*Don't Tell Anyone This But "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Has Got To Go-By Any Means Necessary

Click on the headline to link to a Boston Globe, dated October 13, 2010, article detailing the legal situation now that a federal judge has granted an injunction to stop the military from discharging open gays from the various branches of the service.

Markin comment:

Look, we anti-imperialist, anti-warriors hate the American imperial military. We hate to see people getting dragged into the military, one way or another. Yet we have to insist that those selfsame military personnel have the same rights as the civilian population has (or that the civilian population should have), including openly (or not) expressing their own sexual preferences. Under conditions of our communist future this would have been a "no-brainer." But we will take our positive social steps forward anyway we can get them. Here, under the auspices of a federal judge, who simply just read the terms of their bourgeois constitution correctly, the right thing is being done. Kudos to the judge on that one.

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-“War on Terror” Witchhunt-Protest FBI Raids on Leftists, Union Activists!

Markin comment:

This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist mentioned in this day's (and yesterday's) other posts.

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Workers Vanguard No. 966
8 October 2010

“War on Terror” Witchhunt

Protest FBI Raids on Leftists, Union Activists!

OCTOBER 5—In a series of dawn raids on September 24, FBI agents in Minneapolis and Chicago invaded seven homes and an office of leftists and labor activists. The Feds spent hours ransacking their homes, seizing cell phones and passports and carting away vanloads of boxes filled with personal papers, address books and computer disks. The activists were slapped with subpoenas to testify this month before a witchhunting grand jury. Subpoenas have also been served against individuals in North Carolina and Michigan. The government seeks to pin charges of “material support to terrorism” on the activists and others associated with them based on their political activities in solidarity with the oppressed in the Near East and Latin America. Today, an attorney for the activists announced that all 14 of those hit with subpoenas in the Midwest will refuse to testify before the grand jury in Chicago.

Most of the victims of the raids are well-known leftists. Jessica Sundin is a longtime antiwar activist in Minneapolis, a supporter of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and member of the Anti-War Committee, whose office was also raided. Joe Iosbaker is a chief steward and executive board member of Service Employees International Union Local 73 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he acts as an adviser to the Students for a Democratic Society. Mick Kelly is the editor of the FRSO’s newspaper, Fight Back! Hatem Abudayyeh, a Palestinian American antiwar activist, is executive director of the Arab American Action Network.

It is vitally necessary for the labor movement to come to the defense of these activists and demand an end to the witchhunt. For decades, the capitalist rulers have sought to tar leftists as “terrorists”—i.e., people with no rights the state is bound to respect and to whom the government can do anything. The recent FBI raids open a sinister new front in that effort. Paving the Feds’ way, a June 21 Supreme Court decision expanded what can legally be considered “material support to terrorism” to include a wide range of activities deemed as somehow aiding proscribed foreign organizations.

In a protest letter issued the day after the raids, the Partisan Defense Committee, a class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, denounced the Feds’ attempt to chill the political activities of those who protest government policies at home and wars abroad. The letter stated: “From its inception under the Bush administration, the ‘war on terror,’ which initially victimized Arab and Muslim immigrants, set into motion repressive measures that also target leftists, trade unionists, and black people. Now the Obama administration is escalating these wholesale attacks on civil liberties with these neo-McCarthyite raids.”

The PDC and a number of other organizations have demanded that the subpoenas be withdrawn, that no charges be filed and that all belongings seized by the Feds be returned immediately. On September 27, the San Francisco Labor Council passed a resolution condemning the raids, and protest rallies have been held in cities across the country.

Almost to a man, liberal organizations and the reformist left had promoted the illusion that Barack Obama would represent some kind of “change” from the George W. Bush regime. But as we pointed out, what drove Obama’s promises to clean up some of the Bush gang’s most blatant “excesses” was his commitment to wage a more effective “war on terror.” In office, Obama has embraced every one of the repressive tools handed down to him by Bush (and Bush’s predecessor, Bill Clinton)—and then some: detention of “enemy combatants” at Guantánamo; domestic wiretapping by the National Security Agency; invocation of “state secrets” to quash lawsuits exposing U.S.-sponsored torture; kangaroo-court military commissions to try “terror” suspects; endorsement of indefinite detention, a hallmark of police-state regimes. While Bush broadened the FBI’s legal authority to launch “terrorism” investigations based solely on one’s political views, the Obama government has taken this a big step further with the concerted raids against leftists.

“War on Terror” Targets All of Us

The same day as the FBI raids, the left-wing National Lawyers Guild released a report titled “The Policing of Political Speech: Constraints on Mass Dissent in the U.S.” that pointed to “a highly orchestrated curtailment of personal and political liberties” in the nine years since the September 11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The report denounced the government’s stigmatizing activists as terrorists and its use of “fear-based techniques against those who dare speak out against government policies.”

The purpose of “anti-terror” witchhunts is...to instill terror in the population. The country’s rulers fan fears of constant threat from the likes of Al Qaeda in order to garner popular support for (or acquiescence to) an immense expansion of police powers. As the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee argued in an amici curiae brief filed in July 2003 on behalf of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen seized and detained by the government as an “enemy combatant”:

“The ‘war against terrorism’ is a fiction, a political construct, not a military reality. It is a political crusade conducted in the name of ridding society of a perceived evil. It is no more a ‘war’ in a military sense than ‘war against cancer,’ ‘war against obesity’ or a ‘war against immorality.’ Like the ‘war against communism’ and the ‘war against drugs,’ this ‘war’ is a pretext to increase the state’s police powers and repressive apparatus, constricting the democratic rights of the population.”

It did not take long after the September 11 attacks for the government to demonstrate that its campaign for “national unity” against “terrorism” targeted a much wider swath than immigrants from Islamic countries, not least the labor movement. In December 2001, striking school teachers in New Jersey were pilloried as Taliban. The following year, Tom Ridge, then head of Homeland Security, personally intervened to warn West Coast longshoremen organized by the ILWU that any strike action would be treated as a threat to national security. Even such liberal pacifists as the Quakers and the Catholic Worker group have been spied upon in the “anti-terror” witchhunt, as documented in a report issued last month by the Justice Department’s Inspector General.

The SL/PDC amici brief pointed out: “The Executive’s declaration that its ‘war against terrorism’ forfeits constitutional protections for designated individuals echoes the regimes of shahs and colonels and presidents ‘for life’ from the Near East to Africa to Latin America, to justify the mass imprisonment and unmarked graves of political dissidents.” The brief continued, “The Executive is proclaiming the right to disappear citizens of its choosing.” Taking this “right” to its logical conclusion, the Obama administration earlier this year gave legal authority for the targeted assassination of a U.S. citizen living abroad—Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is accused of being an Al Qaeda operative and is believed to be hiding in Yemen.

How the “anti-terror” laws and other measures could be used for political witchhunts was on display in the police mobilizations that met protesters at the Republican and Democratic national conventions in 2004 and 2008. Civil disobedience and disruptions caused by a few anarchoid youth—trivial acts that used to be vindictively charged as “disorderly conduct”—were now defined as acts of terrorism. In the lead-up to the 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC), eight protest organizers were arrested on “terrorism” charges. Since then, charges have been dropped against three of the “RNC 8” and another has pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. While “terrorism” charges have been dropped against the remaining four, they still face trumped-up conspiracy charges that carry with them the threat of years in prison. With the trial for the four due to begin this month, we demand: Drop all charges against the RNC protesters!

While the country’s rulers have a long history of harassing and criminalizing leftist dissent, the designation of political opponents as terrorists is a threat of greater magnitude. To be declared a terrorist is to be declared an individual outside of society, for whom democratic rights have no application and who the cops have license to gun down, or disappear, without any purported reason. In the 1960s, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover’s declaration that the Black Panther Party constituted the “greatest threat to national security” gave police nationwide a green light to blow Panthers away. Thirty-eight Black Panther Party members were assassinated in the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO campaign and hundreds of others railroaded to prison. Begun in the 1950s, COINTELPRO was vastly expanded under Democrat Lyndon Johnson and his attorney general, Ramsey Clark (long a leading light in the Workers World Party’s International Action Center).

Democrats, Republicans Criminalize Dissent

The government’s prohibition of “material support to terrorism” originated with the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act under Clinton and was expanded by Bush’s USA Patriot Act. The law proscribes providing money, personnel, services or training to some 40 foreign organizations designated by the Secretary of State as terrorist.

One measure of the threat that “anti-terror” laws pose for the rights of the population as a whole can be seen in the case of leftist attorney Lynne Stewart. Along with her legal assistant Ahmed Abdel Sattar and translator Mohamed Yousry, Stewart was convicted in 2005 of frame-up charges of support to terrorism for her determined legal defense of blind Egyptian sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was imprisoned for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. At stake in Stewart’s case was the very right to legal representation. This July, Obama’s Justice Department succeeded in pressing the courts to vindictively increase her sentence to ten years—a virtual death sentence for a 70-year-old woman who suffers from breast cancer.

The June Supreme Court ruling expanded what constitutes “material support” to include the exercise of the rights of speech and association, which are supposedly protected by the First Amendment. The ruling was in response to a case brought by the Humanitarian Law Project and other groups and individuals who wanted to advise the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) on how to appeal to the United Nations for peaceful resolution of their struggles. The LTTE and PKK had long been targets of the wars waged by the U.S.-supported Sri Lankan and Turkish governments against the oppressed Tamil and Kurdish national minorities.

The Court’s decision essentially criminalized any activity that is considered as giving legitimacy to “terrorists.” This could include anything from donating money to Muslim charities to interviewing a guerrilla fighter for the press (see “Supreme Court Decision Shreds First Amendment Rights,” WV No. 961, 2 July). The secular nationalist LTTE and PKK had made it onto the State Department hit list because they fought a desperate struggle against regimes allied with the U.S.

In ruling against the Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court declared outright: “Providing foreign terrorist groups with material support in any form also furthers terrorism by straining the United States’ relationships with its allies.” A mere three months later, the Feds launched their attack against leftist activists. Freedom Road, which cheered Obama’s 2008 campaign, is hardly a radical leftist outfit. However, the FRSO and others became targets of government repression on the basis of their support to the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the secular-nationalist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah.

The FARC has been embroiled in a long struggle against Washington’s Colombian puppet regime and its paramilitary death squads, who specialize in killing union activists. Some of the leftists targeted in the FBI raids have been active in the National Committee to Free Ricardo Palmera, a political prisoner in the U.S. who, as a leader of the FARC, was tracked down and arrested in Ecuador with the help of U.S. agents.

For the U.S. imperialists, who carry out mass terror in Afghanistan and elsewhere on a daily basis, the designation of “foreign terrorist organization” is elastic and constantly shifting. The last domestic “terrorism” witchhunt, under the Republican Reagan administration, was aimed at mobilizing the population for war against the Soviet Union. We wrote in “Why Reagan Needs ‘Terrorism’,” (WV No. 347, 3 February 1984): “For the bourgeoisie, ‘terrorism’ is violence associated with causes of which they disapprove, the use of force outside their own monopoly of violence: strikers defending their picket lines, black people protecting their communities against racist nightriders, Central American peasants fighting back against the landlords’ army and hired killers.”

Washington’s terrorist designation has included the Irish Republican Army and Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress during the reign of apartheid in South Africa. Included on today’s list are the Basque nationalist ETA, the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Real IRA. Although the Islamic reactionaries of Al Qaeda are currently at the top of the U.S. hit list, when these forces were throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the U.S. government hailed them as “freedom fighters” against the Soviet Union. The Soviet military intervention in that country had opened the road to the liberation of its horribly oppressed peoples, and particularly women. The Kremlin bureaucracy’s treacherous withdrawal of troops in 1988-89 allowed the mujahedin cutthroats to eventually take power, after which the likes of Osama bin Laden turned on their former U.S. paymasters.

The Workers Party Has a Right to Organize!

That Obama has stepped up Bush’s attacks on civil liberties should come as no surprise. The Democrats’ posture as the friend of labor and minorities makes them often more effective in carrying out attacks on the working class and the oppressed. It was Democrat Woodrow Wilson who ordered the arrest and imprisonment of members of the Industrial Workers of the World as well as Eugene Debs and members of his Socialist Party for their opposition to the interimperialist First World War. The Wilson administration also carried out the deportation of thousands of foreign-born radicals in the 1919 Palmer Raids, which came on the heels of the Bolshevik Revolution. It was liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt who interned 120,000 Japanese Americans in World War II and imprisoned 18 Trotskyists and Minneapolis Teamsters union leaders under the Smith Act for opposing U.S. imperialism’s entry into the war. His successor, Harry Truman, carried out the Smith Act prosecutions of Communist Party members in the late 1940s.

Where before the government raised the spectre of communism, today it paints its witchhunt targets as “terrorists” and their supporters. In any case, the point of these campaigns is to strengthen the apparatus of the bourgeois state, which is a machinery of repression and violence against those the capitalists exploit and oppress.

In our fight to build a revolutionary workers party that will act as a tribune of the people, we Marxists are intransigent in our opposition to any infringement on democratic rights. In the mid 1980s, we successfully challenged the FBI’s Domestic Security/Terrorism guidelines, which equated left-wing political activity with terrorism and organized crime. In announcing our suit against the FBI, we wrote in WV No. 340 (21 October 1983):

“We are compelled to undertake this legal battle, not only to defend ourselves against the new FBI red-hunt but also to fight to preserve the existing democratic rights of the working-class movement. We do not intend to be blown away—faceless, nameless victims in the dead of night. As the organization which embodies the continuity of revolutionary Marxism in the U.S. today, our task is too important: the liberation of the workers and oppressed from the chains of this decaying, racist system through victorious socialist revolution. A Workers Party Has a Right to Organize!”

As a result of our lawsuit, the government conceded the central aim of our legal challenge—that Marxist advocacy cannot be equated with violence or criminal terrorism. The FBI changed its definition of the SL to one that describes what we are—“a Marxist political organization.” Our suit struck a modest but genuine blow to the government’s efforts to criminalize leftist political dissent. But, as we wrote when we announced the victory of our suit, “We have no illusions that the government’s secret police have stopped or will stop their harassment, infiltration and disruption of Marxist political organizations and other perceived political opponents of the government” (“FBI Admits: Marxists Are Not Terrorists,” WV No. 368, 7 December 1984).

A longstanding low level of class and social struggle has given the rulers a virtually free hand in implementing their attacks on democratic rights and the rights of labor. Bearing the lion’s share of responsibility for this situation are the capitalists’ lieutenants in the labor bureaucracy, who have acceded to wage cuts and union-busting while saluting the imperialists’ “war on terror” in the name of “national unity.”

As we have always insisted, the ultimate target of “anti-terror” and other measures of repression is the multiracial working class, which has the potential social power and class interest to be the gravediggers of the capitalist order. Short of the overthrow of capitalist rule, none of the rights and gains that working people hold dear are secure. The Spartacist League fights to build the vanguard workers party needed to lead the exploited and oppressed in a socialist revolution that sweeps away murderous capitalist-imperialism and establishes the rule of the working class.

***A Twist On The Military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Policy – For Gay And Lesbian Bolsheviks In The Military

Click on the headline to link to a Huffington Post entry on the Republican-led Senate defeat of an amendment to change the "don't ask, don't tell" military policy on gays and lesbians sexual orientations.

Markin comment:

The Republicans (and some Democrats, naturally) really don’t get it on the gay rights in the military issue, at least on this simple democratic issue of the right for someone’s sexual orientation not to be an issue, one way or the other, in any social setting in the first decade of the 21st century. The recent defeat of an amendment to a bill annulling that previous military policy speaks volumes. In that sense they, the august Senators, are not far removed from the punishment freaks, chattel slavery-worshippers, and other assorted denizens of the netherworld called the tea party movement. Moreover, on this issue, as far as I know from the public testimony of major members of the military general staff who were called before Congressional committees on this saw no further reason to continue the policy. After all, this late in the game, who knows who on the general staff is or is not gay? And what of it. So, what is the big issue?

But here is my little twist on the matter. Look, those of us of the anti-war left really do not want to advocate, one way or the other, for how the imperialists use their soldiers, as a general proposition. Except, of course, to get those soldiers, one way or the other, to stop fighting for the American imperial state. That said, we are seriously interested, imperial soldiers or not, that those soldiers, including gay and lesbian soldiers, get the same democratic rights as civilians. Thus we oppose this hare-brained “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. At least as far as sexual orientation goes.

Now what we really want to do is to turn all those soldiers through our communist propaganda into soldier-Bolsheviks, whatever their sexual orientation, for our side. Thus, while we do not support that “don’t ask, don’t tell policy for sexual orientation I think that today it is the beginning of wisdom if we do continue to has that policy for political orientation. After all that “democratic” military brass might get just a little nervous, and have horrid nightmares about those 1917 days, with the notion of Bolsheviks in the ranks, including gay and lesbian Bolsheviks. We will just keep that part our little secret, okay?

*From The Blogosphere-Ignorance is Strength:Perhaps we need a little 'Salt'!-By Ed Felien / The Rag Blog / September 3, 2010

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

*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Woody Guthrie's "Deportees"- Full Citizenship Rights For All Those Who Make It To The U.S.!

Click on the title to link a YouTube film clip of Arlo Guthrie and Emmylou Harris performing his father's Deportee.

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.

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Markin comment:

Woody's words were written long ago but they definitely resonate today. This is a "no-brainer" for us- Full citizenship rights for all who make it to the United States!



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Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)
Lyrics by Woody Guthrie
Music by Martin Hoffman

The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting
The oranges are piled in their cresote dumps
They're flying you back to the Mexico border
To pay all your money to wade back again

My father's own father, he wanted that river
They took all the money he made in his life
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees
And they rode the truck till they took down and died

CHORUS
Good-bye to my Juan, good-bye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maris
You won't have a name when you ride the big air-plane
And all they will call you will be deportees.

Some of us are illega, and others not wanted
Our work contract's out and we have to move on
But it's six hundred miles to that Mexican border
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like theives.

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts
We died in your valleys and died on your plains
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.

CHORUS

A sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos canyon
Like a fireball of lightning, it shook all our hills
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says they are just deportees.

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except deportees?

©1961 (renewed) & 1963 Ludlow Music Inc., New York,NY (TRO)

* On Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project- A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to a commentary by Professor David Cole (who worked on the case) on the recent ugly free speech (or rather anti-free speech) decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project by the U.S. Supreme Court. Watch your back, fellow leftists.

*From The Archives Of The Black Civil Rights Struggle-Bruce Watson's "Freedom Summer"- A Guest Interview

Click on the headline to link to a Boston Sunday Globe, dated August 8, 2010, interview with noted history writer Bruce Watson (Bread and Roses, Sacco and Vanzetti, both reviewed in this space) about his new book, Freedom Summer.


Markin comment:

No question that those who went South in the early 1960s, especially into hell-hole Mississippi to register blacks to vote, were in the vanguard of the civil rights movement (except, of course, the real vanguard, those home-grown civil rights fighters who had to stay and fight the rearguard actions after the student volunteers left). As noted here, many of those civil rights fighters of the time, including this writer (although my time was spent in hell-hole Alabama) went on to fight other social battles elsewhere.

But here is my problem with this mist of time thing although the book is a very worthwhile read, and I think that it epitomizes what was, in retrospect, the limitations on that struggle. It was never just about the simple democratic question of voting, important as that was for those who were forcibly not permitted to do so, and placing that in the center those other issues jobs, land, equal access, legal justice, etc. were not addressed. Or worst, after the heyday of the civil rights movement when our eyes turned to the Vietnam anti-war struggle the black liberation struggle in the South was placed on the back-burner, way on the back-burner.

And it has never, in a positive way at least, gotten back to center stage. Oh, except for that coterie, that rather large coterie as I have become aware of lately and was confirmed by some of the remembrances here, of those who went South (or did the important support work in the North and West) who now, in a self-satisfied manner, assume (still, if you can believe it) that the election of one Barack Obama put paid to the question. At one point I avoided such people, some of them friends, purposefully. Liberals, blah.

*Not Ready For Prime Time Class Struggle- Greg Brown's "Marriage Chant"

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Greg Brown and Ani Difranco performing his Marriage Chant.

Markin comment:

On a day when the question of marriage is in the air (the favorable decision in the California Proposition 8 case) I cannot resist the urge to throw out this Greg Brown number. Although I, personally, have had more than my fair share of the marriage ups and downs, the details of which need not detain us here, and thus some of Greg's lyric do not "speak" to me that's okay today. Remember your mother's advise though -Just look before you leap, okay? By the way, change the lyrics here to fit your particular "predicament", (oops) sexual preference.


Marriage ChantGreg Brown Lyrics from his Convenant album

marriage is impossible marriage is dull
your dance card is empty your plate is too full
it's something no sensible person would do
i wish i was married i wish I was married
i wish i was married to you

marriage is unnatural marriage is hard
you rotate your tires you work in the yard
you fight about nothing every hour or two
i wish i was married i wish i was married
i wish i was married to you

the children throw fits in airports & such
they projectile vomit on aunt ruthie at lunch
& your in-laws know just what you should do
but i wish i was married i wish i was married
i wish i was married to you

i'd like to fix you my special broth when you're sick
i'd like to fight with you when you're bein' real thick
there is no end to what i would like to do
i wish i was married i wish i was married
i wish i was married to you

i like the roll in rock & roll
& all i know is you're the sister of my soul
& we make a circle just we two
& i wish i was married i wish i was married
i wish i was married to you

the sky unpredictable mysterious the sea
do we wish most for what never can be
it never can be i guess that's true
but i wish i was married i wish i was married
i wish i was uh huh huh to you

the grass is always greener is what they say to me
if I was your husband maybe I'd agree
i like brown grass & vows that stay true
& i wish i was married i wish i was married
i wish i was married to you to you to you mmhmm to you


Transcribed by Shirley Cottle.

* A Nice Legal Victory, For Now, For Gay Marriage Rights-Down With California Prop 8

Click on the headline to link a Good As You Are website online copy of the Federal District Court judge's decision in Perry et. al v. Schwarznegger (the California Proposition 8 case).

Markin comment:

We will take our simple, democratic, do the right thing, get the state and federal government out of the marriage-deciding business anyway, whenever we can. This issue, the issue of gay marriage rights, seems to be gaining traction mainly through the the legal process in the states (and, as here, in the lower federal courts). State voters are behind the curve on this one. So be it-but we will defend this gay rights issue in the streets, if necessary. If the decision in California, the most populous state, finally holds that would be a big, big step in turning this issue around nationwide, especially the way legal decisions get made and law get pushed forward (a little). (Remember Brown v. School Board and Roe v. Wade.) Caveat: the judge stayed the order so there will be further wrangling over the appeals process. Drop the stay and let California gays and lesbians marry right now. Get the bouquets ready to throw.

*Outrage- Darkness In America- People's Attorney Lynne Stewart Must Not Die In Jail-Free Her Now !

Click on the headline ot link to a SteveLendmanBlog entry Darkness In America:Lynne Stewart's Resentencing.

Markin comment:

The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee website has nothing up as yet about the situation, as of today. But check it, periodically, and donate money for further efforts to free Lynne Stewart (and her co-defendants).

People's Attorney Lynne Stewart Must Not Die In Jail-Free Her Now!

*From "Boston Indy Media"- The Pro-Immigration Rights Protest And March In Boston During The National Governor's Conference

Click on the headlines to link to a Boston Indy Media post on the pro-immigration rights protest and march in Boston during the recent National Governor's Conference.

Markin comment:

While we radical defenders of immigrant rights do not really have a positive program on bourgeois immigration policy. We are not, after all, advisers to the government on immigration policy. We know what we do want- Full citizenship rights for all who make here. And we know what we do not want- anti-immigrant laws like Arizona's SB 1070 and the trickle of other such state legislative actions of that ilk.

*From The Horse's Mouth- The Supreme Court's Decision In "Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project"

Click on the headline link to the United States Supreme Court decision of June 21,2010 in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project mentioned in the Workers Vanguard article posted earlier today.


Markin comment:

Read it and weep.

*From The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee-Sentencing Hearing July 15, 2010-New York City

Click on on the headline to link to theLynne Stewart Defense Committee Website for important updated information


From The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee Website

JULY 15, 2010

SENTENCING DAY

Sentencing is at 2:30pm, we will be there at 11am

Federal Courthouse

500 Pearl Street
NY, NY
Doors will open at 2pm

LET'S PACK THE COURT!!!

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- "Supreme Court Decision Shreds First Amendment Rights"

Click on the headline to link to the Workers Vanguard website for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.


Markin comment:

As noted in this linked article, although not unexpected from the Neanderthals (oops, that is disrespectful to those early residents of our fair planet who represented, at the time, a higher form of life) on the Supreme Court this decision will have, as in other previous decisions like in the 2nd Court Of Appeals case of people's attorney Lynne Stewart, a "chilling effect" on free speech. By the way, anyone who is under the illusion that you need to know the law, and just the law, rather than exhibit your ingrown "original intent" political prejudices to be a Supreme Court justice should read this decision. I think those unfairly maligned Neanderthals could come up with a more rational decision. And they did not have several hard-pressed, overworked law clerks to "write" the thing for them.

From The "UJP" Website- Demonstrate In Boston Saturday July 11, 2010 At The National Governors Conference Against Arizona's Immigration Law SB 1070

Click on the headline to link to a post from the "UJP" Website-"Demonstrate In Boston July 11, 2010 At The National Governors Conference Against Arizona's Immigration Law SB 1070."

Markin comment:

Some issues, and this Arizona SB 1070 apartheid-like pass law is one of them, require very little explanation and very vocal opposition wherever and whenever possible. Boston at the National Governors Conference (where Arizona's governor and chief enforcer will be present)on July 11, 2010 is one of them. Massachusetts will also get attention for its recent anti-immigrant legislation, as well. We will be there.

*The Latest From The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee- Free Lynne Stewart (And Her Co-Workers-translator Mohamed Yousry and paralegal Ahmed Abdel) Now!

Click on the headline to link to the Lynne Stewart Defense Committee- Free Lynne Stewart (And Her Co-Workers) Now!

Markin comment:

This is exactly the right day to call for freedom, a real call for freedom in 2010. This is a no brainer- Free our sister and her two co-workers (translator Mohamed Yousry and paralegal Ahmed Abdel Sattar)now!

*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-In Defense of Homosexual Rights: The Marxist Tradition

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for "Communism and homosexuality".

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Summer 1988 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.


In Defense of Homosexual Rights: The Marxist Tradition

Defense of democratic rights for homosexuals is part of the historic tradition of Marxism. In the 1860s, the prominent lawyer J.B. von Schweitzer was tried, found guilty and disbarred for homosexual activities in Mannheim, Germany. The socialist pioneer Ferdinand Lassalle aided von Schweitzer, encouraging him to join Lassalle's Universal German Workingmen's Association in 1863. After Lassalle's death, von Schweitzer was elected the head of the group, one of the organizations that merged to form the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The SPD itself waged a long struggle in the late 19th century against Paragraph 175 of the German penal code, which made homosexual acts (for males) a crime. August Bebel and other SPD members in the Reichstag attacked the law, while the SPD's party paper Vorwarts reported on the struggle against state persecution of homosexuals.

In 1895 one of the most infamous anti-homosexual outbursts of the period targeted Oscar Wilde, one of the leading literary lights of England (where homosexuality had been punishable by death until 1861). Wilde had some socialist views of his own: his essay, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," was smuggled into Russia by young radicals. When the Marquess of Queensberry called him a sodomist, Wilde sued for libel. Queensberry had Wilde successfully prosecuted and sent to prison for being involved with Queensberry's son. The Second International took up Wilde's defense. In the most prestigious publication of the German Social Democracy, "Die Neue Zeit", Eduard Bernstein, later known as a revisionist but then speaking as a very decent Marxist, argued that there was nothing sick about homosexuality, that Wilde had committed no crime, that every socialist should defend him and that the people who put him on trial were the criminals.

Upon coming to power in 1917 in Russia, the Bolshevik Party began immediately to undercut the old bourgeois prejudices and social institutions responsible for the oppression of both women and homosexuals— centrally the institution of the family. They sought to create social alternatives to relieve the crushing burden of women's drudgery in the family, and abolished all legal impediments to women's equality, while also abolishing all laws against homosexual acts. Stalin's successful political counterrevolution rehabilitated the reactionary ideology of bourgeois society, glorifying the family unit. In 1934 a law making homosexual acts punishable by imprisonment was introduced, and mass arrests of homosexuals took place. While defending the socialized property forms of the USSR against capitalist attack, we Trotskyists fight for political revolution in the USSR to restore the liberating program and goals of the early Bolsheviks, including getting the state out of private sexual life. As Grigorii Batkis, director of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene, pointed out in "The Sexual Revolution in Russia," published in the USSR in 1923:
"Soviet legislation bases itself on the following principle:

'It declares the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters so long as nobody isinjured and no one's interests are encroached upon

"Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offenses against public morality—Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same as so-called 'natural' intercourse. All forms of sexual intercourse are private matters." [emphasis in original]

—quoted in John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement 1864-1935

*From The "Bob Feldman '68" Blog- "The Ballad Of Harvey Milk"

Click on the headline to link to a "Bob Feldman '68" blog entry- his song "The Ballad Of Harvey Milk" that connects right in with today's theme on the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in 1969.

*Remember Stonewall 1969-The Other “Milk” Film- “The Times Of Harvey Milk”

Click On To Link To Guest Commentator Amy Rath's, Editor Of "The Women And Revolution" Pages Of The Working Class Newspaper "Workers Vanguard", Review Of "Milk' in 2009.

The Other “Milk” Film- “The Times Of Harvey Milk”

Originally reviewed in 2009 on the 25th Anniversary of “The Times Of Harvey Milk” documentary.

DVD Review

The Times Of Harvey Milk, Harvey, George Moscone and others, 1984

In the recent hoopla over the commercial film “Milk”, about the political rise and assassination (along with the Mayor, George Moscone) of the first acknowledged openly gay politician, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and the Oscar-worthy performance by actor Sean Penn this little film documentary has been overshadowed. This is unfortunate on two counts. First, this film won, on its own merits, an Oscar, as well, for the Best Documentary of 1984. Secondly, for those with a political perspective, especially those with a leftist perspective, this documentary is a more satisfying and instructive film about the limitations of electoral politics as a vehicle for the advancement of any oppressed sector of society.

Below the headline for this review I have placed a link to a 2009 review of “Milk” by Amy Rath, editor of the Women and revolution pages of the working class newspaper “Workers Vanguard”. The points made there about the limitations of sectoral politics by segments of the oppressed are close to my own views and therefore I will merely make a few comments here about some other points of interest in the film.

This documentary is driven by footage of the events that led up to Harvey Milk’s political victory, his term of office, short as it was, the events surrounding the trial of his murderer, fellow Supervisor Dan White. And the outrage, justifiably so, of the gay community and others, over the jury verdict in the case (manslaughter). As is the nature of such efforts there are the inevitable “talking heads” who give their take on Milk, the meaning of his political life, some personal observations and comments by those who were influenced by, or worked politically with, Milk.

Two of the commentators stick out. One, a lesbian professor from San Francisco State (I think that is the right school) gives an overview of what the Milk campaign meant for the gay community and the struggle for political power in one city. The other, an old time local labor leader (important in a big labor town, at least at that time), who, seemingly kicking and screaming, came to admire Harvey Milk. One should pay careful attention to his comments even a quarter of a century later as, despite some real gains made by the gay and lesbian rights movement, there is nevertheless still a ”culture gap” that he expressed very well about his attitude toward gays before working with Milk and that is not uncommon, if politically incorrect, in many neighborhoods today.

Twenty five years after the release of this film how does the legacy of Harvey Milk’s work stand up? I don’t mean the limitations of the parliamentary (and legal) road to social reform. That is covered in the Rath article on “Milk”. I have also dealt with the question in other contexts around the women’s liberation struggle, the black liberation struggle and other questions of strategic importance to the struggle for a more just society. Rather I want to finish here with a little comment about Harvey Milk, the gay man. From this documentary it is clear that he was very political, very committed to the struggle for gays rights, not afraid, as in the case of Proposition 6 (the 1978 efforts by some right-wingers to exclude homosexuals from the public teaching profession), to tackle the yahoos and had a certain charisma. In short, all the attributes of any politico (at least a potentially successful one). But that is neither here nor there. What I think Milk’s short political life ultimately means was caught in the speech included in the film that he made after that Proposition 6 defeat where he called on all gays and lesbians to “come out of the closet" (a seemingly quaint term now but very advanced then) and fight the yahoos wherever they are and wherever you are. That, my friends, despite my differences of political strategy with the late Harvey Milk is very good advise indeed.

*The Latest From "The Further Left Forum" Blog- "When The Top Caves In" - A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to a blog entry via the "Further Left Forum"blog- " When the top caves in".