Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
*******
Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call ourselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
**********
In the recent past as part of my one of my commentaries I noted the following:
“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the “new world” we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”
A couple of the people that I have talked lately were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one of the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work- checks and balances-form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)
I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those of the "one percent" having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one. In that sense previous historical models come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.
In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started this Lessons Of History series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
***********
Ernest Belfort Bax-Gracchus Babeuf
IX. End of Trial, and Tragic Death of Babeuf
The leader of the accused having terminated his long discourse, observations were addressed to the Court by Buonarroti, Veillart, Massart, Ballyer, Didier, and others. Laflantry, a counsel who appeared for some of the accused, pleaded eloquently on behalf of Buonarroti, and several of the defendants made vain attempts to obtain a hearing, but were cut short by the President, who refused to listen to them. This brought the duration of the trial to the sixty-sixth sitting of the High Court (3 Prairial V – 23rd May 1797), when the President addressed the jury, stating that he was about to put to them three questions which would bring the accused into three categories. The text of the first question of each series was as follows:–
I. Did there exist in Germinal and Floreal of the year IV. a conspiracy to overthrow the government, and set the citizens up in arms, one against the other?
II. Did there exist a conspiracy against the legitimate authority?
III. Did there exist a conspiracy to force the dissolution of the two Councils and of the executive Directory?
In these were involved two other uniform questions:–
1. Who of the accused took part in such conspiracy?
2. Did he do so with the intention of facilitating the carrying into execution of its intentions?
Reypalade, the president juryman, criticised the questions, and particularly remarked as to the law of 27 Germinal, that it had been voted and. created expressly to meet the present case and the acts of accusation under consideration. Veillart, in a long speech, appealed to the jury to disregard that law. He submitted that when the jury were convinced that an accused came within only one of the chief questions, they ought to declare that the three must be taken together, and not each of them as capital. One will gather from the above, the bias of the Court.
At the following sitting, Rèal, a prominent member of the bar, and one of the principal defending counsel, argued with considerable eloquence against the classification of these questions: submitted that if they were based on the law 27 Germinal, as Reypalade had suggested, that the words “méchamment et à dessein”, which would coincide with the English terms maliciously, and with criminal intent must be added to that of intentionelle, or intentionally.
Veillart contested the proposition of Real, and insisted upon the conclusions of the day before, and the rejection of the suggested amendments. He was constantly interrupted by the dissenting murmurs of the accused. He was supported in his argument by his colleague Bailly. The discussions which then followed are only of mediocre interest in comparison with those of the opening days.
The defence was exhausted, and the defendants awaited the verdict. As to the prosecution, it was resumed in a virulent harangue launched by the above-mentioned Bailly, one of the national Prosecutors. He said, in effect, that the defendants were accused of the most heinous of crimes against the very foundations of French society; that had they a succeeded in the objects of their conspiracy, they would have overthrown the Republic “on a mountain of corpses covered with blood and tears.” The atrocity of their plans and the extraordinary wickedness of their designs made the ultimate success of such an abominable plot impossible. France was tired of having revolution upon revolution thrust upon her, and so on. He called also to mind the reign of Terror, most disastrous to the State, and the eighteen months of execrable horrors that they had passed through. He said, “Robespierre and his abominable commune have passed away, all the factions did not go with them. There existed those who would do away with all authority, who wished to have no government, republican or otherwise. And among the journals that agitated such principles was notoriously that of Babeuf, the oft-quoted Tribun du Peuple, which, he alleged, advocated absolute disorganisation, and Babeuf, the professed leader of the faction of the pretended ‘Equals’, had a preponderance that had astonished all those who had followed the evidence given during the trial. This great luminary, Babeuf, who was, their shining light and the very spirit of the movement, and who regarded himself, and was recognised by his colleagues, as the only person capable directing such stupendous enterprises, this exceedingly hot politician and ardent reformer, now appeared ignominiously before the Court as a very cold and insignificant person, posing as a mere copyist, a servile follower of a small coterie of philanthropic fanatics who dreamt of ways to lead the people to pure democracy.”
In addition to the above series of questions pub to the jury by the President of the High Cow others were added, relating to alleged provocations, written and verbal, to the re-establishment of the Constitution of 1793. This was done through the mediation, and at the request of the foreman or president of the jury, as just mentioned. In view of the circumstances relating to the constitution of the Court, the violent speech above referred to by the prosecutor Bailly was utterly superfluous, and was simply playing to the gallery.
The proceeding of the Court was, moreover, illegal, as was subsequently recognised by the criminal tribunal of the Seine, which pronounced these questions to have been admitted by the high court of Vendôme in contravention of the law. Buonarroti states that even the public prosecutors did not attempt to defend this action of the Vendôme tribunal against the protests of some of the prisoners, who pleaded that it was a matter suddenly sprung upon the jury, upon which they had not been heard in explanation or defence. But, notwithstanding this, the new counts were proceeded with. The accused laid great stress, moreover, on the form in which the question of intention was laid before the jury. They were much concerned, as already stated, that the adverb méchamment (maliciously) should be maintained as part of the questions put, since they specially challenged an examination of the motives which they contended would have actuated them had they been guilty, as the prosecution alleged, of the charge of conspiracy, which formed the Chief count in the indictment.
Some of the jurors, of whom there were sixteen, supported the accused, urging legality being observed in the interrogatories administered to them. But it was in vain. The judges composing the High Court insisted, as we have seen, on restricting the conspiracy indictment to the formula, “Has the accused conspired or provoked, with the intention of conspiring or provoking?”, thus intentionally excluding all reference to moral justification for the incriminated acts. Only three: of the sixteen jurors were consistently favourable throughout to the accused. Notwithstanding this, most of the counts relating to the conspiracy were met with an acquittal. It was only on the question of provocation, written and verbal, to the re-establishment of the Constitution of 1793, that certain of the prisoners, to wit, Babeuf, Darthé, Buonarroti, Germain, Cazin, Moroy, Blondeau, Menessier, and Bouin were convicted. Even then, “extenuating circumstances” were found for all except Babeuf and Darthé. The Blondeau referred to had been arrested for the share he had taken in attempting to corrupt the guards in order to enable Babeuf to effect his escape. The Government seemed to have used this prosecution as a convenient means of disposing of persons suspected by their agents, or otherwise inconvenient to them. Thus among the accused was a young man named Potofeux, who had been lying in gaol for twelve months, although absolutely a stranger to the Babouvists and their movement.
From the dawn of the 7th of Prairial, year V, the beating of drums, the noise of artillery, and unusual movements of troops announced to the inhabitants of the little town of Vendôme the tragic end of the judicial drama to which they had become so long accustomed. The day the prisoners appeared for the last time before the tribunal the building was filled by a sad and silent crowd. On the declaration of the jury above given, which the eye-witness Buonarroti tells us was pronounced with a voice betraying strong emotion by the foreman, the leading prosecutor rose to demand the penalty of death for the two principal prisoners, namely, Babeuf and Darthé, and transportation for the others. One of the counsel for the defence made a last desperate attempt to get the verdict quashed by invoking the article in the new Constitution of the year III, which declared that no law affecting the liberty of the press should be valid for longer than one year from the date of its promulgation. Hence it was contended that the law of the 27th of Germinal of the year IV, upon which the prosecution had based its indictment, being a law containing clauses contravening the liberty of the press, had ceased to have effect, owing to its having been in existence for more than a year. As might have been expected, the court refused to consider the point, and proceeded to pass sentence on the prisoners in accordance with the demands of the prosecution. Babeuf and Darthé were sentence to death, and the remaining seven to deportation t the French possessions in tropical America.
No sooner had sentence been pronounced than a violent tumult made itself heard. Babeuf and Darthé had stabbed themselves with daggers. A cry arose, “They are being assassinated!” Buonarroti sprang to his feet and appealed to the people. The public in the body of the court made a sudden movement, which was immediately suppressed by a hundred bayonets (the precincts of the tribunal were all occupied by military) suddenly appearing and being levelled at the crowd. But Babeuf a Darthe had relied on clumsy, self-made daggers worthless metal, which broke before reaching the hearts at which they aimed.[According to another account, quoted by Fleury (Babeuf) p.336), their hands were seized by the gendarmes guarding them before they could complete their purpose.] The only result their attempt was a night of agony in their cells. For the moment the excitement amongst the public had made itself apparent; and while the soldiers were in the act of driving back those surrounding the prisoners, the gendarmes rushed forward, seized the latter, and dragged them away to their dungeon threatening them the while with their sabres.
The following day the two wounded men were carried to the guillotine. All, even their most vehement political opponents, admit that both, especially Babeuf, mounted the scaffold with a splendid courage that never deserted them to the last. The two bodies were thrown by the executioner and his assistants, according to Buonarroti, into the common sewer, but, according, to other accounts, were buried superficially in a plot of land not far off: In any case they were exhumed shortly after by their admirers, and reverently interred in a field belonging to one of the neighbouring peasants. The inhabitants of the little town of Vendôme seem to have deeply sympathised with these victims of counter-revolution. Buonarroti assures us that a deep gloom overhung the town the day of the execution - “a general mourning” is his expression.
During his last painful night, Babeuf manned himself to what must have been the terrible ordeal of inditing the following touching letter to his wife and family:– “Good evening, my friends. I am about to be enveloped in eternal night. I have better expressed to the friend [viz. Le Pelletier], to whom I addressed the two letters you have seen, my situation as regards you than I can do to yourselves. It seems to me that I feel nothing in order to feel too much. I leave your lot in his hands. Alas I know not if you will find him able to do that which I have asked of him. I know not how you will be able to reach him. Your love for me has brought you hither in spite of all the obstacles of our misery. You have supported yourself here in the midst of obstacles and privations. Your constancy has made you follow all the proceedings of this long, cruel trial of which, like myself, you have drunk the bitter cup. But I do not know how my memory will be judged, notwithstanding that I believe I have conducted myself in a manner without reproach Lastly, I am ignorant of what will become of all the republicans, their families, and even their infants at the breast, in the midst of the royalist madness which the counter-revolution will bring with it. Oh! my friends, how agonising are these reflections in my last moments! To die for the country, to leave my family, my children, my dear wife, would be more supportable did I not see at the end of all, liberty lost, and all that belongs to sincere republicans covered by the most horrible proscription! Oh! my tender children, what will you become? I cannot struggle against the strongest emotion on your account. Do not believe, nevertheless, that I feel regret at having sacrificed myself for the best of all causes, even though all my efforts should be useless to save it. I have fulfilled my task. If you should survive the terrible storm that now bursts over the Republic and over all that is attached to it; if you should find yourself once more in a situation of tranquillity, and should secure some friends who would aid you to triumph over your bad fortune, I would urge you to live in union together; I would urge my wife to try and bring up her children in all gentleness, and I would urge my children to merit the goodness of their mother by respecting her and always submitting themselves to her. It belongs to the family of the martyr of liberty to give an example of all the virtues in order to win the esteem and attachment of all good men. I would desire that my wife should do all that is possible to give an education to her children, while entreating all her friends to aid her to the utmost of their power in this object. I beg Émile to pay attention to this wish of a father whom I believe he loves well, and by whom he was so much beloved; I beg him to pay attention to it without loss of time, and as soon as he is able.“
My friends, I hope you will remember me and often speak of me. I hope that you will believe I have loved you all very much. I could conceive of no other way of rendering you happy than through the common welfare. I have failed; I am sacrificed; it is for you also I die. Speak much of me to Camille. Tell him again and again a thousand times how tenderly I have always borne him in my heart. Say the same to Caius as soon as he is capable of understanding it.
Lebois has announced that he will print separately our defences. He should give as much publicity as possible to mine. I advise my wife as my dearest friend, not to hand over to Baudouin nor to Lebois, nor to others, any copy of my defence without keeping another correct copy by her, in order to make sure that this defence will never be lost. You will know, my dear friend, that that this defence is precious, that it will be always dear to virtuous hearts and to the friends of their country The only legacy which will remain to you from me will be my reputation. And I am sure that the enjoyment of it will console greatly both you and your children. You will love to hear all sympathetic and just hearts say, when speaking of your husband, your father, he was perfectly virtuous.
Adieu! I am bound to the earth by but a thread, that to-morrow will break. That is certain. The sacrifice has to be made. The wicked are the stronger, and I give way to them. It is at least sweet to die with a conscience as pure as mine. What is cruel, what is agonising, is to be torn from your arms, oh! my tender friends, oh! all that is most dear to me!!! I tear myself away; the violence is done. Adieu! adieu! Adieu! ten millions of times adieu!
Yet one word more. Write to my mother at my sisters. Send them, by diligence or otherwise my defence, as soon as it is printed. Tell them that I am dead, and try to make these worthy people understand that such a death is glorious, far from being dishonourable.
Adieu then, once more, my dearest ones, my tender friends, adieu for ever! I wrap myself in the bosom of a virtuous slumber.
Fifty-six of the accused were acquitted. Among these was Vadier, the late Mountainist member of the Convention, and president of the Committee of General Security during the Terror. He was naturally an object of special hatred to the Reaction; and although he was residing in Toulouse at the time of the Babeuf conspiracy in Paris, and had no connection whatever with the movement, the opportunity was too good to be let slip by his enemies, so the unfortunate old man was dragged from Toulouse to the capital, and thence to Vendôme, to stand his trial before the special high court for a matter of which he knew nothing. But that was not all. So incensed were the authorities against him that he was not allowed to speak even in his own defence. Notwithstanding this, the evidence against him being practically nil, the jury acquitted him without hesitation. Nettled by this failure, and not to be baulked of their prey, the court ordered him to be kept in arrest on the strength of an alleged decree of the Convention for the deportation of certain members of the Mountain, which had since been rescinded. He remained in prison till the Coup d’État of the 18th of Brumaire.
The five prisoners who were convicted of participation in the attempt to re-establish the Constitution of ’93, but were given the benefit of extenuating circumstances, were shortly after their conviction interned, together with the acquitted Vadier, in the fortress on the island of Pelée, situated at the entrance to the harbour of Cherbourg. The whole of the way thither they were kept chained and confined in iron cages, exposed in many cases to the insults and threats of reactionary crowds, though towns were not wanting through which they passsed where they were received with the most friendly greetings. At Saint Lô, for example, the mayor at the head of the municipal council, received them with every cordiality as “our unfortunate brothers” In a speech, he declared them to have defended the rights of the people in a manner for which every good citizen owed them gratitude and love.
It may be interesting to follow the careers of some of the actors in the events we have been describing. Rèal, the chief counsel for the defence in the Vendôme trial, whose zeal and energy in performance of his duties on this occasion are not to be gainsaid – notwithstanding that Babeuf, more anxious to affirm his principles than to get off the denial of the truth, or even on technical grounds was certainly a difficult client to deal with from advocate’s point of view – this same Rèal became, under the Empire, Prefect of Police, then Councillor of State, and finally Count7. Germain died in 1830, a prosperous agriculturalist, having long deserted the fields of politics. Drouet, the postmaster of St Menehould, and strenuous member of the Mountain the Convention, also took service under the Napoleonic regime, when he became sub-prefect, after having first been decorated with the Legion of Honour. The Marquis d'Antonelle, the colleague of Drouet on the Mountain, and a fellow-participator with the other Montagnards in the conspiracy of the Equals, appears, after some years obscurity, after the Restoration, as a strong partisan of the resuscitated Bourbons. Vadier died in honourable consistency in exile during the Restoration period. The time and place of the death of his colleague on the Committee of General Security, Amar, remain in some doubt. Felix le Pelletier, who succeeded in escaping imprisonment or transportation, was probably the wealthiest man in the movement, and nobly fulfilled his obligations towards the children of his dead friend. Émile he adopted, while he saw towards the placing of the two younger brothers, Camille and Caius, with an old friend of his, a former member of the Convention.
Subsequently, after he was grown up, Émile joined the Spanish patriots in their struggle for independence. Happening to hear, while Spain, that Grisel, the traitor, who had delivered over his father to death and his father’s friends to imprisonment and exile, was also there, he sought him out and challenged him to a duel. The duel was one to the death. Émile Babeuf fought with a reckless bravery and fury. Finally he struck Grisel a mortal blow, but not before he himself had received a dangerous wound in the chest. This, however, was nothing to him. He had executed vengeance on the traitor. He subsequently became a bookseller in Lyons where, however, he failed. Returning to Paris he started a journal called the Nain Jaune, of strong Jacobin tendencies. But this also came to an untimely end, being seized by the police and suppressed. He tried bookselling again in Paris but this time also with disastrous financial results. He then seems to have joined the imperial cause and to have associated his fortunes with those of Napoleon the First. After the fall of the empire he emigrated to America, where he died in the early twenties of the last century. His brother Caius was killed in battle during the first invasion of French territory in 1814, while his other brother Camille committed suicide from column Vendôme in the following year, 1813, at the sight of the Cossacks entering Paris.
Émile Babeuf, it may be noted had one son Pierre Babeuf, who occupied various official posts, having been sub-prefect in 1848, inspector of insurances, etc. He died in Paris, 20th February 1871, at the age of sixty-two. With the death of this solitary grandchild of Gracchus Babeuf the name itself became extinct.
The appreciation of his father from the pen of Émile Babeuf, discovered among his papers by M. Victor Advielle, and reproduced by him in his Histoire de Gracchus Babeuf et du Babouvisme, vol.i, pp.344-5) may be of interest:–
As to the conduct of my father, this belongs to history; and the facts, however we may regard them, prove nothing against his heart. He may have erred in his actions, but his conscience was never compromised. I will go farther and venture the assurance that he always had pure and disinterested intentions, that he only valued life in so far as he believed it useful to his country, and he perished, a victim of his opinions, with same fervour that the saints walked to their martyrdom. I have only one trait to cite that cannot be made public, but which will decide your opinion. Long persecutions by private enemies caused my father to languish in prison till the 9th Thermidor. He cleared himself completely of an accusation of forgery, and was given back to society. But his fortune having been reduced to nothing, in order to obtain food for our little family we were obliged to sell part of our furniture for at that time famine reigned in Paris. My father was then again thrown into prison. The 13th of Vendémiaire liberated him again, and he continued his journal, entitled the Tribun du People. The government then deputed a man to go and see him, whose merits would be sufficiently proved did I but mention his name, in order to persuade him, like Fréron, to exchange his character, his conscience, his pen, for the ministry of finance! My father was revolted at the proposal and broke with the negotiation. No person has hitherto related the fact that at the time the entry of the Prussians into the plains Champagne, my father, sent as commissioner of the department of the Somme to Peronne to see the fortification of the place, defeated a conspiracy there, which aimed at nothing less the delivering the place over to the enemy. He had the guilty arrested, and saved the town from being surprised the following night by an advanced guard of the Prussian army. Finally, no one has told how Paris, notwithstanding neglect and the Maximum, owed its subsistence during eighteen months to the unremitting energies of the general secretary of the Administration of Subsistence, Babeuf, who passed nearly all his nights in working and in distributing their respective tasks to twenty-four employés.b
We have no means of testing the truth of the statements contained in the foregoing notice, with the exception of that respecting his work at the victualling commission in Paris, the conscientious thoroughness of which is otherwise confirmed. More especially, as regards the alleged tempt on the part of the government to corrupt Babeuf by means of its mysterious, emissary, we are left utterly in the dark, even by Émile himself, as to the nature of the position alleged to have been offered his father in the ministry of finance. But the notice, so far as Émile is concerned, certainly tends to confirm, what we gather from other indications in his career, namely, that with all his political worthlessness and general instability of character, Émile Babeuf always retained an affectionate regard for the memory of his father. In view of this fact, we would willingly believe that his turning his back on the principles in which he had been brought up, and which he himself so ardently championed earlier in his life, in order to cringe before the “Corsican adventurer”, was due to this weakness of character, acted on by stress of private circumstances, rather than to any intrinsic moral baseness.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-The Embryo Of An Alternate Government-Learn The Lessons Of History- From The Pages Of The French Revolution- Ernest Belfort Bax-The Last Episode of the French Revolution Being a History of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals(1911)-IX. End of Trial, and Tragic Death of Babeuf
Monday, February 27, 2012
March 1st, 2012: National Day of Action For Education-All Out For The Boston Action-Assemble Dewey Square- 1:00 PM
Click on the title to link to the College Occupy Boston website for more details on the March 1st actions in Boston.
Markin comment:
Free, quality higher education for all- Create 100, 200, many publicly-funded Harvards!
*******
March 1st, 2012: National Day of Action For Education
Posted on February 16, 2012 by romina
0 Comments and 1 Reaction
Statement from Occupy Education:
We refuse to pay for the crisis created by the 1%. We refuse to accept the dismantling of our schools and universities, while the banks and corporations make record profits. We refuse to accept educational re-segregation, massive tuition increases, outrageous student debt, and increasing privatization and corporatization.
They got bailed out and we got sold out. But through nationally coordinated mass action we can and will turn back the tide of austerity.
We call on all students, teachers, workers, and parents from all levels of education —pre-K-12 through higher education in public and private institutions— and all Occupy assemblies, labor unions, and organizations of oppressed communities, to mobilize on March 1st, 2012 across the country to tell those in power: The resources exist for high-quality education for all. If we make the rich and the corporations pay we can reverse the budget cuts, tuition hikes, and attacks on job security, and fully fund public education and social services.
This is a call to work together, but it is up to each school and organization to determine what local and regional actions—such as strikes, walkouts, occupations, marches, etc.—they will take to say no to business as usual.
We have the momentum, the numbers, and the determination to win. Education is not for sale. Let’s take back our schools. Let’s make history.
For more information:
Facebook page: March 1st National Day of Action for Education
Facebook event page: March 1st National Day of Action for Education
Markin comment:
Free, quality higher education for all- Create 100, 200, many publicly-funded Harvards!
*******
March 1st, 2012: National Day of Action For Education
Posted on February 16, 2012 by romina
0 Comments and 1 Reaction
Statement from Occupy Education:
We refuse to pay for the crisis created by the 1%. We refuse to accept the dismantling of our schools and universities, while the banks and corporations make record profits. We refuse to accept educational re-segregation, massive tuition increases, outrageous student debt, and increasing privatization and corporatization.
They got bailed out and we got sold out. But through nationally coordinated mass action we can and will turn back the tide of austerity.
We call on all students, teachers, workers, and parents from all levels of education —pre-K-12 through higher education in public and private institutions— and all Occupy assemblies, labor unions, and organizations of oppressed communities, to mobilize on March 1st, 2012 across the country to tell those in power: The resources exist for high-quality education for all. If we make the rich and the corporations pay we can reverse the budget cuts, tuition hikes, and attacks on job security, and fully fund public education and social services.
This is a call to work together, but it is up to each school and organization to determine what local and regional actions—such as strikes, walkouts, occupations, marches, etc.—they will take to say no to business as usual.
We have the momentum, the numbers, and the determination to win. Education is not for sale. Let’s take back our schools. Let’s make history.
For more information:
Facebook page: March 1st National Day of Action for Education
Facebook event page: March 1st National Day of Action for Education
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Where Is Perry Mason When You Need Him-Raymond Burr’s “Blue Gardenia”
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film noir Blue Gardenia
Blue Gardenia, starring Anne Baxter, Raymond Burr, Richard Conte, title song sung by Nat King Cole, directed by Fritz Lang, Warner brothers, 1953
Yes, where is Perry Mason when you need him. And not just because one of the lead actors in this film noir is Raymond Burr, who made Perry famous on 1950s black and white television (hey, look it upon Wikipedia if you don’t believe me there really was a time when that is what TV. viewing looked like. Ya, I know, the dark ages.), but because there is a murder to be solved. His. Or rather the ne’er do well, roué, lady’s man, whatever, character he plays here, Harry Preeble, an artist with a very roving eye.
If there is a murder, then there must be a murderer, right, or in this case a murderess, and here hard-working, get ahead, and just jilted Norah (played by Anne Baxter) is picture perfect for the frame, and the big house, women’s side. See, she was old boy Harry’s last known date, last know drunken date taken up to his apartment, from the wilds of the Blue Gardenia club, Chinese food, blue gardenias for the ladies, and serious rum drinks a specialty, to see that old chestnut, his etchings. Yes, silly girl, especially with Harry’s reputation. But birthday, jilted, and blue, flowers for your hair or not, would make any girl, hell, any human, a little out of sorts.
Out of sorts or not, Anne Baxter, who is reduced to sharing an apartment with two other fellow female workers (including one incredibly fierce chain-smoking Ann Sothern), is not going to take any fall for one little off night. And here is where hard-hitting reporter Casey at the press (played by Richard Conte) comes in to wrap things up, wrap them up so tight that even the police have to cry “uncle,” let her go, and go off in some corner and pout. That leaves only one thing. If Ann Baxter didn’t do it, then who did? I am not telling. But think back a minute, old Harry had that roving eye and so the number of female suspects could have stretched around the block. It’s too late for Mr. Harry, but remember that old saw about a woman scorned. Well don’t say you were not warned.
Blue Gardenia, starring Anne Baxter, Raymond Burr, Richard Conte, title song sung by Nat King Cole, directed by Fritz Lang, Warner brothers, 1953
Yes, where is Perry Mason when you need him. And not just because one of the lead actors in this film noir is Raymond Burr, who made Perry famous on 1950s black and white television (hey, look it upon Wikipedia if you don’t believe me there really was a time when that is what TV. viewing looked like. Ya, I know, the dark ages.), but because there is a murder to be solved. His. Or rather the ne’er do well, roué, lady’s man, whatever, character he plays here, Harry Preeble, an artist with a very roving eye.
If there is a murder, then there must be a murderer, right, or in this case a murderess, and here hard-working, get ahead, and just jilted Norah (played by Anne Baxter) is picture perfect for the frame, and the big house, women’s side. See, she was old boy Harry’s last known date, last know drunken date taken up to his apartment, from the wilds of the Blue Gardenia club, Chinese food, blue gardenias for the ladies, and serious rum drinks a specialty, to see that old chestnut, his etchings. Yes, silly girl, especially with Harry’s reputation. But birthday, jilted, and blue, flowers for your hair or not, would make any girl, hell, any human, a little out of sorts.
Out of sorts or not, Anne Baxter, who is reduced to sharing an apartment with two other fellow female workers (including one incredibly fierce chain-smoking Ann Sothern), is not going to take any fall for one little off night. And here is where hard-hitting reporter Casey at the press (played by Richard Conte) comes in to wrap things up, wrap them up so tight that even the police have to cry “uncle,” let her go, and go off in some corner and pout. That leaves only one thing. If Ann Baxter didn’t do it, then who did? I am not telling. But think back a minute, old Harry had that roving eye and so the number of female suspects could have stretched around the block. It’s too late for Mr. Harry, but remember that old saw about a woman scorned. Well don’t say you were not warned.
“We don’t want the word peace connected with the word veteran”-paraphrase of a remark by an official parade organizer- “Oh ya, well watch this”- All Out For The Smedley Butler Brigade Veterans For Peace-Initiated Saint Patrick’s PEACE Parade on Sunday March 18th in South Boston
Click on the headline to link to the Smedley Butler Brigade Facebook page.
Veterans For Peace
Call for Help
Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade
Alternative Peoples Parade for Peace, Equality, Jobs, Social and Economic Justice
When: Sunday, March 18-2:00 PM
Where: South Boston- form up outside the Broadway Redline Station
Please join us for our Second Annual Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade, the Alternative Peoples Parade for Peace, Equality, Jobs, Social and Economic Justice.
Once again Veterans for Peace have been denied to walk in the Saint Patrick’s Parade in South Boston. Last year they gave us a reason for the denial, “They did not want the word Peace associated with the word Veteran”. Well last year, in three weeks time, we pulled our own permit and had our own parade with 500 participants. We had to walk one mile behind the traditional parade. We had lead cars with our older vets asGrand Marshals, Vets For Peace, MFSO, Code Pink and numerous other local peace groups.
Also: Seventeen years ago the gay and bisexual groups in Boston were also denied. They were the first groups we reached out to and invited them to walk in our parade. Last year we had Join the Impact with us. We also had church / religious groups, and labor. Last year we stole the press, it was a controversy and we received front page coverage and editorial articles in all of the major newspapers, radio and television reports.
This year we anticipate 2,000 people in our parade, multiple bands, we have a Duck Boat, the Ragging Grannies will be singing from the top of the boat. We have a trolley for older folks not able to walk. We may have floats. We will have multiple street bands, a large religious division, a large labor division and “Occupy Everywhere” division, including Occupy Boston and numerous other Occupy groups.
All we need is you, your VFP chapter, peace groups, GLBT groups, religious and labor groups and Occupy groups. Please come to Boston and join us in this fabulous parade.
Please see the attached flyer and a description of the Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade, it’s history and where we are.
On behalf of the Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade Organizing Committee.
Thank you,
Pat Scanlon (VN 69’)
Coordinator, VFP Chapter 9, Smedley Butler Brigade
patscanlonmusic@yahoo.com
978-475-1776
*******
Markin comment:
As if I needed any extra push to join in this VFP action I have reposted a blog that pretty clearly explains why I am always ready to march with my fellow VFPers, any time any place.
Re-posted From American Left History- Thursday, November 11, 2010
*A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan!
Markin comment:
Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system that governs us has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.
Now normally in Boston, and in most places, a Veterans Day parade means a bunch of Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) or American Legion-types taking time off from drinking at their post bars (“the battle of the barstool”) and donning the old overstuffed uniform and heading out on to Main Street to be waved at, and cheered on, by like-minded, thankful citizens. And of course that happened this time as well. What also happened in Boston this year (and other years but I have not been involved in previous marches) was that the Veterans For Peace (VFP) organized an anti-war march as part of their “Veterans Day” program. Said march to be held at the same place and time as the official one.
Previously there had been a certain amount of trouble, although I am not sure that it came to blows, between the two groups. (I have only heard third-hand reports on previous events.) You know, the "super-patriots" vs. “commie symps” thing that has been going on as long as there have been ex-soldiers (and others) who have differed from the bourgeois party pro-war line. In any case the way this impasse had been resolved previously, and the way the parameters were set this year as well, was that the VFP took up the rear of the official parade, and took up the rear in an obvious way. Separated from the main body of the official parade by a medical emergency truck. Nice, right? Something of the old playground “I’ll take my ball and bat and go home” by the "officials" was in the air on that one.
But here is where there is a certain amount of rough plebeian justice, a small dose for those on the side of the angels, in the world. In order to form up, and this was done knowingly by VFP organizers, the official marchers, the bands and battalions that make up such a march, had to “run the gauntlet” of dove emblem-emblazoned VFP banners waving frantically directly in front of their faces as they passed by. Moreover, although we formed the caboose of this thing the crowds along the parade route actually waited as the official paraders marched by and waved and clapped at our procession. Be still my heart. But that response just provides another example of the ‘street cred” that ex-soldiers have on the anti-war question. Now, if there is to be any really serious justice in the world, if only these vets would go beyond the “bring the troops home” and embrace- immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S./Allied Troops from Iraq and Afghanistan then we could maybe start to get somewhere out on those streets. But today I was very glad to be fighting for our communist future among those who know first-hand about the dark side of the American experience. No question.
************
From Veterans For Peace:
Saint Patrick's Peace Parade
Peoples Parade for Peace, Equality, Jobs, Social and Economic Justice
Saint Patrick, the patron Saint of Ireland was a man of peace. Saint Patrick's Day should be a day to celebrate Saint Patrick and the Irish Heritage of Boston and the contributions of the Irish throughout American history. In Boston the parade should be a day to celebrate the changes in our culture, the ethnic, religious diversity, points of views and politics of our great City of Boston. For on Saint Patrick's Day we are all Irish.
Saint Patrick Day parades have been held in Boston since 1737 (Unofficial parades). In 1901 Evacuation Day was declared a holiday in the City of Boston. Because of the coincidence of the proximity of the two holidays the celebrations were combined and for the past forty years the Allied War Veterans Council have been organizing the Saint Patrick's Day Parade, turning what should be the celebration of Saint Patrick, the Irish Heritage and History into a military parade.
In 2011, the local chapter of Veterans For Peace, the Smedley Butler Brigade submitted an application to march in the traditional Saint Patrick's Day Parade. Veterans For Peace is a national veterans organization with 130 chapters across the country. The Smedley Butler Brigade has over 200 members locally. It's members range from veterans from WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf, Iraq and the Afghanistan War. All Veterans For Peace wanted to do was to march in the Saint Patrick's Day Parade and carry their flags and banners. Their application was denied by the "Allied War Council". When the organizer of the parade, Phil Wuschke, was asked why their application was denied, he stated, "Because they did not want to have the word peace associated with the word Veteran". They were also told that they were too political, as if the Saint Patrick's Day Parade and other activities surrounding the parade are not political.
Veterans For Peace subsequently filed for their own permit for the Saint Patrick's Peace Parade. Seventeen years ago, the gay and bisexual community (GLBT) had also applied to march in the parade and like the veterans were denied. GBLT sued the Allied War Council and the case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, resulting in the Hurley Decision, named after Wacko Hurley, the ruler supreme of the parade. This decision states that who ever is organizing the parade has the right to say who is in and who can be excluded from the parade, no questions asked. Even though the City of Boston will spend in excess of $300,000.00 in support of this parade, they have no say in who can be in the parade. The Saint Patrick's Day Parade should be sponsored by the City of Boston and not a private group, who have secretive, private meetings, not open to the public and who practice discrimination and exclusion.
In the case of Veterans For Peace, if you are carrying a gun or drive a tank you can be in the parade, if you are a veteran of the US Military and carrying a peace symbol, you are excluded. Once Veterans For Peace had their parade permit in hand the first group they reached out to was the gay and bisexual community in Boston. "You were not allowed to walk in their parade seventeen years ago, how would you like to walk in our parade" The response was immediate and Join the Impact, one of many GLBT organizations in the Boston area enthusiastically joined the Saint Patrick's Peace Parade, the alternative peoples parade. Because of another Massachusetts's Court decision the "Saint Patrick's Peace Parade" had to walk one mile behind the traditional parade. With only three weeks to organize the parade when it steped off this little parade had over 500 participants, grand marshals, a Duck Boat, a band, veterans, peace groups, church groups, GBLT groups, labor groups and more. It was a wonderful parade and was very warmly welcomed by the residents of South Boston.
This year, once again, Veterans For Peace submitted an application to the "Allied War Council" for the inclusion of the small "Saint Patrick's Peace Parade" into the larger parade. Once again the Veterans were denied;
"Your application has been reviewed, we refer you to the Supreme Court ruling on June 19,1995your application to participate in the March 18,2012 Saint Patrick's Day Parade had been denied"
No reason given as to why, just denied. This should be unacceptable to every citizen of Boston, especially the politicians who will be flocking to the Breakfast and Roast on March 18th. This kind of exclusion should not be condoned nor supported by anyone in the City of Boston, especially our elected political leaders.
Just in case the Allied War Council has not noticed, South Boston is no longer a strictly Irish Catholic community. In fact the Irish are no longer a majority in South Boston. The community is much more diverse in 2012 in ethnicity, life styles, religion, points of view and politics then it was forty years ago. Times have changed, the City has changed, the population has changed, social norms have changed. People are much more accepting of those that may be different, have a different religion, customs or ideas. We are a much more inclusive society, everyone that is except the antiquated Allied War Veterans.
It is time for the Saint Patrick's Day Parade to be inclusive of these differing groups. It is time for the Saint Patrick's Day Parade to be reflective of the changes in our culture. It is time for this parade to include groups of differing life styles, points of views and politics or the City of Boston should take back this parade. There is no place in Boston or anywhere in this country for bigotry, hatred, censorship, discrimination and exclusion. This should be a day of celebration, for all the peoples of the great City of Boston to come together, to celebrate Saint Patrick and our Irish History and Heritage. In 2012 this parade should be inclusive and also celebrate what makes us Americans, what makes this country great, our multi-ethnic diversity, differing life-styles, religious affiliations, differing politics and points of views. All of us should wear the green, no one should be excluded, since on Saint Patrick's Day we are all Irish.
Veterans For Peace
Call for Help
Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade
Alternative Peoples Parade for Peace, Equality, Jobs, Social and Economic Justice
When: Sunday, March 18-2:00 PM
Where: South Boston- form up outside the Broadway Redline Station
Please join us for our Second Annual Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade, the Alternative Peoples Parade for Peace, Equality, Jobs, Social and Economic Justice.
Once again Veterans for Peace have been denied to walk in the Saint Patrick’s Parade in South Boston. Last year they gave us a reason for the denial, “They did not want the word Peace associated with the word Veteran”. Well last year, in three weeks time, we pulled our own permit and had our own parade with 500 participants. We had to walk one mile behind the traditional parade. We had lead cars with our older vets asGrand Marshals, Vets For Peace, MFSO, Code Pink and numerous other local peace groups.
Also: Seventeen years ago the gay and bisexual groups in Boston were also denied. They were the first groups we reached out to and invited them to walk in our parade. Last year we had Join the Impact with us. We also had church / religious groups, and labor. Last year we stole the press, it was a controversy and we received front page coverage and editorial articles in all of the major newspapers, radio and television reports.
This year we anticipate 2,000 people in our parade, multiple bands, we have a Duck Boat, the Ragging Grannies will be singing from the top of the boat. We have a trolley for older folks not able to walk. We may have floats. We will have multiple street bands, a large religious division, a large labor division and “Occupy Everywhere” division, including Occupy Boston and numerous other Occupy groups.
All we need is you, your VFP chapter, peace groups, GLBT groups, religious and labor groups and Occupy groups. Please come to Boston and join us in this fabulous parade.
Please see the attached flyer and a description of the Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade, it’s history and where we are.
On behalf of the Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade Organizing Committee.
Thank you,
Pat Scanlon (VN 69’)
Coordinator, VFP Chapter 9, Smedley Butler Brigade
patscanlonmusic@yahoo.com
978-475-1776
*******
Markin comment:
As if I needed any extra push to join in this VFP action I have reposted a blog that pretty clearly explains why I am always ready to march with my fellow VFPers, any time any place.
Re-posted From American Left History- Thursday, November 11, 2010
*A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan!
Markin comment:
Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system that governs us has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.
Now normally in Boston, and in most places, a Veterans Day parade means a bunch of Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) or American Legion-types taking time off from drinking at their post bars (“the battle of the barstool”) and donning the old overstuffed uniform and heading out on to Main Street to be waved at, and cheered on, by like-minded, thankful citizens. And of course that happened this time as well. What also happened in Boston this year (and other years but I have not been involved in previous marches) was that the Veterans For Peace (VFP) organized an anti-war march as part of their “Veterans Day” program. Said march to be held at the same place and time as the official one.
Previously there had been a certain amount of trouble, although I am not sure that it came to blows, between the two groups. (I have only heard third-hand reports on previous events.) You know, the "super-patriots" vs. “commie symps” thing that has been going on as long as there have been ex-soldiers (and others) who have differed from the bourgeois party pro-war line. In any case the way this impasse had been resolved previously, and the way the parameters were set this year as well, was that the VFP took up the rear of the official parade, and took up the rear in an obvious way. Separated from the main body of the official parade by a medical emergency truck. Nice, right? Something of the old playground “I’ll take my ball and bat and go home” by the "officials" was in the air on that one.
But here is where there is a certain amount of rough plebeian justice, a small dose for those on the side of the angels, in the world. In order to form up, and this was done knowingly by VFP organizers, the official marchers, the bands and battalions that make up such a march, had to “run the gauntlet” of dove emblem-emblazoned VFP banners waving frantically directly in front of their faces as they passed by. Moreover, although we formed the caboose of this thing the crowds along the parade route actually waited as the official paraders marched by and waved and clapped at our procession. Be still my heart. But that response just provides another example of the ‘street cred” that ex-soldiers have on the anti-war question. Now, if there is to be any really serious justice in the world, if only these vets would go beyond the “bring the troops home” and embrace- immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S./Allied Troops from Iraq and Afghanistan then we could maybe start to get somewhere out on those streets. But today I was very glad to be fighting for our communist future among those who know first-hand about the dark side of the American experience. No question.
************
From Veterans For Peace:
Saint Patrick's Peace Parade
Peoples Parade for Peace, Equality, Jobs, Social and Economic Justice
Saint Patrick, the patron Saint of Ireland was a man of peace. Saint Patrick's Day should be a day to celebrate Saint Patrick and the Irish Heritage of Boston and the contributions of the Irish throughout American history. In Boston the parade should be a day to celebrate the changes in our culture, the ethnic, religious diversity, points of views and politics of our great City of Boston. For on Saint Patrick's Day we are all Irish.
Saint Patrick Day parades have been held in Boston since 1737 (Unofficial parades). In 1901 Evacuation Day was declared a holiday in the City of Boston. Because of the coincidence of the proximity of the two holidays the celebrations were combined and for the past forty years the Allied War Veterans Council have been organizing the Saint Patrick's Day Parade, turning what should be the celebration of Saint Patrick, the Irish Heritage and History into a military parade.
In 2011, the local chapter of Veterans For Peace, the Smedley Butler Brigade submitted an application to march in the traditional Saint Patrick's Day Parade. Veterans For Peace is a national veterans organization with 130 chapters across the country. The Smedley Butler Brigade has over 200 members locally. It's members range from veterans from WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf, Iraq and the Afghanistan War. All Veterans For Peace wanted to do was to march in the Saint Patrick's Day Parade and carry their flags and banners. Their application was denied by the "Allied War Council". When the organizer of the parade, Phil Wuschke, was asked why their application was denied, he stated, "Because they did not want to have the word peace associated with the word Veteran". They were also told that they were too political, as if the Saint Patrick's Day Parade and other activities surrounding the parade are not political.
Veterans For Peace subsequently filed for their own permit for the Saint Patrick's Peace Parade. Seventeen years ago, the gay and bisexual community (GLBT) had also applied to march in the parade and like the veterans were denied. GBLT sued the Allied War Council and the case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, resulting in the Hurley Decision, named after Wacko Hurley, the ruler supreme of the parade. This decision states that who ever is organizing the parade has the right to say who is in and who can be excluded from the parade, no questions asked. Even though the City of Boston will spend in excess of $300,000.00 in support of this parade, they have no say in who can be in the parade. The Saint Patrick's Day Parade should be sponsored by the City of Boston and not a private group, who have secretive, private meetings, not open to the public and who practice discrimination and exclusion.
In the case of Veterans For Peace, if you are carrying a gun or drive a tank you can be in the parade, if you are a veteran of the US Military and carrying a peace symbol, you are excluded. Once Veterans For Peace had their parade permit in hand the first group they reached out to was the gay and bisexual community in Boston. "You were not allowed to walk in their parade seventeen years ago, how would you like to walk in our parade" The response was immediate and Join the Impact, one of many GLBT organizations in the Boston area enthusiastically joined the Saint Patrick's Peace Parade, the alternative peoples parade. Because of another Massachusetts's Court decision the "Saint Patrick's Peace Parade" had to walk one mile behind the traditional parade. With only three weeks to organize the parade when it steped off this little parade had over 500 participants, grand marshals, a Duck Boat, a band, veterans, peace groups, church groups, GBLT groups, labor groups and more. It was a wonderful parade and was very warmly welcomed by the residents of South Boston.
This year, once again, Veterans For Peace submitted an application to the "Allied War Council" for the inclusion of the small "Saint Patrick's Peace Parade" into the larger parade. Once again the Veterans were denied;
"Your application has been reviewed, we refer you to the Supreme Court ruling on June 19,1995your application to participate in the March 18,2012 Saint Patrick's Day Parade had been denied"
No reason given as to why, just denied. This should be unacceptable to every citizen of Boston, especially the politicians who will be flocking to the Breakfast and Roast on March 18th. This kind of exclusion should not be condoned nor supported by anyone in the City of Boston, especially our elected political leaders.
Just in case the Allied War Council has not noticed, South Boston is no longer a strictly Irish Catholic community. In fact the Irish are no longer a majority in South Boston. The community is much more diverse in 2012 in ethnicity, life styles, religion, points of view and politics then it was forty years ago. Times have changed, the City has changed, the population has changed, social norms have changed. People are much more accepting of those that may be different, have a different religion, customs or ideas. We are a much more inclusive society, everyone that is except the antiquated Allied War Veterans.
It is time for the Saint Patrick's Day Parade to be inclusive of these differing groups. It is time for the Saint Patrick's Day Parade to be reflective of the changes in our culture. It is time for this parade to include groups of differing life styles, points of views and politics or the City of Boston should take back this parade. There is no place in Boston or anywhere in this country for bigotry, hatred, censorship, discrimination and exclusion. This should be a day of celebration, for all the peoples of the great City of Boston to come together, to celebrate Saint Patrick and our Irish History and Heritage. In 2012 this parade should be inclusive and also celebrate what makes us Americans, what makes this country great, our multi-ethnic diversity, differing life-styles, religious affiliations, differing politics and points of views. All of us should wear the green, no one should be excluded, since on Saint Patrick's Day we are all Irish.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Poet's Corner- A Poem To While The Class Stuggle By- Claude Mckay's "If We Must Die" -In Honor Of The 92nd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March 1919)
Markin comment:
Sometimes a poem (or a song, play, or picture, but usually a poem) says more in a few lines than all the "high" communist propaganda we throw out about the stakes for our side in the class struggle. Claude McKay's If We Must Die is one of them.
If We Must Die by Claude McKay
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Sometimes a poem (or a song, play, or picture, but usually a poem) says more in a few lines than all the "high" communist propaganda we throw out about the stakes for our side in the class struggle. Claude McKay's If We Must Die is one of them.
If We Must Die by Claude McKay
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Burying History of Chicanos and All Oppressed-Tucson School Book Ban
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 996
17 February 2012
Burying History of Chicanos and All Oppressed-Tucson School Book Ban
In another chapter out of Arizona’s Anglo-chauvinist, anti-immigrant handbook, last month Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) officials stormed into classrooms to confiscate books used in the Mexican American Studies (MAS) program, effectively banning them. The pretext was that books such as Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, Critical Race Theory and Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years violated a 2010 state law axing ethnic studies. Specifically, the law prohibits any courses that are “designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group,” “advocate ethnic solidarity” or allegedly “promote resentment toward a race or class of people.” Presumably, the texts are to be replaced by the likes of Little House on the Prairie.
In signing the 2010 law, Republican governor Jan Brewer—notorious for the earlier apartheid-style anti-immigrant law SB1070—aimed her fire at the MAS program in Tucson, where 60 percent of the student body is Latino. Signaling the likelihood of broader censorship, the language in the law also goes after courses that supposedly “promote the overthrow of the U.S. government.” Consequently, Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Brazilian radical intellectual Paulo Freire, which references the term “oppression” as used in the 1848 Communist Manifesto, was added to the list of forbidden works.
Although a state-ordered audit last year concluded that the Tucson MAS program broke no law and cultivated a climate “conducive to student achievement,” Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal was determined to bring the program down. Threatening to pull around $14 million of state funding from the school district, Huppenthal declared that MAS courses promote the “harmful, dispiriting message” that “Latino minorities have been and continue to be oppressed by a Caucasian majority.” This in Arizona, of all places, where for years “English fluency police” were sent in to monitor teachers, threatening them with dismissal for having heavy accents!
Last month, angry students marched to the TUSD headquarters in protest against the suspension of MAS. Assistant Superintendent Lupita Garcia railed at them that Mexico is where Mexican studies is taught, “this country is called America and we study U.S. history.” In fact, U.S. history includes the far from minor detail that the entire Southwest, including Arizona, and more was stolen from Mexico. Imitating Newt “let poor kids scrub toilets” Gingrich, administrators punished protesters by assigning them to Saturday janitorial duties—a glaring demonstration of the utter racist contempt the bourgeois authorities have for the Latino poor.
The banning of MAS and its instructional texts is part and parcel of an ongoing crackdown on immigrants across the country. In states like Arizona and Alabama, police have been given free rein to interrogate and detain anyone appearing to be a “foreigner.” There, and everywhere else, the cops continue their racial profiling of blacks, Latinos, Muslims and other minorities. As Republican presidential hopefuls bait each other on who can be the most virulently bigoted against immigrants, it is the federal government under Democrat Barack Obama that is the main enforcer of anti-immigrant repression. Last year, the government set a record of some 400,000 deportations, due largely to the expansion of the “Secure Communities” program initiated by George W. Bush.
The capitalist rulers’ crackdown has fueled nativist rants painting immigrants as criminals and bemoaning the 14th Amendment—a central gain of the Civil War granting citizenship to children born on American soil—in order to go after so-called “anchor babies.” Against both the Republican and Democratic parties of capital, we say that anyone who has made it to this country should have the same rights as those born here: Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! And after socialist revolution rips power from the U.S. capitalist rulers, a workers government would return to Mexico certain contiguous regions of the Southwest that were seized from Mexico.
Illustrating the ideological thrust of the campaign against “un-American” ethnic studies, Huppenthal singled out a MAS classroom that had a poster of Che Guevara, telling Democracy Now (18 January) that students were being “indoctrinated into a Paulo Freirean-Marxian kind of style of thinking about racial attitudes and creating hatred.” When it suits his purposes, Huppenthal, who ran for Superintendent on a campaign to “stop La Raza,” also compares the MAS texts to Hitler’s Mein Kampf—this from Arizona’s chief book-burner!
Programs like ethnic studies are the result of social struggle—especially the civil rights and Vietnam antiwar movements and other movements of the ’60s and ’70s—and not the “benevolence” of an enlightened ruling class. In fact, Tucson’s MAS program resulted from a 1974 federal desegregation order following a suit by black and Latino families. But with the rollback of school integration and the ratcheting up of anti-immigrant racism, the bourgeois authorities are increasingly burying any teaching of the long history of racial and ethnic oppression in this country. We defend ethnic studies courses as part of our defense of the oppressed and our fight for free, quality, integrated education for all, from preschool to postgraduate.
While ethnic studies programs cover the history of blacks, Native Americans and other minorities—a history not otherwise taught through whitewashed U.S. textbooks—they do not fundamentally challenge the dominant ideology of the racist capitalist system. In fact, such programs are typically packaged to promote the myth that one can escape oppression and become “empowered” by being represented in this so-called “democracy.” The education system as a whole reinforces bourgeois ideology, serving the interests of the ruling class.
The uncensored truth is that racial oppression and national chauvinism are endemic to capitalism, wielded by the ruling class to divide the proletariat—i.e., the working class—and weaken its struggles. As a Marxist newspaper offering a revolutionary perspective, we quote what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels laid out in the Communist Manifesto:
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class.... In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
It will take workers revolution to usher in the dawn of socialist society. As we stated in a previous article on the ban of ethnic studies in Arizona (WV No. 963, 27 August 2010): “It will ultimately require the overthrow of the capitalist system to end oppression—and for the real history of the struggles against oppression and exploitation to be taught.”
Workers Vanguard No. 996
17 February 2012
Burying History of Chicanos and All Oppressed-Tucson School Book Ban
In another chapter out of Arizona’s Anglo-chauvinist, anti-immigrant handbook, last month Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) officials stormed into classrooms to confiscate books used in the Mexican American Studies (MAS) program, effectively banning them. The pretext was that books such as Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, Critical Race Theory and Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years violated a 2010 state law axing ethnic studies. Specifically, the law prohibits any courses that are “designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group,” “advocate ethnic solidarity” or allegedly “promote resentment toward a race or class of people.” Presumably, the texts are to be replaced by the likes of Little House on the Prairie.
In signing the 2010 law, Republican governor Jan Brewer—notorious for the earlier apartheid-style anti-immigrant law SB1070—aimed her fire at the MAS program in Tucson, where 60 percent of the student body is Latino. Signaling the likelihood of broader censorship, the language in the law also goes after courses that supposedly “promote the overthrow of the U.S. government.” Consequently, Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Brazilian radical intellectual Paulo Freire, which references the term “oppression” as used in the 1848 Communist Manifesto, was added to the list of forbidden works.
Although a state-ordered audit last year concluded that the Tucson MAS program broke no law and cultivated a climate “conducive to student achievement,” Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal was determined to bring the program down. Threatening to pull around $14 million of state funding from the school district, Huppenthal declared that MAS courses promote the “harmful, dispiriting message” that “Latino minorities have been and continue to be oppressed by a Caucasian majority.” This in Arizona, of all places, where for years “English fluency police” were sent in to monitor teachers, threatening them with dismissal for having heavy accents!
Last month, angry students marched to the TUSD headquarters in protest against the suspension of MAS. Assistant Superintendent Lupita Garcia railed at them that Mexico is where Mexican studies is taught, “this country is called America and we study U.S. history.” In fact, U.S. history includes the far from minor detail that the entire Southwest, including Arizona, and more was stolen from Mexico. Imitating Newt “let poor kids scrub toilets” Gingrich, administrators punished protesters by assigning them to Saturday janitorial duties—a glaring demonstration of the utter racist contempt the bourgeois authorities have for the Latino poor.
The banning of MAS and its instructional texts is part and parcel of an ongoing crackdown on immigrants across the country. In states like Arizona and Alabama, police have been given free rein to interrogate and detain anyone appearing to be a “foreigner.” There, and everywhere else, the cops continue their racial profiling of blacks, Latinos, Muslims and other minorities. As Republican presidential hopefuls bait each other on who can be the most virulently bigoted against immigrants, it is the federal government under Democrat Barack Obama that is the main enforcer of anti-immigrant repression. Last year, the government set a record of some 400,000 deportations, due largely to the expansion of the “Secure Communities” program initiated by George W. Bush.
The capitalist rulers’ crackdown has fueled nativist rants painting immigrants as criminals and bemoaning the 14th Amendment—a central gain of the Civil War granting citizenship to children born on American soil—in order to go after so-called “anchor babies.” Against both the Republican and Democratic parties of capital, we say that anyone who has made it to this country should have the same rights as those born here: Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! And after socialist revolution rips power from the U.S. capitalist rulers, a workers government would return to Mexico certain contiguous regions of the Southwest that were seized from Mexico.
Illustrating the ideological thrust of the campaign against “un-American” ethnic studies, Huppenthal singled out a MAS classroom that had a poster of Che Guevara, telling Democracy Now (18 January) that students were being “indoctrinated into a Paulo Freirean-Marxian kind of style of thinking about racial attitudes and creating hatred.” When it suits his purposes, Huppenthal, who ran for Superintendent on a campaign to “stop La Raza,” also compares the MAS texts to Hitler’s Mein Kampf—this from Arizona’s chief book-burner!
Programs like ethnic studies are the result of social struggle—especially the civil rights and Vietnam antiwar movements and other movements of the ’60s and ’70s—and not the “benevolence” of an enlightened ruling class. In fact, Tucson’s MAS program resulted from a 1974 federal desegregation order following a suit by black and Latino families. But with the rollback of school integration and the ratcheting up of anti-immigrant racism, the bourgeois authorities are increasingly burying any teaching of the long history of racial and ethnic oppression in this country. We defend ethnic studies courses as part of our defense of the oppressed and our fight for free, quality, integrated education for all, from preschool to postgraduate.
While ethnic studies programs cover the history of blacks, Native Americans and other minorities—a history not otherwise taught through whitewashed U.S. textbooks—they do not fundamentally challenge the dominant ideology of the racist capitalist system. In fact, such programs are typically packaged to promote the myth that one can escape oppression and become “empowered” by being represented in this so-called “democracy.” The education system as a whole reinforces bourgeois ideology, serving the interests of the ruling class.
The uncensored truth is that racial oppression and national chauvinism are endemic to capitalism, wielded by the ruling class to divide the proletariat—i.e., the working class—and weaken its struggles. As a Marxist newspaper offering a revolutionary perspective, we quote what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels laid out in the Communist Manifesto:
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class.... In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
It will take workers revolution to usher in the dawn of socialist society. As we stated in a previous article on the ban of ethnic studies in Arizona (WV No. 963, 27 August 2010): “It will ultimately require the overthrow of the capitalist system to end oppression—and for the real history of the struggles against oppression and exploitation to be taught.”
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Greece: Defend Electric Power Unionists!-For A Workers Government Now!
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 996
17 February 2012
Greece: Defend Electric Power Unionists!
The following February 4 protest letter was sent by the Komitee für soziale Verteidigung (Committee for Social Defense), which is associated with the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany, to Greek prime minister Lucas Papademos and to his Labor and Justice ministers.
The Komitee für soziale Verteidigung strongly protests the outrageous persecution of 15 trade unionists of the Greek public power company union, GENOP-DEH, including its president, Nikos Photopoulos. The unionists had occupied the offices of the state power company DEH, to stop the company printing letters cutting off the electricity supply to thousands of families who refuse to pay the new property tax and thousands more who can no longer pay their bills. Squads of riot police violently removed the unionists, who were then charged with trespass, “obstructing the functioning of a public institution” and “obstructing the forces of order.” For their courageous action in defense of working and poor families they now face possible jail terms of up to five years.
The Greek capitalist government’s agencies of repression are carrying out the dictates of the European Union, which is dominated by German imperialism. From its formation, the purpose of the European Union was to serve the interests of the imperialist powers and their junior partners in squeezing their own working classes and attacking their unions, and more effectively dominating the weakest countries like Greece. The multiethnic working class in Germany has also seen its wages, pensions and living standards driven down by the German capitalists’ drive to rule Europe.
Class-conscious workers in Germany applaud the actions of the victimized trade unionists. The KfsV will make this case known to workers here. In solidarity with our class brothers in Greece, we demand: Drop all charges against the Greek power worker unionists!
Workers Vanguard No. 996
17 February 2012
Greece: Defend Electric Power Unionists!
The following February 4 protest letter was sent by the Komitee für soziale Verteidigung (Committee for Social Defense), which is associated with the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany, to Greek prime minister Lucas Papademos and to his Labor and Justice ministers.
The Komitee für soziale Verteidigung strongly protests the outrageous persecution of 15 trade unionists of the Greek public power company union, GENOP-DEH, including its president, Nikos Photopoulos. The unionists had occupied the offices of the state power company DEH, to stop the company printing letters cutting off the electricity supply to thousands of families who refuse to pay the new property tax and thousands more who can no longer pay their bills. Squads of riot police violently removed the unionists, who were then charged with trespass, “obstructing the functioning of a public institution” and “obstructing the forces of order.” For their courageous action in defense of working and poor families they now face possible jail terms of up to five years.
The Greek capitalist government’s agencies of repression are carrying out the dictates of the European Union, which is dominated by German imperialism. From its formation, the purpose of the European Union was to serve the interests of the imperialist powers and their junior partners in squeezing their own working classes and attacking their unions, and more effectively dominating the weakest countries like Greece. The multiethnic working class in Germany has also seen its wages, pensions and living standards driven down by the German capitalists’ drive to rule Europe.
Class-conscious workers in Germany applaud the actions of the victimized trade unionists. The KfsV will make this case known to workers here. In solidarity with our class brothers in Greece, we demand: Drop all charges against the Greek power worker unionists!
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-"No Illusions in Police “Reform”—For Workers Revolution!"-Poltical Lessons For Those In The Occupy Movement Who Are Looking For The Way Forward
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 996
17 February 2012
Spartacist Speaker at Occupy Oakland Forum
No Illusions in Police “Reform”—For Workers Revolution!
OAKLAND—The city administration and Oakland Police Department (OPD), backed by the local bourgeois media, have been on a campaign of arrests, smears and intimidation against Occupy Oakland protesters. Following the arrest of 409 people at a January 28 protest, a dozen activists have been charged with a combination of felonies and misdemeanors. “Stay away” orders bar them from being within 300 yards of City Hall and Frank Ogawa Plaza (renamed Oscar Grant Plaza by protesters in remembrance of the young black worker killed by a BART transit cop in 2009).
At least one activist, a black man known as Truth, has been in jail since his arrest the night of the November 2 mass protest at the Oakland port. Marcel Johnson, a black homeless man better known as Khali who was part of the Occupy Oakland encampment, has been incarcerated since his arrest on December 16 and could face a life sentence under California’s draconian “three strikes” law. Free Truth, Khali and all Occupy protesters! Drop all the charges!
At a February 1 Occupy Oakland press conference, many of those arrested recounted the horrors they experienced after being trapped and rounded up by police the week before. Dozens were crammed into cells designed to hold five people at most. Several were held for 50 hours or more without charges. Many, including people with HIV, were denied their medication. Meanwhile, the media has joined Democratic mayor Jean Quan and the City Council in accusing protesters of “violence,” particularly targeting anarchists. In a menacing move, the San Francisco Chronicle posted on its Web site the names and addresses of several of those arrested on January 28. What really drove the Oakland city administration and local media crazy was that some protesters had burned an American flag they found inside City Hall. Several Occupy Oakland activists have since taken to carrying American flags at demonstrations in an effort to show their patriotic credentials.
A February 7 City Council meeting was convened to vote on a resolution allowing the use of any “lawful” means to prevent future shutdowns at the port and strengthening police enforcement powers against protesters overall. Representatives of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union spoke against the resolution, pointing out that it would be aimed against the union. The resolution, which failed, had been introduced by Councilman Ignacio De La Fuente, who earlier denounced Occupy Oakland for engaging in “domestic terrorism.”
Addressing the City Council meeting, prominent Occupy Oakland activist Barucha Peller stated: “I know you guys used to be progressive. But right now you’re on the wrong side of history” (San Francisco Chronicle, 8 February). The idea that these capitalist politicians could ever represent anything but the interests of the bourgeoisie is a stark expression of how the populist notion of the “99 percent” promotes illusions in American bourgeois democracy and its representatives.
Under the guise of debating “tactics” for “our movement,” the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO) treacherously denounced the few dozen protesters who went to City Hall late at night on January 28 after braving hours of police tear gas, flash-bang grenades and rubber bullets. Accusing them of “vandalism” and “stupid and inexcusable” actions, the ISO lectured that “this irresponsible and backward behavior handed city officials and the media a perfect weapon to smear the whole movement” (“The Backlash Against Occupy Oakland,” socialistworker.org, 6 February). In fact, the ISO is handing the bourgeois media and politicians more ammunition by echoing the violence-baiting dished out against protesters.
The brutality of the OPD has become so infamous that a federal judge is threatening to put the department under receivership. This stems from a nearly decade-old settlement of the case of the Oakland “Riders”—a gang of cops unleashed on the West Oakland ghetto. The repeated cop attacks against Occupy Oakland activists have brought increased attention to the OPD, which has been ordered to comply with various “reforms.”
When a Citizens Police Review Board meeting originally scheduled for February 9 was “indefinitely postponed,” Occupy Oakland organized its own “forum on police actions,” which was attended by up to 500 people. A video presentation powerfully showed the brutality meted out to protesters since late October, and many individuals spoke at the end of the forum about the violence they regularly face at the hands of the cops, whether as demonstrators or as residents of Oakland’s ghettos. But the political focus of the event, exemplified by the official speakers, including members of the review board, was how best to “reform” the OPD and bring it under “community control.” Police Chief Howard Jordan was even invited to a “Q&A” session (of course, he did not show). We print below the remarks of a Spartacist League comrade during the “public speaking section” at the end of the forum.
* * *
I am speaking for the Spartacist League; some of you may have seen our paper, Workers Vanguard. We are here to say that we defend Occupy Oakland protesters against police repression and demand that everyone who’s been arrested be released and that all charges be dropped. Plain and simple, the cops are the enemy. They’re part of the capitalist state, which exists to defend the interests and rule of the bourgeoisie against the workers and the oppressed. And no amount of civilian review boards, community control or federal oversight or takeover is going to change that. All these things are a sham, designed to whitewash the cops while giving the illusion of accountability. They’re designed to clean up their image so the cops can carry out their repression all the more effectively.
The cops that killed Oscar Grant and terrorize the ghettos are part of the same capitalist system that imprisons over two million people, most of them black and Latino, in this country and wages war abroad. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat in the White House. When Quan was running, you were sold a bill of goods that she was “progressive.” The same bill of goods was sold about Obama. In fact, Obama’s message to black people is racial oppression. His message to immigrants is deportation. His message to working people is union-busting. His message to the population is to shred our rights. And his message to the world is imperialist war. There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about the flag that was burned outside of City Hall. Well, the truth is, from Haiti to the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, that flag is dripping with the blood of millions of American imperialism’s victims.
Their styles might be different, but the Democrats and the Republicans are capitalist parties and they serve the same capitalist class, and you better remember that when the elections come around and they try to sell you the poison pill of “lesser evilism.” But the “99 percent” populism of Occupy disguises the class nature of the capitalist state and its parties. It is counterposed to the understanding that the fundamental class divide in society is between the working class and the capitalist class. What we need is a workers party to fight for a socialist revolution. What we need is a new ruling class, the workers.
Workers Vanguard No. 996
17 February 2012
Spartacist Speaker at Occupy Oakland Forum
No Illusions in Police “Reform”—For Workers Revolution!
OAKLAND—The city administration and Oakland Police Department (OPD), backed by the local bourgeois media, have been on a campaign of arrests, smears and intimidation against Occupy Oakland protesters. Following the arrest of 409 people at a January 28 protest, a dozen activists have been charged with a combination of felonies and misdemeanors. “Stay away” orders bar them from being within 300 yards of City Hall and Frank Ogawa Plaza (renamed Oscar Grant Plaza by protesters in remembrance of the young black worker killed by a BART transit cop in 2009).
At least one activist, a black man known as Truth, has been in jail since his arrest the night of the November 2 mass protest at the Oakland port. Marcel Johnson, a black homeless man better known as Khali who was part of the Occupy Oakland encampment, has been incarcerated since his arrest on December 16 and could face a life sentence under California’s draconian “three strikes” law. Free Truth, Khali and all Occupy protesters! Drop all the charges!
At a February 1 Occupy Oakland press conference, many of those arrested recounted the horrors they experienced after being trapped and rounded up by police the week before. Dozens were crammed into cells designed to hold five people at most. Several were held for 50 hours or more without charges. Many, including people with HIV, were denied their medication. Meanwhile, the media has joined Democratic mayor Jean Quan and the City Council in accusing protesters of “violence,” particularly targeting anarchists. In a menacing move, the San Francisco Chronicle posted on its Web site the names and addresses of several of those arrested on January 28. What really drove the Oakland city administration and local media crazy was that some protesters had burned an American flag they found inside City Hall. Several Occupy Oakland activists have since taken to carrying American flags at demonstrations in an effort to show their patriotic credentials.
A February 7 City Council meeting was convened to vote on a resolution allowing the use of any “lawful” means to prevent future shutdowns at the port and strengthening police enforcement powers against protesters overall. Representatives of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union spoke against the resolution, pointing out that it would be aimed against the union. The resolution, which failed, had been introduced by Councilman Ignacio De La Fuente, who earlier denounced Occupy Oakland for engaging in “domestic terrorism.”
Addressing the City Council meeting, prominent Occupy Oakland activist Barucha Peller stated: “I know you guys used to be progressive. But right now you’re on the wrong side of history” (San Francisco Chronicle, 8 February). The idea that these capitalist politicians could ever represent anything but the interests of the bourgeoisie is a stark expression of how the populist notion of the “99 percent” promotes illusions in American bourgeois democracy and its representatives.
Under the guise of debating “tactics” for “our movement,” the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO) treacherously denounced the few dozen protesters who went to City Hall late at night on January 28 after braving hours of police tear gas, flash-bang grenades and rubber bullets. Accusing them of “vandalism” and “stupid and inexcusable” actions, the ISO lectured that “this irresponsible and backward behavior handed city officials and the media a perfect weapon to smear the whole movement” (“The Backlash Against Occupy Oakland,” socialistworker.org, 6 February). In fact, the ISO is handing the bourgeois media and politicians more ammunition by echoing the violence-baiting dished out against protesters.
The brutality of the OPD has become so infamous that a federal judge is threatening to put the department under receivership. This stems from a nearly decade-old settlement of the case of the Oakland “Riders”—a gang of cops unleashed on the West Oakland ghetto. The repeated cop attacks against Occupy Oakland activists have brought increased attention to the OPD, which has been ordered to comply with various “reforms.”
When a Citizens Police Review Board meeting originally scheduled for February 9 was “indefinitely postponed,” Occupy Oakland organized its own “forum on police actions,” which was attended by up to 500 people. A video presentation powerfully showed the brutality meted out to protesters since late October, and many individuals spoke at the end of the forum about the violence they regularly face at the hands of the cops, whether as demonstrators or as residents of Oakland’s ghettos. But the political focus of the event, exemplified by the official speakers, including members of the review board, was how best to “reform” the OPD and bring it under “community control.” Police Chief Howard Jordan was even invited to a “Q&A” session (of course, he did not show). We print below the remarks of a Spartacist League comrade during the “public speaking section” at the end of the forum.
* * *
I am speaking for the Spartacist League; some of you may have seen our paper, Workers Vanguard. We are here to say that we defend Occupy Oakland protesters against police repression and demand that everyone who’s been arrested be released and that all charges be dropped. Plain and simple, the cops are the enemy. They’re part of the capitalist state, which exists to defend the interests and rule of the bourgeoisie against the workers and the oppressed. And no amount of civilian review boards, community control or federal oversight or takeover is going to change that. All these things are a sham, designed to whitewash the cops while giving the illusion of accountability. They’re designed to clean up their image so the cops can carry out their repression all the more effectively.
The cops that killed Oscar Grant and terrorize the ghettos are part of the same capitalist system that imprisons over two million people, most of them black and Latino, in this country and wages war abroad. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat in the White House. When Quan was running, you were sold a bill of goods that she was “progressive.” The same bill of goods was sold about Obama. In fact, Obama’s message to black people is racial oppression. His message to immigrants is deportation. His message to working people is union-busting. His message to the population is to shred our rights. And his message to the world is imperialist war. There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about the flag that was burned outside of City Hall. Well, the truth is, from Haiti to the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, that flag is dripping with the blood of millions of American imperialism’s victims.
Their styles might be different, but the Democrats and the Republicans are capitalist parties and they serve the same capitalist class, and you better remember that when the elections come around and they try to sell you the poison pill of “lesser evilism.” But the “99 percent” populism of Occupy disguises the class nature of the capitalist state and its parties. It is counterposed to the understanding that the fundamental class divide in society is between the working class and the capitalist class. What we need is a workers party to fight for a socialist revolution. What we need is a new ruling class, the workers.
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Black Liberation: A Key Task of Proletarian Revolution
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 996
17 February 2012
Black Liberation: A Key Task of Proletarian Revolution
(Quote of the Week)
To celebrate Black History Month, we print below an excerpt from a 1933 document by Max Shachtman, then a leader of the U.S. Trotskyist movement. Addressing the central importance of the fight against black oppression, the document was written a few years before the explosive class battles by black and white workers that built industrial unions in this country. What Shachtman stressed at a time of Jim Crow segregation in the South is just as true today: the liberation of black people in the U.S. can be achieved only through the overthrow of capitalism by the revolutionary proletariat.
The Civil War and the Reconstruction Period, so far as the bourgeoisie was concerned, completed the bourgeois democratic revolution commenced in 1776 with the declaration of independence from England. For the Negro masses, this second revolution—to destroy the stranglehold of slavocracy over the unfoldment of industrial capitalism—yielded all that the democratic revolution in this country will ever yield them. It gave them “legal” rights; it freed them from chattel slavery. It ended with their betrayal: the “legal” rights were confined to paper; the emancipation ended with the partial restitution in parts of the South of semi-serfdom instead of with converting the plantation slaves into free landed peasants, as the French bourgeois revolution did. More than this, the bourgeoisie could not give. Since that time, these outdated economic forms have been merged into the general capitalist economy of a decadent, parasitic imperialism.…
There is only one correct way of formulating the problem of the remnants of slavery and serfdom under which hundreds of thousands of southern Negroes live to this day, and it gives the key to the whole problem: the Negro was liberated from chattel slavery as a by-product of the military-political struggle of the progressive northern bourgeoisie to consolidate the nation on a modern capitalist basis, free from the fetters of a reactionary slavocracy. The Negro will not only be liberated from the wage slavery of today but the survivals of feudalism and slavery will be exterminated, as a “by-product” of the military-political struggle of the last progressive class in American society—the class of black and white proletarian—to establish a socialist nation by means of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The historical aims of the imperialist bourgeoisie are not incompatible with the preservation of social and caste inequality for oppressed peoples, or with the preservation of antiquated modes of production and exchange. The historical aims of the socialist proletariat are incompatible with the maintenance of any anti-democratic institutions, of any capitalist or pre-capitalist modes of production. In this fact lies the only guarantee that the victorious working class will truly and completely emancipate the Negro masses by emancipating itself.
—Max Shachtman, “Communism and the Negro” (1933), reprinted as Race and Revolution (Verso, 2003)
Workers Vanguard No. 996
17 February 2012
Black Liberation: A Key Task of Proletarian Revolution
(Quote of the Week)
To celebrate Black History Month, we print below an excerpt from a 1933 document by Max Shachtman, then a leader of the U.S. Trotskyist movement. Addressing the central importance of the fight against black oppression, the document was written a few years before the explosive class battles by black and white workers that built industrial unions in this country. What Shachtman stressed at a time of Jim Crow segregation in the South is just as true today: the liberation of black people in the U.S. can be achieved only through the overthrow of capitalism by the revolutionary proletariat.
The Civil War and the Reconstruction Period, so far as the bourgeoisie was concerned, completed the bourgeois democratic revolution commenced in 1776 with the declaration of independence from England. For the Negro masses, this second revolution—to destroy the stranglehold of slavocracy over the unfoldment of industrial capitalism—yielded all that the democratic revolution in this country will ever yield them. It gave them “legal” rights; it freed them from chattel slavery. It ended with their betrayal: the “legal” rights were confined to paper; the emancipation ended with the partial restitution in parts of the South of semi-serfdom instead of with converting the plantation slaves into free landed peasants, as the French bourgeois revolution did. More than this, the bourgeoisie could not give. Since that time, these outdated economic forms have been merged into the general capitalist economy of a decadent, parasitic imperialism.…
There is only one correct way of formulating the problem of the remnants of slavery and serfdom under which hundreds of thousands of southern Negroes live to this day, and it gives the key to the whole problem: the Negro was liberated from chattel slavery as a by-product of the military-political struggle of the progressive northern bourgeoisie to consolidate the nation on a modern capitalist basis, free from the fetters of a reactionary slavocracy. The Negro will not only be liberated from the wage slavery of today but the survivals of feudalism and slavery will be exterminated, as a “by-product” of the military-political struggle of the last progressive class in American society—the class of black and white proletarian—to establish a socialist nation by means of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The historical aims of the imperialist bourgeoisie are not incompatible with the preservation of social and caste inequality for oppressed peoples, or with the preservation of antiquated modes of production and exchange. The historical aims of the socialist proletariat are incompatible with the maintenance of any anti-democratic institutions, of any capitalist or pre-capitalist modes of production. In this fact lies the only guarantee that the victorious working class will truly and completely emancipate the Negro masses by emancipating itself.
—Max Shachtman, “Communism and the Negro” (1933), reprinted as Race and Revolution (Verso, 2003)
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Protest Prison Vendetta Against Jalil Muntaqim
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 996
17 February 2012
Protest Prison Vendetta Against Jalil Muntaqim
On February 9, the Partisan Defense Committee sent the following protest letter on behalf of Jalil Muntaqim (Anthony Bottom), a former member of the Black Panther Party and then the Black Liberation Army. Muntaqim was one of the New York 3 who were convicted in 1975 in a COINTELPRO frame-up on charges of killing two New York City cops in 1971. Muntaqim was also targeted in the recent campaign against former Panthers known as the San Francisco 8 (see “COINTELPRO Charges Dropped Against Four SF8 Defendants” in WV No. 941, 28 August 2009).
We are writing to protest the campaign of harassment being meted out to Anthony Bottom, also known as Jalil Muntaqim, since his transfer to Attica Correctional Facility. Mr. Bottom has now been sentenced to six months in Special Housing Unit (SHU) on the outrageous pretext that he possessed photographs taken at memorials for former Black Panthers. These were confiscated as supposedly “gang-related,” or representative of an “unauthorized organization.”
The false characterization of the Black Panther Party as a “gang” has long been used by prison authorities as a means to repress outspoken advocates of black rights incarcerated throughout the country. This continues even at a time when the Black Panther Party has ceased to be a social force for many decades now.
That Mr. Bottom’s photos were not in any way contraband is attested by the fact they were transferred to him by the prison’s Correspondence Department. Clearly this persecution is due to his political beliefs and past affiliations. We demand that Anthony Bottom be taken out of SHU, that all his photographs be returned to him and this campaign of harassment be stopped.
* * *
Protests should be sent to: New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, Office of the Attorney General, The Capitol, Albany, NY 12224-0341; and Commissioner Brian Fischer, NYS Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, Building 2, 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY 12226-2050. Letters should reference Anthony “Jalil” Bottom, Attica inmate, DIN number 77A4283.
Workers Vanguard No. 996
17 February 2012
Protest Prison Vendetta Against Jalil Muntaqim
On February 9, the Partisan Defense Committee sent the following protest letter on behalf of Jalil Muntaqim (Anthony Bottom), a former member of the Black Panther Party and then the Black Liberation Army. Muntaqim was one of the New York 3 who were convicted in 1975 in a COINTELPRO frame-up on charges of killing two New York City cops in 1971. Muntaqim was also targeted in the recent campaign against former Panthers known as the San Francisco 8 (see “COINTELPRO Charges Dropped Against Four SF8 Defendants” in WV No. 941, 28 August 2009).
We are writing to protest the campaign of harassment being meted out to Anthony Bottom, also known as Jalil Muntaqim, since his transfer to Attica Correctional Facility. Mr. Bottom has now been sentenced to six months in Special Housing Unit (SHU) on the outrageous pretext that he possessed photographs taken at memorials for former Black Panthers. These were confiscated as supposedly “gang-related,” or representative of an “unauthorized organization.”
The false characterization of the Black Panther Party as a “gang” has long been used by prison authorities as a means to repress outspoken advocates of black rights incarcerated throughout the country. This continues even at a time when the Black Panther Party has ceased to be a social force for many decades now.
That Mr. Bottom’s photos were not in any way contraband is attested by the fact they were transferred to him by the prison’s Correspondence Department. Clearly this persecution is due to his political beliefs and past affiliations. We demand that Anthony Bottom be taken out of SHU, that all his photographs be returned to him and this campaign of harassment be stopped.
* * *
Protests should be sent to: New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, Office of the Attorney General, The Capitol, Albany, NY 12224-0341; and Commissioner Brian Fischer, NYS Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, Building 2, 1220 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY 12226-2050. Letters should reference Anthony “Jalil” Bottom, Attica inmate, DIN number 77A4283.
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-"On Posse Comitatus Law"-Down With NDAA!
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 996
17 February 2012
On Posse Comitatus Law
(Letter)
January 14, 2012
Editor, Workers Vanguard:
In discussing the erasure of democratic rights under the rubric of the “war on terror”, the lead article in WV 993, “Obama Ramps Up ‘War on Terror’ at Home”, states: “This is not to mention the direct violation [by the NDAA—National Defense Authorization Act] of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits military forces from engaging in domestic law enforcement.” Two problems with this: 1. It’s technically incorrect. The Posse Comitatus Act (PCA) prohibits use of military forces domestically except when approved by Congress or explicitly allowed in the U.S. constitution. Since the NDAA was passed by Congress, its implementation would not be in violation of the PCA. 2. As for the NDAA violating the spirit of the PCA, the PCA was a post-Reconstruction law of racist and reactionary intent, designed to prevent local Reconstruction governments from appealing to the Federal government for protection against the terror that overthrew the democratic gains of the Reconstruction period. It is not exactly something one should refer to as an historical standard of bourgeois-democratic rights, such as habeas corpus, which WV properly cited in the previous sentence. So why is this being cited in WV?
Comradely,
J.H.
WV replies:
It may indeed have been more precise for the article to state that President Obama’s signing of the NDAA further eroded—rather than “directly violated”—the Posse Comitatus Act. J.H.’s second objection, though, is historically inaccurate as there were no Reconstruction governments left to defend, which is not to deny that the Act served a reactionary purpose. J.H. misses the main point. Eliminating the formal restrictions on the military engaging in domestic law enforcement could only have dangerous consequences for the workers and oppressed. We want to defend such restrictions against any attempt to limit or repeal them.
The U.S. bourgeoisie has long upheld the formal separation of the military from domestic repressive duties as a benefit of bourgeois democracy as distinct from a military police-state dictatorship. The Posse Comitatus Act stands as a centerpiece of this distinction. We have no illusions that this or any other law will restrain the bourgeoisie from unleashing the military when it perceives a sufficient threat to its class rule. Over the years, the government has come up with many ways of restricting the Posse Comitatus Act or getting around it by militarizing police forces, providing them with armed personnel carriers, drones, etc. There have been quite a few amendments to the Act, including authorizing the president to call out the armed forces to restore order in cases of civil disturbance, to assist in the “war on drugs” and to aid enforcement of the racist immigration laws. We trust that J.H. agrees that these are not positive developments.
Posse Comitatus, meaning the “force of the county,” dates back to English common law. Carried over to North America, it authorized local sheriffs to compel members of the community to assist in making arrests and maintaining order. Federal posse comitatus originated with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which “commanded” all citizens to “aid and assist” U.S. marshals in the capture of escaped slaves. By the time the slavocracy was defeated in the Civil War, the state power was no longer in the business of catching slaves. For a brief and unique period in American history—Reconstruction—its job in the South was enforcing the newly won rights of black people. Since few white southerners could be pressed into defending these rights, this left federal troops to be the “posse.”
By 1877, the last of the Reconstruction governments had already been replaced by the white Southern “Redeemers,” in some cases following bloody massacres of recently freed blacks during which the second Grant administration refused to dispatch additional troops. By the time the remaining federal troops were withdrawn from the South in 1877, the Northern bourgeoisie had already aligned with the remnants of the slavocracy to force the freed slaves back onto the former plantations as brutally exploited tenants or sharecroppers. As KKK nightriders were terrorizing the South, the Posse Comitatus Act was enacted the following year to prevent the use of the military to protect black people and enforce their civil rights. The law codified what was already a ruling-class consensus. The Civil War and Reconstruction were the last progressive acts of the U.S. bourgeoisie, which would rapidly develop into an imperialist capitalist class, marking its emergence as such with the 1898 Spanish-American War.
The military could no longer play any progressive role. Continuing a military campaign against American Indians that followed the tail end of the Civil War, some of the troops withdrawn from the South following Reconstruction were dispatched to drive the Nez Percé from their home in Oregon. Others were sent to break the 1877 strike by thousands of rail workers—the first nationwide strike in this country. Federal troops have been repeatedly sent to put down strikes: from the 1894 Pullman strike by the newly formed American Railway Union to the 1899 miners strike in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to the seizure of railroads and coal mines ordered by Democratic president Truman in 1946 to break a strike by 400,000 coal miners. Just recently, the Coast Guard was deployed, along with other forces of the state, to escort a ship up the Columbia River to the Port of Longview, Washington, to prevent any interference from ILWU longshoremen in their battle against the EGT bosses (see article in this issue). In this, the military was true to its purpose as a core component of the capitalist state, which is to defend the class rule, interests and profits of the bourgeoisie, internationally and domestically.
When struggles for black rights emerged following World War II, they were met with brutal KKK and state terror. The liberal leaders of the civil rights movement, epitomized by Martin Luther King Jr. and tailed by reformist socialist organizations, called for federal troops to the South, sowing the deadly illusion that the imperialist army that was smashing workers and peasants in Vietnam would somehow defend fighters for black freedom at home. We are opposed to such calls on the armed forces of the capitalist state. In 1957, Eisenhower’s troops were sent to put down an upheaval of the Little Rock, Arkansas, black population, which was fighting to defend black students against racist mobs. The troops thus prevented the total rout of the retreating racists. From the 1943 racist riots in Detroit to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, federal troops were sent in only after blacks armed and mobilized to defend themselves. In 1967, the 82nd Airborne was brought in to suppress the Detroit ghetto explosion.
As Marxists, we assess laws such as the Posse Comitatus Act not by the motivations of their authors but by how they concretely impact class and social struggles. From the same vantage point, we judge what legal protections exist from how they serve the interests of the working class and the oppressed. Thus, while we recognize habeas corpus as an important democratic right in most periods, we support Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War as a necessary measure to put down forces acting in support of the secessionist South in a war over slavery. Similarly, many of the democratic protections embodied in the Bill of Rights emerged from the experience of winning independence from the British monarchy, subsequent social struggle and hostility to a centralized state power in a society divided between slave and free labor social systems.
These protections, including the right to bear arms and later formal restrictions on military police powers, are important gains for the working class, which must defend the rights won through struggle against the rulers’ inevitable attempts to restrict or reverse them.
Workers Vanguard No. 996
17 February 2012
On Posse Comitatus Law
(Letter)
January 14, 2012
Editor, Workers Vanguard:
In discussing the erasure of democratic rights under the rubric of the “war on terror”, the lead article in WV 993, “Obama Ramps Up ‘War on Terror’ at Home”, states: “This is not to mention the direct violation [by the NDAA—National Defense Authorization Act] of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits military forces from engaging in domestic law enforcement.” Two problems with this: 1. It’s technically incorrect. The Posse Comitatus Act (PCA) prohibits use of military forces domestically except when approved by Congress or explicitly allowed in the U.S. constitution. Since the NDAA was passed by Congress, its implementation would not be in violation of the PCA. 2. As for the NDAA violating the spirit of the PCA, the PCA was a post-Reconstruction law of racist and reactionary intent, designed to prevent local Reconstruction governments from appealing to the Federal government for protection against the terror that overthrew the democratic gains of the Reconstruction period. It is not exactly something one should refer to as an historical standard of bourgeois-democratic rights, such as habeas corpus, which WV properly cited in the previous sentence. So why is this being cited in WV?
Comradely,
J.H.
WV replies:
It may indeed have been more precise for the article to state that President Obama’s signing of the NDAA further eroded—rather than “directly violated”—the Posse Comitatus Act. J.H.’s second objection, though, is historically inaccurate as there were no Reconstruction governments left to defend, which is not to deny that the Act served a reactionary purpose. J.H. misses the main point. Eliminating the formal restrictions on the military engaging in domestic law enforcement could only have dangerous consequences for the workers and oppressed. We want to defend such restrictions against any attempt to limit or repeal them.
The U.S. bourgeoisie has long upheld the formal separation of the military from domestic repressive duties as a benefit of bourgeois democracy as distinct from a military police-state dictatorship. The Posse Comitatus Act stands as a centerpiece of this distinction. We have no illusions that this or any other law will restrain the bourgeoisie from unleashing the military when it perceives a sufficient threat to its class rule. Over the years, the government has come up with many ways of restricting the Posse Comitatus Act or getting around it by militarizing police forces, providing them with armed personnel carriers, drones, etc. There have been quite a few amendments to the Act, including authorizing the president to call out the armed forces to restore order in cases of civil disturbance, to assist in the “war on drugs” and to aid enforcement of the racist immigration laws. We trust that J.H. agrees that these are not positive developments.
Posse Comitatus, meaning the “force of the county,” dates back to English common law. Carried over to North America, it authorized local sheriffs to compel members of the community to assist in making arrests and maintaining order. Federal posse comitatus originated with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which “commanded” all citizens to “aid and assist” U.S. marshals in the capture of escaped slaves. By the time the slavocracy was defeated in the Civil War, the state power was no longer in the business of catching slaves. For a brief and unique period in American history—Reconstruction—its job in the South was enforcing the newly won rights of black people. Since few white southerners could be pressed into defending these rights, this left federal troops to be the “posse.”
By 1877, the last of the Reconstruction governments had already been replaced by the white Southern “Redeemers,” in some cases following bloody massacres of recently freed blacks during which the second Grant administration refused to dispatch additional troops. By the time the remaining federal troops were withdrawn from the South in 1877, the Northern bourgeoisie had already aligned with the remnants of the slavocracy to force the freed slaves back onto the former plantations as brutally exploited tenants or sharecroppers. As KKK nightriders were terrorizing the South, the Posse Comitatus Act was enacted the following year to prevent the use of the military to protect black people and enforce their civil rights. The law codified what was already a ruling-class consensus. The Civil War and Reconstruction were the last progressive acts of the U.S. bourgeoisie, which would rapidly develop into an imperialist capitalist class, marking its emergence as such with the 1898 Spanish-American War.
The military could no longer play any progressive role. Continuing a military campaign against American Indians that followed the tail end of the Civil War, some of the troops withdrawn from the South following Reconstruction were dispatched to drive the Nez Percé from their home in Oregon. Others were sent to break the 1877 strike by thousands of rail workers—the first nationwide strike in this country. Federal troops have been repeatedly sent to put down strikes: from the 1894 Pullman strike by the newly formed American Railway Union to the 1899 miners strike in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to the seizure of railroads and coal mines ordered by Democratic president Truman in 1946 to break a strike by 400,000 coal miners. Just recently, the Coast Guard was deployed, along with other forces of the state, to escort a ship up the Columbia River to the Port of Longview, Washington, to prevent any interference from ILWU longshoremen in their battle against the EGT bosses (see article in this issue). In this, the military was true to its purpose as a core component of the capitalist state, which is to defend the class rule, interests and profits of the bourgeoisie, internationally and domestically.
When struggles for black rights emerged following World War II, they were met with brutal KKK and state terror. The liberal leaders of the civil rights movement, epitomized by Martin Luther King Jr. and tailed by reformist socialist organizations, called for federal troops to the South, sowing the deadly illusion that the imperialist army that was smashing workers and peasants in Vietnam would somehow defend fighters for black freedom at home. We are opposed to such calls on the armed forces of the capitalist state. In 1957, Eisenhower’s troops were sent to put down an upheaval of the Little Rock, Arkansas, black population, which was fighting to defend black students against racist mobs. The troops thus prevented the total rout of the retreating racists. From the 1943 racist riots in Detroit to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, federal troops were sent in only after blacks armed and mobilized to defend themselves. In 1967, the 82nd Airborne was brought in to suppress the Detroit ghetto explosion.
As Marxists, we assess laws such as the Posse Comitatus Act not by the motivations of their authors but by how they concretely impact class and social struggles. From the same vantage point, we judge what legal protections exist from how they serve the interests of the working class and the oppressed. Thus, while we recognize habeas corpus as an important democratic right in most periods, we support Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War as a necessary measure to put down forces acting in support of the secessionist South in a war over slavery. Similarly, many of the democratic protections embodied in the Bill of Rights emerged from the experience of winning independence from the British monarchy, subsequent social struggle and hostility to a centralized state power in a society divided between slave and free labor social systems.
These protections, including the right to bear arms and later formal restrictions on military police powers, are important gains for the working class, which must defend the rights won through struggle against the rulers’ inevitable attempts to restrict or reverse them.
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-"ILWU Holds the Line Against Union Busting-Lessons of the Battle of Longview"-Lessons In Labor Struggle For Those In The Occupy Movement Who Are Looking For The Way Forward
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 996
17 February 2012
"ILWU Holds the Line Against Union Busting-Lessons of the Battle of Longview"-Lessons In Labor Struggle For Those In The Occupy Movement Who Are Looking For The Way Forward
On February 7, members of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 21 began loading wheat destined for South Korea on the first ship to pull into the new, high-tech EGT terminal in Longview, Washington. Two days later, a five-year contract settlement covering both maintenance and production at the terminal was approved by Local 21 members. The scabs of Operating Engineers Local 701 are out and the ILWU is in. This marks the end of a nearly two-year-long showdown pitting the ILWU against the giant EGT grain conglomerate and, behind it, finally, the full forces of the capitalist state.
We salute the militancy and determination of the ILWU members who fought so hard, centrally those of Local 21. Earlier in this battle, the union and its allies flexed their muscle in the kind of labor action not seen in this country for decades. Mass pickets were mobilized to block trains bringing grain into the terminal. The cops retaliated with a vendetta of harassment, intimidation and multiple arrests against ILWU members and their supporters. When police attacked the union’s lines on September 7, ILWU International president Robert McEllrath, who had been brutally manhandled by the cops, called to disperse the picket and wait for the backing of other longshoremen. Ports in the region were shut down the following day as ILWU members poured into Longview to give EGT, its hired security thugs and the strikebreaking cops a real taste of union power. With the labor-hating media screaming that thousands of tons of grain had been dumped on the tracks, EGT, backed by Obama’s National Labor Relations Board, went to the courts, which leveled over $300,000 in fines against the union.
The ILWU International leadership backed off, retreating to filing suits in the capitalist courts and pushing a referendum appealing for the recall of the local Cowlitz County sheriff. Trainloads of grain were driven unhindered into the terminal, where it was unloaded by scabs from Operating Engineers Local 701. By late last year, the company was moving to get the grain shipped out, with the backing of the Obama administration’s “Homeland Security” apparatus. The union was now looking down the barrels of a flotilla of armed Coast Guard ships and helicopters being mobilized to escort the first ship up the Columbia River to the EGT terminal. Citing the ILWU’s previous “violent” actions, the Coast Guard ordered a temporary “safety zone” around the terminal and any incoming ships, giving itself authority to take whatever action was necessary to enforce it. Any violation could bring fines of up to $250,000 and six years in prison.
The Cowlitz-Wahkiakum Counties Central Labor Council issued a “Call to Action” urging workers and their allies to mobilize in Longview when the first ship came in. McEllrath wrote a letter to all ILWU locals calling on them to be prepared for protest action. The populist Occupy movement was organizing for caravans from the Pacific Northwest and down the West Coast. Individual unions and labor councils around the country passed motions and sent letters protesting the deployment of the U.S. military against the ILWU.
A showdown pitting military forces deployed by the Obama administration against unionists and Occupy protesters could have damaged the Democrat’s political fortunes in the lead-up to the 2012 presidential elections. With news spreading of the imminent arrival of the first ship, Washington State’s Democratic Party governor stepped in and brokered a tentative agreement between the ILWU and EGT.
The “Partnership” of Labor and Capital Is a Lie!
The ILWU’s International president is now saluting “the partnership between the ILWU and EGT” as the beginning of “many years of safe, productive operation at the facility, and stability in the Pacific Northwest grain export industry.” But the whole battle at Longview gives the lie to the bureaucracy’s promotion of a “partnership” between the longshoremen and the EGT owners, a lie that is at the heart of the virtually unchallenged offensive by the bosses and their state that has gutted the unions in this country.
The “stability” of the multibillion dollar U.S. grain industry, the biggest and most profitable in the world, means skyrocketing food prices and the starvation and death of millions around the globe. The world’s grain supply is controlled by a handful of agribusiness giants, including U.S.-based Cargill and Archer-Daniels-Midland. At home, their profits are created through the increasing exploitation of the working class, which is why EGT was out to bust the ILWU at its Longview terminal. They didn’t succeed. The West Coast-wide organization of the union, and the jobs at the Longview port the union has worked for 80 years, were preserved.
ILWU Local 21 president Dan Coffman told Workers Vanguard that the union prevailed in its demand that the company pay into the ILWU/Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) health and welfare package and pay into the pension plan as well. EGT will also pay the overtime rate for any work over eight hours per day. Nonetheless, the fact that EGT can mandate ILWU members to work 12-hour shifts is a real threat to the workers’ health and safety. (The ILWU’s contract with the PMA allows shifts of at most ten hours, and then only if the ship is scheduled to sail immediately.) Moreover, EGT will pay straight time for night shifts instead of the standard time-and-a-third shift differential.
The union also beat back EGT’s refusal to recognize maintenance/repair and other inside workers in the terminal as members of the ILWU. These workers were selected and separately hired by the company from the Local 21 hall as permanent “steady men.” They were then required to decide on whether they would be represented by the ILWU. Steady men, who are guaranteed work with individual shipping and stevedoring companies, have long been allowed under the ILWU contract with the PMA, subverting the union hiring hall and rotary dispatch system. Those gains of the historic 1934 strike that forged the union are designed to equalize work opportunities for ILWU members. Coffman also told us that the union lost its demand to man the control room in the EGT terminal, which means that the central operations will be run by the company.
With unions like those of public sector workers in Wisconsin being mowed down by the capitalist union-busters, it is a real achievement that the ILWU in Longview was able to hold the line against EGT. But the fight is hardly over. The ILWU is still saddled with more than $300,000 in fines, which it is appealing in the federal courts. While the courts acquitted some of those arrested, there are still ILWU members facing charges, including felony counts. The ILWU and its supporters must fight for all of these charges to be dropped! And the next battle will be with other grain exporting companies when the Grainhandlers’ Agreement with the ILWU comes up on October 1.
EGT’s $200 million Longview facility is the first new grain terminal to be built in 25 years in the U.S. It is equipped to handle an average load rate of 3,000 metric tons per hour, far surpassing the 750 to 2,500 metric ton rate of other grain export elevators in the Pacific Northwest. Expected to load 150 to 200 ships a year at Longview, EGT—a multinational conglomerate of St. Louis-based Bunge North America, the Japanese Itochu Corporation and the South Korean STX Pan Ocean shipping company—is positioned to come out on top of the profit bonanza that will flow from the projected increase of U.S. corn, wheat and soybean exports to Asia. Faced with such competition, the other grain exporters will be looking to take their losses out of the hide of the ILWU.
Grain handling by the ILWU in the Pacific Northwest, overwhelmingly bulk cargo, is covered by agreements that are separate from the ILWU’s contract with the PMA, which is dominated by container shipping companies. That contract is up in 2014, and the PMA will be carefully watching the grain negotiations in order to press any advantage against the ILWU. With the newly enlarged Panama Canal scheduled to open the same year, the PMA will be playing to fears that the shipping companies will send their container ships directly to the East Coast instead of offloading containers in the West Coast ports and shipping them by rail across the continent. The APM Terminal at Hampton Roads, Virginia, which opened in 2007, is highly automated compared to West Coast ports and is the third-largest container terminal in the country. Shipping companies on both coasts seek to pit the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), which organizes East Coast and Gulf Coast ports and whose master contract expires September 30, against the relatively more powerful ILWU, in a race to the bottom over jobs.
The ILWU and ILA are both increasingly isolated union outposts amid a sea of low-wage, non-union workers in the ever-growing chain of world trade, from port truckers to warehouse and intermodal rail facility workers to sailors manning the mammoth cargo ships. The strength of the longshore unions has been further and increasingly eroded by the allegiance of their leaderships to the profitability and national interests of America’s capitalist rulers. The power of workers united on the basis of their own class interests in struggle against the employers was seen in the mass pickets and other actions in Longview. But this initial militancy ran straight up against the class collaborationism of the union misleaders.
Front Lines of an International Class Battle
The ILWU leadership portrayed the fight against EGT as that of a small community against a “foreign” multinational corporation. On the contrary, it was a class battle pitting the workers against the capitalist owners of EGT. In any such battle, the owners can depend on the forces of the capitalist state, which exists precisely to defend their interests—from “community” cops and sheriff’s departments all the way up to the forces of “Homeland Security” and the military. The workers’ power lies in their collective organization and ability to stop production and shut off the flow of profits. In marshaling this strength, solidarity actions between different unions and with workers internationally are crucial. This is all the more so with just-in-time delivery and increasingly interconnected global production. It is precisely because such actions as “hot-cargoing” and solidarity strikes are so effective that they have been outlawed.
As in any other conflict, the question of who wins or loses is decided by the relative strength of the opposing forces. The union’s power lay in its ability to stop grain coming in or going out of the EGT terminal. At the height of the grain harvest season in late summer and early fall, the company was particularly vulnerable. The ILWU urgently needed the backing of the strength and solidarity of other unions, most importantly those in the EGT grain cargo chain.
Early on, the union and its allies mobilized mass pickets that stopped trains carrying grain. These trains were driven by members of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (BLE), which is affiliated with the Teamsters. When the ILWU backed down in the face of massive police repression, the trains started rolling in. Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa Jr. sent a letter pledging support to the ILWU in its fight with EGT. But the most elementary solidarity was for the BLE to stop the train shipments. That would have meant defying Taft-Hartley and the myriad other laws banning such actions. Defiance of anti-labor laws, with workers battling the cops and other strikebreaking forces, was how the unions were built in this country. And just as surely, they have been decimated by sacrificing labor’s weapons of struggle on the altar of capitalist legality.
Operating Engineers Local 701, which supplied the scab labor for EGT, was given cover by AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka. Trumka declared that this was simply a “jurisdictional” dispute between two unions that needed to be resolved in the chambers of the national labor traitors! As we wrote in “ILWU Fights Deadly Threat” (WV No. 986, 16 September 2011): “The only ‘jurisdictional’ dispute in Longview is between capital and labor! And Trumka has taken the side of the bosses.” This treachery was in service to the Democratic Party, which is every bit as much a party of the bosses as the Republicans but one to which the labor officials pledge their allegiance, peddling the Democrats as the “friends of labor.” Trumka didn’t want a big class battle in Longview upsetting Obama’s electoral fortunes. When it came down to it, neither did the ILWU tops.
The union was in a tough spot. It is not easy to prevail in the face of the full force of the capitalist state. But the union’s capacity to fight was undermined by its leadership’s support for the very forces of “national security” the ILWU was up against. In 2002, the ILWU International leadership collaborated in the drafting of the Maritime Transportation Security Act, which is aimed at policing the docks as part of the government’s “war on terror.” Despicably pointing a finger at the largely immigrant, non-union port truckers as a potential “security” threat, the ILWU tops acquiesced to the implementation of the Transport Workers Identification Credential (TWIC), objecting only after it had been implemented. Forced to submit to criminal background and immigration status checks, tens of thousands of port workers were denied “security” clearance. Many immigrant truckers chose not to apply, fearing deportation.
Among the offenses that would permanently bar workers from the waterfront under TWIC is involvement in a “transportation security incident” including “transportation system disruption or economic disruption in a specific area.” Coast Guard officials showed up at the Longview ILWU Local 21 hall threatening to revoke union members’ TWIC cards if there were any union protests interfering with the loading of the grain ship.
In the face of the military might of its “own” government, the ILWU desperately needed to appeal for international working-class solidarity. Last fall, there had been small solidarity protests against EGT’s union-busting in Japan, Korea and Australia. These needed to translate into action by appealing to dock workers in Korea and throughout Asia to refuse to unload scab grain shipped from EGT’s Longview terminal. But the ILWU was not well positioned to do so when its leadership was braying that the union was defending the U.S. grain export industry against a “foreign” multinational. Grain and other food exports are wielded as weapons by U.S. imperialism against the workers and oppressed of the world and to keep less developed countries under the boot of the “world’s only superpower.”
The very nature of longshore work, which is dependent on world trade, underlines that labor’s fight is international. Longshore and other transport workers in the global cargo chain have immense potential social power. This was laid out in an article by JoAnn Wypijewski titled “On the Front Lines of the World Class Struggle—The Cargo Chain” (CounterPunch, 1 March 2010):
“As important as productivity is to the shipping industry’s fortunes, all the speed of automated ports is worthless if there are ruptures anywhere in the relay from factory to consumer…. In the U.S.A. that means smooth acquiescence not only from 60,000 longshore workers, but also from 28,000 tugboat operators and harbor pilots, 60,000 port truckers, 850,000 freight truckers, 165,000 railroad workers, 2 million warehouse and distribution workers, 370,000 express package delivery people, and 160,000 logistic planners—and from similarly interlocked clusters of workers all around the world. They are not all organized, but then they would not all have to say No: just enough of them, acting in concert at vital points in the chain.”
But thanks to the treachery of the trade-union misleaders, there were no such ruptures in the cargo chain bringing grain in and unloading it in the EGT terminal. The one notable and honorable exception when it came to getting the grain shipped out was the Inland Boatmen’s Union (part of the ILWU), which refused to man the tugs to take the ship in and out. With its back up against the wall in the face of U.S. military forces, the ILWU leadership’s “America first” patriotism cuts across their ability to appeal for international solidarity.
Let those union militants and their allies who fought so courageously draw the lessons to prepare for future battles. If the unions are to be instruments of struggle against the bosses, they must break the chains forged by the labor misleaders that have shackled the workers to the interests of the capitalist exploiters and their political parties. The continued existence of the ILWU as a powerful industrial union cries out for a class-struggle fight to unionize the masses of unorganized workers, such as the port truckers, which would require combating anti-immigrant chauvinism and organizing them at full union pay, benefits and working conditions. For two weeks, hundreds of truckers at the Port of Seattle have been on strike against their unbearable working conditions, demanding their right to unionize.
The red-white-and-blue bureaucrats must be ousted in a fight for a class-struggle leadership, one whose banner will be the red flag of working-class internationalism! Such a leadership will arm the workers for some hard-fought battles against the capitalist exploiters and lay the basis for forging a multiracial workers party, one that will fight for a socialist revolution to uproot the whole system of wage slavery, racial oppression, poverty and imperialist war.
Substituting the Populist Occupy Movement for Class Struggle
It is a measure of the betrayals by the labor misleaders that the populist Occupy movement has emerged as the central locus of any protest against the ravages of the economic catastrophe created by Wall Street financiers and corporate magnates. Occupy overwhelmingly believes in the myth of some “good old days” of American capitalist rule, with a government that represented the “will of the people.” Yet much of the “socialist” left in this country has opportunistically hailed Occupy as the key to revitalizing the labor movement. On the contrary, its “99 percent” populism—which extends to the racist, strikebreaking cops—dissolves any understanding of the fundamental class line between the workers and their capitalist exploiters.
In the Bay Area, left-talking labor fakers like retired ILWU bureaucrat Jack Heyman and former Local 10 executive board member Clarence Thomas promoted the “community pickets” by the Occupy movement that blockaded the Oakland port on November 2 and again on December 12. In the lead-up to the December 12 Occupy blockades, which also shut down the ports in Longview and Portland in proclaimed solidarity with the ILWU’s fight in Longview, Heyman argued: “If Occupy is successful now, then momentum for a coastwide shutdown by longshore workers is highly likely when the scab ship arrives.” But far from building any such “momentum,” the blockade reduced the workers to at best being passive observers, standing by awaiting a decision by an arbitrator as to whether crossing these picket lines was a threat to their health and safety.
As enthusiastically described by the International Socialist Organization’s Socialist Worker (13 December 2011), there was much cheering in Oakland on December 12 when it was announced that the arbitrator had ruled and “workers had headed home.” What a farce! The workers were little more than pawns in a game of media and legal theater. This is not a new game for Heyman and Thomas, who have built their “militant” reputations with the Bay Area rad-lib milieu through such community pickets.
As symbolic actions that pose the need for the workers to champion solidarity with the struggles of their class brothers and sisters, such pickets can episodically be an effective tactic. But they do little to raise workers’ consciousness of their social power and class interests. Although upheld as evidence of the militancy of the ILWU, these pickets of leftists, liberals and other forces are premised on the same acquiescence to anti-labor laws behind which the ILWU and other union tops hide their sellouts of militant labor action. This was expressed by an “Occupy the Ports” statement building for December 12 arguing that “labor unions are constrained under reactionary, anti-union federal legislation...from taking job actions on the basis of solidarity.”
Picket lines are not public relations shows on behalf of the workers. Nor are they actions of civil disobedience by masses of petty-bourgeois and other declassed elements in Occupy who have no relation to, or corresponding power at, the point of production. They are battle lines in the class struggle between the workers and the capitalists who derive their profits from the exploitation of labor. Their success is predicated on the consciousness and organization of the workers mobilized as a class against their class enemy.
There is no question that the ILWU Longview local appreciated the attention that Occupy protests drew to their fight against the EGT union-busters. And who can blame them? When the ILWU International retreated, the Longview workers were taking all the casualties while EGT was riding high in the saddle, its terminal being filled with grain and the forces of Obama’s federal government at its back to get it shipped out. Solidarity with labor on the part of Occupy activists is certainly welcome. But the Occupy blockades were no substitute for the mobilization of the class power of the workers in struggle. Whatever the intention of the protesters, their pickets could easily end up pitting the protesters against the workers and their union. That is precisely the program of the more “radical” wing of Occupy exemplified by the Black Orchid anarchist collective in Seattle, which openly counterposes the largely petty-bourgeois Occupy forces as a “new movement of the working class” to the unions.
Evidently this is no problem for Jack Heyman. A central speaker at a January 6 Seattle Occupy meeting to mobilize for a caravan to Longview when the first ship pulled into the EGT terminal, Heyman embraced Occupy “sister Barucha” who “thinks that trade unions are capitalist institutions.” This, Heyman went on to argue, is “the wonderful thing about this Occupy movement…. We have different tendencies in it and we can raise our differences and yet come together for one goal, which is to win victory for the Longview longshoremen.” It’s kind of hard to win such a victory for workers fighting to preserve their union with people who think that unions are capitalist institutions! But Heyman has been peddling his credentials as a union “militant” to liberal radicals for so long that he can’t even recognize the class line.
Like the U.S. labor bureaucracy as a whole, the ILWU International embraced Occupy’s “99 percent” populism, no doubt hoping that it would further Obama’s chances of re-election. But the longshore union tops were hostile to the December 12 port shutdown. In his January 3 letter to ILWU locals about protesting when the first ship arrived, McEllrath warned longshoremen to approach those organizing for Occupy caravans to Longview with “extreme caution.” Several ILWU local bureaucrats and members from the Pacific Northwest attended the January 6 Seattle Occupy meeting and demanded that this letter be read. After being made to wait for close to two hours, they got out of their seats to protest and a melee ensued. In putting off the request by regional officials of the union under fire, the event organizers had invited such a confrontation.
In fact, the Black Orchid Collective seems to have relished it. In a statement issued after the event titled “Unity vs. Union Goons,” they condemned the ILWU officials for “trying to prevent us from transcending their dying structures.” In the aftermath of the confrontation, the Seattle local of the ILWU passed a motion banning its members from “all support for ‘Occupy’ formally or informally,” laying the basis to witchhunt ILWU members who have worked with Occupy. Such a witchhunt could be in the offing, and it should be rejected by the ILWU.
The Internationalist Group (IG), which cheerleads for Heyman, subsequently wrote us asking “where the Spartacist League stands on this disruption”? As we had made perfectly clear in writing to the IG: “We stand on the side of the defense of the union against EGT’s union-busting offensive, backed by the military and other police forces of the federal government, not with those in the Occupy movement who share the belief that the unions should be eliminated.”
While describing the politics of Occupy as “bourgeois populism,” the IG simultaneously condemns it for trying to go around the union bureaucracy “when what is needed is a fight to defeat and drive out these ‘labor lieutenants of the capitalist class’.” But Occupy is not part of the labor movement, which is where such a fight has to be waged. Our struggle with the labor bureaucrats is a political one, in opposition to its subordination of the unions to the national interests and profits of America’s capitalist rulers. Those like Heyman, the IG and others who promote the Occupy movement—whose populist politics in fact mirror those of the labor misleaders—as a substitute for the union reaped the fruits of their own grotesque opportunism at the Seattle meeting.
Those Who Labor Must Rule!
Occupy is not, and cannot be, the vehicle for revitalizing the American labor movement. That is the task of the workers themselves. What is posed is not simply the preservation of the existing unions, many of which have already been reduced to a mere shadow of their former existence, but the struggle to transform them into workers’ battalions of class struggle. The majority black membership of Bay Area ILWU Local 10 bridges a key fault line in U.S. society, giving the union the ability to harness its social power to the anger of the masses of the inner cities whose lives have been written off as worthless to American capitalism. Likewise, the Latino members in the ILWU’s L.A./Long Beach local provide a key link to the huge number of Latino immigrants in Los Angeles. This would be a key to the fight to organize the non-union, majority immigrant port truckers who are vital to shutting down the ports.
To wage such battles, the union must inscribe on its banner the fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants and champion the cause of black freedom. But the union itself is rent by the same racial and ethnic fault lines that the shipping bosses play on to divide and weaken the ILWU, pitting the overwhelmingly white ILWU workers in the Pacific Northwest, the black members in the Bay Area and the Latino members in L.A. against each other. It was a coastwide strike in 1934 that laid the basis for the founding of the ILWU, uniting longshoremen, seamen and other maritime workers. In San Francisco, where the longshore struggle sparked a general strike, the union leadership consciously appealed to the oppressed black population and fought against the bosses’ attempts to use racial and ethnic divisions to break the workers’ struggle.
The San Francisco general strike was not the only major class battle of 1934. There was also a mass strike sparked by auto parts workers in Toledo and truck drivers’ strikes in Minneapolis, out of which the Teamsters was forged as a powerful industrial union. They were all led by reds. As James P. Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, whose supporters led the Minneapolis strikes, wrote in an article on the 1936 West Coast maritime strike (printed in Notebook of an Agitator, 1958), a contract settlement “is only a temporary truce and the nature of such a settlement is decided by power; ‘justice’ has nothing to do with it. The workers will not have justice until they take over the world…. The bosses are powerful in the first place, because they own the ships and the docks, and the workers have not yet challenged their fraudulent claim to such ownership. And because they own the ships the bosses own the government.”
The workers struggle against increasingly brutal exploitation will not end short of getting rid of a system based on production for profit and establishing a workers government that will take the means of production out of the hands of the rapacious capitalist owners and make it the collective property of society. Then, advances in automation and other technology, which are now wielded as clubs against workers’ jobs and livelihoods, will be used to reduce their workload and lead to vast improvements in the conditions of life for the population as a whole.
The road forward lies in the fight to forge a new class-struggle leadership of the unions that will wage the battles out of which a revolutionary workers party can be built. It is the purpose of the Spartacist League to forge the nucleus of such a party as the U.S. section of a revolutionary working-class international organization. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote over 150 years ago in the Communist Manifesto: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries unite!”
Workers Vanguard No. 996
17 February 2012
"ILWU Holds the Line Against Union Busting-Lessons of the Battle of Longview"-Lessons In Labor Struggle For Those In The Occupy Movement Who Are Looking For The Way Forward
On February 7, members of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 21 began loading wheat destined for South Korea on the first ship to pull into the new, high-tech EGT terminal in Longview, Washington. Two days later, a five-year contract settlement covering both maintenance and production at the terminal was approved by Local 21 members. The scabs of Operating Engineers Local 701 are out and the ILWU is in. This marks the end of a nearly two-year-long showdown pitting the ILWU against the giant EGT grain conglomerate and, behind it, finally, the full forces of the capitalist state.
We salute the militancy and determination of the ILWU members who fought so hard, centrally those of Local 21. Earlier in this battle, the union and its allies flexed their muscle in the kind of labor action not seen in this country for decades. Mass pickets were mobilized to block trains bringing grain into the terminal. The cops retaliated with a vendetta of harassment, intimidation and multiple arrests against ILWU members and their supporters. When police attacked the union’s lines on September 7, ILWU International president Robert McEllrath, who had been brutally manhandled by the cops, called to disperse the picket and wait for the backing of other longshoremen. Ports in the region were shut down the following day as ILWU members poured into Longview to give EGT, its hired security thugs and the strikebreaking cops a real taste of union power. With the labor-hating media screaming that thousands of tons of grain had been dumped on the tracks, EGT, backed by Obama’s National Labor Relations Board, went to the courts, which leveled over $300,000 in fines against the union.
The ILWU International leadership backed off, retreating to filing suits in the capitalist courts and pushing a referendum appealing for the recall of the local Cowlitz County sheriff. Trainloads of grain were driven unhindered into the terminal, where it was unloaded by scabs from Operating Engineers Local 701. By late last year, the company was moving to get the grain shipped out, with the backing of the Obama administration’s “Homeland Security” apparatus. The union was now looking down the barrels of a flotilla of armed Coast Guard ships and helicopters being mobilized to escort the first ship up the Columbia River to the EGT terminal. Citing the ILWU’s previous “violent” actions, the Coast Guard ordered a temporary “safety zone” around the terminal and any incoming ships, giving itself authority to take whatever action was necessary to enforce it. Any violation could bring fines of up to $250,000 and six years in prison.
The Cowlitz-Wahkiakum Counties Central Labor Council issued a “Call to Action” urging workers and their allies to mobilize in Longview when the first ship came in. McEllrath wrote a letter to all ILWU locals calling on them to be prepared for protest action. The populist Occupy movement was organizing for caravans from the Pacific Northwest and down the West Coast. Individual unions and labor councils around the country passed motions and sent letters protesting the deployment of the U.S. military against the ILWU.
A showdown pitting military forces deployed by the Obama administration against unionists and Occupy protesters could have damaged the Democrat’s political fortunes in the lead-up to the 2012 presidential elections. With news spreading of the imminent arrival of the first ship, Washington State’s Democratic Party governor stepped in and brokered a tentative agreement between the ILWU and EGT.
The “Partnership” of Labor and Capital Is a Lie!
The ILWU’s International president is now saluting “the partnership between the ILWU and EGT” as the beginning of “many years of safe, productive operation at the facility, and stability in the Pacific Northwest grain export industry.” But the whole battle at Longview gives the lie to the bureaucracy’s promotion of a “partnership” between the longshoremen and the EGT owners, a lie that is at the heart of the virtually unchallenged offensive by the bosses and their state that has gutted the unions in this country.
The “stability” of the multibillion dollar U.S. grain industry, the biggest and most profitable in the world, means skyrocketing food prices and the starvation and death of millions around the globe. The world’s grain supply is controlled by a handful of agribusiness giants, including U.S.-based Cargill and Archer-Daniels-Midland. At home, their profits are created through the increasing exploitation of the working class, which is why EGT was out to bust the ILWU at its Longview terminal. They didn’t succeed. The West Coast-wide organization of the union, and the jobs at the Longview port the union has worked for 80 years, were preserved.
ILWU Local 21 president Dan Coffman told Workers Vanguard that the union prevailed in its demand that the company pay into the ILWU/Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) health and welfare package and pay into the pension plan as well. EGT will also pay the overtime rate for any work over eight hours per day. Nonetheless, the fact that EGT can mandate ILWU members to work 12-hour shifts is a real threat to the workers’ health and safety. (The ILWU’s contract with the PMA allows shifts of at most ten hours, and then only if the ship is scheduled to sail immediately.) Moreover, EGT will pay straight time for night shifts instead of the standard time-and-a-third shift differential.
The union also beat back EGT’s refusal to recognize maintenance/repair and other inside workers in the terminal as members of the ILWU. These workers were selected and separately hired by the company from the Local 21 hall as permanent “steady men.” They were then required to decide on whether they would be represented by the ILWU. Steady men, who are guaranteed work with individual shipping and stevedoring companies, have long been allowed under the ILWU contract with the PMA, subverting the union hiring hall and rotary dispatch system. Those gains of the historic 1934 strike that forged the union are designed to equalize work opportunities for ILWU members. Coffman also told us that the union lost its demand to man the control room in the EGT terminal, which means that the central operations will be run by the company.
With unions like those of public sector workers in Wisconsin being mowed down by the capitalist union-busters, it is a real achievement that the ILWU in Longview was able to hold the line against EGT. But the fight is hardly over. The ILWU is still saddled with more than $300,000 in fines, which it is appealing in the federal courts. While the courts acquitted some of those arrested, there are still ILWU members facing charges, including felony counts. The ILWU and its supporters must fight for all of these charges to be dropped! And the next battle will be with other grain exporting companies when the Grainhandlers’ Agreement with the ILWU comes up on October 1.
EGT’s $200 million Longview facility is the first new grain terminal to be built in 25 years in the U.S. It is equipped to handle an average load rate of 3,000 metric tons per hour, far surpassing the 750 to 2,500 metric ton rate of other grain export elevators in the Pacific Northwest. Expected to load 150 to 200 ships a year at Longview, EGT—a multinational conglomerate of St. Louis-based Bunge North America, the Japanese Itochu Corporation and the South Korean STX Pan Ocean shipping company—is positioned to come out on top of the profit bonanza that will flow from the projected increase of U.S. corn, wheat and soybean exports to Asia. Faced with such competition, the other grain exporters will be looking to take their losses out of the hide of the ILWU.
Grain handling by the ILWU in the Pacific Northwest, overwhelmingly bulk cargo, is covered by agreements that are separate from the ILWU’s contract with the PMA, which is dominated by container shipping companies. That contract is up in 2014, and the PMA will be carefully watching the grain negotiations in order to press any advantage against the ILWU. With the newly enlarged Panama Canal scheduled to open the same year, the PMA will be playing to fears that the shipping companies will send their container ships directly to the East Coast instead of offloading containers in the West Coast ports and shipping them by rail across the continent. The APM Terminal at Hampton Roads, Virginia, which opened in 2007, is highly automated compared to West Coast ports and is the third-largest container terminal in the country. Shipping companies on both coasts seek to pit the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), which organizes East Coast and Gulf Coast ports and whose master contract expires September 30, against the relatively more powerful ILWU, in a race to the bottom over jobs.
The ILWU and ILA are both increasingly isolated union outposts amid a sea of low-wage, non-union workers in the ever-growing chain of world trade, from port truckers to warehouse and intermodal rail facility workers to sailors manning the mammoth cargo ships. The strength of the longshore unions has been further and increasingly eroded by the allegiance of their leaderships to the profitability and national interests of America’s capitalist rulers. The power of workers united on the basis of their own class interests in struggle against the employers was seen in the mass pickets and other actions in Longview. But this initial militancy ran straight up against the class collaborationism of the union misleaders.
Front Lines of an International Class Battle
The ILWU leadership portrayed the fight against EGT as that of a small community against a “foreign” multinational corporation. On the contrary, it was a class battle pitting the workers against the capitalist owners of EGT. In any such battle, the owners can depend on the forces of the capitalist state, which exists precisely to defend their interests—from “community” cops and sheriff’s departments all the way up to the forces of “Homeland Security” and the military. The workers’ power lies in their collective organization and ability to stop production and shut off the flow of profits. In marshaling this strength, solidarity actions between different unions and with workers internationally are crucial. This is all the more so with just-in-time delivery and increasingly interconnected global production. It is precisely because such actions as “hot-cargoing” and solidarity strikes are so effective that they have been outlawed.
As in any other conflict, the question of who wins or loses is decided by the relative strength of the opposing forces. The union’s power lay in its ability to stop grain coming in or going out of the EGT terminal. At the height of the grain harvest season in late summer and early fall, the company was particularly vulnerable. The ILWU urgently needed the backing of the strength and solidarity of other unions, most importantly those in the EGT grain cargo chain.
Early on, the union and its allies mobilized mass pickets that stopped trains carrying grain. These trains were driven by members of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (BLE), which is affiliated with the Teamsters. When the ILWU backed down in the face of massive police repression, the trains started rolling in. Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa Jr. sent a letter pledging support to the ILWU in its fight with EGT. But the most elementary solidarity was for the BLE to stop the train shipments. That would have meant defying Taft-Hartley and the myriad other laws banning such actions. Defiance of anti-labor laws, with workers battling the cops and other strikebreaking forces, was how the unions were built in this country. And just as surely, they have been decimated by sacrificing labor’s weapons of struggle on the altar of capitalist legality.
Operating Engineers Local 701, which supplied the scab labor for EGT, was given cover by AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka. Trumka declared that this was simply a “jurisdictional” dispute between two unions that needed to be resolved in the chambers of the national labor traitors! As we wrote in “ILWU Fights Deadly Threat” (WV No. 986, 16 September 2011): “The only ‘jurisdictional’ dispute in Longview is between capital and labor! And Trumka has taken the side of the bosses.” This treachery was in service to the Democratic Party, which is every bit as much a party of the bosses as the Republicans but one to which the labor officials pledge their allegiance, peddling the Democrats as the “friends of labor.” Trumka didn’t want a big class battle in Longview upsetting Obama’s electoral fortunes. When it came down to it, neither did the ILWU tops.
The union was in a tough spot. It is not easy to prevail in the face of the full force of the capitalist state. But the union’s capacity to fight was undermined by its leadership’s support for the very forces of “national security” the ILWU was up against. In 2002, the ILWU International leadership collaborated in the drafting of the Maritime Transportation Security Act, which is aimed at policing the docks as part of the government’s “war on terror.” Despicably pointing a finger at the largely immigrant, non-union port truckers as a potential “security” threat, the ILWU tops acquiesced to the implementation of the Transport Workers Identification Credential (TWIC), objecting only after it had been implemented. Forced to submit to criminal background and immigration status checks, tens of thousands of port workers were denied “security” clearance. Many immigrant truckers chose not to apply, fearing deportation.
Among the offenses that would permanently bar workers from the waterfront under TWIC is involvement in a “transportation security incident” including “transportation system disruption or economic disruption in a specific area.” Coast Guard officials showed up at the Longview ILWU Local 21 hall threatening to revoke union members’ TWIC cards if there were any union protests interfering with the loading of the grain ship.
In the face of the military might of its “own” government, the ILWU desperately needed to appeal for international working-class solidarity. Last fall, there had been small solidarity protests against EGT’s union-busting in Japan, Korea and Australia. These needed to translate into action by appealing to dock workers in Korea and throughout Asia to refuse to unload scab grain shipped from EGT’s Longview terminal. But the ILWU was not well positioned to do so when its leadership was braying that the union was defending the U.S. grain export industry against a “foreign” multinational. Grain and other food exports are wielded as weapons by U.S. imperialism against the workers and oppressed of the world and to keep less developed countries under the boot of the “world’s only superpower.”
The very nature of longshore work, which is dependent on world trade, underlines that labor’s fight is international. Longshore and other transport workers in the global cargo chain have immense potential social power. This was laid out in an article by JoAnn Wypijewski titled “On the Front Lines of the World Class Struggle—The Cargo Chain” (CounterPunch, 1 March 2010):
“As important as productivity is to the shipping industry’s fortunes, all the speed of automated ports is worthless if there are ruptures anywhere in the relay from factory to consumer…. In the U.S.A. that means smooth acquiescence not only from 60,000 longshore workers, but also from 28,000 tugboat operators and harbor pilots, 60,000 port truckers, 850,000 freight truckers, 165,000 railroad workers, 2 million warehouse and distribution workers, 370,000 express package delivery people, and 160,000 logistic planners—and from similarly interlocked clusters of workers all around the world. They are not all organized, but then they would not all have to say No: just enough of them, acting in concert at vital points in the chain.”
But thanks to the treachery of the trade-union misleaders, there were no such ruptures in the cargo chain bringing grain in and unloading it in the EGT terminal. The one notable and honorable exception when it came to getting the grain shipped out was the Inland Boatmen’s Union (part of the ILWU), which refused to man the tugs to take the ship in and out. With its back up against the wall in the face of U.S. military forces, the ILWU leadership’s “America first” patriotism cuts across their ability to appeal for international solidarity.
Let those union militants and their allies who fought so courageously draw the lessons to prepare for future battles. If the unions are to be instruments of struggle against the bosses, they must break the chains forged by the labor misleaders that have shackled the workers to the interests of the capitalist exploiters and their political parties. The continued existence of the ILWU as a powerful industrial union cries out for a class-struggle fight to unionize the masses of unorganized workers, such as the port truckers, which would require combating anti-immigrant chauvinism and organizing them at full union pay, benefits and working conditions. For two weeks, hundreds of truckers at the Port of Seattle have been on strike against their unbearable working conditions, demanding their right to unionize.
The red-white-and-blue bureaucrats must be ousted in a fight for a class-struggle leadership, one whose banner will be the red flag of working-class internationalism! Such a leadership will arm the workers for some hard-fought battles against the capitalist exploiters and lay the basis for forging a multiracial workers party, one that will fight for a socialist revolution to uproot the whole system of wage slavery, racial oppression, poverty and imperialist war.
Substituting the Populist Occupy Movement for Class Struggle
It is a measure of the betrayals by the labor misleaders that the populist Occupy movement has emerged as the central locus of any protest against the ravages of the economic catastrophe created by Wall Street financiers and corporate magnates. Occupy overwhelmingly believes in the myth of some “good old days” of American capitalist rule, with a government that represented the “will of the people.” Yet much of the “socialist” left in this country has opportunistically hailed Occupy as the key to revitalizing the labor movement. On the contrary, its “99 percent” populism—which extends to the racist, strikebreaking cops—dissolves any understanding of the fundamental class line between the workers and their capitalist exploiters.
In the Bay Area, left-talking labor fakers like retired ILWU bureaucrat Jack Heyman and former Local 10 executive board member Clarence Thomas promoted the “community pickets” by the Occupy movement that blockaded the Oakland port on November 2 and again on December 12. In the lead-up to the December 12 Occupy blockades, which also shut down the ports in Longview and Portland in proclaimed solidarity with the ILWU’s fight in Longview, Heyman argued: “If Occupy is successful now, then momentum for a coastwide shutdown by longshore workers is highly likely when the scab ship arrives.” But far from building any such “momentum,” the blockade reduced the workers to at best being passive observers, standing by awaiting a decision by an arbitrator as to whether crossing these picket lines was a threat to their health and safety.
As enthusiastically described by the International Socialist Organization’s Socialist Worker (13 December 2011), there was much cheering in Oakland on December 12 when it was announced that the arbitrator had ruled and “workers had headed home.” What a farce! The workers were little more than pawns in a game of media and legal theater. This is not a new game for Heyman and Thomas, who have built their “militant” reputations with the Bay Area rad-lib milieu through such community pickets.
As symbolic actions that pose the need for the workers to champion solidarity with the struggles of their class brothers and sisters, such pickets can episodically be an effective tactic. But they do little to raise workers’ consciousness of their social power and class interests. Although upheld as evidence of the militancy of the ILWU, these pickets of leftists, liberals and other forces are premised on the same acquiescence to anti-labor laws behind which the ILWU and other union tops hide their sellouts of militant labor action. This was expressed by an “Occupy the Ports” statement building for December 12 arguing that “labor unions are constrained under reactionary, anti-union federal legislation...from taking job actions on the basis of solidarity.”
Picket lines are not public relations shows on behalf of the workers. Nor are they actions of civil disobedience by masses of petty-bourgeois and other declassed elements in Occupy who have no relation to, or corresponding power at, the point of production. They are battle lines in the class struggle between the workers and the capitalists who derive their profits from the exploitation of labor. Their success is predicated on the consciousness and organization of the workers mobilized as a class against their class enemy.
There is no question that the ILWU Longview local appreciated the attention that Occupy protests drew to their fight against the EGT union-busters. And who can blame them? When the ILWU International retreated, the Longview workers were taking all the casualties while EGT was riding high in the saddle, its terminal being filled with grain and the forces of Obama’s federal government at its back to get it shipped out. Solidarity with labor on the part of Occupy activists is certainly welcome. But the Occupy blockades were no substitute for the mobilization of the class power of the workers in struggle. Whatever the intention of the protesters, their pickets could easily end up pitting the protesters against the workers and their union. That is precisely the program of the more “radical” wing of Occupy exemplified by the Black Orchid anarchist collective in Seattle, which openly counterposes the largely petty-bourgeois Occupy forces as a “new movement of the working class” to the unions.
Evidently this is no problem for Jack Heyman. A central speaker at a January 6 Seattle Occupy meeting to mobilize for a caravan to Longview when the first ship pulled into the EGT terminal, Heyman embraced Occupy “sister Barucha” who “thinks that trade unions are capitalist institutions.” This, Heyman went on to argue, is “the wonderful thing about this Occupy movement…. We have different tendencies in it and we can raise our differences and yet come together for one goal, which is to win victory for the Longview longshoremen.” It’s kind of hard to win such a victory for workers fighting to preserve their union with people who think that unions are capitalist institutions! But Heyman has been peddling his credentials as a union “militant” to liberal radicals for so long that he can’t even recognize the class line.
Like the U.S. labor bureaucracy as a whole, the ILWU International embraced Occupy’s “99 percent” populism, no doubt hoping that it would further Obama’s chances of re-election. But the longshore union tops were hostile to the December 12 port shutdown. In his January 3 letter to ILWU locals about protesting when the first ship arrived, McEllrath warned longshoremen to approach those organizing for Occupy caravans to Longview with “extreme caution.” Several ILWU local bureaucrats and members from the Pacific Northwest attended the January 6 Seattle Occupy meeting and demanded that this letter be read. After being made to wait for close to two hours, they got out of their seats to protest and a melee ensued. In putting off the request by regional officials of the union under fire, the event organizers had invited such a confrontation.
In fact, the Black Orchid Collective seems to have relished it. In a statement issued after the event titled “Unity vs. Union Goons,” they condemned the ILWU officials for “trying to prevent us from transcending their dying structures.” In the aftermath of the confrontation, the Seattle local of the ILWU passed a motion banning its members from “all support for ‘Occupy’ formally or informally,” laying the basis to witchhunt ILWU members who have worked with Occupy. Such a witchhunt could be in the offing, and it should be rejected by the ILWU.
The Internationalist Group (IG), which cheerleads for Heyman, subsequently wrote us asking “where the Spartacist League stands on this disruption”? As we had made perfectly clear in writing to the IG: “We stand on the side of the defense of the union against EGT’s union-busting offensive, backed by the military and other police forces of the federal government, not with those in the Occupy movement who share the belief that the unions should be eliminated.”
While describing the politics of Occupy as “bourgeois populism,” the IG simultaneously condemns it for trying to go around the union bureaucracy “when what is needed is a fight to defeat and drive out these ‘labor lieutenants of the capitalist class’.” But Occupy is not part of the labor movement, which is where such a fight has to be waged. Our struggle with the labor bureaucrats is a political one, in opposition to its subordination of the unions to the national interests and profits of America’s capitalist rulers. Those like Heyman, the IG and others who promote the Occupy movement—whose populist politics in fact mirror those of the labor misleaders—as a substitute for the union reaped the fruits of their own grotesque opportunism at the Seattle meeting.
Those Who Labor Must Rule!
Occupy is not, and cannot be, the vehicle for revitalizing the American labor movement. That is the task of the workers themselves. What is posed is not simply the preservation of the existing unions, many of which have already been reduced to a mere shadow of their former existence, but the struggle to transform them into workers’ battalions of class struggle. The majority black membership of Bay Area ILWU Local 10 bridges a key fault line in U.S. society, giving the union the ability to harness its social power to the anger of the masses of the inner cities whose lives have been written off as worthless to American capitalism. Likewise, the Latino members in the ILWU’s L.A./Long Beach local provide a key link to the huge number of Latino immigrants in Los Angeles. This would be a key to the fight to organize the non-union, majority immigrant port truckers who are vital to shutting down the ports.
To wage such battles, the union must inscribe on its banner the fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants and champion the cause of black freedom. But the union itself is rent by the same racial and ethnic fault lines that the shipping bosses play on to divide and weaken the ILWU, pitting the overwhelmingly white ILWU workers in the Pacific Northwest, the black members in the Bay Area and the Latino members in L.A. against each other. It was a coastwide strike in 1934 that laid the basis for the founding of the ILWU, uniting longshoremen, seamen and other maritime workers. In San Francisco, where the longshore struggle sparked a general strike, the union leadership consciously appealed to the oppressed black population and fought against the bosses’ attempts to use racial and ethnic divisions to break the workers’ struggle.
The San Francisco general strike was not the only major class battle of 1934. There was also a mass strike sparked by auto parts workers in Toledo and truck drivers’ strikes in Minneapolis, out of which the Teamsters was forged as a powerful industrial union. They were all led by reds. As James P. Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, whose supporters led the Minneapolis strikes, wrote in an article on the 1936 West Coast maritime strike (printed in Notebook of an Agitator, 1958), a contract settlement “is only a temporary truce and the nature of such a settlement is decided by power; ‘justice’ has nothing to do with it. The workers will not have justice until they take over the world…. The bosses are powerful in the first place, because they own the ships and the docks, and the workers have not yet challenged their fraudulent claim to such ownership. And because they own the ships the bosses own the government.”
The workers struggle against increasingly brutal exploitation will not end short of getting rid of a system based on production for profit and establishing a workers government that will take the means of production out of the hands of the rapacious capitalist owners and make it the collective property of society. Then, advances in automation and other technology, which are now wielded as clubs against workers’ jobs and livelihoods, will be used to reduce their workload and lead to vast improvements in the conditions of life for the population as a whole.
The road forward lies in the fight to forge a new class-struggle leadership of the unions that will wage the battles out of which a revolutionary workers party can be built. It is the purpose of the Spartacist League to forge the nucleus of such a party as the U.S. section of a revolutionary working-class international organization. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote over 150 years ago in the Communist Manifesto: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries unite!”
In Boston-Say NO to MBTA Fare Hikes and Service Cuts!
Say NO to MBTA Fare Hikes and Service Cuts!
No MBTA Layoffs! Help Stop T Fare Hikes and Service Cuts Riders, Unions, Community Groups: Build a Mass Movement to
Stop Attacks on our Living Standards!
Tax the Corporations, Private Universities and the super-Rich for more revenue to Expand Service!
The MBTA board states that 30% of its yearly budget goes to debt servicing. This debt was created by Massachusetts during the Big Dig when the MBTA was legally mandated to upgrade stations and was given no Big Dig money to do it, instead being forced into massive debt.
Then in 2000, the State Legislature stopped funding the MBTA directly from the State budget, instead relying on fare increases and a portion of the sales tax - both are taxes on the working people who use public transit!
Now the MBTA board wants to eliminate bus routes, eliminate weekend service for the commuter rail, Mattapan line and E-line, eliminate The Ride (a service that many elderly and disabled people need to go about their daily routine), make the subway more dangerous by going to one conductor per train instead of two, and, in this terrible economy, eliminate over 500 good union jobs!
These cuts will hurt all working people. We should not be made to pay for the greed and short-sightedness of the corporate-dominated MBTA Board and State Legislature. Corporations and private universities could not exist without public transportation bringing their workforces to and from work on time every day, including weekends. Many corporations already pay nothing in taxes. The big universities, including Harvard, the richest university in the world, are "non-profits" and pay no taxes. The universities, who could not operate without T service, should drastically increase "in kind" payments in iieu of taxes ."TlTTs would create added revenue that could expand T service and lower fares.
In order to defeat the fare hikes and service cuts, we will need to build a movement that reaches out into all affected communities. We need to do "Mic Checks" on morning and evening commutes - on the subway commuter rail, and buses. We should engage with the MBTA unions and ask them to publicly support their jobs, wages, health care and pensions in solidarity with T riders and other unions. We need more good jobs for our communities. Union members who rely on the T to get to work should bring this movement to their union meetings and co-workers because T fare hike and service cuts mean a cut in disposable income, and hurt all union members. We should reach out to elderly communities who would have to pay the largest percentage fare increases.
Socialist Alternative calls for the building of an organized mass day of non-payment which would put massive pressure on the unelected MBTA board and Beacon Hill to consider other options such as use of the State's "Rainy Day Fund," taxing the corporations and private universities, bringing T funding back into the State budget and other alternatives that would not further erode the T and our living standards.
We Say:
•No Fare Hike, No Service Cuts, No
MBTA Layoffs!
•For an extension of MBTA hours and
services to create more union, living
wage jobs!
*Fund public transportation by taxing the
big corporations and rich private
universities.
*Fund the contracts of the union MBTA
workers, our communities need more
jobs, not less.'
*Organize mass demonstrations and
occupations of our public transit as part
of a movement that can stop the fare-
hikes.
*Set elections for the MBTA board within
a month. All positions should be elected
and subject to recall.
*Repeal the "Forward Funding" law!
Bring back direct funding for the MBTA
by putting T spending back into the .
regular State budget as it was before
2000.
Contact: boston@SocfalistAlternative.org 774-454-9060 - "Boston Socialist Alternative on Facebook
Labor Donated
No MBTA Layoffs! Help Stop T Fare Hikes and Service Cuts Riders, Unions, Community Groups: Build a Mass Movement to
Stop Attacks on our Living Standards!
Tax the Corporations, Private Universities and the super-Rich for more revenue to Expand Service!
The MBTA board states that 30% of its yearly budget goes to debt servicing. This debt was created by Massachusetts during the Big Dig when the MBTA was legally mandated to upgrade stations and was given no Big Dig money to do it, instead being forced into massive debt.
Then in 2000, the State Legislature stopped funding the MBTA directly from the State budget, instead relying on fare increases and a portion of the sales tax - both are taxes on the working people who use public transit!
Now the MBTA board wants to eliminate bus routes, eliminate weekend service for the commuter rail, Mattapan line and E-line, eliminate The Ride (a service that many elderly and disabled people need to go about their daily routine), make the subway more dangerous by going to one conductor per train instead of two, and, in this terrible economy, eliminate over 500 good union jobs!
These cuts will hurt all working people. We should not be made to pay for the greed and short-sightedness of the corporate-dominated MBTA Board and State Legislature. Corporations and private universities could not exist without public transportation bringing their workforces to and from work on time every day, including weekends. Many corporations already pay nothing in taxes. The big universities, including Harvard, the richest university in the world, are "non-profits" and pay no taxes. The universities, who could not operate without T service, should drastically increase "in kind" payments in iieu of taxes ."TlTTs would create added revenue that could expand T service and lower fares.
In order to defeat the fare hikes and service cuts, we will need to build a movement that reaches out into all affected communities. We need to do "Mic Checks" on morning and evening commutes - on the subway commuter rail, and buses. We should engage with the MBTA unions and ask them to publicly support their jobs, wages, health care and pensions in solidarity with T riders and other unions. We need more good jobs for our communities. Union members who rely on the T to get to work should bring this movement to their union meetings and co-workers because T fare hike and service cuts mean a cut in disposable income, and hurt all union members. We should reach out to elderly communities who would have to pay the largest percentage fare increases.
Socialist Alternative calls for the building of an organized mass day of non-payment which would put massive pressure on the unelected MBTA board and Beacon Hill to consider other options such as use of the State's "Rainy Day Fund," taxing the corporations and private universities, bringing T funding back into the State budget and other alternatives that would not further erode the T and our living standards.
We Say:
•No Fare Hike, No Service Cuts, No
MBTA Layoffs!
•For an extension of MBTA hours and
services to create more union, living
wage jobs!
*Fund public transportation by taxing the
big corporations and rich private
universities.
*Fund the contracts of the union MBTA
workers, our communities need more
jobs, not less.'
*Organize mass demonstrations and
occupations of our public transit as part
of a movement that can stop the fare-
hikes.
*Set elections for the MBTA board within
a month. All positions should be elected
and subject to recall.
*Repeal the "Forward Funding" law!
Bring back direct funding for the MBTA
by putting T spending back into the .
regular State budget as it was before
2000.
Contact: boston@SocfalistAlternative.org 774-454-9060 - "Boston Socialist Alternative on Facebook
Labor Donated
Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- When Jimmy Jack’s Jukebox Jumped- Super Hits 1962-A CD Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Brenda Lee performing her classic teen longing song, All Alone Am I.
CD Review
Super Hits 1962, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1991
Scene brought to mind by the cover that graces this CD. Simple. A jukebox, a Wurlitzer jukebox gismo, bright lights inviting, all are welcome, standing alone in some off-hand corner ready to be played by the latest crowd of song-hungry nickel, dime and quarter carrying teens after they get out of a hard day of fighting boredom at school, in this case the hoary Olde Saco High School up in Maine (or down in Maine for the purists) or are getting ready to do the do on a Friday or Saturday night (in summer, any night) before heading to wilder visions out in the great snarl of the Atlantic Ocean wave machine that is the setting for more than one budding romance, teenage style, Maine ocean teenage style.
“No question, no question at all, Jimmy Jack’s,” answered Josh Breslin to the off-hand life and death question posed by Billy La Croix, king hell king or at least prince, given his age, a mere thirteen, of the be-bop-crazed young teen night around Olde Saco, and maybe farther.
And the question posed by young Billy? Who has the best jukebox with the best and most up to date tunes around town? Of course, the question was a no-brainer, a real no-brainer, for real, because Billy just had to know the answer before he said it. See Billy is none other than the son of the owner of Jimmy Jack’s Diner, the most popular hang-out for teens, young and old, in the whole southern coastal Maine area.
Perhaps an explanation is in order. First off, the Jimmy Jack’s Diner we are referring to is the one on Main Street (really U.S. Route One but everybody calls it Main Street just to be in tune with the seven million other Main Streets that are really part of some state or federal road system and are just as forgettable in the dreary pass through towns of wayward America) down by the old long closed MacAdams Textile Mills, the one with the primo jukebox I just mentioned. The other Jimmy Jack’s Diner, the one over on Atlantic Avenue heading to the beach, is strictly for the early supper, two dinners for the price of one before six, Monday through Thursday, discounts for seniors all day, every day, and tourista in summer, place. With no jukebox, and with no need for such an object to draw the oldsters in.
Second, don’t be fooled by the Jimmy Jack thing, like it was some wayward down home Alabama or Mississippi thing. That’s a vanilla American thing that Billy’s father, real name Jean Jacques LaCroix, picked out when everybody after World War II wanted to leave their heritage behind and drop hyphens. Billy, Jimmy Jack, hell, even Josh Breslin on his mother‘s side (nee Leblanc) are nothing but French-American from way back, not Parisian types though but from Canada, you know Quebec or Nova Scotia, places like that.
And don’t get any idea, any idea at all that Billy LaCroix, or Jimmy Jack’s Diner’s jukebox, is filled up with hokey Cajun ancient Arcadian twos-step jolie blon memory accordion stuff. No Billy is not the king hell king of, maybe prince, given his age, of that kingdom but the, like I said before, be-bop teen night. That means rock, rock and rock for the squares, maybe a doo-wop tune or a weeper for the girls just to keep things interesting. And that has been true for a while.
Here’s how it works. Mr. LaCroix (although everybody calls him Jimmy Jack, except Mrs. LaCroix who still calls him some romanticky, smoochy, lovey-dovey, Jean Jacques, for some reason) figured out that with two diners in one town he wanted to cater to two different clienteles. You already know about the nursing home diner over on Atlantic Avenue for cheapos trying to impress nobody since everybody is already married. But the real Jimmy Jack’s with jukebox in tow is now strictly for teen-agers, for those who want to be teenagers but can’t because they are too old (or too young, maybe), and at night, especially weekend nights a little older crowd, a motorcycle and hot road crowd really for action but in need of early evening or late night (Jimmy Jack’s is open 24/7) refreshments and a little hot music to get things going. And to check out, ya, check out the honeys who line up around the place to be checked out. But you figured that out already. I hope.
And this is where Billy comes in, although now that you know some stuff asking Josh that question about who had the best jukebox was nothing but pure vanity on his part. His part now that he is king, or prince or something. But what got Jimmy Jack pushing the teen scene business is from the time he met Stu Miller, the king hell king and not no prince either but a real king of the hot road night, the only serious night around Olde Saco. Stu came into Jimmy Jack’s one day, one afternoon, from what I heard, for some coffee and. Business was a little slow so they got to talking and during the conversation Stu mentioned that the joint could use a jukebox so that kids who wanted to hear the latest tunes about twelve times in a row could do so in comfort, maybe dance a little, and just hang out.
Jimmy Jack didn’t think much of the idea while Stu was talking until about a half hour later while they were still mulling it over, pro and con, at least fifteen girls began filling up the booths and ordering Cokes and. And, of course, if fifteen girls are, just casually after a hard day looking beautiful at school and all, sitting in any public space for more than two minutes then, like lemmings to the nearby sea, thirty guys are going to be hanging around the booths ordering their Pepsi and. Of course, the real draw was Stu and his custom-built ’57 fire red Chevy that every girl in town, and from what I heard a few women, a couple married, wanted a ride in. And enough had, girls and women both, so that hanging around old Jimmy Jack’s, or any place else was just plain good luck for any girl (or woman) looking to try her luck.
You know, naturally, that Stu still has a special parking spot out in front of Jimmy Jack’s and no one, not police or anybody, had better be seen in it, or else. What you don’t know is that once Stu made Jimmy Jack’s his headquarters the jukebox was a sure thing and the master mad man in charge of keeping the machine filled with the latest hits and throwing out last week’s faded flowers was none other than Billy LaCroix. And his vanity question. And although Josh, as is his wont, will probably be scratching his head for a while over why Billy asked that question one and all should know that what makes Jimmy Jack’s jukebox jump is one William La Croix.
See Billy, since about the age of eight, has had an ear for the rumble coming out of the hills of rock and roll, for the real deal stuff, and the fakos too. So you can be sure that there will be plenty of Brenda Lee and her All Alone Am I and Break It To Me Gently for the swooning girls, and guys who have just been dumped by their true loves and couldn’t express themselves better than listening to Brenda eighty-six times to get over it, and they do. Get over it, that is. And the Drifters up-beat Up On The Roof (and whatever dream image that roof brings to mind) will get play as will the soapy Everley Brothers’ Crying In Rain. And Billy says Shelley Fabares’ Johnny Angel is nothing but candy for those self-same swooning girls and, get this, guys too because she looks kind of innocent foxy the way a lot of guys like their frills.
Jesus, you know every last dance dee-jay is hoping and praying that nobody ever, ever gets tired of last dance of the night because ‘Til by The Angels is built for nothing but last dance time. And every guy is hoping he gets lucky, and girls too. By the way forget Neil Sedaka’s Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, The Lettermen’s When I Fall In Love and Brian Hyland’s Sealed With A Kiss. Strictly faded flowers. You see what I mean. Ya, Jimmy Jack’s was the best.
CD Review
Super Hits 1962, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1991
Scene brought to mind by the cover that graces this CD. Simple. A jukebox, a Wurlitzer jukebox gismo, bright lights inviting, all are welcome, standing alone in some off-hand corner ready to be played by the latest crowd of song-hungry nickel, dime and quarter carrying teens after they get out of a hard day of fighting boredom at school, in this case the hoary Olde Saco High School up in Maine (or down in Maine for the purists) or are getting ready to do the do on a Friday or Saturday night (in summer, any night) before heading to wilder visions out in the great snarl of the Atlantic Ocean wave machine that is the setting for more than one budding romance, teenage style, Maine ocean teenage style.
“No question, no question at all, Jimmy Jack’s,” answered Josh Breslin to the off-hand life and death question posed by Billy La Croix, king hell king or at least prince, given his age, a mere thirteen, of the be-bop-crazed young teen night around Olde Saco, and maybe farther.
And the question posed by young Billy? Who has the best jukebox with the best and most up to date tunes around town? Of course, the question was a no-brainer, a real no-brainer, for real, because Billy just had to know the answer before he said it. See Billy is none other than the son of the owner of Jimmy Jack’s Diner, the most popular hang-out for teens, young and old, in the whole southern coastal Maine area.
Perhaps an explanation is in order. First off, the Jimmy Jack’s Diner we are referring to is the one on Main Street (really U.S. Route One but everybody calls it Main Street just to be in tune with the seven million other Main Streets that are really part of some state or federal road system and are just as forgettable in the dreary pass through towns of wayward America) down by the old long closed MacAdams Textile Mills, the one with the primo jukebox I just mentioned. The other Jimmy Jack’s Diner, the one over on Atlantic Avenue heading to the beach, is strictly for the early supper, two dinners for the price of one before six, Monday through Thursday, discounts for seniors all day, every day, and tourista in summer, place. With no jukebox, and with no need for such an object to draw the oldsters in.
Second, don’t be fooled by the Jimmy Jack thing, like it was some wayward down home Alabama or Mississippi thing. That’s a vanilla American thing that Billy’s father, real name Jean Jacques LaCroix, picked out when everybody after World War II wanted to leave their heritage behind and drop hyphens. Billy, Jimmy Jack, hell, even Josh Breslin on his mother‘s side (nee Leblanc) are nothing but French-American from way back, not Parisian types though but from Canada, you know Quebec or Nova Scotia, places like that.
And don’t get any idea, any idea at all that Billy LaCroix, or Jimmy Jack’s Diner’s jukebox, is filled up with hokey Cajun ancient Arcadian twos-step jolie blon memory accordion stuff. No Billy is not the king hell king of, maybe prince, given his age, of that kingdom but the, like I said before, be-bop teen night. That means rock, rock and rock for the squares, maybe a doo-wop tune or a weeper for the girls just to keep things interesting. And that has been true for a while.
Here’s how it works. Mr. LaCroix (although everybody calls him Jimmy Jack, except Mrs. LaCroix who still calls him some romanticky, smoochy, lovey-dovey, Jean Jacques, for some reason) figured out that with two diners in one town he wanted to cater to two different clienteles. You already know about the nursing home diner over on Atlantic Avenue for cheapos trying to impress nobody since everybody is already married. But the real Jimmy Jack’s with jukebox in tow is now strictly for teen-agers, for those who want to be teenagers but can’t because they are too old (or too young, maybe), and at night, especially weekend nights a little older crowd, a motorcycle and hot road crowd really for action but in need of early evening or late night (Jimmy Jack’s is open 24/7) refreshments and a little hot music to get things going. And to check out, ya, check out the honeys who line up around the place to be checked out. But you figured that out already. I hope.
And this is where Billy comes in, although now that you know some stuff asking Josh that question about who had the best jukebox was nothing but pure vanity on his part. His part now that he is king, or prince or something. But what got Jimmy Jack pushing the teen scene business is from the time he met Stu Miller, the king hell king and not no prince either but a real king of the hot road night, the only serious night around Olde Saco. Stu came into Jimmy Jack’s one day, one afternoon, from what I heard, for some coffee and. Business was a little slow so they got to talking and during the conversation Stu mentioned that the joint could use a jukebox so that kids who wanted to hear the latest tunes about twelve times in a row could do so in comfort, maybe dance a little, and just hang out.
Jimmy Jack didn’t think much of the idea while Stu was talking until about a half hour later while they were still mulling it over, pro and con, at least fifteen girls began filling up the booths and ordering Cokes and. And, of course, if fifteen girls are, just casually after a hard day looking beautiful at school and all, sitting in any public space for more than two minutes then, like lemmings to the nearby sea, thirty guys are going to be hanging around the booths ordering their Pepsi and. Of course, the real draw was Stu and his custom-built ’57 fire red Chevy that every girl in town, and from what I heard a few women, a couple married, wanted a ride in. And enough had, girls and women both, so that hanging around old Jimmy Jack’s, or any place else was just plain good luck for any girl (or woman) looking to try her luck.
You know, naturally, that Stu still has a special parking spot out in front of Jimmy Jack’s and no one, not police or anybody, had better be seen in it, or else. What you don’t know is that once Stu made Jimmy Jack’s his headquarters the jukebox was a sure thing and the master mad man in charge of keeping the machine filled with the latest hits and throwing out last week’s faded flowers was none other than Billy LaCroix. And his vanity question. And although Josh, as is his wont, will probably be scratching his head for a while over why Billy asked that question one and all should know that what makes Jimmy Jack’s jukebox jump is one William La Croix.
See Billy, since about the age of eight, has had an ear for the rumble coming out of the hills of rock and roll, for the real deal stuff, and the fakos too. So you can be sure that there will be plenty of Brenda Lee and her All Alone Am I and Break It To Me Gently for the swooning girls, and guys who have just been dumped by their true loves and couldn’t express themselves better than listening to Brenda eighty-six times to get over it, and they do. Get over it, that is. And the Drifters up-beat Up On The Roof (and whatever dream image that roof brings to mind) will get play as will the soapy Everley Brothers’ Crying In Rain. And Billy says Shelley Fabares’ Johnny Angel is nothing but candy for those self-same swooning girls and, get this, guys too because she looks kind of innocent foxy the way a lot of guys like their frills.
Jesus, you know every last dance dee-jay is hoping and praying that nobody ever, ever gets tired of last dance of the night because ‘Til by The Angels is built for nothing but last dance time. And every guy is hoping he gets lucky, and girls too. By the way forget Neil Sedaka’s Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, The Lettermen’s When I Fall In Love and Brian Hyland’s Sealed With A Kiss. Strictly faded flowers. You see what I mean. Ya, Jimmy Jack’s was the best.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)