*PROTEST THE CONGRESSIONAL ATTACK ON MUMIA ABU-JAMAL!

Click on the title to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site.

THIS INFORMATION IS PASSED ON FROM THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE. I NEED ONLY ADD THAT TIME IS CRITICAL IN MUMIA'S CASE. IF THERE WAS ANY REAL JUSTICE IN MUMIA'S CASE THEY WOULD BE NAMING A STREET IN PHILADELPHIA FOR HIM FOR HIS WORK AS THE 'VOICE OF THE VOICELESS'.


Protest Congressional Attack on Mumia Abu-Jamal!
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

The following statement was issued by the Partisan Defense Committee on December 8.

The Partisan Defense Committee denounces the U.S. House of Representatives' vote on December 6 which attacked the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis for naming a street in honor of death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. The resolution, which passed 368 to 31 with support from both Republicans and Democrats, repeats the prosecution's frame-up lies against Mumia. This resolution seeks to pave the way for the legal lynching of an innocent man! The resolution also "commends all police officers in the United States and throughout the world"—and this in the wake of the NYC police killing of Sean Bell in a 50-round fusillade on November 25, and the Atlanta police's gunning down of 88-year-old Kathryn Johnston in her own home.

There are mountains of evidence proving Mumia Abu-Jamal's innocence and the police/prosecution frame-up: there is no ballistics evidence, so-called eyewitnesses were coerced and Mumia's confession was fabricated. In 2001 Rachel Wolkenstein (co-counsel for Mumia from 1995 to 1999) submitted an affidavit to the U.S. District Court detailing that evidence, including Arnold Beverly's confession that he, not Mumia, killed Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Yet all the courts to which it has been presented have refused to hear the Beverly evidence. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Mumia could raise only three issues on his appeal: the racially biased jury selection in his 1982 trial, the D.A.'s prejudicial summary argument that Mumia would have "appeal after appeal," and the grossly biased post-conviction state hearings in the 1990s before Judge Albert Sabo (who a court reporter testified had said at the time of the original trial that he would help "fry the n—r"). These challenges should be heard in court. But the harsh reality is that the Court of Appeals—like every other court in this case—has refused to hear countless other violations of Mumia's rights. Every aspect of Mumia's case shows how much the capitalist rulers want him dead.

The House of Representatives' overwhelming vote further drives home the depth of hatred the entire bourgeois state apparatus has for Mumia Abu-Jamal, a courageous, eloquent and unbroken fighter for black freedom and against racist repression. Mumia was framed up and falsely convicted for the murder of Faulkner because he is a talented journalist known as the "voice of the voiceless," a former Black Panther, a supporter of the MOVE organization and an outspoken opponent of racism.

Partisan Defense Committee spokesman Rachel Wolkenstein was invited to and spoke as part of the delegation at the street-naming in Saint-Denis this past April. That event provoked months of a renewed campaign by police and government officials against Mumia. In a letter to the mayor of Paris dated October 30, Mumia denounced efforts by Philadelphia politicians to retaliate against Saint-Denis, writing that "the merchants of death" have a "campaign to not only kill me, but to wipe my name from the face of the earth. Why else would they care about a small street in St. Denis? Or an award of Citizen of Honor from the City of Light? The Empire thinks it is Master of the World and can tell all what to do".

In response to this vicious campaign, the Comite de Defense Sociale, the PDC's fraternal legal and social defense organization in France, issued a leaflet on November 16 denouncing efforts by Philadelphia politicians to stifle growing support for Mumia: "This attack takes place when the international defense campaign for Mumia is once again gaining steam, a campaign that Philadelphia and its police are seeking to crush in the egg."

More evidence of growing support for Mumia is the statement by the Partisan Defense Committee under the headline, "We Demand the Immediate Freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal, an Innocent Man" signed by hundreds of labor activists and prominent individuals, including Nobel Prize winners Nadine Gordimer and Dario Fo, Harvard University's Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cindy Sheehan of Gold Star Families for Peace, author Michael Eric Dyson, the poet Sonia Sanchez, New York City councilman Charles Barren and Illinois Congressman Danny K. Davis. That statement was printed as a full-page ad in New York's Amsterdam News (26 October), the Nation (20 November), and also in the Chicago Defender and the San Francisco Bay View.

The House resolution against Mumia comes at a crucial juncture in the legal proceedings. Mumia has submitted the final papers in his appeal of a federal court decision that affirmed his frame-up conviction while overturning the death sentence. After oral argument, the court could decide within months whether to reinstate the death penalty, to condemn him to the living death of life in prison or to grant a new trial. The latest offensive by Congress and the city of Philadelphia against Mumia underlines the need to mobilize now for his freedom.

On December 9 in Philadelphia, the Partisan Defense Committee will join a rally called by the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal on the 25th anniversary of Mumia's arrest. The PDC understands that the capitalist state and its courts are not neutral institutions but organs of repression against the working class and the oppressed. Mumia's freedom will not be won through reliance on the rigged "justice" system or on capitalist politicians, whether Democratic, Republican or Green. Our PDC contingent will march under the slogans: "For Class-Struggle Defense to Free Mumia Now! There Is No Justice in the Capitalist Courts! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!"

*NOW THAT WE HAVE SEEN PLAN 'A' ON IRAQ WE NEED TO MOVE ON TO PLAN 'B'

Click on the title to link to an "Under The Hood" (Fort Hood G.I. Coffeehouse)Web site online article about the "Oleo Strut" Coffeehouse, an important development in the anti-Vietnam War struggle. Hats off to those bygone anti-war fighters.

COMMENTARY

OBVIOUSLY, NO TO TROOP ESCALATION- IMMEDIATE,UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL OF ALL U.S./ALLIED TROOPS FROM IRAQ!-SUPPORT AND BUILD ANTI-WAR SOLDIER AND SAILOR SOLIDARITY COMMITTEES!

This will be one of my shorter blogs. After all, what more needs to be said after President Bush unveiled his Plan "A" for 'victory' in Iraq. They must have spent all of twenty minutes on this plan. Actually, any more time would have been wasted. We have seen this kind of escalation before. They called it Vietnam. But the same mentality is at work. Enough, in fact, more than enough said.

Here is Plan "B", short and sweet. Immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S./Allied troops from Iraq, pronto. Forget the politicians, Democratic or Republican. Forget the military brass. Forget the advisers and the think tank specialists. Let us turn our direction where it counts to fighting for the soul of the troops. Form anti-war soldier and sailor committees now. If the troops in Iraq decide to leave, and in the final analysis they are the only ones who can end this war, we must not let them stand alone.

STILL HO HUM-THE HOUSE DEMOCRATS PASS A VERY MINIMUM WAGE BILL

COMMENTARY

This week, the week of January 8, 2007, the Democratically-controlled U.S. House of Representatives, passed a new federal minimum wage bill making the new minimum wage standard $7.25/hr.. This bill was hailed as the beginning of the golden age of working people by the organized labor tops and Democratic politicians. Be still my heart-we have reached the promise land! Of course for most Democratic politicans a $7 an hour wage is very far removed from their daily reality. No, that is not exactly true. When they are at home and notice the people, mainly immigrants, who maintain their lawns and clean and repair their houses-that is where they connect with the minimum wage. For a very different take on this question I repost a blog from the summer of 2006 when this issue first surfaced. I stand by the political points made there.


HO-HUM- THE DEMOCRATS WANT TO FIGHT FOR A $7 FEDERAL MINIMUM WAGE
WHAT PLANET ARE THESE PEOPLE ON? FIGHT FOR A LIVING WAGE!
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!

Is there no end to this madness of bourgeois parliamentary politics? This writer has just recently learned that the leader of the House Democrats, Nancy Pelosi, wants to reintroduce legislation that would raise the federal minimum wage standard from $5 to $7 (rounded off)/hour. This is legislation that earlier in the session the Republican-dominated Congress brushed aside without a murmur as an outrage against humankind. This project is supposedly the lynch pin of the Democratic program, and incidentally the road to heaven for working people, for the 2006 election cycle in the fall.

Let’s do the math-rounding off a little. National median household income is about $50,000/yr. $5*40hours*52 weeks= $10,000 /yr. That is very, very, very poor, indeed. Now, let us try $7*40 hours*52 weeks=$15,000/yr. Even Bill Gates and Warren Buffet would agree that still is very, very, very poor, indeed. These numbers speak to “Third World” economic conditions. And it’s no accident that a significant proportion of people at the bottom are blacks, Hispanics and immigrants from “third world” countries. Jesus, with this program this writer has to seriously reconsider his longtime fundamental opposition to capitalist parties and to capitalism. $7/hour minimum wages means we have entered paradise. Forget socialist equality. Forget the classless society. Just vote Democratic in 2006.

Seriously though, this issue brings up what militants must do. Our program is not small, incremental increases of minimum wage levels but a living wage for all. That is the program that a workers party representative in Congress would fight for. However, that is not the end all or be all of our program. Karl Marx long ago argued against the bourgeois and socialist theorists of the Iron Law of Wages (those who thought the struggle for increased wages was Utopian or counterproductive because the capitalists’ wage bills were fixed). He also argued against the trade union reformists that the remedy was not a “fair day’s pay for a far day’s work” but the ultimate abolition of the wage system through societal redistribution of the social surplus generated by labor. That is our ultimate goal.

Nevertheless, the capitalists will argue that raising the minimum wage will eliminate jobs here or send jobs to other countries. No, it will reduce their profits-maybe (they always seem to be able to generate those non-existent funds when pressed to the wall by successful strikes). That is the bottom line. To be honest, it is not the concern of militants if individual capitalists go under. Our immediate fight is for jobs, and jobs with a living wage and some dignity. To stop runaway shops labor has to organize internationally. To stop the 'race to the bottom' here labor has to organize Wal-Mart and the South, of openers. That is the beginning. The end? Remember Karl Marx’s point-ABOLISH THE WAGE SYSTEM.



THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!

A CENTURY OF REVOLUTION, INDEED

BOOK REVIEW

A CENTURY OF REVOLUTION, 1603-1714, CHIRSTOPHER HILL, W.W. Norton and Co., New York, 1980

The late eminent British Marxist historian Christopher Hill is better known for his pioneer work in the micro-history of the English Revolution and the influences of left-wing political forces such as the Levellers and Diggers and religious forces such the Quakers, Shakers, Ranters and Seekers on it. Here he has written an overview of the entire 17th century as part of this series of books on the history of England to modern times. Needless to say some of his work around the English Revolution seeps into this work as well, which makes his analysis of that period the strongest section of the book.

Professor Hill traces the major social, political, economic and religious trends that culminated in the revolution back to the reign of James I (and some economic trends back to Elizabethan times). He covers such keys areas of conflict as the changes in land use and ownership, agricultural innovations including the highly controversial enclosure policy, governmental foreign policy which tended to have a distinctly Catholic, particularly pro-Spanish, orientation, the embryonic beginnings of the split between court and ‘country’ as a result of Stuart arbitrary rule, the split between landed proprietors and city merchants; the city and the country, the established church and the numerous pro-Puritan (read Calvinist) sects that started to sprout up like wildfire and the rise of a secular democratic movement based in the cities that both the Army and the Levellers would draw from in the Civil War period.

Special note should be taken of the decades between the beginning of the defensive struggle against Charles I in 1640 and 1660 with the restoration of his son Charles II to the throne. At this point the tensions that were merely outlined by the prior policies of the Stuart governments came to the breaking point. Hill does more than merely narrate that story. He shows, based on his well-stocked body of knowledge about the period, the various stages of the revolution from the first defensive struggles of the Parliamentarians to the definitive break with Charles and the establishment of the New Model Army which would usher in a period of military dominance of government and society and with it the rise and fall of the various secular and religious democratic movements. Hill also does a masterful job of showing how the various plebian democratic forces led by the Levellers, and to a much lesser extent the Diggers,in society reacted to governmental policy (and how the government dealt with those forces) and how these various fights sapped the revolutionary energy of the masses.

As more than one historian and sociologist has noted, as a general proposition the study of post-revolutionary periods tends to be rather anti-climatic. That is also the case here with the restoration of Charles II. England, however, exhibited that trend in revolutionary history that notes that even when the revolution runs out of steam there is generally no regression back to the old ways of ruling. Despite the regression in governmental form, Parliament supremacy was essentially assured although not without various intrigues against it and against England. As importantly, the capitalist industrial developmental trends that had been gathering force throughout the century kept expanding after the revolution. That trend would make England the number one power in the world in the next century. For an excellent overview of an important period in English history, which moreover is filled with helpful footnotes on sources for further research, this is your stop.