Saturday, June 10, 2017

A View From The Left-An Appreciation of Chuck Berry-By Ruth Ryan

A View From The Left-An Appreciation of Chuck Berry-By Ruth Ryan





Workers Vanguard No. 1112
19 May 2017
An Appreciation of Chuck Berry
(Letter)
23 April 2017
To Workers Vanguard,
Chuck Berry (1926-2017) was very nearly the last of the black pioneers of rock’n roll from the 1940s and 50s including Little Richard, Ike Turner, Howlin Wolf and more, who lived, performed and innovated from the time of Jim Crow segregation and lynch law until well into the 21st Century. Chuck’s parents and grandparents on both sides knew their slave-born ancestors and passed on to him their names, relationships and stories.
Like others before him, Chuck bucked his Baptist parents’ opposition to play “the devil’s music”. Consigned to the category of “race music”, he and his fellow rockers were exploited by promoters and recording companies, cheated of the rights to their songs, and later saw their songs covered with far greater commercial success by admiring white American performers and British invaders (Roll Over Beethoven, Sweet Little Sixteen). John Lennon was quoted as saying, “If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry.’”
Unable to make a living from their recordings, these musicians toured at an exhausting pace, staying in segregated accommodations and playing to segregated audiences. Where there were no hotels for blacks, they slept in their cars and ducked the police. They were virulently hated by politicians and law enforcement when white kids, especially white girls, began to literally dance across the color line, touching the explosive intersection of sex and race under capitalism. From Billie Holiday to Ray Charles, black musicians were targeted for beatings, confiscation of earnings, arrest and imprisonment, typically for sex, drugs and taxes. Chuck was hounded under the Mann Act, once for travelling with a married 17-year old and once with a teen prostitute. He was imprisoned for tax evasion (i.e., failure to set aside money to pay outrageously regressive self-employment taxes).
Chuck built on previous musical advances, including those of Johnny Johnson, T-Bone Walker and Bob Wills, melding blues and country swing with his own style. He was a vivid story teller of the poor man’s experience (Nadine, No Money Down, Memphis Tennessee). He combined his slyly provocative lyrics, signature duck walk and a hard-driving rhythm, “the backbeat, you can’t lose it”. He made the crossover to biracial and teenage audiences, shedding his exploitive managers, signing with Chess Records, and getting a grip on the rights to his songs.
Chuck was prominent among the musicians who boldly broke the color line in performance venues. He was unapologetic, and an icon for the 1960s generation who rebelled against the strictures of family and religion, imperialist war and racial oppression. The Freedom Riders, those who sat in at lunch counters, those who marched against the Vietnam War grew up on his music, knew his songs and his story. The life and hard times of Chuck Berry exemplified the fact that there is no original American music or culture without black music and culture. Beating all odds, Chuck Berry died in bed at his home at the age of 90.
Ruth Ryan

Before The Deluge-Robin Williams’ Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)-A Film Review

Before The Deluge-Robin Williams’ Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)-A Film Review 



DVD Review

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell,

Good Morning, Vietnam, starring Robin Williams, Forrest Whittaker, 1987   

Frankly before I first saw Robin Williams in Good Moring, Vietnam I was not particularly a fan of his, didn’t see what all the uproar was about as he gained a widespread audience based, I think, on his uncanny ability to improvise as he went along which showed up on the screen when the deal went down. After watching Williams’ go through his paces in the tragi-comic film (we will get to the tragic part in a second) though and learning as well that he had improvised many of the signature radio broadcasts which dot the film I found myself laughing like crazy. Laughing like crazy almost as much the second time around even though I knew where the thing was going. With Forrest Whittaker playing the straight man Private Eddie Garlick to Williams’ zany radio personality character Adrian Cronauer the thing worked like a charm. That was the funny part, the part that a 1987 audience I think would be happy to see.

Now to the tragic part, the part that Adrian got himself dragged into by his friendship with a young Vietnamese man whom he was trying to get close to so that he could in turn get close to his beautiful sister. As it turned out, not surprisingly, with what we later painfully found out after a decade of in your face war was that the young man was a Vietnamese patriot meaning a National Liberation Front fighter, an “enemy” who used Adrian as cover for his actions against the then beginning to burgeon American military presence in Vietnam which would not end until those graphic scenes of helicopters taking fleeing Vietnamese and Americans off of the American Embassy in April 1975. But in 1965 all was fresh so to speak as even the wary GIs heading to the boondocks and other tough spots who Adrian was gathering around his broadcasts could laugh a little when he did his magic. A kind of age of innocence before the deluge. Nice juxtapositions. Nice work Robin Williams whatever else was eating you inside. Watch this one.               

    

A 'Gonzo' Bibliography- The Works Of Hunter S. Thompson At A Glance

 A 'Gonzo' Bibliography- The Works Of Hunter S. Thompson At A Glance



Click on title to link to something like a complete list of works (as of 2009) of the late Hunter S. Thompson.


Zack James’ comment June, 2017:

Sometimes you just have to follow the bouncing ball like in those old time sing along cartoons they used to have back in say the 1950s,the time I remember them from, on Saturday afternoon matinees at the old now long gone Stand Theater in my growing up town of North Adamsville. Follow me for a minute here I won’t be long. Earlier this spring my oldest brother, Alex, took attended a conference in San Francisco which he has done periodically for years. While there he noticed an advertisement on a bus for something called the Summer of Love Experience at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. That ad immediately caught his attention he had been out there that year and had participated in those events at the urging of his friend Peter Paul Markin who was something of a holy goof (a Jack Kerouac term of art), a low rent prophet, and a street criminal all in one. When Alex got back to the East after having attended the exhibition he got in contact with me to help him, and the still standing corner boys who also had gone out West at Markin’s urging to put together a tribute booklet honoring Markin and the whole experience.

After completing that project, or maybe while completing it I kept on thinking about the late Hunter S. Thompson who at one time was the driving force behind gonzo journalism and had before his suicide about a decade ago been something of a muse to me. At first my thoughts were about how Thompson would have taken the exhibition at the de Young since a lot of what he wrote about in the 1960s and 1970s was where the various counter-cultural trends were, or were not, going. But then as the current national political situation in America in the Trump Age has turned to crap, to craziness and straight out weirdness I began to think about how Thompson would have handled the 24/7/365 craziness these days since he had been an unremitting searing critic of another President of the United States who also had low-life instincts, one Richard Milhous Nixon.

The intertwining of the two stands came to head recently over the fired FBI director James Comey hearings where he essentially said that the emperor had no clothes. So I have been inserting various Thompson-like comments in an occasional series I am running in various on-line publications-Even The President Of The United States Sometimes Must Have To Stand Naked-Tales From The White House Bunker. And will continue to overlap the two-Summer of Love and Age of Trump for as long as it seems relevant. So there you are caught up. Ifs not then I have included hopefully for the last time the latest cross-over Thompson idea.           

************      
Zack James comment, Summer of 2017                

Maybe it says something about the times we live in, or maybe in this instance happenstance or, hell maybe something in the water but certain things sort of dovetail every now and again. I initially started this commentary segment after having written a longest piece for my brother and his friends as part of a small tribute booklet they were putting together about my and their takes on the Summer of Love, 1967. That event that my brother, Alex, had been knee deep in had always interested me from afar since I was way too young to have appreciated what was happening in San Francisco in those Wild West days. What got him motivated to do the booklet had been an exhibit at the de Young Art Museum in Golden Gate Park where they were celebrating the 50th anniversary of the events of that summer with a look at the music, fashion, photography and exquisite poster art which was created then just as vivid advertising for concerts and “happenings” but which now is legitimate artful expression.

That project subsequently got me started thinking about the late Hunter Thompson, Doctor Gonzo, the driving force behind a new way of looking at and presenting journalism which was really much closer to the nub of what real reporting was about. Initially I was interested in some of Thompson’s reportage on what was what in San Francisco as he touched the elbows of those times having spent a fair amount of time working on his seminal book on the Hell’s Angels while all hell was breaking out in Frisco town. Delved into with all hands and legs the high points and the low, the ebb which he located somewhere between the Chicago Democratic Convention fiasco of the summer of 1968 and the hellish Rollins Stones Altamont concert of 1969.     

Here is what is important today though, about how the dots get connected out of seemingly random occurrences. Hunter Thompson also made his mark as a searing no holds barred mano y mano reporter of the rise and fall, of the worthy demise of one Richard Milhous Nixon at one time President of the United States and a common low-life criminal of ill-repute. Needless to say today, the summer of 2107, in the age of one Donald Trump, another President of the United States and common low-life criminal begs the obvious question of what the sorely missed Doctor Gonzo would have made of the whole process of the self-destruction of another American presidency, or a damn good run at self-destruction. So today and maybe occasionally in the future there will be some intertwining of commentary about events fifty years ago and today. Below to catch readers up to speed is the most recent “homage” to Hunter Thompson. And you too I hope will ask the pertinent question. Hunter where are you when we need, desperately need, you.       
*******
Zack James comment, Summer of 2017 

You know it is in a way too bad that “Doctor Gonzo”-Hunter S Thompson, the late legendary journalist who broke the back, hell broke the neck, legs, arms of so-called objective journalism in a drug-blazed frenzy back in the 1970s when he “walked with the king”’ is not with us in these times. (Walking with the king not about walking with any king or Doctor King but being so high on drugs, your choice, that commin clay experiences fall by the way side. In the times of this 50th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love, 1967 which he worked the edges of while he was doing research (live and in your face research by the way) on the notorious West Coast-based Hell’s Angels. His “hook” through Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters down in Kesey’s place in La Honda where many an “acid test” took place, where many walked with the king, if you prefer, and where for a time the Angels, Hunter in tow, were welcomed. He had been there in the high tide, when it looked like we had the night-takers on the run and later as well when he saw the ebb tide of the 1960s coming a year or so later although that did not stop him from developing the quintessential “gonzo” journalism fine-tuned with plenty of dope for which he would become famous before the end, before he took his aging life and left Johnny Depp and company to fling his ashes over this good green planet. He would have “dug” the exhibition, maybe smoked a joint for old times’ sake (oh no, no that is not done in proper society, in high art society these days) at the de Young Museum at the Golden Gate Park highlighting the events of the period showing until August 20th of this year.   


Better yet he would have had this Trump thug bizarre weirdness wrapped up and bleeding from all pores just like he regaled us with the tales from the White House bunker back in the days when Trump’s kindred one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal was running the same low rent trip before he was run out of town by his own like some rabid rat. He would have gone crazy seeing all the crew deserting the sinking U.S.S. Trump with guys like fired FBI Director Comey going to Capitol Hill and saying out loud the emperor has no clothes and would not know the truth if it grabbed him by the throat. Every day would be a feast day. But perhaps the road to truth these days, in the days of “alternate facts” and assorted other bullshit would have been bumpier than in those more “civilized” times when simple burglaries and silly tape-recorders ruled the roost. Hunter did not make the Nixon “hit list” (to his everlasting regret for which he could hardly hold his head up in public) but these days he surely would find himself in the top echelon. Maybe too though with these thugs who like their forbears would stop at nothing he might have found himself in some back alley bleeding from all pores. Hunter Thompson wherever you are –help. Selah. Enough said-for now  



Markin comment:

Anytime you need to read something funny about late 20th-early 21st century American bourgeois politics and culture grab some Hunter. He got me through many a tough night. He, and his savage wit, are missed by this writer, for sure.

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love- BETTER THAN SEX-NOT! Hunter Thompson Toward The End

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love- BETTER THAN SEX-NOT! Hunter Thompson Toward The End  



Zack James’ comment June, 2017:

Sometimes you just have to follow the bouncing ball like in those old time sing along cartoons they used to have back in say the 1950s,the time I remember them from, on Saturday afternoon matinees at the old now long gone Stand Theater in my growing up town of North Adamsville. Follow me for a minute here I won’t be long. Earlier this spring my oldest brother, Alex, took attended a conference in San Francisco which he has done periodically for years. While there he noticed an advertisement on a bus for something called the Summer of Love Experience at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. That ad immediately caught his attention he had been out there that year and had participated in those events at the urging of his friend Peter Paul Markin who was something of a holy goof (a Jack Kerouac term of art), a low rent prophet, and a street criminal all in one. When Alex got back to the East after having attended the exhibition he got in contact with me to help him, and the still standing corner boys who also had gone out West at Markin’s urging to put together a tribute booklet honoring Markin and the whole experience.

After completing that project, or maybe while completing it I kept on thinking about the late Hunter S. Thompson who at one time was the driving force behind gonzo journalism and had before his suicide about a decade ago been something of a muse to me. At first my thoughts were about how Thompson would have taken the exhibition at the de Young since a lot of what he wrote about in the 1960s and 1970s was where the various counter-cultural trends were, or were not, going. But then as the current national political situation in America in the Trump Age has turned to crap, to craziness and straight out weirdness I began to think about how Thompson would have handled the 24/7/365 craziness these days since he had been an unremitting searing critic of another President of the United States who also had low-life instincts, one Richard Milhous Nixon.

The intertwining of the two stands came to head recently over the fired FBI director James Comey hearings where he essentially said that the emperor had no clothes. So I have been inserting various Thompson-like comments in an occasional series I am running in various on-line publications-Even The President Of The United States Sometimes Must Have To Stand Naked-Tales From The White House Bunker. And will continue to overlap the two-Summer of Love and Age of Trump for as long as it seems relevant. So there you are caught up. Ifs not then I have included hopefully for the last time the latest cross-over Thompson idea.           

************      
Zack James comment, Summer of 2017                

Maybe it says something about the times we live in, or maybe in this instance happenstance or, hell maybe something in the water but certain things sort of dovetail every now and again. I initially started this commentary segment after having written a longest piece for my brother and his friends as part of a small tribute booklet they were putting together about my and their takes on the Summer of Love, 1967. That event that my brother, Alex, had been knee deep in had always interested me from afar since I was way too young to have appreciated what was happening in San Francisco in those Wild West days. What got him motivated to do the booklet had been an exhibit at the de Young Art Museum in Golden Gate Park where they were celebrating the 50th anniversary of the events of that summer with a look at the music, fashion, photography and exquisite poster art which was created then just as vivid advertising for concerts and “happenings” but which now is legitimate artful expression.
That project subsequently got me started thinking about the late Hunter Thompson, Doctor Gonzo, the driving force behind a new way of looking at and presenting journalism which was really much closer to the nub of what real reporting was about. Initially I was interested in some of Thompson’s reportage on what was what in San Francisco as he touched the elbows of those times having spent a fair amount of time working on his seminal book on the Hell’s Angels while all hell was breaking out in Frisco town. Delved into with all hands and legs the high points and the low, the ebb which he located somewhere between the Chicago Democratic Convention fiasco of the summer of 1968 and the hellish Rollins Stones Altamont concert of 1969.     
Here is what is important today though, about how the dots get connected out of seemingly random occurrences. Hunter Thompson also made his mark as a searing no holds barred mano y mano reporter of the rise and fall, of the worthy demise of one Richard Milhous Nixon at one time President of the United States and a common low-life criminal of ill-repute. Needless to say today, the summer of 2107, in the age of one Donald Trump, another President of the United States and common low-life criminal begs the obvious question of what the sorely missed Doctor Gonzo would have made of the whole process of the self-destruction of another American presidency, or a damn good run at self-destruction. So today and maybe occasionally in the future there will be some intertwining of commentary about events fifty years ago and today. Below to catch readers up to speed is the most recent “homage” to Hunter Thompson. And you too I hope will ask the pertinent question. Hunter where are you when we need, desperately need, you.       
*******
Zack James comment, Summer of 2017 

You know it is in a way too bad that “Doctor Gonzo”-Hunter S Thompson, the late legendary journalist who broke the back, hell broke the neck, legs, arms of so-called objective journalism in a drug-blazed frenzy back in the 1970s when he “walked with the king”’ is not with us in these times. (Walking with the king not about walking with any king or Doctor King but being so high on drugs, your choice, that commin clay experiences fall by the way side. In the times of this 50th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love, 1967 which he worked the edges of while he was doing research (live and in your face research by the way) on the notorious West Coast-based Hell’s Angels. His “hook” through Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters down in Kesey’s place in La Honda where many an “acid test” took place, where many walked with the king, if you prefer, and where for a time the Angels, Hunter in tow, were welcomed. He had been there in the high tide, when it looked like we had the night-takers on the run and later as well when he saw the ebb tide of the 1960s coming a year or so later although that did not stop him from developing the quintessential “gonzo” journalism fine-tuned with plenty of dope for which he would become famous before the end, before he took his aging life and left Johnny Depp and company to fling his ashes over this good green planet. He would have “dug” the exhibition, maybe smoked a joint for old times’ sake (oh no, no that is not done in proper society, in high art society these days) at the de Young Museum at the Golden Gate Park highlighting the events of the period showing until August 20th of this year.   

Better yet he would have had this Trump thug bizarre weirdness wrapped up and bleeding from all pores just like he regaled us with the tales from the White House bunker back in the days when Trump’s kindred one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal was running the same low rent trip before he was run out of town by his own like some rabid rat. He would have gone crazy seeing all the crew deserting the sinking U.S.S. Trump with guys like fired FBI Director Comey going to Capitol Hill and saying out loud the emperor has no clothes and would not know the truth if it grabbed him by the throat. Every day would be a feast day. But perhaps the road to truth these days, in the days of “alternate facts” and assorted other bullshit would have been bumpier than in those more “civilized” times when simple burglaries and silly tape-recorders ruled the roost. Hunter did not make the Nixon “hit list” (to his everlasting regret for which he could hardly hold his head up in public) but these days he surely would find himself in the top echelon. Maybe too though with these thugs who like their forbears would stop at nothing he might have found himself in some back alley bleeding from all pores. Hunter Thompson wherever you are –help. Selah. Enough said-for now  



BOOK REVIEW

BETTER THAN SEX, HUNTER S. THOMPSON, BALLANTINE BOOKS, NEW YORK, 1994

Know this. The late Hunter Thompson, Doctor Gonzo, was something of a muse for me although our politics, in the final analysis, were light years apart. In the end he never found a Democratic Party presidential candidate that he, even if grudgingly, could not support. I have read everything of his that I could get my hands on. During many a troubled time when I got down on the seemingly hopeless struggle in the fight for socialism his savage humor aimed at the inanities of bourgeois politics and politicians carried me through. That said, the book under review Better Than Sex about the trials and tribulations of covering the ill-starred 1992 presidential campaign eventually ‘won’ by Bill Clinton is not one of his better efforts and even with his vast journalistic skills must have been a chore rather than something to really dig into. I will tell you my take on the matter.

Hunter Thompson started making a name for himself as a political journalist in his first efforts at trying to understand presidential campaigns during the ill-fated Democratic campaign of George McGovern against one Richard M. Nixon in 1972. His Fear and Loathing on Campaign Trail 1972 stands as a classic of ‘alternative’ journalism on the issue. He stated then that a political junkie, and by any definition he was one, could only really stand in the vortex of one such campaign before burning out. Nevertheless he pressed his luck. Unfortunately, Thompson found himself in the place where Teddy White found himself after his seminal ‘straight’ reporting on the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon campaign, The Making of President. White too, went on to write more such books and not to his benefit. In short, pigeon-holed. Take that lesson for what it is worth.

The problem with Better Than Sex is that Thompson had written it all before, and to better effect. The writing seems frantic and tired, very tired. It did not help that his cast of main characters- one President George H. W. Bush, William Jefferson Clinton and the genuine dingo bat Ross Perot- would make even a political junkie get him or herself to the nearest rehabilitation center. The book reflects that hollowness in many ways not the least is the extraordinary amount of filler (literally with ‘draft’ notes, letters, etc.) that clutters the book. If these reasons do not convince you then a three star rating on a genuine five star journalistic hero of mine tells the tale. Still, there is more than enough savagely funny analysis and humor for a real Thompson junkie to get by on during those lonely political nights. Enough said.

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Pete Seeger's "Oh, Had I A Golden Thread"

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Pete Seeger's "Oh, Had I  A Golden Thread"




Click on the title to link a "YouTube" film clip of Pete Seeger (with Judy Collins) performing "Oh, Had I A Golden Thread."


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. Markin.

*************

Oh, Had I A Golden Thread(Pete Seeger)


Oh, had I a golden thread
And needle so fine
I'd weave a tapestry
Of rainbow design
Of rainbow design

Far over the water
I'd weave my magic strand
To every city
Through every single land
Through every land

And in it I would weave the bravery
Of women giving birth
In it I would weave the innocence
Of children over all the earth
Children of all earth

Show my brothers and my sisters
My rainbow design
And bind up this sorry world
With hand and heart and mind
Hand and heart and mind

O had I a golden thread
And needle so fine
I'd weave a tapestry
Of rainbow design
Of rainbow design

Rally And March In Cambridge-Monday June 12th-Defend The Palestinians!


Support Military Resisters -REFUSING TO KILL IS NOT A CRIME! INVEST IN CARING NOT KILLING!-Payday Newsletter - JUNE 2017

To    
Payday
An international network of men                   Newsletter June 2017
working with the Global Women's Strike      More on www.refusingtokill.net
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Ex military intelligence analyst Rowan McAllan who deployed to Iraq will be voting for Jeremy Corbyn because his foreign policy will make Britain safer.  Watch the video.
                                 
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Chelsea Manning was freed on 17 May. Celebrations took place in at least 22 towns and cities in nine countries. Read Payday and Queer Strike’s statement Her and our victory.
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Palestinian prisoners won “80% of their demands” to improve their detention conditions after a 40-day hunger strike.
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Join the weekly picket of the Israeli Embassy every Friday in London, 4-4.30pm, to demand the release of conscientious objectorAtalia Ben-Abba, 19, repeatedly imprisoned for refusing to serve.  
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Mothers and other carers protest outside Holborn family court against the increasing numbers of children taken into care, court secrecy and cuts to legal aid on the first Wednesday of every month.  Next protest 7 June 12.30pm.

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The International Labor Defense- The Unexpected Afterlife of American Communism

The International Labor Defense- The Unexpected Afterlife of American Communism  
Sarah Jaffe
June 6, 2017
New York Times
The Communist Party U.S.A. had its greatest successes as the country reeled from the Depression. Today, as we are still picking our way out of the rubble left by the crash of 2008, left-wing ideas have gained new purchase.

Claudia Jones arriving for a court date in 1951., George Alexanderson / New York Times ,
The Communist, in the American imagination, has always been the ultimate outside agitator.
No matter how homegrown a resistance movement was, or how local the organizers were, the first response from those facing protest has always been to blame an outsider. This was as true for town hall protests during the February 2017 congressional recess as it was for anti-lynching struggles more than 80 years ago during the Great Depression.
For much of the past century in this country, this undesirable alien — seen as being from someplace foreign and in need of deportation back there — stood accused of invading to stir up trouble where there was none, where previously the locals had been docile and willing to accept whatever everyday inequality was their lot. Though many Communists were indeed immigrants, who would be targeted for harassment and deportation for as long as the party existed, many, too, were homegrown, born and raised in the same cities and towns as their persecutors.
The Communist Party U.S.A., founded in 1919, was closely tied to what emerged as the Soviet Union after the 1917 October Revolution, but the American party also drew on decades of local radical organizing. Many of its members came out of the Socialist Party, the labor movement and even anarchist activism, but the party also found a base among African-Americans when Communists proved willing to take on their struggles for self-determination.
In short, American Communism was a movement that grew out of what the historian Robin D. G. Kelley, the author of “Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression,” calls “the most despised and dispossessed elements of American society.” It was the black workers drawn to the party, Professor Kelley argues, who shaped its political choices as much as the varying dictates that came from the Communist International, Moscow’s directorate for foreign parties.
During the Depression, the party took on fights not just for better wages and working conditions but also against evictions by landlords and abuses of the criminal punishment system. In the Deep South, the battle for freedom for the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers falsely accused of rape in 1931, was led by the International Labor Defense, a legal arm of the Communist Party U.S.A.
That stand still inspires activists today. The Scottsboro case was what drew the organizer and educator Mariame Kaba, who runs the blog Prison Culture, to learn more about the Communist Party U.S.A.
“They were helping nine young black men,” she said, “and preventing their state-sanctioned murder for a crime they didn’t commit.”
The party inspired loyalty for reasons beyond simply an affinity for Marxist ideas. It was the campaigns Communists ran against police brutality, the practice of lynching and the Jim Crow laws that made their politics relevant to the lives of ordinary people. In the North as well as the South, on soapboxes on the streets of Harlem as well as on plots of sharecropped land in Alabama, Communist organizing addressed the bread-and-butter concerns of black people.
Communists believed that organizing the working class would work only if white workers realized that their liberation, too, was bound up with the fate of black workers. Facing this threat, anti-Communists and segregationists worked hard to sustain the fractures. They blamed Communists for fomenting “race mixing,” evoking sexualized fears that social equality would mean black men having sex with white women — the very fears that put the Scottsboro Boys on trial. In turn, when black people agitated for civil rights, the Bull Connors of the world called such demands Communist-inspired, returning to the same narrative of dangerous outsiders.
Such an argument said, in effect, that black people had to be whipped up by radical foreigners in order to challenge the remnants of slavery in the Jim Crow South, and that without those outsiders, America was, to steal a phrase from the 2016 election, already great. The view also ignores that it was the black members of the Communist Party U.S.A., raised in such circumstances, who made it clear that their struggles for economic independence were bound up with the racist violence they faced from both the police and white supremacist groups.
Those black Communists often had to fight to hold their party accountable to its professed ideals when the party shifted its strategy toward courting white liberals. The debates that resurfaced during the 2016 election cycle, about the primacy of race or class in left-wing organizing, particularly around the primary campaign of Bernie Sanders, echoed these past battles.
In the 1930s, the party taught its members to discuss their problems using the language of exploitation. This language meant that people “understood that racism and what they called male chauvinism wasn’t simply people acting badly or being psychologically controlled or being ignorant,” Professor Kelley said. “It was about the benefits that they derived from exploitative relationships.”
That framework, which has been revisited today in platform documents like “A Vision for Black Lives,” argues that racism, at root, is not about hate between groups, but about the way power is held in society. And class, according to this analysis, is created by relationships of exploitation.
These arguments were championed by organizers like Claudia Jones, a black leader within the Communist Party U.S.A. and a journalist for its newspaper, The Daily Worker. According to Charlene Carruthers, the national director of Black Youth Project 100, Ms. Jones expounded the idea now known as intersectionality decades before that term became so ubiquitous that Hillary Clinton used it in a tweet on the campaign trail. For Ms. Jones, understanding the lives of black women and the economic and social position they occupied would create a better understanding of the system of capitalism as a whole. It followed, Ms. Carruthers explains, that black women’s work was central in the struggle to replace the system.
Within organized labor, particularly the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1940s, the Communist-led unions were consistently the leaders on racial and gender equality. Sometimes this clashed with the wishes of white male members, who occasionally went on strike against the inclusion of black members. With the eventual purge of such so-called red unions from the federation, the cause of antiracism slipped to the sidelines. Only in the past decade or so has it returned as a priority for some unions.
The Communist Party U.S.A.’s support for the nonaggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union at the beginning of World War II — a seeming betrayal of its strong anti-fascist stance — splintered the party’s membership. Revelations after the war about Stalin’s crimes further damaged the party’s international prestige. For the most part, in the West, Communist parties never recovered from those blows. At the same time, the end of the war hastened the demise of the old European empires, and Communists often took leading roles in the new anticolonial movements.
The story of Claudia Jones is instructive here, also. Born in Trinidad in 1915, she moved to New York with her family in the 1920s. In 1948, she was arrested for her political activism, tried under the McCarran and Smith Acts, imprisoned for several years and eventually deported, settling in London. She was one of many victims of the Red Scare that crushed American Communism and spurred purges, blacklists, deportations and a few high-profile executions.
Whipped-up fear of foreign terror around outsider Communists like Ms. Jones finds an echo today in the rhetoric of criminal immigrants and the scaremongering about “radical Islamic terror.” The techniques of McCarthyism have resurfaced, this time to evoke the threat of terrorism rather than Communism.
Yet for all the work that went into killing the idea that another system was possible, the specter of Communism haunts us still. The Communist Party U.S.A. had its greatest successes as the country reeled from the Depression. Today, as we are still picking our way out of the rubble left by the crash of 2008, left-wing ideas have gained new purchase. It was the material conditions of people’s lives, Ms. Kaba points out, that made them willing to listen to something radically different during the 1930s and ’40s. It was that economic reality that drove millions of people to pay attention to both the nationalist bombast of Mr. Trump and the democratic socialist message of Bernie Sanders.
That same reality drove organizers like Will Emmons of Lexington, Ky., to found new groups like the Kentucky Workers League, which Mr. Emmons says draws inspiration explicitly from the Communist Party of the ’30s and the work of the Black Panthers in the ’60s. The group has organized direct actions to defend people being evicted and offers community programs such as homework assistance at a local library. It ran a solidarity campaign with workers at a factory owned by Lexington-based Lexmark, contacting the workers in Mexico and pressuring the company locally to come to the table and bargain with the workers’ union. Since Mr. Trump’s victory, the group has turned to protecting immigrants in the community from deportation.
The year 2016 saw a revolt against politics as usual, with the mainstream parties’ failing to offer much in the way of solutions to struggling people across the United States. In the wake of the election, Ms. Carruthers said, organizations like Black Youth Project 100 have to broaden the scope of their work while cleaving to their political vision. Courting the supposed white mainstream while ignoring the material needs of black people, immigrants, transgender people and other marginalized communities will not placate Trumpian efforts to foment fear of the un-American outsider.
The power of the radical agitator — homegrown as well as outsider — has always been the ability to expose the gap between the narrative of American greatness and the realities of people’s lives. What American Communists, at their best, pioneered was to show how effectively grass-roots movements can challenge the racism, state violence and economic exploitation that people face in their daily lives, and connect those fights to a broader vision of a just world.
Sarah Jaffe (@sarahljaffe) is a Nation Institute fellow and the author of “Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt.”
This is an essay in the series Red Century, about the history and legacy of Communism 100 years after the Russian Revolution.
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A View From The Left- WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

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WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

With Over 120,000 Petition Signatures, the People's Budget Earns Its Name
At a June 7 press conference entitled, “The People Support the People’s Budget: A Roadmap for the Resistance,” representatives of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) and a host of grassroots advocacy and social justice organizations announced the delivery of over 120,000 petition signatures to Congress in support of the CPC’s People’s Budget.  President Trump’s budget proposal includes massive cuts to government programs ranging from education, healthcare, and social security, to international diplomacy, humanitarian aid, and more. It also includes a significant increase in military spending. The People’s Budget offers an alternative plan for how to keep Americans safe and secure, and how to meet the needs of the American people.  More

Sanders Backers Plant Left-Wing Flag in the Massachusetts Democratic Party
At the Massachusetts Democratic convention over the weekend, the normally sober event had an unruly and raucous vibe. It took some strange twists.  Eventually, the journey resulted in a platform that is among the most progressive ever passed by a state party. It’s likely the most progressive platform by a major party in the nation's history, period. It calls for single-payer healthcare, a $15 minimum wage, paid family leave, forgiveness of student loan debt, a ranked-choice voting system, an independent commission to draw the state’s congressional districts, the abolition of Massachusetts superdelegates, an end to for-profit prisons, a carbon tax, more accountability for police officers who use excessive force, and more…  In the end, progressives got most of what they sought from the process, though they narrowly lost a vote on an amendment that called for an end to the statewide ban on local rent-control measures. And, after much contentious back and forth, the convention chair ruled that two proposals, relating to foreign policy and peace in the Middle East, were out of order, on the basis that the state party doesn’t take a stance on federal-level policy questions.   More

Image result for cartoon trump working class democratsTHE DEMOCRATS’ ‘WORKING-CLASS PROBLEM’
The Democrats don’t have a “white working-class problem.” They have a “working-class problem,” which progressives have been reluctant to address honestly or boldly. The fact is that Democrats have lost support with all working-class voters across the electorate, including the Rising American Electorate of minorities, unmarried women, and millennials. This decline contributed mightily to the Democrats’ losses in the states and Congress and to the election of Donald Trump…  Bernie Sanders’s “revolution” and attack on big money was much closer to hitting the mark than was Hillary Clinton’s message, and he won millennials and white working-class voters in the primary. It is not surprising that white working-class voters then went for Trump, and that some Sanders voters went for the Green Party in the general election, but the Democrats’ working-class problem go way beyond what Sanders broached…  What the national Democrats’ embrace of the liberal moral frame and America’s economic ascendance misses is not just the plight of nonmetropolitan America, but also the reality on the ground in the big cities, which are ground zero for our country’s greatest challenges.   More

America is a world leader in health inequality
The divide between health outcomes for the richest and poorest Americans is among the largest in the world, according to a new study…  The timing of the study is important — it was conducted just before many of the Affordable Care Act's major policies were enacted. A major facet of the ACA was a redistribution of income, a tax on the richest Americans that helped pay to expand health coverage for the country’s poorest, and the study's authors said it suggests that any reduction in coverage could be a step backward, in an area where the United States has been underperforming…  But he and his co-authors caution that there's more to closing the health outcome gap than providing insurance. When the researchers tried to do more of an apples-to-apples comparison by adjusting for whether people had insurance or not when making the cross-country comparison, they found that the disparity was only slightly decreased.   More

The Demolition of American Education
Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos’s proposed budget for the US Department of Education is a boon for privatization and a disaster for public schools and low-income college students. They want to cut federal spending on education by 13.6 percent. Some programs would be eliminated completely; others would face deep reductions. They want to cut $10.6 billion from existing programs and divert $1.4 billion to charter schools and to vouchers for private and religious schools. This budget reflects Trump and DeVos’s deep hostility to public education and their desire to shrink the Department of Education, with the ultimate goal of getting rid of it entirely. The proposed budget would shrink the assistance programs that now enable 12 million students to attend college: funding for college work-study programs would be cut in half, thus “saving” $490 million.  More

BERNIE SANDERS:
Why Trump's So-Called Infrastructure Plan Is Good for Wall Street But Bad for America
At a time when the American Society of Civil Engineers says we need to spend $2 trillion above current spending levels just to get our infrastructure back to a state of good repair, Trump actually cuts direct federal spending on our crumbling infrastructure by nearly $145 billion over the next decade…  Just like Trump’s “health care” bill is actually a $231 billion tax cut for the top 2 percent, his infrastructure plan would create $200 billion in new tax loopholes and other giveaways for wealthy investors, and it would reward corporations that have stashed their profits overseas with huge tax cuts.  Under Trump’s proposal, billionaires on Wall Street, wealthy campaign contributors and even foreign governments would receive hundreds of billions in tax breaks to purchase our highways, airports, and water treatment plants. They would then be allowed to impose huge new tolls and fees on the backs of American commuters and homeowners.  The reality is that Trump’s plan to sell off our nation’s highways, bridges, and other vital infrastructure to Wall Street, private investors, and foreign governments is an old idea that does not work.  More
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/editorial-cartoons/kevin-siers/7g1pcm/picture152432469/ALTERNATES/FREE_960/SIERS052517
Trump Is Losing His Most Loyal Supporters: Poll
Twitter is not the only thing hindering Trump’s presidency, because the president’s traditional die-hard supporters are beginning to change their tune, according to the Washington Post. FiveThiryEight’s Nate Silver pointed out that there has been “a considerable decline in the number of Americans who strongly approve of Trump, from a peak of around 30 percent in February to just 21 or 22 percent of the electorate now. (The decline in Trump’s strong approval ratings is larger than the overall decline in his approval ratings, in fact.)”  A poll released by Quinnipiac University on Wednesday corroborates with Silver’s observation, according to the Post. “If you look at the trend in Quinnipiac’s polling since January, strong approval of the president’s job performance has faded in a number of constituencies — including Republicans and whites without college degrees.”   More

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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong

“POTS AND KETTLES” IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Related imageMost Americans – even avid news followers – are probably confused by recent disputes among the Arab petro-monarchies, which are all nominally members of the same Gulf Cooperation Council alliance (GCC).  Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), joined by Egypt, have broken diplomatic relations with Qatar and placed the tiny but natural gas-rich Persian Gulf emirate under virtual siege.  Qatar, with a citizen population of only 200,000 – along with 2 million expatriate workers – is vulnerable because, as a peninsula adjoining Saudi Arabia, it depends for most of its food and other imports on the now closed border.  Turkey, Russia and Iran have offered to supply Qatar by air or sea. (Turkey is also preparing to send troops to defend Qatar.)

Saudi Arabia and its allies charge that Qatar is “financing terrorists” around the Arab-speaking world.  But of course Saudi Arabia is a well-known promoter of the extremist Wahhabi interpretation of Islam and is a backer of its own violent proxies in Syria and elsewhere. What’s really going on? 

Qatar (with its ally Turkey) and the Saudi block both support violent religious extremists, but different brands. Qatar backs the Muslim Brotherhood, which in some countries seeks to gain power through elections and is anti-monarchistin general – clearly dangerous to Saudi Arabia and its allies. Qatar-based Al-Jazeera TV was a cheerleader for the Arab Spring uprisings – despite autocratic rule in its home country.

Image result for cartoon us middle eastIn Syria, the two sides support rival violent jihadist groups.  Qatar and Turkey also maintain commercial and political relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran, which the Saudi-led coalition fiercely opposes on political and sectarian grounds -- with encouragement from the Trump administration.  (Iran itself was the victim of an ISIS terrorist attack this week, perhaps with Saudi collusion.)  

Complicating the situation is the fact that the US maintains its Fifth Fleet headquarters in Saudi-aligned Bahrain, while it has its largest Middle East base in Qatar, the Al Ubaid air field and the CENTCOM operations center – with 10,000 military personal in all.   As the US continues its interventions in the Middle East – especially in Syria -- it finds itself unable to maintain a coherent policy because of the conflicting interests of its various allies, many of whom support violent and anti-democratic religious extremists of one sort or another.

WHY QATAR IS IN THE NAUGHTY CORNER
There is no doubt that the al-Thani clan, which rules the emirate from its capital, Doha, has funded militants fighting the regime of president Bashar al-Assad in Syria and meddled in the internal affairs of other Arab nations through its support of the Muslim Brotherhood, notably in Egypt. But these are relative sideshows in a broader regional game. Even allowing for the seeming hypocrisyof Saudi Arabia’s making such accusations, given its history of backing Sunni militant groups in Syria and its military intervention in Yemen, the allegations are so well known as to be tired at this point.  The more heinous sin for which Doha is being punished is its willingness to acknowledge that Iran occupies a position as an important regional power and that political Islamists like Hamas and Hezbollah have a role to play in determining the future of the Middle East.   More

VIJAY PRASHAD:
ISIS Wins, as Trump Sucks Up to the Saudis, and Launches Destructive Fight with Qatar
By the close of 2015, the Saudi agenda appeared to be in disarray while Qatar and Turkey appeared to be fearful of the Saudis. Turkey, badly battered by its miscalculation in Syria, began to rely on Qatar’s natural gas revenue to stabilize its economy and leaned on Qatar to open discussions with Russia. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, went to the United States, brought more weapons and attempted to forge a new kind of Arab NATO against both Iran and the patrons of the Muslim Brotherhood, namely Turkey and Qatar…  But Trump, carrying the Israeli agenda on his shoulders, seemed entranced by the Saudi-Egyptian-Israeli axis. Isolation of Iran ran along the grain of the agenda of his own team. If this meant that Qatar had to be drawn in, well, so be it despite the fact that Qatar hosts one of the largest U.S. military bases in the world.   More

UK may not publish terrorist funding report amid claims it focuses on Saudi Arabia
An investigation into the foreign funding of extremist Islamist groups may never be published, the Home Office has admitted.
The inquiry commissioned by David Cameron, was launched as part of a deal with the Liberal Democrats in December 2015, in exchange for the party supporting the extension of British airstrikes against Isis into Syria. But although it was due to be published in the spring of 2016, it has not been completed and may never be made public due to its "sensitive" contents. It is thought to focus on Saudi Arabia, which the UK recently approved £3.5bn worth of arms export licences to.  More

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy ruled by Wahhabism, an intolerant form of Sunni Islam, and the Saudi state has supported movements such as Al Qaeda, ISIS and the Taliban. The Saudi government fiercely discriminates against Muslims of other sects, bans public worship by Christians, and supports gender inequality. The Saudis opposed the 2015 U.S.-Iran nuclear deal even though it guarantees a world with fewer nuclear weapons.
Image result for cartoon U.S. saudi allianceSaudi Arabia invaded Bahrain to support that country's rulers during the 2011 Arab Spring, and it is presently making war in Yemen, where its airstrikes have led to many thousands of civilian deaths and risks a serious famine. Our country is providing indispensable military aid and support for the Saudi war in Yemen; in the last two years our government has sold over $20 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia. We refuel Saudi warplanes that have bombed schools, hospitals, marketplaces, weddings, and funerals.
Additionally, Saudi military actions have disrupted the food supply in Yemen. Yemen  imports nearly 90% of its food; according to the UN, 17 million Yemenis suffer from severe food insecurity.

Avoiding Apocalypse on the Korean Peninsula
The Korean peninsula, all 85,270 square miles of it, is about the size of Idaho. It contains more soldiers (2.8 million, not counting reserves) and armaments (nearly 6,000 tanks, 31,000 artillery pieces, and 1,134 combat aircraft) than any other place on the planet. The armies of North and South Korea face each other across the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, and Seoul, South Korea’s capital, is a mere 35 miles away as the artillery shell flies. More than 25 million people inhabit that city’s greater metropolitan area, home to about half of South Korea’s population. Unsurprisingly, untold numbers of North Korean missiles and artillery pieces are trained on that city. Once the guns started firing, thousands of its denizens would undoubtedly die within hours. Of course, North Koreans, too, would be caught in an almost instant maelstrom of death.  And the war wouldn’t be a bilateral affair.  South Korea hosts 28,500 American troops. In addition, there are some 200,000 American civilians in the country, most of them in Seoul.  Many in both categories could be killed by North Korean attacks and the United States would, in turn, hit multiple targets in that country.    More

At remote desert garrison in Syria, a US-Iran confrontation is brewing
US-backed forces announced Tuesday that they had begun the long-awaited assault on the northeastern Syrian city of Raqqa, the so-called Islamic State's main stronghold in the country and its self-declared capital.  But some 170 miles to the south, in a remote corner of Syria’s southeastern desert, another clash is brewing that is pitting the strategic objectives of the United States against those of Iran, and that could soon bring US troops and Iranian-backed forces into direct military confrontation.  Both US and Russian warplanes have been deployed, and some shots have already been fired, including by US-backed coalition forces on Tuesday, the US military said.  The clash is over a military garrison at Tanf, located near a border crossing on a highway that cuts through hundreds of miles of flat desert…  But if Tanf’s main value to the US so far has been in the war on ISIS, it has also, perhaps unwittingly, become a front-line outpost in the US containment of regional power Iran, whose allies are advancing on the garrison from two directions.     More

Image result for omran family aleppoALEPPO: The Return of Omran to No Fanfare from Western Media
Omran has been found alive and well in East Aleppo. Syrian & Lebanese media have been interviewing the father of Omran Daqneesh the traumatized boy that graced the covers of virtually every media outlet in August 2016. Omran’s bewilderment reduced news anchors to tears and tipped the world over the edge of rational thought and into the realms of sentimentalized chaos. To the West, he became the symbol of intervention. We almost went to war over Omran…  “Omran’s image was widely used to illustrate the brutality of the Assad regime as it tried to crush the opposition in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. But his family, like many others in rebel-held east Aleppo, are reported to have remained loyal to the regime throughout the siege.  They refused all media interviews and reportedly went into regime-held west Aleppo when they had a chance.”    More

Jeremy Corbyn Dares to Speak Truth About the 'War on Terror'—and British Voters Are Responding
While many progressives have portrayed the so-called War on Terror as an unfortunate but necessary evil, Corbyn has made a crucial break with the norms of the political establishment, condemning the imperial wars the West has waged and emphasizing that this military intervention has only fueled the violent extremism the British government claims to be combating. A new series of polls shows Corbyn has slashed Prime Minister Theresa May's enormous lead to just 3 points, and has surged ahead of her in London…  In the past, right-wing politicians have successfully exploited terror attacks like the kind carried out in Manchester, stoking fear and anti-Muslim bigotry to shift public opinion. Jeremy Corbyn, a left-wing anti-war stalwart, upended the dynamic by introducing a counter-narrative that challenged violent extremism at its roots. While many liberals spoke of the bombing as a mere tragedy, whitewashing its politicized nature, Corbyn pointed his finger at interventionism and empire.   More


US Senate passes resolution declaring Jerusalem 'undivided' capital of Israel
The non-binding resolution, introduced by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, was passed with widespread bipartisan cid:184CE5BB-1E66-463E-A88E-7D4CFF6EA125@hsd1.ma.comcast.net.support with a vote of 90-0, according to The Jerusalem Post.  The Jerusalem Post reported that the Senate passed the resolution in order to express its support for the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, which would move the US embassy to Jerusalem. Trump signed a presidential waiver to prevent the act’s implementationlast week, following on the footsteps of every US president since the act’s introduction. The resolution’s passing also came on the same day that Palestinians around the world commemorated the “Naksa,” meaning “setback,” marking the Israeli invasion and occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan Heights that began on June 5, 1967 during the Six-Day War, displacing some 300,000 Palestinians, as well as thousands of Syrians, from their homes.   More

Why Jerusalem is not recognized internationally as the capital of Israel
Israel - which captured the western half of Jerusalem in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war - frames the day as the "reunification" of the east and west of its capital.   Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem effectively put the entire city under de-facto Israeli control. The state's jurisdiction and ownership of Jerusalem, however, is not recognised by the international community, including the United States…  Under the 1947 UN Partition Plan to divide historic Palestine between Jewish and Arab states, Jerusalem was granted special status and was meant to be placed under international sovereignty and control. The special status was based on Jerusalem's religious importance to the three Abrahamic religions...  In 1980, Israel passed the"Jerusalem Law", stating that "Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel", thereby formalising its annexation of East Jerusalem.   In response, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 478 in 1980 declaring the law "null and void"… Though Israel claims Jerusalem as its undivided capital, the realities for those who live there cannot be more different. While Palestinians live under apartheid-like conditions, Israelis enjoy a sense of normality, guaranteed for them by their state.    More

US, Israel ‘jointly engaged in street fighting’ at UN
An early indication of the new campaign’s success, analysts noted, was the election last week of Danny Danon as a vice-president of the UN’s main representative forum, the General Assembly. Danon has been Israel’s ambassador to the UN since 2015.
He is known as an arch-opponent of the two-state solution and, before heading to the UN in New York, had repeatedly called for Israel to annex most of the West Bank…  “The US and Israel are now jointly engaged in ‘street fighting’ at the UN,” a Western diplomat, who wished to remain anonymous, told Al Jazeera. “Washington is throwing its weight around and bullying people. The old rules of diplomacy have been thrown out of the window.”  That view was confirmed by Hanan Ashrawi, a former Palestinian negotiator and member of the PLO Executive Committee.  “The Trump administration has become a very vocal and aggressive attorney for Israel,” she told Al Jazeera. “It threatens consequences for anyone seen to be supporting the Palestinians or criticising Israel.”   More

The Six Day War and Israeli Lies: What I Saw at the CIA
As a junior analyst at the CIA, I helped to draft the report that described Israel’s attack against Egypt on the morning of June 5, 1967.  There were sensitive communications intercepts that documented Israeli preparations for an attack, and no evidence of an Egyptian battle plan.  The Israelis had been clamoring about indications of Egyptian preparations for an invasion, but we had no sign of Egyptian readiness in terms of its air or armored power.  The assumption was that the Israelis were engaging in disinformation in order to gain U.S. support…  Rostow cited “assurances” from the Israeli ambassador in Washington that under no circumstances would the Israelis attack first.  Over the protests of Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan, the Israeli government lied to the White House about how the war started.  President Johnson was told that the Egyptians had initiated firing on Israeli settlements and that an Egyptian squadron had been observed heading toward Israeli. Neither statement was true.   More

On 50th Anniversary of Israeli Occupation, Palestinian Opinions Largely Ignored
This week marks the 50th anniversary of what’s called in Israel and the United States the Six-Day War, and an-Naksah (“The Setback”) in Palestine—a conflict that lasted from June 4 to June 10, 1967, and marked the beginning of a decades-long occupation of Gaza and the West Bank by the Israeli military. In their respective opinion pieces analyzing the conflict and its subsequent effect on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, major US media have favored Israeli and pro-Israel American voices at the expense of Palestinians by a wide margin. A survey of opinion pieces in major US newspapers and magazines over the past week found that an overwhelming majority of voices featured in the media—23 out of 26—were Israeli or American, while only three were Palestinian or Palestinian-American.   More

Israeli settler activity triples, 7,721 homes planned or approved
In the last six months, the Higher Planning Council for Judea and Samaria has advanced or authorized plans for 4,909 new homes in West Bank settlements, Peace Now said in a report it published on its website on Thursday.  Out of those, 3,178 were advanced or approved this week alone by the Higher Planning Council for Judea and Samaria, the group said. Additionally, in 2017, the government published tenders for 2,812 new homes, which is the last bureaucratic step needed before tractors can begin to work in the field.    More

Israeli politicians celebrate book that says Arabs should be incarcerated in camps
Likud politicians celebrated the launch of a book by an Islam expert Wednesday night, but it wasn’t your typical book party. The author, historian Raphael Israeli, says the Israeli Arabs are a fifth column who “suck from the state’s teats” and cannot be integrated into Israeli society.  He even cites admiration for the Americans’ internment of Japanese citizens during World War II and objects to the fact that Israeli Arabs "are not confined in camps."   More


Saturday, June 10:  Mobilizing Against Anti-BDS Legislation, @ 10:30 am - 1:00 pm
Central Square Branch Library, 45 Pearl St, Cambridge.  Legislation has been filed in the Massachusetts legislature which aims to penalize supporters of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. This legislation (S.1689 /H.1685), deceptively titled “An Act Prohibiting Discrimination in State Contracts,” is in fact a dangerous attempt to restrict our right to use boycotts to advocate for Palestinian human rights. Click here or here to learn more


Thusday, June 15: You're invited to a Boston Town Hall in Dorchester! 7pm, Great Hall in Codman Square. Attorney General Maura, along with Senator Linda Dorcena Forry, Representative Russell E. Holmes, City Councilor-at-Large Ayanna Pressley, and District 4 City Councilor Andrea J. Campbell and the Communities of Color, invite you to a Boston Town Hall Meeting

Tuesday, June 20:  Learn about the Moral Revival and the National Poor People's Campaign, 6pm
UU Urban Ministry, 10 Putnam Street Roxbury .  All Moral Revival supporters are invited to our quarterly gathering.  We will provide updates on the  national Poor People’s Campaign being led by Rev. William Barber,  and how our work can align with it.
A simple supper will be provided. Donations gratefully accepted.  Kindly RSVP here

Tuesday, June 20:  CENTRO PRESENTE: “Know and defend your rights: What to do if you are detained by Immigration,”   9am,  First Hispanic Baptist Church, 10 Kingsboro Park, Jamaica Plain.  Childcare and refreshments will be provided  For more information, call Centro Presente 857-256-2981