AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Saturday, April 16, 2016

In Honor Of Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s Birthday (April 1870-Janaury 1924)-The Struggle Continues-Ivan Smilga’s Political Journey-Take One

In Honor Of Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s Birthday (April 1870-Janaury 1924)-The Struggle Continues-Ivan Smilga’s Political Journey-Take One

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

For a number of years I have been honoring various revolutionary forbears, including the subject of this birthday tribute, the Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin architect (along with fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky) of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 in each January under the headline-Honor The Three L’s –Lenin, Luxemburg , Liebknecht. My purpose then was (and still is) to continue the traditions established by the Communist International in the early post-World War I period in honoring revolutionary forbears. That month has special significance since every January

Leftists honor those three leading revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in his sleep after a long illness in 1924, and Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered in separate incidents after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin.

I have made my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in which he eventually wound up in prison only to be released when the Kaiser abdicated (correctly went to jail when it came down to it once the government pulled the hammer down on his opposition), on some previous occasions. The key point to be taken away today, still applicable today as in America we are in the age of endless war, endless war appropriations and seemingly endless desires to racket up another war out of whole cloth every change some ill-begotten administration decides it needs to “show the colors”, one hundred years later in that still lonely and frustrating struggle to get politicians to oppose war budgets, to risk prison to choke off the flow of war materials.

I have also made some special point in previous years about the life of Rosa Luxemburg, the “rose of the revolution.” About her always opposing the tendencies in her adopted party, the German Social-Democracy, toward reform and accommodation, her struggle to make her Polish party ready for revolutionary opportunities, her important contributions to Marxist theory and her willing to face and go to jail when she opposed the first World War.

This month, the month of his birth, it is appropriate, at a time when the young needs to find, and are in desperate need of a few good heroes, a few revolutionaries who contributed to both our theoretical understandings about the tasks of the international working class in the age of imperialism (the age, unfortunately, that we are still mired in) and to the importance of the organization question in the struggle for revolutionary power, to highlight the struggles of Vladimir Lenin, the third L, in order to define himself politically.

Below is a first sketch written as part of a series posted over several days before Lenin’s birthday on the American Left History blog starting on April 16^th of a young fictional labor militant, although not so fictional in the scheme of the revolutionary developments in the Russia of the Tsar toward the end of the 19^th century and early 20^th century which will help define the problems facing the working-class there then, and the ones that Lenin had to get a handle on.

*******

Ivan Smilga, “Big Ivan” to his friends, called so since childhood in the rural neighborhood, really a village, where he grew up, and rightly so since he was large, six feet six and two hundred and sixty pounds. So large by Russian hunger standards in the winter of 1893 when he had come out of the Ukrainian farmlands, come out of the miniature hamlet of Vresk, not many miles outside of Odessa to Moscow when he had heard that John Smythe and Sons, the big English textile firm had been given a license by the Tsar, by the Ministry of Commerce, to set up a factory in that city to produce cloth for the home market.

The farm life had been so barren, so desolate, so worked out by his father and really by the farmer who had worked the land before and moved east, east toward Siberia where the frontier now lie ahead, that Ivan had walked on foot or taken a sleigh ride most of the way that hard winter in order to as he said (roughly and politely translated from the Russian although the English is almost too gentile for a what a rough-hewn peasant boy not civilized by city ways and what Miss Primrose’s etiquette books would tolerate would thunder when riled) “get the stink of country life blown out of his nostrils.” He was not alone on that first day when the first Smythe plant went on line. Thousands of young farm boy Ivans (although perhaps none quite as large) were standing impatiently in line in front of the main office building for a chance at employment. And more than one farm boy was crestfallen to see that if he had to compete against thousands of Ivans there were that many more thousands of Ivanas, young farm girls, girls as always attracted to textile work in every budding capitalist country in order to get off their own desolate family farms and make their ways in the world before marriage. (Ivan would later find, find out among a lot of things that the idyll textile dewy-eyed factory girl of British and American legend was just that, a legend but that did not stop them or later generations from coming when they heard the spindles roaring). Although perhaps they would be too polite and pious to use the words that Ivan used to indicate his reasoning for getting off the land, and not look back.

Fortunately Ivan, with his bulk and strength, was chosen very quickly by a savvy watchful Russian foreman who knew what he needed and it was staring him right in the eye, needed the strong back and mitt-like hands of a young man who could lift the rolls of fabric and balance then on his back as they came off the machines. And so Ivan started his new life, or part of his new life as a working-man, as a man of the city. For about a year things went well, although he worked many long sixteen hour days six days a week being young he was capable of doing the work. And loved to pocket his wages at the end of the week (extra wages, a few kopeks more, as it turned out later since that foreman had told the English superintendent that Ivan was something of a superman. Moreover he had the grudging respect of other men (and the eye of a few of the girl operators) so it was best to piece him off before he found out about trade unions and such. Nice maneuver, divide and conquer right on the factory floor). Being somewhat frugal (as he had been taught in the peasant manner) Ivan was able to save for his dream of owning a small shop, maybe a blacksmith’s shop, to service the needs of the fine horses that he saw daily on the streets of Moscow. Ivan also sent, as a dutiful son, kopeks home to his family to help tide them over as the grain harvest that year was sufficiently short to bring the threat of severe hunger, maybe famine it was not unheard of , back to the Smilga door once again.

In the spring of 1895 all that changed though. Ivan had worked his way up to head hauler, directing others to load and unload the rolls of fabric produced from the never-ending machines. He had a good reputation among his fellow workers, although not a few saw his dreams of a little shop as somewhat awry (but who would dare tell Ivan Smilga, even later the hardest toughest street Bolshevik from Georgia, he could not have his dream this side of paradise). Moreover he was a moderate drinker by Russian and Ukrainian standards, no more than a bottle at ta sitting, and so the young women of the factory floor would flirt, or at least cast an eye his way, especially Elena Kassova, who worked one of the machines which Ivan was in charge of keeping up to speed by rapidly get the rolls off the end of the line. Then one day James Smiley, the company owner’s son and manager of the plant announced to young Ivan Smilga that his services (and that of the crew who worked under him) were no longer necessary since the company had purchased a machine that would automatically take the rolls from the machine and place them on a wagon, a wagon so simple to operate that one of the girl machine-tenders could do it periodically as needed while still tending her machine.

So there Ivan was, out in the cold, without a job, and with no particular prospects. Ivan stewed over his plight for about a week, maybe ten days, with solace only from uncharacteristic endless bottles of vodka. Then one night he rounded up his now unemployed work crew, a group of four young farm boys who like Ivan did not want to go home to that desolate farm land, and explained to them his plan to get his and their jobs back. Of course each crew member had also sought solace in the bottle and so collectively their minds may not have been quite as sharp as they should have been when Ivan unfolded his scheme. To hear Ivan tell the story the plan was simplicity itself. They would sneak into the factory on Saturday night when the machines were shut down and smash that hauling machine to smithereens. Then the Smileys, father and son, would have to hire them back, maybe give them higher wages to boot.

Needless to say greedy for work and plied with liquor the crew bought into the plan with every hand and foot. That very next Saturday night they pulled off the caper. Snuck into the factory undetected by a dozing night watchman to do their nefarious work (that night watchman, Orlov, would subsequently be fired for being drunk and asleep on the job and Ivan would not see him again until he saw him on the barricades in Moscow when the Bolsheviks were trying to subdue the local branch of the Provisional Government after November 1917). All day Sunday the working-class quarters of Moscow were abuzz with the news, spread by the night watchman Orlov who claimed he had been knocked out by whoever did the dastardly deed, that parties unknown had smashed the machinery. There were newspaper reports that the culprits would be momentarily apprehended. That the “Luddites” would be captured and dealt with summarily. (Nobody knew exactly what a Luddite was but they all knew it could not be good to be one, or, worse, accused of being one) Of course they never were. On the other hand come that Monday morning as Ivan and the crew waited around in front of the factory doors expecting to be re-hired coming up the road on a horse-drawn wooden flatbed carriage was an exact replica of the machinery destroyed the previous Saturday night.

*****He Saw Starlight On The Rails-With The Irascible Bruce “Utah” Phillips in Mind

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Jack Dawson was not sure when he had heard that the old long-bearded son of a bitch anarchist hell of a songwriter, hell of a story-teller Bruce “Utah” Phillips caught the westbound freight, caught that freight around 2007 he found out later a couple of years after he too had come off the bum this time from wife problems, divorce wife problems (that westbound freight by the way an expression from the hobo road to signify that a fellow traveler hobo, tramp, bum it did not matter then the distinctions that had seemed so important in the little class department when they were alive had passed on, had had his fill of train smoke and dreams and was ready to face whatever there was to face up in hobo heaven, no, the big rock candy mountain that some old geezer had written on some hard ass night when dreams were all he had to keep him company). That “Utah” moniker not taken by happenstance since Phillips struggled through the wilds of Utah on his long journey, played with a group called the Utah Valley boys, put up with, got through a million pounds of Mormon craziness and, frankly, wrote an extraordinary number of songs in his career by etching through the lore as he found it from all kinds of Mormon sources, including some of those latter day saints.

For those who do not know the language of the road, not the young and carefree road taken for a couple of months during summer vacation or even a Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac-type more serious expedition under the influence of On The Road (what other travelogue of sorts would get the blood flowing to head out into the vast American Western night) and then back to the grind but the serious hobo “jungle” road like Jack Dawson had been on for several years before he sobered up after he came back from ‘Nam, came back all twisted and turned when he got discharged from the Army back in 1971 and could not adjust to the “real world” of his Carver upbringing in the East and had wound up drifting, drifting out to the West, hitting California and when that didn’t work out sort of ambled back east on the slow freight route through Utah taking the westbound freight meant for him originally passing to the great beyond, passing to a better place, passing to hard rock candy mountain in some versions here on earth before Black River Shorty clued him in.

Of course everybody thinks that if you wind up in Utah the whole thing is Mormon, and a lot of it is, no question, but when Jack hit Salt Lake City he had run into a guy singing in a park. A guy singing folk music stuff, labor songs, tarvelling blues stuff, the staple of the genre, that he had remembered that Sam Lowell from Carver High, from the same class year as him, had been crazy for back in the days when he would take his date and Jack and his date over to Harvard Square and they would listen to guys like that guy in the park singing in coffeehouses. Jack had not been crazy about the music then and some of the stuff the guy was singing seemed odd now too but back then it either amounted to a cheap date, or the girl actually liked the stuff and so he went along with it.

So Jack, nothing better to do, sat in front of guy and listened. Listened more intently when the guy, who turned out to be Utah (who was using the moniker “Pirate Angel” then, as Jack was using "Daddy Two Cents" reflecting his financial condition or close to it, monikers a good thing on the road just in case the law, bill-collectors or ex-wives were trying to reach you and you did not want to reached), told the few bums, tramps and hoboes who were the natural residents of the park that if they wanted to get sober, if they wanted to turn things around a little that they were welcome, no questions asked, at the Joe Hill House. (No questions asked was right but everybody was expected to at least not tear the place up, which some nevertheless tried to do.)

That Joe Hill by the way was an old time immigrant anarchist who did something to rile the Latter Day Saints up because they threw he before a firing squad with no questions asked. Joe got the last line though, got it for eternity-“Don’t mourn (his death), organize!”

Jack, not knowing anybody, not being sober much, and maybe just a tad nostalgic for the old days when hearing bits of folk music was the least of his worries, went up to Utah and said he would appreciate the stay. And that was that. Although not quite “that was that” since Jack knew nothing about the guys who ran the place, didn’t know who Joe Hill was until later (although he suspected after he found out that Joe Hill had been a IWW organizer [Wobblie, Industrial Worker of the World] framed and executed in that very state of Utah that his old friend the later Peter Paul Markin who lived to have that kind of information in his head would have known. See this Joe Hill House unlike the Sallies (Salvation Army) where he would hustle a few days of peace was run by this Catholic Worker guy, Ammon Hennessey, who Utah told Jack had both sobered him up and made him some kind of anarchist although Jack was fuzzy on what that was all about. So Jack for about the tenth time tried to sober up, liquor sober up this time out in the great desert (later it would be drugs, mainly cocaine which almost ripped his nose off he was so into it that he needed sobering up from). And it took, took for a while.

Whatever had been eating at Jack kept fighting a battle inside of him and after a few months he was back on the bottle. But during that time at the Joe Hill House he got close to Utah, as close as he had gotten to anybody since ‘Nam, since his friendship with Jeff Crawford from up in Podunk Maine who saved his ass, and that of a couple of other guys in a nasty fire-fight when Charley (G.I. slang for the Viet Cong originally said in contempt but as the war dragged on in half-hearted admiration) decided he did indeed own the night in his own country. Got as close as he had to his corner boys like Sam Lowell from hometown Carver. Learned a lot about the lure of the road, of drink and drugs, of tough times (Utah had been in Korea) and he had felt bad after he fell off the wagon. But that was the way it was.

Several years later after getting washed clean from liquor and drugs, at a time when Jack started to see that he needed to get back into the real world if he did not want to wind up like his last travelling companion, Denver Shorty, whom he found face down one morning on the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge and had abandoned his body fast in order not to face the police report, he noticed that Utah was playing in a coffeehouse in Cambridge, a place called Passim’s which he found out had been taken over from the Club 47 where Sam had taken Jack a few times. So Jack and his new wife (his and her second marriages) stepped down into the cellar coffeehouse to listen up.

As Jack waited in the rest room area a door opened from the other side across the narrow passageway and who came out but Utah. As Jack started to grab his attention Utah blurred out “Daddy Two Cent, how the hell are you?” and talked for a few minutes. Later that night after the show they talked some more in the empty club before Utah said he had to leave to head back to Saratoga Springs in New York where he was to play at the Café Lena the next night.

That was the last time that Jack saw Utah in person although he would keep up with his career as it moved along. Bought some records, later tapes, still later CDs just to help the brother out. In the age of the Internet he would sent occasional messages and Utah would reply. Then he heard Utah had taken very ill, heart trouble like he said long ago in the blaze of some midnight fire, would finally get the best of him. And then somewhat belatedly Jack found that Utah had passed on. The guy of all the guys he knew on the troubled hobo “jungle” road who knew what “starlight on the rails” meant to the wanderers he sang for had cashed his ticket. RIP, brother.

*****Important Mumia Abu Jamal Update-Free Mumia

Click below to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site.

http://www.partisandefense.org/

Commentary

The legendary social commentator and stand up comic Lenny Bruce, no stranger to the American ‘justice’ system himself, once reportedly said that in the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls. The truth of that statement came home on Thursday March 27, 2008 as a panel of the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals voted two to one to uphold Mumia’s conviction.

The only question left is that of resentencing- the death penalty or, perhaps worst, life in prison without parole. I have not yet read the decision but we are now a long way away from the possibility of a retrial-the narrow legal basis for even appealing in the legal system in the first place. Know this- in the end it will be in the streets and factories through the efforts of the international labor movement and other progressive forces that Mumia will be freed. That is the only way, have no illusions otherwise, whatever the next legal steps might be.

*****

Some facts about the case from the PDC (2006):

Mumia Is an Innocent Man
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!
Abolish the Racist Death Penalty

Mumia Abu-Jamal has been on death row for nearly 24 years, falsely convicted of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Mumia Abu-Jamal is innocent and mountains of evidence show this, including the confession of another man, Arnold Beverly, to the murder. All the elements of the capitalist “justice” system colluded in framing up this former Black Panther and MOVE supporter because he is an eloquent and defiant spokesman for the oppressed. The fight to free Mumia has now reached a critical juncture. Last December, the federal appeals court put Mumia’s case on a “fast track” for decision, marking the last stages of the legal proceedings. Both Mumia and prosecutors are appealing decisions made in 2001 by U.S. District Court judge William Yohn, who overturned the death sentence but upheld every aspect of Mumia’s frame-up conviction. The state is as determined as ever to execute Mumia and has appealed. He has been barred by the courts from presenting evidence that he is innocent. But the district attorney filed legal papers in the federal appeals court in April, opening its case with a venomous, lying statement to portray Mumia as a cop-killer who must be executed. In a short time, even as soon as six months, the court could decide what is next for Mumia: death, life in prison or more legal proceedings.
Mumia was locked up on death row in 1982 based on lying testimony extorted by the cops without a shred of physical evidence. The judge at his trial, Albert Sabo—known as the “King of Death Row”—was overheard by a court stenographer saying, “I’m going to help ’em fry the n----r.” Rigging the jury to exclude black people, the prosecution incited jurors with the grotesque lie that Mumia’s membership in the Panthers as a teenager proved he was committed to kill a cop “all the way back then.” The 1982 conviction was secured with arguments that the jury could disregard any doubts about Mumia’s guilt because he would have “appeal after appeal.” In nearly two decades of appeals, each and every court has rejected the reams of documented evidence of the blatant frame-up of Mumia. For over four years, Pennsylvania state as well as federal courts have refused to even consider the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner.
The execution of Stanley Tookie Williams by the state of California in December casts an ominous shadow. The legal lynching of Williams, which provoked an outcry nationally and internationally, signaled the determination of the U.S. capitalist rulers to fortify their machinery of death in the face of growing reticence in the population over how the death penalty is applied. Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s foremost political prisoner, is the executioners’ number one target. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made this clear when, in denying clemency for Williams, he cited the fact that Williams’ 1998 book, Life in Prison, was dedicated to—among others—Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Mumia’s case demonstrates what the racist death penalty is all about. It is the lynch rope made legal, the ultimate weapon in the government’s arsenal of repression aimed at the working class and oppressed. A legacy of chattel slavery, the death penalty is maintained in a society where the segregation of the majority of the black population is used as a wedge to divide the laboring masses and perpetuate the rapacious rule of capital. The murderous brutality of the racist capitalist system was displayed for all to see when thousands of people, overwhelmingly black and poor, were left to die in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Mumia’s appeal takes place in the context of the government’s assertion of its “right” to disappear, torture or even assassinate its perceived opponents, and to wiretap and spy on anyone and everyone. In the name of the “war on terror,” rights won through tumultuous class and social battles are being put through the shredder by the Bush administration with the support of the Democratic Party. The purpose is to terrorize and silence any who would stand in the way of the capitalist rulers’ relentless drive for profits and their imperialist adventures, like the colonial occupation of Iraq.
As Mumia’s case moves through the final stages of legal
proceedings, the fight for his freedom is urgently posed. The Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League/U.S.—stands for pursuing every legal avenue in Mumia’s behalf while putting no faith in the “justice” of the capitalist courts. Through publicity and action, we have struggled to mobilize the broadest social forces, centered on the labor movement, to demand Mumia’s freedom and the abolition of the racist death penalty. As Mumia faced execution in August 1995, a mass outpouring of protest nationally and internationally—from civil liberties organizations and such heads of state as South Africa’s Nelson Mandela to trade unions representing millions of workers—succeeded in staying the executioner’s hand.
Today we face greater odds. But if undertaken through a mobilization based on the social power of the working class, the fight for Mumia’s freedom would be a giant step forward in the defense of all of us against the increasingly depraved and vicious rulers of this country.

Anatomy of a Frame-Up
In the eyes of the capitalist state, from the time Mumia was a 15-year-old spokesman for the Black Panther Party in Philadelphia in 1969, he was a dead man on leave. Then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover pronounced: “The Negro youth and moderate[s] must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teachings, they will be dead revolutionaries.” This policy was carried out under both the Democratic administration of Lyndon Johnson and his Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, and the Republican Nixon administration. Under the FBI’s “counter-intelligence” program known as COINTELPRO, 38 Panthers were murdered and hundreds of others framed up and railroaded to prison.
The 900 pages of FBI files the PDC was able to obtain on Mumia’s behalf, even though highly expurgated, make clear that the FBI and cops used any “dirty trick” in their mission to get him. His every move was tracked and his name put on the FBI’s Security Index, the 1960s version of a “terrorist” hit list. Even with the demise of the Panthers, the state did not call off its vendetta against Mumia. As a journalist known as the “voice of the voiceless,” Mumia’s impassioned defense of black rights continued to enrage them. The Philly cops particularly seethed over his sympathetic coverage of the MOVE organization, which was subjected to an onslaught of state terror.
Mumia was targeted for death because of his political beliefs, because of what he wrote, because of what he said. And in the early morning hours of 9 December 1981 at the corner of 13th and Locust Streets in Philadelphia, the cops finally saw their chance. Mumia was driving a cab through the area that night. He heard gunshots. He saw people running, saw his own brother and got out of his cab to help him. Moments later, Mumia was critically wounded by a bullet through the chest. Nearby lay a wounded police officer, Daniel Faulkner. The cops found their long-awaited opportunity and seized on it to frame up Mumia as a “cop killer.”
The prosecution’s case rested on three legs, all based on lies: the testimony of “eyewitnesses” coerced through favors and terror; a “confession” purportedly made by Mumia the night of the shooting that was such a blatant hoax that it didn’t surface until months later; and nonexistent ballistics “evidence.” In 2001, this frame-up was completely blown to pieces with Arnold Beverly’s confession that he was the man who shot Faulkner. In a sworn affidavit printed in the PDC pamphlet Mumia Abu-Jamal Is an Innocent Man!, Beverly stated:

“I was hired, along with another guy, and paid to shoot and kill Faulkner. I had heard that Faulkner was a problem for the mob and corrupt policemen because he interfered with the graft and payoffs made to allow illegal activity including prostitution, gambling, drugs without prosecution in the center city area.

“Faulkner was shot in the back and then in the face before Jamal came on the scene. Jamal had nothing to do with the shooting.”
Beverly stated that the second shooter also fled the scene. This is supported by a sworn affidavit by Mumia’s brother, Billy Cook, who testified that his friend Kenneth Freeman was a passenger in Cook’s VW at 13th and Locust that night. Freeman later admitted to Cook that he was part of the plan to kill Faulkner and had participated in the shooting and then fled the scene. This is further corroborated by the testimony of a witness at the scene, William Singletary, who said he saw a passenger get out of Cook’s VW, shoot Faulkner and then flee the scene.
At least half a dozen witnesses who were on the scene the night of the shooting saw, from several different vantage points, one or more black men flee. Police radio “flashes” right after the shooting reported that the shooters had fled the scene with Faulkner’s gun. Five witnesses, including two cops, describe someone at the scene wearing a green army jacket, which both Beverly and Freeman were wearing that night. Neither Mumia nor Cook wore a green army jacket: Mumia wore a red ski jacket with wide vertical blue stripes and Cook had a blue jacket with brass buttons.
Beverly said that Mumia was shot by a cop at the scene. This is confirmed by no less an authority than the state Medical Examiner’s office, whose record written the same morning as the shooting quotes a homicide officer saying that Mumia was shot by “arriving police reinforcements,” not by Faulkner. Other witnesses have corroborated Beverly’s testimony that undercover and uniformed police were in the vicinity at the time of the shooting, which Beverly assumed meant that they were in on the plan to kill Faulkner. One witness, Marcus Cannon, saw two undercover cops on the street across from the shooting. William Singletary also saw “white shirts” (police supervisors) at the scene right after the shots were fired.
The prosecution dismisses the idea that the cops would kill one of their own as an outlandish invention. Leaving aside that Beverly passed two lie detector tests, his account fits with the fact that at the time of Faulkner’s killing in 1981, there were at least three ongoing federal investigations into police corruption in Philadelphia, including police connections with the mob. Police working as FBI informants were victims of hits in the early 1980s. A former federal prosecutor acknowledged that the Feds had a police informant whose brother was a cop, just as Faulkner had a brother who was a cop.
A sworn affidavit by Donald Hersing, a former informant in an FBI investigation into police corruption, confirms that at the time of Faulkner’s shooting the word was out that the Feds had an informant in the police force. The commanding officer of the Central Police Division, where the murder of Faulkner took place, the chief of the police Homicide Division and the ranking officer at the scene of Faulkner’s killing, Alfonzo Giordano, were all under investigation at the time on federal corruption charges. These cops were literally the chain of command in the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Giordano had been the right-hand man for Philadelphia’s notoriously racist police chief and later mayor, Frank Rizzo. From 1966 to 1970, Giordano was in charge of the cop “Stakeout” squad, which led the police raid on the Black Panthers’ headquarters in 1970. He was also the supervisor of the 15-month police siege of MOVE’s Powelton Village house in 1977-78, which resulted in nine MOVE members being sent to prison on frame-up charges of killing a cop. Giordano knew exactly who Mumia was. The senior officer on the scene, he had both motive and opportunity to frame up Mumia for the killing of Faulkner.
Giordano originated the claim that Mumia’s gun—the putative murder weapon—was lying beside him on the street. But according to police radio records, the cops were still looking for the gun some 14 minutes after hordes of police had arrived on the scene. Giordano arranged the identification of Mumia by cab driver Robert Chobert, who became a witness for the prosecution. Giordano was the central witness for the prosecution at Mumia’s pretrial hearing. But he was never called as a witness at Mumia’s trial. Shortly before the trial, he was assigned to a desk job. One working day after Mumia was convicted, Giordano resigned from the force. In 1986, Giordano copped a plea on federal charges based on his receiving tens of thousands of dollars in illegal payoffs from 1979 to 1980. He didn’t spend a day in jail.

Prosecution’s Web of Lies
The prosecution’s story is that two people were on the corner of 13th and Locust where Faulkner was shot: Mumia’s brother Billy Cook and Faulkner. They claim that Mumia ran across the street when he saw his brother being beaten by Faulkner. According to police and prosecutors, Mumia shot the cop in the back, the cop shot back at Mumia and then Mumia stood over the fallen cop and shot him “execution style” several times in the head. Even a close examination of the cops’ and prosecution’s own evidence gives the lie to this scenario. A look at the “three legs” of the prosecution’s case provides not only stark confirmation of Mumia’s innocence but clear corroboration of Beverly’s testimony.
The Prosecution’s Witnesses: Even with police and prosecution threats and favors at the time of the 1982 trial, no witness testified to seeing Mumia actually shoot Faulkner. Only one, Cynthia White, the prosecution’s star witness, testified that she thought she saw a gun in Mumia’s hand when he crossed the street. A prostitute working in the area, White claimed to have witnessed the events from the southeast corner of 13th and Locust. Yet the other two prosecution witnesses, as well as two defense witnesses who knew White, all denied she was at the scene during the shooting! Other prostitutes testified in subsequent court hearings that White alternately got police favors or was threatened by police in order to extract her testimony.
As for Robert Chobert, at first he told police that the shooter “ran away.” After further interrogation, he changed his story, claiming that Mumia stood over Faulkner while the shots were fired and that no one ran away. A cab driver using a suspended license while on probation for felony arson, Chobert was given favors by the prosecution in exchange for his testimony. He later admitted that he never saw the shooting. The third state witness was Michael Scanlan. He initially identified Mumia as the VW driver but then claimed that the shooter ran across Locust Street, which Beverly admits that he did. He also admitted that he did not know if Mumia was the man he saw.
Ballistics and Forensics: The prosecution claimed that ballistics evidence was “consistent” with Mumia’s gun being the murder weapon even while admitting that the “consistency” applied to millions of handguns. There is no evidence that Mumia’s gun was even fired that night. There was every opportunity to test Mumia’s hands, or the gun, for evidence that it had been recently fired. But according to police no such tests, which are standard operating procedure, were ever done! The Stakeout officer who claimed he picked up Mumia’s gun did not turn it over for more than two hours, providing more than ample time to have it tampered with.
The Medical Examiner’s report states that Faulkner was shot with a .44 calibre bullet, yet Mumia’s gun was a .38 calibre. Although the crime lab claimed that the main bullet fragment removed from Faulkner’s head was too damaged to test, the defense team’s ballistics expert denied this. A second bullet fragment removed from the head wound simply disappeared without a trace.
Evidence at the scene—bullet fragments, blood stains, the absence of divots in the sidewalk—refutes the prosecution claim that Faulkner was shot repeatedly while lying on the ground. The bullet patterns are far more consistent with multiple shooters, as Beverly testifies. A copper bullet jacket found at the scene was inconsistent with either Faulkner’s or Mumia’s guns, suggesting that a different gun was fired. Similarly, type O blood was found at the scene, but Faulkner, Mumia and Cook were all type A, suggesting that another person was present and injured. The angle of Mumia’s own wounds is impossible if he was shot while standing over Faulkner as the prosecution claimed. However, Mumia’s wounds are consistent with Beverly’s testimony that Mumia was shot by a cop at the scene.
The “Confession”: The frame-up’s final leg was the claim that Mumia, lying in a pool of blood at the hospital where he was taken for treatment, shouted out that he had shot the cop. Yet the police officer assigned to guard Mumia there reported that same day that Mumia “made no comments.” In reality, he was so badly wounded, with a bullet hole through one lung, and had been so badly beaten by police on the street and at the hospital, that he could not have “shouted” anything. The “confession” was manufactured by the prosecution at a roundtable meeting with cops two months after the shooting.
Priscilla Durham, a security guard, was the only hospital employee who backed up the cops’ “confession” lie. In 2003 Durham’s stepbrother Kenneth Pate swore that Durham said she was pressured by the cops to say Mumia confessed. Pate also said Durham heard Mumia say, “Get off me, get off me, they’re trying to kill me.”
Mumia Abu-Jamal has always categorically maintained his innocence. As he declared in a 2001 affidavit: “I did not shoot Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. I had nothing to do with the killing of Officer Faulkner. I am innocent…. I never confessed to anything because I had nothing to confess to.”
Mobilize Now to Free Mumia!
The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal is an object lesson in the class nature of the capitalist state. Its justice system is class- and race-biased to the core. The cops and courts who framed up this innocent man, the living tomb of the prison system in which he is jailed, the executioner who stands ready to kill—all are instruments of organized violence used to preserve the rule of the capitalist class through the forcible suppression of the working class and oppressed. Smashing this racist frame-up machine will require a socialist revolution that overturns the capitalist system. Demands for a “new trial” which have been raised by liberals, self-proclaimed socialist organizations, black nationalists and others have fed illusions that there can be justice in the capitalist courts. Those illusions demobilized a movement of millions around the world in Mumia’s defense.
The time is now to rekindle mass protest—nationally and internationally—on behalf of Mumia. Mumia’s freedom will not be won through reliance on the rigged “justice” system or on capitalist politicians, whether Democrat, Republican or Green. The power that can turn the tide is the power of millions—working people, anti-racist youth, death penalty abolitionists—united in struggle to demand the freedom of this innocent man. Crucial to this perspective is the mobilization of the labor movement, whose social power derives from its ability to shut down production. As we have stated since we first took up Mumia’s defense in the mid 1980s, what’s necessary are labor-centered united-front actions, generating effective protest across a spectrum of political beliefs while assuring all the right to have their own say.
The time is now to make Mumia’s case a rallying cry against the racist death penalty, against black oppression, against government repression. Raise your voice and organize now in your union, on your campus, in your community to demand: Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the racist death penalty!
—Partisan Defense Committee, 27 May 2006

An Open Letter to Mumia Abu-Jamal Supporters-A Personal Commentary (April 2008)

The Partisan Defense Committee has passed "An Open Letter to All Supporters of Mumia‘s Freedom" to this writer. Those few who might not know of the torturous legal battles to free this innocent man can find further information at the above-mentioned Partisan Defense site. I make my own comments below.

Normally I pass information about the case of political prisoner Mumia abu-Jamal on without much comment because the case speaks for itself. The case has been front and center in international labor defense struggles for over two decades. However, in light of the adverse ruling by a majority of a federal Third Circuit Court of Appeal panel in March 2008 that affirmed Mumia’s 1982 conviction for first-degree murder of a police officer and left the only issue for decision that of resentencing to either reinstate his original death sentence or keep him imprisoned for life without parole I have some things to say about this fight.

Occasionally, in the heat of political battle some fights ensue around strategy that after the smoke has cleared, upon reflection, leave one with more sorrow than anger. Not so today. Today I am mad. Am I mad about the irrational decision by the majority of the Third Circuit panel in Mumia’s case? Yes, but when one has seen enough of these cases over a lifetime then one realizes that, as the late sardonic comic and social commentator Lenny Bruce was fond of saying, in the Hall of Justice the only justice is in the halls.

What has got me steamed is the obvious bankruptcy of the strategy, if one can use this term, of centering Mumia’s case on the question of a new trial in order to get the ‘masses’- meaning basically parliamentary liberal types interested in supporting the case. This by people who allegedly KNOW better. The bankruptcy of this strategy, its effects on Mumia’s case and the bewildered response of those who pedaled it as good coin is detailed in the above-mentioned Open Letter. Read it.

Today, in reaction to the Third Circuit court’s decision, everyone and their brother and sister are now calling for Mumia’s freedom. At a point where he is between a rock and a hard place. However, it did not have to be that way. Mumia was innocent in 1982 and he did not stop being innocent at any point along this long road. Freedom for Mumia was (and is) the correct slogan in the case. A long line of political criminal cases, starting in this country with that of the Haymarket Martyrs if not before, confirms that simple wisdom. Those who consciously pedaled this weak ‘new trial’ strategy as a get rich quick scheme now have seen the chickens come home to roost. And Mumia pays the price.

I would point out two factors that made a ‘retrial’ strategy in the case of an innocent man particularly Pollyanna-ish for those honest militants who really believed that Mumia’s case was merely a matter of the American justice system being abused and therefore some court would rectify this situation if enough legal resources were in place. First, it is illusory that somehow, as exemplified in this case, a higher court system would remedy this egregious wrong. Long ago I remember a lawyer, I believe that it might have been the late radical lawyer Conrad Lynn no stranger to political defense work, telling a group of us doing defense work for the Black Panthers, that all these judges belong to the same union. They do not upset each other’s work except under extreme duress.

Second, and this is where the ‘wisdom’ of the reformists about reaching the ‘masses’ by a stagest theory of defense work (fight for retrial first, then freedom) turns in on them. As witness the list of names of those who have signed the Partisan Defense Committee’s call for Mumia’s freedom, excepting professional liberals and their hangers –on, those interested in Mumia’s case (or any leftwing political defense case) will sign on just as easily for freedom as retrial. Thus, opportunism does not pay, even in the short haul. That said, Free Mumia- say it loud, say it proud.

*****When The Bourgeoisie Was In Full Flower- With The French Painter Caillebotte In Mind

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Yeah, the Baron, Baron Haussmann if you need a name to go with the damage, the social damage done, had done a good job, a damn good job of breaking up beloved Paris with his squeaky clean street lines and wide boulevards. Yeah, changed the face of Paris, the Paris of squalid throw your leavings out the window and heaven help who is below, and heaven help what awful thing was thrown down to the trash-filled streets. The Paris of funny crooked cul de sac streets, which reflected the add-ons over centuries to make a great city from the piss-pot small town back in the Middle Ages when the university was the center of attraction and the good bourgeois in embryo were trying to hold off the barbarians, the wayward no account peasant drifters who snuck off the land, or tried to in order to sulk and menace in the shadows down by the Seine, the river of life and of intrigue.

The Paris of the small craftsman working his trade in some lonely workshop, maybe an indentured apprentice by his side if the craft was skilled enough to warrant such service, his “home” and hearth in the back rooms where the dutiful wife and undutiful screaming children scratched out their pitiful existence. Said craftsman working furiously always brow-beaten worrying about being edged out by Monsieur So and So with plenty of capital and fifty men in his employ underselling him by virtue of economy of scale (or just plain greed at having anybody even a single slave craftsman in his “invisible hand” market place). The Paris too of the jack-roller, the pick-pocket, the wharf rats, the tavern-dwellers, the drifters, the grifters, and the midnight sifters along the shallow shadows of that same beloved Seine

He, Jean Villon, was called Jean-bon out of respect for his courage under fire in the hell-hole barricade days of 1848 when he and his neighbors, all working-men, held out to the last when the vicious petty-bourgeois who would have benefited most from victory deserted the barricades and he and his took to their fallen losses and jail cells with equanimity (he and his comrades ever after called ‘48ers and no further explanation was necessary, none what-so-ever in any street or boulevard in the town). And called Jean-bon as well for his general good humor when he was not talking politics or scheming the next plot that would bring on the newer world that he and his brethren were seeking. This morning he had had to laugh about the changes in the Rue Madeleine, the urine-laned street where he grew up, about the smell to high heaven of tanning chemicals, rough blacksmith coals, clothe dyes, slaughtered cattles and poultries. Laughed too that in those days, the days before the Baron got the itch (Baron dreams prodded on by ’89 dreams of san-culottes crowds demanding his head on a platter, or maybe just his head any way they could get it preferably via the people’s justice of the guillotine and more recent close calls in ‘48) none of the government’s men dared to enter those quarters even to look for the treasonous or seditious whoever was in power was always nervously pacing the floor about (it did not matter-king-premier-emperor-they all nervously paced their respective floors).

Yeah, back then nothing but crooked little streets leading to harmless little cafes, where he, workingman Villon held “court” with the riff-raff so-called of the old society. Calmly and cautiously quartered where no king’s men would bother to penetrate for they might not come back. Villon descended in some cousin-age degree never quite figured out back to the 15^th century from the outlaw poet mad monk bastard saint Francois Villon who wrote longing "exile in his own country" verse with one hand and stole whatever was not nailed down with the other a fact which Jean never tired of pointing out when back in the day, back in ‘48 on the barricades when it counted comrades would wonder whether his revolutionary energies were flagging and he would drag out his pedigree to small-mouthed scoffs and tittles.

Yeah, the Baron was a slick one tearing down the old quarters to let the rising petty-bourgeois have their elegant apartments tucked away from the steamy stinking markets, the riff-raff cafes, the shadow men of the Seine. Let the bourgeoisie laugh in their clubs about how the riff-raff, meaning their working-men, those who slaved for them, those they had fired for being what some wag called “master-less men” for their habit of robbing said masters whenever the shadows fell, and robbing the once innocent peasant girls who followed in their train and cast their fate with the lot of their virtue, would get a belly-full of lead from the phalanx encircling infantry the next time they tried to pull up brick number one in order to build a barricade.

Although for a while when Thiers, that wizened troll who never uttered anything but treacherous remarks and never stopped for one minute to give the orders to send whatever troops against the barricades which remained loyal to keep him in power. Rammed those troops against the brave Paris communards of blessed memory back in 1871 when the frightened bourgeoisie realized that the barricades could still be constructed when the working-men rose up in righteous anger at the betrayals put upon them. (Those communards like their earlier brethren of ’48 called communards and no further explanation was necessary, none what-so-ever in any street or boulevard in the town.)

But those days were long gone now. The Baron had won, had won his victory over the riff-raff and Jean-bon Villon knew it would be a long time before the blood of the communards dried. Dried and avenged.

Now the picture before Villon as he walked along Rue Madeline a place foreign to his eyes this rainy Sunday morning is that of prosperous petty bourgeois walking under the shadows of their handsome umbrellas along the well-trodden brick-laid slippery street taking in the sullen airs of the day. Each pair, male and female from a rough look at the scene, in their own world heading perhaps to some café breakfast (under awnings this morning) maybe going to the gardens up the road. Villon, the old revolutionary, looking down and noticing that every spattered brick had been inlaid (although that never stopped them from tearing them up in the old days), noticed that as one wag put it that now the streets were big enough for all of Paris without regard to class to walk and fete wherever they cared to. Here is the waggish joke though, except for some ragman with his cur of a dog his sort were nary to be seen on these wet streets and intersections. Yeah, the Baron did his work well.

AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

Saturday, April 16, 2016

In Honor Of Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s Birthday (April 1870-Janaury 1924)-The Struggle Continues-Ivan Smilga’s Political Journey-Take One

*****He Saw Starlight On The Rails-With The Irascible Bruce “Utah” Phillips in Mind

*****Important Mumia Abu Jamal Update-Free Mumia

*****When The Bourgeoisie Was In Full Flower- With The French Painter Caillebotte In Mind

Victory To The Verizon Workers-Support Thea Picket Lines

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About Me

Saturday, April 16, 2016

In Honor Of Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s Birthday (April 1870-Janaury 1924)-The Struggle Continues-Ivan Smilga’s Political Journey-Take One

*****He Saw Starlight On The Rails-With The Irascible Bruce “Utah” Phillips in Mind

*****Important Mumia Abu Jamal Update-Free Mumia

*****When The Bourgeoisie Was In Full Flower- With The French Painter Caillebotte In Mind

Victory To The Verizon Workers-Support Thea Picket Lines

At least 36,000 Verizon workers have been on strike since Wednesday after failing to reach a new labor agreement by the contract's deadline.