April 4 Call to Action: We are One
By jwjnational, on March 25th, 2011
On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, where he had gone to stand with sanitation workers demanding their dream: the right to bargain collectively for a voice at work and a better life. The workers were trying to form a union with AFSCME.
On April 4, 2011, join union members, community activists, people of faith, students, youth, LGBTQ, civil rights, and immigrant rights allies to stand in solidarity with working people in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and dozens of other states where well-funded, right-wing corporate politicians are trying to take away the rights Dr. King gave his life for: the freedom to bargain, to vote, to afford a college education and justice for all workers, immigrant and native-born. It’s a day to show movement with actions, teach-ins, worksite discussions, vigils, faith events – a day to be creative, but clear: We are one.
Visit www.we-r-1.org to find a local event, or add your own event to the growing list of activities. Some ideas for action:
•Worksite actions. Recruit co-workers to carry out a worksite activity – wearing red shirts, ribbons, or stickers – and having a discussion about the attacks on working people at lunch break.
•Organize a teach-in or screening of “At the River I Stand”, which tells the story of the Memphis sanitation workers and Dr. King’s support of their struggle.
•Organize a mobilization or action that links current organizing or bargaining fights with the moment we are in.
•Organize a prayer vigil in front of a symbol that represents Dr. King’s vision of a better world.
•Organize discussions at churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples the weekend before April 4.
•Organize an action with students who are fighting budget battles around education and make link to attack on workers in the public sector.
•Change your Facebook & twitter profile image to the JwJ “We Are One” image
The www.we-r-1.org website has some resources to help you plan your events and check out Jobs with Justice resources including a guerilla theater script, talking points, a video discussion guide, and chants.
It’s time to come together to curb unchecked corporate power. Who will control our communities: working people or corporations?
In Dr. King’s words:
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
Showing posts with label break with the democrats. Show all posts
Showing posts with label break with the democrats. Show all posts
Monday, April 04, 2011
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / March 12, 2011-In bitter cold rain:Thousands rally at Indianapolis State House
Markin comment: We need a fight to the finish this time. Fight for a general strike.
******
In bitter cold rain:Thousands rally at Indianapolis State House
By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / March 12, 2011
INDIANAPOLIS --On Thursday morning, March 10, three buses left the parking lot of a large supermarket in Lafayette, Indiana bound for the huge workers rights rally at the Indianapolis State House.
The buses were sponsored by the United Steelworkers Local 115A and the NAACP. About 100 workers, teachers, and peace and justice activists were on the buses. About two miles away another three buses left for Indianapolis with 100 activists from the Building Trades Council of Tippecanoe County and the Northwest Central Labor Council (AFL-CIO).
The buses were warm, cozy, and the spirit of solidarity pervaded the atmosphere. Travelers were determined to demonstrate their outrage at the rightwing onslaught on workers and education being planned by Indiana Republicans. Arriving about one hour later, riders disembarked from the warm and fuzzy atmosphere of the trip to a bitterly cold, cloudy, and windy rally in downtown Indianapolis.
The rally consisted of speeches, chants, prayers, and exhortations. Thousands of Hoosier workers withstood the cold to express their anger and their clear realization that the quality of their lives was in jeopardy.
Local 115A passed out some literature to articulate the reasons for enduring the cold and shouting for economic justice. They said that:
The struggle in Indiana was inspired by the events in Wisconsin.
The rally was about worker rights, including so-called Right-to-Work legislation and proposals to eliminate the right of teachers to organize.
The right-to-work bill that was not dead as some media had reported would negatively impact workers in both the private and public sectors.
Public sector rights, which need to be defended, had already been weakened by Indiana’s governor, Mitch Daniels.
The struggle in Indiana was not a publicity stunt, copying the movement in Wisconsin. Democratic House members walked out of the legislature and traveled to Illinois to forestall the Indiana body from passing the draconian legislation.
Taxpayers of the state were not funding the walkout by State House Democrats.
The so-called Right-to-Work bill was not the only threat posed to workers in Indiana. One bill would eliminate the secret ballot in union certification elections. Another would remove the right to collective bargaining from public employees at the local level. Another bill would prohibit local communities from establishing living wage laws in excess of the state determined minimum wage.
The struggle in Indiana is about protecting public education. Bills would authorize private firms to be hired to evaluate teacher performance, without any teacher input. School funding could be used to provide vouchers for use in private schools. Schools that did not meet certain performance standards would be transferred to private for-profit corporations.
The campaign to protect public education also required resisting the cutting of funds for colleges and universities.
The struggle for workers rights was relevant to the economy of the entire state of Indiana, not just the 300,000 unionized workers.
Another USW Local 115 document made the motivation for action crystal clear:
We stand at the statehouse as one people, one labor movement, one united group of citizens. We are proud to be union members and union supporters because together we have built Indiana! Whether we are construction workers, teachers or students --whether we clean buildings, deliver health care or manufacture useful products -- we stand together!
There were different assessments of the State House rally in Indianapolis. The conservative Indianapolis Star, on the one hand estimated that only 8,000 workers rallied in Indianapolis, but on the other hand pointed out how cold, windy, and rainy the weather was, suggesting that attendees were truly committed.
One trade unionist, recalling the rally of 20,000 Building Trades workers in 1995 indicated that he could not tell if this rally was bigger or smaller than that one. Another worker said that we needed at least 100,000 at the rally to make a difference.
Several speakers expressed their appreciation for those that attended the rally. AFL-CIO leaders from Kentucky and Wisconsin pointed out that the Indiana struggle was part of a larger movement involving workers from Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, and everywhere that the basic standard of living of workers was being challenged.
Perhaps the most poignant statement came from an Iraq war vet who reminded the crowd that $3 trillion had been spent on two costly, foolish wars in the 21st century that helped create today’s economic crisis.
The outcome of the ferment, anger, and rebelliousness all around the world remains unclear. But one fine folk singer, after leading the crowd in a rendition of “This Land is Your Land,” wished the movement well. He recalled Woody Guthrie’s injunction: “Take it easy, but take it.” Perhaps that is where we are at today.
[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]
******
In bitter cold rain:Thousands rally at Indianapolis State House
By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / March 12, 2011
INDIANAPOLIS --On Thursday morning, March 10, three buses left the parking lot of a large supermarket in Lafayette, Indiana bound for the huge workers rights rally at the Indianapolis State House.
The buses were sponsored by the United Steelworkers Local 115A and the NAACP. About 100 workers, teachers, and peace and justice activists were on the buses. About two miles away another three buses left for Indianapolis with 100 activists from the Building Trades Council of Tippecanoe County and the Northwest Central Labor Council (AFL-CIO).
The buses were warm, cozy, and the spirit of solidarity pervaded the atmosphere. Travelers were determined to demonstrate their outrage at the rightwing onslaught on workers and education being planned by Indiana Republicans. Arriving about one hour later, riders disembarked from the warm and fuzzy atmosphere of the trip to a bitterly cold, cloudy, and windy rally in downtown Indianapolis.
The rally consisted of speeches, chants, prayers, and exhortations. Thousands of Hoosier workers withstood the cold to express their anger and their clear realization that the quality of their lives was in jeopardy.
Local 115A passed out some literature to articulate the reasons for enduring the cold and shouting for economic justice. They said that:
The struggle in Indiana was inspired by the events in Wisconsin.
The rally was about worker rights, including so-called Right-to-Work legislation and proposals to eliminate the right of teachers to organize.
The right-to-work bill that was not dead as some media had reported would negatively impact workers in both the private and public sectors.
Public sector rights, which need to be defended, had already been weakened by Indiana’s governor, Mitch Daniels.
The struggle in Indiana was not a publicity stunt, copying the movement in Wisconsin. Democratic House members walked out of the legislature and traveled to Illinois to forestall the Indiana body from passing the draconian legislation.
Taxpayers of the state were not funding the walkout by State House Democrats.
The so-called Right-to-Work bill was not the only threat posed to workers in Indiana. One bill would eliminate the secret ballot in union certification elections. Another would remove the right to collective bargaining from public employees at the local level. Another bill would prohibit local communities from establishing living wage laws in excess of the state determined minimum wage.
The struggle in Indiana is about protecting public education. Bills would authorize private firms to be hired to evaluate teacher performance, without any teacher input. School funding could be used to provide vouchers for use in private schools. Schools that did not meet certain performance standards would be transferred to private for-profit corporations.
The campaign to protect public education also required resisting the cutting of funds for colleges and universities.
The struggle for workers rights was relevant to the economy of the entire state of Indiana, not just the 300,000 unionized workers.
Another USW Local 115 document made the motivation for action crystal clear:
We stand at the statehouse as one people, one labor movement, one united group of citizens. We are proud to be union members and union supporters because together we have built Indiana! Whether we are construction workers, teachers or students --whether we clean buildings, deliver health care or manufacture useful products -- we stand together!
There were different assessments of the State House rally in Indianapolis. The conservative Indianapolis Star, on the one hand estimated that only 8,000 workers rallied in Indianapolis, but on the other hand pointed out how cold, windy, and rainy the weather was, suggesting that attendees were truly committed.
One trade unionist, recalling the rally of 20,000 Building Trades workers in 1995 indicated that he could not tell if this rally was bigger or smaller than that one. Another worker said that we needed at least 100,000 at the rally to make a difference.
Several speakers expressed their appreciation for those that attended the rally. AFL-CIO leaders from Kentucky and Wisconsin pointed out that the Indiana struggle was part of a larger movement involving workers from Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, and everywhere that the basic standard of living of workers was being challenged.
Perhaps the most poignant statement came from an Iraq war vet who reminded the crowd that $3 trillion had been spent on two costly, foolish wars in the 21st century that helped create today’s economic crisis.
The outcome of the ferment, anger, and rebelliousness all around the world remains unclear. But one fine folk singer, after leading the crowd in a rendition of “This Land is Your Land,” wished the movement well. He recalled Woody Guthrie’s injunction: “Take it easy, but take it.” Perhaps that is where we are at today.
[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]
Dispatch from Madison:Governor Walker’s putsch-By Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog / March 11, 2011
Dispatch from Madison:Governor Walker’s putsch
By Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog / March 11, 2011
[This is the second of Paul Beckett's reports from Madison for The Rag Blog.]
MADISON, Wisconson -- In less than 24 hours, in a series of shocking and unprecedented developments, public sector union and collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin have been eviscerated by a Republican legislative majority controlled by Governor Scott Walker.
What seemed to Democratic legislative members and to neutral observers (but there are few of those in Wisconsin now) a putsch, began about 6 p.m. on the evening of Wednesday, March 9. As coups go, this one clearly was carefully -- even brilliantly -- prepared. The surprise was absolute.
Governor Walker spoke to a news conference on Monday, March 7. He referred to meetings at the Illinois border his staff had had with some of the 14 Democratic state senators who had left Wisconsin on February 17 in order to prevent passage of the “union busting” legislation, SB11. (See my article, “Madison and the Revolution at Home," on The Rag Blog, March 8, 2010.)
A compromise was brewing, Walker implied. “The problem,” Walker said, “is Senator [Mark] Miller.” (Miller is the titular leader of the Senate Democrats.) Maybe it is time, Walker went on, for the Democratic caucus to elect a new leader.
All eyes turned to the Group of 14 Democratic senators: were they divided? Would one or more accept some form of compromise and enable the Republicans to complete their passage of SB11? (The presence of only ONE Democratic senator in the chamber would legitimate the vote passing SB11.] (Read the full text of SB11 here.)
Meanwhile, unperceived, Republicans prepared a trap that would snap shut on Wednesday. The complicated, 144-page “Budget Repair Bill” (SB11) was being taken apart by staff and reformulated, ostensibly to strip out everything BUT the collective bargaining provisions.
The result was labeled a conference amendment to SB11, and was only six pages shorter than the original. But the point was that this new version could be labeled as non-fiscal and would not carry the quorum requirement of the original.
A bizarre reversal of positions was now apparent. Incorporation of the collective bargaining provisions within the Budget Repair Bill, very definitely a “fiscal” measure, had been stoutly justified by Governor Walker on the grounds that they were inseparable from the fiscal repair provisions. (Opponents had argued that the provisions had nothing to do with fiscal “repair” and should be taken out of the Budget Repair Bill and debated separately.)
Now, the Republican position was the opposite. The new version was NOT fiscal. With the quorum requirement changed, whether the Group of 14 were in the Chamber or in Illinois was immaterial. The bill could be passed with Republican votes alone.
The ambush worked perfectly. Democrats and protesters remained focused on the hold-out by the 14 Senators and on the possibility of compromise. Word of Walker’s plan leaked out only at the last minute, late on Wednesday afternoon. Beginning about 5:30 p.m. a cluster of emails, most of them billed “emergency,” appeared in my email inbox. The following, from the Dane County Democrats, is typical:
Breaking Update: Tonight at 6:00 pm in the Senate Parlor we are hearing that Senate GOP is going to split the budget repair bill, fiscal from non-fiscal, and ram it through in the dark of night. Given that they're attempting to ram through the bill without any media attention we wanted to let you know that very important developments are likely to occur tonight at 6:00 pm in the Senate Parlor.
Please be at the capital by 6:00PM TONIGHT!
Actually, I did not receive any of the emails until the next day. I was having a quick dinner a block away from the Capitol at Ian’s Pizza (an enterprise that has become known internationally for its role in keeping the protesters in the Capitol Rotunda sustained). I was on the way to a 7 p.m. debate between Madison’s two mayoral candidates.
Suddenly people were shouting, “To the Capitol. They’re going to pass the bill! Tonight!” People in groups of two, four, six, were hurrying up State Street toward the Capitol. I followed. At the top of State Street was a volcano-shaped mountain of snow (some five inches had fallen the night before). On its peak a tall young man stood shouting in an amazing voice: “Everyone to the Capitol! Everyone to the Capitol!” He waved us onward.
The word spread amazingly. By 6 p.m. hundreds were there; very soon thousands. It was dark. Everyone wanted to enter the Capitol. A long line formed at the only entrance that was (in a limited way) open. The line moved glacially. Inside, on the other side of the revolving door, protesters were packed, waiting, apparently, to be taken one-by-one through the security wanding procedure. Noise was deafening: “Whose house? Our house!”
Soon, however, any pretense of an open Capitol was abandoned; the police closed the doors absolutely, leaving some inside and thousands outside. People were angry.
Photo by Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog.
In the meantime, inside the Senate chamber, the deed was already done. In less than half an hour, a “conference committee” had reported out the revised bill. The committee Chair gaveled the meeting closed as the Democratic minority leader, Peter Barca, was shouting out the many ways in which the meeting was improper under the rules of the Legislature or illegal under state law.
The bill was then instantaneously passed (or “passed”) by the Senate Republicans.
By about 6:25 p.m. it was all done. The session was immediately adjourned, and the Republican Members were reportedly smuggled out of the Capitol building and beyond the crowds through a tunnel. (Their escape and removal by a special Madison Metro bus was not as secret as they would have liked.)
The word spread among the protesters and, more than any other time in the three weeks of protest, the mood was one of deep anger and frustration. Later in the evening some of the inside protesters opened an unguarded outside door. Crowds outside pushed in, brushing aside the police, who had raced to stop them. Thousands ended up inside, chanting, commiserating, venting. Most left by 2 or 3 a.m.
The expectation was that the building would open at 8 a.m. Thursday morning and that the Assembly would begin passage of the “conference amendment” by 9 a.m. In fact, the building did not reopen in the morning. The Department of Administration announced that an “assessment of building security requirements” was in progress. By 11 a trickle of protesters was permitted in as the Assembly slowly began to organize itself for the crucial session to pass the Senate version.
The session, billed a “Special Session” to allow more flexibility with rules and the traditions of the “Body” as it is always called, was brought to order at 12:34 p.m. Incongruously (considering he had been refused entry to the Capitol an hour or so earlier), the Reverend Jesse Jackson was allowed to deliver an opening prayer. He took no sides on the issues, and insisted that the legislators join hands (literally) across the aisle. They did, and then a bitter partisan verbal battle began.
A little over three hours of speeches were allowed. Most of these were from Democratic representatives clad in the bright orange T shirts proclaiming workers’ rights that they had adopted three weeks before. The session was broadcast by WisconsinEye and is available for viewing here.
The Democrats argued the illegality of procedures. They asserted that the bill before the Assembly was not the same one that had been before the Senate, and that senators (they were all Republican) had not been informed, had not been given copies of the new legislation, and could not have understood what they were voting for. They cited the shame brought on “this Body,” and on Wisconsin by all that had been done over the recent days and weeks.
More than that, they condemned the loss of workers’ rights and human rights, and the great harm that would be done to Wisconsin families and communities by the bill. Representative Tamara Grigsby, Democrat from the 18th District, delivered a particularly powerful and moving speech. (Had this reporter been a member of the Republican caucus he would have instantly moved across the aisle, sobbing with shame.)
To no avail. At 3:40 in the afternoon, abruptly, with some 20 representatives still to speak, the chair called for the vote (it is electronic and almost instantaneous), announced that the bill was passed, and adjourned the meeting.
The Republicans once again dematerialized mysteriously from the Capitol building.
It was over. Or, perhaps, just begun. The Democratic Party and labor unions are filing complaints and suits challenging the legality of the bill’s passage. The Governor’s use of the State Patrol (now under the direction of the father of Scott Fitzgerald, leader of the Senate Republicans, and his brother Jeff Fitzgerald, leader of the Assembly Republicans) to enforce the Capitol closures is being challenged.
But it has been understood from the beginning that this is less a legislative battle than a long-term political one that will touch every community and involve every important issue. It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of Wisconsin is at stake. And as Michael Moore has been saying so eloquently, the implications for the nation are huge.
Already planned for Saturday, March 12, is a major protest, bringing together farmers (who will mount a “tractorcade” around the Capitol square), labor, educators, students, liberal-progressives from all over the state, and many members of smaller communities that are becoming aware of the hit their schools and local governments are about to take from the Walker budget. Major speakers are invited, and it is reported that the 14 Democratic Senators will return to thank the public for their support.
Recall campaigns are planned on both sides. Under Wisconsin’s recall law almost a year must go by before a campaign to recall Scott Walker can begin. The same is true of Assembly members. So effectively, only senators are presently subject to recall. A bevy of progressive organizations are organizing campaigns directed against at least four of the Republican senators and, so far, there seems to be enormous energy behind these. Success would shift the Senate back to Democratic hands. The Republican recall campaigns, if they are pursued, would be directed against members of the “Group of 14” representing swing districts.
The political fallout of this tempestuous three weeks events will soon begin to be known. It is interesting, already, that one Republican senator and four Republican representatives voted against the “conference amendment.” And there is speculation that one reason that Scott Walker opted for this radical and legally risky legislative maneuver was that he sensed weakening on the part of other of the Republican senators.
[Dr. Paul Beckett lives in Madison, Wisconsin. He can be reached at beckettpa@gmail.com.]
Source
The Rag Blog
Posted by thorne dreyer at 6:00 PM
Labels: Direct Action, Labor Unions, Madison, Paul Beckett, Rag Bloggers, Reactionary Politcs, Scott Walker, Social Protest, Union Busting, Wisconsin
3 Make/read comments:
Extremist to the DHS said...
It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of Wisconsin is at stake.
Doubtful .... It is true that the future of the democratic party in WI, and to some extent elsewhere, is at stake. Without forced collection of union dues by governments, the slush fund to pay off democrat lawmakers with union money takes a hit. That affects both the unions, who get sweetheart deals from the democrat politicians they buy, and the democrat politicians themselves.
Other than that cast of characters, I am doubtful that anyone else is going to give a crap that public employees have to choose to write out a check to pay their union dues and no longer receive special job perks that average workers never see.
Mar 14, 2011 2:26:00 AM
Gaston Cantens said...
The Governor’s use of the State Patrol to enforce the Capitol closures is being challenged.
Mar 15, 2011 4:56:00 AM
Brother Jonah said...
Yeah, Extremist,we workers are just stupid and subhuman. Alle Sieg Heil am der Korporatisch Reich!
Mar 15, 2011 7:20:00 PM
By Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog / March 11, 2011
[This is the second of Paul Beckett's reports from Madison for The Rag Blog.]
MADISON, Wisconson -- In less than 24 hours, in a series of shocking and unprecedented developments, public sector union and collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin have been eviscerated by a Republican legislative majority controlled by Governor Scott Walker.
What seemed to Democratic legislative members and to neutral observers (but there are few of those in Wisconsin now) a putsch, began about 6 p.m. on the evening of Wednesday, March 9. As coups go, this one clearly was carefully -- even brilliantly -- prepared. The surprise was absolute.
Governor Walker spoke to a news conference on Monday, March 7. He referred to meetings at the Illinois border his staff had had with some of the 14 Democratic state senators who had left Wisconsin on February 17 in order to prevent passage of the “union busting” legislation, SB11. (See my article, “Madison and the Revolution at Home," on The Rag Blog, March 8, 2010.)
A compromise was brewing, Walker implied. “The problem,” Walker said, “is Senator [Mark] Miller.” (Miller is the titular leader of the Senate Democrats.) Maybe it is time, Walker went on, for the Democratic caucus to elect a new leader.
All eyes turned to the Group of 14 Democratic senators: were they divided? Would one or more accept some form of compromise and enable the Republicans to complete their passage of SB11? (The presence of only ONE Democratic senator in the chamber would legitimate the vote passing SB11.] (Read the full text of SB11 here.)
Meanwhile, unperceived, Republicans prepared a trap that would snap shut on Wednesday. The complicated, 144-page “Budget Repair Bill” (SB11) was being taken apart by staff and reformulated, ostensibly to strip out everything BUT the collective bargaining provisions.
The result was labeled a conference amendment to SB11, and was only six pages shorter than the original. But the point was that this new version could be labeled as non-fiscal and would not carry the quorum requirement of the original.
A bizarre reversal of positions was now apparent. Incorporation of the collective bargaining provisions within the Budget Repair Bill, very definitely a “fiscal” measure, had been stoutly justified by Governor Walker on the grounds that they were inseparable from the fiscal repair provisions. (Opponents had argued that the provisions had nothing to do with fiscal “repair” and should be taken out of the Budget Repair Bill and debated separately.)
Now, the Republican position was the opposite. The new version was NOT fiscal. With the quorum requirement changed, whether the Group of 14 were in the Chamber or in Illinois was immaterial. The bill could be passed with Republican votes alone.
The ambush worked perfectly. Democrats and protesters remained focused on the hold-out by the 14 Senators and on the possibility of compromise. Word of Walker’s plan leaked out only at the last minute, late on Wednesday afternoon. Beginning about 5:30 p.m. a cluster of emails, most of them billed “emergency,” appeared in my email inbox. The following, from the Dane County Democrats, is typical:
Breaking Update: Tonight at 6:00 pm in the Senate Parlor we are hearing that Senate GOP is going to split the budget repair bill, fiscal from non-fiscal, and ram it through in the dark of night. Given that they're attempting to ram through the bill without any media attention we wanted to let you know that very important developments are likely to occur tonight at 6:00 pm in the Senate Parlor.
Please be at the capital by 6:00PM TONIGHT!
Actually, I did not receive any of the emails until the next day. I was having a quick dinner a block away from the Capitol at Ian’s Pizza (an enterprise that has become known internationally for its role in keeping the protesters in the Capitol Rotunda sustained). I was on the way to a 7 p.m. debate between Madison’s two mayoral candidates.
Suddenly people were shouting, “To the Capitol. They’re going to pass the bill! Tonight!” People in groups of two, four, six, were hurrying up State Street toward the Capitol. I followed. At the top of State Street was a volcano-shaped mountain of snow (some five inches had fallen the night before). On its peak a tall young man stood shouting in an amazing voice: “Everyone to the Capitol! Everyone to the Capitol!” He waved us onward.
The word spread amazingly. By 6 p.m. hundreds were there; very soon thousands. It was dark. Everyone wanted to enter the Capitol. A long line formed at the only entrance that was (in a limited way) open. The line moved glacially. Inside, on the other side of the revolving door, protesters were packed, waiting, apparently, to be taken one-by-one through the security wanding procedure. Noise was deafening: “Whose house? Our house!”
Soon, however, any pretense of an open Capitol was abandoned; the police closed the doors absolutely, leaving some inside and thousands outside. People were angry.
Photo by Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog.
In the meantime, inside the Senate chamber, the deed was already done. In less than half an hour, a “conference committee” had reported out the revised bill. The committee Chair gaveled the meeting closed as the Democratic minority leader, Peter Barca, was shouting out the many ways in which the meeting was improper under the rules of the Legislature or illegal under state law.
The bill was then instantaneously passed (or “passed”) by the Senate Republicans.
By about 6:25 p.m. it was all done. The session was immediately adjourned, and the Republican Members were reportedly smuggled out of the Capitol building and beyond the crowds through a tunnel. (Their escape and removal by a special Madison Metro bus was not as secret as they would have liked.)
The word spread among the protesters and, more than any other time in the three weeks of protest, the mood was one of deep anger and frustration. Later in the evening some of the inside protesters opened an unguarded outside door. Crowds outside pushed in, brushing aside the police, who had raced to stop them. Thousands ended up inside, chanting, commiserating, venting. Most left by 2 or 3 a.m.
The expectation was that the building would open at 8 a.m. Thursday morning and that the Assembly would begin passage of the “conference amendment” by 9 a.m. In fact, the building did not reopen in the morning. The Department of Administration announced that an “assessment of building security requirements” was in progress. By 11 a trickle of protesters was permitted in as the Assembly slowly began to organize itself for the crucial session to pass the Senate version.
The session, billed a “Special Session” to allow more flexibility with rules and the traditions of the “Body” as it is always called, was brought to order at 12:34 p.m. Incongruously (considering he had been refused entry to the Capitol an hour or so earlier), the Reverend Jesse Jackson was allowed to deliver an opening prayer. He took no sides on the issues, and insisted that the legislators join hands (literally) across the aisle. They did, and then a bitter partisan verbal battle began.
A little over three hours of speeches were allowed. Most of these were from Democratic representatives clad in the bright orange T shirts proclaiming workers’ rights that they had adopted three weeks before. The session was broadcast by WisconsinEye and is available for viewing here.
The Democrats argued the illegality of procedures. They asserted that the bill before the Assembly was not the same one that had been before the Senate, and that senators (they were all Republican) had not been informed, had not been given copies of the new legislation, and could not have understood what they were voting for. They cited the shame brought on “this Body,” and on Wisconsin by all that had been done over the recent days and weeks.
More than that, they condemned the loss of workers’ rights and human rights, and the great harm that would be done to Wisconsin families and communities by the bill. Representative Tamara Grigsby, Democrat from the 18th District, delivered a particularly powerful and moving speech. (Had this reporter been a member of the Republican caucus he would have instantly moved across the aisle, sobbing with shame.)
To no avail. At 3:40 in the afternoon, abruptly, with some 20 representatives still to speak, the chair called for the vote (it is electronic and almost instantaneous), announced that the bill was passed, and adjourned the meeting.
The Republicans once again dematerialized mysteriously from the Capitol building.
It was over. Or, perhaps, just begun. The Democratic Party and labor unions are filing complaints and suits challenging the legality of the bill’s passage. The Governor’s use of the State Patrol (now under the direction of the father of Scott Fitzgerald, leader of the Senate Republicans, and his brother Jeff Fitzgerald, leader of the Assembly Republicans) to enforce the Capitol closures is being challenged.
But it has been understood from the beginning that this is less a legislative battle than a long-term political one that will touch every community and involve every important issue. It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of Wisconsin is at stake. And as Michael Moore has been saying so eloquently, the implications for the nation are huge.
Already planned for Saturday, March 12, is a major protest, bringing together farmers (who will mount a “tractorcade” around the Capitol square), labor, educators, students, liberal-progressives from all over the state, and many members of smaller communities that are becoming aware of the hit their schools and local governments are about to take from the Walker budget. Major speakers are invited, and it is reported that the 14 Democratic Senators will return to thank the public for their support.
Recall campaigns are planned on both sides. Under Wisconsin’s recall law almost a year must go by before a campaign to recall Scott Walker can begin. The same is true of Assembly members. So effectively, only senators are presently subject to recall. A bevy of progressive organizations are organizing campaigns directed against at least four of the Republican senators and, so far, there seems to be enormous energy behind these. Success would shift the Senate back to Democratic hands. The Republican recall campaigns, if they are pursued, would be directed against members of the “Group of 14” representing swing districts.
The political fallout of this tempestuous three weeks events will soon begin to be known. It is interesting, already, that one Republican senator and four Republican representatives voted against the “conference amendment.” And there is speculation that one reason that Scott Walker opted for this radical and legally risky legislative maneuver was that he sensed weakening on the part of other of the Republican senators.
[Dr. Paul Beckett lives in Madison, Wisconsin. He can be reached at beckettpa@gmail.com.]
Source
The Rag Blog
Posted by thorne dreyer at 6:00 PM
Labels: Direct Action, Labor Unions, Madison, Paul Beckett, Rag Bloggers, Reactionary Politcs, Scott Walker, Social Protest, Union Busting, Wisconsin
3 Make/read comments:
Extremist to the DHS said...
It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of Wisconsin is at stake.
Doubtful .... It is true that the future of the democratic party in WI, and to some extent elsewhere, is at stake. Without forced collection of union dues by governments, the slush fund to pay off democrat lawmakers with union money takes a hit. That affects both the unions, who get sweetheart deals from the democrat politicians they buy, and the democrat politicians themselves.
Other than that cast of characters, I am doubtful that anyone else is going to give a crap that public employees have to choose to write out a check to pay their union dues and no longer receive special job perks that average workers never see.
Mar 14, 2011 2:26:00 AM
Gaston Cantens said...
The Governor’s use of the State Patrol to enforce the Capitol closures is being challenged.
Mar 15, 2011 4:56:00 AM
Brother Jonah said...
Yeah, Extremist,we workers are just stupid and subhuman. Alle Sieg Heil am der Korporatisch Reich!
Mar 15, 2011 7:20:00 PM
Thursday, March 10, 2011
*Another Small Victory On The Death Penalty Abolition Front- Illinois Falls
Click on the headline to link to a The New York Times article about the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois.
Markin comment:
Below is a comment made in this space when New Mexico abolished the death penalty in 2009. The main points, the main political points, made there apply here especially the last one- Abolish the death penalty- everywhere!
Saturday, March 21, 2009
*Another Small Victory On The Death Penalty Abolition Front- New Mexico Falls
Commentary
This week, the week of March 16, 2009, Governor Bill Richardson (you remember him from the Democratic presidential campaign trail in 2008 and as a Obama Cabinet appointment gone awry, don’t you?) signed a bill passed by the New Mexico legislature that abolished the death penalty for capital crimes in that state. New Mexico thus joins New Jersey (2007) as the second state in recent times that has overturned this barbaric practice that had previously been on its books. We will take every, even small victory, on this front that we can get our hands on. Kudos.
As a general political proposition it has become apparent that the way that the death penalty will be abolished, short of an early act of a victorious workers government, is through piecemeal legislation in the individual states. So be it. On the federal level one should expect no positive action as the vaunted “liberal’ President Barack Obama is in favor of its retention (as, to be even-handed in our scorn, were then Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee Massachusetts Senator John Kerry- such is the nature of big time bourgeois politics).
That leaves the United States Supreme Court. Well, let’s move on back to that first paragraph about where the locus of action is on the death penalty question-the individual states. One little note though, some of the Supremes have been making noises (especially Justice Stevens) about abolition of the death penalty as a constitutional question. Well, we have been down that road before. I recall that former Justice Blackmon came out against the death penalty and received accolades and awards far and wide, especially from his brethren in the legal community. The only problem with that tribute from this corner is that he did so AFTER he left the bench. Where was the good Justice he when he could have done something (even in a technical sense like granting stays of execution and other legal niceties) about it though? This death penalty question is a quintessential democratic issue but, once again, don’t depend on the “house” liberals to be in the forefront of its abolition. Abolish The Death Penalty Everywhere Now!
Markin comment:
Below is a comment made in this space when New Mexico abolished the death penalty in 2009. The main points, the main political points, made there apply here especially the last one- Abolish the death penalty- everywhere!
Saturday, March 21, 2009
*Another Small Victory On The Death Penalty Abolition Front- New Mexico Falls
Commentary
This week, the week of March 16, 2009, Governor Bill Richardson (you remember him from the Democratic presidential campaign trail in 2008 and as a Obama Cabinet appointment gone awry, don’t you?) signed a bill passed by the New Mexico legislature that abolished the death penalty for capital crimes in that state. New Mexico thus joins New Jersey (2007) as the second state in recent times that has overturned this barbaric practice that had previously been on its books. We will take every, even small victory, on this front that we can get our hands on. Kudos.
As a general political proposition it has become apparent that the way that the death penalty will be abolished, short of an early act of a victorious workers government, is through piecemeal legislation in the individual states. So be it. On the federal level one should expect no positive action as the vaunted “liberal’ President Barack Obama is in favor of its retention (as, to be even-handed in our scorn, were then Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee Massachusetts Senator John Kerry- such is the nature of big time bourgeois politics).
That leaves the United States Supreme Court. Well, let’s move on back to that first paragraph about where the locus of action is on the death penalty question-the individual states. One little note though, some of the Supremes have been making noises (especially Justice Stevens) about abolition of the death penalty as a constitutional question. Well, we have been down that road before. I recall that former Justice Blackmon came out against the death penalty and received accolades and awards far and wide, especially from his brethren in the legal community. The only problem with that tribute from this corner is that he did so AFTER he left the bench. Where was the good Justice he when he could have done something (even in a technical sense like granting stays of execution and other legal niceties) about it though? This death penalty question is a quintessential democratic issue but, once again, don’t depend on the “house” liberals to be in the forefront of its abolition. Abolish The Death Penalty Everywhere Now!
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
A Cold “Civil War” Is Brewing In The Land - In Solidarity With The Wisconsin Public Workers’ Unions Struggle- Reflections On Boston’s Labor Support Rally
Click on the headline to link to a Boston Indymedia entry for the rally held at the Massachusetts State House in Boston in support of the Wisconsin Public Workers’ Unions’ struggle to save collective bargaining on Tuesday February 22, 2011,
Markin comment:
Sometimes a rally, like many other events, is just a rally. For example, after a while the various anti-war rallies, their speakers, and their purposes (lately Iraq, Afghanistan, or both) have tended to be pro forma events, necessary but very much on a well-trodden subject that we leftist militants are not gaining ground on among the masses that we are trying to influence. On Tuesday February 22, 2011, at a rally held in front of the Massachusetts State House in Boston in support of the beleaguered and battling Wisconsin public workers unions, however, there was a refreshing and positive change.
On that day, on short notice, several hundred spirited union workers, public and private, and their supporters rallied on behalf of their brothers and sisters in Wisconsin. Of course, the now obligatory anti-union, anti-immigrant, anti-anti Tea Party movement sent a small force to suck up some bourgeois media attention (and got it out of all proportion to their numbers under some quaint theory of even-handed impartiality). I do not know, or remember, the names of every union that was represented but it was a cross-section of the labor movement in the Boston area, and the representatives were serious in their commitment and understanding that the class struggle, hell, the class war has just heated up several degrees even if they would not have been able to articulate it that way. Clearly understood though was that the lines were now drawn by this vanguard militant segment of the local labor movement.
Needless to say, lacking serious class-struggle traditions in this generation (and part of the last) there were many workers, young and old, in the crowd who had illusions in the good offices of the government, especially in the good offices of the Democratic Party occupants of that government. That was reflected in the speakers’ list chock full of Democratic Party office-holders, from Congressmen to locals, who had even the most attenuated relationship to the local labor movement, including no friend of labor Governor Deval Patrick fresh from a recent electoral win in heavily liberal Massachusetts. These illusions will, of necessity, begin to shake themselves out a bit as the class struggle gets even hotter but for today there is a militant base on which to draw around the struggle to preserve our unions, preserve the heart of a union, the collective-bargaining process (and, needless to say as well, the right to strike).
To give dramatic symbolism to the day’s efforts and to underline what is at stake, as well as highlight that cold “civil war” warning in the headline to today’s entry let me finish with this little observation seen in front of the State House. The Tea Party contingent set up their small operation, unknowingly I am sure, across Beacon Street in front of the now-famous Saint-Gaudens sculpture depicting the black soldiers of the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Regiment (led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw)that did great service to the Union cause down in the South during the American Civil War, and who had the privilege of entering defeated and captured Charleston, South Carolina in 1865 to the words of “John Brown’s Body.” In order to counteract the effect of the heckling by the Tea Party advocates some young, stalwart craft union workers got up behind that cohort and used the sculpture as a standing ground to do their pro-union sloganeering work. While they also may not have known what the frieze represented as we head to the observance of the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War that scene should give one pause for reflection.
Markin comment:
Sometimes a rally, like many other events, is just a rally. For example, after a while the various anti-war rallies, their speakers, and their purposes (lately Iraq, Afghanistan, or both) have tended to be pro forma events, necessary but very much on a well-trodden subject that we leftist militants are not gaining ground on among the masses that we are trying to influence. On Tuesday February 22, 2011, at a rally held in front of the Massachusetts State House in Boston in support of the beleaguered and battling Wisconsin public workers unions, however, there was a refreshing and positive change.
On that day, on short notice, several hundred spirited union workers, public and private, and their supporters rallied on behalf of their brothers and sisters in Wisconsin. Of course, the now obligatory anti-union, anti-immigrant, anti-anti Tea Party movement sent a small force to suck up some bourgeois media attention (and got it out of all proportion to their numbers under some quaint theory of even-handed impartiality). I do not know, or remember, the names of every union that was represented but it was a cross-section of the labor movement in the Boston area, and the representatives were serious in their commitment and understanding that the class struggle, hell, the class war has just heated up several degrees even if they would not have been able to articulate it that way. Clearly understood though was that the lines were now drawn by this vanguard militant segment of the local labor movement.
Needless to say, lacking serious class-struggle traditions in this generation (and part of the last) there were many workers, young and old, in the crowd who had illusions in the good offices of the government, especially in the good offices of the Democratic Party occupants of that government. That was reflected in the speakers’ list chock full of Democratic Party office-holders, from Congressmen to locals, who had even the most attenuated relationship to the local labor movement, including no friend of labor Governor Deval Patrick fresh from a recent electoral win in heavily liberal Massachusetts. These illusions will, of necessity, begin to shake themselves out a bit as the class struggle gets even hotter but for today there is a militant base on which to draw around the struggle to preserve our unions, preserve the heart of a union, the collective-bargaining process (and, needless to say as well, the right to strike).
To give dramatic symbolism to the day’s efforts and to underline what is at stake, as well as highlight that cold “civil war” warning in the headline to today’s entry let me finish with this little observation seen in front of the State House. The Tea Party contingent set up their small operation, unknowingly I am sure, across Beacon Street in front of the now-famous Saint-Gaudens sculpture depicting the black soldiers of the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Regiment (led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw)that did great service to the Union cause down in the South during the American Civil War, and who had the privilege of entering defeated and captured Charleston, South Carolina in 1865 to the words of “John Brown’s Body.” In order to counteract the effect of the heckling by the Tea Party advocates some young, stalwart craft union workers got up behind that cohort and used the sculpture as a standing ground to do their pro-union sloganeering work. While they also may not have known what the frieze represented as we head to the observance of the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War that scene should give one pause for reflection.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Victory To The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions!- Hands Off The Unions! -Hands Off The Democratic Legislators
Markin comment:
I suppose we all knew that it would come to this. Probably the last serious bastion of organized labor-the public employees unions are starting to face the onslaught of governmental attempts to break those collective bargaining agreements, crying budgetary crisis- the heart of any union operation. With the demise of the industrial unions (representing less than ten percent cent of the workforce in the wake of the deindustrialization of America) the public employee union became the obvious target in the bosses' relentless struggle to break any collective working agreements. Wisconsin, as all sides agree, is the tip of the iceberg and will be closely watched by other states (and the federal government).
On the question of the Democratic legislators who have left the state (at least as of today, February 18, 2011), to avoid voting on the proposals. While it is unusual for those of us who consider themselves communist labor militants to demand hands off for this crowd under normal circumstances in this case we are duty-bound to defend their action. Stay the hell out of Wisconsin until this blows over. A good idea would be to put workers on the borders to make sure the State Police don't try to force them back. Okay. Strange times that we live in, strange indeed.
*******
Wisconsin Public Workers Protest Governor's Proposal .Article Comments (277) more in Politics & Policy ».EmailPrintSave This ↓ More.
Text By KRIS MAHER And DOUGLAS BELKIN
For a second straight day, thousands of Wisconsin public employees converged on the state capitol in Madison to protest Gov. Scott Walker's plan to close the state's projected $3.6 billion budget shortfall by increasing the cost of their pensions and health benefits and taking away their collective bargaining rights.
About 10,000 teachers, nurses, city workers and firefighters chanted "Kill the Bill" and held signs outside that said "Recall Walker," while others squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder inside the capitol rotunda as a key legislative panel held hearings on the bill.
View Full Image
Associated Press
In Madison, Wis., thousands protested a plan to balance the state's budget in part by stripping public workers of bargaining rights.
.Mr. Walker said Wednesday afternoon he would listen to lawmakers' concerns but didn't plan "to fundamentally undermine the principle of the bill, which is to allow not only the state but local governments to balance their budgets."
In exchange for bearing more costs and losing bargaining leverage, the state's 170,000 public employees were promised no furloughs or layoffs. Mr. Walker has threatened to order layoffs of up to 6,000 state workers if the measure fails.
President Barack Obama called Mr. Walker's bill an "assault on unions." He made the remark in the course of an interview with a Milwaukee radio station about federal budget issues.
"I think it's very important for us to understand that public employees, they're our neighbors, they're our friends," Mr. Obama said. "These are folks who are teachers and they're firefighters and they're social workers and they're police officers."
In Madison, the protesters aimed to sway a handful of moderate Republican senators from traditionally Democratic districts.
Mr. Walker said the dramatic action is necessary to close the state's gaping budget hole for the fiscal year starting in July and avoid massive employee layoffs.
"We're at a point of crisis," Mr. Walker told reporters. And while he said he appreciated the concerns of the public employees shouting outside his office door, taxpayers "need to be heard as well."
Beyond eliminating collective bargaining rights, the bill would force public workers to pay half the cost of their pensions and at least 12.6% of their health-care coverage.
Phil Neuenfeldt, president of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO called the bill "an attack on organized labor and middle class values."The protests have been among the most well attended in recent Wisconsin history.
Public schools in Madison were closed on Wednesday because 40% of teachers called in sick.
Archbishop Jerome Listecki of the Wisconsin Catholic Conference called on state lawmakers to "carefully consider" the implications of removing collective-bargaining rights for public workers.
Under Mr. Walker's proposal, public-worker unions could still represent employees, but could not pursue pay increases above those pegged to the Consumer Price Index unless they were approved by a public referendum. Unions also could not force employees to pay dues and would have to hold votes once a year to stay organized.
Write to Kris Maher at kris.maher@wsj.com and Douglas Belkin at doug.belkin@wsj.com
Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit
I suppose we all knew that it would come to this. Probably the last serious bastion of organized labor-the public employees unions are starting to face the onslaught of governmental attempts to break those collective bargaining agreements, crying budgetary crisis- the heart of any union operation. With the demise of the industrial unions (representing less than ten percent cent of the workforce in the wake of the deindustrialization of America) the public employee union became the obvious target in the bosses' relentless struggle to break any collective working agreements. Wisconsin, as all sides agree, is the tip of the iceberg and will be closely watched by other states (and the federal government).
On the question of the Democratic legislators who have left the state (at least as of today, February 18, 2011), to avoid voting on the proposals. While it is unusual for those of us who consider themselves communist labor militants to demand hands off for this crowd under normal circumstances in this case we are duty-bound to defend their action. Stay the hell out of Wisconsin until this blows over. A good idea would be to put workers on the borders to make sure the State Police don't try to force them back. Okay. Strange times that we live in, strange indeed.
*******
Wisconsin Public Workers Protest Governor's Proposal .Article Comments (277) more in Politics & Policy ».EmailPrintSave This ↓ More.
Text By KRIS MAHER And DOUGLAS BELKIN
For a second straight day, thousands of Wisconsin public employees converged on the state capitol in Madison to protest Gov. Scott Walker's plan to close the state's projected $3.6 billion budget shortfall by increasing the cost of their pensions and health benefits and taking away their collective bargaining rights.
About 10,000 teachers, nurses, city workers and firefighters chanted "Kill the Bill" and held signs outside that said "Recall Walker," while others squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder inside the capitol rotunda as a key legislative panel held hearings on the bill.
View Full Image
Associated Press
In Madison, Wis., thousands protested a plan to balance the state's budget in part by stripping public workers of bargaining rights.
.Mr. Walker said Wednesday afternoon he would listen to lawmakers' concerns but didn't plan "to fundamentally undermine the principle of the bill, which is to allow not only the state but local governments to balance their budgets."
In exchange for bearing more costs and losing bargaining leverage, the state's 170,000 public employees were promised no furloughs or layoffs. Mr. Walker has threatened to order layoffs of up to 6,000 state workers if the measure fails.
President Barack Obama called Mr. Walker's bill an "assault on unions." He made the remark in the course of an interview with a Milwaukee radio station about federal budget issues.
"I think it's very important for us to understand that public employees, they're our neighbors, they're our friends," Mr. Obama said. "These are folks who are teachers and they're firefighters and they're social workers and they're police officers."
In Madison, the protesters aimed to sway a handful of moderate Republican senators from traditionally Democratic districts.
Mr. Walker said the dramatic action is necessary to close the state's gaping budget hole for the fiscal year starting in July and avoid massive employee layoffs.
"We're at a point of crisis," Mr. Walker told reporters. And while he said he appreciated the concerns of the public employees shouting outside his office door, taxpayers "need to be heard as well."
Beyond eliminating collective bargaining rights, the bill would force public workers to pay half the cost of their pensions and at least 12.6% of their health-care coverage.
Phil Neuenfeldt, president of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO called the bill "an attack on organized labor and middle class values."The protests have been among the most well attended in recent Wisconsin history.
Public schools in Madison were closed on Wednesday because 40% of teachers called in sick.
Archbishop Jerome Listecki of the Wisconsin Catholic Conference called on state lawmakers to "carefully consider" the implications of removing collective-bargaining rights for public workers.
Under Mr. Walker's proposal, public-worker unions could still represent employees, but could not pursue pay increases above those pegged to the Consumer Price Index unless they were approved by a public referendum. Unions also could not force employees to pay dues and would have to hold votes once a year to stay organized.
Write to Kris Maher at kris.maher@wsj.com and Douglas Belkin at doug.belkin@wsj.com
Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
From The "Renegade Eye" Blog-"Republicrats Target Social Security"
Click on the headline to link to the above article via the Renegade Eye blog.
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future- The Fight, The Very Long Fight, To Break With The Democrats- “McGovern And The New Left” (1972)
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*********
Markin comment on this article:
As I have mentioned, many times before, in previous comments about my early political career as late as 1968 I was in the throes of “enchantment” with the Democratic Party left-wing as the be all and end all for progressive political struggle. I have mentioned the name Robert Kennedy whom I tramped around the country for in the spring of 1968. And, although I am red-faced with embarrassment every time I say it to this day, I humped around the country for Hubert Horatio Humphrey in the fall of that year. Why? To “fight the right” in the personage of one Richard Milhous Nixon, later the President of the United States and artless common criminal.
And that is exactly the point of the article and my placing it in this space, given the recent political calculus around support (now fading support) for current President Barack Obama as the “progressive”, progressive black Democratic candidate to boot, against today’s version of the political right. Some things never change and some people never learn any lessons but that doesn’t mean that they should not be put out there. Break with the Democrats!, obviously, for those of use who fight for a workers party that fights for a workers government as part of the struggle for our communist future is simply the beginning of wisdom. Needless to say , really needless to say in this case, breaking with the Republicans, Greens, and other assorted non-worker class programs falls under that same umbrella.
Note: There is one distinction that should be noted between 1972 and 2011 when reading this article . Today (or rather 2008) the push for Obama (or Hilary Clinton, for that matter) represented something a move to the left (or to politics)by the youth, if only momentarily, the push for George McGovern in 1972 by elements of the left that should have and did know better actually represented a step to the right, and, more importantly a step, a long step back to the rat hole (nice term, right?) of bourgeois politics. And we have been stuck there ever since. Forward!
*********
From The Revolutionary Communist Youth (forebear of the Spartacus Youth Clubs) Newsletter, Number 14, October-November 1972
McGOVERN AND THE NEW LEFT
The New Left entered its death agony when SDS fell apart, George McGovern is now attempt¬ing to bury the corpse.
The New Left was rooted in the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, particularly the campus milieu. Born as the advance youth guard of liberal, Social Democratic and bourgeois idealism, it was tied to the Kennedy wing of the ruling class. While the early alliance broke down, symbolized by the sellout of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Convention, it produced no qualitative break, SDS was still willing to go "part of the way with LBJ." But the inability of the capitalists to realize even its minimal promises of peace and civil rights eventually drove the New Left further and further away from conscious, active support. But most of the New Left activists did not move in the direction of the working class. The New Left, having broken pragmatically with the ruling class, saw little hope in the American proletariat still immersed in the reaction and passivity of Cold War red purges. Instead, it oriented in an empirical manner to what was currently in motion—the "Third World," oppressed minorities, and even the students themselves.
But it is now 1972. The "Third World" is not toppling U.S. imperialism. Rather, Mao is inviting Nixon to China. The black nationalist movement is in ruins, with its most militant and best known expression, the Black Panther Party, morally disgraced, split and physically defeated by the repressive apparatus of the state. And the Vietnam war continues, despite the election of three so-called "peace" candidates.
The repeated failures of the New Left have clearly demonstrated the bankruptcy of its theoretical conceptions. Some of its components have drawn the correct conclusion that only the working class has the power to destroy imperialism. Most of them have returned to the waiting arms of the liberal bourgeoisie.
Bloc of 5! Classes
Important in this process is the role played by the Stalinist DRV-NLF itself. The NLF's struggle against U.S. imperialism and bourgeois liberalism's embracing of the American war effort in Vietnam helped create the New Left. Yet this moral and political authority which the NLF possessed has now facilitated the capitulation of the New Left. The 7-point Peace Plan sellout and the all but open support for McGovern in the pages of Nhari Dan by the Hanoi bureaucracy all served to further disorient those rooted in impressionism.
According to the June 1972 Liberated Guardian:
"... Nixon could encourage a coup in Saigon led by someone with the stature of Big Minn. Such a coup would at some point in the future lead to the tripartite coalition the NLF has been seeking ....
"If Nixon can work out such a deal the left must educate the American people about the war sufficiently so that people will see the defeat for just that. Nixon will be seen as a loser rather than a peace-maker."
Thus, according to the Liberated Guardian, if the NLF forms a coalition government with Nixon's consent with a treacherous compradore like Minh, this is not a sellout but a victory! The extent to which political degeneration has taken place can be seen in the fact that not even the Chinese Communist Party, when they were chasing Chiang Kai-shek as an ally, ever stooped to declaring that the comprador bourgeoisie was somehow a friend of the "people."
But what is the nature of the "tripartite coalition"? If there is any way of preventing the gains that the construction of even a deformed (Stalinist) workers state would produce, short of a U.S. battlefield victory, the NLF's "coalition" is it. It is proposed precisely in order to avoid the dangerous necessity of taking power through a social revolution carried to completion by the working class and poor peasants. Once set in motion the revolution might well transcend the confines the Stalinist bureaucracy seeks to keep it in.
Thus, during the Tet offensive, when the NLF was at the height of its influence among the urban masses, it refused to establish Soviets. When Quang Tri was taken during the spring offensive, private property was declared sacrosanct, and a new government established composed predomi¬nantly of Saigon's ex-officials
"Small and Vacillating" Rifts
The Spring Offensive which could have sent Thieu packing allowed McGovern, as the representative of outright bourgeois defeatism, to gain leadership of the Democratic Party, The misleadership and defeats of the New Left aided him in gaining almost unchallenged hegemony over the campus population,, As spring student strikes took intermissions during the Democratic Party primaries, students, mostly in the newly enfranchised 18-21 year-old group, provided the door-bell ringing, caucus-packing machinery that enabled McGovern to take advantage of the rise of bourgeois defeatism. The pact was sealed at the Democratic Convention with the dumping of Daley and the New Leftish quotas of Blacks, women and youth.
The tide of pro-Mc-Govern sentiment that has swept the campus milieu has dragged with it almost the entire New Left to one degree or another. The opportunist rationales used to justify capitulation have been endless.
Remarkable in its own way for cynicism and sophism is the Guardian. In the lead article of 23 August 1972, it explained in detail that McGovern is an imperialist politician, essentially no different than the others, but then went on to speak "... of the necessity to take advantage of every rift and antagonism, however small and vacillating [our emphasis], that exist among the ranks of the bourgeoisie.". We do no oppose the the growing trend of those among the masses who intend to vote for McGovern..."
But the bourgeoisie is not a monolithic entity. There are always "small and vacillating" rifts within it. There were "small and vacillating" rift between Hitler and Goebbels. Not only is the Guardian advocating a bloc with one section of the bourgeoisie, but it is using a rationale that could equally justify such a bloc at any time o place. This is the logic of naked capitulationism
Left Moves Right
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, after years' attempting wrecking jobs on the Left for being "too political" have shown up with shorn loci deep in the McGovern camp. But what is more natural, since the two of them have continuous: stated in the past that there was no difference between the "exploiters" on the Left and the bourgeoisie? The remnants of Weatherman are hoping that McGovern will lessen the repression, enabling them to walk unimpeded to the land of milk, hone and "power to the people." Rennie Davis, Dave Dellinger and other "movement" individuals popularized by the bourgeois press have adopted the slogan "Evict Nixon."
The SWP has continued to recruit from its series of Pop Fronts by preaching their "independence" from all political parties. When attacked from either the right or the left, the SWP could simply chant "We're for non-exclusion. Every body should vote for who they want." Of course this "line" succeeded beyond their wildest dream (or nightmares)—NPAC and SMC supporters are voting for who they choose... McGovern.' And the SWP's response? "After McGovern—Us" as the tell their members, planning on a tremendous influx of new, but non-socialist, recruits through the Jenness-Pulley campaign as disillusioned McGovern supporters swarm to the SWV/YSA after the elections.
The orthodox Maoists of the Revolutionary Union (RU) claim that they are to the left of the SWP; in wishing to build a "mass independent anti imperialist movement." Through the Attica Brigade, an "anti-imperialist" marching society that they are currently involved in, they have issued leaflet urging McGovern supporters to build the mass anti-imperialist movement, since it was after all, this "movement" which built McGovern
Likewise, the Maoist groups participating in the People's Solidarity Committee (Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization—formerly Young Lords, Venceremos, I Wor Kuen, Black Workers Congress, and others, including the RU push the slogan "Defeat Nixon" without mentioning McGovern, thus giving the latter backhanded support.
No Steps Forward, Another Back
The role of PL/SDS is particularly unfortunate The WSA was the pro-working-class wing of the old SDS. Its victory through political struggle over RYM offered the possibility of winning a large part of the New Left to the side of the working class. But PL was incapable of taking advantage of that opportunity. Having no conception of the rob that a communist youth organization could play it formalized its incapacity into the "theory" that "students cannot tell workers what to do," Even at its most post-split left point, PL specifically, emphatically and repeatedly rejected the idea that SDS should be a socialist youth group. PL could think of nothing better for SDS than wretched gimmicks like the Campus Worker-Student Alliance strategy or endless PL unemployment marches. Having no strategy for pro-working-class students, it was inevitable that SDS should sink back into the swamp of New Leftism, carried away by the McGovern tide.
Miami, McGovern and Mindless Activism
At the Democratic Convention, when McGovern stated at a Prisoners of War wives' meeting that -he would keep troops in Thailand until the prisoners were returned, SDS gathered up a flock of indignant liberals to "confront" him at his headquarters, McGovern, joined by national TV, met them personally, and informed them that the state¬ment meant nothing, since he had previously promised to withdraw all troops from Indochina regardless of other NLF activity.
An SDSer then handed McGovern their "anti-racism" bill, requesting his signature. He pointed out that the bill which forbade police to "assault a minority person except in provable self-defense" (and when don't the police claim self-defense?)said nothing about assaults on whites. The SDSer then stated that the Senator had the old bill, and immediately set off for a copy of the new bill for his signature. Rarely has SDS disgraced itself so utterly and publicly.
"Political Working Class" for McGovern
The resolution of the National Caucus of Labor Committees at the Trade Unionists for Action and Democracy conference stated that "TUAD will refuse all support to candidates for public office who advocate wage controls in any form" (our emphasis). Given the proper situation, not only might a bourgeois candidate denounce wage controls (and in fact McGovern has said that Nixon's wage controls are "unfair") but he could conceivably mouth every one of the points in the NCLC program, only to drop them after the election, as the bourgeois state remains intact. The NCLC's failure to declare their opposition to all bourgeois candidates, regardless of what they say, exposes their incapacity to take a clear working-class line.
In the last analysis, despite their bitter denunciations of him, the NCLC serves as a left cover for McGovern's economic schemes, just as the SWP serves as a left cover for his peace promises.
It is not simply that McGovern is a capitalist candidate—indeed the NCLC has shown a willingness in the past to bloc with the CIA-compromised Socialist Party against the rest of the left, when they attacked the then pro-working-class Worker-Student Alliance wing of SDS in the SP's New America.
McGovern represents an attempt by one bourgeois wing to draw all wings of the radical petty-bourgeois intelligentsia under its banner. Therefore, McGovern came up with his "plan," which, though considerably more modest than the NCLC's schemes, is fundamentally of the same species. Such reform platforms of the early McGovern-NCLC have traditionally served as the programs of Popular Fronts. How radical and deep-going they are is determined by the depth of the working-class radicalization and militancy that they are designed to dissipate. And when the crisis is over the program is burned. Whether the promises of the Popular Front are minimal or far-reaching is irrelevant, as they are worth no more than the paper they are printed on, as McGovern's abandonment of his pre-nomination platform shows.
No Middle Road
If leaflets, bull sessions or simple activism were enough to end the war, the war would have been ended long ago. If ringing door-bells and lesser evilism in elections were enough, the war would never have gotten started. From Eisenhower with his promise to "go personally to Korea and bring the boys home," through Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, with his "secret peace plan," all American presidents have been "peace candidates" of one form or another. But unable to fight its way out of the pragmatism which gave it birth, the New Left has continued like a punch-drunk fighter to reel from one post-election knock-out to another. The New Left has spent virtually its entire existence trying to find a middle road between reformism and revolution, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. It has not yet understood that no such middle road exists.
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*********
Markin comment on this article:
As I have mentioned, many times before, in previous comments about my early political career as late as 1968 I was in the throes of “enchantment” with the Democratic Party left-wing as the be all and end all for progressive political struggle. I have mentioned the name Robert Kennedy whom I tramped around the country for in the spring of 1968. And, although I am red-faced with embarrassment every time I say it to this day, I humped around the country for Hubert Horatio Humphrey in the fall of that year. Why? To “fight the right” in the personage of one Richard Milhous Nixon, later the President of the United States and artless common criminal.
And that is exactly the point of the article and my placing it in this space, given the recent political calculus around support (now fading support) for current President Barack Obama as the “progressive”, progressive black Democratic candidate to boot, against today’s version of the political right. Some things never change and some people never learn any lessons but that doesn’t mean that they should not be put out there. Break with the Democrats!, obviously, for those of use who fight for a workers party that fights for a workers government as part of the struggle for our communist future is simply the beginning of wisdom. Needless to say , really needless to say in this case, breaking with the Republicans, Greens, and other assorted non-worker class programs falls under that same umbrella.
Note: There is one distinction that should be noted between 1972 and 2011 when reading this article . Today (or rather 2008) the push for Obama (or Hilary Clinton, for that matter) represented something a move to the left (or to politics)by the youth, if only momentarily, the push for George McGovern in 1972 by elements of the left that should have and did know better actually represented a step to the right, and, more importantly a step, a long step back to the rat hole (nice term, right?) of bourgeois politics. And we have been stuck there ever since. Forward!
*********
From The Revolutionary Communist Youth (forebear of the Spartacus Youth Clubs) Newsletter, Number 14, October-November 1972
McGOVERN AND THE NEW LEFT
The New Left entered its death agony when SDS fell apart, George McGovern is now attempt¬ing to bury the corpse.
The New Left was rooted in the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, particularly the campus milieu. Born as the advance youth guard of liberal, Social Democratic and bourgeois idealism, it was tied to the Kennedy wing of the ruling class. While the early alliance broke down, symbolized by the sellout of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Convention, it produced no qualitative break, SDS was still willing to go "part of the way with LBJ." But the inability of the capitalists to realize even its minimal promises of peace and civil rights eventually drove the New Left further and further away from conscious, active support. But most of the New Left activists did not move in the direction of the working class. The New Left, having broken pragmatically with the ruling class, saw little hope in the American proletariat still immersed in the reaction and passivity of Cold War red purges. Instead, it oriented in an empirical manner to what was currently in motion—the "Third World," oppressed minorities, and even the students themselves.
But it is now 1972. The "Third World" is not toppling U.S. imperialism. Rather, Mao is inviting Nixon to China. The black nationalist movement is in ruins, with its most militant and best known expression, the Black Panther Party, morally disgraced, split and physically defeated by the repressive apparatus of the state. And the Vietnam war continues, despite the election of three so-called "peace" candidates.
The repeated failures of the New Left have clearly demonstrated the bankruptcy of its theoretical conceptions. Some of its components have drawn the correct conclusion that only the working class has the power to destroy imperialism. Most of them have returned to the waiting arms of the liberal bourgeoisie.
Bloc of 5! Classes
Important in this process is the role played by the Stalinist DRV-NLF itself. The NLF's struggle against U.S. imperialism and bourgeois liberalism's embracing of the American war effort in Vietnam helped create the New Left. Yet this moral and political authority which the NLF possessed has now facilitated the capitulation of the New Left. The 7-point Peace Plan sellout and the all but open support for McGovern in the pages of Nhari Dan by the Hanoi bureaucracy all served to further disorient those rooted in impressionism.
According to the June 1972 Liberated Guardian:
"... Nixon could encourage a coup in Saigon led by someone with the stature of Big Minn. Such a coup would at some point in the future lead to the tripartite coalition the NLF has been seeking ....
"If Nixon can work out such a deal the left must educate the American people about the war sufficiently so that people will see the defeat for just that. Nixon will be seen as a loser rather than a peace-maker."
Thus, according to the Liberated Guardian, if the NLF forms a coalition government with Nixon's consent with a treacherous compradore like Minh, this is not a sellout but a victory! The extent to which political degeneration has taken place can be seen in the fact that not even the Chinese Communist Party, when they were chasing Chiang Kai-shek as an ally, ever stooped to declaring that the comprador bourgeoisie was somehow a friend of the "people."
But what is the nature of the "tripartite coalition"? If there is any way of preventing the gains that the construction of even a deformed (Stalinist) workers state would produce, short of a U.S. battlefield victory, the NLF's "coalition" is it. It is proposed precisely in order to avoid the dangerous necessity of taking power through a social revolution carried to completion by the working class and poor peasants. Once set in motion the revolution might well transcend the confines the Stalinist bureaucracy seeks to keep it in.
Thus, during the Tet offensive, when the NLF was at the height of its influence among the urban masses, it refused to establish Soviets. When Quang Tri was taken during the spring offensive, private property was declared sacrosanct, and a new government established composed predomi¬nantly of Saigon's ex-officials
"Small and Vacillating" Rifts
The Spring Offensive which could have sent Thieu packing allowed McGovern, as the representative of outright bourgeois defeatism, to gain leadership of the Democratic Party, The misleadership and defeats of the New Left aided him in gaining almost unchallenged hegemony over the campus population,, As spring student strikes took intermissions during the Democratic Party primaries, students, mostly in the newly enfranchised 18-21 year-old group, provided the door-bell ringing, caucus-packing machinery that enabled McGovern to take advantage of the rise of bourgeois defeatism. The pact was sealed at the Democratic Convention with the dumping of Daley and the New Leftish quotas of Blacks, women and youth.
The tide of pro-Mc-Govern sentiment that has swept the campus milieu has dragged with it almost the entire New Left to one degree or another. The opportunist rationales used to justify capitulation have been endless.
Remarkable in its own way for cynicism and sophism is the Guardian. In the lead article of 23 August 1972, it explained in detail that McGovern is an imperialist politician, essentially no different than the others, but then went on to speak "... of the necessity to take advantage of every rift and antagonism, however small and vacillating [our emphasis], that exist among the ranks of the bourgeoisie.". We do no oppose the the growing trend of those among the masses who intend to vote for McGovern..."
But the bourgeoisie is not a monolithic entity. There are always "small and vacillating" rifts within it. There were "small and vacillating" rift between Hitler and Goebbels. Not only is the Guardian advocating a bloc with one section of the bourgeoisie, but it is using a rationale that could equally justify such a bloc at any time o place. This is the logic of naked capitulationism
Left Moves Right
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, after years' attempting wrecking jobs on the Left for being "too political" have shown up with shorn loci deep in the McGovern camp. But what is more natural, since the two of them have continuous: stated in the past that there was no difference between the "exploiters" on the Left and the bourgeoisie? The remnants of Weatherman are hoping that McGovern will lessen the repression, enabling them to walk unimpeded to the land of milk, hone and "power to the people." Rennie Davis, Dave Dellinger and other "movement" individuals popularized by the bourgeois press have adopted the slogan "Evict Nixon."
The SWP has continued to recruit from its series of Pop Fronts by preaching their "independence" from all political parties. When attacked from either the right or the left, the SWP could simply chant "We're for non-exclusion. Every body should vote for who they want." Of course this "line" succeeded beyond their wildest dream (or nightmares)—NPAC and SMC supporters are voting for who they choose... McGovern.' And the SWP's response? "After McGovern—Us" as the tell their members, planning on a tremendous influx of new, but non-socialist, recruits through the Jenness-Pulley campaign as disillusioned McGovern supporters swarm to the SWV/YSA after the elections.
The orthodox Maoists of the Revolutionary Union (RU) claim that they are to the left of the SWP; in wishing to build a "mass independent anti imperialist movement." Through the Attica Brigade, an "anti-imperialist" marching society that they are currently involved in, they have issued leaflet urging McGovern supporters to build the mass anti-imperialist movement, since it was after all, this "movement" which built McGovern
Likewise, the Maoist groups participating in the People's Solidarity Committee (Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization—formerly Young Lords, Venceremos, I Wor Kuen, Black Workers Congress, and others, including the RU push the slogan "Defeat Nixon" without mentioning McGovern, thus giving the latter backhanded support.
No Steps Forward, Another Back
The role of PL/SDS is particularly unfortunate The WSA was the pro-working-class wing of the old SDS. Its victory through political struggle over RYM offered the possibility of winning a large part of the New Left to the side of the working class. But PL was incapable of taking advantage of that opportunity. Having no conception of the rob that a communist youth organization could play it formalized its incapacity into the "theory" that "students cannot tell workers what to do," Even at its most post-split left point, PL specifically, emphatically and repeatedly rejected the idea that SDS should be a socialist youth group. PL could think of nothing better for SDS than wretched gimmicks like the Campus Worker-Student Alliance strategy or endless PL unemployment marches. Having no strategy for pro-working-class students, it was inevitable that SDS should sink back into the swamp of New Leftism, carried away by the McGovern tide.
Miami, McGovern and Mindless Activism
At the Democratic Convention, when McGovern stated at a Prisoners of War wives' meeting that -he would keep troops in Thailand until the prisoners were returned, SDS gathered up a flock of indignant liberals to "confront" him at his headquarters, McGovern, joined by national TV, met them personally, and informed them that the state¬ment meant nothing, since he had previously promised to withdraw all troops from Indochina regardless of other NLF activity.
An SDSer then handed McGovern their "anti-racism" bill, requesting his signature. He pointed out that the bill which forbade police to "assault a minority person except in provable self-defense" (and when don't the police claim self-defense?)said nothing about assaults on whites. The SDSer then stated that the Senator had the old bill, and immediately set off for a copy of the new bill for his signature. Rarely has SDS disgraced itself so utterly and publicly.
"Political Working Class" for McGovern
The resolution of the National Caucus of Labor Committees at the Trade Unionists for Action and Democracy conference stated that "TUAD will refuse all support to candidates for public office who advocate wage controls in any form" (our emphasis). Given the proper situation, not only might a bourgeois candidate denounce wage controls (and in fact McGovern has said that Nixon's wage controls are "unfair") but he could conceivably mouth every one of the points in the NCLC program, only to drop them after the election, as the bourgeois state remains intact. The NCLC's failure to declare their opposition to all bourgeois candidates, regardless of what they say, exposes their incapacity to take a clear working-class line.
In the last analysis, despite their bitter denunciations of him, the NCLC serves as a left cover for McGovern's economic schemes, just as the SWP serves as a left cover for his peace promises.
It is not simply that McGovern is a capitalist candidate—indeed the NCLC has shown a willingness in the past to bloc with the CIA-compromised Socialist Party against the rest of the left, when they attacked the then pro-working-class Worker-Student Alliance wing of SDS in the SP's New America.
McGovern represents an attempt by one bourgeois wing to draw all wings of the radical petty-bourgeois intelligentsia under its banner. Therefore, McGovern came up with his "plan," which, though considerably more modest than the NCLC's schemes, is fundamentally of the same species. Such reform platforms of the early McGovern-NCLC have traditionally served as the programs of Popular Fronts. How radical and deep-going they are is determined by the depth of the working-class radicalization and militancy that they are designed to dissipate. And when the crisis is over the program is burned. Whether the promises of the Popular Front are minimal or far-reaching is irrelevant, as they are worth no more than the paper they are printed on, as McGovern's abandonment of his pre-nomination platform shows.
No Middle Road
If leaflets, bull sessions or simple activism were enough to end the war, the war would have been ended long ago. If ringing door-bells and lesser evilism in elections were enough, the war would never have gotten started. From Eisenhower with his promise to "go personally to Korea and bring the boys home," through Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, with his "secret peace plan," all American presidents have been "peace candidates" of one form or another. But unable to fight its way out of the pragmatism which gave it birth, the New Left has continued like a punch-drunk fighter to reel from one post-election knock-out to another. The New Left has spent virtually its entire existence trying to find a middle road between reformism and revolution, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. It has not yet understood that no such middle road exists.
Friday, December 03, 2010
The First Stirrings Of The 2012 American Presidential Campaign- Everybody Who Is Smarter Than Sarah Palin Raise Your Hand
Markin comment:
I swear I had a vision, I swear I heard a voice call to me to make a comment on the 2012 American Presidential elections right now, today. I know that we are all materialists, men and women of science, and some of us are historical materialists to boot so the siren call for some comment on my part for these bogus bourgeois elections should be the last thing that I call up as the subject of a vision. Still, remember the Ides of March and all of that. Can I, under the circumstances, afford to defy the portents?
Yes, I know, I supposedly fore swore comment of the bourgeois election cycles forever a couple of years ago once I realized that such activity was a waste of precious cyber-ink for a commentator who wanted to bring that house of cards down. But remember this. Can a man who in his jaded youth, long before the Internet brought instant results (and a bewildering onslaught of instant commentary better left for later reflection), stayed up into the wee hours wondering whether the Democrats would win the 23rd Congressional District in Texas or the 34th in California really ever truly be trusted to break the habit even if he is "recovering?"
And that bring us to the subject of that vision, or rather the subject that brought on this vision. This may seem trivial after all the build-up but here is the story. I recently ran into an old acquaintance out on the street in Boston. I noticed that he had on a Sarah Palin for President in 2012 button. Naturally I had to make comment on that political advertisement. And here is what I said, “Why would you support someone who is not as smart as you are for President?” Now I know, because I know him from way back in the day, that he is very smart so it gave him cause for pause.
Of course, when it comes to bourgeois politicians, being smart is not always relevant either way. (Witness Bush, Junior, Yalie and all, for the dunce proposition, or the other way Obama, Harvard Law and all, for the wizard proposition). So based on my further conversation with him do not be surprised if you see an announcement that unknown smart guy, Michael Mackey, is throwing his hat into the ring for the Republican nomination for President in 2012. In fact everyone smarter than Sarah Palin should consider it their duty to do so. That is my first piece of “wisdom” for the 2012 political season. Meanwhile those of us who are serious about changing the world, for the better, will continue our work to build a workers party that fights for a workers government. So everyone can have a shot at being smart, if nothing else, okay?
I swear I had a vision, I swear I heard a voice call to me to make a comment on the 2012 American Presidential elections right now, today. I know that we are all materialists, men and women of science, and some of us are historical materialists to boot so the siren call for some comment on my part for these bogus bourgeois elections should be the last thing that I call up as the subject of a vision. Still, remember the Ides of March and all of that. Can I, under the circumstances, afford to defy the portents?
Yes, I know, I supposedly fore swore comment of the bourgeois election cycles forever a couple of years ago once I realized that such activity was a waste of precious cyber-ink for a commentator who wanted to bring that house of cards down. But remember this. Can a man who in his jaded youth, long before the Internet brought instant results (and a bewildering onslaught of instant commentary better left for later reflection), stayed up into the wee hours wondering whether the Democrats would win the 23rd Congressional District in Texas or the 34th in California really ever truly be trusted to break the habit even if he is "recovering?"
And that bring us to the subject of that vision, or rather the subject that brought on this vision. This may seem trivial after all the build-up but here is the story. I recently ran into an old acquaintance out on the street in Boston. I noticed that he had on a Sarah Palin for President in 2012 button. Naturally I had to make comment on that political advertisement. And here is what I said, “Why would you support someone who is not as smart as you are for President?” Now I know, because I know him from way back in the day, that he is very smart so it gave him cause for pause.
Of course, when it comes to bourgeois politicians, being smart is not always relevant either way. (Witness Bush, Junior, Yalie and all, for the dunce proposition, or the other way Obama, Harvard Law and all, for the wizard proposition). So based on my further conversation with him do not be surprised if you see an announcement that unknown smart guy, Michael Mackey, is throwing his hat into the ring for the Republican nomination for President in 2012. In fact everyone smarter than Sarah Palin should consider it their duty to do so. That is my first piece of “wisdom” for the 2012 political season. Meanwhile those of us who are serious about changing the world, for the better, will continue our work to build a workers party that fights for a workers government. So everyone can have a shot at being smart, if nothing else, okay?
Saturday, November 20, 2010
From The Rengade Eye BLog-After The Obama Mid-Term Elections
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
Stratfor: The World Looks at Obama After the U.S. Midterm Election
By George Friedman
November 04, 2010
The 2010 U.S. midterm elections were held, and the results were as expected: The Republicans took the House but did not take the Senate. The Democrats have such a small margin in the Senate, however, that they cannot impose cloture, which means the Republicans can block Obama administration initiatives in both houses of Congress. At the same time, the Republicans cannot override presidential vetoes alone, so they cannot legislate, either. The possible legislative outcomes are thus gridlock or significant compromises.
U.S. President Barack Obama hopes that the Republicans prove rigidly ideological. In 1994, after the Republicans won a similar victory over Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich attempted to use the speakership to craft national policy. Clinton ran for re-election in 1996 against Gingrich rather than the actual Republican candidate, Bob Dole; Clinton made Gingrich the issue, and he won. Obama hopes for the same opportunity to recoup. The new speaker, John Boehner, already has indicated that he does not intend to play Gingrich but rather is prepared to find compromises. Since Tea Party members are not close to forming a majority of the Republican Party in the House, Boehner is likely to get his way.
Another way to look at this is that the United States remains a predominantly right-of-center country. Obama won a substantial victory in 2008, but he did not change the architecture of American politics. Almost 48 percent of voters voted against him. Though he won a larger percentage than anyone since Ronald Reagan, he was not even close to the magnitude of Reagan’s victory. Reagan transformed the way American politics worked. Obama did not. In spite of his supporters’ excitement, his election did not signify a permanent national shift to the left. His attempt to govern from the left accordingly brought a predictable result: The public took away his ability to legislate on domestic affairs. Instead, they moved the country to a position where no one can legislate anything beyond the most carefully negotiated and neutral legislation.
Foreign Policy and Obama’s Campaign Position
That leaves foreign policy. Last week, I speculated on what Obama might do in foreign affairs, exploring his options with regard to Iran. This week, I’d like to consider the opposite side of the coin, namely, how foreign governments view Obama after this defeat. Let’s begin by considering how he positioned himself during his campaign.
The most important thing about his campaign was the difference between what he said he would do and what his supporters heard him saying he would do. There were several major elements to his foreign policy. First, he campaigned intensely against the Bush policy in Iraq, arguing that it was the wrong war in the wrong place. Second, he argued that the important war was in Afghanistan, where he pledged to switch his attention to face the real challenge of al Qaeda. Third, he argued against Bush administration policy on detention, military tribunals and torture, in his view symbolized by the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.
In a fourth element, he argued that Bush had alienated the world by his unilateralism, by which he meant lack of consultation with allies — in particular the European allies who had been so important during the Cold War. Obama argued that global hostility toward the Bush administration arose from the Iraq war and the manner in which Bush waged the war on terror. He also made clear that the United States under Bush had an indifference to world opinion that cost it moral force. Obama wanted to change global perceptions of the United States as a unilateral global power to one that would participate as an equal partner with the rest of the world.
The Europeans were particularly jubilant at his election. They had in fact seen Bush as unwilling to take their counsel, and more to the point, as demanding that they participate in U.S. wars that they had no interest in participating in. The European view — or more precisely, the French and German view — was that allies should have a significant degree of control over what Americans do. Thus, the United States should not merely have consulted the Europeans, but should have shaped its policy with their wishes in mind. The Europeans saw Bush as bullying, unsophisticated and dangerous. Bush in turn saw allies’ unwillingness to share the burdens of a war as meaning they were not in fact allies. He considered so-called “Old Europe” as uncooperative and unwilling to repay past debts.
The European Misunderstanding of Obama
The Europeans’ pleasure in Obama’s election, however, represented a massive misunderstanding. Though they thought Obama would allow them a greater say in U.S. policy — and, above all, ask them for less — Obama in fact argued that the Europeans would be more likely to provide assistance to the United States if Washington was more collaborative with the Europeans.
Thus, in spite of the Nobel Peace Prize in the early days of the romance, the bloom wore off as the Europeans discovered that Obama was simply another U.S. president. More precisely, they learned that instead of being able to act according to his or her own wishes, circumstances constrain occupants of the U.S. presidency into acting like any other president would.
Campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, Obama’s position on Iraq consisted of slightly changing Bush’s withdrawal timetable. In Afghanistan, his strategy was to increase troop levels beyond what Bush would consider. Toward Iran, his policy has been the same as Bush’s: sanctions with a hint of something later.
The Europeans quickly became disappointed in Obama, especially when he escalated the Afghan war and asked them to increase forces when they wanted to withdraw. Perhaps most telling was his speech to the Muslim world from Cairo, where he tried to reach out to, and create a new relationship with, Muslims. The problem with this approach was that that in the speech, Obama warned that the United States would not abandon Israel — the same stance other U.S. presidents had adopted. It is hard to know what Obama was thinking. Perhaps he thought that by having reached out to the Muslim world, they should in turn understand the American commitment to Israel. Instead, Muslims understood the speech as saying that while Obama was prepared to adopt a different tone with Muslims, the basic structure of American policy in the region would not be different.
Why Obama Believed in a Reset Button
In both the European and Muslim case, the same question must be asked: Why did Obama believe that he was changing relations when in fact his policies were not significantly different from Bush’s policies? The answer is that Obama seemed to believe the essential U.S. problem with the world was rhetorical. The United States had not carefully explained itself, and in not explaining itself, the United States appeared arrogant.
Obama seemed to believe that the policies did not matter as much as the sensibility that surrounded the policies. It was not so much that he believed he could be charming — although he seemed to believe that with reason — but rather that foreign policy is personal, built around trust and familiarity rather than around interests. The idea that nations weren’t designed to trust or like one another, but rather pursued their interests with impersonal force, was alien to him. And so he thought he could explain the United States to the Muslims without changing U.S. policy and win the day.
U.S. policies in the Middle East remain intact, Guantanamo is still open, and most of the policies Obama opposed in his campaign are still there, offending the world much as they did under Bush. Moreover, the U.S. relationship with China has worsened, and while the U.S. relationship with Russia has appeared to improve, this is mostly atmospherics. This is not to criticize Obama, as these are reasonable policies for an American to pursue. Still, the substantial change in America’s place in the world that Europeans and his supporters entertained has not materialized. That it couldn’t may be true, but the gulf between what Obama said and what has happened is so deep that it shapes global perceptions.
Global Expectations and Obama’s Challenge
Having traveled a great deal in the last year and met a number of leaders and individuals with insight into the predominant thinking in their country, I can say with some confidence that the global perception of Obama today is as a leader given to rhetoric that doesn’t live up to its promise. It is not that anyone expected his rhetoric to live up to its promise, since no politician can pull that off, but that they see Obama as someone who thought rhetoric would change things. In that sense, he is seen as naive and, worse, as indecisive and unimaginative.
No one expected him to turn rhetoric into reality. But they did expect some significant shifts in foreign policy and a forceful presence in the world. Whatever the criticisms leveled against the United States, the expectation remains that the United States will remain at the center of events, acting decisively. This may be a contradiction in the global view of things, but it is the reality.
A foreign minister of a small — but not insignificant — country put it this way to me: Obama doesn’t seem to be there. By that he meant that Obama does not seem to occupy the American presidency and that the United States he governs does not seem like a force to be reckoned with. Decisions that other leaders wait for the United States to make don’t get made, the authority of U.S. emissaries is uncertain, the U.S. defense and state departments say different things, and serious issues are left unaddressed.
While it may seem an odd thing to say, it is true: The American president also presides over the world. U.S. power is such that there is an expectation that the president will attend to matters around the globe not out of charity, but because of American interest. The questions I have heard most often on many different issues are simple: What is the American position, what is the American interest, what will the Americans do? (As an American, I frequently find my hosts appointing me to be the representative of the United States.)
I have answered that the United States is off balance trying to place the U.S.-jihadist war in context, that it must be understood that the president is preoccupied but will attend to their region shortly. That is not a bad answer, since it is true. But the issue now is simple: Obama has spent two years on the trajectory in place when he was elected, having made few if any significant shifts. Inertia is not a bad thing in policy, as change for its own sake is dangerous. Yet a range of issues must be attended to, including China, Russia and the countries that border each of them.
Obama comes out of this election severely weakened domestically. If he continues his trajectory, the rest of the world will perceive him as a crippled president, something he needn’t be in foreign policy matters. Obama can no longer control Congress, but he still controls foreign policy. He could emerge from this defeat as a powerful foreign policy president, acting decisively in Afghanistan and beyond. It’s not a question of what he should do, but whether he will choose to act in a significant way at all.
This is Obama’s great test. Reagan accelerated his presence in the world after his defeat in 1982. It is an option, and the most important question is whether he takes it. We will know in a few months. If he doesn’t, global events will begin unfolding without recourse to the United States, and issues held in check will no longer remain quiet.
RENEGADE EYE
Stratfor: The World Looks at Obama After the U.S. Midterm Election
By George Friedman
November 04, 2010
The 2010 U.S. midterm elections were held, and the results were as expected: The Republicans took the House but did not take the Senate. The Democrats have such a small margin in the Senate, however, that they cannot impose cloture, which means the Republicans can block Obama administration initiatives in both houses of Congress. At the same time, the Republicans cannot override presidential vetoes alone, so they cannot legislate, either. The possible legislative outcomes are thus gridlock or significant compromises.
U.S. President Barack Obama hopes that the Republicans prove rigidly ideological. In 1994, after the Republicans won a similar victory over Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich attempted to use the speakership to craft national policy. Clinton ran for re-election in 1996 against Gingrich rather than the actual Republican candidate, Bob Dole; Clinton made Gingrich the issue, and he won. Obama hopes for the same opportunity to recoup. The new speaker, John Boehner, already has indicated that he does not intend to play Gingrich but rather is prepared to find compromises. Since Tea Party members are not close to forming a majority of the Republican Party in the House, Boehner is likely to get his way.
Another way to look at this is that the United States remains a predominantly right-of-center country. Obama won a substantial victory in 2008, but he did not change the architecture of American politics. Almost 48 percent of voters voted against him. Though he won a larger percentage than anyone since Ronald Reagan, he was not even close to the magnitude of Reagan’s victory. Reagan transformed the way American politics worked. Obama did not. In spite of his supporters’ excitement, his election did not signify a permanent national shift to the left. His attempt to govern from the left accordingly brought a predictable result: The public took away his ability to legislate on domestic affairs. Instead, they moved the country to a position where no one can legislate anything beyond the most carefully negotiated and neutral legislation.
Foreign Policy and Obama’s Campaign Position
That leaves foreign policy. Last week, I speculated on what Obama might do in foreign affairs, exploring his options with regard to Iran. This week, I’d like to consider the opposite side of the coin, namely, how foreign governments view Obama after this defeat. Let’s begin by considering how he positioned himself during his campaign.
The most important thing about his campaign was the difference between what he said he would do and what his supporters heard him saying he would do. There were several major elements to his foreign policy. First, he campaigned intensely against the Bush policy in Iraq, arguing that it was the wrong war in the wrong place. Second, he argued that the important war was in Afghanistan, where he pledged to switch his attention to face the real challenge of al Qaeda. Third, he argued against Bush administration policy on detention, military tribunals and torture, in his view symbolized by the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.
In a fourth element, he argued that Bush had alienated the world by his unilateralism, by which he meant lack of consultation with allies — in particular the European allies who had been so important during the Cold War. Obama argued that global hostility toward the Bush administration arose from the Iraq war and the manner in which Bush waged the war on terror. He also made clear that the United States under Bush had an indifference to world opinion that cost it moral force. Obama wanted to change global perceptions of the United States as a unilateral global power to one that would participate as an equal partner with the rest of the world.
The Europeans were particularly jubilant at his election. They had in fact seen Bush as unwilling to take their counsel, and more to the point, as demanding that they participate in U.S. wars that they had no interest in participating in. The European view — or more precisely, the French and German view — was that allies should have a significant degree of control over what Americans do. Thus, the United States should not merely have consulted the Europeans, but should have shaped its policy with their wishes in mind. The Europeans saw Bush as bullying, unsophisticated and dangerous. Bush in turn saw allies’ unwillingness to share the burdens of a war as meaning they were not in fact allies. He considered so-called “Old Europe” as uncooperative and unwilling to repay past debts.
The European Misunderstanding of Obama
The Europeans’ pleasure in Obama’s election, however, represented a massive misunderstanding. Though they thought Obama would allow them a greater say in U.S. policy — and, above all, ask them for less — Obama in fact argued that the Europeans would be more likely to provide assistance to the United States if Washington was more collaborative with the Europeans.
Thus, in spite of the Nobel Peace Prize in the early days of the romance, the bloom wore off as the Europeans discovered that Obama was simply another U.S. president. More precisely, they learned that instead of being able to act according to his or her own wishes, circumstances constrain occupants of the U.S. presidency into acting like any other president would.
Campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, Obama’s position on Iraq consisted of slightly changing Bush’s withdrawal timetable. In Afghanistan, his strategy was to increase troop levels beyond what Bush would consider. Toward Iran, his policy has been the same as Bush’s: sanctions with a hint of something later.
The Europeans quickly became disappointed in Obama, especially when he escalated the Afghan war and asked them to increase forces when they wanted to withdraw. Perhaps most telling was his speech to the Muslim world from Cairo, where he tried to reach out to, and create a new relationship with, Muslims. The problem with this approach was that that in the speech, Obama warned that the United States would not abandon Israel — the same stance other U.S. presidents had adopted. It is hard to know what Obama was thinking. Perhaps he thought that by having reached out to the Muslim world, they should in turn understand the American commitment to Israel. Instead, Muslims understood the speech as saying that while Obama was prepared to adopt a different tone with Muslims, the basic structure of American policy in the region would not be different.
Why Obama Believed in a Reset Button
In both the European and Muslim case, the same question must be asked: Why did Obama believe that he was changing relations when in fact his policies were not significantly different from Bush’s policies? The answer is that Obama seemed to believe the essential U.S. problem with the world was rhetorical. The United States had not carefully explained itself, and in not explaining itself, the United States appeared arrogant.
Obama seemed to believe that the policies did not matter as much as the sensibility that surrounded the policies. It was not so much that he believed he could be charming — although he seemed to believe that with reason — but rather that foreign policy is personal, built around trust and familiarity rather than around interests. The idea that nations weren’t designed to trust or like one another, but rather pursued their interests with impersonal force, was alien to him. And so he thought he could explain the United States to the Muslims without changing U.S. policy and win the day.
U.S. policies in the Middle East remain intact, Guantanamo is still open, and most of the policies Obama opposed in his campaign are still there, offending the world much as they did under Bush. Moreover, the U.S. relationship with China has worsened, and while the U.S. relationship with Russia has appeared to improve, this is mostly atmospherics. This is not to criticize Obama, as these are reasonable policies for an American to pursue. Still, the substantial change in America’s place in the world that Europeans and his supporters entertained has not materialized. That it couldn’t may be true, but the gulf between what Obama said and what has happened is so deep that it shapes global perceptions.
Global Expectations and Obama’s Challenge
Having traveled a great deal in the last year and met a number of leaders and individuals with insight into the predominant thinking in their country, I can say with some confidence that the global perception of Obama today is as a leader given to rhetoric that doesn’t live up to its promise. It is not that anyone expected his rhetoric to live up to its promise, since no politician can pull that off, but that they see Obama as someone who thought rhetoric would change things. In that sense, he is seen as naive and, worse, as indecisive and unimaginative.
No one expected him to turn rhetoric into reality. But they did expect some significant shifts in foreign policy and a forceful presence in the world. Whatever the criticisms leveled against the United States, the expectation remains that the United States will remain at the center of events, acting decisively. This may be a contradiction in the global view of things, but it is the reality.
A foreign minister of a small — but not insignificant — country put it this way to me: Obama doesn’t seem to be there. By that he meant that Obama does not seem to occupy the American presidency and that the United States he governs does not seem like a force to be reckoned with. Decisions that other leaders wait for the United States to make don’t get made, the authority of U.S. emissaries is uncertain, the U.S. defense and state departments say different things, and serious issues are left unaddressed.
While it may seem an odd thing to say, it is true: The American president also presides over the world. U.S. power is such that there is an expectation that the president will attend to matters around the globe not out of charity, but because of American interest. The questions I have heard most often on many different issues are simple: What is the American position, what is the American interest, what will the Americans do? (As an American, I frequently find my hosts appointing me to be the representative of the United States.)
I have answered that the United States is off balance trying to place the U.S.-jihadist war in context, that it must be understood that the president is preoccupied but will attend to their region shortly. That is not a bad answer, since it is true. But the issue now is simple: Obama has spent two years on the trajectory in place when he was elected, having made few if any significant shifts. Inertia is not a bad thing in policy, as change for its own sake is dangerous. Yet a range of issues must be attended to, including China, Russia and the countries that border each of them.
Obama comes out of this election severely weakened domestically. If he continues his trajectory, the rest of the world will perceive him as a crippled president, something he needn’t be in foreign policy matters. Obama can no longer control Congress, but he still controls foreign policy. He could emerge from this defeat as a powerful foreign policy president, acting decisively in Afghanistan and beyond. It’s not a question of what he should do, but whether he will choose to act in a significant way at all.
This is Obama’s great test. Reagan accelerated his presence in the world after his defeat in 1982. It is an option, and the most important question is whether he takes it. We will know in a few months. If he doesn’t, global events will begin unfolding without recourse to the United States, and issues held in check will no longer remain quiet.
RENEGADE EYE
Thursday, November 04, 2010
After The Tea Party-Us- The 2010 Midterm Congressional Elections- We Desperately Need To Fight For A Workers Party That Fights For A Workers Government-A Short Note
Markin comment:
In the aftermath of the 2008 presidential elections I, half-jokingly, ran a slogan- “After Obama-Us.” The serious part of that slogan was that once the illusions in the ephemeral “Obama the Charma” whirlwind swirl wore off and leftists, progressive and working people, who should have known better, sobered up then politically our day, the day of those who fight for our communist future, would come. Obviously, given the equally ephemeral capacity of the left to seriously take advantage of those Obamian disillusionments in the immediate situation, there was also fantastic quality, the half-joking part, to that exercise.
What is serious today in the aftermath of the 2010 election is the rise of the tea party movement and its ability electorally, in the short haul, to suck up the political air. Air that by all that is rational in modern class society torn every which way by the contradictions of capitalism should be ours. But, as one of the most general laws of political discourse foretells- politics abhors a vacuum. Thus, for today at least, and if the exit poll numbers are right and there is no reason to doubt their tenor if not their accuracy, there is a substantial working class component to the tea party movement. Not for the first time, given no real reason to seek help from the minuscule left that has the program but not the foot soldiers to bring dramatic social change, working people have sought their “salvation” elsewhere.
Today then I do not want to speak of those who have middle class professional jobs and who support the tea party movement between trips to Europe. Today I do not want to speak of my fellow AARP seniors who on the one hand benefit from the current social and health programs but rail against government hand-outs. Today I don not want to speak of those who, rich or just niggardly, who do not want to pay their taxes, frankly any taxes if you listen carefully to their cant. Those, for the most part are not “our people.”
No, today, I want to direct my attention, and yours, to the need, the desperate need, to break those elements of the working class enamored of this tea-ish movement to the fight for a workers party that fights for a workers government. Immediately the fight to get jobs, the fight to stop foreclosures, the fight for free quality health care and about seventy-three other fights that I have detailed elsewhere. That is the real point of today’s headline- "After the tea party, us." Otherwise it’s just back to the other party of capitalist, the Democrats. Been there, done that. More, later.
In the aftermath of the 2008 presidential elections I, half-jokingly, ran a slogan- “After Obama-Us.” The serious part of that slogan was that once the illusions in the ephemeral “Obama the Charma” whirlwind swirl wore off and leftists, progressive and working people, who should have known better, sobered up then politically our day, the day of those who fight for our communist future, would come. Obviously, given the equally ephemeral capacity of the left to seriously take advantage of those Obamian disillusionments in the immediate situation, there was also fantastic quality, the half-joking part, to that exercise.
What is serious today in the aftermath of the 2010 election is the rise of the tea party movement and its ability electorally, in the short haul, to suck up the political air. Air that by all that is rational in modern class society torn every which way by the contradictions of capitalism should be ours. But, as one of the most general laws of political discourse foretells- politics abhors a vacuum. Thus, for today at least, and if the exit poll numbers are right and there is no reason to doubt their tenor if not their accuracy, there is a substantial working class component to the tea party movement. Not for the first time, given no real reason to seek help from the minuscule left that has the program but not the foot soldiers to bring dramatic social change, working people have sought their “salvation” elsewhere.
Today then I do not want to speak of those who have middle class professional jobs and who support the tea party movement between trips to Europe. Today I do not want to speak of my fellow AARP seniors who on the one hand benefit from the current social and health programs but rail against government hand-outs. Today I don not want to speak of those who, rich or just niggardly, who do not want to pay their taxes, frankly any taxes if you listen carefully to their cant. Those, for the most part are not “our people.”
No, today, I want to direct my attention, and yours, to the need, the desperate need, to break those elements of the working class enamored of this tea-ish movement to the fight for a workers party that fights for a workers government. Immediately the fight to get jobs, the fight to stop foreclosures, the fight for free quality health care and about seventy-three other fights that I have detailed elsewhere. That is the real point of today’s headline- "After the tea party, us." Otherwise it’s just back to the other party of capitalist, the Democrats. Been there, done that. More, later.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
From The International Bolshevik Tendency Website -Democrats, Cops and Screws: Agents of the Oppressors-Democrats, Cops and Screws-Lock Up Mehserle—Throw Away the Key!
Democrats, Cops and Screws: Agents of the Oppressors
Lock Up Mehserle—Throw Away the Key!
Since the murder of Oscar Grant by BART cop Johannes Mehserle on New Year's Day 2009, thousands of people have mobilized to demand "Justice for Oscar Grant" and oppose attempts to let Mehserle walk free after his conviction on the far lesser charge of "involuntary manslaughter."
Involuntary manslaughter usually carries a sentence of two to four years, but if a gun was used, the judge can add three to ten years to the sentence. Mehserle is a dangerous racist killer who should be locked up for life, but 14 years would be a lot better than what Judge Robert Perry, who conducted his trial, is probably intending to give him. Perry was responsible for the official cover-up of the LAPD Ramparts scandal in which more than 70 police officers were implicated for planting evidence, framing innocent people andtaking pay-offs from drug dealers while organizing robberies, beatings and shootings. Tony Pirone and Marysol Domenici, two other BART cops who were complicit in Grant's murder and withheld information during Mehserle's trial, also deserve long stretches in prison.
Outrage at this murder has come from many places, so it is no surprise that there are different ideas about how to take the struggle forward. We have to start by recognizing that responsibility for this crime goes beyond Mehserle, the BART police and the BART board. Oscar Grant's murder was a product of the routine functioning of the American social system and particularly the racist administration of "criminal justice." Responsibility for Oscar Grant's death is therefore shared by all those who materially support and perpetuate the system, including many of the local politicians who made a show of protesting Mehserle's crime.
While many innocent people like Oscar Grant have been killed by cops, no police officer has ever been jailed for murder in the State of California. The popularity of the slogan "I am Oscar Grant" reflects widespread awareness of the profound injustice of this racist system. There is no way justice for Oscar Grant can be achieved by reliance on institutions that exist to maintain and defend the status quo—or on those who run them.
To suppress the growing social tensions resulting from the decline of American capitalism over the last 30 years, ruling-class politicians (Democrat as well as Republican) have ramped up state repression and vastly expanded the police and prison system. In California between 1988 and 2008 the number of prison guards increased at four times the rate of other state agencies. In the 2009-2011 City of Oakland budget, the police department eats up an incredible 43 percent of the general fund, compared to a measly 2 percent for community development and human services. An Oakland cop's salary averages an astounding $162,000 a year.
It is obvious to tens of millions of working-class Americans that capitalism is unable to provide meaningful employment or meet the most elementary needs of the population for housing, health care and education. And in this racist system people of color and youth are always the hardest hit. Today the official unemployment rate for blacks stands at 15.6 percent (compared to 8.6 percent for whites) while more than 40 percent of black youth are unemployed. As the economy pushes more and more workers downwards and jobs dry up, the prison population is rising.
All of the Democratics running for election this November in Oakland are tied to law enforcement one way or another. Indeed, the majority of them are directly funded by the police and prison guards. Democratic Assemblyman Don Perata, a frontrunner in Oakland's mayoral race, has accepted $409,000 from the Prison Guards' Union since 2009 and has made it clear that he intends to increase the police budget. Jerry Brown, the Democratic candidate for governor, helped push through the "Police Officer's Bill of Rights" in the 1980s during his first term. This was cited by Mehserle to avoid speaking to BART internal affairs investigators following the murder. Not only has Brown been endorsed by organizations representing cops and screws, he has accepted $825,000 from them for campaign ads.
Oakland Councilmembers Jean Quan and Rebecca Kaplan are striking more critical poses with calls for increased community "oversight" of the police. But "community control" of the cops will never amount to more than a symbolic gesture, and neither Quan nor Kaplan have any serious intention of trying to rein in the police. Rather than openly talking about the reality of systemic racism, or the need to punish killer cops, they recycle fairy tales about police "serving and protecting" all members of the public equally. This is the kind of pledge of allegiance to the status quo that anyone who wants to pursue a career as a Democratic politician has to make.
Councilmember Desley Brooks, who has been closely associated with the Oscar Grant movement and was one of the main speakers for the "Mothers Taking a Stand" event in September, told protesters commemorating the first anniversary of Oscar's murder outside the Fruitvale BART station that "justice might not look like what you expect!" This amounted to a not-so-veiled appeal for trusting the BART board (which had provided the stage and sound equipment for the event) and accepting the decision engineered by a "justice" system that first moved the trial to Los Angeles and then put together a jury without even a single black on it.
Brooks, along with Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson, Minister Keith Muhammad of the Nation of Islam and various other black clergy, co-signed an "Open Letter" prior to the demonstration at 14th and Broadway on 8 July, the day the verdict was announced, calling on citizens to "shut down outside agitators." This statement provided political cover for the cops to carry out the mostly random arrests of more than 80 people, including Oakland School Board member Jumoke Hinton Hodge.
No Democratic politician will tell the simple truth that any sort of real "Justice for Oscar Grant" can only be won outside a racist justice system which has long validated state-sanctioned murder. To be a member of the Democratic Party is to be a cog in a political machine committed to the maintenance of a social order based on the exploitation of the working class and the special oppression of black and brown workers who are segregated at the bottom of the economic pyramid. The role of the Democrats is to keep the lid on potential mass struggle by promoting the illusion that electoral politics—organized on the principle that every dollar is equal— can offer an avenue for ordinary people to achieve real change. Reliance on the Democrats will undermine any possibility of winning "Justice for Oscar Grant."
The police, as the front-line defenders of social inequality and capitalist privilege, are the natural enemies of workers and the oppressed. Blacks, other minorities and "illegal" immigrants face continuous intimidation, harassment and violence from cops and other agents of the state. Defenders of capitalism like to portray the police as neutral enforcers of "the law," but everyone knows that laws are written by politicians who are bought and paid for by big business. The role of cops during major labor disputes throughout American history has been to escort scabs, bust picket lines and even, in some cases, murder strikers. In the 1934 West Coast Maritime Strike that founded the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) the police killed seven people coast-wide, including Howard Sperry and Nicholas Bordoise in San Francisco.
In 2003, Oakland police fired wooden bullets and tear gas without warning at ILWU members and anti-war protesters at the Port of Oakland. It later came out that the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center had been intercepting dockers' emails prior to the protest. A few weeks ago, under the guise of "national security," the FBI raided anti-war activists in Minneapolis, Chicago, Michigan and North Carolina, absurdly claiming that supporters of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and the Arab-American Action Network are "terrorists" because they solidarize with the Colombian FARC guerrillas and the Palestinians.
The bureaucratic leadership of the labor movement eagerly welcomes the affiliation of police "unions." The International Union of Police Associations has belonged to the AFL-CIO since 1979. In a 12 May 2009 letter to the Labor Council, the president of the San Francisco Police Officers' Assocation, reported that in the previous year his organization had donated $25,000 "to the labor community and members of the San Francisco Labor Council for everything ranging from golf tournaments to installation dinners."
The ILWU's San Francisco Local 10 Constitution stipulates that no cop can be admitted to the union. This is a policy that should be adopted by every self-respecting union: cops out of the labor movement! Local 10's initiative in launching today'sport shutdown and labor-community rally to demand justice for Oscar Grant provides a glimpse of the enormous impact a militant, politically-conscious labor movement could have in waging the struggle against racism and all other forms of social oppression.
Whatever sentence Mehserle gets on 5 November, it won't be enough to pay for his crime. Effective struggle against the racist social order that permits such outrages starts by breaking with the Democratic political agents who administer it, as well as the armed thugs who "serve and protect" it. A labor movement led by people tied to the ruling class will never be able to launch a serious struggle to advance the interests of its members, much less other victims of capitalist injustice.
In the end, the only way to secure justice for Oscar Grant and the thousands of others murdered by racist cops over the years is by breaking up the existing police force and all the rest of the capitalist apparatus of repression. This requires a social revolution to expropriate the ruling elites and establish a collectively-run, democratically-planned economy in which all important decisions are made, not by a tiny handful of ultra-wealthy individuals, but by workers' councils organized on the principle that those who labor should rule. The International Bolshevik Tendency is committed to the struggle to build a party capable of leading such a revolution and opening the way to establishing an egalitarian, socialist regime in every country on the planet.
Cops out of the the labor movement!
Break with the Democrats—
Build a revolutionary workers' party!
Lock Up Mehserle—Throw Away the Key!
Since the murder of Oscar Grant by BART cop Johannes Mehserle on New Year's Day 2009, thousands of people have mobilized to demand "Justice for Oscar Grant" and oppose attempts to let Mehserle walk free after his conviction on the far lesser charge of "involuntary manslaughter."
Involuntary manslaughter usually carries a sentence of two to four years, but if a gun was used, the judge can add three to ten years to the sentence. Mehserle is a dangerous racist killer who should be locked up for life, but 14 years would be a lot better than what Judge Robert Perry, who conducted his trial, is probably intending to give him. Perry was responsible for the official cover-up of the LAPD Ramparts scandal in which more than 70 police officers were implicated for planting evidence, framing innocent people andtaking pay-offs from drug dealers while organizing robberies, beatings and shootings. Tony Pirone and Marysol Domenici, two other BART cops who were complicit in Grant's murder and withheld information during Mehserle's trial, also deserve long stretches in prison.
Outrage at this murder has come from many places, so it is no surprise that there are different ideas about how to take the struggle forward. We have to start by recognizing that responsibility for this crime goes beyond Mehserle, the BART police and the BART board. Oscar Grant's murder was a product of the routine functioning of the American social system and particularly the racist administration of "criminal justice." Responsibility for Oscar Grant's death is therefore shared by all those who materially support and perpetuate the system, including many of the local politicians who made a show of protesting Mehserle's crime.
While many innocent people like Oscar Grant have been killed by cops, no police officer has ever been jailed for murder in the State of California. The popularity of the slogan "I am Oscar Grant" reflects widespread awareness of the profound injustice of this racist system. There is no way justice for Oscar Grant can be achieved by reliance on institutions that exist to maintain and defend the status quo—or on those who run them.
To suppress the growing social tensions resulting from the decline of American capitalism over the last 30 years, ruling-class politicians (Democrat as well as Republican) have ramped up state repression and vastly expanded the police and prison system. In California between 1988 and 2008 the number of prison guards increased at four times the rate of other state agencies. In the 2009-2011 City of Oakland budget, the police department eats up an incredible 43 percent of the general fund, compared to a measly 2 percent for community development and human services. An Oakland cop's salary averages an astounding $162,000 a year.
It is obvious to tens of millions of working-class Americans that capitalism is unable to provide meaningful employment or meet the most elementary needs of the population for housing, health care and education. And in this racist system people of color and youth are always the hardest hit. Today the official unemployment rate for blacks stands at 15.6 percent (compared to 8.6 percent for whites) while more than 40 percent of black youth are unemployed. As the economy pushes more and more workers downwards and jobs dry up, the prison population is rising.
All of the Democratics running for election this November in Oakland are tied to law enforcement one way or another. Indeed, the majority of them are directly funded by the police and prison guards. Democratic Assemblyman Don Perata, a frontrunner in Oakland's mayoral race, has accepted $409,000 from the Prison Guards' Union since 2009 and has made it clear that he intends to increase the police budget. Jerry Brown, the Democratic candidate for governor, helped push through the "Police Officer's Bill of Rights" in the 1980s during his first term. This was cited by Mehserle to avoid speaking to BART internal affairs investigators following the murder. Not only has Brown been endorsed by organizations representing cops and screws, he has accepted $825,000 from them for campaign ads.
Oakland Councilmembers Jean Quan and Rebecca Kaplan are striking more critical poses with calls for increased community "oversight" of the police. But "community control" of the cops will never amount to more than a symbolic gesture, and neither Quan nor Kaplan have any serious intention of trying to rein in the police. Rather than openly talking about the reality of systemic racism, or the need to punish killer cops, they recycle fairy tales about police "serving and protecting" all members of the public equally. This is the kind of pledge of allegiance to the status quo that anyone who wants to pursue a career as a Democratic politician has to make.
Councilmember Desley Brooks, who has been closely associated with the Oscar Grant movement and was one of the main speakers for the "Mothers Taking a Stand" event in September, told protesters commemorating the first anniversary of Oscar's murder outside the Fruitvale BART station that "justice might not look like what you expect!" This amounted to a not-so-veiled appeal for trusting the BART board (which had provided the stage and sound equipment for the event) and accepting the decision engineered by a "justice" system that first moved the trial to Los Angeles and then put together a jury without even a single black on it.
Brooks, along with Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson, Minister Keith Muhammad of the Nation of Islam and various other black clergy, co-signed an "Open Letter" prior to the demonstration at 14th and Broadway on 8 July, the day the verdict was announced, calling on citizens to "shut down outside agitators." This statement provided political cover for the cops to carry out the mostly random arrests of more than 80 people, including Oakland School Board member Jumoke Hinton Hodge.
No Democratic politician will tell the simple truth that any sort of real "Justice for Oscar Grant" can only be won outside a racist justice system which has long validated state-sanctioned murder. To be a member of the Democratic Party is to be a cog in a political machine committed to the maintenance of a social order based on the exploitation of the working class and the special oppression of black and brown workers who are segregated at the bottom of the economic pyramid. The role of the Democrats is to keep the lid on potential mass struggle by promoting the illusion that electoral politics—organized on the principle that every dollar is equal— can offer an avenue for ordinary people to achieve real change. Reliance on the Democrats will undermine any possibility of winning "Justice for Oscar Grant."
The police, as the front-line defenders of social inequality and capitalist privilege, are the natural enemies of workers and the oppressed. Blacks, other minorities and "illegal" immigrants face continuous intimidation, harassment and violence from cops and other agents of the state. Defenders of capitalism like to portray the police as neutral enforcers of "the law," but everyone knows that laws are written by politicians who are bought and paid for by big business. The role of cops during major labor disputes throughout American history has been to escort scabs, bust picket lines and even, in some cases, murder strikers. In the 1934 West Coast Maritime Strike that founded the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) the police killed seven people coast-wide, including Howard Sperry and Nicholas Bordoise in San Francisco.
In 2003, Oakland police fired wooden bullets and tear gas without warning at ILWU members and anti-war protesters at the Port of Oakland. It later came out that the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center had been intercepting dockers' emails prior to the protest. A few weeks ago, under the guise of "national security," the FBI raided anti-war activists in Minneapolis, Chicago, Michigan and North Carolina, absurdly claiming that supporters of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and the Arab-American Action Network are "terrorists" because they solidarize with the Colombian FARC guerrillas and the Palestinians.
The bureaucratic leadership of the labor movement eagerly welcomes the affiliation of police "unions." The International Union of Police Associations has belonged to the AFL-CIO since 1979. In a 12 May 2009 letter to the Labor Council, the president of the San Francisco Police Officers' Assocation, reported that in the previous year his organization had donated $25,000 "to the labor community and members of the San Francisco Labor Council for everything ranging from golf tournaments to installation dinners."
The ILWU's San Francisco Local 10 Constitution stipulates that no cop can be admitted to the union. This is a policy that should be adopted by every self-respecting union: cops out of the labor movement! Local 10's initiative in launching today'sport shutdown and labor-community rally to demand justice for Oscar Grant provides a glimpse of the enormous impact a militant, politically-conscious labor movement could have in waging the struggle against racism and all other forms of social oppression.
Whatever sentence Mehserle gets on 5 November, it won't be enough to pay for his crime. Effective struggle against the racist social order that permits such outrages starts by breaking with the Democratic political agents who administer it, as well as the armed thugs who "serve and protect" it. A labor movement led by people tied to the ruling class will never be able to launch a serious struggle to advance the interests of its members, much less other victims of capitalist injustice.
In the end, the only way to secure justice for Oscar Grant and the thousands of others murdered by racist cops over the years is by breaking up the existing police force and all the rest of the capitalist apparatus of repression. This requires a social revolution to expropriate the ruling elites and establish a collectively-run, democratically-planned economy in which all important decisions are made, not by a tiny handful of ultra-wealthy individuals, but by workers' councils organized on the principle that those who labor should rule. The International Bolshevik Tendency is committed to the struggle to build a party capable of leading such a revolution and opening the way to establishing an egalitarian, socialist regime in every country on the planet.
Cops out of the the labor movement!
Break with the Democrats—
Build a revolutionary workers' party!
Friday, August 06, 2010
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- Phil Och's "Love Me, I'm A Liberal"- Some Songs Are Timeless-Ouch, Phil!
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.
***********
Markin comment:
This is a continuation of entries for folksinger/songwriter Phil Och's who back in the early 1960s stood right up there with Bob Dylan in the protest songwriting category. The entries on this date testify to that. However, early on I sensed something special about Dylan and never really warmed up to Ochs. His singing style did not "move" me and that counted for a lot in those days. The rest just turned on preference.
********
This may not be Phil's best song but time has done nothing to diminish its razor-edged point.
Love Me, I'm a Liberal Lyrics
E A E A
I cried when they shot Medgar Evers
E C#m
Tears ran down my spine
E A E
I cried when they shot Mr. Kennedy
F#7 B7
As though I'd lost a father of mine
E A E
But Malcolm X got what was coming
G#m A
He got what he asked for this time
E C#m A B7 E
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal
I go to civil rights rallies
And I put down the old D.A.R.
I love Harry and Sidney and Sammy
I hope every colored boy becomes a star
But don't talk about revolution
That's going a little bit too far
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal
I cheered when Humphrey was chosen
My faith in the system restored
I'm glad the commies were thrown out
of the A.F.L. C.I.O. board
I love Puerto Ricans and Negros
as long as they don't move next door
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal
The people of old Mississippi
Should all hang their heads in shame
I can't understand how their minds work
What's the matter don't they watch Les Crain?
But if you ask me to bus my children
I hope the cops take down your name
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal
I read New republic and Nation
I've learned to take every view
You know, I've memorized Lerner and Golden
I feel like I'm almost a Jew
But when it comes to times like korea
There's no one more red, white and blue
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal
I vote for the democtratic party
They want the U.N. to be strong
I go to all the Pete Seeger concerts
He sure gets me singing those songs
I'll send all the money you ask for
But don't ask me to come on along
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal
Once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But I've grown older and wiser
And that's why I'm turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal
***********
Markin comment:
This is a continuation of entries for folksinger/songwriter Phil Och's who back in the early 1960s stood right up there with Bob Dylan in the protest songwriting category. The entries on this date testify to that. However, early on I sensed something special about Dylan and never really warmed up to Ochs. His singing style did not "move" me and that counted for a lot in those days. The rest just turned on preference.
********
This may not be Phil's best song but time has done nothing to diminish its razor-edged point.
Love Me, I'm a Liberal Lyrics
E A E A
I cried when they shot Medgar Evers
E C#m
Tears ran down my spine
E A E
I cried when they shot Mr. Kennedy
F#7 B7
As though I'd lost a father of mine
E A E
But Malcolm X got what was coming
G#m A
He got what he asked for this time
E C#m A B7 E
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal
I go to civil rights rallies
And I put down the old D.A.R.
I love Harry and Sidney and Sammy
I hope every colored boy becomes a star
But don't talk about revolution
That's going a little bit too far
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal
I cheered when Humphrey was chosen
My faith in the system restored
I'm glad the commies were thrown out
of the A.F.L. C.I.O. board
I love Puerto Ricans and Negros
as long as they don't move next door
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal
The people of old Mississippi
Should all hang their heads in shame
I can't understand how their minds work
What's the matter don't they watch Les Crain?
But if you ask me to bus my children
I hope the cops take down your name
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal
I read New republic and Nation
I've learned to take every view
You know, I've memorized Lerner and Golden
I feel like I'm almost a Jew
But when it comes to times like korea
There's no one more red, white and blue
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal
I vote for the democtratic party
They want the U.N. to be strong
I go to all the Pete Seeger concerts
He sure gets me singing those songs
I'll send all the money you ask for
But don't ask me to come on along
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal
Once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But I've grown older and wiser
And that's why I'm turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
*A Pinprick At Modern American Capitalism- Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story - An Encore Note
Click on title to link to the Renegade Eye blog posting of a review in Socialist Appeal of the Michael Moore film, Capitalism: A Love Story.
Markin comment:
Originally, I did not intend to review Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story and was more than happy to let the linked article posted on October 29, 2009serve in that capacity leaving myself the short comment below:
"Thanks for saving me from having to review this work. While we can all appreciate the work of Michael Moore in tweaking the right (here in America) I would feel much better about his work, his person, and his politics if he didn't have that front row seat safely ensconced in the midst of the Democratic Party. Michael- Break with the Democrats! Enough said."
After a recent re-viewing of the film documentary I still do no feel any great need to review the film, although in addition to the quoted comment above, which I stand by and I believe is still good advise for Mr. Moore, I do have a couple of other comments to make:
First, although this documentary was just released last year it already has a dated feel to it, as governmental regimes have changed but not the greedy profit motive that drives the capitalist economy and which the twin governmental parties of capitalism, Republican and Democratic, each in their way, serve. Moore’s main object at the time, I assume, was to take advantage, easy advantage as the case turned out, of the villainous characters that ran the capitalist government under President Bush, under whose regime all economic hell broke loose, especially in 2008. That was then, and this is now though. The easily interchangeable cast of characters now look remarkable the same, the wars the same, unemployment still at modern day highs, Wall Street bonuses obscene, Congress still under that street's thumb (as Moore, in his great film-making capacity, really captures) under new “go to” guy Obama. Sure, plenty of people had (and still have) lots of illusions in Obama so Brother Moore was not alone, although some of the others had enough sense not to film their glee for the world to see and thus have to now shield their faces from public view after the inevitable shoe has fallen.
Second, one of the central motifs here is Moore’s notion that this country can turn itself around by going back to some form of Rooseveltian “New Deal" (his Second Bill Of Rights). But his big push is for social and political action by the “little people.” (Called by Moore, and others, the middle class, although it is really called the working class, brother, at least from the film footage interviews from such towns as Detroit and Cleveland. There is nothing wrong with calling a thing by its right name, okay?) Moore makes several plugs (including at the end) for people to “do something.” Unfortunately, such a vague statement in politics can be turned on you. In a racist-tinged, anti-immigrant, starve public services (part of which is directed at those same two groups) “Age of the Tea Bag”, political action by the “little people” is not always, without a program, a socialist program, the kind of clarion call to action that one is looking for. So political programmatic clarity, always in short supply with Moore, is a must.
Finally, although I didn’t notice it as much on the first viewing, Moore’s worldview is informed by an almost Catholic Worker movement-like (formed in the old Great Depression days by Dorothy Day and others, and later included followers like the Berrigan brothers and many ex-priests and ex-nuns) sensibility. Now, as I, perhaps, have mentioned before Dorothy Day was revered in my childhood home, especially by my devout, pious poor mother. So I can thus sense the origins of the quest for justice in Moore’s work, as that spark also drove part of my own social education, if not for his conclusions. But Brother Moore that was long ago, and I was just I kid. Grownups fight, and fight hard, under the banner-Break with the Democrats! Fight for our communist future!
Markin comment:
Originally, I did not intend to review Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story and was more than happy to let the linked article posted on October 29, 2009serve in that capacity leaving myself the short comment below:
"Thanks for saving me from having to review this work. While we can all appreciate the work of Michael Moore in tweaking the right (here in America) I would feel much better about his work, his person, and his politics if he didn't have that front row seat safely ensconced in the midst of the Democratic Party. Michael- Break with the Democrats! Enough said."
After a recent re-viewing of the film documentary I still do no feel any great need to review the film, although in addition to the quoted comment above, which I stand by and I believe is still good advise for Mr. Moore, I do have a couple of other comments to make:
First, although this documentary was just released last year it already has a dated feel to it, as governmental regimes have changed but not the greedy profit motive that drives the capitalist economy and which the twin governmental parties of capitalism, Republican and Democratic, each in their way, serve. Moore’s main object at the time, I assume, was to take advantage, easy advantage as the case turned out, of the villainous characters that ran the capitalist government under President Bush, under whose regime all economic hell broke loose, especially in 2008. That was then, and this is now though. The easily interchangeable cast of characters now look remarkable the same, the wars the same, unemployment still at modern day highs, Wall Street bonuses obscene, Congress still under that street's thumb (as Moore, in his great film-making capacity, really captures) under new “go to” guy Obama. Sure, plenty of people had (and still have) lots of illusions in Obama so Brother Moore was not alone, although some of the others had enough sense not to film their glee for the world to see and thus have to now shield their faces from public view after the inevitable shoe has fallen.
Second, one of the central motifs here is Moore’s notion that this country can turn itself around by going back to some form of Rooseveltian “New Deal" (his Second Bill Of Rights). But his big push is for social and political action by the “little people.” (Called by Moore, and others, the middle class, although it is really called the working class, brother, at least from the film footage interviews from such towns as Detroit and Cleveland. There is nothing wrong with calling a thing by its right name, okay?) Moore makes several plugs (including at the end) for people to “do something.” Unfortunately, such a vague statement in politics can be turned on you. In a racist-tinged, anti-immigrant, starve public services (part of which is directed at those same two groups) “Age of the Tea Bag”, political action by the “little people” is not always, without a program, a socialist program, the kind of clarion call to action that one is looking for. So political programmatic clarity, always in short supply with Moore, is a must.
Finally, although I didn’t notice it as much on the first viewing, Moore’s worldview is informed by an almost Catholic Worker movement-like (formed in the old Great Depression days by Dorothy Day and others, and later included followers like the Berrigan brothers and many ex-priests and ex-nuns) sensibility. Now, as I, perhaps, have mentioned before Dorothy Day was revered in my childhood home, especially by my devout, pious poor mother. So I can thus sense the origins of the quest for justice in Moore’s work, as that spark also drove part of my own social education, if not for his conclusions. But Brother Moore that was long ago, and I was just I kid. Grownups fight, and fight hard, under the banner-Break with the Democrats! Fight for our communist future!
Thursday, April 29, 2010
*No Vote To New Labor In The United Kingdom (UK) Parliamentary Elections
Click on the headline to link to a "Lenin Internet Archive" online copy of his 1920 classic statement of revolutionary tactics, "Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder-"Left-Wing" Communism In Great Britain"
Markin comment:
For radicals and revolutionaries in America come election time it is, or should be, a no-brainer to call for a NO vote to all the pro-capitalist parties, big or small, donkeys, elephants or greens. Occasionally, at least this has been the case in the span of my political lifetime; we can support one or another socialist or communist candidate depending on their programs. However, for the most part, lacking even a reformist workers party to campaign for, we use the heightened political atmosphere that elections bring to get out our propaganda messages. On such themes as the need to for labor to break from the capitalist parties, in particular its long alliance with the American Democratic Party, the need to build an independent working class party with a class struggle program and the need to deal with questions of special oppression for women, blacks and others.
The tasks for radicals and revolutionaries in the United Kingdom (UK) are slightly different. (I am under the sway of the BBC in this usage as it is their preferred form, and it further recognizes something that should be painful to every revolutionary-that Great Britain is still a monarchy). There, for the past century or so, the working class has had its own party, at least in a formal sense. So the question of whether to support or not support this reformist formation is an open and lively political question. As this entry’s headline indicates there should be no question that New Labor should not be supported by a vote in the upcoming parliamentary elections. After over a decade of hard, bitter, austere administration of the capitalist state against the short and ling term interests of the working class this should be a “no-brainer” as well. The only question then would be support, if any, to the myriad ostensibly socialist organizations that populate the left of the Labor Party, inside or out.
I say that No vote position should be a “no-brainer” but I am beginning to see and hear rumblings from the UK, now that the three-way race seems to be a donnybrook, that those to the left of Labor should give some kind of “critical support” to Labor- the “poodle” party to the Bush/Obama imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan…and who knows where tomorrow. And, of course, those who wish to do so will trot out Lenin, the Lenin of “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder”, to argue that New Labor should be supported “like a rope supports a hanging man”, but supported nevertheless. As the linked article above by Lenin demonstrates Arthur Henderson, and his cohorts, seem almost to be bloody "Bolsheviks" by comparison with today's crop of "labor leaders".
Now critical support to reformist parties, of which Old Labor in the UK was a sterling example, can be an important tactic. Old Labor, however, was at least solidly based on the trade unions and was a class party. An argument could easily be made that Old Labor would not have existed without the support, financial or otherwise, from the trade unions. New Labor is increasingly, and consciously, breaking from that path and modeling itself on the American Democratic Party. But, although at some point, the question of being able to support New Labor at all, as a matter of principle, may come up that is not the case today, nor is it the main criterion for calling for a No vote. Critical support is a tactic that revolutionaries use, including old comrades Lenin and Trotsky, to point out the contradictions between the working class base and the actions of the leadership in cases where revolutionaries are not powerful and authoritative enough to lead the working class. Where can one point to any contradiction in New Labor that revolutionaries could use to draw the lessons for the working class base. To pose the question is to give the answer in this case. No Vote To New Labor!
Note: I had a certain amount of sport bringing up the United Kingdom (UK) designation. However there is a point to be made here. The minimum, minimum, minimum program that revolutionaries should thing about on the question of critical support is actually a democratic program from the 17th century, Cromwell’s program. Abolish the monarchy! Abolish the House of Lords! Abolish the state church! Doesn’t Socialist Republics of the British Isles, although a little bulky to say and write, read and sound better than UK? Ya, I thought so.
Markin comment:
For radicals and revolutionaries in America come election time it is, or should be, a no-brainer to call for a NO vote to all the pro-capitalist parties, big or small, donkeys, elephants or greens. Occasionally, at least this has been the case in the span of my political lifetime; we can support one or another socialist or communist candidate depending on their programs. However, for the most part, lacking even a reformist workers party to campaign for, we use the heightened political atmosphere that elections bring to get out our propaganda messages. On such themes as the need to for labor to break from the capitalist parties, in particular its long alliance with the American Democratic Party, the need to build an independent working class party with a class struggle program and the need to deal with questions of special oppression for women, blacks and others.
The tasks for radicals and revolutionaries in the United Kingdom (UK) are slightly different. (I am under the sway of the BBC in this usage as it is their preferred form, and it further recognizes something that should be painful to every revolutionary-that Great Britain is still a monarchy). There, for the past century or so, the working class has had its own party, at least in a formal sense. So the question of whether to support or not support this reformist formation is an open and lively political question. As this entry’s headline indicates there should be no question that New Labor should not be supported by a vote in the upcoming parliamentary elections. After over a decade of hard, bitter, austere administration of the capitalist state against the short and ling term interests of the working class this should be a “no-brainer” as well. The only question then would be support, if any, to the myriad ostensibly socialist organizations that populate the left of the Labor Party, inside or out.
I say that No vote position should be a “no-brainer” but I am beginning to see and hear rumblings from the UK, now that the three-way race seems to be a donnybrook, that those to the left of Labor should give some kind of “critical support” to Labor- the “poodle” party to the Bush/Obama imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan…and who knows where tomorrow. And, of course, those who wish to do so will trot out Lenin, the Lenin of “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder”, to argue that New Labor should be supported “like a rope supports a hanging man”, but supported nevertheless. As the linked article above by Lenin demonstrates Arthur Henderson, and his cohorts, seem almost to be bloody "Bolsheviks" by comparison with today's crop of "labor leaders".
Now critical support to reformist parties, of which Old Labor in the UK was a sterling example, can be an important tactic. Old Labor, however, was at least solidly based on the trade unions and was a class party. An argument could easily be made that Old Labor would not have existed without the support, financial or otherwise, from the trade unions. New Labor is increasingly, and consciously, breaking from that path and modeling itself on the American Democratic Party. But, although at some point, the question of being able to support New Labor at all, as a matter of principle, may come up that is not the case today, nor is it the main criterion for calling for a No vote. Critical support is a tactic that revolutionaries use, including old comrades Lenin and Trotsky, to point out the contradictions between the working class base and the actions of the leadership in cases where revolutionaries are not powerful and authoritative enough to lead the working class. Where can one point to any contradiction in New Labor that revolutionaries could use to draw the lessons for the working class base. To pose the question is to give the answer in this case. No Vote To New Labor!
Note: I had a certain amount of sport bringing up the United Kingdom (UK) designation. However there is a point to be made here. The minimum, minimum, minimum program that revolutionaries should thing about on the question of critical support is actually a democratic program from the 17th century, Cromwell’s program. Abolish the monarchy! Abolish the House of Lords! Abolish the state church! Doesn’t Socialist Republics of the British Isles, although a little bulky to say and write, read and sound better than UK? Ya, I thought so.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
*From The "Green Left Global News" Blog-" Beyond "Green Capitalism"
Click on the headline to link to a "Green Left Global News" blog entry, "Beyond "Green Capitalism".
Markin comment:
Praise be!- Someone is finally making the connection that 'green' (small) capitalism is still capitalism- driven by the profit motion rather than social need. Now if the people who understood that would only start to think about the real alternative, socialism-and, for openers, a vanguard party to bring it about. Hope springs eternal.
Markin comment:
Praise be!- Someone is finally making the connection that 'green' (small) capitalism is still capitalism- driven by the profit motion rather than social need. Now if the people who understood that would only start to think about the real alternative, socialism-and, for openers, a vanguard party to bring it about. Hope springs eternal.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
*From The "SteveLendmanBlog"- On The Massachusetts U.S. Senate Election Results
Click on the title to link to a "Steven Lendman Blog" entry that deals with the fall out from the recent special election in Massachusetts to fill the unexpired term of the late Democratic Senator, Edward Kennedy.
Markin commnet:
I leave it to ace commentator Steve Lendman to do the bang-up job of analysis of this benighted bourgeois special election. Thanks, Steve.
Markin commnet:
I leave it to ace commentator Steve Lendman to do the bang-up job of analysis of this benighted bourgeois special election. Thanks, Steve.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
* Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story"- A Guest Review
Click on title to link to Renegade Eye's posting of review in "Socialist Appeal" of the Michael Moore film, "Capitalism: A Love Story".
Markin comment:
Thanks for saving me from having to review this work. While we can all appreciate the work of Michael Moore in tweaking the right I would feel much better about his work, his person and his politics if he didn't have that front row seat safely ensconced in the midst of the Democratic Party. Michael- Break with the Democrats! Enough said.
Markin comment:
Thanks for saving me from having to review this work. While we can all appreciate the work of Michael Moore in tweaking the right I would feel much better about his work, his person and his politics if he didn't have that front row seat safely ensconced in the midst of the Democratic Party. Michael- Break with the Democrats! Enough said.
Friday, August 28, 2009
As The Kennedy Legacy In American Politics Passes- Reflections Of An Old Leftist On Bobby Kennedy
Click on title to link to the Public Broadcasting System's "American Experience" episode on Robert Kennedy.
Markin Commentary-August 28, 2009
With the passing of Massachusetts United Senator Edward Kennedy on August 26, 2009 there is a palpable sense that a political era has passed in American bourgeois politics. That may be. There will be plenty of time to analyze that, for those so inclined, later. For now though this reviewer, as one who was born in Massachusetts and has been face to face with the Kennedy aura since early childhood, has a few comments to make, not on Ted Kennedy, but on the political hero of my youth his older brother, Robert. I am reposting two entries, “The Real Robert Kennedy” and “On Bobby Kennedy”, from last year, the 40th anniversary of Bobby’s assassination during his run for the 1968 democratic presidential nomination.
As for the late Ted Kennedy he probably went as far it is possible to do in professing the liberal capitalist credo inherited from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal”. Admittedly, since the halcyon “Camelot” days of the early 1960s that has been a bar that has been progressively lowered. Nevertheless, on specific issues, we leftists could unite (and did), with the appropriate freedom of criticism that we needed to insist on as a condition for joint action, with Ted Kennedy. That, my friends, who may not understand is under the old principle of uniting with “the devil and his grandmother” for the good of our cause.
But here is the real “skinny” on Ted Kennedy from our prospective. When, and if, the deal went down and the existence of the capitalist system was on the line old Teddy would have been the last “liberal” defender on the last barricade of that system. And why not? It was his system. Somewhere to Kennedy’s left there was a great divide that he could not pass and where we would, of necessity, have had to part company on those barricades just mentioned. Enough said on Ted though today I really want to go back to my young and reminisce about Bobby. Again.
Posted on “American Left History”-July 17, 2008
*The Real Robert Kennedy- A Sober Liberal View From PBS's American Experience Series
DVD REVIEW
Robert Kennedy, American Experience, PBS, 2004
It is somewhat ironic that at just the time that when presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, a recent addition to the Democratic Party pantheon of heroes and heir apparent to the Kennedy legacy, is claiming the nomination of the party that the 40th Anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy during the presidential campaign of 1968 is being remembered in some quarters. That event holds much meaning in the political evolution of this writer. The Robert Kennedy campaign of 1968 was the last time that this writer had a serious desire to fight solely on the parliamentary road for progressive political change. So today he too has some remembrances, as well. This documentary from the Public Broadcasting System’s "American Experience" series only adds some visual flashes to those remembrances.
In a commentary in another space I have mentioned that through the tumultuous period leading to the early spring of 1968 that I had done some political somersaults as a result of Bobby Kennedy’s early refusal to take on a sitting president, Lyndon Johnson, for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Moreover, I committed myself early (sometime in late 1967) to the reelection of Lyndon Johnson, as much as I hated his Vietnam War policy. Why? One Richard M. Nixon. I did not give Eugene McCarthy’s insurgent campaign even a sniff, although I agreed with his anti-war stance. Why? He could not beat one Richard M. Nixon. When Bobby Kennedy jumped in and Johnson announced that he was not going to run again and I was there the next day. I was a senior in college at the time but I believe I spent hundreds of hours that spring working the campaign either out of Boston, Washington, D.C. or elsewhere. Why? Well, you can guess the obvious by now. He COULD beat one Richard M. Nixon.
It was more than that though, and I will discuss that in the next paragraph. I took, as many did, Bobby's murder hard. It would be rather facile now to say that something of my youth, and that of others who I have talked to recently about this event, got left behind with his murder but there you have it. However, to show you the kind of political year that it was for me about a week after his death I was in the Hubert Humphrey campaign office in Boston. Why? You know why by now. And for those who don’t it had one name- Richard M. Nixon.
But let us get back to that other, more virtuous, political motive for supporting Bobby Kennedy. It was always, in those days, complicated coming from Massachusetts to separate out the whirlwind effect that the Kennedy family had on us, especially on ‘shanty’ Irish families. On the one hand we wished one of our own well, especially against the WASPs, on the other there was always that innate bitterness (jealousy, if you will) that it was not we who were the ones that were getting ahead. If there is any Irish in your family you know what I am talking about.
To be sure, as a fourteen year old I walked the neighborhood for John Kennedy in 1960 but as I have mentioned elsewhere that was a pro forma thing. Part of the ritual of entry into presidential politics. The Bobby thing was from the heart. Why? It is hard to explain but there was something about the deeply felt sense of Irish fatalism that he projected, especially after the death of his brother, that attracted me to him. But also the ruthless side where he was willing to cut Mayor Daly and every politician like him down or pat them on the back and more, if necessary, to get a little rough justice in the world. In those days I held those qualities, especially in tandem, in high esteem. Hell, I still do, if on a narrower basis.
Okay, that is enough for a trip down memory lane back to the old politically naïve days, or rather opportunistic days. Without detailing the events here the end of 1968 was also a watershed year for changing my belief that an individual candidate rather than ideas and political program were decisive for political organizing. That understanding, furthermore, changed my political appreciation for Bobby Kennedy (and the vices and virtues of the Democratic Party). That is the import of this well-produced (as always) portrayal of the short life and career of Robert Kennedy. If in 1968, with my 1968 political understandings, I stood shoulder to shoulder with Robert Kennedy my political evolution and his political past, as detailed here, have changed my perceptions dramatically.
This documentary highlights the close relationship between Robert and his older brother John starting with the Massachusetts United Senate campaign in 1952 (and that would continue in the 1960 campaign and during John Kennedy’s administration right up to the assassination). We are presented here, however, with the ‘bad’ Bobby who was more than willing to join Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “red scare” anti-communist campaign and the anti-labor McClellan Committee campaigns against Jimmy Hoffa in particular. There is no love lost between this writer and labor bureaucrats like Hoffa (or his son) but a bedrock position then and today is the need for labor to clean its own house. What purpose does government intervention into the labor movement do except to weaken it? Bobby was on the other side on this one, as well.
Under the John Kennedy Administration Robert, moreover, played a key role in putting a damper on the early civil rights movement in the South (as well as putting a 'tap' on Martin Luther King at the behest of one J. Edgar Hoover), the Bay of Pigs decision and aftermath , the Cuban Missile Crisis confrontation with the Soviet Union and the early escalation, under the rubric of counter-insurgency, in Vietnam. As readily observable, where I had previously downplayed my opposition to some of Bobby's positions I now put a minus next to them. That is politics.
Finally though, I will frankly admit a lingering ‘softness’ for Bobby. Why? The late political journalist Jack Newfield one of the inevitable 'talking heads' that people PBS productions, a biographer of Robert Kennedy I believe but in any case a close companion in the mid-1960’s and a prior resident of the Bedford-Stuveysant ghetto of New York City, made this comment about a Robert Kennedy response to his question during a tour of that area. Newfield asked Kennedy what he would have become if he had grown up in Bedford-Stuveysant. Bobby responded quickly- I would either be a juvenile delinquent or a revolutionary. I would like to think that he meant those alternatives seriously. Enough said.
Markin Commentary-August 28, 2009
With the passing of Massachusetts United Senator Edward Kennedy on August 26, 2009 there is a palpable sense that a political era has passed in American bourgeois politics. That may be. There will be plenty of time to analyze that, for those so inclined, later. For now though this reviewer, as one who was born in Massachusetts and has been face to face with the Kennedy aura since early childhood, has a few comments to make, not on Ted Kennedy, but on the political hero of my youth his older brother, Robert. I am reposting two entries, “The Real Robert Kennedy” and “On Bobby Kennedy”, from last year, the 40th anniversary of Bobby’s assassination during his run for the 1968 democratic presidential nomination.
As for the late Ted Kennedy he probably went as far it is possible to do in professing the liberal capitalist credo inherited from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal”. Admittedly, since the halcyon “Camelot” days of the early 1960s that has been a bar that has been progressively lowered. Nevertheless, on specific issues, we leftists could unite (and did), with the appropriate freedom of criticism that we needed to insist on as a condition for joint action, with Ted Kennedy. That, my friends, who may not understand is under the old principle of uniting with “the devil and his grandmother” for the good of our cause.
But here is the real “skinny” on Ted Kennedy from our prospective. When, and if, the deal went down and the existence of the capitalist system was on the line old Teddy would have been the last “liberal” defender on the last barricade of that system. And why not? It was his system. Somewhere to Kennedy’s left there was a great divide that he could not pass and where we would, of necessity, have had to part company on those barricades just mentioned. Enough said on Ted though today I really want to go back to my young and reminisce about Bobby. Again.
Posted on “American Left History”-July 17, 2008
*The Real Robert Kennedy- A Sober Liberal View From PBS's American Experience Series
DVD REVIEW
Robert Kennedy, American Experience, PBS, 2004
It is somewhat ironic that at just the time that when presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, a recent addition to the Democratic Party pantheon of heroes and heir apparent to the Kennedy legacy, is claiming the nomination of the party that the 40th Anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy during the presidential campaign of 1968 is being remembered in some quarters. That event holds much meaning in the political evolution of this writer. The Robert Kennedy campaign of 1968 was the last time that this writer had a serious desire to fight solely on the parliamentary road for progressive political change. So today he too has some remembrances, as well. This documentary from the Public Broadcasting System’s "American Experience" series only adds some visual flashes to those remembrances.
In a commentary in another space I have mentioned that through the tumultuous period leading to the early spring of 1968 that I had done some political somersaults as a result of Bobby Kennedy’s early refusal to take on a sitting president, Lyndon Johnson, for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Moreover, I committed myself early (sometime in late 1967) to the reelection of Lyndon Johnson, as much as I hated his Vietnam War policy. Why? One Richard M. Nixon. I did not give Eugene McCarthy’s insurgent campaign even a sniff, although I agreed with his anti-war stance. Why? He could not beat one Richard M. Nixon. When Bobby Kennedy jumped in and Johnson announced that he was not going to run again and I was there the next day. I was a senior in college at the time but I believe I spent hundreds of hours that spring working the campaign either out of Boston, Washington, D.C. or elsewhere. Why? Well, you can guess the obvious by now. He COULD beat one Richard M. Nixon.
It was more than that though, and I will discuss that in the next paragraph. I took, as many did, Bobby's murder hard. It would be rather facile now to say that something of my youth, and that of others who I have talked to recently about this event, got left behind with his murder but there you have it. However, to show you the kind of political year that it was for me about a week after his death I was in the Hubert Humphrey campaign office in Boston. Why? You know why by now. And for those who don’t it had one name- Richard M. Nixon.
But let us get back to that other, more virtuous, political motive for supporting Bobby Kennedy. It was always, in those days, complicated coming from Massachusetts to separate out the whirlwind effect that the Kennedy family had on us, especially on ‘shanty’ Irish families. On the one hand we wished one of our own well, especially against the WASPs, on the other there was always that innate bitterness (jealousy, if you will) that it was not we who were the ones that were getting ahead. If there is any Irish in your family you know what I am talking about.
To be sure, as a fourteen year old I walked the neighborhood for John Kennedy in 1960 but as I have mentioned elsewhere that was a pro forma thing. Part of the ritual of entry into presidential politics. The Bobby thing was from the heart. Why? It is hard to explain but there was something about the deeply felt sense of Irish fatalism that he projected, especially after the death of his brother, that attracted me to him. But also the ruthless side where he was willing to cut Mayor Daly and every politician like him down or pat them on the back and more, if necessary, to get a little rough justice in the world. In those days I held those qualities, especially in tandem, in high esteem. Hell, I still do, if on a narrower basis.
Okay, that is enough for a trip down memory lane back to the old politically naïve days, or rather opportunistic days. Without detailing the events here the end of 1968 was also a watershed year for changing my belief that an individual candidate rather than ideas and political program were decisive for political organizing. That understanding, furthermore, changed my political appreciation for Bobby Kennedy (and the vices and virtues of the Democratic Party). That is the import of this well-produced (as always) portrayal of the short life and career of Robert Kennedy. If in 1968, with my 1968 political understandings, I stood shoulder to shoulder with Robert Kennedy my political evolution and his political past, as detailed here, have changed my perceptions dramatically.
This documentary highlights the close relationship between Robert and his older brother John starting with the Massachusetts United Senate campaign in 1952 (and that would continue in the 1960 campaign and during John Kennedy’s administration right up to the assassination). We are presented here, however, with the ‘bad’ Bobby who was more than willing to join Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “red scare” anti-communist campaign and the anti-labor McClellan Committee campaigns against Jimmy Hoffa in particular. There is no love lost between this writer and labor bureaucrats like Hoffa (or his son) but a bedrock position then and today is the need for labor to clean its own house. What purpose does government intervention into the labor movement do except to weaken it? Bobby was on the other side on this one, as well.
Under the John Kennedy Administration Robert, moreover, played a key role in putting a damper on the early civil rights movement in the South (as well as putting a 'tap' on Martin Luther King at the behest of one J. Edgar Hoover), the Bay of Pigs decision and aftermath , the Cuban Missile Crisis confrontation with the Soviet Union and the early escalation, under the rubric of counter-insurgency, in Vietnam. As readily observable, where I had previously downplayed my opposition to some of Bobby's positions I now put a minus next to them. That is politics.
Finally though, I will frankly admit a lingering ‘softness’ for Bobby. Why? The late political journalist Jack Newfield one of the inevitable 'talking heads' that people PBS productions, a biographer of Robert Kennedy I believe but in any case a close companion in the mid-1960’s and a prior resident of the Bedford-Stuveysant ghetto of New York City, made this comment about a Robert Kennedy response to his question during a tour of that area. Newfield asked Kennedy what he would have become if he had grown up in Bedford-Stuveysant. Bobby responded quickly- I would either be a juvenile delinquent or a revolutionary. I would like to think that he meant those alternatives seriously. Enough said.
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