Saturday, February 06, 2010

The Murder Of Emmett Till- Once Again, "Mississippi Goddam"

Click on the title to link to a PBS Webpage on the documentary, "The Murder Of Emmett Till".

DVD REVIEW

February Is Black History Month

The Murder Of Emmett Till, PBS Productions, 2003

This PBS production is a long overdue appreciation of the life the martyred civil rights figure, fourteen year old Chicago resident Emmett Till, down in deeply segregated Mississippi in 1955 at the hands of at least two white men while visiting relatives. Emmett’s crime- “eyeballing”, or whistling, or some such at a white woman while black. Sounds familiar from other later contexts, right (like today blacks being stopped in white neighborhoods, on the roads by white police, etc.)? For that childish indiscretion, however, Emmett paid with his young life. That these men, his later self-proclaimed killers were “white trash”, and considered as such by ‘gentile’ Southern society nevertheless insured that they would not suffer for their crimes. At least not under the Mississippi-style ‘justice’ of the times. They were white. And white was right. Case closed.

This documentary is also is a tribute, a much warranted tribute, to Emmett’s mother, the now deceased Mame Till, whose interview clips go a long way to understanding the nature of the case and her lifelong search for justice for her son- somewhere. As pointed out near the end of the film that never really occurred in her lifetime or the lifetimes of Emmett’s killers. Along the way the film details the why of that statement; the murder is graphically laid out, the ‘justice’ system in Mississippi is laid bare. The reaction of blacks in Chicago at Emmett’s funeral and later at the verdict, as well as those in the South who were just starting to organize for their rights, had a galvanizing effect. As one of the journalist interviewees noted, Emmett’s case highlighted that blacks were under attack, knew they were in a life and death struggle and had better start doing something about it. Moreover, this case provided the first solid evidence to the North, blacks and whites alike, that something was desperately wrong with the justice system in the Jim Crow South.

The beginnings of my personal awareness of the central role of the black liberation struggle in any fight for fundamental change in America did not stem from the Till tragedy but rather a little latter from the attempts to integrate the schools of Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. This film and many of the interviewees (journalists, an ex-Governor of Mississippi, field hands who witnessed various aspects of Till’s abduction and/or the cover up of the murder, Southern white liberals, etc.) point to the Till case as the tip of the iceberg that exploded soon after in the famous Rosa Parks bus incident in Montgomery, Alabama. No matter where you trace the beginnings of the modern civil right movement from though, in Emmett Till’s case there is only conclusion- Nina Simone said it best in her song- “Mississippi Goddam”.


Here are the lyrics to Nina Simone's poignant and appropriate "Mississippi Goddam"


Mississippi Goddam
(1963) Nina Simone


The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam
And I mean every word of it

Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Can't you see it
Can't you feel it
It's all in the air
I can't stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer

Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

This is a show tune
But the show hasn't been written for it, yet

Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every day's gonna be my last

Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don't belong here
I don't belong there
I've even stopped believing in prayer

Don't tell me
I tell you
Me and my people just about due
I've been there so I know
They keep on saying "Go slow!"

But that's just the trouble
"do it slow"
Washing the windows
"do it slow"
Picking the cotton
"do it slow"
You're just plain rotten
"do it slow"
You're too damn lazy
"do it slow"
The thinking's crazy
"do it slow"
Where am I going
What am I doing
I don't know
I don't know

Just try to do your very best
Stand up be counted with all the rest
For everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

I made you thought I was kiddin' didn't we

Picket lines
School boy cots
They try to say it's a communist plot
All I want is equality
for my sister my brother my people and me

Yes you lied to me all these years
You told me to wash and clean my ears
And talk real fine just like a lady
And you'd stop calling me Sister Sadie

Oh but this whole country is full of lies
You're all gonna die and die like flies
I don't trust you any more
You keep on saying "Go slow!"
"Go slow!"

But that's just the trouble
"do it slow"
Desegregation
"do it slow"
Mass participation
"do it slow"
Reunification
"do it slow"
Do things gradually
"do it slow"
But bring more tragedy
"do it slow"
Why don't you see it
Why don't you feel it
I don't know
I don't know

You don't have to live next to me
Just give me my equality
Everybody knows about Mississippi
Everybody knows about Alabama
Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

That's it!

***Poet's Corner- Bob Dylan's "The Death Of Emmett Till"

Click on the title to link to a "YouTube" film clip of a performance of Bob Dylan's "Death Of Emmet Till".

February Is Black History Month

THE DEATH OF EMMETT TILL

Words and Music by Bob Dylan
1963, 1968 Warner Bros. Inc
Renewed 1991 Special Rider Music


"Twas down in Mississippi no so long ago,
When a young boy from Chicago town stepped through a Southern door.
This boy's dreadful tragedy I can still remember well,
The color of his skin was black and his name was Emmett Till.

Some men they dragged him to a barn and there they beat him up.
They said they had a reason, but I can't remember what.
They tortured him and did some evil things too evil to repeat.
There was screaming sounds inside the barn, there was laughing sounds out on the street.

Then they rolled his body down a gulf amidst a bloody red rain
And they threw him in the waters wide to cease his screaming pain.
The reason that they killed him there, and I'm sure it ain't no lie,
Was just for the fun of killin' him and to watch him slowly die.

And then to stop the United States of yelling for a trial,
Two brothers they confessed that they had killed poor Emmett Till.
But on the jury there were men who helped the brothers commit this awful crime,
And so this trial was a mockery, but nobody seemed to mind.

I saw the morning papers but I could not bear to see
The smiling brothers walkin' down the courthouse stairs.
For the jury found them innocent and the brothers they went free,
While Emmett's body floats the foam of a Jim Crow southern sea.

If you can't speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that's so unjust,
Your eyes are filled with dead men's dirt, your mind is filled with dust.
Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood it must refuse to flow,
For you let this human race fall down so God-awful low!

This song is just a reminder to remind your fellow man
That this kind of thing still lives today in that ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan.
But if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we could give,
We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live.

*From The Pen Of Vladmir Lenin- "The Tasks Of Of Revolutionary Social-Democracy In The European War"

Click on the title to link to the "Lenin Internet Archive" article mentioned in the headline.

Friday, February 05, 2010

*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Black Freedom, Women's Rights and the Civil War

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for black abolitionist Sojourner Truth.

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Spring 1989 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.

**********

Black Freedom, Women's Rights
and the Civil War

This article is based on a talk given by W&R associate editor Amy Rath at a public forum held 5 April 1988 at Howard University. For additional historical material on women in the anti-slavery struggle, see "The Grimke Sisters: Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights" (W&R No. 29, Spring 1985) and "Harriet Tubman: Fighter for Black Freedom" (W&R No. 32, Winter 1986).

The talk discusses the movement for women's rights in the U.S. prior to the Civil War, its link through the radical abolition movement with the fight against black slavery, and the destruction of that link to produce the antecedents of the present "feminists." It centers on the ideology of the antebellum abolitionists, the most far-sighted of whom saw that all democratic struggles were vitally linked and that deeply revolutionary changes would be required to establish equality. These men and women were not Marxists but bourgeois radicals of their time; for many, the primary political motivation was religion.

Northern anti-slavery activists espoused "free labor" and accepted the idea that if legal barriers to equality were removed, the American dream would be possible for anyone, given talent and hard work. In antebellum America, in the context of steady immigration and an expanding frontier, a propertyless farmhand could perhaps acquire land of his own, while a (white) laborer might look to becoming a small-scale employer of labor in a generation. But if the "free labor" ideology imagined a democratic political system of economic equals based on a society of skilled artisans and yeoman farmers, this model rapidly became a fiction. A capitalist class of Northern industrial, finance and railroad capitalists had the ascendancy. Though still a predominantly agricultural country, America was the fastest-growing industrial power (with the second-highest industrial output, after Britain). America was already the world's technological leader, very much feared as a competitor by Britain, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.

The slave society of the South existed in the framework of a powerful Northern industrial sector which purchased staple crops from the South, first of all cotton. The rich plantations which possessed the South's best land and dominated the region politically were built on a pre-capitalist class relationship of black chattel slavery; at the same time they were part of a money economy in the world's most dynamic capitalist country. The conflict of social systems between the ever more powerful North and the backward South was a profound contradiction heading for collision, exacerbated by America's undemocratic "states' rights" political system which had given the South disproportionate control of the national government (especially the presidency and Supreme Court) since Independence.

The Progressive Bourgeoisie and the Limits of Reconstruction


The "irrepressible conflict" exploded in the Civil War, in the course of which Lincoln, the Northern bourgeoisie's ablest political leader, found himself obliged to go much further than he had intended in the direction of adopting the emancipation program of the abolitionists. Fifteen years before, abolitionists had been viewed as an isolated, if noisy, crew of radical fanatics.
The Civil War smashed slavery and left behind in the South a chaotic situation and four million ex-slaves who had been promised "freedom." But the war and its aftermath underlined that a truly egalitarian radical vision of social reconstruction already could not be promoted by a capitalist ruling class.

In her talk, comrade Rath emphasized the birth of a "feminist" women's movement as a rightward split at a crucial moment in American history: the era of "Reconstruction." Reconstruction posed a possibility of socially revolutionary transformations in the South: the regional ruling class, based on the ownership of land and slaves, had been militarily defeated; under the occupying Northern power, political rights were exercised by the former slaves and those willing to be allied with them.

Reconstruction brought not only black enfranchisement but significant democratic reforms: the 1868 South Carolina constitutional convention drafted the state's first divorce law, while Reconstruction legislatures established the South's first public schools and went to work on liberalizing the South's draconian penal codes and reforming the planters' property tax system (which had taxed the farmer's mule and the workman's tools while all but exempting the real wealth—land). But the Northern capitalists betrayed the promise of Reconstruction, allowing it to be physically smashed by forces such as the Ku Klux Klan, even though that meant the destruction of the Republican Party in the South.

Replacing slavery, a new system of racial subordination took shape: a refurbished system of labor discipline through such measures as one-year labor contracts and "vagrancy" laws to bind ex-slaves to the plantations, and a rigid system of Jim Crow segregation. The defeat of Reconstruction shaped the postwar South into modern times: the sharecropping, the poll taxes, convict labor (the chain gang), the "separate but equal" unequal facilities.
While the woman suffrage leaders described in comrade Rath's talk took a stand against the great democratic gains that hung in the balance, many women mobilized by the anti-slavery movement served honorably in Reconstruction, for example as freedmen's schoolteachers who risked their lives to participate in freeing black people from the chains of bondage.

During Reconstruction, debate raged over the agrarian question: the radical demand raised by the freed-men and destitute white Unionist Southerners that the secessionists' estates be confiscated and distributed to them. Some abolitionists saw that racial democracy could not be achieved if a class of whites continued to own the land where a class of blacks were laborers. They argued for justice to those who had been slaves (who created the wealth of the plantations, beginning by clearing the wilderness).

But the tide had turned: the triumphant Northern rulers would not permit such an attack on "property rights" (especially as Northerners directly and Northern banks were coming to own a good deal of Southern property). Fundamentally, the federal power reinvested political power in the hands of the former "best people" of the old Confederacy. In the sequel, intensive exploitation of black agricultural labor, rather than industrial development or capital investment in the modernization of agriculture, remained the basis of the Southern economy.
What was the alternative? Working-class power was shown by the 1848 and 1871 upheavals in Europe to be the alternative to bourgeois rule, as Marx and Engels explained from the Communist Manifesto onward, but conditions were not mature even in Europe for the small proletariat to seize and wield state power. In mid-19th century America, the Northern bourgeoisie under the pressure of a revolutionary Civil War possessed a genuinely progressive side, the basis for the abolitionists' support for the Republican Party. The abolitionists' great debates revolved around how far out in front of the progressive bourgeoisie they should be. There were "radicals" and those with a more "realistic" appraisal of what the Republican Party would support. Today, more than a century after Reconstruction, that debate is transcended. The ruling class long since passed firmly over to the side of reaction; the federal government is no defender of the oppressed. Those who look to find support for an egalitarian program in any wing of the ruling class are doomed to disappointment. To complete the unfinished democratic tasks of the bourgeois revolution is a responsibility of the modern working class.

When the post-Civil War suffragettes chose to focus on the narrowest political rights for middle-class women and turn their backs on the rights and survival of the most desperately oppressed, they prefigured all of today's "constituency" and "reform" politics which refuse to attack the profound class inequalities ingrained in capitalist society. Sojourner Truth's classic "Ain't I a Woman" speech (see below) today stands as a powerful indictment of these ladies as much as of the outright sexists she was debating. Those who renounce the revolutionary content of the demand for women's liberation so as to advance their schemes for election of female politicians or advancement of women in academia are direct descendants of those first "feminists" who refused to challenge the power structure of their time on behalf of justice for two million of their sisters who were freed slaves.

But there is another women's movement: the women who have joined in the front ranks of every revolutionary struggle on this planet, from the 19th-century radical abolitionists to the women workers who sparked the Russian Revolution to the communist women of today. When the October Revolution of 1917 smashed the old tsarist society in Russia, militant women were among the first recruits to communism in dozens of countries where women were oppressed by semi-feudal conditions and "customs." Young women radicalized around questions like women's education, the veil, wife-beating, religious obscurantism, arranged marriages, etc., recognized a road forward to uprooting social reaction and building a society freed from sexual, racial and class inequality. Our heroes are the revolutionary women who have shared in making all of revolutionary history, from the first moment that slaves rose up against the Roman Empire to the great struggles of today.

It was 1863, and the bloodiest war ever fought by the U.S. was raging. Abraham Lincoln had finally realized he must pronounce the destruction of slavery as the North's goal in this civil war. On 22 September 1862, his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation declared that on the first of January, 1863, all slaves in the Confederacy "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves in the border states loyal to the Union, it turned the tide of battle. The war was now indisputably a war to end slavery, not simply to repair the Union. Soon thereafter, the government began to enlist blacks into the army; these ex-slaves and sons of ex-slaves tipped the military balance in favor of the Union. It was a matter of time until black soldiers singing "John Brown's Body" marched into Charleston, South Carolina—the "soul of secession," as Karl Marx called it-after Sherman's march through Georgia to the sea.

In May of the revolutionary year 1863, the first convention of the Women's Loyal National League met in New York City. Its most eminent speaker was a woman whose name is little known today: Angelina Grimke" Weld. As part of her address she gave a keen analysis of the war:

"This war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles; a war upon the working classes, whether
white or black; a war against Man, the world over. In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government...are
driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them, victims of the same violence that for two centuries has held the black man a prisoner of war "The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."

—Gerda Lerner, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina

A resolution was presented: "There can never be a true peace in this Republic until the civil and political rights of all citizens of African descent and all women are practically established." Angelina Grimke' defended it against those who thought it too radical:
"I rejoice exceedingly that that resolution would combine us with the negro. I feel that we have been with him— True, we have not felt the slaveholder's lash; true, we have not had our hands manacled, but our hearts have been crushed I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."

It was only after the Civil War that an ideology arose which was later named "feminism": the idea that the main division in society is sex. In response to the debate over the role of the newly freed slaves in U.S. society, the leaders of the woman suffrage movement—Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—sided with the counterrevolutionary assault on Reconstruction. The birth of bourgeois feminism was part of a right-wing process which shattered the vision of the left wing of the revolutionary democracy into separate, feeble bourgeois reform movements.

The Second American Revolution

The Civil War was one of the great social revolutions in the history of the world, destroying the slaveholding class in the South and freeing the black slaves. Not only Marxists saw that. The best fighters of the day—the Grimke sisters, the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens—knew that the war would have to become a revolution against slavery before the North could win. They hated the feudalistic society of the South, with its degraded slaves, its cruelty, its arrogant, leisurely gentlemen planters, its impoverished rural whites, its lack of education, industry and general culture. The radical abolitionists wanted to wipe away that society, and also saw much wrong in the North, such as the subservience of women, and legal and social discrimination against blacks. Their ideology was to create a new order based on free labor and "equality before the law," a concept brought to the U.S. by the Radical Republican Charles Sumner out of his study of the 1789 French Revolution.

In Europe after the French Revolution the status of women was the most visible expression of the contradiction between capitalist society and its own ideals. But in the U.S. that was not so true, because of chattel slavery. The United States—the first country to proclaim itself a democratic republic—was the largest slaveholding country in the world, a huge historical contradiction which had to be resolved.

The Industrial Revolution

It was the Industrial Revolution, fundamentally, that generated what William Seward called the "Irrepressible Conflict." In broad historical terms the Industrial Revolution had created the material conditions for the elimination of slavery in society. Technological and social advances made possible a much more productive capitalist agriculture and industry. In 1854 the abolitionist clergyman Theodore Parker described slavery as "the foe to Northern Industry—to our mines, our manufactures, and our commerce...to our democratic politics in the State, our democratic culture in the school, our democratic work in the community" (quoted in James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom).

The Industrial Revolution had a contradictory effect on the condition of women. Production of goods had been primarily through cottage industry, but with the invention of the spinning jenny, the power loom and the steam engine, cottage industry was ended. The men left home to go to the factory, while women stayed home to do the housework, raise the children and to buy at the local store what once they had made at home.

Women's labor ceased to be productive labor in the strict Marxist sense. This is the material basis for the 19th-century ideology of the "women's sphere." While the material advances of the Industrial Revolution made life easier for women, it also locked them into the stifling confines of domesticity in the isolated nuclear family. Women also worked in factories, but even in the industries in which they were concentrated (in textile production they made up two-thirds of the labor force) generally they worked only for a few years before getting married.

The Fight for Women's Legal Rights

Slaves were a class, but women are a specially oppressed group dispersed through all social classes. Although all women were oppressed to some extent because of their position in the family, the class differences were fundamental between the black slave woman and the slave plantation mistress, or the Northern German-speaking laundress and the wife of the owner of the Pennsylvania iron mill. "Sisterhood" was as much a myth then as it is now. Women identified first with the class to which they belonged, determined by who their husbands or fathers were.

Before the Civil War, women were basically without any civil rights. They couldn't sue or be sued, they couldn't be on juries, all their property and earnings went to their husband or father. Although women did have the vote for a few years in New Jersey and Virginia after the American Revolution, this advance was quickly eliminated. (This was part of a general right-wing turn after the Revolution, when suffrage was restricted gradually through property qualifications. In New York State, for example, with some restrictions blacks could vote up to about 1821.) For the wealthy upper-class woman, this lack of legal rights loomed as a terrible injustice because it prevented her from functioning as a full member of the ruling class (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the mother of American feminism and the daughter of a judge, felt this keenly). For the working-class or slave woman, if her property legally belonged to her husband it didn't seem a problem— she didn't have any property.

Though the legal question was a small matter for poor and slave women, nevertheless legal injustice is not insignificant for Marxists, and it is bound up with multi-layered social oppression. This was true for the position of women in pre-Civil War society. Until the 1850s wife-beating was legal in most states. Divorce was almost impossible, and when it was obtained children went with the husband. The accepted attitude toward women was assumption of their "inferiority," and the Bible was considered an authority. When anesthesia was discovered in the 1840s, doctors opposed its use for childbirth, because that suffering was women's punishment for Eve's sin.

The Anti-Slavery Struggle and Democratic Rights

But how were women to fight for equal rights in this society divided between slave and free? Angelina Grimke' was precisely correct when she said, "until the negro gets his rights, we will never have ours." It was necessary to destroy chattel slavery, which was retarding the development of the whole society. The movement for women's rights developed in the North out of the struggle to abolish slavery. It could hardly have developed in the South. In the decades before the war, in response to the growing Northern anti-slavery agitation, the South was becoming more reactionary than ever: more fanatical in defense of the ideology of slavery and more openly repressive. There were wholesale assaults on basic democratic rights, from attacks on the rights of the small layer of free blacks, who were seen as a source of agitation and insurrection, to a ban on the distribution of abolitionist literature.

In the South, there were no public schools. It was illegal to teach slaves to read, and almost half of the entire Southern population was illiterate. But in the North over 90 percent of the residents could read and write. Girls and boys went to school in about the same proportions, the only country in the world where this was true. So while in the North women teachers were paid less than men, and women factory hands received one-quarter the wage of men, in the South there were few teachers at all, and few industrial workers.

As a young slave in Maryland, and later while he was trying to earn a living as a refugee in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Frederick Douglass came to understand the common interests of all working people in the South, slaves and free blacks and whites. He learned a trade on the docks, where he experienced racist treatment from white workmen, who saw black labor as a threat to their jobs. But Douglass realized that the position of the workmen, too, against their boss was eroded and weakened by slavery and racism. As Marx said, "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." And indeed, the working-class movement met with little success in the antebellum U.S., whereas after the war there was an upsurge in unionism and labor struggle.

The vanguard of the abolitionist movement—the radical insurrectionist wing—believed in the identity of the interests of all the oppressed. John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, the great activist of the Underground Railroad, and the Grimke sisters were all inspired by a vision of human equality based in revolutionary democracy. Although their egalitarian principle was based on a religious view and ours is based on a Marxist understanding of society, we honor their essential work in leading the anti-slavery struggle. The abolition of slavery did profoundly alter the United States, it did open the road to liberation by making possible the development of the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard, which will establish justice by abolishing the exploitation of man by man.

The Grimke Sisters of South Carolina

Penetrating insights into the situation of women in pre-Civil War America came from women who were committed abolitionists. Sarah and Angelina Grimke are examples, as is Sojourner Truth who is better known today. The Grimke sisters were unusual members of the ruling class who defected to the other side. As daughters of one of South Carolina's most powerful slave-holding families, they had grown up in luxury, but left the South because of their revulsion for slavery. The Grimke sisters became famous in 1837-1838 as agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The power of their personal witness of the atrocities of the slave system drew huge audiences. The sisters were quick to point out that as upper-class white women, they had seen only the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves, and not the more brutal treatment of plantation hands in the fields. But one of the things they did know about was the sexual exploitation of women slaves and the brutal breakup of black families through the slave trade.

Because the sisters addressed the issues of sexual exploitation frankly and often, it was one of the issues the opposition used to try to shut them up. The clergy complained that the Grimke's brought up a subject "which ought not to be named"—how dare these delicate .blossoms of Southern womanhood talk about sex! The very idea of women speaking publicly represented an attack on the proper relationship between the sexes and would upset "women's place" in the home. Contemporary observers were shocked by the sight of women participating actively in the debates of the anti-slavery movement, as they did especially in New England, the birthplace of radical abolitionism. The Grimkes replied by pointing out that the same argument was used against abolition itself: it would upset the established order of social relations. They effectively linked up women's rights and emancipation of the slaves.

Sojourner Truth: "Ain't I a Woman?"

Black women got it from both sides, as the life of Sojourner Truth shows. She was born a slave around 1797 in New York State and was not freed until 1827, under the "gradual emancipation" provisions of the state law. As a slave she was prevented from marrying the man she loved, who was brutally beaten for daring to visit her (they were owned by different masters). They were both forcibly married to other slaves. Her son was sold South as a small child, away from her. After she was freed, she lived a backbreaking existence in New York City, one of the more racist cities in the North and a center for the slave trade.

Sojourner Truth went to all the women's rights conventions. The famous story about her dates from 1853. The usual crowd of male hecklers had almost shut down the proceedings. The women were unable to answer their sneers of how delicate and weak women were. Sojourner Truth asked for the floor and got it, despite the opposition of a lot of the delegates to the presence of a black abolitionist. You have to keep in mind what this woman looked like in this gathering of ladies: she was six feet tall, nearly 60 years old, very tough and work-worn. She said:

"The man over there says women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages or over puddles, or gives me the best place—and ain't I a woman?
"Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have born...children, and seen most of 'em sold into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me—and ain't I a woman?"

—Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle

Sojourner Truth put her finger on the heart of the contradiction between the stifling idealization of women and their oppression as housewives and mothers and exploitation as slaves and workers.

Women's Rights and the Abolitionist Movement

Support for women's rights was tenuous within the politically diverse anti-slavery movement. Many free-soilers were not anti-racist; some opposed slavery because they didn't want blacks around. Even some of the most dedicated abolitionists argued that "women's rights" could harm the anti-slavery cause, and in 1840 a split in the American Anti-Slavery Society was precipitated by the election of a woman to the leading body.
That same year at an international anti-slavery meeting in London, women members of the American delegation were denied their seats. In the audience was the young Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Out of this experience she decided to begin organizing for women's rights. Eight years later, in 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York the first women's rights convention in the world was held. At first Stanton wasn't going to put forward the vote as a demand—she was afraid it was too extreme. She had to be argued into it by Frederick Douglass. It was the only demand that didn't get unanimous support at the meeting; it was considered too radical.

The role of Douglass was not an accident. The best fighters for women's rights were not the Elizabeth Cady Stantons and the Susan B. Anthonys—the ones who "put women first"—but the left-wing abolitionists. The most militant advocates of black equality, the insurrectionist wing, the prophets of the Civil War, were also the most consistent fighters for women's rights, because they saw no division of interest between blacks and women. Frederick Douglass not only attended all the women's meetings, arguing effectively for full equality for women, but he brought the message elsewhere. He put forward resolutions for women's rights at black conventions, and they were passed. He used to advertise the meetings in his paper and print reports on the proceedings. His paper's motto was, "Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren."

The Fight Over the 14th Amendment

Stanton and Anthony had suspended their woman suffrage campaign for the duration of the war. They circulated petitions for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, which became the 13th Amendment. After the war Stanton and Anthony set up an Equal Rights Association to agitate for the vote for both blacks and women. They thought because of the broad social upheaval the time was ripe for woman suffrage. But this proved not to be the case.

The question here was citizenship rights under capitalist law, specifically voting. Compare it with how voting rights and citizenship were looked at in another revolution at the same time: the 1871 Paris Commune, the first proletarian revolution (whose example dramatically reinforced ideological conservatism among the American bourgeoisie). The Commune subsumed nationality and citizenship to class considerations. Anybody who got elected from the working class, whatever country they were born in, sat on the legislative body of the Commune, while the industrialists and the bourgeois parliamentarians fled the city and were "disenfranchised" as their property was expropriated.

This was not on the agenda in the United States in the 1860s. The historical tasks of the Civil War and Reconstruction were to complete the unfinished bourgeois revolution, to resolve questions like slave versus free, national sovereignty and democratic rights. In his novel Gore Vidal calls Lincoln the Bismarck of his country, and this is justified. For example, before the Civil War, each state printed its own money. Greenbacks were first made by the Union to finance the war. The Supreme Court regularly said, "the United States are." Only after the war did this country's name become a singular noun—one national government.

But the big question was what to do with the newly emancipated slaves, and this question focused on two things: land and the vote. The debate over the vote represented, in legal terms, a struggle to determine what "citizenship" meant in relation to the state. Many Northern states did not allow blacks to vote, either. The 14th Amendment, which was passed to answer this question, says that all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are citizens of the nation and of the state in which they live, and that states can't abridge their "privileges and immunities" or deprive them of life, liberty, or property without "due process of law" or deny them "equal protection of the laws."

The Republican Party, which was founded as an anti-slavery party, contained within it many shades of political opinion. It has been argued that the only reason the Republicans gave the vote to blacks was to maintain political control over the states in the conquered Confederacy. This was true of some Republicans, but the men who politically dominated Congress during the period of Radical Reconstruction were committed revolutionary democrats, as observers of the time said of Thaddeus Stevens, who was called the "Robespierre, Danton, and Marat of America." There were good reasons for Douglass' loyalty to the Republicans, given after much early hesitation and sometimes combined with scathing criticism.

But there were a lot of contradictions. The party that was trying to implement black rights was also the party that was massacring the Indians in the West, breaking workers' strikes in the North, presiding over a new scale of graft and corruption, and trying to annex Santo Domingo. In the fight to replace slavery with something other than a peonage system which mimicked bondage, the land question was key. And the robber barons—the moneylords, the triumphant ruling class-rapidly got pretty nervous about the campaign to confiscate the plantations and give them to the blacks. It was an assault on property rights, in line with what those uppity workers in the North were demanding: the eight-hour day, unions, higher wages. The ruling class was quite conscious about this; an 1867 New York Times editorial stated:

"If Congress is to take cognizance of the claims of labor against capital...there can be no decent pretense for confining the task to the slave-holder of the South. It is a question, not of humanity, not of loyalty, but of the fundamental relation of industry to capital; and sooner or later, if begun at the South, it will find its way into the cities of the North.... An attempt to justify the confiscation of Southern land under the pretense of doing justice to the freedmen, strikes at the root of all property rights in both sections. It concerns Massachusetts quite as much as Mississippi."

—Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War

This question was not resolved quickly, but over a couple of decades. But to collapse a lot of complex history, the revolutionary tide receded under the weight of triumphant capitalism. In 1877 Union troops were withdrawn from Southern occupation as part of the compromise making Rutherford B. Hayes president. The Civil War did not establish black equality, and the 14th and 15th Amendments which codified in law the war's revolutionary gains were turned into virtual dead letters. Nor did the Civil War liberate women, not even in a limited, legalistic sense. They continued to be denied even the simple right to vote (although in some districts in South Carolina in 1870, under the encouragement of black election officials, black women exercised the franchise for a brief time).

From the defeat of Reconstruction was spawned the kind of society we have now. On top of the fundamental class divisions in the U.S. is pervasive and institutionalized racial oppression. The black slaves were liberated from bondage only to become an oppressed race/color caste, segregated at the bottom of society— although today, unlike the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, blacks also constitute a key component of the American proletariat.

The Birth of American Feminism

Many Radical Republicans were critical of the 14th Amendment, which was a true child of compromise. Sumner called it "uncertain, loose, cracked, and rickety." Opposition centered on a loophole that allowed a state to opt for losing some representation in Congress if it chose to restrict black suffrage—and Southern states exploited this concession. But what Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn't like about it was that for the first time, the word "male" appeared in the Constitution. And this fight was the birth of American feminism.

Of course the 14th Amendment should have given women the vote, and the importance of suffrage for black women was not inconsiderable. But a Civil War had just been fought on the question of black freedom, and it was indeed the "Negro's Hour," as many abolitionists argued. The biggest benefit for women's rights would have been to struggle for the biggest expansion possible in black freedom—to campaign for the land, for black participation in government on the state and federal level, to crush racism in the North, to integrate blacks in housing, education, jobs—to push to the limit the revolutionary possibilities of the period. But Stanton and Anthony sided with the right-wing
assault on the revolutionary opening that existed. They wrote:

"Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Ung Tung who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence or Webster's spelling book, making laws for [white abolitionists] Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, or Fanny Kemble."

Stanton and Anthony embraced race-hatred and anti-immigrant bigotry against the Irish, blacks, Germans and Asians, grounded in class hostility.
They took this position at a time when blacks in the South faced escalating race-terror. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 to terrorize Southern blacks; hundreds were murdered. Republicans of both colors were targeted, and a special object of Klan hatred was the schoolhouse and the schoolteacher (many of them Northern women). In the North as well there was a struggle over the vote, over integrated schools. There was a fight to end Jim Crow in the Washington, D.C. trolley system (after the law desegregating streetcars was passed there in 1865, Sojourner Truth herself went around the capital boarding the cars of companies that were refusing to seat blacks). The freedmen's struggles for a fundamental transformation of race relations triggered in the North what some historians have called the first racist backlash. Frederick Douglass' home in Rochester, New York was burned to the ground; Republican and abolitionist leaders routinely received death threats.

So in this period of violent struggle over the race question, the feminists joined forces with the Democrats, the political party of the Klan and the Confederacy, who hoped to exploit the women's issue against blacks. Henry Blackwell (Lucy Stone's husband) argued that white women voting in the South would cancel out the black vote. Stanton and Anthony teamed up with George Train, a notorious racist, who financed their newspaper, Revolution. They adopted the slogan "educated suffrage"—that is, a literacy test for voters—which was deliberately formulated against non-English-speaking immigrants and ex-slaves.

Frederick Douglass made a valiant attempt to win the feminists over to support for the amendments at a meeting of the Equal Rights Association in 1869, where he argued for the urgency of the vote for blacks:

"When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed to the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot."

—Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle

At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands" while imploring a redoubling of "our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." But by this point, a split was inevitable. The feminists blamed the Republican Party and the abolitionists for the defeat in Kansas of an 1867 referendum on woman suffrage. They decided that "men" could not be trusted, and for the first time argued that women must organize separately for their own rights. They even flirted with male exclusionism. The movement split in two, one maintaining a formally decent posture on the race question as a cover for doing nothing. The main wing led by Stanton and Anthony wanted to address broad issues, but their capitulation to racist reaction defined them.

They claimed the ballot would solve everything. Their paper was printed in a "rat" office (below union scale). Anthony urged women to be scabs to "better" their condition, then whined when the National Labor Congress refused to admit her as a delegate! Stanton said it proved the worst enemy of women's rights was the working man.

After Reconstruction went down to defeat, the first "feminists" dedicated themselves to the reactionary attempt to prove woman suffrage wouldn't rock the Jim Crow boat. But in the South, the restabilization of a system of overt racist injustice set the context for all social questions. In the South, any extension of the franchise was feared as a threat to "white supremacy" stability. By 1920, when woman suffrage was passed nationally— largely because of World War I which brought women into industry and social life—not a single Southern state had passed the vote for women, although almost every other state had some form of it.

Today, the bourgeois feminists like to hark back to the struggle over the 14th Amendment as proof there must be a separatist women's movement. They claim Stanton and Anthony as their political mothers. Let them have them! We stand in a different tradition: the heritage of Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, the Grimke sisters, of revolutionary insurrectionism against the class enemy. Today, to complete the unfinished tasks of the Civil War and emancipate women and blacks from social slavery requires a communist women's movement, part of a multiracial vanguard party fighting for workers power in the interests of all the oppressed.

*The Latest From The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Website- A 74th Reunion Meeting Coming Up In May

Click on the title to link to the "Abraham Lincoln Brigade" Website.

Markin comment:

Every once in a while I go through the list of sites that I have links to on my profile page. I happened to click onto the Abraham Lincoln Brigade site while looking for something on the American poet Langston Hughes whom I have posted several entries on today. On their homepage I noted that there is to be a 74th Anniversary reunion meeting held in May (the International Brigades, including the Lincolns, entered the Spanish Civil War in early fall of 1936). As those who follow this blog may know I have railed against these odd-ball year celebrations on previous occasions. No so here. Those "premature anti-fascists" who fought and died in Spain are kindred spirits and should be honored every year and in every way. Not the least of which should be by our producing some victories in the struggle for our communist future. Hats off to the Lincolns!

Note: I do have a little question of who of the Lincolns would still be around to celebrate. The recruiting process done by the Communist Party for reliable politically Stalinist fighters would have required those who went to Spain to be in their twenties, I assume. Thus, any participant would have to be somewhere in their mid-90s. Is that right? And who is left? A big hats off to them, whoever they are.

Thursday, February 04, 2010

*Songs Of The Anti-Slavery Underground Railroad- "Follow The Drinking Gourd"

Click on the title to link to the "Follow The Drinking Gourd" Website.

February Is Black History Month

Guest Commentary

Here is a little lesson in the code used during the days of the heroic anti-slavery Underground Railroad.


What the Lyrics Mean

The following explanations are drawn principally from the H.B. Parks article, supplemented by my own research.

H.B. Parks Version

LYRICS EXPLANATION

VERSE 1 Taken together, this verse suggests escaping in the spring and heading North to freedom.

When the sun come back, Refers to the winter or spring. The days are getting longer, and the angle of the sun is higher each day at noon.

When the firs' quail call, Refers to the breeding season. Quail in Alabama start calling to each other in early to mid-April.

Then the time is come

Foller the drinkin' gou'd. The "drinkin' gou'd" alludes to the hollowed out gourd used by slaves (and other rural Americans) as a water dipper. Used here it is a code name for the Big Dipper star formation, which points to Polaris, the Pole Star, and North.

CHORUS

Foller the drinkin' gou'd,
Foller the drinkin' gou'd;
For the ole man say, "Ole man" is nautical slang for "Captain" (or "Commanding Officer.") According to Parks, the Underground Railroad operative Peg Leg Joe was formerly a sailor.
"Foller the drinkin' gou'd."

VERSE 2 Describes how to follow the route, from Mobile, Alabama north.
The riva's bank am a very good road, The first river in the song is the Tombigbee, which empties into Mobile Bay. Its headwaters extend into northeastern Mississippi.

The dead trees show the way, According to Parks, Peg Leg Joe marked trees and other landmarks "with charcoal or mud of the outline of a human left foot and a round spot in place of the right foot." (1)

Lef' foot, peg foot goin' on,
Foller the drinkin' gou'd.

CHORUS

VERSE 3 Describes the route through northeastern Mississippi and into Tennessee.
The riva ends a-tween two hills, The headwaters of the Tombigbee River end near Woodall Mountain, the high point in Mississippi and an ideal reference point for a map song. The "two hills" could mean Woodall Mountain and a neighboring lower hill.

But the mountain itself evidently has a twin cone profile and so could represent both hills at once. (More on the route to come.)

Foller the drinkin' gou'd;

'Nuther riva on the other side The river on the other side of the hills is the Tennessee, which extends outward in an arc above Woodall Mountain. The left-hand side proceeds virtually due north to the Ohio river border with Illinois – definitely the preferred route, since the right hand side meanders back into northern Alabama and then proceeds up into Tennessee.

Follers the drinkin' gou'd.

CHORUS

VERSE 4 Describes the end of the route, in Paducah, Kentucky.

Wha the little riva When the Tennessee...
Meet the grea' big un, ...meets the Ohio River. The Tennessee and Ohio rivers come together in Paducah, KY, opposite southern Illinois.

The ole man waits-- Per one of Parks's informants, the runaways would be met on the banks of the Ohio by the old sailor. Of course, the chances that Peg Leg Joe himself would be there to meet every escapee (as depicted literally in the children's books) are quite small.

Foller the drinkin' gou'd.

*A Song In Honor Of "General" Harriet Tubman

Click on the title to link to a Wikipedia entry for the great abolitionist, Underground Railroad conductor, and friend of revolutionary abolitionist John Brown, "Harriet Tubman". All honor to her memory.

February is Black History Month

Guest Commentary/Lyrics

Harriet Tubman

A Cappella Arrangement for Women's Voices



One night I dreamed I was in slavery,
'Bout eighteen fifty was the time,
Sorrow was the only sign,
Nothing around to ease my mind.
Out of the night appeared a lady,
Leading a distant pilgrim band.
"First mate," she yelled, pointing her hand,
"Make room on board for this young woman."

Singing: Come on up, mm mm mm, I got a lifeline
Come on up to this train of mine
Come on up, mm mm mm, I got a lifeline
Come on up to this train of mine.
She said her name was Harriet Tubman
And she drove for the underground railroad.

Hundreds of miles we travelled onward,
Gathering slaves from town to town,
Seeking every lost and found,
Setting those free who once were bound.
Somehow my heart was growing weaker,
I fell by the wayside's sinking sand.
Firmly did this lady stand,
Lifted me up and took my hand.

Singing: ....

Who are those children dressed in red?
They must be the ones that Moses led.

Singing: ....

Harriet Tubman

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

*The Latest From The "Greater Boston Stop The Wars Coalition" Website

Click on the title to link to the Website mentioned in the headline.

*The Latest From The "Students For A Democratic Society (SDS)" (2006 Model) Website

Click on the title to link to the Website mentioned in the headline.

*The Latest From The "Different Drummer" Website At Fort Drum, New York

Click on the title to link to the G.I. Website mentioned in the headline.

Markin comment:

One protest, large or small, hooted at or cheered, such as the one down at Fort Hood, Texas on January 16, 2009, is worth more than many such rallies elsewhere. Hats off to the brothers and sisters down in at Fort Hood Texas on the front lines of the anti-war struggle. The anti-war soldiers, sailors and airmen must not stand alone. Build soldiers and sailors solidarity committees now!

*The Latest From "G.I. Voice" At Fort Lewis, Washington

Click on the title to link to the G.I.-suportive Website mentioned in the headline.

Markin comment:

One protest, large or small, hooted at or cheered, such as the one down at Fort Hood, Texas on January 16, 2009, is worth more than many such rallies elsewhere. Hats off to the brothers and sisters down in at Fort Hood Texas on the front lines of the anti-war struggle. The anti-war soldiers, sailors and airmen must not stand alone. Build soldiers and sailors solidarity committees now!

*The Latest From the "Under The Hood" Anti-War G.I. Website At Fort Hood, Texas

Click on the title to link to a "Killen Daily Herald" article about a protest at Fort Hood on January 16, 2009.

Markin comment:

One protest, large or small, hooted at or cheered, at a military installation is worth many more such rallies elsewhere. Hats off to the brothers and sisters down in at Fort Hood Texas on the front lines of the anti-war struggle. The anti-war soldiers, sailors and airmen must not stand alone. Build soldiers and sailors solidarity committees now!

*The Latest From The "Free The San Francisco Eight Defense Committee" Website

Click on the title to link to the Website mentioned in the headline.

*The Latest From The "Wobblies" (IWW) Website

Click on the title to link to the Website mentioned in the headline.

*From The Pen Of Max Shachtman-"Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg"

Click on the title to link to the Website mentioned in the headline.

Markin comment:

In his prime, under the guidance of James P. Cannon in the American Communist Party, especially the in their work in the International Labor Defense, and later as a leader of what became the Trotskyist party in the United States, the Socialist Workers Party, Max Shachtman, knew how to "speak" Marxism. Later, after he turned the task of 'socialism' over to the U.S. State Department and kindred forces, he was still facile as a writer but the politics became ugly, very ugly, except perhaps to the late American Federation Of Teachers President, Albert Shanker. Here is an example of "high" Shachtman.

*The Latest From The "Hands Off Honduras" Website

Click on the title to link to the Website mentioned in the headline.

*The Latest From The "Workers World Party" Website

Click on the title to link to the Website mentioned in the headline.

*The Latest From The "ANSWER" Website- All Out On March 20th

Click on the title to link to the Website mentioned in the headline.

*The Latest From The "Julius And Ethel Rosenberg Fund For Children" Website

Click on the title to link to the Website mentioned in the headline.

Markin comment:

Honor the memory of the heroic communists, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, by helping the children of today's fighters against American and world imperialism survive. "An injury to one is an injury to all".

*The Latest From The "End U.S. Wars" Website

Click on the title to link to the Website mentioned in the headline.

*The Latest From The Boston International Socialist Organization Group

Click on the title to link to the Website mentioned in the headline.

*The Latest From The International Socialist Organization's "International Socialist Review"

Click on the title to link to the Website mentioned in the headline.

*The Latest From The "Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty" Website

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Markin comment:

This one is easy, at least to say. Down with the barbaric death penalty. Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!

The Latest From The International Bolshevik Tendency Website

Click on the title to link to the Website mentioned in the headline.

*From The National Assembly To End The Iraq And Afghanistan Wars and Occupations- A Guest Commentary

Click on the title to link to the "National Assembly To End The Iraq And Afghanistan Wars And Occupations" Website.

Markin comment:

I was in the audience for this speech. Two things to think about for right now from our communist perspective. Not one word is said about a socialist or communist solution, as opposed to the now ritualistic anti-imperialist rhetoric required at these confabs, as result of all the good activity projected here. Presumably it is enough to get to the streets and ....get some newly elected 'progressives' pressured into doing good deeds in the same old structure. We have been down that road for a thousand years, or it seems like it. Ouch!

Secondly, I love the streets as much as anybody in order to fight for our perspective but even I have to confess to a rather "conservative" bent in reaction to this grab bag of ideas about the virtues of mass actions. There is no overall perspective about fundamentally changing to a new society, and a new way of doing our governmental business. Workers councils, workers parties, workers governments sound very good right about now after all this fluff. And LESS utopian.

More later on this group.

BUILDING MASS ACTIONS
NEW ENGLAND UNITED CONFERENCE
JAN. 30, 2010 MIT

BY Marilyn Levin, Co-Coordinator, National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations


I remember a discussion of antiwar strategy where a list was made of who really had the power to end the war in Iraq as the basis of where we should focus our efforts. The list started with the soldiers - if youth didn't join the army or soldiers refused to fight, then the war would end. Second was the President and Congress - ultimately, they were the only ones who could stop funding the war and order the troops home. That was the list. When I suggested they were forgetting the most important and powerful group, the American people - working people, immigrants, people of color, students - who when mobilized in mass actions could bring the war machine to a halt and force the Congress to act - they looked at me like I was hopelessly naive and living in a fantasy world.

Well, I contend that until the American people are mobilized not just to vote for candidates every two years but to go to the streets in large numbers to act on their antiwar sentiments by demanding an end to wars and occupations and a reordering of our financial system from a war economy to a peace economy, then Congress won't be compelled to stop, as they were forced to withdraw from Vietnam.

Howard Zinn understood this and that is his legacy. He showed that throughout history, social change occurs not from the top down but from ordinary people organizing in their own interests against the powerful. He said "It is not who is sitting in the White House that is important - it is who is sitting in."

Some say that if we are not able to bring hundreds of thousands into the streets, mass actions are not viable. This is simply not true. It is still how we get from small to large. We can't wait until thousands are ready to come into the streets and then jump in and offer leadership. No, we keep protesting and connecting with those who are ready to join together in action at that time.

I have been privileged to be a part of some of the major victories of the last 50 years - the civil rights movement, the struggles for women's, gay and immigrant rights, the anti-Vietnam war movement, and I know the power of these social movements. None of these movements began with mass mobilizations. In the civil rights era, we had small demos and large ones and we kept demonstrating until we won. Small demos don't hurt the movement, they are simply ignored by the media. This does not mean it wasn't effective in terms of movement building and reaching new activists. New people, especially youth, are always heartened by action.

People who are critical of mass action are not bringing many more people into the movement or increasing pressure on the government by their methods. Electoral action may bring people to the polls but it doesn't sustain them in action organizations; just meeting with elected officials and calling their offices does not pressure them to change.

Periodic unified mass actions, along with other types of actions, are necessary for the following reasons: to forge unity, to provide continuity so that we build upon each action, to counter the propaganda machine of the mass media by keeping the issues in the public eye, to inspire and bring in new activists, to explain the connections between issues and bring social movements together for a common purpose, to expose our government's role and real designs, to pressure the government to change, and to empower the opposition.

It is our historical and moral obligation to organize masses of people to challenge US imperialism and its war machine, the greatest threat to humankind and our planet ever known. A movement has no existence unless it organizes and is visible. It is imperative that we do this because the Afghans, the Iraqis and the Pakistanis need to know they have not been abandoned and left at the mercy of the U.S. war machine and the oil corporations. Soldiers and their families will not organize against the war until they see they will be backed by a strong civilian antiwar movement. Young people will not join the military, in spite of the economy, when they see support for redirecting the war budget into jobs. We need to play a leading role in a movement of international opposition to wars and exploitation.

What are the barriers to mass action? One is lack of unity in the movement. We have an antiwar movement that started large and was allowed to dwindle in spite of growing public opposition. We got lost in the morass of the last election and have not recovered yet. We also face the danger of getting buried again in the next election. (We've got to keep those Democrats in power so they continue their bipartisan war policies and drain our economy by trillions.) These elections are now continual without the breaks where we could organize between them that we used to have. We can't afford to keep getting derailed and marginalized. Second is the lack of a mass action perspective that focuses on organizing masses of people in the streets, not on pressuring Congress. Third is maintaining an Out Now demand - Out now from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and all the other places the US dominates by its military might. Not "Out Someday, Maybe".

I am one of the National Co-Coordinators of the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations, a national network of organizations who formed in 2008because of the vacuum of leadership and organization in the antiwar movement. We organized around five basic principles that we hold today as the basis for where we stand:

1) Unity - all sections of the movement working together for common goals
and actions;
2) Political Independence - no affiliations or support to any political party;
3) Democracy - decision-making at conferences with one person, one vote;
4) Mass Action - as the central strategy for organizing while embracing other
forms of outreach and protest; and
5) Out Now - the central demand to withdraw all military forces,contractors,and bases from the countries where the US was waging war on the people.


We will hold our third conference this summer in Albany, NY and we are expanding co-sponsorship to have a truly unified movement conference to project future mass actions. We supported and built last March's national actions in DC, SF, and LA and we are actively building March 20. It doesn't matter who initiates the demonstrations, we need to join all of our forces to bring out the most numbers and to get the US antiwar movement back on track to finally bring an end to these ever-widening and endless wars and occupations win the fight for jobs, health care, education, reparations for Haiti, and all the rest of the social necessities we need to have healthy and productive lives.

*The Latest From The "National Committee To Free The Cuban Five"

Click on the title to link to the Website mentioned in the headline.

Markin comment:

As I never tire of saying-defense of the Cuban Five is the defense of the Cuban Revolution. That is doubly important for those of us here in the United States, the "belly of the beast".

*The Latest From Afghanistan From Reuters- Hell, Troops Out Now!

Click on the title to link to the Website mentioned in the headline.

*The Latest From The "Carnival Of Socialism" Website

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*The Latest From The "by any means necessary" Website

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Markin comment:

I, after looking at an entry on this site concerning Venezuela strongman Hugo Chavez's call for a 5th International, would feel much better about such prospects if there had been an actual socialist revolution in that country as opposed to an oil-dependent social welfare program under a left nationalist regime. Hell, even Cuba's Fidel and the ill-fated Tricontinental International at least had some form of workers state behind it. This thing has the look of a Latin version of the ...Second (Social-Democratic) International of faded memory.

*The Latest From The "Socialist Appeal" Website

Click on the title to link to the Website mentioned in the headline.

*The Latest From The "black man with a library" blog -Black Is Back

Click on the title to link to the blog mentioned in the headline. Some excellent material on black history here. I will be "stealing' plenty of it in the future.

*The Latest From The "Further Left Forum" Blog

Click on the title to link to the blog mentioned in the headline.

*From The Bob Feldman 68 Blog- The 1968 Columbia SDS Actions

Click on the title to link to the Website mentioned in the headline.

*The Latest From The "United For Justice With Peace" (UJP) Website

Click on the title to link to the Website mentioned in the headline.

*From "Boston Indy Media"- The New England United Anti-War Conference

Click on the title to link to the report mentioned in the headline.

*The Latest From The International Marxist Tendency Website

Click on the title to link to the Website mentioned in the headline

* The Anti-War Iraq And Afghan War Troops And Veterans Must Not Stand Alone-A Link To The IVAW Website

Click on the title to link to the "Iraq Veterans Against The War" Web site.

Markin comment:

I am proud to add this link to the IVAW site to this blog today. But more than that, these anti-war soldiers, sailors and airmen must not stand alone. Get The Trucks and Planes Rolling! All Out Of Iraq And Afghanistan Now!

*The Latest From The "Black Is Back" Website

Click on the title to link to the "Black Is Back" Website mentioned in the headline.

*The "Winter Soldier" Testimony- From The Anti- War Iraq Veterans Against The War (IVAW)

Click on the title to link to the "Winter Soldier" testimony being presented by some of the soldiers who fought there- the Iraq Anti-War Veterans (IVAW).

Markin comment:

Sometimes just one combat soldier's story is worth more than ten rallies. It happened during the Vietnam War with the VVAW. Now another soldier generation, unfortunately, has to tell its story. Listen up, closely. And like I said in an early blog entry today. Get the damn trucks and planes rolling! All Out Of Iraq and Afghanistan Now!

*The Latest From The "Black Agenda Report" Website

Click on the title to link to the "Black Agenda Report" Website.

February Is Balck History Month

*The Latest From The "New England United" Anti-War Coalition Website

Click on the title to link to the "New England United" anti-war coalition Website.

*From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- "Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism"

Click on the title to link to the "Leon Trotsky Internet Archives" article mentioned in the headline.

From The Marxist Archives- From The Pen Of The American Socialist Workers' Party Leader James P. Cannon On The Revolutionary Position on World War II

Click on the title to link to the "James P. Cannon Internet Archives" copy of his article on the position that revolutionaries should take on World War II, in the aftermath of the United States entry into that war with the bombings at Pearl Harbor.

*Beyond The Disaster In Haiti- A Historical View- A Guest Commentary

Click on the title to link a "Workers Vanguard" article, dated January 29, 2010, giving some historical perspective in the aftermath of the disastrous and deadly earthquake in Haiti.

*From The "Veterans And Service Members Task Force" Of The ANSWER Coalition- A Ten-Point Program

Click on the title to link to the "Veterans And Service Members Task Force" Of The ANSWER Coalition Website.

Markin comment:

I have placed this ten-point program here in order to generate a little discussion about the kind of demands and slogans that we should be educating service members around. My first impression, after looking at this program, was that ten points is too many for starters. But that is a little quirk of mine about "keeping it simple" with programmatic demands, especially when making propaganda for those who may not be that politically sophisticated starting out. Many of the demands are supportable but I question why they would be in a program that is trying to reach rank and file service members today.

This program is a lot to chew at one sitting, especially that point about abolishing the officers corps. That is an excellent point but it is also, practically speaking, the call to split the army more appropriately made (other than for propaganda purposes)in a revolutionary situation. If not, in essence, it is merely a call for rank and file control of the existing military that is akin to the call for workers control of production in a non-revolutionary situation. I believe that is no something that we want to advocate. We do not want to take administrative responsibility for running the imperial state, period.

Secondly, and this is probably a greater objection, some of the demands on their face are more utopian than even our little civilian demands for a workers party that fights for a workers government. Things like dismantling the military-industrial complex, reparations to victims, indictments of war criminals and profiteers are tasks that we will be more than happy to take up on "Day One" of workers power but, at least in my reading of the program there appears to be a belief that this can be done, or should be done by the current imperial rulers. Ask Commander-in-Chief of Obama if he is interested in redressing many historic wrongs? Is that the plan here? The question posed that way gives the answer.

Finally, I note there is no call for a rank and file service members union in the program. A ranks-based service members union is somewhat analogous to a workers union in concept in that it is an important way to gain unity for collective action in "on the job" rank and file matters like those questions of racial, sexual and homophobic harassment, job assignments, etc. mentioned in the program. And the military bosses will hate it as much as civilian employers hate workers unions. More later.

***********


March Forward!- Veterans and Services Members Task Force Of The ANSWER Coalition

10 Point Program for Struggle

1
We demand the right to refuse illegal and immoral orders.


Service members should no longer be bound to carry out the plans of the Pentagon and Wall Street in violation of U.S. law, international law and people’s right to self-determination. Service members deserve the right to resist, without persecution, orders that conflict with internationally recognized laws or that conflict with their own conscience.

2
We demand an immediate end to the criminal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.


Service members should no longer be sent to fight, kill, die, be seriously wounded and/or psychologically scarred furthering the domination of U.S. corporations over other nations. We have nothing to gain from these wars. The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan serve only the interests of the rich, not the service personnel who are sent over and over to repress people who have the right to determine their own destiny. The people of Iraq and Afghanistan are not our enemies. The more than 800 U.S. bases in 130 countries around the world should be shut down and the troops, fleets and air power brought home.

3
We demand an end to the existing officer corps.


The existing class stratification in the military must end. Officers—who are overwhelmingly from more privileged sectors of society—enjoy a much higher standard of living. They are paid significantly more, are provided much higher quality housing, and have access to services not available to enlisted personnel. Officers advance their careers on the backs of enlisted personnel, going so far as to send their troops into harm’s way for the good of their résumés. The existing officer corps should be dismantled and replaced by enlisted service members who are democratically elected by their units and who are subject to recall at anytime. Officers should no longer enjoy special privileges, including hand salutes. We also demand the right for lower enlisted ranks to unionize and form committees to address grievances with the chain of command, the unit and the military.

4
We demand an end to racism, sexism and homophobia prevalent in the military.


These are intentional barriers to rank-and-file unity against the will of the Pentagon, and must be eliminated through comprehensive education and strict disciplinary action. We demand an end to the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and all other discriminatory measures against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and transgender individuals.

5
We demand adequate funding for The Department of Veterans Affairs.


Veterans should have full access to quality health care. Services should be drastically expanded to meet the real physical and mental health needs of veterans and their families. Independent medical investigations should be initiated to research the effects of potentially harmful experimental drugs and chemical, biological and nuclear agents to which service members have been exposed. Any service member who has served in a combat theater should automatically receive lifetime compensation from the VA for being forced to suffer or inflict physical and/or psychological harm in advancing the interests of U.S. corporations.

6
We demand the right to a job, housing, health care and education for all.


Service members are lured into the military with the hopes of escaping economic hardship as a civilian, and to obtain education benefits and job training. Yet thousands of service members must remain in the military, literally trapped due to the lack of opportunities in the civilian world. No service member should have to choose between military service and poverty. Housing, a job, and access to free quality education and job training should be a right for everyone.

7
We demand the immediate end to all military aid to governments in service of US imperialism.


U.S. domination is not only exercised through direct military involvement, but also through a myriad of brutal client regimes and comprador governments that are funded, supported and directed by the U.S. government. Service members should not have to serve a military that uses billions of dollars in funds and weapons to prop up governments that are guilty of committing war crimes or repressing their citizens for the interests of the Pentagon and Wall Street. Aid to such countries as Israel, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, South Korea, Uganda and Egypt should be immediately cut off. All remaining funds, military equipment and weapons should be repossessed. Reparations should be paid to the populations that the military aid was used to repress.

8
We demand the immediate dismantling of the permanent military-industrial complex.


As long as there is a system in place that allows U.S. corporations to reap massive profits from going to war, there will be war for profit. The domination of the military-industrial complex has caused the death of tens of thousands of service personnel, and millions of innocent people—all in the name of profit. All private military corporations should be shut down or nationalized. The more than 1 trillion dollars a year that feeds the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex should be used to meet people’s needs.

9
We demand that all those involved in pursuing war for profit be indicted.


To ensure that service personnel no longer have to fight for the interests of the rich, all those responsible must be held accountable. Politicians, policy makers, lobbyists, CEOs and others involved in pursuing warfare—both military and economic—as a means to reap profit should be indicted for war crimes. Media outlets involved in disseminating false information in support of these plans should also be held accountable.

10
We demand full reparations paid, with interest, to all victims of the U.S. military.


As service members in the U.S. military, we have been told that our enemy is the poor and oppressed abroad. But they are not our enemies. To begin to undo the injustices in which we have been forced to take part, the U.S. government should pay for the rebuilding of every structure bombed, compensating families for every person killed and providing a lifetime of health care and disability benefits for every individual wounded, including resistance fighters who took up arms against the U.S. military.

*The Latest From The "Carnival of Socialism" Blog- Number 47 Is Out

Click on the title to link to the Website mentioned in the headline.

*The Latest From The "Green Left Global News" Blog- A Socialist Upsurge?

Click on the title to link to the Website mentioned in the headline.

Markin comment:

Be still my heart. Read Richard Seymour's "Lenin's Tomb" article of February 6, 2010 for an update on the poll numbers for positive responses to socialist notions. Now all we need is the revolutionary party, some class conscious workers, some allies from others classes, a little weakness from the ruling class and ....... well, that is enough for now. Let's get that first step done, the party, and the rest will follow in due course.

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

*Honor The Heroic North Carolina A&T Student Participants On The 50th Anniversary Of The Greensboro Sit-Ins

Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the "Greensboro February 1,1960 Woolworth's sit-in participants being honored today.

February Is Black History Month

Markin comment:

I was a little too young to be very conscious of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycotts and other events in the struggle against Jim Crow in the South in the late 1950s. I, however, was fully aware of the sit-ins in Greensboro in 1960 and other locales and supported actions here in the North against Woolworth's policies in the South. I do not believe that the Greensboro actions fully defined my commitment to the black liberation struggle at the time. I think the later cases of Medgar Evers, of James Meridith trying to desegregate Ole Miss, and Birmingham and the Bull Connor-led police reaction there were more decisive. However Greensboro was definitely the catalyst. Hats off to the sit-in participants.

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-"We Shall Overcome"

Click on the title to link a "YouTube" film clip of Mahalia Jackson performing "We Shall Overcome".

February Is Black History Month

In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

We Shall Overcome

Lyrics derived from Charles Tindley's gospel song "I'll Overcome Some Day" (1900), and opening and closing melody from the 19th-century spiritual "No More Auction Block for Me" (a song that dates to before the Civil War). According to Professor Donnell King of Pellissippi State Technical Community College (in Knoxville, Tenn.), "We Shall Overcome" was adapted from these gospel songs by "Guy Carawan, Candy Carawan, and a couple of other people associated with the Highlander Research and Education Center, currently located near Knoxville, Tennessee. I have in my possession copies of the lyrics that include a brief history of the song, and a notation that royalties from the song go to support the Highlander Center."

1.
We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome some day

CHORUS:
Oh, deep in my heart
I do believe
We shall overcome some day

2.
We'll walk hand in hand
We'll walk hand in hand
We'll walk hand in hand some day

CHORUS

3.
We shall all be free
We shall all be free
We shall all be free some day

CHORUS

4.
We are not afraid
We are not afraid
We are not afraid some day

CHORUS

5.
We are not alone
We are not alone
We are not alone some day

CHORUS

6.
The whole wide world around
The whole wide world around
The whole wide world around some day

CHORUS

7.
We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome some day

CHORUS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SOURCES:
Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History, Second Edition (Norton, 1971): 546-47, 159-60

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-"Keep Your Eyes On The Prize"

Click on the title to link a "YouTube" film clip of Bruce Springsteen performing "Keep Your Eyes On The Prize"

February Is Black History Month

In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

Mavis Staples - Eyes on the Prize Lyrics

Paul and Silas, bound in jail
Had no money for to go their bail
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on
Hold on, (hold on), hold on, (hold on)
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on!
Hold on, (hold on), hold on, (hold on)
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on!

Paul and Silas began to shout
Doors popped open, and they walked out
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on
Hold on, (hold on), hold on, (hold on)
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on!

Well, the only chains that we can stand
Are the chains of hand in hand
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on
Got my hand on the freedom plow
Wouldn't take nothing for my journey now
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on!
Hold on, (hold on), hold on, (hold on)
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on!
Hold on, (hold on), hold on, (hold on)
Keep your Eyes on the Prize, hold on!

Hold on, (hold on), hold on, (hold on)
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on!
Hold on, (hold on), hold on, (hold on)
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on!

(Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on)
(Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on)
(Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on)

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-"We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder"

Click on the title to link a "YouTube" film clip of a performance of "We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder".

February Is Black History Month

In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder

We are climbing Jacob’s ladder,
We are climbing Jacob’s ladder,
We are climbing Jacob’s ladder,
Soldiers of the cross.

Every round goes higher, higher,
Every round goes higher, higher,
Every round goes higher, higher,
Soldiers of the cross.

Sinner, do you love my Jesus?
Sinner, do you love my Jesus?
Sinner, do you love my Jesus?
Soldiers of the cross.

If you love Him, why not serve Him?
If you love Him, why not serve Him?
If you love Him, why not serve Him?
Soldiers of the cross.

*Films to While The Class Stuggle Away By- "February One: The Story Of The Greensboro Four"

Click on the title to link to the "Independent Lens" Website for more information on the film "February One: The Story Of The Greensboro Four" that is about the heroic black North Carolina A&T students who sat in at the Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth's in 1960.

February Is Black History Month

Markin comment:

I have not seen this film yet. I will have commentary when I do.

Monday, February 01, 2010

*From The Archives Of Bolshevik Anti-War Work- V.I. Lenin On Imperialist War And The Tasks Of Socialists-Heading To October

Click on the title to link to an important political polemic by Vladimir Lenin concerning the fight against imperialist war and the tasks of socialists.

*From The Archives Of Bolshevik Anti-War Work- V.I. Lenin On Imperialist War And The Tasks Of Socialists-"Appeal To All Soldiers"

Click on the title to link to an important political polemic by Vladimir Lenin concerning the fight against imperialist war and the tasks of socialists.

*From The Archives Of Bolshevik Anti-War Work- V.I. Lenin On Imperialist War And The Tasks Of Socialists- "To The Soldiers And Sailors"

Click on the title to link to an important political polemic by Vladimir Lenin concerning the fight against imperialist war and the tasks of socialists.

*From The Archives Of Bolshevik Anti-War Work- V.I. Lenin On Imperialist War And The Tasks Of Socialists

Click on the title to link to an important political polemic by Vladimir Lenin concerning the fight against imperialist war and the tasks of socialists.

*From The Archives Of Bolshevik Anti-War Work- V.I. Lenin On Imperialist War And The Tasks Of Socialists

Click on the title to link to an important political polemic by Vladimir Lenin concerning the fight against imperialist war and the tasks of socialists.

*From The Archives Of Bolshevik Anti-War Work- V.I. Lenin On Imperialist War And The Tasks Of Socialists

Click on the title to link to an important political polemic by Vladimir Lenin concerning the fight against imperialist war and the tasks of socialists.

*From The Archives Of Bolshevik Anti-War Work- V.I. Lenin On Imperialist War And The Tasks Of Socialists

Click on the title to link to an important political polemic by Vladimir Lenin concerning the fight against imperialist war and the tasks of socialists.

*From The Archives Of Bolshevik Anti-War Work- V.I. Lenin On Imperialist War And The Tasks Of Socialists-The Zimmerwald Manifesto

Click on the title to link to an important political polemic by Vladimir Lenin concerning the fight against imperialist war and the tasks of socialists.

*The Lessons Of Anti-War History- The Way That A People's Representative Should Act On The War Question, And How He Or She Shouldn't

Click on the title to link to a "Lenin Internet Archives" entry entitled "What Has Been Revealed By the Trial of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Duma Group", dated March 19, 1915, that is a useful contrast to the entry below taken from a recent "Progressive Democrats of America" blog entry.

Markin comment:

The two counter-posed entries speak for themselves. I would only add, since the word has reemerged recently in political talk, that we could certainly use a few more Bolsheviks to fight forthrightly on the parliamentary level against Obama's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan today.


************************
From "Progressive Democrats Of America" Website home page.


Congressman Payne: I Won't Oppose War Money Because Obama's President
By David Swanson
January 31, 2010, New Brunswick, NJ


Rep. Donald PayneTake Action: Tell Congress "Stop funding war"

My encounter with Congressman Payne at the PDA-NJ Statewide Conference

Congressman Donald Payne (D., N.J.) has voted against war funding bills for years. Last summer he was one of 32 heroes to vote No under intense pressure from the White House to vote Yes. When I asked him a couple of years ago to sign onto impeaching Bush he immediately said "Sure!" and he did it.

Today I asked him if he would commit to voting No on the next $33 billion for war. I asked him privately, just after he'd given a long speech to a Progressive Democrats of America conference in New Jersey, a speech about how much he opposes the wars.

Payne told me that he didn't want to commit to voting No on the next "emergency war supplemental" because Obama is president, echoing Jan Schakowsky's comments last June when she made a similar reversal.

"Congressman Payne," I said, "aren't the bombs the same? Isn't the dying the same?" He agreed and told me I was preaching to the choir.

"And is the only difference that a different person is president?" I asked. "Yes," he replied.

When I had prefaced my question with praising him for standing strong last June, I had referenced the major promises and threats that other congressmembers had reported receiving from the White House. Payne said he had experienced the same. Yet somehow he had resisted, but is unsure about resisting further.

Earlier in the day, another Democratic congressman from New Jersey, Frank Pallone, had spoken to the PDA conference, and both PDA's national director Tim Carpenter and I had asked him publicly to commit to voting No on the war money.

I thanked Pallone for voting No on war supplementals in 2004 and 2005 and expressed disappointment that he had voted Yes last June. He refused to commit to voting No, with the excuse that something good might be attached to the war money. Yet he had voted No in the past, despite the fact that good hard-to-oppose measures were always applied as lipstick on these bills.

Was Pallone's real thinking that he wanted to obey the president? I can't say for sure, but I can say that he took a lot of questions from PDA members about his positions, and he tended to answer by explaining what Obama's positions are. And I can say that Pallone raised lots of rightwing reasons for not being stronger on issues like healthcare, and other members of the panel he was part of decisively refuted each point but had no impact on the congressman's position whatsoever.

Joining Pallone on the panel were Carpenter and PDA board member Steve Cobble, Co-Chair of PDA's Healthcare Not Warfare campaign Donna Smith, and the president of the New Jersey Industrial Union Council Ray Stever. They laid out the case and the strategy for shifting our resources from wars to human needs, especially single-payer healthcare.

The conference rooms were packed, and everyone involved was eager to get to work, including a lot of people new to PDA's organizing. Joanne O'Neil and the other leaders of New Jersey PDA were pleased with the conference, but far from satisfied with the positions of the two congress members who attended.

To their credit, however, everyone was focused on lobbying, challenging, and pressuring until their representatives agree to represent the people of New Jersey rather than taking their orders from a president who has three more years in office even if his followers get themselves voted out this November.

I expect more congress members from New Jersey, possibly even Payne and Pallone, to be joining those committed to voting No on the wars they claim to oppose: http://defundwar.org.