COMMENTARY
RANDOM THOUGHTS ON THE CURRENT POLITICAL LANDSCAPE.
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY
WHAT KIND OF MONSTER IS RUMSFELD ANYWAY?
On a couple of occasions over the past several months I have commented on the question of calls for Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation. The first time was when some retired generals were clamoring for his resignation in the spring. The second time was this summer, the summer of 2006, when New York Senator Hillary Clinton, hands trembling, put in her bid for this year’s Profiles in Courage Award after hearings of the Senate Armed Forces Committee.
At that time I noted, tongue in cheek I thought, that my mother a life-long Republican had called for that resignation a couple of years ago. Now comes news that other very influential Republicans had the same thought. According to Bob Woodward’s new book former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and apparently the President’s wife, First Lady Laura Bush, also sought to get rid of the bastard. Card has since confirmed the truth of that information. Thus, this begs the question of how much real political courage it took for Congressional Democrats to call for Rumsfeld’s resignation. and just how vile a character the man is if elements in the inner circle of his own Administration wanted his head on a platter. Yes, we are definitely dealing with some kind of monster here. I am republishing my blog from the time of the generals’ armchair revolt in the spring to provide the real solution to the Rumsfeld problem.
IN THE CASE OF ONE DONALD RUMSFELD- RESIGNATION IS NOT ENOUGH!
In the normal course of events leftists, including this writer, have no particular need to comment on, much less advocate or support a call, for the resignation of one of the ministers of a capitalist government. In this case, we are talking about the controversy over the possible resignation of one Mr. Donald Rumsfeld, Minister of War in the Bush Cabinet. Let the capitalist politicians sort it out among themselves is this writer’s usual stance on such matters. Let the beady-eyed “talking head” liberal and conservative media pundits spout forth on behalf of the best interests of “their” system. After all this is not exactly like the summer of 1917 in Russia where the Bolsheviks were agitating around the slogan –“Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers”- as a stopgap political ploy against the Popular Front Provisional Government on the way to overthrowing that government. This current controversy nevertheless has my interest.
The case of Mr. Rumsfeld is special. Every once in a while a politician comes along in American public life who leftists can use to personalize everything that is wrong with the capitalist system. And epitomize what the rest of the world has come to fear and loathe as the dark side of the American spirit. One Richard M. Nixon, once President of the United and now residing in one of Dante’s circles of hell, comes to mind from an earlier generation. In that sense we need our Donalds. Hell, I have enjoyed politically kicking Mr. Rumsfeld around when he was riding high. And, excuse my manners; I enjoy kicking him around when he is down. (To give credit where credit is due, the late two lines were inspired by the late Dr. Hunter Thompson.) Nevertheless this specimen must go. There will be no tears shed here for Mr. Rumsfeld.
Many liberals , and some not so liberal, in Congress looking to rehabilitate their sorry records on Iraq, including the key question of voting for the war budget, are having a cheap field day on this one. However, in any moderately effective European parliamentary system guys like Rumsfeld would have been long gone. Although I should perhaps qualify that statement since the august members of the British Labor Party could not muster enough votes to vote 'no confidence' in Mr. Rumsfeld’s fellow hawkish crony, Mr. Anthony Blair.
I must admit that I am a little uncomfortable when all manner of retired general are coming out of the woodwork aiming at Mr. Rumsfeld’s head. We militant leftists are after all respectable people and THESE are certainly not our kind of people. Except under normal circumstances these types, despite an occasional candidate for the role of American Napoleon Bonaparte like General Douglas MacArthur, keep quiet and take their consultant fees. Things must be far, far worst than we suspect in Iraq if the chiefs are abandoning ship already. Moreover, the thrust of the former generals’ criticism is that Mr. Rumsfeld did not adequately provision them with enough troops to get the job done. This is a veiled, and maybe not so veiled, call for escalation. There are differences between the Iraq War and the Vietnam War which we need to appreciate but escalation would dramatically close the gap between those differences. We could go from the Big Muddy of Vietnam to the Big Sandy of Iraq. Watch out.
Finally, and to get back on the left on this issue, if there is any justice in this world Mr. Rumsfeld, despite his probable cabinet immunity defense, clearly should be tried as a war criminal. He exceeds by orders of magnitude the standards necessary for such an indictment. However, my vision is not to have him tried before some bogus Court of International Criminal Justice. My suggestion is that he be sent, alone (or with a few of his neo-con conspirators), to Baghdad, without armor. There he should be tried by a tribunal of the victims of his war crimes, the impoverished and desperate urban and rural masses of Iraq. Resignation is not enough- Indeed!!
ON THE WILES OF CONSERVATIVE POLITICANS
In a blog posted this summer I commented on the effect of the United States Supreme Court’s ruling on the question of the Executive Branch’s authority to try detainees in military commissions under very much less than even the inadequate conditions of what passes for justice these days. At that time I noted that once the smoke cleared Congress would give the Bush Administration what it wanted. This week, the week of Septemeber 25th, after much wrangling by fellow Republicans apparently solely for effect, the Senate gave the administration pretty much what it wanted, including the virtual suspension of habeas corpus in these cases.
Two points. First, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, a hard fought for and important right going back centuries, is definitely not a good sign for the rest of us. Some commentators have declared that these provisions will not pass constitutional muster. Grow up. I will take bets at 5 to 2 that the current Supreme Court will defer to the so-called legislative intent and bow before the executive authority on this one. Believe me, I would rather lose this bet.
Second, this legislation shreds the concepts that are embodied in the Geneva Conventions concerning the status of enemy combatants. Without having illusions in the effectiveness of these Conventions and noting the weaknesses of the protections in them, militant leftists fight to keep them in place as a legal avenue of redress. Otherwise someday we might be reduced to dependence on what amounts to the goodwill of governments who wish us nothing but ill-will. No thanks. Below I have republished my comments at the time of the Supreme Court decision.
SUPREME COURT OUTLAWS PRIVATE PRESIDENTIAL MILITARY COURTS-FOR NOW
PRESIDENT MUST BEG CONGRESS REAL HARD FOR MILITARY COMMISSIONS.
Just as I started feeling good about beating up on the United States Supreme Court justices this week, calling them black-robed closet Nazis and Neanderthals (see June archives) the justices vote by 5-4 (oops, 5-3 Chief Justice Roberts recused himself on this one- but WE all know where he stands) to deny President Bush the right to use his own executive-derived and organized private Star Chamber proceedings against detained ‘enemy combatants’.
This decision would seem to negate this writer’s usual uncanny grasp of which way the political winds are blowing. Not so. Without trying to weasel out of this squeamish situation by lawyerly argument I would point out that in The Angels of Death Ride Again (see June archives) that the Court was positioning itself just to the left of the medieval Star Chamber. And I am correct on this. The Court’s decision did not strike down the executive military commissions as the vehicles for show trials that such commissions had become but only that the President must ask Congress nicely to set them up with all due regard for those shopworn concepts- the rule of law and the constitutional balance of powers. When the Court starts bringing these arguments in it’s definitely time to head for cover. How hard do you think the Bush administration is going to have to fight Congress (presumably in an election year) to get approval for legislation for military commissions to try a bunch of Moslems fanatics. Damn, they live and breathe for these kinds of soft ball votes.
We live in desperate times as the above commentaries for only ONE WEEK make abundantly clear so we have to take even small victories, such as this decision when we can get them. Any limitation, no matter how small, on the Imperial Presidency can only help give us a little breather. Enough said.
WHAT FOURTH AMENDMENT?
I had expected Congress by now to give the Administration its desired open-ended program to wiretap domestic operations to its heart’s context without the niceties of Fourth Amendment protection. The Congress adjourned without taking up a final vote on this legislation. Presumably it will do so in an aptly named “lame duck” session after the November 7th elections. More then. Until then below is a republication of a blog commenting on Judge Diggs Taylor's ruling that such previous practices were unconstitutional.
A VICTORY (IF ONLY TEMPORARY) FOR THE FOURTH AMENDMENT
COMMENTARY
SHOCKING REVELATION: A FEDERAL JUDGE ACTUALLY KNOWS THE 4th AMENDMENT EXISTS. APPARENTLY NOT EVERY LAW SCHOOL TUITION WAS WASTED.
Every once in a while a judge does something right. While militant leftists have no illusions in the bourgeois judicial system, as such, we will grasp in both hands every little minor victory, even if temporary, that comes our way. In this case a federal district court judge, Judge Diggs Taylor, has held that the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping of every piece of information not nailed down and that the agency can get its hands on is unconstitutional. Judge Diggs Taylor will not be getting invited to any Federalist Society seminars or other such cozy affairs any time soon.
Naturally, the Bush Administration, normally slow to act when democratic rights are to be enforced, has ordered the Justice Department to appeal this decision- immediately, with all deliberate speed. When the 6th Circuit Appeals Court or the Supremes get this one you know its fate. I will take bets, even up, on a 5-4 quashing of this decision even though I have it on good authority that Justices Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy et. al are all unaware that there IS a Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Now for the politics. Yes, the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights are pretty faded as working documents for any kind of just society today. But, damn, something like the Fourth Amendment against general searches and seizures even though its parameters are getting narrower and narrower with virtually every new court decision is something every militant leftist must defend. WE WOULD WANT THIS SAFEGUARD UNDER A WORKERS GOVERNMENT- WE DESPERATELY NEED IT NOW.
We are the best defenders of that right against unreasonable searches and seizures if for no other reason that it makes our work easier. Hell, what do you think the original American revolutionaries, particularly those at the base, were fighting against? Yes, that very same prohibition against general writs of assistance that the National Security Agency and the Bush Administration are more than happy to flaunt in our faces. Do we really want to have big brother having the right to look at everything we do. On the other hand we are not Pollyannas. We are not blinded by a mistaken believe in the “sweet” rule of law that gets bandied about in the media when it gets misty-eyed about democracy. Moreover, such rights are honored more in the breech than the observance. If this government wants to get information (even if not usable in court) it will find a way to get it, warrant or no warrant. Notwithstanding that premise we will savor this decision a little for now.
ON THE GOVERNOR’S RACE IN MASSACHUSETTS
The focus of these commentaries under the writer's byline described below generally reflect an interest in the national political scene. However, here in Massachusetts where the writer resides there is a Governor's race that has drawn some media attention due to the fact that it pits a Harvard-trained Republican woman, Kerry Healey, against a Harvard-trained black male Democrat, Deval Patrick. While this contest may be of interest to elitist affirmative action devotees and the like the gist of the campaign has the all to familar ring of a traditional Massachusetts dogfight.
That, in any case, is not what interests me here. What interests me is one question that I would pose to Mr. Patrick (Ms. Healey is beyond the pale on this one) and every militant leftist or anti-war activist should do the same. If you are elected Governor will you as Commander-in-Chief of the Massachusetts National Guard refuse to provide troops to the federal government for service in Iraq? YES OR NO.
Mr. Patrick is the darling of the liberal anti-war element in the state but I do not believe those 'folks' would like his answer. Nevertheless, this question is really the complement, on the state level, to the question of voting on the war budget by Congressmen at federal level. In short, at the state level it is the only real way to stop the war in Iraq. Ask away.
DO I HAVE ANY TAKERS?
Probably the only real fun for a leftist looking at the 2006 elction cycle is taking a bet or two on the results of the elections for the the major parties. In order to bet on such outcomes it is necessary to be, as with all smart bets, detached from the hurly-burly of the campaigns. This writer can affirm his disinterestedness in these campaigns with both hands held high.In any case here is the proposition-the early October line is 3/2 that the Republicans will retain both Houses of Congress. What? If one looked uncritically at the mainstream media one would have thought that 2006 was going to be a sea-change kind of election. And certainly we need a change. However, as we get closer it is apparent that the Republicans can hang on because, for the most part, the Democrats are playing the Republican-lite tune. Even with the Congressman Foley scandal.
Christ, any party that cannot separate itself out from and get outmaneuvered on the national security/Iraq quagmire against a genuinely dingbat Republican party deserves to go the way of the Whigs. Moreover, there was really a lot of wishful thinking by the media about Democratic changes from the get-go. Before the media got a hold of the story last spring there were not that many close races. So to keep the story alive the media conveniently doubled the number of close electoral contests to 50. Looking at the polls recently show that, like last spring, there are really only about 25 real contests in the House and a half dozen in the Senate. Inertia and gerrymandering have struck again. I can hardly wait for the Democratic post-election sniffles about what went wrong. However, at 3/2 I consider it like finding money on the ground. Any takers?
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES OF COMMENTARY ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
Sunday, October 01, 2006
THESE ARE NOT SALAD DAYS FOR LIBERAL HAWKS
BOOK REVIEW
THE GOOD FIGHT: WHY LIBERALS-AND ONLY LIBERALS-CAN WIN THE WAR ON TERROR AND MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, PETER BEINART, HARPERCOLLINS, NEWYORK, 2006
In the normal course of events these days the tasks of working class socialists, particularly during the electoral cycle, are to create and distribute propaganda in favor of socialist solutions to the crisis of humankind and to organize around a socialist program. Since we are not in an immediate struggle for political power that is more than enough work. Thus, usually the goings-on among capitalist propagandists and ideologues have no direct relation to working on those tasks. However every once in a while, as now during a electoral cycle, it is interesting to take note of what is going on in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Why? Make no mistake, while the relation of forces today is totally on their side, in the final analysis we will have to directly fight the liberal wing of that party for the political allegiance of the better elements of that party. Does any militant leftist believe that today in 2006 that our recruiting grounds are located anywhere in the vicinity of the Republican Party?
With that thought in mind Mr. Beinart’s book, the Good Fight, is an outline of a plan to undercut the so-called liberal-pacifist wing of the Democratic Party in order to draw back the allegiance of what at one time were the elements that made the Democratic Party a governing party during much of the 20th century. In short, Mr. Beinart is fighting for what appears to him to be the ‘soul’ of the Democratic Party. Mr. Beinart’s central argument is that while he and other liberal hawks were wrong, dead wrong, on support to the Bush Administrations war in Iraq those who did at least get that question right are nevertheless wrong on a strategy to either defeat or contain Islamic terrorism. Of course, in the process Mr. Beinart thus retroactively absolves himself of his ‘little error’ on Iraq in the interests of the greater war on terrorism. Nobody ever said democratic ideologues were incapable of the occasional sleight-of-hand.
The predicate for this thesis is that there is vast ‘conspiracy’ underfoot by those, apparently led by the filmmaker Michael Moore and kindred spirits, who want to take over the Democratic Party and emulate Neville Chamberlain's capitualtion to Hitler at Munich as a reaction to the current "war on terror". The result, according to Mr. Beinart, is that the centrist/ Lieberman wing will have no home and the Democratic Party will not rule again like in the good old days of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. In answer, this writer makes this observation-what planet does Mr. Beinart live on? If memory serves Mr. Moore supported one General Wesley Clark, the mad commander of NATO forces in Serbia who attempted to bomb that country back to Stone Age conditions, in the presidential primaries of 2004. Moreover, do any rational liberal politicians or activists take political counsel from Mr. Moore? Certainly he is a political gadfly and provocative filmmaker but, please, go after the big game. And spend less time on the Internet.
Moreover, and I do not need to rely on memory for this one, who in the Democratic Party opposed the now crumbling war in Afghanistan? There were very few of us in those days, even those who were allegedly opposed to all wars on pacifist grounds, out on the streets protesting that invasion in the aftermath of the hysteria over 9/11. I saw no Democratic Party opposition, hawk or dove, to that little adventure. No, overall, as we are painfully aware every day, the Democratic Party is nothing more than a somewhat loyal parliamentary opposition. They take no more risks than the Republicans. The real problem is that on foreign policy, either in its containment or confrontational stages, the Democratic Party is Republican-lite. That in a nutshell is their political malaise-the Republicans do better at and are perceived to be better at protecting the long term interests of the ruling classes-end of story.
Mr. Beinart’s book does bring up a serious political question about how to fight the war on terror for those who favor a workers government and we duck the issue at our peril. Be forewarned, Islamic fundamentalism is a present threat to not only democratic forms of government but ultimately also to socialist forms as well. Thus, without being forced to outline an abstract blueprint to a theoretical question- How would a workers government in power respond to the actions of the Islamic terrorists? Fair enough.
The obvious first answer is that a workers government would try to break the stranglehold of Islamic fundamentalism at the base by, yes, throwing lots of money and organizers at the problems which keep the Islamic masses in poverty. Beyond that the breaking up of the Islamic terrorist organizations appears to be much more of police problem than a military one. A workers government, like any responsible government, would mercilessly track down every one of these cells in the appropriate manner. Finally, a workers government under foreseeable conditions would not be a pacifist government, even though its long-term aim is a peaceful world. There is a long way to go before humankind gets to that stage.
Let me suggest the following as one possible scenario that a future workers government might follow. The Soviet Union’s intervention into Afghanistan in 1979 drove the West, including the American Democratic Party headed by one President Jimmy Carter, to support the Islamic fundamentalists of that time as a proxy against the Soviets. The Soviet Union, even if eventually only half-heartedly committed to the intervention, in retrospect, was then the vanguard of the fight against Islamic fundamentalism. Does anyone today want to rethink that Western opposition to Soviet intervention into Afghanistan? One should. A workers government today would follow the Soviet lead demonstrated in Afghanistan and in earlier fights in the 1920’s against counterrevolutionary Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia as it attempted to consolidate the Soviet state. That is a sketch of some aspects of a workers government policy to think about. As these thoughts suggest in the fight against Islamic fundamentalism the real options are fairly narrow.
THE GOOD FIGHT: WHY LIBERALS-AND ONLY LIBERALS-CAN WIN THE WAR ON TERROR AND MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, PETER BEINART, HARPERCOLLINS, NEWYORK, 2006
In the normal course of events these days the tasks of working class socialists, particularly during the electoral cycle, are to create and distribute propaganda in favor of socialist solutions to the crisis of humankind and to organize around a socialist program. Since we are not in an immediate struggle for political power that is more than enough work. Thus, usually the goings-on among capitalist propagandists and ideologues have no direct relation to working on those tasks. However every once in a while, as now during a electoral cycle, it is interesting to take note of what is going on in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Why? Make no mistake, while the relation of forces today is totally on their side, in the final analysis we will have to directly fight the liberal wing of that party for the political allegiance of the better elements of that party. Does any militant leftist believe that today in 2006 that our recruiting grounds are located anywhere in the vicinity of the Republican Party?
With that thought in mind Mr. Beinart’s book, the Good Fight, is an outline of a plan to undercut the so-called liberal-pacifist wing of the Democratic Party in order to draw back the allegiance of what at one time were the elements that made the Democratic Party a governing party during much of the 20th century. In short, Mr. Beinart is fighting for what appears to him to be the ‘soul’ of the Democratic Party. Mr. Beinart’s central argument is that while he and other liberal hawks were wrong, dead wrong, on support to the Bush Administrations war in Iraq those who did at least get that question right are nevertheless wrong on a strategy to either defeat or contain Islamic terrorism. Of course, in the process Mr. Beinart thus retroactively absolves himself of his ‘little error’ on Iraq in the interests of the greater war on terrorism. Nobody ever said democratic ideologues were incapable of the occasional sleight-of-hand.
The predicate for this thesis is that there is vast ‘conspiracy’ underfoot by those, apparently led by the filmmaker Michael Moore and kindred spirits, who want to take over the Democratic Party and emulate Neville Chamberlain's capitualtion to Hitler at Munich as a reaction to the current "war on terror". The result, according to Mr. Beinart, is that the centrist/ Lieberman wing will have no home and the Democratic Party will not rule again like in the good old days of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. In answer, this writer makes this observation-what planet does Mr. Beinart live on? If memory serves Mr. Moore supported one General Wesley Clark, the mad commander of NATO forces in Serbia who attempted to bomb that country back to Stone Age conditions, in the presidential primaries of 2004. Moreover, do any rational liberal politicians or activists take political counsel from Mr. Moore? Certainly he is a political gadfly and provocative filmmaker but, please, go after the big game. And spend less time on the Internet.
Moreover, and I do not need to rely on memory for this one, who in the Democratic Party opposed the now crumbling war in Afghanistan? There were very few of us in those days, even those who were allegedly opposed to all wars on pacifist grounds, out on the streets protesting that invasion in the aftermath of the hysteria over 9/11. I saw no Democratic Party opposition, hawk or dove, to that little adventure. No, overall, as we are painfully aware every day, the Democratic Party is nothing more than a somewhat loyal parliamentary opposition. They take no more risks than the Republicans. The real problem is that on foreign policy, either in its containment or confrontational stages, the Democratic Party is Republican-lite. That in a nutshell is their political malaise-the Republicans do better at and are perceived to be better at protecting the long term interests of the ruling classes-end of story.
Mr. Beinart’s book does bring up a serious political question about how to fight the war on terror for those who favor a workers government and we duck the issue at our peril. Be forewarned, Islamic fundamentalism is a present threat to not only democratic forms of government but ultimately also to socialist forms as well. Thus, without being forced to outline an abstract blueprint to a theoretical question- How would a workers government in power respond to the actions of the Islamic terrorists? Fair enough.
The obvious first answer is that a workers government would try to break the stranglehold of Islamic fundamentalism at the base by, yes, throwing lots of money and organizers at the problems which keep the Islamic masses in poverty. Beyond that the breaking up of the Islamic terrorist organizations appears to be much more of police problem than a military one. A workers government, like any responsible government, would mercilessly track down every one of these cells in the appropriate manner. Finally, a workers government under foreseeable conditions would not be a pacifist government, even though its long-term aim is a peaceful world. There is a long way to go before humankind gets to that stage.
Let me suggest the following as one possible scenario that a future workers government might follow. The Soviet Union’s intervention into Afghanistan in 1979 drove the West, including the American Democratic Party headed by one President Jimmy Carter, to support the Islamic fundamentalists of that time as a proxy against the Soviets. The Soviet Union, even if eventually only half-heartedly committed to the intervention, in retrospect, was then the vanguard of the fight against Islamic fundamentalism. Does anyone today want to rethink that Western opposition to Soviet intervention into Afghanistan? One should. A workers government today would follow the Soviet lead demonstrated in Afghanistan and in earlier fights in the 1920’s against counterrevolutionary Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia as it attempted to consolidate the Soviet state. That is a sketch of some aspects of a workers government policy to think about. As these thoughts suggest in the fight against Islamic fundamentalism the real options are fairly narrow.
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
CONFESSIONS OF AN OLD MILITANT-A CAUTIONARY TALE
THIS CONFESSION IS NOT FOR THE FAINT-HEARTED-BE FOREWARNED.
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY
I VOTED FOR VICE PRESIDENT HUBERT HORATIO HUMPHREY OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES IN 1968. MOREOVER, I ACTIVELY CAMPAIGNED FOR THE DEMOCRATIC TICKET IN THE FALL OF THAT YEAR. AND AS AN ASPIRING YOUNG POLITICAN I WAS PERFECTLY WILLING TO ACCEPT AN ENTRY-LEVEL POSITION IN A VICTORIOUS HUMPHREY ADMINISTRATION.
The thought of that rash youthful action as I am writing this piece still brings a blush to my cheeks. Of all the political mistakes I have made in my life this is the one that is still capable of doing that. In today’s confessional age, however, it is good to get it off my conscience. Right? Please, let me tell you the story. If at any point it sounds awfully familiar concerning today’s political choices please feel free to stop.
First, I must plead my youth as a mitigating circumstance. And as this is also an age when victims give voice to their travails you must realize that I was a victim of circumstances throughout all of this experience. Those circumstances most certainly had a name. That name, one Richard Milhous Nixon, at one time President of the United States, common war criminal, and political sociopath now residing in one of Dante’s circles of hell. You knew, didn’t you, that at least one of the villains had to be a Republican- some things never change. It may be hard for today’s militants to understand how much THAT man dominated our political hatreds in those days. To put it in perspective just remember that Mr. Nixon was the ‘godfather’ of the current president, Mr. Bush, common war criminal, political sociopath and a prime candidate for one of Dante’s circles of hell. Enough said.
In the early and mid- 1960’s this writer defined himself as a left-liberal of the Americans for Democratic Action school of politics. He had worked for civil rights for blacks and against war, particularly the Vietnam War then beginning to take center stage in national politics. When it became apparent that Mr. Nixon was going to be a serious candidate for president I made a very calculated political decision. Despite his war follies the writer was fully committed to supporting one Lyndon Baines Johnson, one time President of the United States, common war criminal, political sociopath and now also residing in one of Dante’s circles. Those readers who supported the pro- Iraqi War Democratic presidential candidate, one John Forbes Kerry, in 2004 know the surreal mental gymnastics entailed to justify my position at that time. Why Johnson? Because he was the only candidate that could defeat the main villain of the piece, Mr. Nixon.
At no time did I consider the candidacy of the anti-war candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota viable by the above-mentioned standard. It must have been something about Irish poets and wits. In any case, after Mr. Johnson announced that he was not going to run again I easily switched my allegiance to Senator Robert Kennedy of New York. Even today I have a little soft spot for the memory of that man. If ever a bourgeois politician could move me it was Bobby. Remember this, it was Robert Kennedy was nailed on the head what Mr. Nixon represented politically- the dark side of the American spirit. However, in the final analysis, what drove me to the Kennedy campaign was the belief that he was the only candidate who could defeat Mr. Nixon.
After the Kennedy assassination in June 1968 and after a little confusion I moved on to support Mr. Humphrey, one time Vice President of the United States, common war criminal and political sociopath now at the Dante residence. Why? Because he was… (you can fill in the rest now). You were warned that this story was not for the faint-hearted. Why did I turn against the Democratic Party? Well, I finally got it about the nature of the American imperialist political system. How did I come to that conclusion? A little thing called the draft into the Army during Vietnam. But that is a story for another time. However, the story has a happy ending. Over the years I have voted for various socialist and labor party candidates and propositions and have not regretted one of those votes. Still, old habits die hard. I am still looking for that entry-level government job- in a victorious workers government.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES OF COMMENTARY ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY
I VOTED FOR VICE PRESIDENT HUBERT HORATIO HUMPHREY OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES IN 1968. MOREOVER, I ACTIVELY CAMPAIGNED FOR THE DEMOCRATIC TICKET IN THE FALL OF THAT YEAR. AND AS AN ASPIRING YOUNG POLITICAN I WAS PERFECTLY WILLING TO ACCEPT AN ENTRY-LEVEL POSITION IN A VICTORIOUS HUMPHREY ADMINISTRATION.
The thought of that rash youthful action as I am writing this piece still brings a blush to my cheeks. Of all the political mistakes I have made in my life this is the one that is still capable of doing that. In today’s confessional age, however, it is good to get it off my conscience. Right? Please, let me tell you the story. If at any point it sounds awfully familiar concerning today’s political choices please feel free to stop.
First, I must plead my youth as a mitigating circumstance. And as this is also an age when victims give voice to their travails you must realize that I was a victim of circumstances throughout all of this experience. Those circumstances most certainly had a name. That name, one Richard Milhous Nixon, at one time President of the United States, common war criminal, and political sociopath now residing in one of Dante’s circles of hell. You knew, didn’t you, that at least one of the villains had to be a Republican- some things never change. It may be hard for today’s militants to understand how much THAT man dominated our political hatreds in those days. To put it in perspective just remember that Mr. Nixon was the ‘godfather’ of the current president, Mr. Bush, common war criminal, political sociopath and a prime candidate for one of Dante’s circles of hell. Enough said.
In the early and mid- 1960’s this writer defined himself as a left-liberal of the Americans for Democratic Action school of politics. He had worked for civil rights for blacks and against war, particularly the Vietnam War then beginning to take center stage in national politics. When it became apparent that Mr. Nixon was going to be a serious candidate for president I made a very calculated political decision. Despite his war follies the writer was fully committed to supporting one Lyndon Baines Johnson, one time President of the United States, common war criminal, political sociopath and now also residing in one of Dante’s circles. Those readers who supported the pro- Iraqi War Democratic presidential candidate, one John Forbes Kerry, in 2004 know the surreal mental gymnastics entailed to justify my position at that time. Why Johnson? Because he was the only candidate that could defeat the main villain of the piece, Mr. Nixon.
At no time did I consider the candidacy of the anti-war candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota viable by the above-mentioned standard. It must have been something about Irish poets and wits. In any case, after Mr. Johnson announced that he was not going to run again I easily switched my allegiance to Senator Robert Kennedy of New York. Even today I have a little soft spot for the memory of that man. If ever a bourgeois politician could move me it was Bobby. Remember this, it was Robert Kennedy was nailed on the head what Mr. Nixon represented politically- the dark side of the American spirit. However, in the final analysis, what drove me to the Kennedy campaign was the belief that he was the only candidate who could defeat Mr. Nixon.
After the Kennedy assassination in June 1968 and after a little confusion I moved on to support Mr. Humphrey, one time Vice President of the United States, common war criminal and political sociopath now at the Dante residence. Why? Because he was… (you can fill in the rest now). You were warned that this story was not for the faint-hearted. Why did I turn against the Democratic Party? Well, I finally got it about the nature of the American imperialist political system. How did I come to that conclusion? A little thing called the draft into the Army during Vietnam. But that is a story for another time. However, the story has a happy ending. Over the years I have voted for various socialist and labor party candidates and propositions and have not regretted one of those votes. Still, old habits die hard. I am still looking for that entry-level government job- in a victorious workers government.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES OF COMMENTARY ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
Sunday, September 24, 2006
*THE TROOPS ARE NOT COMING HOME THIS CHRISTMAS OR ANY CHRISTMAS SOON!
Click on the title to link to an "Under The Hood" (Fort Hood G.I. Coffeehouse)Web site online article about the "Oleo Strut" Coffeehouse, an important development in the anti-Vietnam War struggle. Hats off to those bygone anti-war fighters.
COMMENTARY
IRAQ LOOKS MORE AND MORE LIKE VIETNAM EVERY DAY-IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL OF ALL UNITED STATES/ALLIED TROOPS!
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY
This writer for a long time has resisted the seemingly facile task of comparing the situation in Iraq today to the Vietnam of some forty years ago. But it is getting harder and harder to do so. On the face of it the differences are obvious. In Vietnam, revolutionary leftist forces were attempting to unify into one state that which by international diplomacy and previous bouts of international Stalinist treachery had been artificially split.
Furthermore, the defining principle behind the revolutionary forces there was the resolution of the agrarian question and the fight for what those forces conceived to be the road to socialism. Today in Iraq there are nationalist/sectarian forces which want to take revenge on the results of the European- derived Treaty of Versailles after World War I and re-divide this artificially created state-gun in hands. The fact that in Kurdish-controlled areas only the Kurdish flag can fly really says it all. Additionally, as far as this writer can tell, from the little known about the murky underworld of radical Islamic politics there are no forces fighting for anything like a secular- democratic much less a socialist solution to the problems there. Rather something like an Islamic Republic under repressive and anti-women Sharia law appears to be the favored political solution.
However, those differences between the domestic forces in Iraq and Vietnam aside the real way Iraq today looks like Vietnam is the similarities in the role of American imperialism on the ground. The latest news this week, the week of September 18, 2006, coming from the central military command is there will be no draw down of troops any time soon. LET ME REPEAT- THERE WILL NOT BE ANY DRAW DOWN ANY TIME SOON. All those who foolishly believed that draw down would occur and did not take the Bush Administration at its word when it declared empathically that troops would not be withdrawn as long as it drew breathe should ponder this. More on this below.
Moreover, in the week of September 25, 2006 we have the spectacle of the consensus of the various American intelligence services in a 'leaked' report finding that the situation in general and in Iraq in particular is to say the least grim. LET ME REPEAT-THERE WILL BE NO SOLUTION TO THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION CREATED AND DEMOCRATIC PARTY SUPPORTED 'WAR AGAINST TERRORISM' UNTIL THE GREEK CALENDS. There is no way to prettify those sentiments. The question is what to do about it.
There are starting to be voices heard, dormant for a while, spearheaded by the editors of National Review and other neo-con sources that the lesson to be learned from Iraq is that to really win in Iraq the Americans must sent in more troops. How much such sentiments are worth from these previous supporters of a quick and cheap air power strategy in Iraq is beside the point. What is noteworthy is that this premise is not an isolated sentiment even among alleged opponents of the war. And that, in a nutshell, is where the comparison to Vietnam comes into play. The hubris which led the United States into the quagmire of Iraq is still very much in play.
The notion that in order rectify the original mistake of invasion more mistakes, such as increased troop levels, can solve the problem and bring victory where none is possible is the same mentality that led to all the escalations of the Vietnam era.
Against all reason the Bushies of America and the world cannot believe that the situation is lost. Well hell, that is their problem. Militant leftists have other problems like organizing the opposition and getting the troops out to worry over.
Additionally, President Bush himself is getting a little testy at the Prime Minister of Iraq. He cannot believe that at this late stage the wholly-owned American puppet government in Iraq hasn’t stepped up to its tasks of creating domestic tranquility. One should remember the names Diem and Thieu from Vietnamese history who got the same kinds of dressing-downs from previous American administrations. With that thought in mind let me ask this question. Is there anyone today on the planet outside the immediate Bush family that believes that the writ of the Iraqi government runs outside the Green Zone (and even that premise might be shaky)? These guys (and they are overwhelmingly men) never led anything, went into exile under Saddam rather than go underground and build a resistance movement and represent no one but themselves. And the Bushies like it that way.
But, enough of that. The real question is what are we anti-war, anti-imperialist activists going to do about the situation. President Bush has been rightly accused of upping the security alerts during election time to highlight the security question that he has (successfully) used as a trump card to swing the electoral balance in his favor. A less well-known fact is that during the fall of election years, including this year, the leaderships of the reformist anti-war movements close down the nationally-centered anti-war demonstration campaigns which are the lynch pins of their politics. It is no secret that this is done to help so-called 'anti-war' Democratic politicians or at least not be a source of embarrassment to the weak Democratic parliamentary opposition to the war.
In a blog written this summer (see August archives) I wrote an open letter to the troops in Iraq. The thrust of the letter was that the conventional politicians, their own military leadership and the anti-war movement had left the troops in Iraq hanging in the wind. As we enter the fall electoral campaign this is truer than ever. I will repeat here what I stated there- if the troops are to withdraw from Iraq it will have to be on their own hook. Start forming the soldiers and sailors solidarity committees now. Militant leftists here must support those efforts. Begin to fraternize with the troops here. If you live near Oceanside, California go to Camp Pendleton. In North Carolina go to Fort Bragg and Camp Lejuene. Go to Fort Campbell in Kentucky. If you live near naval bases go there. Unfortunately today there is no other way to end the war. FORWARD.
Revised, September 27, 2006
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES OF COMMENTARY ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
COMMENTARY
IRAQ LOOKS MORE AND MORE LIKE VIETNAM EVERY DAY-IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL OF ALL UNITED STATES/ALLIED TROOPS!
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY
This writer for a long time has resisted the seemingly facile task of comparing the situation in Iraq today to the Vietnam of some forty years ago. But it is getting harder and harder to do so. On the face of it the differences are obvious. In Vietnam, revolutionary leftist forces were attempting to unify into one state that which by international diplomacy and previous bouts of international Stalinist treachery had been artificially split.
Furthermore, the defining principle behind the revolutionary forces there was the resolution of the agrarian question and the fight for what those forces conceived to be the road to socialism. Today in Iraq there are nationalist/sectarian forces which want to take revenge on the results of the European- derived Treaty of Versailles after World War I and re-divide this artificially created state-gun in hands. The fact that in Kurdish-controlled areas only the Kurdish flag can fly really says it all. Additionally, as far as this writer can tell, from the little known about the murky underworld of radical Islamic politics there are no forces fighting for anything like a secular- democratic much less a socialist solution to the problems there. Rather something like an Islamic Republic under repressive and anti-women Sharia law appears to be the favored political solution.
However, those differences between the domestic forces in Iraq and Vietnam aside the real way Iraq today looks like Vietnam is the similarities in the role of American imperialism on the ground. The latest news this week, the week of September 18, 2006, coming from the central military command is there will be no draw down of troops any time soon. LET ME REPEAT- THERE WILL NOT BE ANY DRAW DOWN ANY TIME SOON. All those who foolishly believed that draw down would occur and did not take the Bush Administration at its word when it declared empathically that troops would not be withdrawn as long as it drew breathe should ponder this. More on this below.
Moreover, in the week of September 25, 2006 we have the spectacle of the consensus of the various American intelligence services in a 'leaked' report finding that the situation in general and in Iraq in particular is to say the least grim. LET ME REPEAT-THERE WILL BE NO SOLUTION TO THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION CREATED AND DEMOCRATIC PARTY SUPPORTED 'WAR AGAINST TERRORISM' UNTIL THE GREEK CALENDS. There is no way to prettify those sentiments. The question is what to do about it.
There are starting to be voices heard, dormant for a while, spearheaded by the editors of National Review and other neo-con sources that the lesson to be learned from Iraq is that to really win in Iraq the Americans must sent in more troops. How much such sentiments are worth from these previous supporters of a quick and cheap air power strategy in Iraq is beside the point. What is noteworthy is that this premise is not an isolated sentiment even among alleged opponents of the war. And that, in a nutshell, is where the comparison to Vietnam comes into play. The hubris which led the United States into the quagmire of Iraq is still very much in play.
The notion that in order rectify the original mistake of invasion more mistakes, such as increased troop levels, can solve the problem and bring victory where none is possible is the same mentality that led to all the escalations of the Vietnam era.
Against all reason the Bushies of America and the world cannot believe that the situation is lost. Well hell, that is their problem. Militant leftists have other problems like organizing the opposition and getting the troops out to worry over.
Additionally, President Bush himself is getting a little testy at the Prime Minister of Iraq. He cannot believe that at this late stage the wholly-owned American puppet government in Iraq hasn’t stepped up to its tasks of creating domestic tranquility. One should remember the names Diem and Thieu from Vietnamese history who got the same kinds of dressing-downs from previous American administrations. With that thought in mind let me ask this question. Is there anyone today on the planet outside the immediate Bush family that believes that the writ of the Iraqi government runs outside the Green Zone (and even that premise might be shaky)? These guys (and they are overwhelmingly men) never led anything, went into exile under Saddam rather than go underground and build a resistance movement and represent no one but themselves. And the Bushies like it that way.
But, enough of that. The real question is what are we anti-war, anti-imperialist activists going to do about the situation. President Bush has been rightly accused of upping the security alerts during election time to highlight the security question that he has (successfully) used as a trump card to swing the electoral balance in his favor. A less well-known fact is that during the fall of election years, including this year, the leaderships of the reformist anti-war movements close down the nationally-centered anti-war demonstration campaigns which are the lynch pins of their politics. It is no secret that this is done to help so-called 'anti-war' Democratic politicians or at least not be a source of embarrassment to the weak Democratic parliamentary opposition to the war.
In a blog written this summer (see August archives) I wrote an open letter to the troops in Iraq. The thrust of the letter was that the conventional politicians, their own military leadership and the anti-war movement had left the troops in Iraq hanging in the wind. As we enter the fall electoral campaign this is truer than ever. I will repeat here what I stated there- if the troops are to withdraw from Iraq it will have to be on their own hook. Start forming the soldiers and sailors solidarity committees now. Militant leftists here must support those efforts. Begin to fraternize with the troops here. If you live near Oceanside, California go to Camp Pendleton. In North Carolina go to Fort Bragg and Camp Lejuene. Go to Fort Campbell in Kentucky. If you live near naval bases go there. Unfortunately today there is no other way to end the war. FORWARD.
Revised, September 27, 2006
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES OF COMMENTARY ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-"Silkwood"-A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for Karen Silkwood
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1984 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.
**********
Silkwood. Directed by Mike Nichols. Written by
Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen. ABC Motion Pictures.
A Twentieth Century-Fox release, 1984.
By Amy Rath
The long-standing controversy over the death of Karen Silkwood is being debated yet again, as the release of the movie Silkwood brings the case into the public eye. Silkwood has long been embraced by feminist and ecology groups as a heroine and martyr to the atomic power industry—the "no-nuke" Norma Rae; many believe she was deliberately poisoned with radioactive material and murdered to shut her up. Now, the movie, starring Meryl Streep and directed by Mike Nichols, has been seized upon by such bourgeois mouthpieces as the New York Times and the Washington Post to propagandize for the nuclear energy industry and smear her name.
"Fact and Legend Clash in "Silkwood'," cired the Times' science writer William J. broad, masquerading as a movie critic in the Sunday Arts and Leisure section. "Chicanery," "meretricious," "a perversion of the reporter's craft," blasts a Times (25 December 1983) editorial. That same day the Washington Post printed a piece by one Nick Thimmesch, a free-lance journalist with ties to Silkwood's employer, the Kerr-McGee corporation, charging "glaring discrepancies between the known record and the film's representations."
These are lies. In fact, Silkwood sticks remarkably close to the documentary record. If anything, it is surprisingly devoid of politics for such an alleged propaganda tract. Frankly, it's a little dull. It includes a lot of material (some of it made up, presumably for dramatic interest) about Karen Silkwood's unremarkable personal life. Like most people, she had problems with her lovers and roommates, didn't get along with her ex-spouse, was often troubled, and drank and took drugs. The bulk of the movie is a retelling of the last few weeks of her life, and raises more questions than it answers. How were Karen Silkwood's body and home contaminated with plutonium? Was Kerr-McGee deliberately covering up faulty fuel rods, which could lead to a disastrous accident at the breeder-reactor in Washington state where the rods were to be shipped? What happened on that Oklahoma highway on 13 November 1974, when Karen Silkwood was killed in a car crash, en route to an interview with a New York Times reporter?
The ending of the movie shows Silkwood blinded by the headlights of a truck on the highway, then her mangled body and car, seeming to imply that she was run off the road, as indeed independent investigators have concluded from an examination of her car and the tire tracks on the road and grass. Then a written message on the screen reports that Oklahoma police ruled her death a one-car accident and found traces of methaqualone (Quaalude) and alcohol in her blood¬stream. The conclusion is left for the viewer to decide We may never know the answers to these questions. As we noted in Workers Vanguard (No. 146,25 February 1977) in an article titled "Conspiracy and Cover-Up in Atomic Industry: FBI Drops Inquiry in Karen Silkwood Death":
"The abrupt cancellation of the second Congressional investigation into FBI handling of the case of Karen Silkwood has added to a widespread belief that the facts surrounding the death of the young trade unionist two years ago are being covered up at the highest levels of industry and government.
"...her documentation of company negligence and falsification of safety records was damning to powerful interests and as long as the bourgeois courts and commissions are running the investigations of her death, the only results will be successive cover-ups of the cover-ups."
In the fall of 1974 Karen Silkwood had been working for two years as a laboratory technician at the Cimarron, Oklahoma plutonium processing facility owned by Kerr-McGee, one of the largest energy conglomerates in the U.S. She became interested in health and safety issues at the plant. She brought her worries to the union, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW), and was elected as a union safety inspector, the movie makes this appear to be her first interest in the union. In fact, she had been one of the few die-hards in a defeated strike the previous year; she never crossed the picket line and she remained in the union even when its membership went down to 20. Along with fellow unionists, she traveled to union headquarters in Washington, D.C., where officials assigned her to gather documentation of company cover-ups of faulty fuel rods, as well as other safety violations.
Early in November 1974, Silkwood was repeatedly contaminated with plutonium, one of the deadliest materials known to man, in circumstances which have never been fully explained. In the Hollywood movie Meryl Streep ends up with raw pink patches over her face from decontamination scrubdowns. Her panicked expression when she knows she has to face a second one imparts the horror of it. Yet it is only a pale image of the reality. Silkwood's first scrubdown was with Tide and Clorox; the two others which, occurred over the next two days employed a sandpaper-like paste of potassium permanganate and sodium bisulfate. De¬spite this chemical torture (try scrubbing yourself with Ajax sometime), her skin still registered high levels of radiation. Worse yet, three days of nasal smears (to monitor inhaled radioactive contamination) increased to over 40,000 disintegrations per minute (dpm)— normal background radiation from cosmic rays and naturally occurring isotopes is roughly 30 dpm.
Silkwood's house was contaminated as well; it was stripped and her belongings were sealed and buried— one scene poignantly portrayed in the movie. An examination conducted at the medical facility at Los Alamos showed that she had received internal contami¬nation possibly as high as 24 nanocuries of plutonium (about 50,000 dpm). The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC, now Nuclear Regulatory Commission) has set a lifetime limit of 16 nanocuries; many specialists consider this hundreds of times too high. The fact is that plutonium is an extremely potent carcinogen, inhalation of which is virtually certain to induce lung cancer at levels where other radioactive nuclides can be tolerat¬ed. And Silkwood was particularly susceptible—she was female, had lung problems (asthma) and was small, under 100 pounds. In short, the plutonium she received chained her to cancer and a painful, slow death.
It is for this contamination, which an Oklahoma jury ruled the responsibility of Kerr-McGee, that $10.5 million in punitive damages was assessed against the company for the Silkwood estate. On January 11 the Supreme Court ruled the court had a legitimate right to assess this penalty; however, the case has been returned to a Jower court where Kerr-McGee may challenge the award on new grounds. Kerr-McGee has held that the contamination was "by her own hand," as a plot to discredit the company, a contention repeated by the New York Times in its editorial, which doesn't even mention that a jury had ruled this imputation not proved.
Since then, theories about Silkwood's contamination have included such slanderous tales as that put forth by alleged FBI informer Jacque Srouji, who claimed that Silkwood was deliberately contaminated by the union, to create a martyr. This is a telling indication of how far the capitalists will go to discredit the only thing that stands between the workers and total disregard for any safety. In the movie the International union representatives are made to appear as a bunch of slick bureaucrats who push Silkwood way out front without anywhere near sufficient backup. Certainly the OCAW is as craven before the capitalists as any other union in the U.S. But it has fought, however partially, for safer conditions for the workers it represents.
In the movie, Silkwood posits that someone purposely contaminated her urine-specimen jar with plutonium while it was in her locker room, a jar she later accidentally broke in her bathroom at home. This explanation is plausible, but we can't know for certain. We do know that Silkwood had been a straight A student in school, the only girl in her high school chemistry class, a member of the National Honor Society. She had studied medical technology. She knew that tampering with plutonium was death. The idea that she would deliberately contaminate herself could originate only in the sick and vicious minds of a profit-mad industry like Kerr-McGee.
Even the New York Times had to admit that Kerr-McGee was "a hellish place to work." Between 1970 and 1974 there were 574 reported exposures to plutonium. Dr. Karl Morgan, formerly a health physicist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, testified at a Congressional investigation that he had never seen a facility so poorly run. The plant was constructed in a tornado alley; the tornado warnings were so frequent that the company never bothered to remove the plutonium to a safe place. Yet the hazards of the plant get barely a nod in the film. Only one other instance of contamination is shown, Silkwood's friend Thelma. But when Silkwood is shown leaving off her urine sample at the lab for analysis, the audience sees many such samples lined up, thus many more contaminations.
Yes, nuclear power is dangerous. An accident such as almost happened at Three Mile Island could kill thousands of people. But the only "solution" to this problem provided by the movie Silkwood—and shared in real life by the OCAW union tops—is, ironically enough, the New York Times! Get the Times to publish the damning evidence, and the AEC will make Kerr-McGee straighten things out. The crusading press will save America by publicly exposing wrong, and the government will step in and perform justice. Sure. This is a liberal pipedream: the AEC serves the interests of power conglomerates like Kerr-McGee, and the New York Times worships money, not justice.
The "no-nukers" hail the name of Silkwood in their campaign to abolish nuclear power. But the problem is that you have to replace it with something, and in this capitalist society there is no such thing as a danger-free source of energy. For generations workers have died miserably in coal mines and suffocated to death with black lung disease. Like any technology, nuclear power can be used and abused. It is not so much a question of a special technology, but the irrationality of the capitalist economy which makes all industry in the U.S., including the nuclear industry, hazardous. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan threatens to blow up the world hundreds of times over to save American profits. Over 90 percent of the nuclear waste in this country is military. And that's nothing compared to the global nuclear holocaust plotted in the Pentagon. That is the real danger of nuclear power.
The no-nuke movement is part of a middle-class ecological concern that the disastrous conditions which workers have faced for generations might spread to the suburbs, perhaps even onto a college campus. Anti-nuke groups actively publicize and collect funds for the Silkwood lawsuit but not a peep is heard in protest against the murder of Gregory Goobic during a two-week strike by OCAW Local 1-326 in Rodeo, California last January. Goobic, a 20-year-old union member, was run down by a scab truck while picketing a Union 76 oil refinery. A company boss, with arms folded, stood in the dead striker's blood as cops kept the other picketers away. The capitalists and their government are not interested in the lives of their employees, particularly when adequate wages, work¬ing conditions and safety precautions stand in the way of profits. Obviously one thing militants in unions such as OCAW must do is fight for safety committees with the power to close down plants. But equally necessarily is the struggle to replace the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy with a leadership that will break with both bourgeois parties and build a workers party. The world will be safe to live in when the ruling class has been expropriated by a workers government that runs society for the benefit of all, not the profits of a few.
Silkwood has been denounced by corporate spokesmen at the New York Times for portraying Karen Silkwood as "a nuclear Joan of Arc" when she was really "a victim of her own infatuation with drugs"; it has been denounced by anti-nuke fan Anna Mayo of the Village Voice for portraying her as a dope-smoking "bad girl" when she was really "beloved daughter, sister, friend, union martyr and heroine of the largest, most viable grass-roots force in the U.S. and Western Europe, the anti-nuclear movement."
Actually, Karen Silkwood was simply a union militant fighting the best she could for a better life for herself and her coworkers against one of the least safe, most powerful, biggest price-gouging capitalist enterprises in the country. And we think the movie did a nice job showing it."
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1984 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.
**********
Silkwood. Directed by Mike Nichols. Written by
Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen. ABC Motion Pictures.
A Twentieth Century-Fox release, 1984.
By Amy Rath
The long-standing controversy over the death of Karen Silkwood is being debated yet again, as the release of the movie Silkwood brings the case into the public eye. Silkwood has long been embraced by feminist and ecology groups as a heroine and martyr to the atomic power industry—the "no-nuke" Norma Rae; many believe she was deliberately poisoned with radioactive material and murdered to shut her up. Now, the movie, starring Meryl Streep and directed by Mike Nichols, has been seized upon by such bourgeois mouthpieces as the New York Times and the Washington Post to propagandize for the nuclear energy industry and smear her name.
"Fact and Legend Clash in "Silkwood'," cired the Times' science writer William J. broad, masquerading as a movie critic in the Sunday Arts and Leisure section. "Chicanery," "meretricious," "a perversion of the reporter's craft," blasts a Times (25 December 1983) editorial. That same day the Washington Post printed a piece by one Nick Thimmesch, a free-lance journalist with ties to Silkwood's employer, the Kerr-McGee corporation, charging "glaring discrepancies between the known record and the film's representations."
These are lies. In fact, Silkwood sticks remarkably close to the documentary record. If anything, it is surprisingly devoid of politics for such an alleged propaganda tract. Frankly, it's a little dull. It includes a lot of material (some of it made up, presumably for dramatic interest) about Karen Silkwood's unremarkable personal life. Like most people, she had problems with her lovers and roommates, didn't get along with her ex-spouse, was often troubled, and drank and took drugs. The bulk of the movie is a retelling of the last few weeks of her life, and raises more questions than it answers. How were Karen Silkwood's body and home contaminated with plutonium? Was Kerr-McGee deliberately covering up faulty fuel rods, which could lead to a disastrous accident at the breeder-reactor in Washington state where the rods were to be shipped? What happened on that Oklahoma highway on 13 November 1974, when Karen Silkwood was killed in a car crash, en route to an interview with a New York Times reporter?
The ending of the movie shows Silkwood blinded by the headlights of a truck on the highway, then her mangled body and car, seeming to imply that she was run off the road, as indeed independent investigators have concluded from an examination of her car and the tire tracks on the road and grass. Then a written message on the screen reports that Oklahoma police ruled her death a one-car accident and found traces of methaqualone (Quaalude) and alcohol in her blood¬stream. The conclusion is left for the viewer to decide We may never know the answers to these questions. As we noted in Workers Vanguard (No. 146,25 February 1977) in an article titled "Conspiracy and Cover-Up in Atomic Industry: FBI Drops Inquiry in Karen Silkwood Death":
"The abrupt cancellation of the second Congressional investigation into FBI handling of the case of Karen Silkwood has added to a widespread belief that the facts surrounding the death of the young trade unionist two years ago are being covered up at the highest levels of industry and government.
"...her documentation of company negligence and falsification of safety records was damning to powerful interests and as long as the bourgeois courts and commissions are running the investigations of her death, the only results will be successive cover-ups of the cover-ups."
In the fall of 1974 Karen Silkwood had been working for two years as a laboratory technician at the Cimarron, Oklahoma plutonium processing facility owned by Kerr-McGee, one of the largest energy conglomerates in the U.S. She became interested in health and safety issues at the plant. She brought her worries to the union, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW), and was elected as a union safety inspector, the movie makes this appear to be her first interest in the union. In fact, she had been one of the few die-hards in a defeated strike the previous year; she never crossed the picket line and she remained in the union even when its membership went down to 20. Along with fellow unionists, she traveled to union headquarters in Washington, D.C., where officials assigned her to gather documentation of company cover-ups of faulty fuel rods, as well as other safety violations.
Early in November 1974, Silkwood was repeatedly contaminated with plutonium, one of the deadliest materials known to man, in circumstances which have never been fully explained. In the Hollywood movie Meryl Streep ends up with raw pink patches over her face from decontamination scrubdowns. Her panicked expression when she knows she has to face a second one imparts the horror of it. Yet it is only a pale image of the reality. Silkwood's first scrubdown was with Tide and Clorox; the two others which, occurred over the next two days employed a sandpaper-like paste of potassium permanganate and sodium bisulfate. De¬spite this chemical torture (try scrubbing yourself with Ajax sometime), her skin still registered high levels of radiation. Worse yet, three days of nasal smears (to monitor inhaled radioactive contamination) increased to over 40,000 disintegrations per minute (dpm)— normal background radiation from cosmic rays and naturally occurring isotopes is roughly 30 dpm.
Silkwood's house was contaminated as well; it was stripped and her belongings were sealed and buried— one scene poignantly portrayed in the movie. An examination conducted at the medical facility at Los Alamos showed that she had received internal contami¬nation possibly as high as 24 nanocuries of plutonium (about 50,000 dpm). The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC, now Nuclear Regulatory Commission) has set a lifetime limit of 16 nanocuries; many specialists consider this hundreds of times too high. The fact is that plutonium is an extremely potent carcinogen, inhalation of which is virtually certain to induce lung cancer at levels where other radioactive nuclides can be tolerat¬ed. And Silkwood was particularly susceptible—she was female, had lung problems (asthma) and was small, under 100 pounds. In short, the plutonium she received chained her to cancer and a painful, slow death.
It is for this contamination, which an Oklahoma jury ruled the responsibility of Kerr-McGee, that $10.5 million in punitive damages was assessed against the company for the Silkwood estate. On January 11 the Supreme Court ruled the court had a legitimate right to assess this penalty; however, the case has been returned to a Jower court where Kerr-McGee may challenge the award on new grounds. Kerr-McGee has held that the contamination was "by her own hand," as a plot to discredit the company, a contention repeated by the New York Times in its editorial, which doesn't even mention that a jury had ruled this imputation not proved.
Since then, theories about Silkwood's contamination have included such slanderous tales as that put forth by alleged FBI informer Jacque Srouji, who claimed that Silkwood was deliberately contaminated by the union, to create a martyr. This is a telling indication of how far the capitalists will go to discredit the only thing that stands between the workers and total disregard for any safety. In the movie the International union representatives are made to appear as a bunch of slick bureaucrats who push Silkwood way out front without anywhere near sufficient backup. Certainly the OCAW is as craven before the capitalists as any other union in the U.S. But it has fought, however partially, for safer conditions for the workers it represents.
In the movie, Silkwood posits that someone purposely contaminated her urine-specimen jar with plutonium while it was in her locker room, a jar she later accidentally broke in her bathroom at home. This explanation is plausible, but we can't know for certain. We do know that Silkwood had been a straight A student in school, the only girl in her high school chemistry class, a member of the National Honor Society. She had studied medical technology. She knew that tampering with plutonium was death. The idea that she would deliberately contaminate herself could originate only in the sick and vicious minds of a profit-mad industry like Kerr-McGee.
Even the New York Times had to admit that Kerr-McGee was "a hellish place to work." Between 1970 and 1974 there were 574 reported exposures to plutonium. Dr. Karl Morgan, formerly a health physicist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, testified at a Congressional investigation that he had never seen a facility so poorly run. The plant was constructed in a tornado alley; the tornado warnings were so frequent that the company never bothered to remove the plutonium to a safe place. Yet the hazards of the plant get barely a nod in the film. Only one other instance of contamination is shown, Silkwood's friend Thelma. But when Silkwood is shown leaving off her urine sample at the lab for analysis, the audience sees many such samples lined up, thus many more contaminations.
Yes, nuclear power is dangerous. An accident such as almost happened at Three Mile Island could kill thousands of people. But the only "solution" to this problem provided by the movie Silkwood—and shared in real life by the OCAW union tops—is, ironically enough, the New York Times! Get the Times to publish the damning evidence, and the AEC will make Kerr-McGee straighten things out. The crusading press will save America by publicly exposing wrong, and the government will step in and perform justice. Sure. This is a liberal pipedream: the AEC serves the interests of power conglomerates like Kerr-McGee, and the New York Times worships money, not justice.
The "no-nukers" hail the name of Silkwood in their campaign to abolish nuclear power. But the problem is that you have to replace it with something, and in this capitalist society there is no such thing as a danger-free source of energy. For generations workers have died miserably in coal mines and suffocated to death with black lung disease. Like any technology, nuclear power can be used and abused. It is not so much a question of a special technology, but the irrationality of the capitalist economy which makes all industry in the U.S., including the nuclear industry, hazardous. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan threatens to blow up the world hundreds of times over to save American profits. Over 90 percent of the nuclear waste in this country is military. And that's nothing compared to the global nuclear holocaust plotted in the Pentagon. That is the real danger of nuclear power.
The no-nuke movement is part of a middle-class ecological concern that the disastrous conditions which workers have faced for generations might spread to the suburbs, perhaps even onto a college campus. Anti-nuke groups actively publicize and collect funds for the Silkwood lawsuit but not a peep is heard in protest against the murder of Gregory Goobic during a two-week strike by OCAW Local 1-326 in Rodeo, California last January. Goobic, a 20-year-old union member, was run down by a scab truck while picketing a Union 76 oil refinery. A company boss, with arms folded, stood in the dead striker's blood as cops kept the other picketers away. The capitalists and their government are not interested in the lives of their employees, particularly when adequate wages, work¬ing conditions and safety precautions stand in the way of profits. Obviously one thing militants in unions such as OCAW must do is fight for safety committees with the power to close down plants. But equally necessarily is the struggle to replace the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy with a leadership that will break with both bourgeois parties and build a workers party. The world will be safe to live in when the ruling class has been expropriated by a workers government that runs society for the benefit of all, not the profits of a few.
Silkwood has been denounced by corporate spokesmen at the New York Times for portraying Karen Silkwood as "a nuclear Joan of Arc" when she was really "a victim of her own infatuation with drugs"; it has been denounced by anti-nuke fan Anna Mayo of the Village Voice for portraying her as a dope-smoking "bad girl" when she was really "beloved daughter, sister, friend, union martyr and heroine of the largest, most viable grass-roots force in the U.S. and Western Europe, the anti-nuclear movement."
Actually, Karen Silkwood was simply a union militant fighting the best she could for a better life for herself and her coworkers against one of the least safe, most powerful, biggest price-gouging capitalist enterprises in the country. And we think the movie did a nice job showing it."
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
*FREEDOM NOW FOR MUMIA ABU-JAMAL
Click on the title to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site.
I AM PASSING ON THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT RECENTLY RECEIVED FROM THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE. I NEED ONLY ADD THAT THE POINT MENTIONED ABOUT THE NEED TO CALL FOR MUMIA'S FREEDOM RATHER THAN THE CALL FOR A NEW TRIAL RETAINS ALL ITS VALIDITY. FINALLY, IF YOU DO NOTHING ELSE IN YOUR POLITICAL LIFE STAND BY THIS INNOCENT MAN. SUPPORT, ORGANIZE, RAISE FUNDS FOR HIS DEFENSE.
FREEDOM NOW FOR MUMIA ABU-JAMAL
The fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal is at a critical juncture. A prize-winning journalist, former Black Panther Party spokesman, supporter of the MOVE organization and defiant opponent of racist state terror, Mumia was railroaded to death row in 1982 on false charges of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. On July 20, Mumia filed his opening legal brief in the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, which last December put his case on a "fast track" for decision. The forces of the capitalist state have long been determined to carry out Mumia's legal lynching as a warning to those who challenge racist cop repression, to fighters against U.S. imperialist depredations, to workers who stand up for their rights on the picket lines. The Partisan Defense Committee—a legal and social defense organization associated with the Marxist Spartacist League—calls on all opponents of racist injustice, and in particular the labor movement, to mobilize for freedom now for Mumia!
Mumia's life is in grave danger. The court is expected to rule in a matter of months whether he will live, die or have further legal proceedings. Both Mumia and the prosecution are appealing a 2001 ruling by U.S. District Court judge William Yohn, who overturned Mumia's death sentence but upheld every aspect of his frame-up conviction. The Third Circuit has refused to hear any evidence of Mumia's innocence and has only allowed him to challenge three of the more than two dozen constitutional violations in his case. For more than five years, state and federal courts have refused to hear the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Daniel Faulkner. In an affidavit reprinted in the PDC pamphlet The Fight to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal—Mumia Is Innocent!, Beverly says that he was hired to kill Faulkner, who was reportedly interfering with prostitution, gambling, drugs and police payoffs, and that "Jamal had nothing to do with the shooting."
The courts have suppressed the Beverly evidence because it demonstrates that the injustice done to Mumia was not the work of one rogue cop, prosecutor or judge but the workings of a "justice" system whose purpose is to repress the working class, minorities and the poor on behalf of the capitalist ruling class. The fight to free Mumia must be waged on the basis that he is an innocent man, the victim of a political and racist frame-up. The need to mobilize around this understanding is underscored by the fact that Beverly's confession and other proof of Mumia's innocence—including the suppression and coercion of eyewitnesses by police and prosecutors and their fabrication, some two months after his arrest, of a phony "confession" by Mumia—cannot even get a hearing in the capitalist courts.
The Beverly confession has been derided by liberals like the writer Dave Lindorff and all but ignored by reformist left organizations. Many liberals object to Mumia's treatment in the courts but see it as at most an "aberration" in an otherwise fair and just legal system, and they regard the idea that the cops would frame up an innocent man as absurd.
But to see that such frame-ups are routine procedure requires looking no further than a special prosecutor's report released on July 19, which examines nearly 150 cases in which Chicago cops used electroshock, suffocation and torture to beat bogus confessions out of black "suspects." Although the Chicago report is mainly a damage-control job, it nonetheless confirms that there was widespread torture and that police brass knew about it and gave a commendation to the cops who were doing it. It was well-documented at the time of Mumia's trial that the Philly police used similar methods.
Mumia's frame-up was not only racist—it was politically driven as well. The police and FBI had Mumia in their sights since his Black Panther youth and continued their vendetta as he became known as "the voice of the voiceless" for his searing commentaries on racism, poverty and repression—a role Mumia continues to play through his writings from death row.
The three issues covered in Mumia's new brief point to the racist and political bias that saturated his trial and appeals, proving that Mumia, like Dred Scott in 1857, has no rights that a court is bound to respect. One issue is the racist bias of the late hanging judge Albert Sabo, a member of the Fraternal Order of Police (F.O.P.) who presided over Mumia's 1982 trial and again at his post-conviction (PCRA) hearings in the 1990s. The court filings highlight a 2001 affidavit of court reporter Terri Maurer-Carter, who disclosed that at the time of the trial she overheard Sabo say, "I'm going to help them fry the n---r." During the 1995 PCRA hearings, Sabo routinely quashed Mumia's subpoenas, sustained prosecution objections and found all of Mumia's witnesses "incredible." Sabo jailed PDC attorney Rachel Wolkenstein, then a member of Mumia's legal team, and told another defense lawyer, "Counselor, justice is just an emotional feeling."
The brief also exposes the prosecutor's racist jury-rigging at the trial. Excluding black jurors was an official policy of the Philadelphia DA.'s office, codified in a 1987 training video directing prosecutors to strike "blacks from the low-income areas" from juries because they have "a resentment for law enforcement." Statistical studies prove that this was the practice throughout the 1980s. Mumia's brief documents that for his trial "a black person's odds of being struck were ten times higher than someone who is white" (emphasis in original).
Mumia's third challenge strikes at the prosecution's outrageous closing argument that the jury should err on the side of convicting Mumia because he would have "appeal after appeal." This argument blatantly erased the reasonable doubt standard, telling the jury that in case of doubt they should convict Mumia. Mumia's brief also responds to the prosecution's own appeal of Judge Yohn's 2001 ruling, which seeks to reverse the overturning of Mumia's death sentence. Yohn found the sentence to be unconstitutional because the sentencing form and jury instructions did not allow jurors to freely consider all the "mitigating circumstances" weighing against a death sentence. Yet Mumia has remained on death row this entire time.
Mumia's case is what the death penalty is all about. It is a legacy of chattel slavery and the ultimate weapon in the government's arsenal of repression aimed at the working class and oppressed. The capitalist rulers want to see Mumia dead because they see in him the spectre of black revolution, a voice of defiant opposition to their system of racist oppression. Acting as their spearhead is the F.O.P., which has tried to intimidate Mumia's supporters at every step.
On July 19, the day before Mumia filed his court brief, more than 130 British lawyers released a letter to the court calling to overturn his conviction. Their letter emphasizes that the courts' blatant bias against Mumia must be seen "in the light of the Katrina hurricane disaster in New Orleans, when television viewers in every country of the world witnessed an unparalleled display of racism on a massive scale, allowed (some would say enabled) by the US government." The National Lawyers Guild and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund will be filing amicus (friend of court) briefs on Mumia's behalf.
The frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal is an object lesson in the class character of the capitalist state—centrally the cops, courts, prisons and military—which is an apparatus of violence used to preserve bourgeois rule by suppressing the working class and oppressed. An international movement of millions stayed the executioner's hand in 1995 after Mumia's first death warrant was issued. But that movement was systematically demobilized by reformist organizations that tailored their appeals to the liberal "mainstream," to those who saw in Mumia's case a "miscarriage of justice" that could be remedied if only he got a new, "fair" trial. As Rachel Wolkenstein stated earlier this year, in a talk printed in The Fight to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal:
"This meant tying Mumia's defense to what Democratic Party politicians would accept, like the need for a new trial to clean up the image created by Sabo's indisputably racially biased trial and PCRA proceeding. This meant denying the truth about the capitalist state and its vendetta against black militants, the COINTELPRO targeting of Mumia, the murderous attacks on the MOVE organization.
"Appealing to the 'mainstream' also meant ambiguity on the question of Mumia's innocence—and on whether he lives or dies, is entombed for life or goes free—so long as there is a new trial. It meant rejecting the very reasons that millions around the globe had taken up Mumia's cause: revulsion with the injustices inherent in capitalism— poverty, racial and ethnic bias, war. There was broad identification with Mumia's fight against the 'system' and for justice for all of humanity."
Every legal remedy must be pursued on Mumia's behalf. But Mumia himself told the French Communist Party's newspaper L'Humanite (25 April) that he had "very little hope in a favorable decision" by the Third Circuit court. Since first taking up Mumia's cause in 1987, the PDC has warned against any illusions in bourgeois "justice," placing all our faith in mobilizing the social power of the working class and the oppressed in defense of Mumia. If successful, the fight for Mumia's freedom would, as Wolkenstein stated in her talk, "strike a blow against the government's 'anti-terror' campaign and the evisceration of democratic rights. It would give labor a sense of its own power. The fight for Mumia is the fight for black liberation, for the liberation of us all, part of the struggle for socialist revolution."
We must mobilize now to make Mumia's fight once again a rallying cry against racist "legal lynching," against black oppression, against government repression. Free Mumia! Abolish the racist death penalty!
Join the Fight to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Contact the Partisan Defense Committee.
e-mail: partisandefense@earthlink.net • Web site: www.partisandefense.org New York: PO. Box
99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013-0099 • (212) 406-4252 Chicago: PO. Box 802867, Chicago, IL 60680-2867 • (312) 563-0442 Bay Area: RO. Box 77462, San Francisco, CA 94107-0462 • (510) 839-0852
I AM PASSING ON THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT RECENTLY RECEIVED FROM THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE. I NEED ONLY ADD THAT THE POINT MENTIONED ABOUT THE NEED TO CALL FOR MUMIA'S FREEDOM RATHER THAN THE CALL FOR A NEW TRIAL RETAINS ALL ITS VALIDITY. FINALLY, IF YOU DO NOTHING ELSE IN YOUR POLITICAL LIFE STAND BY THIS INNOCENT MAN. SUPPORT, ORGANIZE, RAISE FUNDS FOR HIS DEFENSE.
FREEDOM NOW FOR MUMIA ABU-JAMAL
The fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal is at a critical juncture. A prize-winning journalist, former Black Panther Party spokesman, supporter of the MOVE organization and defiant opponent of racist state terror, Mumia was railroaded to death row in 1982 on false charges of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. On July 20, Mumia filed his opening legal brief in the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, which last December put his case on a "fast track" for decision. The forces of the capitalist state have long been determined to carry out Mumia's legal lynching as a warning to those who challenge racist cop repression, to fighters against U.S. imperialist depredations, to workers who stand up for their rights on the picket lines. The Partisan Defense Committee—a legal and social defense organization associated with the Marxist Spartacist League—calls on all opponents of racist injustice, and in particular the labor movement, to mobilize for freedom now for Mumia!
Mumia's life is in grave danger. The court is expected to rule in a matter of months whether he will live, die or have further legal proceedings. Both Mumia and the prosecution are appealing a 2001 ruling by U.S. District Court judge William Yohn, who overturned Mumia's death sentence but upheld every aspect of his frame-up conviction. The Third Circuit has refused to hear any evidence of Mumia's innocence and has only allowed him to challenge three of the more than two dozen constitutional violations in his case. For more than five years, state and federal courts have refused to hear the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Daniel Faulkner. In an affidavit reprinted in the PDC pamphlet The Fight to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal—Mumia Is Innocent!, Beverly says that he was hired to kill Faulkner, who was reportedly interfering with prostitution, gambling, drugs and police payoffs, and that "Jamal had nothing to do with the shooting."
The courts have suppressed the Beverly evidence because it demonstrates that the injustice done to Mumia was not the work of one rogue cop, prosecutor or judge but the workings of a "justice" system whose purpose is to repress the working class, minorities and the poor on behalf of the capitalist ruling class. The fight to free Mumia must be waged on the basis that he is an innocent man, the victim of a political and racist frame-up. The need to mobilize around this understanding is underscored by the fact that Beverly's confession and other proof of Mumia's innocence—including the suppression and coercion of eyewitnesses by police and prosecutors and their fabrication, some two months after his arrest, of a phony "confession" by Mumia—cannot even get a hearing in the capitalist courts.
The Beverly confession has been derided by liberals like the writer Dave Lindorff and all but ignored by reformist left organizations. Many liberals object to Mumia's treatment in the courts but see it as at most an "aberration" in an otherwise fair and just legal system, and they regard the idea that the cops would frame up an innocent man as absurd.
But to see that such frame-ups are routine procedure requires looking no further than a special prosecutor's report released on July 19, which examines nearly 150 cases in which Chicago cops used electroshock, suffocation and torture to beat bogus confessions out of black "suspects." Although the Chicago report is mainly a damage-control job, it nonetheless confirms that there was widespread torture and that police brass knew about it and gave a commendation to the cops who were doing it. It was well-documented at the time of Mumia's trial that the Philly police used similar methods.
Mumia's frame-up was not only racist—it was politically driven as well. The police and FBI had Mumia in their sights since his Black Panther youth and continued their vendetta as he became known as "the voice of the voiceless" for his searing commentaries on racism, poverty and repression—a role Mumia continues to play through his writings from death row.
The three issues covered in Mumia's new brief point to the racist and political bias that saturated his trial and appeals, proving that Mumia, like Dred Scott in 1857, has no rights that a court is bound to respect. One issue is the racist bias of the late hanging judge Albert Sabo, a member of the Fraternal Order of Police (F.O.P.) who presided over Mumia's 1982 trial and again at his post-conviction (PCRA) hearings in the 1990s. The court filings highlight a 2001 affidavit of court reporter Terri Maurer-Carter, who disclosed that at the time of the trial she overheard Sabo say, "I'm going to help them fry the n---r." During the 1995 PCRA hearings, Sabo routinely quashed Mumia's subpoenas, sustained prosecution objections and found all of Mumia's witnesses "incredible." Sabo jailed PDC attorney Rachel Wolkenstein, then a member of Mumia's legal team, and told another defense lawyer, "Counselor, justice is just an emotional feeling."
The brief also exposes the prosecutor's racist jury-rigging at the trial. Excluding black jurors was an official policy of the Philadelphia DA.'s office, codified in a 1987 training video directing prosecutors to strike "blacks from the low-income areas" from juries because they have "a resentment for law enforcement." Statistical studies prove that this was the practice throughout the 1980s. Mumia's brief documents that for his trial "a black person's odds of being struck were ten times higher than someone who is white" (emphasis in original).
Mumia's third challenge strikes at the prosecution's outrageous closing argument that the jury should err on the side of convicting Mumia because he would have "appeal after appeal." This argument blatantly erased the reasonable doubt standard, telling the jury that in case of doubt they should convict Mumia. Mumia's brief also responds to the prosecution's own appeal of Judge Yohn's 2001 ruling, which seeks to reverse the overturning of Mumia's death sentence. Yohn found the sentence to be unconstitutional because the sentencing form and jury instructions did not allow jurors to freely consider all the "mitigating circumstances" weighing against a death sentence. Yet Mumia has remained on death row this entire time.
Mumia's case is what the death penalty is all about. It is a legacy of chattel slavery and the ultimate weapon in the government's arsenal of repression aimed at the working class and oppressed. The capitalist rulers want to see Mumia dead because they see in him the spectre of black revolution, a voice of defiant opposition to their system of racist oppression. Acting as their spearhead is the F.O.P., which has tried to intimidate Mumia's supporters at every step.
On July 19, the day before Mumia filed his court brief, more than 130 British lawyers released a letter to the court calling to overturn his conviction. Their letter emphasizes that the courts' blatant bias against Mumia must be seen "in the light of the Katrina hurricane disaster in New Orleans, when television viewers in every country of the world witnessed an unparalleled display of racism on a massive scale, allowed (some would say enabled) by the US government." The National Lawyers Guild and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund will be filing amicus (friend of court) briefs on Mumia's behalf.
The frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal is an object lesson in the class character of the capitalist state—centrally the cops, courts, prisons and military—which is an apparatus of violence used to preserve bourgeois rule by suppressing the working class and oppressed. An international movement of millions stayed the executioner's hand in 1995 after Mumia's first death warrant was issued. But that movement was systematically demobilized by reformist organizations that tailored their appeals to the liberal "mainstream," to those who saw in Mumia's case a "miscarriage of justice" that could be remedied if only he got a new, "fair" trial. As Rachel Wolkenstein stated earlier this year, in a talk printed in The Fight to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal:
"This meant tying Mumia's defense to what Democratic Party politicians would accept, like the need for a new trial to clean up the image created by Sabo's indisputably racially biased trial and PCRA proceeding. This meant denying the truth about the capitalist state and its vendetta against black militants, the COINTELPRO targeting of Mumia, the murderous attacks on the MOVE organization.
"Appealing to the 'mainstream' also meant ambiguity on the question of Mumia's innocence—and on whether he lives or dies, is entombed for life or goes free—so long as there is a new trial. It meant rejecting the very reasons that millions around the globe had taken up Mumia's cause: revulsion with the injustices inherent in capitalism— poverty, racial and ethnic bias, war. There was broad identification with Mumia's fight against the 'system' and for justice for all of humanity."
Every legal remedy must be pursued on Mumia's behalf. But Mumia himself told the French Communist Party's newspaper L'Humanite (25 April) that he had "very little hope in a favorable decision" by the Third Circuit court. Since first taking up Mumia's cause in 1987, the PDC has warned against any illusions in bourgeois "justice," placing all our faith in mobilizing the social power of the working class and the oppressed in defense of Mumia. If successful, the fight for Mumia's freedom would, as Wolkenstein stated in her talk, "strike a blow against the government's 'anti-terror' campaign and the evisceration of democratic rights. It would give labor a sense of its own power. The fight for Mumia is the fight for black liberation, for the liberation of us all, part of the struggle for socialist revolution."
We must mobilize now to make Mumia's fight once again a rallying cry against racist "legal lynching," against black oppression, against government repression. Free Mumia! Abolish the racist death penalty!
Join the Fight to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Contact the Partisan Defense Committee.
e-mail: partisandefense@earthlink.net • Web site: www.partisandefense.org New York: PO. Box
99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013-0099 • (212) 406-4252 Chicago: PO. Box 802867, Chicago, IL 60680-2867 • (312) 563-0442 Bay Area: RO. Box 77462, San Francisco, CA 94107-0462 • (510) 839-0852
Friday, September 15, 2006
THE YEAR OF THE WORKING CLASS
COMMENTARY
DON’T COMMENT, ORGANIZE!
It seems that every time this writer picks up any serious journal, newspaper or other periodical there is some article about the plight of the American working class family and the fact, which nobody bothers to deny at this point, that the class divide in this country (and elsewhere) is getting wider. I am not complaining about the fact of publication about the plight of the working class, mind you. After all anything that exposes the fact that there are, surprise, surprise, actually classes in American society warms this old Marxist’s heart. What bothers me is that after making their exposes the writers either have no prescription for solving the problem or, if they do believe that it can be resolved, it is by returning the Democratic Party to power on the national level. To state the problem I have with the prospectives of these writers this way is to give the answer. There will be no solution. The times, however, cry out for a solution. And the start of that solution is to break from the old capitalist party parliamentary solutions and build a workers party. Nothing new here. But it must be done. In short, don’t comment, organize!
Along the same lines this writer recently read an article by Tony Judt in, of all places, the very proper old Cold War liberal New York Review of Books on the possible resurgence of Marxism in some form. Obviously, I, personally, would link the creation of a workers party to a Marxian program. I have made that clear from the beginning of these postings. What is interesting is that that nature of the world since the ‘second phase’ globalization of capitalism has occurred over the last couple of decades that some commentators have picked up on the fact that the conditions of the international labor market now look an awful lot like those at the turn of the last century. In short, a lot of people are going to be presenting their solutions to the crisis and not all of them are in the interest of the international working class. Certainly Professor Judt does not want to see any resurgence of Marxism, having spent the better part of his career expounding on the benefits of the capitalist order against Stalinism. Stay tuned for more on this.
DON’T COMMENT, ORGANIZE!
It seems that every time this writer picks up any serious journal, newspaper or other periodical there is some article about the plight of the American working class family and the fact, which nobody bothers to deny at this point, that the class divide in this country (and elsewhere) is getting wider. I am not complaining about the fact of publication about the plight of the working class, mind you. After all anything that exposes the fact that there are, surprise, surprise, actually classes in American society warms this old Marxist’s heart. What bothers me is that after making their exposes the writers either have no prescription for solving the problem or, if they do believe that it can be resolved, it is by returning the Democratic Party to power on the national level. To state the problem I have with the prospectives of these writers this way is to give the answer. There will be no solution. The times, however, cry out for a solution. And the start of that solution is to break from the old capitalist party parliamentary solutions and build a workers party. Nothing new here. But it must be done. In short, don’t comment, organize!
Along the same lines this writer recently read an article by Tony Judt in, of all places, the very proper old Cold War liberal New York Review of Books on the possible resurgence of Marxism in some form. Obviously, I, personally, would link the creation of a workers party to a Marxian program. I have made that clear from the beginning of these postings. What is interesting is that that nature of the world since the ‘second phase’ globalization of capitalism has occurred over the last couple of decades that some commentators have picked up on the fact that the conditions of the international labor market now look an awful lot like those at the turn of the last century. In short, a lot of people are going to be presenting their solutions to the crisis and not all of them are in the interest of the international working class. Certainly Professor Judt does not want to see any resurgence of Marxism, having spent the better part of his career expounding on the benefits of the capitalist order against Stalinism. Stay tuned for more on this.
NO FREE SPEECH FOR FASCISTS/KLANSMEN
COMMENTARY
ORGANIZE MASS LABOR ACTIONS AND NIP THIS THREAT IN THE BUD
In a recent blog (dated, September 4, 2006) this writer mentioned that one of the Klan groups in this country held a demonstration at the Gettysburg National Cemetery over the Labor Day, 2006 weekend around a list of demands that included bringing the troops home from Iraq in order to patrol the U.S. borders. Symbols mean a lot in politics and the notion that Klansmen were permitted to demonstrate at a key symbol in the fight to end slavery and preserve the union raised my temperature more than a little. As I said then Gettysburg has been hallowed ground for generations of militants fought and paid for in great struggle and much blood BY Northern troops.
At that time I posed the question of what, if any, opposition to the demonstration leftists had put together to run these hooded fools out of town. In response, I was raked over the coals for calling for an organized fight by labor to nip these elements in the bud. Why? Apparently some people believe that running the fools out of town would have violated the Klan’s free speech rights. Something is desperately misunderstood here about both the nature of free speech and the nature of the Klan/fascist menace.
First, let us be clear, militant leftists defend every democratic right as best we can. I have often argued in this space that to a great extend militant leftists are the only active defenders of such rights- on the streets, where it counts. That said, the parameters of such rights, as all democratic rights, do not trump the needs of the class struggle. In short, militant leftist have no interest in defending or extending the rights of fascists and Klansmen to fill the air with their gibberish. Now that may offend some American Civil Liberties Union-types but any self-respecting militant leftist knows that such a position is right is his or her ‘gut’.
Moreover, let us take stock of what we are dealing with here. With the arrival of the Bush Administration we have heard from the left, especially the less politically sophisticated elements, the word fascist, etc. bandied about as a descriptive term for that crowd. Wrong. Yes, the Bush crowd is an extreme right-wing parliamentary cabal and surely harbors more than a few crypto-fascists in its entourage. However, they operate mainly within the norms of bourgeois democracy. Fascism (and here the Klan represents a home-grown variety of that trend) is based on the extra-parliamentary mobilization of the destroyed and decaying middle class. That seemingly subtle distinction is clear in the United States at this time. Militant leftists, if appropriate, can debate the right-wing parliamentary elements. You fight, to the best of your abilities and resources, the para-military forces as they surface in the streets. Supporting democratic rights for fascists/Klansmen, much less getting on the same debating platform with them, is not only foolhardy but sows dangerous illusions about the nature of their threat. There is nothing to debate.
In the final analysis we will be fighting the Klan-types on the streets and the issue will no be rights of free expression (except, maybe, in defense of ours) but the survival of our organizations. A short glance at history is to the point. One of the great tragedies of the Western labor movement was the defeat and destruction of the German labor movement in the wake of Hitler’s Nazi Party’s rise to power in 1933. That destruction was brought on by the fatally erroneous policies of both the German Social Democratic and its ostrich-like ‘see no evil' policy and that of the Communists parties and its “Third Period” isolationist policy. Thus, neither party fully saw the danger in time and compounded that error when they did see it and yet still refused to call for a united front of all labor organizations to confront and destroy Hitler and his storm troopers. We know the result. And it was not necessary.
Moreover, Hitler’s organization at one time (in the mid-1920’s) was small and unimportant like today’s Klan/Nazi threat. But that does not mean that under certain circumstances that could not change. By 1930 Hitler had 100,000 trained and disciplined storm troopers who were fighting the labor organizations in the streets and in the working class districts. And that, dear readers, is exactly the point of my argument. NO FREE SPEECH FOR FASCISTS/KLANMEN! ORGANIZE LABOR TO CLEAR THE STREETS OF THIS RABBLE WHEN THEY SURFACE! NIP THE KLAN/NAZIS IN THE BUD!
ORGANIZE MASS LABOR ACTIONS AND NIP THIS THREAT IN THE BUD
In a recent blog (dated, September 4, 2006) this writer mentioned that one of the Klan groups in this country held a demonstration at the Gettysburg National Cemetery over the Labor Day, 2006 weekend around a list of demands that included bringing the troops home from Iraq in order to patrol the U.S. borders. Symbols mean a lot in politics and the notion that Klansmen were permitted to demonstrate at a key symbol in the fight to end slavery and preserve the union raised my temperature more than a little. As I said then Gettysburg has been hallowed ground for generations of militants fought and paid for in great struggle and much blood BY Northern troops.
At that time I posed the question of what, if any, opposition to the demonstration leftists had put together to run these hooded fools out of town. In response, I was raked over the coals for calling for an organized fight by labor to nip these elements in the bud. Why? Apparently some people believe that running the fools out of town would have violated the Klan’s free speech rights. Something is desperately misunderstood here about both the nature of free speech and the nature of the Klan/fascist menace.
First, let us be clear, militant leftists defend every democratic right as best we can. I have often argued in this space that to a great extend militant leftists are the only active defenders of such rights- on the streets, where it counts. That said, the parameters of such rights, as all democratic rights, do not trump the needs of the class struggle. In short, militant leftist have no interest in defending or extending the rights of fascists and Klansmen to fill the air with their gibberish. Now that may offend some American Civil Liberties Union-types but any self-respecting militant leftist knows that such a position is right is his or her ‘gut’.
Moreover, let us take stock of what we are dealing with here. With the arrival of the Bush Administration we have heard from the left, especially the less politically sophisticated elements, the word fascist, etc. bandied about as a descriptive term for that crowd. Wrong. Yes, the Bush crowd is an extreme right-wing parliamentary cabal and surely harbors more than a few crypto-fascists in its entourage. However, they operate mainly within the norms of bourgeois democracy. Fascism (and here the Klan represents a home-grown variety of that trend) is based on the extra-parliamentary mobilization of the destroyed and decaying middle class. That seemingly subtle distinction is clear in the United States at this time. Militant leftists, if appropriate, can debate the right-wing parliamentary elements. You fight, to the best of your abilities and resources, the para-military forces as they surface in the streets. Supporting democratic rights for fascists/Klansmen, much less getting on the same debating platform with them, is not only foolhardy but sows dangerous illusions about the nature of their threat. There is nothing to debate.
In the final analysis we will be fighting the Klan-types on the streets and the issue will no be rights of free expression (except, maybe, in defense of ours) but the survival of our organizations. A short glance at history is to the point. One of the great tragedies of the Western labor movement was the defeat and destruction of the German labor movement in the wake of Hitler’s Nazi Party’s rise to power in 1933. That destruction was brought on by the fatally erroneous policies of both the German Social Democratic and its ostrich-like ‘see no evil' policy and that of the Communists parties and its “Third Period” isolationist policy. Thus, neither party fully saw the danger in time and compounded that error when they did see it and yet still refused to call for a united front of all labor organizations to confront and destroy Hitler and his storm troopers. We know the result. And it was not necessary.
Moreover, Hitler’s organization at one time (in the mid-1920’s) was small and unimportant like today’s Klan/Nazi threat. But that does not mean that under certain circumstances that could not change. By 1930 Hitler had 100,000 trained and disciplined storm troopers who were fighting the labor organizations in the streets and in the working class districts. And that, dear readers, is exactly the point of my argument. NO FREE SPEECH FOR FASCISTS/KLANMEN! ORGANIZE LABOR TO CLEAR THE STREETS OF THIS RABBLE WHEN THEY SURFACE! NIP THE KLAN/NAZIS IN THE BUD!
Monday, September 04, 2006
EVERYONE WANTS TO DO SOMETHING WITH THE TROOPS IN IRAQ-EXCEPT IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL
EVERYONE WANTS TO DO SOMETHING WITH THE TROOPS IN IRAQ- EXCEPT IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL.
COMMENTARY
BUSH, AL QAEDA AND THE KLAN HAVE THEIR DREAMS- AND THEY ARE NOT PRETTY
In a recent blog, dated September 3, 2006, this writer jokingly mentioned that the only people in the world who still supported the war in Iraq were in the immediate Bush entourage. Apparently I was not as far from the truth as I thought. The Bush Administration has clearly drawn a line in the sand on Iraq and has adamantly proclaimed that troops will stay in Iraq as long as that administration draws breathe. And Bush means every word of it. So we know exactly what he wants to do with the troops in Iraq. Leave them as hostages to the sectarian civil war there. Much more interesting are a couple of news reports concerning an American Al Qaeda operative and a Klu Klux Klan demonstration at the Gettysburg National Cemetery. Even hard core American right-wingers and Islamic fundamentalists are getting into the anti-Bush act.
On the American Al Qaeda operative. Apparently this Californian trained at an Al Qaeda base prior to 9/11 and then skipped to the Middle East, shortly after those events, with the FBI hot on his trail. Recently he came forward as an English-speaking spokesman (oops, spokesperson) for Al Qaeda’s No.2 man. And here is what his take on the American troops in Iraq is. He has called for the troops to switch sides and support the Al Qaeda cause in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jesus, and all I want to do is withdraw the troops from Iraq. After that, while I do not expect them to turn their swords into plowshares, I sure as hell do not expect them to become cannon fodder for Islamic fundamentalists. Know this- militant leftists have, as a part of their business of changing the world, a fight against religious fundamentalism and that most definitely includes this crowd. It is not always true, and in this case it is definitely not true, that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. We just have to order our priorities- American imperialism is today the main enemy of the peoples of the world. We will deal with the other enemies in due course.
On the Klu Klux Klan demonstration. I do not, as of this moment, know if there was any opposition by militant leftists to the fact that this organization was allowed to demonstrate anywhere, let alone Gettysburg National Cemetery. Gettysburg is hallowed ground for all those who struggled against slavery and the preservation of the union in the American Civil War- the Second American Revolution. That the Klan be permitted anywhere near there is a provocation in itself. In any case, I will deal with the issue of free speech for fascists and Klansmen (oops! Klanspersons) in another blog. What I want to mention here is one of their demands. Their spokesperson called for the troops in Iraq to come home- and patrol the borders (presumably with Mexico) against the so-called immigration menace. What I mentioned above concerning Al Qaeda pertains to this group as well.
The Bush Plan. The Al Qaeda Plan. The Klan Plan. All their dreams are our nightmares. What about the Markin Plan? That’s a simple idea given today’s political conjecture. The only way out is for the troops in Iraq to figure a way out. Use history, particularly the Russian Revolution, as an example. Given the opposing plans presented here I do believe that Markin’s Plan takes the only rationale course. At least this writer’s proposal ultimately gets the troops out of harm’s way. Which is just a shorthand way to say that this writer will, shortly, be sending another open letter to the troops in Iraq (see blog, dated August 24, 2006 for first open letter)- this time with some suggestions for really organizing a troop withdrawal. Enough said.
COMMENTARY
BUSH, AL QAEDA AND THE KLAN HAVE THEIR DREAMS- AND THEY ARE NOT PRETTY
In a recent blog, dated September 3, 2006, this writer jokingly mentioned that the only people in the world who still supported the war in Iraq were in the immediate Bush entourage. Apparently I was not as far from the truth as I thought. The Bush Administration has clearly drawn a line in the sand on Iraq and has adamantly proclaimed that troops will stay in Iraq as long as that administration draws breathe. And Bush means every word of it. So we know exactly what he wants to do with the troops in Iraq. Leave them as hostages to the sectarian civil war there. Much more interesting are a couple of news reports concerning an American Al Qaeda operative and a Klu Klux Klan demonstration at the Gettysburg National Cemetery. Even hard core American right-wingers and Islamic fundamentalists are getting into the anti-Bush act.
On the American Al Qaeda operative. Apparently this Californian trained at an Al Qaeda base prior to 9/11 and then skipped to the Middle East, shortly after those events, with the FBI hot on his trail. Recently he came forward as an English-speaking spokesman (oops, spokesperson) for Al Qaeda’s No.2 man. And here is what his take on the American troops in Iraq is. He has called for the troops to switch sides and support the Al Qaeda cause in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jesus, and all I want to do is withdraw the troops from Iraq. After that, while I do not expect them to turn their swords into plowshares, I sure as hell do not expect them to become cannon fodder for Islamic fundamentalists. Know this- militant leftists have, as a part of their business of changing the world, a fight against religious fundamentalism and that most definitely includes this crowd. It is not always true, and in this case it is definitely not true, that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. We just have to order our priorities- American imperialism is today the main enemy of the peoples of the world. We will deal with the other enemies in due course.
On the Klu Klux Klan demonstration. I do not, as of this moment, know if there was any opposition by militant leftists to the fact that this organization was allowed to demonstrate anywhere, let alone Gettysburg National Cemetery. Gettysburg is hallowed ground for all those who struggled against slavery and the preservation of the union in the American Civil War- the Second American Revolution. That the Klan be permitted anywhere near there is a provocation in itself. In any case, I will deal with the issue of free speech for fascists and Klansmen (oops! Klanspersons) in another blog. What I want to mention here is one of their demands. Their spokesperson called for the troops in Iraq to come home- and patrol the borders (presumably with Mexico) against the so-called immigration menace. What I mentioned above concerning Al Qaeda pertains to this group as well.
The Bush Plan. The Al Qaeda Plan. The Klan Plan. All their dreams are our nightmares. What about the Markin Plan? That’s a simple idea given today’s political conjecture. The only way out is for the troops in Iraq to figure a way out. Use history, particularly the Russian Revolution, as an example. Given the opposing plans presented here I do believe that Markin’s Plan takes the only rationale course. At least this writer’s proposal ultimately gets the troops out of harm’s way. Which is just a shorthand way to say that this writer will, shortly, be sending another open letter to the troops in Iraq (see blog, dated August 24, 2006 for first open letter)- this time with some suggestions for really organizing a troop withdrawal. Enough said.
VOTE NO ON THE ABORTION REFERENDUM-HR 1215-IN SOUTH DAKOTA ON NOV.7TH
COMMENTARY
VOTE NO ON THIS DIRECT CHALLENGE TO ROE vs. WADE
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY
NOVEMBER UPDATE: Well, the results are in and the good citizens of South Dakota have defeated HR 1215 by a fair margin. This is a small but important victory against the onslaught of the so-called 'right to life' forces. The results, at least temporarily, cuts those forces off the direct path to the United States Supreme Court that the authors of the legislation intended by its draconian provisions. However, be vigilant as these small victories are always subject to challenge in some other forum by the right-wing forces. The states are apparently still the battlegrounds for the fight to further restrict access to abortion-which means in practice poor and young women will find abortion harder to come by. Government out of the bedrooms! Defend the right to privacy! Forward to Women's Liberation.
ORIGINAL POST
This writer has spilled no little ink castigating the judicial decisions of the Neanderthals who pose as justices on the United States Supreme Court. And rightly so. And I am sure that I will have plenty of occasions to do so again. But some times these guys (and I do mean guys because at the time, in 1973, the court consisted of all men) get it at least partially right. That decision was Roe v. Wade which for all intents and purposes declared that a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion (or not) fell within her right to privacy and thus was constitutional protected against the snooping of the state. As far as that decision went in the direction of increased, if partial and reversible, democratic rights militant leftists supported the decision. And defend it today. Moreover, today we face yet another, apparently frontal, challenge to the decision this time in South Dakota. We are duty-bound to try to beat this one back as well.
Since 1973 later Supreme Court memberships have attempted to nullify abortion rights by making the scope of Roe v. Wade much more restrictive than the original court decision, generally under some compelling state interest rationale in creating more restrictive procedures. State legislatures have also contributed their ‘wisdom’ by narrowing its scope and making the procedures, especially for the most vulnerable- teenage girls and poor women, as hard and impractical as possible. To add fuel to the fire various so-called “right-to-life” groups have, at times, spent much time and effort in intimidating women at abortion clinics.
Now the South Dakota legislature has passed a law which has all the hallmarks of an openly declared war cry in order to get this issue before the Supremes again. The legislation, HR 1215, is intentionally so restrictive of the conditions under which an abortion would be legally permitted as to totally negate the right. The only stated condition that would make an abortion legal in South Dakota is if the mother’s life was in danger. Not even rape or incest cases would qualify. Thanks a lot. Christ, where the hell do these people who make such proposals come from. However, the legislation is up for a vote by the citizens of South Dakota on November 7th. This bill must be voted down.
Militant leftists must remember, or be made aware, that the political environment in 1973 when Roe. v. Wade was officially decided was a time of social protest and the awakening of the women’s liberation movement. Such protest has quite a lot to do with how the decision came down and that it was decided at all. There is a lesson for us here. The long and short of it is that every democratic gain must be defended strongly against the inevitable war to chip away those rights. A women’s right to choose falls in that category. But it is not enough to merely defend that right. To make the right real we need to insure those poor women, teenagers and others who do not have easy access to abortion clinics have that access as part of free, yes free, universal quality health care. This fact starkly comes home in the case of South Dakota where, according to news reports, there is only one abortion clinic in the whole state. Thus, the beginning of wisdom on this issue is that we need to fight to implement the socialist program. But until that time- DEFEND ABORTION RIGHTS. NO ON HR 1215. FREE ABORTION ON DEMAND. FREE QUALITY UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE FOR ALL.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES OF COMMENTARY ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
VOTE NO ON THIS DIRECT CHALLENGE TO ROE vs. WADE
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY
NOVEMBER UPDATE: Well, the results are in and the good citizens of South Dakota have defeated HR 1215 by a fair margin. This is a small but important victory against the onslaught of the so-called 'right to life' forces. The results, at least temporarily, cuts those forces off the direct path to the United States Supreme Court that the authors of the legislation intended by its draconian provisions. However, be vigilant as these small victories are always subject to challenge in some other forum by the right-wing forces. The states are apparently still the battlegrounds for the fight to further restrict access to abortion-which means in practice poor and young women will find abortion harder to come by. Government out of the bedrooms! Defend the right to privacy! Forward to Women's Liberation.
ORIGINAL POST
This writer has spilled no little ink castigating the judicial decisions of the Neanderthals who pose as justices on the United States Supreme Court. And rightly so. And I am sure that I will have plenty of occasions to do so again. But some times these guys (and I do mean guys because at the time, in 1973, the court consisted of all men) get it at least partially right. That decision was Roe v. Wade which for all intents and purposes declared that a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion (or not) fell within her right to privacy and thus was constitutional protected against the snooping of the state. As far as that decision went in the direction of increased, if partial and reversible, democratic rights militant leftists supported the decision. And defend it today. Moreover, today we face yet another, apparently frontal, challenge to the decision this time in South Dakota. We are duty-bound to try to beat this one back as well.
Since 1973 later Supreme Court memberships have attempted to nullify abortion rights by making the scope of Roe v. Wade much more restrictive than the original court decision, generally under some compelling state interest rationale in creating more restrictive procedures. State legislatures have also contributed their ‘wisdom’ by narrowing its scope and making the procedures, especially for the most vulnerable- teenage girls and poor women, as hard and impractical as possible. To add fuel to the fire various so-called “right-to-life” groups have, at times, spent much time and effort in intimidating women at abortion clinics.
Now the South Dakota legislature has passed a law which has all the hallmarks of an openly declared war cry in order to get this issue before the Supremes again. The legislation, HR 1215, is intentionally so restrictive of the conditions under which an abortion would be legally permitted as to totally negate the right. The only stated condition that would make an abortion legal in South Dakota is if the mother’s life was in danger. Not even rape or incest cases would qualify. Thanks a lot. Christ, where the hell do these people who make such proposals come from. However, the legislation is up for a vote by the citizens of South Dakota on November 7th. This bill must be voted down.
Militant leftists must remember, or be made aware, that the political environment in 1973 when Roe. v. Wade was officially decided was a time of social protest and the awakening of the women’s liberation movement. Such protest has quite a lot to do with how the decision came down and that it was decided at all. There is a lesson for us here. The long and short of it is that every democratic gain must be defended strongly against the inevitable war to chip away those rights. A women’s right to choose falls in that category. But it is not enough to merely defend that right. To make the right real we need to insure those poor women, teenagers and others who do not have easy access to abortion clinics have that access as part of free, yes free, universal quality health care. This fact starkly comes home in the case of South Dakota where, according to news reports, there is only one abortion clinic in the whole state. Thus, the beginning of wisdom on this issue is that we need to fight to implement the socialist program. But until that time- DEFEND ABORTION RIGHTS. NO ON HR 1215. FREE ABORTION ON DEMAND. FREE QUALITY UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE FOR ALL.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES OF COMMENTARY ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
*Labor's Untold Story- The 19th Century Labor-Farmer Alliances
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for Farmers' Alliances and link from there.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Sunday, September 03, 2006
*Labor's Untold Story- Honor The Labor Organizer And Women's Rights Fighter Lucy Parsons
Click on title to link to The Lucy Parsons Project.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
*Labor's Untold Story- Honor The Haymarket Martyr Labor Organizer Albert Parsons
Click on title to link to the "Autobiography of Haymarket Martyr and labor leader Albert Parsons. This hardly the last you will hear about this man in this on-going labor series.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
MARRIAGE IS APPARENTLY NOT FOR THE FAINT-HEARTED
COMMENTARY
NOTES ON THE RECENT NEW YORK AND WASHINGTON STATE SAME-SEX MARRIAGE DECISIONS
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
UPDATED: NOVEMBER 24, 2006
As noted in the commentary below the thrust of the fight on the issue of same-sex marriage has returned to the states with a vengeance. Since the original blog the midterm 2006 elections have produces seven more states that have passed resolutions or state constitutional amendments defining marriage in the old fashion way-one man, one woman. Arizona is the only state that bucked the trend. Also since the summer the New Jersey Supreme Court has held that same-sex marriage does not violate the state constitution. However, unlike Massachusetts the justices left it up to the state legislative to run with the issue. The struggle continues but remember- Government out of the bedrooms!
Originally posted: August 2006
Earlier this year, when the United States Senate was discussing and voting on a proposal to make the prohibition against same-sex marriage a constitutional amendment this writer pointed out that with the defeat of that measure in the United States Senate the battle ground would again shift to the states and particularly to the judiciary. (see blog, dated June 7, 2006). The states have been the battleground for quite some time. Numerous states have overwhelmingly approved various state constitutional amendments, statutes, etc. banning same-sex marriage. This summer the highest courts of New York and Washington states have rendered decisions along that same line. What is striking is the legal reasoning used to justify the majority decisions in these cases. One would think these cases were about prohibitions against indentured servitude rather than marriage. Here’s why.
One would have thought that in this day in age the act of marriage, at its core, represents nothing more than the act of registering the fact two people decided to legally fortify their relationship. Apparently this writer is way off base in that assumption. According to the legal reasoning put forward by the majorities in the aforementioned states procreation is a fundamental state interest. Fair enough. However, to those majorities the point of marriage, the fundamental point, is to ensure that procreation is protected within that act. Odd, odd indeed. While it would be easy to punch a hole (or rather about 10,000 holes) in that reasoning I will let it go. Let me say this- by the courts’ reasoning whole categories, way beyond the targeted same-sex couples, would be affected if their reasoning is followed through to the end. A rule of thumb in judicial- decision making is to tailor the decision as narrowly as possible while addressing the facts of the case. It takes an active act of judicial malice to take a swipe at most of society in order to get to your sacrificial lambs. Nice going Washington and New York Supremes.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
NOTES ON THE RECENT NEW YORK AND WASHINGTON STATE SAME-SEX MARRIAGE DECISIONS
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
UPDATED: NOVEMBER 24, 2006
As noted in the commentary below the thrust of the fight on the issue of same-sex marriage has returned to the states with a vengeance. Since the original blog the midterm 2006 elections have produces seven more states that have passed resolutions or state constitutional amendments defining marriage in the old fashion way-one man, one woman. Arizona is the only state that bucked the trend. Also since the summer the New Jersey Supreme Court has held that same-sex marriage does not violate the state constitution. However, unlike Massachusetts the justices left it up to the state legislative to run with the issue. The struggle continues but remember- Government out of the bedrooms!
Originally posted: August 2006
Earlier this year, when the United States Senate was discussing and voting on a proposal to make the prohibition against same-sex marriage a constitutional amendment this writer pointed out that with the defeat of that measure in the United States Senate the battle ground would again shift to the states and particularly to the judiciary. (see blog, dated June 7, 2006). The states have been the battleground for quite some time. Numerous states have overwhelmingly approved various state constitutional amendments, statutes, etc. banning same-sex marriage. This summer the highest courts of New York and Washington states have rendered decisions along that same line. What is striking is the legal reasoning used to justify the majority decisions in these cases. One would think these cases were about prohibitions against indentured servitude rather than marriage. Here’s why.
One would have thought that in this day in age the act of marriage, at its core, represents nothing more than the act of registering the fact two people decided to legally fortify their relationship. Apparently this writer is way off base in that assumption. According to the legal reasoning put forward by the majorities in the aforementioned states procreation is a fundamental state interest. Fair enough. However, to those majorities the point of marriage, the fundamental point, is to ensure that procreation is protected within that act. Odd, odd indeed. While it would be easy to punch a hole (or rather about 10,000 holes) in that reasoning I will let it go. Let me say this- by the courts’ reasoning whole categories, way beyond the targeted same-sex couples, would be affected if their reasoning is followed through to the end. A rule of thumb in judicial- decision making is to tailor the decision as narrowly as possible while addressing the facts of the case. It takes an active act of judicial malice to take a swipe at most of society in order to get to your sacrificial lambs. Nice going Washington and New York Supremes.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
THE (IL)LOGIC OF THE NATION-STATE
COMMENTARY
‘GLOBALIZATION’ THEORY TAKES A BEATING
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
The recent events in the Middle East and elsewhere have highlighted the irrational nature of trying to confine economic, social and political developments to the nation-state system in the age of imperialism. Every conflict from the sectarian civil war in Iraq to the Israeli- Lebanese border war to the Israeli-Palestinian struggle cries out for a socialist solution. That is a fight to the finish, not between ethnically divided populations, but a working class based solution. Today’s political configurations, including the prevalent of religious fundamentalism on all sides in every struggle, make that proposition seem utopian at best and irrelevant at worst. This writer will concede that it is entirely possible that just solutions to these conflicts may proved ultimately intractable nevertheless it is equally obvious that the capitalist nation-state system provides no way out of this dilemma. Sometimes one must fight for what is necessary as well as what is right.
Ironically, Marxists have historically had mixed feelings about the role of the nation-state in history. In the age of the rise of capitalist development at a time when the capitalist system as a whole was a truly progressive historical development, that is until about World War I, Marxists welcomed the formation of nation-states against the particularist , provincial nature of the feudal system. Since World War I, that is since the rise of the full blown imperialist age, Marxist have generally opposed the nation-state in the metropolitan areas. Nevertheless, even today Marxists extend support to national liberation struggles and defend the right to national self-determination for oppressed and neo-colonial peoples. The right to national self-determination has been an integral of the revolutionary program since the early days of the Communist International. The support for struggle of the Palestinian peoples for their own, even if truncated, state falls under that premise. Why? To take the national question off the agenda and place the class question to the fore.
While this little note makes no pretense to do anything but pose the question, to be taken up in future blogs, of the strategies necessary to replace the nation-state with other forms of political organization it does take issue with the notion, currently fashionable, that the process of ‘globalization’ will solve the problems of the nation-state by making borders irrelevant. Well, this writer for one would be more than happy if that were to be the case. However, who is the utopian here? If anything the process of globalization-let us call it by its right name, the international capitalist system- has intensified the tensions in the nation-state system. This ‘globalization’, by the way did not start recently. The whole development of the capitalist system from its progressive beginnings to its imperialist decay has been the struggle to internationalize the market. In short, the capitalists have had their chance - it is time to move on over and let others solve the question of international economic, social and political development. More, much more, later.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
‘GLOBALIZATION’ THEORY TAKES A BEATING
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
The recent events in the Middle East and elsewhere have highlighted the irrational nature of trying to confine economic, social and political developments to the nation-state system in the age of imperialism. Every conflict from the sectarian civil war in Iraq to the Israeli- Lebanese border war to the Israeli-Palestinian struggle cries out for a socialist solution. That is a fight to the finish, not between ethnically divided populations, but a working class based solution. Today’s political configurations, including the prevalent of religious fundamentalism on all sides in every struggle, make that proposition seem utopian at best and irrelevant at worst. This writer will concede that it is entirely possible that just solutions to these conflicts may proved ultimately intractable nevertheless it is equally obvious that the capitalist nation-state system provides no way out of this dilemma. Sometimes one must fight for what is necessary as well as what is right.
Ironically, Marxists have historically had mixed feelings about the role of the nation-state in history. In the age of the rise of capitalist development at a time when the capitalist system as a whole was a truly progressive historical development, that is until about World War I, Marxists welcomed the formation of nation-states against the particularist , provincial nature of the feudal system. Since World War I, that is since the rise of the full blown imperialist age, Marxist have generally opposed the nation-state in the metropolitan areas. Nevertheless, even today Marxists extend support to national liberation struggles and defend the right to national self-determination for oppressed and neo-colonial peoples. The right to national self-determination has been an integral of the revolutionary program since the early days of the Communist International. The support for struggle of the Palestinian peoples for their own, even if truncated, state falls under that premise. Why? To take the national question off the agenda and place the class question to the fore.
While this little note makes no pretense to do anything but pose the question, to be taken up in future blogs, of the strategies necessary to replace the nation-state with other forms of political organization it does take issue with the notion, currently fashionable, that the process of ‘globalization’ will solve the problems of the nation-state by making borders irrelevant. Well, this writer for one would be more than happy if that were to be the case. However, who is the utopian here? If anything the process of globalization-let us call it by its right name, the international capitalist system- has intensified the tensions in the nation-state system. This ‘globalization’, by the way did not start recently. The whole development of the capitalist system from its progressive beginnings to its imperialist decay has been the struggle to internationalize the market. In short, the capitalists have had their chance - it is time to move on over and let others solve the question of international economic, social and political development. More, much more, later.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
INHERIT THE WIND?
INHERIT THE WIND?
COMMENTARY
OF INHERITANCES AND MINIMUM WAGES
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
In the press of other commentaries this writer has had to delay commenting on proposed legislation this summer by Congress concerning the obviously connected issues of the abolition (or severe reduction) of the federal inheritance tax and the marginal increment of the federal minimum wage standard (see blog, dated July 5, 2006 concerning the minimum wage proposal). Obvious, you ask? Yes, those few thousand heirs who are trying to stampede Congress to protect their billions (and have spent many millions to get their way) and those millions fighting to make minimum wages (even at a lousy $7/hr) and thus avoid leaving their heirs to inherit the wind is compelling. Agreed?
At least that connection is compelling interest group politics in the demented minds of the Republican congressional leadership which parleyed these two items together in an effort to embarrass (if that is possible) the Democrats. How? By forcing an up or down vote on the counterposed issues and thus forcing the Democrats to vote against the federal minimum wage proposal. The Democrats initially, with a view to the fall congressional elections, supported an increase in the minimum wage in order to grandstand to a part of their constituency. As if any self-respecting person could, with a straight face, support much less propose a $7 minimum wage in this day in age (see below). Democratic politicians not having to personally live on the minimum wage apparently have weird senses of humor. The Republicans, responding to their very different base, faced no such embarrassment. Their proposal to severely cap, if not eliminate, the inheritance tax for millionaires and billionaires set just the right tone. And avoided an increase in the minimum wage, which they did not want, to boot. My hat is off to the Republican leadership for joining the two issues together. Just when this writer thought that parliamentary cretinism had reached a bottom line beyond which no rational politics could go he finds out that there is an abyss instead. Well you live and learn.
In an earlier blog, cited in the first paragraph, I counterposed to the minimum wage the fight for a living wage. I stand by that idea here. What one may ask is a living wage? Well, for openers the current median household income. That is somewhere near $50,000/yr. Do the math on the proposed federal minimum wage of $7/hr. Anyway one cuts it the total is about $15,000/yr. That, these days, just barely covers a family’s energy, housing and food costs. Get real. It is embarrassing to this writer to have to discuss the concerns of a small part of society which is worried (and seriously worried) about inheritance taxes when several million people have to get by on that $15,000/yr. Hell, I couldn’t. Can anyone else? Something is desperately wrong with this society’s priorities.
Do not get me wrong about the inheritance tax issue. In the final analysis a workers government will not simply confine itself to taxing the rich but will confiscate their inheritances as part of the social redistribution process. And not shed a single tear about it. The rich can work just like the rest of us, at first for their daily needs and by those deeds promote the good of society. However, that is music for the future. The point now is that the current inheritance tax does not hurt the people we care about-working people. The point at which the tax sets in is far, far above anything a worker’s estate would trigger. In short, the fight over this tax, one way or the other, is not central to our fight for a more just society.
Beyond that, various schemes to tax the rich which periodically spring up on the part of leftists as a means of the redistribution of the social surplus are generally put forth in order to deflect the need for class struggle. Needless to say to really put a crimp in the lifestyles of the “rich and famous” working people need to take state power. We need that solution in order to do more than inherit the wind. Forward.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
FOR MORE POLITICAL COMMENTARY AND BOOKS REVIEWS CHECK MY BLOG AT- Http://markinbookreview.blogspot.com/
COMMENTARY
OF INHERITANCES AND MINIMUM WAGES
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
In the press of other commentaries this writer has had to delay commenting on proposed legislation this summer by Congress concerning the obviously connected issues of the abolition (or severe reduction) of the federal inheritance tax and the marginal increment of the federal minimum wage standard (see blog, dated July 5, 2006 concerning the minimum wage proposal). Obvious, you ask? Yes, those few thousand heirs who are trying to stampede Congress to protect their billions (and have spent many millions to get their way) and those millions fighting to make minimum wages (even at a lousy $7/hr) and thus avoid leaving their heirs to inherit the wind is compelling. Agreed?
At least that connection is compelling interest group politics in the demented minds of the Republican congressional leadership which parleyed these two items together in an effort to embarrass (if that is possible) the Democrats. How? By forcing an up or down vote on the counterposed issues and thus forcing the Democrats to vote against the federal minimum wage proposal. The Democrats initially, with a view to the fall congressional elections, supported an increase in the minimum wage in order to grandstand to a part of their constituency. As if any self-respecting person could, with a straight face, support much less propose a $7 minimum wage in this day in age (see below). Democratic politicians not having to personally live on the minimum wage apparently have weird senses of humor. The Republicans, responding to their very different base, faced no such embarrassment. Their proposal to severely cap, if not eliminate, the inheritance tax for millionaires and billionaires set just the right tone. And avoided an increase in the minimum wage, which they did not want, to boot. My hat is off to the Republican leadership for joining the two issues together. Just when this writer thought that parliamentary cretinism had reached a bottom line beyond which no rational politics could go he finds out that there is an abyss instead. Well you live and learn.
In an earlier blog, cited in the first paragraph, I counterposed to the minimum wage the fight for a living wage. I stand by that idea here. What one may ask is a living wage? Well, for openers the current median household income. That is somewhere near $50,000/yr. Do the math on the proposed federal minimum wage of $7/hr. Anyway one cuts it the total is about $15,000/yr. That, these days, just barely covers a family’s energy, housing and food costs. Get real. It is embarrassing to this writer to have to discuss the concerns of a small part of society which is worried (and seriously worried) about inheritance taxes when several million people have to get by on that $15,000/yr. Hell, I couldn’t. Can anyone else? Something is desperately wrong with this society’s priorities.
Do not get me wrong about the inheritance tax issue. In the final analysis a workers government will not simply confine itself to taxing the rich but will confiscate their inheritances as part of the social redistribution process. And not shed a single tear about it. The rich can work just like the rest of us, at first for their daily needs and by those deeds promote the good of society. However, that is music for the future. The point now is that the current inheritance tax does not hurt the people we care about-working people. The point at which the tax sets in is far, far above anything a worker’s estate would trigger. In short, the fight over this tax, one way or the other, is not central to our fight for a more just society.
Beyond that, various schemes to tax the rich which periodically spring up on the part of leftists as a means of the redistribution of the social surplus are generally put forth in order to deflect the need for class struggle. Needless to say to really put a crimp in the lifestyles of the “rich and famous” working people need to take state power. We need that solution in order to do more than inherit the wind. Forward.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
FOR MORE POLITICAL COMMENTARY AND BOOKS REVIEWS CHECK MY BLOG AT- Http://markinbookreview.blogspot.com/
WHAT ABOUT THE TROOP DRAW DOWN IN IRAQ?
EVERYONE WANTS TO DO SOMETHING WITH THE TROOPS IN IRAQ- EXCEPT IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL.
COMMENTARY
BUSH, AL QAEDA AND THE KLAN HAVE THEIR DREAMS- AND THEY ARE NOT PRETTY
In a recent blog, dated September 3, 2006, this writer jokingly mentioned that the only people in the world who still supported the war in Iraq were in the immediate Bush entourage. Apparently I was as not as far from the truth as I thought. The Bush Administration has clearly drawn a line in the sand on Iraq and has adamantly proclaimed that troops will stay in Iraq as long as that administration draws breathe. And Bush means every word of it. So we know exactly what he wants to do with the troops in Iraq. Leave them as hostages to the sectarian civil war there. Much more interesting are a couple of news reports concerning an American Al Qaeda operative and a Klu Klux Klan demonstration at the Gettysburg National Cemetery. Even hard core American right-wingers and Islamic fundamentalists are getting into the anti-Bush act.
On the American Al Qaeda operative. Apparently this Californian trained at an Al Qaeda base prior to 9/11 and then skipped to the Middle East shortly after those events with the FBI hot on his trail. Recently he came forward as an English-speaking spokesman (oops, spokesperson) for Al Qaeda’s No.2 man. And here is what his take on the American troops in Iraq is. He has called for the troops to switch sides and support the Al Qaeda cause in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jesus, and all I want to do is withdraw the troops from Iraq. After that, while I do not expect them to turn their swords into plowshares, I sure as hell do not expect them to become cannon fodder for Islamic fundamentalists. Know this- militant leftists have, as a part of their business of changing the world, a fight against religious fundamentalism and that most definitely includes this crowd. It is not always true, and in this case it is definitely not true, that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. We just have to order our priorities- American imperialism is today the main enemy of the peoples of the world. We will deal with the other enemies in due course.
On the Klu Klux Klan demonstration. I do not, as of this moment, know if there was any opposition by militant leftists to the fact that this organization was allowed to demonstrate anywhere, let alone Gettysburg National Cemetery. Gettysburg is hallowed ground for all those who struggled against slavery and the preservation of the union in the American Civil War- the Second American Revolution. That the Klan be permitted anywhere near there is a provocation in itself. In any case, I will deal with the issue of free speech for fascists and Klansmen (oops! Klanspersons) in another blog. What I want to mention here is one of their demands. Their spokesperson called for the troops in Iraq to come home and patrol the borders (presumably with Mexico) against the so-called immigration menace. What I mentioned above concerning Al Qaeda pertains to this group as well.
The Bush Plan. The Al Qaeda Plan. The Klan Plan. All their dreams are our nightmares. What about the Markin Plan? That’s a simple idea given today’s political conjecture. The only way out is for the troops in Iraq to figure a way out. Use history, particularly the Russian Revolution, as an example. Given the opposing plans presented here I do believe that Markin’s Plan takes the only rationale course. At least this writer’s proposal ultimately gets the troops out of harm’s way. Which is just a shorthand way to say that this writer will, shortly, be sending another open letter to the troops in Iraq (see blog, dated August 24, 2006 for first open letter)- this time with some suggestions for really organizing a troop withdrawal. Enough said.
COMMENTARY
BUSH, AL QAEDA AND THE KLAN HAVE THEIR DREAMS- AND THEY ARE NOT PRETTY
In a recent blog, dated September 3, 2006, this writer jokingly mentioned that the only people in the world who still supported the war in Iraq were in the immediate Bush entourage. Apparently I was as not as far from the truth as I thought. The Bush Administration has clearly drawn a line in the sand on Iraq and has adamantly proclaimed that troops will stay in Iraq as long as that administration draws breathe. And Bush means every word of it. So we know exactly what he wants to do with the troops in Iraq. Leave them as hostages to the sectarian civil war there. Much more interesting are a couple of news reports concerning an American Al Qaeda operative and a Klu Klux Klan demonstration at the Gettysburg National Cemetery. Even hard core American right-wingers and Islamic fundamentalists are getting into the anti-Bush act.
On the American Al Qaeda operative. Apparently this Californian trained at an Al Qaeda base prior to 9/11 and then skipped to the Middle East shortly after those events with the FBI hot on his trail. Recently he came forward as an English-speaking spokesman (oops, spokesperson) for Al Qaeda’s No.2 man. And here is what his take on the American troops in Iraq is. He has called for the troops to switch sides and support the Al Qaeda cause in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jesus, and all I want to do is withdraw the troops from Iraq. After that, while I do not expect them to turn their swords into plowshares, I sure as hell do not expect them to become cannon fodder for Islamic fundamentalists. Know this- militant leftists have, as a part of their business of changing the world, a fight against religious fundamentalism and that most definitely includes this crowd. It is not always true, and in this case it is definitely not true, that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. We just have to order our priorities- American imperialism is today the main enemy of the peoples of the world. We will deal with the other enemies in due course.
On the Klu Klux Klan demonstration. I do not, as of this moment, know if there was any opposition by militant leftists to the fact that this organization was allowed to demonstrate anywhere, let alone Gettysburg National Cemetery. Gettysburg is hallowed ground for all those who struggled against slavery and the preservation of the union in the American Civil War- the Second American Revolution. That the Klan be permitted anywhere near there is a provocation in itself. In any case, I will deal with the issue of free speech for fascists and Klansmen (oops! Klanspersons) in another blog. What I want to mention here is one of their demands. Their spokesperson called for the troops in Iraq to come home and patrol the borders (presumably with Mexico) against the so-called immigration menace. What I mentioned above concerning Al Qaeda pertains to this group as well.
The Bush Plan. The Al Qaeda Plan. The Klan Plan. All their dreams are our nightmares. What about the Markin Plan? That’s a simple idea given today’s political conjecture. The only way out is for the troops in Iraq to figure a way out. Use history, particularly the Russian Revolution, as an example. Given the opposing plans presented here I do believe that Markin’s Plan takes the only rationale course. At least this writer’s proposal ultimately gets the troops out of harm’s way. Which is just a shorthand way to say that this writer will, shortly, be sending another open letter to the troops in Iraq (see blog, dated August 24, 2006 for first open letter)- this time with some suggestions for really organizing a troop withdrawal. Enough said.
Saturday, September 02, 2006
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-British Miners Fight for All the Oppressed
Click on the headline to link to a"LibCom" website entry for the British miners' strike of 1984-85. This link is provided to give some "color" to the story at the local level from a different political prospective from mine.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1985 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.
**********
British Miners Fight for All the Oppressed
The British coal miners' strike now in its eleventh month is a crucial class battle whose outcome will shape the social and political climate of the country for years to come. Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is seeking with unrestrained savagery to bludgeon and starve the miners into submission. If the miners lose, they and the whole British working class will be dealt with in the same spirit of limitless vindictiveness that Thatcher unleashed on the helpless young Argentine sailors of the Belgrano during the Falklands/Malvinas war. Thatcher personally supervised this gratuitous war crime when the ship, miles from the war zone, was dispatched to the bottom of the icy Atlantic.
But the British miners do not intend to lose. Standing alone thanks to the treachery of the Labour Party/ Trades Union Congress tops, they have held out against everything that bloody Thatcher and her cops could throw against them. They have endured thousands of arrests and countless injuries and they are still fighting. And their courageous defiance of the vicious "Iron Lady" has won to their side the most oppressed layers of
British society. The heat of sharp class struggle has tended to forge a spirit of solidarity between the miners and oppressed sectors such as blacks, Asians and Irish.
This political point was emphasized by comrade Eibhlin McDonald, a leader of the Spartacist League of Britain, during her recent visit to the U.S. We reprint below comrade Eibhlin's remarks at a public Spartacist forum in New York last November 16 (originally published in Workers Vanguard No. 367,23 November 1984) and her speech to a national internal meeting of the Spartacus Youth League (WV No. 368, 7 December 1984).
Women have played an active role in the miners' strike. Although women do not work in the British mines, being barred by law from doing so since 1942, the miners' wives have taken their place alongside their men. And they have made their presence felt since the beginning. When one week into the strike Thatcher deployed 10,000 cops in a martial law operation, Kent women beat back a police blockade at the Dartford Tunnel aimed at sealing the Kent strikers off, and went on through to join a demonstration in Leicestershire. In addition to organizing collections of food and money for the strikers' families, the women have been active strike militants. Their participation on picket lines has been especially important given the awesome scope of police attacks, where sometimes hundreds of miners are arrested in a single swoop. When 20,000 coal field women and supporters marched through London last August 11, one prominent slogan was "No surrender!" Here in the United States, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee have been campaigning to win political support among American unionists for the embattled British miners, and to raise desperately needed funds for the miners and their families. As of February 16, a total of $16,905.63 had been raised. W&R appeals to our readers to generously support this effort. Please make checks payable to: Aid to Striking British Miners'Families; mail to: Partisan Defense Committee, Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013.
I'm a member of the British section of the Spartacist tendency, and I'd like to take a few moments to describe to people particularly the British miners' strike which has been going on now for about nine months, I believe. In fact, we had a demonstration recently in London organized by the Spartacist League on the question of South Africa, where a number of miners attended. And we raised the slogan, "African Gold Miners, British Coal Miners— Same Enemy, Same Fight, Workers of the World Unite!" [Applause.] And this slogan had a really powerful resonance—one which is very deeply felt in Britain, primarily as a result of the experience of these miners after nine months on strike. Because you have to understand, two miners have been killed on picket lines; several others have died on the way to picket lines; and most recently people have been killed trying to salvage coal from rubbish tips in order to heat their homes. If you imagine what it's like to have been without money for your family for nine months—no money for food, they have no heating, t nothing like that.
However, they're pretty solid. They're not going back. Because they know that to go back means 20,000 jobs will be lost, and whole communities will be devastated. And, in fact, several thousand of them have been arrested, just simply for picketing. Thatcher has learned a few lessons from Botha's South Africa. They've recently adopted the tactic, instead of throwing people in prison—you obviously can't throw eight, nine, ten thousand miners in prison, because the prisons will overflow—so what they've started to do is to deport them within the country. People are sent off from English coal mines to the north of Scotland, and are not allowed to return home until after the strike.
So there was a certain identification with some of the stuff that was described recently in South Africa among the British miners. There is, of course, a scabbing operation, pretty well funded, we believe probably by the Vatican. Although if you listen to the news reports, then you could very easily be misled. Because as one miner told us recently in one of our meetings— according to the news reports there are now 3,500 scabs in his pit, which he finds very hard to believe, since only 500 people work there [laughter].
Now, there are two things that I want to draw out from the British miners' strike. One is that such a hard-fought class battle against the Thatcher government has inspired whole sections of the population in support for the miners. It's particularly noticeable among the black and Asian community. Something that is very new in Britain—you have a situation where miners, when they come into the city of London from their areas in order to collect money, of course the cops hound them throughout London, and arrest them for trying to collect money and so forth. They go along to a pub in the black ghetto, and the cops come into the pub— "Where are these miners?"—they want to arrest them. But the word had gone out that the cops were arriving, so of course the local people had hidden them. You know: "What miners? There are no miners here." Now, this kind of thing never would have happened before, because capitalism fosters those kind of divisions, and given that the miners union is predominantly white, this solidarity is a direct result of the struggle against Thatcher.
Another aspect of it is that women, mainly miners' wives and families, who'd come from pretty isolated communities, have in fact become political and taken on a leadership role in the strike and have organized themselves into strike committees.
And the other thing that I want to draw out of it is on the Russian question. It comes up most concretely and revolves around the question of Polish Solidarnosc', in Britain, and it's very sharply felt. Because the background to this miners' strike was in fact—the leader of the British miners, Arthur Scargill, happened to mention before a trade-union conference a year ago that Solidarnosc' was an anti-socialist organization. For this he was witchhunted and hounded by not only the capitalist class, the Tory party and so forth, but by a whole section of the trade-union leadership. And it has now become very clear, the people who were most outraged by Scargill's statement are today urging their union members to cross miners' picket lines quite openly. The leader of the Solidarnosc' movement in Poland has sent a message of solidarity... to the scabs. And so Solidarnosc is hated and despised, not just among the British miners, but among whole sections of the population. Which is actually quite a good thing, because it doesn't bode well for Thatcher's war preparations against the Soviet Union.
They do the same kind of thing there. Talking about the "evil empire" in Russia. Except that in Britain a lot of the population now doesn't believe it, because they have seen miners go off to the Soviet Union and have very nice holidays on the Black Sea, you know, for their families and so forth. And they see this on television, and say, well, this is "totalitarian Russia"...it really doesn't look so bad looking at it from Britain [laughter].
Now, just in conclusion. One of the things that is patently obviously missing from the situation is a revolutionary party with a policy directed to the overthrow of capitalism. Because in order to cohere together the struggle, particularly in a situation where old frameworks are breaking down within the country, to cohere and direct that struggle requires a program for the overthrow of capitalism. And that's what the existing trade-union leadership and the Labour Party in Britain doesn't have. For example, twice in the course of the miners' strike, the dockers were out on strike, and were sent back, having gained absolutely nothing. Because these leaders understand that in order to go all out and do what is necessary in order to win the strike, you must be prepared to at least play around with the question of power. And that's what they're not prepared to do.
That in a nutshell is the strategy and program that the Spartacist League has been fighting for there. Because simply in order to win this strike, it's necessary to spread it to other sections of the working class. We hope as the outcome of that kind of successful class battle that you will have the basis for building a revolutionary party. Because in Britain, in South Africa, in fact in the U.S., you can have very hard-fought class battles which may lose or in fact may be frittered away, if you're not prepared to go all the way and address the question of power, for the working class in power, like they did in Russia in 1917.
The Red Avengers [see article, page 24] is kind of a hard act to follow, but let me make one point that one comrade made in the forum in Toronto the other night: the British miners would really love the Red Avengers.
What I want to try to do is give you a flavor of the political situation in Britain, because it really is in marked contrast with Reagan's America right now. But there's something that I would like to underline, which is that the Thatcher government is in the second term of office and went in with a pretty big majority in the election in 1983, not quite as big as Reagan's. The first real opposition they ran into came from the British miners. And it's important to have the understanding and the hope that Reagan will run into the same kind of trouble, because it really does alter the political contours in the country.
You'll have noticed in the press here recently a lot of ballyhoo about a big "back-to-work" movement. And you could very easily be misled, because if you really added up the figures for people that have gone back to work then you probably would get more than is actually in the miners union, in the NUM itself. However, it is true that there has been a certain erosion within the strike recently. (Unlike what the bourgeois press tells you, it's not because of the Qaddafi connection. Miners think that it's really wonderful if they get money from anywhere, and one of them has said recently, in a meeting where someone mentioned the Qaddafi connection, "Well, you know, if we can't get money from Qaddafi, maybe we can get guns. We can use them." And it's not because of getting money from the Soviet Union—they'd love it.) But as of now, there's not much prospect of industrial struggle alongside the miners, and so they're basically now having to dig in to try and survive through the winter pretty much on their own against all the forces of the capitalist state. And that does have an effect on certain elements in the union.
Now, some of the things that are most striking about the course of the struggle. First of all, the way in which whole sections of the population who are normally deeply divided have rallied behind the miners and have seen in the miners' strike a possible solution to what they suffer under Thatcher. This is particularly true for the racially oppressed minorities. The blacks and Asians in Britain have become some of the most solid supporters of the miners. If you understand that the miners union is predominantly white, and pretty elitist in its political attitudes, for them to find allies in the black and Asian population is really quite a change in British politics. The reason for the identification is that the kind of treatment that's being dished out to the miners in the course of the strike is something that has been dished out to the black and Asian population in the inner cities in Britain for quite a long time.
And there's also the fact that the racial minorities tend to do the dirtiest, most dangerous and worst paid jobs in Britain. In actual fact British mining almost falls into that category, because you have to understand that miners or craftsmen in the British mines might take home, at the end of having worked 40 hours, less than $100 a week. And that's someone who's gone through an apprenticeship. And it's really dangerous and there's a lot of accidents. So there's that reason for identification as well.
It's also true of the Irish population. Previously if you had an IRA bombing in the mainland of Britain, regardless of what the target was, it was always followed by a wave of anti-Irish hysteria. You know, a pretty bad period. Whereas recently when the IRA bombed the hotel where a lot of Tories were staying during their conference the response was everybody cheered because one of the people who suffered most was the employment minister, Norman Tebbit. They showed these pictures on television of this guy lying under four or five floors of rubble and then being dragged out by his feet, and everybody cheered and clapped and thought it was wonderful. And someone had the response, whoever did this should be shot—for missing the target. They're really sorry they missed Thatcher.
There's also another example of the way in which the social divisions have broken down. There's an organization in London called Lesbians and Gay Men Support the Miners, and they have regular weekly meetings. Miners come along and address their meetings and express their solidarity with them, and they collect money and they give it to the miners. This is previously inconceivable in Britain.
And this seems true in other unions. There's a lot of workers in other unions who really desperately want to strike alongside the miners and to support them, but their leadership really doesn't want to take on that question.
The other thing that's really striking is on the Russian question— It's really clear that the miners' strike has done more to thwart Thatcher's war plans against the Soviet Union than all the peace demonstrations—and there have been a lot of them in Britain. You know, there's a big CND organization, you've had Greenham Common women, and so forth. And I tell you, the Greenharn Common women have become really insignificant by comparison with the miners' wives, who are out there organizing and fighting for support of the strike. And in more ways than one they really are the backbone of the strike.
The third thing is that, given that so much depends on the outcome of this strike, unless you're prepared to address the question of power, then you cannot even bring this strike to the conclusion that is possible. What I mean is that this strike could have been won several months ago. You had the dockers out on strike twice, and Britain is an island economy so the docks are pretty important. The dockers are a militant union. And you have this situation where the leadership of the trade-union movement and of the Labour Party itself are actually divided. The right wing of both the Labour Party and the trade-union bureaucracy—they're openly anti-Russian, anti-Communist; they were the people who really witchhunted [NUM leader] Arthur Scargill when he denounced Polish Solidarnosc'. And it's really clear today, they just tell their members to cross miners' picket lines, ignore the strike and don't give them any money.
On the other hand you've got the left wing of the trade-union bureaucracy and of the Labour Party that are not openly anti-Russian. But they simply will not call their members out on strike action. So you have a situation like when the dockers were out on strike, or the railwaymen. Several hundred members of the railway unions have been victimized, locked out and sent home, for refusing to handle scab coal on the trains. And their union is doing absolutely nothing to defend them, having originally instructed them to not handle the scab coal.
Now, the Labour Party. I believe that never before in its history has the Labour Party been more discredited. And this was as a result of the miners' strike. There's this character Denis Healey in the British Labour Party who's well known to have connections with the CIA and there's a clot of people around him, and we raised the slogan that this guy should be driven out of the Labour Party because the sort of dislocation that it would cause would be really interesting and would break the mold of British social democracy. And Tony Benn came here to New York and various other places and argued that well, of course, the last thing in the world the miners want is to see the Labour Party splitting right now. Well, I'll tell you this is a lie. Most of the miners could see these guys in hell, never mind driven out of the Labour Party. The general secretary of the TUC appeared in a meeting recently and the miners hung up a noose for him in the back of the room. Because you know, they have declared their open animosity to the miners' strike.
We're going to do this fund drive in the U.S. And there's a lot of miners that are really keen to come and meet the Spartacist League and the SYL in the U.S. They're really excited to come here and they desperately need the money. So I think that this will be really important for the international tendency. And it'll be important for the miners.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1985 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.
**********
British Miners Fight for All the Oppressed
The British coal miners' strike now in its eleventh month is a crucial class battle whose outcome will shape the social and political climate of the country for years to come. Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is seeking with unrestrained savagery to bludgeon and starve the miners into submission. If the miners lose, they and the whole British working class will be dealt with in the same spirit of limitless vindictiveness that Thatcher unleashed on the helpless young Argentine sailors of the Belgrano during the Falklands/Malvinas war. Thatcher personally supervised this gratuitous war crime when the ship, miles from the war zone, was dispatched to the bottom of the icy Atlantic.
But the British miners do not intend to lose. Standing alone thanks to the treachery of the Labour Party/ Trades Union Congress tops, they have held out against everything that bloody Thatcher and her cops could throw against them. They have endured thousands of arrests and countless injuries and they are still fighting. And their courageous defiance of the vicious "Iron Lady" has won to their side the most oppressed layers of
British society. The heat of sharp class struggle has tended to forge a spirit of solidarity between the miners and oppressed sectors such as blacks, Asians and Irish.
This political point was emphasized by comrade Eibhlin McDonald, a leader of the Spartacist League of Britain, during her recent visit to the U.S. We reprint below comrade Eibhlin's remarks at a public Spartacist forum in New York last November 16 (originally published in Workers Vanguard No. 367,23 November 1984) and her speech to a national internal meeting of the Spartacus Youth League (WV No. 368, 7 December 1984).
Women have played an active role in the miners' strike. Although women do not work in the British mines, being barred by law from doing so since 1942, the miners' wives have taken their place alongside their men. And they have made their presence felt since the beginning. When one week into the strike Thatcher deployed 10,000 cops in a martial law operation, Kent women beat back a police blockade at the Dartford Tunnel aimed at sealing the Kent strikers off, and went on through to join a demonstration in Leicestershire. In addition to organizing collections of food and money for the strikers' families, the women have been active strike militants. Their participation on picket lines has been especially important given the awesome scope of police attacks, where sometimes hundreds of miners are arrested in a single swoop. When 20,000 coal field women and supporters marched through London last August 11, one prominent slogan was "No surrender!" Here in the United States, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee have been campaigning to win political support among American unionists for the embattled British miners, and to raise desperately needed funds for the miners and their families. As of February 16, a total of $16,905.63 had been raised. W&R appeals to our readers to generously support this effort. Please make checks payable to: Aid to Striking British Miners'Families; mail to: Partisan Defense Committee, Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013.
I'm a member of the British section of the Spartacist tendency, and I'd like to take a few moments to describe to people particularly the British miners' strike which has been going on now for about nine months, I believe. In fact, we had a demonstration recently in London organized by the Spartacist League on the question of South Africa, where a number of miners attended. And we raised the slogan, "African Gold Miners, British Coal Miners— Same Enemy, Same Fight, Workers of the World Unite!" [Applause.] And this slogan had a really powerful resonance—one which is very deeply felt in Britain, primarily as a result of the experience of these miners after nine months on strike. Because you have to understand, two miners have been killed on picket lines; several others have died on the way to picket lines; and most recently people have been killed trying to salvage coal from rubbish tips in order to heat their homes. If you imagine what it's like to have been without money for your family for nine months—no money for food, they have no heating, t nothing like that.
However, they're pretty solid. They're not going back. Because they know that to go back means 20,000 jobs will be lost, and whole communities will be devastated. And, in fact, several thousand of them have been arrested, just simply for picketing. Thatcher has learned a few lessons from Botha's South Africa. They've recently adopted the tactic, instead of throwing people in prison—you obviously can't throw eight, nine, ten thousand miners in prison, because the prisons will overflow—so what they've started to do is to deport them within the country. People are sent off from English coal mines to the north of Scotland, and are not allowed to return home until after the strike.
So there was a certain identification with some of the stuff that was described recently in South Africa among the British miners. There is, of course, a scabbing operation, pretty well funded, we believe probably by the Vatican. Although if you listen to the news reports, then you could very easily be misled. Because as one miner told us recently in one of our meetings— according to the news reports there are now 3,500 scabs in his pit, which he finds very hard to believe, since only 500 people work there [laughter].
Now, there are two things that I want to draw out from the British miners' strike. One is that such a hard-fought class battle against the Thatcher government has inspired whole sections of the population in support for the miners. It's particularly noticeable among the black and Asian community. Something that is very new in Britain—you have a situation where miners, when they come into the city of London from their areas in order to collect money, of course the cops hound them throughout London, and arrest them for trying to collect money and so forth. They go along to a pub in the black ghetto, and the cops come into the pub— "Where are these miners?"—they want to arrest them. But the word had gone out that the cops were arriving, so of course the local people had hidden them. You know: "What miners? There are no miners here." Now, this kind of thing never would have happened before, because capitalism fosters those kind of divisions, and given that the miners union is predominantly white, this solidarity is a direct result of the struggle against Thatcher.
Another aspect of it is that women, mainly miners' wives and families, who'd come from pretty isolated communities, have in fact become political and taken on a leadership role in the strike and have organized themselves into strike committees.
And the other thing that I want to draw out of it is on the Russian question. It comes up most concretely and revolves around the question of Polish Solidarnosc', in Britain, and it's very sharply felt. Because the background to this miners' strike was in fact—the leader of the British miners, Arthur Scargill, happened to mention before a trade-union conference a year ago that Solidarnosc' was an anti-socialist organization. For this he was witchhunted and hounded by not only the capitalist class, the Tory party and so forth, but by a whole section of the trade-union leadership. And it has now become very clear, the people who were most outraged by Scargill's statement are today urging their union members to cross miners' picket lines quite openly. The leader of the Solidarnosc' movement in Poland has sent a message of solidarity... to the scabs. And so Solidarnosc is hated and despised, not just among the British miners, but among whole sections of the population. Which is actually quite a good thing, because it doesn't bode well for Thatcher's war preparations against the Soviet Union.
They do the same kind of thing there. Talking about the "evil empire" in Russia. Except that in Britain a lot of the population now doesn't believe it, because they have seen miners go off to the Soviet Union and have very nice holidays on the Black Sea, you know, for their families and so forth. And they see this on television, and say, well, this is "totalitarian Russia"...it really doesn't look so bad looking at it from Britain [laughter].
Now, just in conclusion. One of the things that is patently obviously missing from the situation is a revolutionary party with a policy directed to the overthrow of capitalism. Because in order to cohere together the struggle, particularly in a situation where old frameworks are breaking down within the country, to cohere and direct that struggle requires a program for the overthrow of capitalism. And that's what the existing trade-union leadership and the Labour Party in Britain doesn't have. For example, twice in the course of the miners' strike, the dockers were out on strike, and were sent back, having gained absolutely nothing. Because these leaders understand that in order to go all out and do what is necessary in order to win the strike, you must be prepared to at least play around with the question of power. And that's what they're not prepared to do.
That in a nutshell is the strategy and program that the Spartacist League has been fighting for there. Because simply in order to win this strike, it's necessary to spread it to other sections of the working class. We hope as the outcome of that kind of successful class battle that you will have the basis for building a revolutionary party. Because in Britain, in South Africa, in fact in the U.S., you can have very hard-fought class battles which may lose or in fact may be frittered away, if you're not prepared to go all the way and address the question of power, for the working class in power, like they did in Russia in 1917.
The Red Avengers [see article, page 24] is kind of a hard act to follow, but let me make one point that one comrade made in the forum in Toronto the other night: the British miners would really love the Red Avengers.
What I want to try to do is give you a flavor of the political situation in Britain, because it really is in marked contrast with Reagan's America right now. But there's something that I would like to underline, which is that the Thatcher government is in the second term of office and went in with a pretty big majority in the election in 1983, not quite as big as Reagan's. The first real opposition they ran into came from the British miners. And it's important to have the understanding and the hope that Reagan will run into the same kind of trouble, because it really does alter the political contours in the country.
You'll have noticed in the press here recently a lot of ballyhoo about a big "back-to-work" movement. And you could very easily be misled, because if you really added up the figures for people that have gone back to work then you probably would get more than is actually in the miners union, in the NUM itself. However, it is true that there has been a certain erosion within the strike recently. (Unlike what the bourgeois press tells you, it's not because of the Qaddafi connection. Miners think that it's really wonderful if they get money from anywhere, and one of them has said recently, in a meeting where someone mentioned the Qaddafi connection, "Well, you know, if we can't get money from Qaddafi, maybe we can get guns. We can use them." And it's not because of getting money from the Soviet Union—they'd love it.) But as of now, there's not much prospect of industrial struggle alongside the miners, and so they're basically now having to dig in to try and survive through the winter pretty much on their own against all the forces of the capitalist state. And that does have an effect on certain elements in the union.
Now, some of the things that are most striking about the course of the struggle. First of all, the way in which whole sections of the population who are normally deeply divided have rallied behind the miners and have seen in the miners' strike a possible solution to what they suffer under Thatcher. This is particularly true for the racially oppressed minorities. The blacks and Asians in Britain have become some of the most solid supporters of the miners. If you understand that the miners union is predominantly white, and pretty elitist in its political attitudes, for them to find allies in the black and Asian population is really quite a change in British politics. The reason for the identification is that the kind of treatment that's being dished out to the miners in the course of the strike is something that has been dished out to the black and Asian population in the inner cities in Britain for quite a long time.
And there's also the fact that the racial minorities tend to do the dirtiest, most dangerous and worst paid jobs in Britain. In actual fact British mining almost falls into that category, because you have to understand that miners or craftsmen in the British mines might take home, at the end of having worked 40 hours, less than $100 a week. And that's someone who's gone through an apprenticeship. And it's really dangerous and there's a lot of accidents. So there's that reason for identification as well.
It's also true of the Irish population. Previously if you had an IRA bombing in the mainland of Britain, regardless of what the target was, it was always followed by a wave of anti-Irish hysteria. You know, a pretty bad period. Whereas recently when the IRA bombed the hotel where a lot of Tories were staying during their conference the response was everybody cheered because one of the people who suffered most was the employment minister, Norman Tebbit. They showed these pictures on television of this guy lying under four or five floors of rubble and then being dragged out by his feet, and everybody cheered and clapped and thought it was wonderful. And someone had the response, whoever did this should be shot—for missing the target. They're really sorry they missed Thatcher.
There's also another example of the way in which the social divisions have broken down. There's an organization in London called Lesbians and Gay Men Support the Miners, and they have regular weekly meetings. Miners come along and address their meetings and express their solidarity with them, and they collect money and they give it to the miners. This is previously inconceivable in Britain.
And this seems true in other unions. There's a lot of workers in other unions who really desperately want to strike alongside the miners and to support them, but their leadership really doesn't want to take on that question.
The other thing that's really striking is on the Russian question— It's really clear that the miners' strike has done more to thwart Thatcher's war plans against the Soviet Union than all the peace demonstrations—and there have been a lot of them in Britain. You know, there's a big CND organization, you've had Greenham Common women, and so forth. And I tell you, the Greenharn Common women have become really insignificant by comparison with the miners' wives, who are out there organizing and fighting for support of the strike. And in more ways than one they really are the backbone of the strike.
The third thing is that, given that so much depends on the outcome of this strike, unless you're prepared to address the question of power, then you cannot even bring this strike to the conclusion that is possible. What I mean is that this strike could have been won several months ago. You had the dockers out on strike twice, and Britain is an island economy so the docks are pretty important. The dockers are a militant union. And you have this situation where the leadership of the trade-union movement and of the Labour Party itself are actually divided. The right wing of both the Labour Party and the trade-union bureaucracy—they're openly anti-Russian, anti-Communist; they were the people who really witchhunted [NUM leader] Arthur Scargill when he denounced Polish Solidarnosc'. And it's really clear today, they just tell their members to cross miners' picket lines, ignore the strike and don't give them any money.
On the other hand you've got the left wing of the trade-union bureaucracy and of the Labour Party that are not openly anti-Russian. But they simply will not call their members out on strike action. So you have a situation like when the dockers were out on strike, or the railwaymen. Several hundred members of the railway unions have been victimized, locked out and sent home, for refusing to handle scab coal on the trains. And their union is doing absolutely nothing to defend them, having originally instructed them to not handle the scab coal.
Now, the Labour Party. I believe that never before in its history has the Labour Party been more discredited. And this was as a result of the miners' strike. There's this character Denis Healey in the British Labour Party who's well known to have connections with the CIA and there's a clot of people around him, and we raised the slogan that this guy should be driven out of the Labour Party because the sort of dislocation that it would cause would be really interesting and would break the mold of British social democracy. And Tony Benn came here to New York and various other places and argued that well, of course, the last thing in the world the miners want is to see the Labour Party splitting right now. Well, I'll tell you this is a lie. Most of the miners could see these guys in hell, never mind driven out of the Labour Party. The general secretary of the TUC appeared in a meeting recently and the miners hung up a noose for him in the back of the room. Because you know, they have declared their open animosity to the miners' strike.
We're going to do this fund drive in the U.S. And there's a lot of miners that are really keen to come and meet the Spartacist League and the SYL in the U.S. They're really excited to come here and they desperately need the money. So I think that this will be really important for the international tendency. And it'll be important for the miners.
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