and partying from pretty much everywhere, like the Roman Saturnalia. &c.

In fact, the 26^th is already, in Britain and many of its former colonies, a holiday with a slight working class flavor, Boxing Day. Its origins are appropriately secular. Since the aristocracy and the wealthy required, obviously, all their servants around them on Christmas Day, cooking, cleaning, butling and so on, the Downstairs folk were not permitted to be with their families until the next day. Then they would be sent home with boxes containing small gifts and perhaps some nice leftovers from the Christmas feast.

Come the revolution, the switchover should be fairly easy. Christmas becomes Maosday Eve, a lesser holiday which people can observe as they see fit, and most of the good shit happens on the 26^th. The dichromatic red and green color scheme is broadened by the addition of black and/or yellow. And anyone playing "The Little Drummer Boy"--live or recorded--where other persons are forced to hear it without previously granting permission faces re-education.

Maosday!

I can't wait.

So I'm not. Yesterday I decorated my first ever official Maosday tree.

Read more!

Some Notes on The March on Washington: The 50th Anniversary Remix

Disorganized.

Chaotic and frustrating.

A hot mess, let's call it.

One reason last Saturday's March on Washington was hot because it was a transformative experience for many, especially the majority who weren't old enough to really remember the Civil Rights Movement of the '60s. The march itself had been transformed, objectively, by two developments this summer. What had been shaping up as an exercise in nostalgia was reshaped by the "not guilty" verdict handed to the killer of Trayvon Martin and the Supreme Court's trashing of the Voting Rights Act.

The speeches, those I heard, tended to focus on the latter more than the former, but Trayvon Martin signs (both homemade and printed) were the most common single theme in the crowd. My friend Rahim on the Docks pointed out the most brilliant single expression of this, a tee-shirt being hawked with MLK photoshopped into a hoodie—the Two Martins!

The March itself was the biggest expression of Black solidarity since, perhaps, the exultant all-night street celebrations that followed the announcement that Obama had been elected in 2008. The crowd was at least 70% Black, and heavily working class, both among folks who came on their own and also those who were part of the substantial union contingents and of the community groups, civil rights organizations, sororities and frats, and church congregations spread throughout the crowd.

The Mess

The mess was twofold, political and organizational. We heard, those of us who could force our way toward the front, speaker after speaker, many cut off in mid-sentence. No two minute time limit was imposed on Attorney General Holder and House Minority leader Representative Pelosi, though. (A shameful shift from the 1963 March's ban on elected and appointed government officials speaking.) Nor were they heckled, although marchers from Newark booed their sleazy, ambitious mayor Cory "Hollywood" Booker.

Plenty of demonstrators wore shirts and buttons from Obama's campaigns, maybe a triumph of hope over experience, maybe a clear estimate that the alternative remains the greater evil. Interestingly, however, none of the speakers I heard, including a couple union bigs, particularly emphasized voting.
Instead, the constantly repeated theme was "This is not about commemoration, it's about

Read more!

March on Washington: The 50th Anniversary Remix

I’m in Washington, DC and it’s August 24. Before I head out to the March on Washington: The 50th Anniversary Remix, a few thoughts.

A couple of months ago, I had decided not to come. It was, I thought, shaping up as an exercise in nostalgia. Not that I'm not nostalgic. My first political activism came around the Civil Rights Movement. The first really big fight I can remember having my Moms (and the last one I lost) broke out when she wouldn't let my 13 –year- old ass travel to the 1963 March from rural Northwest Connecticut. But the few dozen Big Marches I’ve humped down to DC for in the decades since then have blunted the sentimentality.

Two things changed my mind: the Supreme Court decision trashing the voting rights act and the mass outrage triggered by the “not guilty” verdict for George Zimmerman in the murder of Trayvon Martin. These two developments have objectively changed the character of today’s demonstration.

As the blatantly preplanned and coordinated effort to disenfranchise students at traditionally Black colleges in NC shows, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act is the starting gun in an amped-up campaign to restrict the franchise as much as possible to white folks.

Those leftists who would argue that this is a non-issue, given the bought-and-paid-for nature of elections in our bourgeois democracy do so in defiance of the entire history of this country. The famous compromise in the drafting of the US Constitution which defined a slave as 3/5 of a man for purposes of determining a state’s population,

Read more!

Black NJ: Over 1,000 marchers in Newark demands federal Civil Rights charges against Zimmerman

Immediately after the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in February of 2012, POP took to the streets

“We want President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder to launch a federal investigation and bring civil rights charges against George Zimmerman,” Larry Hamm, NJ state chairman of the People's Organization for Progress.

When the usual "hard-core" 18-25 People's Organization for Progress members and supporters who begin every rally or march became a spirited picketline of more than 50 nearly an hour before an event is scheduled to begin, you know that the event answers a felt need in the community. 

When the picket demanding Justice for Trayvon Martin at the intersection Broad & Market in downtown Newark on Sunday quickly filled up the entire sidewalk on one side of the intersection, Newark police practically begged POP to take it to the streets! Before 3:00 PM, nearly 500 marchers were lined up on Broad Street to march down to the Federal Building. By the conclusion of the march and rally, the Newark Star Ledger  estimated 700 participants, so I would suggest that 1,000 marchers is probably a conservative evaluation (see Hundreds Rally in Newark… for the Star Ledger's report on Sunday's march and rally).

Reflecting on the NAACP's call for federal Civil Rights charges, People's Organization for Progress has a bit of experience with the strengths and weaknesses of this tactic. In 1999, when the State of NJ refused to even consider prosecuting the Orange, NJ police officers responsible for the murder of aspiring rapper Earl Faison (in what the Federal Prosecutor would later refer to as a "stairwell of torture" in the Orange PD building), the only option available was charging the officers with violating Mr. Faison's civil rights. 

Remember, that judicially, murder, manslaughter and homicide are state crimes. There is no federal equivalent, so the closest to justice that the Faison family could hope for was that a literal conspiracy of wilding by the cops would result in a few short jail terms.

Similarly for the family of Trayvon Martin, a federal civil rights conviction against George Zimmerman simply means he is not blameless, as the acquittal in Sanford court indicates the jurors believe. A greater victory, more justice for Mr. Martin's family would probably be the repeal of racist "Stand Your Ground" laws in Florida and throughout the US.

Interestingly, Newark mayor "Hollywood" Booker has gone out of his way to distance himself from those angered by Zimmerman's acquittal (see Booker, other NJ figures…). Apparently, part of his US Senate campaign involves making himself so "non-offensive" to those he sees as his constituents that, by comparison, NYC's racist Mayor Mike is an absolute radical! Hopefully this will make Ras Baraka's election certain…

Read more!

Veterans and the Future of the Peace Movement

[Today, I attended a day-long Conference on the Veterans Peace Movement. Activist from vets groups, military families and other sections of the anti-war/peace movement gathered as part of an ongoing process of  brainstorming directions for the movement in the coming period. The excellent short speech posted here concisely lays out the magnitude of the challenges facing that movement.]

Ben Chitty (left) with Dayl Wise

Veterans & the Politics of Peace

by Ben Chitty

What do you think "veterans against war" or "veterans for peace" really mean? Seems like it should be simple, but it’s not. When David Cline, Clarence Fitch, and Mike Gold revived the NYC metro area chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War in the 1980s, people used to ask, "What war?" or "Why not just 'Vietnam Veterans Against War'?"

You can slice and dice the concepts "veteran against war" or "veteran for peace" in many ways. Here’s one approach. You start by asking where you want to go and what that will take – what would it take to stop this war, whatever war that happens to be; what would it take to stop our own wars, the wars our country fights; what would it take to stop all war, to make war obsolete. You can say it in positive terms: make peace with our enemy; make war our last national policy option; make over our society to eliminate the causes of war -- end oppression and exploitation, so that war can be abolished. That’s a tall order. But look around you -- you can spot someone at almost every point on this spectrum. And every one you see -- every one of us -- is against war and for peace.

I do not have to tell you how many ways you can become sick of war. Brutality, hypocrisy, impunity. Misogyny and homophobia. Bad medicine, environmental degradation. Killing poor people to protect the rich, or people of color to preserve white skin privilege. The military industrial complex, which must be the most wasteful economic engine ever built. Add up the cost of the military, calculate how many schools could be built, or bridges repaired, or superfund sites cleaned up, for the price of one aircraft carrier -- about $13.6 billion dollars for the USS Gerald Ford, now scheduled to float out of dry dock next November -- that’s almost a full year’s budget for the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Science Foundation combined.

So, what about stopping one particular war? Actually, we have no idea.

To begin with, it's hard even to imagine stopping a war before it starts. Many, maybe even most, Americans opposed the Spanish-American War and the annexation of the Philippines, the first World War, the first Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq. All these wars started anyway. So much for democracy.

Some wars don’t stop until someone wins. As long as you believe you’re winning, you won’t be much interested in stopping the war. Stalemates are different. There are two key questions. Can one side

Read more!

Black NJ: People's Organization for Progress on the FBI & NJ State Police attack on Assata Shakur

FBI/NJ State police put up a new billboard advertising their call for an extrajudicial hit against our sister Assata Shakur

This past week, many movement activists were shocked when our sister, Assata Shakur, was suddenly placed atop an until then unknown FBI "terrorist" list. In response, at noon on Friday May 10 People's Organization For Progress, the New Black Panther Party and a host of allied organizations and individuals held a press conference in at the Rodino Federal Building in Newark, NJ. The statement that follows was read by Lawrence Hamm, NJ state chairman for POP:

Take Assata Shakur off the Terrorist List

The People's Organization For Progress (POP) calls upon the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to remove Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesimard) from its Most Wanted Terrorists List.  She does not belong on the list because Ms. Shakur was never charged nor convicted of an act of domestic or international terrorism.

To place her on such a list is fundamentally unjust. It is a perversion of justice and involves the ex post facto application of terrorist laws and definitions of terrorism that were not in existence or applied to her case at the time of her arrest and conviction.

Furthermore, she did not commit the crime she was accused of.   She was placed on the list because her conviction connected her to the murder of a police officer. However, evidence in her case shows that she could not have shot and killed that officer.  She became a fugitive because given the circumstances of her case, the atmosphere of repression, and the racism of the criminal justice system she could not get justice in this country and to remain here may have cost her life.

The move to place her on the list and the doubling of her bounty to $2 million has little to do with justice and everything to do with politics. It is an opportunistic attempt to use the criminal justice system to score political points in this highly charged post Boston bombing environment.

Placing Assata Shakur on the terrorists list when she was not convicted of a "terrorist act" is in essence falsely accusing her of a crime that she did not commit. It is the abandonment of the law in the name of enforcing the law.

Like the war in Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, preemptive strikes, and the abandonment of international law, it is the establishment of a false premise as a rationale for violent action, which has no legal basis but for which political support may be imagined or conjured up.  Placing Assata Shakur on the terrorists list sets a dangerous precedent.

With the false premise established what will be next?  Will Cuba be given the ultimatum to give up Shakur like the Afghanistan government was told to give up Osama Bin Laden before the US invasion of that country?  Will there be a drone strike of Shakur's supposed residence in Cuba?  Will Navy Seal Team "7" be sent on a covert mission to assassinate Assata Shakur who is an American citizen?

Zayid Muhammad of the New Black Panthers introduces Newark elder Amiri Baraka, who also spoke eloquently at the press conferenc 

By identifying Shakur as a terrorist the FBI is taking the terrorists list and making it a "political enemies" list, which is an instrument of state terror. And why not?  This fits in perfectly with unjust and illegal trillion dollar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, extraordinary renditions, black site secret prisons in foreign lands, torture, assassination of US citizens, military courts, secret trials, Guantanamo, elimination of habeas corpus, indefinite detention, government domestic spying, arbitrary arrests, police brutality, racial profiling, stop and frisk, mass incarceration, school to prison pipeline, suppression of dissent, COINTELPRO type operations, ignoring the Constitution, trashing the Bill of rights, and trampling upon our civil liberties.  

And let's look at her accusers. Who is calling her a terrorist?  The FBI who spied on Dr. Martin Luther King. The FBI whose Director J. Edgar Hoover made it his mission to destroy Dr. King. The FBI who engaged in acts of state terror that included assassination against people and organizations in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements.

And the New Jersey State Police who shot up Newark and killed innocent people during the rebellion. The New Jersey State Police who for years engaged in the worst forms of racial profiling.  The New Jersey State Police, a department so rife with racism that the federal government had to put it under a "master" to force it to reform its racist ways.

With this precedent the rights of all Americans are placed in greater jeopardy. Now, anyone can be deemed a terrorist, not because this was proven in a court of law but by fiat, proclamation or declaration by the President, US Attorney General, FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, or some other agency of the federal government.

And this can be done not just for transgressions of the present. It can be done retroactively for sins of the past, ten, twenty, thirty, and forty years ago. If the government doesn't like someone just put them on the terrorist list.

Of course, this exercise of twenty-first century US democracy would not be complete unless accompanied by the economic incentive that American capitalism can provide. In this age of robber billionaires a $1 million dollar bounty on the head of Assata Shakur was not enough. It has been doubled to $2 million.

Who are the $2 million pieces of silver for? Are they for enterprising US citizens? No. Assata Shakur has been given political asylum in Cuba. This pot of gold is to entice elements within Cuban Society to violate the laws and policies of the Cuban government.

The FBI and company hope that in Cuba there are corrupt persons within the police, or criminal elements, or people opposed to the government who will take the bait and do this bit of subcontracting work and keep some of the heat off the bosses in the US.

They hope that there are Hamid Kharzais in Cuba who would like to have bags of money delivered to them on a monthly basis. "Bring Assata Shakur to us and you to can be a millionaire." Dead or alive has not been specified.

The placing of Assata Shakur on the terrorist list while portrayed as a noble act in the attempt to get justice for a slain police officer is in fact a shameful act of revenge, opportunism, political manipulation, and authoritarianism.  It is part and parcel of a corrosive trend eating away at the democratic processes and institutions in our country for half a century and which has accelerated since 9/11.

Assata Shakur should not be on the terrorist list. She should be removed from that list just as Nelson Mandela was removed from that list several years ago. When the threat of terrorism and the terrorist label is misused in this manner the victims of real acts of terror are dishonored.

(Fire on the Mountain thanks POP Corresponding-Secretary Ingrid Hill for her photographs from the press conference/picket at the Rodino Office Building)

Read more!

PotW: To The Memory Of Albert Einstein

TO THE MEMORY OF ALBERT EINSTEIN

by Leibel Bergman

The thunderbolt within the grain of sand--
This is the power that the human hand
Has wrested from our ignorance and fear,
This climax of our yet few thousand years
Of work and strife. This is the promised land
We touch across the ocean of our tears.

How dark the night that was our painful past,
How bright the morning that we see at last,
How slight the bonds that hold us from the shore,
The curse of greed, the evil deeps of war;
These too will vanish though they yet hang fast,
The thief, the slayer, the inquisitor.

All these shall pass: yes, we shall end the blight
Of ignorance, for once for all, the fright
Of children, and the power of the lie,
The hunger, and the long despairing sigh.
We rout our darkness with the speed of light,
Set with our hand a candle in the sky.

1960

from: 

Will We Remember?

Chicago, 1982

Read more!

"Free The Land!" Chokwe Lumumba addresses 30th annual Black Workers for Justice MLK Banquet

Award recipients at BWFJ 30th Annual "MLK Support for Labor Banquet

This year, Black Workers for Justice held their 30th Annual Martin Luther King Support for Labor Banquet. This historic dinner actually represents more than three decades of activism. BWfJ began as the result of a battle initiated by Black women workers at a K-Mart in Rocky Mount, NC in 1981. Your correspondent has been to more than a few of BWfJ's MLK dinners over the years, but this is the first time I've attended two years in a row.

While last year's banquet was a serious  "must attend" affair for a People's Organization for Progress member such as myself (POP's chairman, Lawrence Hamm was the 2012 keynote speaker), the event this year was even more exciting. The spirited response of the crowd to BWfJ's  exhilarating Fruit of Labor singing ensemble was palpable. 

Ajamu Dillahunt, founding member and elder of BWFJ, grooves to the Fruit of Labor's excellent performance

While last year's rousing keynote by POP's Larry Hamm certainly had the crowd on their feet, Jackson, Mississippi Mayoral Candidate and City Councilmember Chokwe Lumumba moved the attendees to "love offerings" in support of his candidacy. But the most impressive aspect of the 2013 BWfJ banquet was the level of youth participation. The Durham, NC based organization People's Durham (a new organization similar to POP in its campaigns and goals, click on  the link People's Durham for more information), was represented by a very youthful contingent of members. People's Durham, along with Larsene Taylor and longtime activist Jim Campbell were recipients of BWfJ Self-Determination Awards (click the link Black Workers for Justice 2013 MLK Dinner to view three pages of additional photos by labor photographer, and friend of the Fire on the Mountain blog page, Jon Levine).

The thrilling spirit of this exciting event was evident in poetry and dance as well as the singing of the Fruit of Labor and others. Erin Byrd read an excellent poem and Laprince Smith led the gathering in singing the Black National Anthem (Lift Every Voice and Sing).

Jackson, MS City Councilman, and Mayoral Candidate, Chokwe Lumumba was the Keynote Speaker.

The truly moving presentation by brother Chokwe Lumumba was informed by his years of activism, both in Jackson, MS and throughout the Black Belt South, as well as the entire US.

Read more!

Poem of the Month: Democratic Womanism

DEMOCRATIC WOMANISM

Alice Walker

You ask me why I smile

 when you tell me you intend

 in the coming national elections

 to hold your nose

 and vote for the lesser of two evils.

 There are more than two evils out there,

 is one reason I smile.

 Another is that our old buddy Nostradamus

 comes to mind, with his fearful

 400 year old prophecy: that our world

 and theirs too

 (our "enemies" – lots of kids included there)

 will end (by nuclear nakba or holocaust)

 in our lifetime. Which makes the idea of elections

 and the billions of dollars wasted on them

 somewhat fatuous.

 A Southerner of Color,

 my people held the vote

 very dear

 while others, for centuries,

 merely appeared to play

 with it.

 One thing I can assure

 you of is this:

 I will never betray such pure hearts

 by voting for evil

 even if it were microscopic

 which, as you can see in any newscast

 no matter the slant,

 it is not.

 I want something else;

 a different system

 entirely.

 One not seen

 on this earth

 for thousands of years. If ever.

 Democratic Womanism.

 Notice how this word has "man" right in the middle of it?

 That’s one reason I like it. He is right there, front and center. But he is surrounded.

 I want to vote and work for a way of life

 that honors the feminine;

 a way that acknowledges

 the theft of the wisdom

 female and dark Mother leadership

 might have provided our spaceship

 all along.

 I am not thinking

 of a talking head

 kind of gal:

 happy to be mixing

 it up

 with the baddest

 bad boys

 on the planet

 her eyes a slit

 her mouth a zipper.

 No, I am speaking of true

 regime change.

 Where women rise

 to take their place

 en masse

 at the helm

 of earth’s frail and failing ship;

 where each thousand years

 of our silence

 is examined

 with regret,

 and the cruel manner in which our values

 of compassion and kindness

 have been ridiculed

 and suppressed

 brought to bear on the disaster

 of the present time.

 The past must be examined closely, I believe, before we can leave

 it there.

 I am thinking of Democratic, and, perhaps

 Socialist, Womanism.

 For who else knows so deeply

 how to share but Mothers

 and Grandmothers? Big sisters

 and Aunts?

 To love

 and adore

 both female and male?

 Not to mention those in between.

 To work at keeping

 the entire community

 fed, educated

 and safe?

 Democratic womanism,

 Democratic Socialist

 Womanism,

 would have as its icons

 such fierce warriors

 for good as

 Vandana Shiva

 Aung San Suu Kyi,

 Wangari Maathai

 Harriet Tubman

 Yoko Ono

 Frida Kahlo

 Angela Davis

 & Barbara Lee:

 With new ones always rising, wherever you look.

[This pretty much speaks for itself. Thanks to Meizhu Lui for submitting it.]

Read more!