Here is something I put together to draw the “pols” to our March 18th peace parade. If you support her, or are at an event where Professor Warren appears, ask this question. And ask every pol you run into the same question. Except change the gender and honorifics as necessary.
******
...Among the Mayfair (or on that day the Hibernian) swells or at the Saint Patrick's' Day Peace Parade in South Boston with-
*Those that are audacious and bold enough, in the street and at the seats of government, to, proudly and loudly through hard-bitten experience, put the words veteran and peace in the same sentence, and mean it. Damn how we mean it.
*Those who, sometimes lonely, unheard and unheralded, keep up the fight against war, from old time Vietnam to the now war drum beat threatened strike on Iran, alive on the vigil corners of Park Street, Copley Square, Arlington, Newton Center, Watertown Square and a hundred other often wind-swept streets and squares.
* Those who have, as a matter of simple democratic and social decency, proudly and publicly expressed their sexual preferences and do not want to be shunted off into some airless closet on Saint Patrick’s Day, or any other day.
*Those who cry out to the high heavens against the notion that living and breathing while being black, Hispanic, Moslem, or just plain ordinary different, is a crime.
*Those who fiercely defy those who howl in the night, blood red in their eyes, when they rail that immigrant –created America be walled off against those who lately come to these shores.
*Those who “speak,” speak in the public squares, at the seats of government, and in the courtrooms, for those political prisoner sisters and brothers whom governments have attempted to silently entomb behind the walls.
*Those who are workers, or who support workers struggles, like at Verizon, out on the don’t cross picket lines and who stand for the private and public union principle-“No More Wisconsins”
*Those that organize and physically put themselves on the line to stand up to the banks and other financial institutions on public service rate increases and when foreclosure and evictions days come around.
*Those of the Occupy movement who, inexpertly, perhaps somewhat haphazardly and fitfully, have nevertheless attempted to provide a platform for the voiceless.
*And those who struggle against the myriad other hurts and oppressions of this wicked old world too numerous to mention here at the cost of sounding cranky and long-winded.
I don’t know where Elizabeth Warren will be on March 18th but I know where I will be, and gladly.
All Out On March 18th for the Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade- Chocky Ar La (rough, very rough, phonetic Gaelic translation- “Our Day Will Come”)
Al Johnson, member VFP, Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade Organizing Committee* (used for identification only, although I hope I have caught the spirit of both groups)
********
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-follow the VFP flags to the staging area.
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 their application to walk in the official 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 as Grand 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, its 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
MassPeaceAction:
Cole Harrison 617-354-2169 infor@MassPeaceAction.org
On Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/events/242916262450591/
Facebook.com/smedleyvfp
Web: smedleyvfp.org
Twitter: @SmedleyVFP
********
From Veterans For Peace:
Saint Patrick's Peace Parade-History
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. Its 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 whoever 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 by 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 people’s 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 stepped 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, and 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.
Thursday, March 01, 2012
Professor Elizabeth Warren Can Talk The Talk. Can She Walk The Walk? Where Will Ms. Elizabeth Warren Be On March 18th?...
Among the Mayfair (or on that day the Hibernian) swells or at the Saint Patrick's' Day Peace Parade in South Boston with-
*Those that are audacious and bold enough, in the street and at the seats of government, to, proudly and loudly through hard-bitten experience, put the words veteran and peace in the same sentence, and mean it. Damn how we mean it.
*Those who, sometimes lonely, unheard and unheralded, keep up the fight against war, from old time Vietnam to the now war drum beat threatened strike on Iran, alive on the vigil corners of Park Street, Copley Square, Arlington, Newton Center, Watertown Square and a hundred other often wind-swept streets and squares.
* Those who have, as a matter of simple democratic and social decency, proudly and publicly expressed their sexual preferences and do not want to be shunted off into some airless closet on Saint Patrick’s Day, or any other day.
*Those who cry out to the high heavens against the notion that living and breathing while being black, Hispanic, Moslem, or just plain ordinary different, is a crime.
*Those who fiercely defy those who howl in the night, blood red in their eyes, when they rail that immigrant –created America be walled off against those who lately come to these shores.
*Those who “speak,” speak in the public squares, at the seats of government, and in the courtrooms, for those political prisoner sisters and brothers whom governments have attempted to silently entomb behind the walls.
*Those who are workers, or who support workers struggles, like at Verizon, out on the don’t cross picket lines and who stand for the private and public union principle-“No More Wisconsins”
*Those that organize and physically put themselves on the line to stand up to the banks and other financial institutions on public service rate increases and when foreclosure and evictions days come around.
*Those of the Occupy movement who, inexpertly, perhaps somewhat haphazardly and fitfully, have nevertheless attempted to provide a platform for the voiceless.
*And those who struggle against the myriad other hurts and oppressions of this wicked old world too numerous to mention here at the cost of sounding cranky and long-winded.
I don’t know where Elizabeth Warren will be on March 18th but I know where I will be, and gladly.
All Out On March 18th for the Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade- Chocky Ar La (rough, very rough, phonetic Gaelic translation- “Our Day Will Come”)
Al Johnson, member VFP, Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade Organizing Committee* (used for identification only, although I hope I have caught the spirit of both groups)
********
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-follow the VFP flags to the staging area.
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 their application to walk in the official 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 as Grand 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, its 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
MassPeaceAction:
Cole Harrison 617-354-2169 infor@MassPeaceAction.org
On Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/events/242916262450591/
Facebook.com/smedleyvfp
Web: smedleyvfp.org
Twitter: @SmedleyVFP
********
From Veterans For Peace:
Saint Patrick's Peace Parade-History
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. Its 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 whoever 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 by 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 people’s 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 stepped 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, and 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.
*Those that are audacious and bold enough, in the street and at the seats of government, to, proudly and loudly through hard-bitten experience, put the words veteran and peace in the same sentence, and mean it. Damn how we mean it.
*Those who, sometimes lonely, unheard and unheralded, keep up the fight against war, from old time Vietnam to the now war drum beat threatened strike on Iran, alive on the vigil corners of Park Street, Copley Square, Arlington, Newton Center, Watertown Square and a hundred other often wind-swept streets and squares.
* Those who have, as a matter of simple democratic and social decency, proudly and publicly expressed their sexual preferences and do not want to be shunted off into some airless closet on Saint Patrick’s Day, or any other day.
*Those who cry out to the high heavens against the notion that living and breathing while being black, Hispanic, Moslem, or just plain ordinary different, is a crime.
*Those who fiercely defy those who howl in the night, blood red in their eyes, when they rail that immigrant –created America be walled off against those who lately come to these shores.
*Those who “speak,” speak in the public squares, at the seats of government, and in the courtrooms, for those political prisoner sisters and brothers whom governments have attempted to silently entomb behind the walls.
*Those who are workers, or who support workers struggles, like at Verizon, out on the don’t cross picket lines and who stand for the private and public union principle-“No More Wisconsins”
*Those that organize and physically put themselves on the line to stand up to the banks and other financial institutions on public service rate increases and when foreclosure and evictions days come around.
*Those of the Occupy movement who, inexpertly, perhaps somewhat haphazardly and fitfully, have nevertheless attempted to provide a platform for the voiceless.
*And those who struggle against the myriad other hurts and oppressions of this wicked old world too numerous to mention here at the cost of sounding cranky and long-winded.
I don’t know where Elizabeth Warren will be on March 18th but I know where I will be, and gladly.
All Out On March 18th for the Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade- Chocky Ar La (rough, very rough, phonetic Gaelic translation- “Our Day Will Come”)
Al Johnson, member VFP, Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade Organizing Committee* (used for identification only, although I hope I have caught the spirit of both groups)
********
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-follow the VFP flags to the staging area.
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 their application to walk in the official 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 as Grand 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, its 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
MassPeaceAction:
Cole Harrison 617-354-2169 infor@MassPeaceAction.org
On Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/events/242916262450591/
Facebook.com/smedleyvfp
Web: smedleyvfp.org
Twitter: @SmedleyVFP
********
From Veterans For Peace:
Saint Patrick's Peace Parade-History
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. Its 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 whoever 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 by 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 people’s 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 stepped 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, and 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.
A Call To Action-United National Antiwar Coalition Conference-March 23-25,2012 - Stamford Hilton Hotel, CT
Click on the headline to link to the United National Antiwar Coalition website for details on workshops, directions, registration and accommodations.
A Call To Action-United National Antiwar Coalition Conference-March 23-25,2012 - Stamford Hilton Hotel, CT
SAY NO! TO THE NATO/G8 WARS & POVERTY AGENDA
A CONFERENCE TO CHALLENGE THE WARS OF THE 1% AGAINST THE 99* ABROAD AND AT HOME
March 23-25,2012 - Stamford Hilton Hotel, CT
The US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the G-8 world economic powers will meet in Chicago, May 15-22,2012 to plan their economic and military strategies for the coming period. These military, financial, and political leaders, who serve the 1 % at home and abroad, impose austerity on the 99% to expand their profits, often by drones, armies, and police.
Just as there is a nationally-coordinated attempt to curb the organized dissent of the Occupy Wall St. movements, the federal and local authorities want to deny us our constitutional rights to peacefully and legally protest within sight and sound range of the NATO/G-8 Summits. We must challenge them and bring thousands to Chicago to stand in solidarity with all those fighting US-backed austerity and war around the globe.
To plan these actions and further actions against the program of endless war of the global elite, we will meet in a large national conference March 23-25 in Stamford CT. This conference will bring to¬gether activists from the occupy movements, and the antiwar, social justice and environmental move¬ments. We will demand that Washington Bring Our War Dollars Home Now! and use these trillions immediately for human needs.
The conference program will feature movement leaders, educators, grassroots activists, 40 workshops, and discussion/voting sessions on an action program. A partial list of presenters include: Ann Wright, Bill McKibben, Glen Ford, Vijay Prashad, Saadia Toor, Cynthia McKinney, Malik Mujahid, Ian Angus, Monami Maulik, Elliot Adams, Bruce Gagnon, David Swanson, Lucy Pagoada, and Clarence Thomas.
A conference highlight will be the relationship between the Wars Abroad and the racist War at Home on the Black Community, addressing unemployment, the New Jim Crow of mass incarceration, police brutality, the prison industry, and the racist death penalty.
Workshop Topics Include:
Occupy Wall St. & the Fight Against War x Global Economic Crisis Climate Crisis and War oo Women and War oo War at Home on Black Community oo War on the U.S.-Mexico Border oc Islamophobia as a Tool of War oo War and Labor's Fight Back oo Defense of Iran oo Afghanistan after Ten Years of Occupation oo Is the U.S. Really Withdrawing from Iraq? oo War on Pakistan oo Updates on Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Yemen oo What Next for the Arab Spring? oo Occupation of Haiti oo U.S. Intervention in Honduras, Colombia, and the rest of Latin America x> Drone Warfare and Weapons in Space oo Fight for Our Right to Protest oo Civil Liberties oo Guantanamo, Torture and Rendition oo U.S. Combat Troops Involved in New Scramble for Africa oo Somalia oc Control of Media oo Imperialism oc Nonviolence & Direct Action oo Palestine: UN Recognized Statehood or Civil Resistance oc Breaking the Siege of Gaza & Ending Occupation oo Veterans Rights oo Immigrant Rights and War °o No War, No Warming oo Bring Our War $$ Home Campaigns.
www.unacpeace.org
**************
A Call To Action-United National Antiwar Coalition Conference-March 23-25,2012 - Stamford Hilton Hotel, CT
SAY NO! TO THE NATO/G8 WARS & POVERTY AGENDA
A CONFERENCE TO CHALLENGE THE WARS OF THE 1% AGAINST THE 99* ABROAD AND AT HOME
March 23-25,2012 - Stamford Hilton Hotel, CT
The US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the G-8 world economic powers will meet in Chicago, May 15-22,2012 to plan their economic and military strategies for the coming period. These military, financial, and political leaders, who serve the 1 % at home and abroad, impose austerity on the 99% to expand their profits, often by drones, armies, and police.
Just as there is a nationally-coordinated attempt to curb the organized dissent of the Occupy Wall St. movements, the federal and local authorities want to deny us our constitutional rights to peacefully and legally protest within sight and sound range of the NATO/G-8 Summits. We must challenge them and bring thousands to Chicago to stand in solidarity with all those fighting US-backed austerity and war around the globe.
To plan these actions and further actions against the program of endless war of the global elite, we will meet in a large national conference March 23-25 in Stamford CT. This conference will bring to¬gether activists from the occupy movements, and the antiwar, social justice and environmental move¬ments. We will demand that Washington Bring Our War Dollars Home Now! and use these trillions immediately for human needs.
The conference program will feature movement leaders, educators, grassroots activists, 40 workshops, and discussion/voting sessions on an action program. A partial list of presenters include: Ann Wright, Bill McKibben, Glen Ford, Vijay Prashad, Saadia Toor, Cynthia McKinney, Malik Mujahid, Ian Angus, Monami Maulik, Elliot Adams, Bruce Gagnon, David Swanson, Lucy Pagoada, and Clarence Thomas.
A conference highlight will be the relationship between the Wars Abroad and the racist War at Home on the Black Community, addressing unemployment, the New Jim Crow of mass incarceration, police brutality, the prison industry, and the racist death penalty.
Workshop Topics Include:
Occupy Wall St. & the Fight Against War x Global Economic Crisis
www.unacpeace.org
**************
In Honor Of The 93rd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-"The Third International After Lenin"
Click on the headline to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives for an online copy of the document mentioned in the headline.
Markin comment:
After the struggle inside the Russian Communist Party in the mid-1920s around internal party democracy and the economics of the transition period the Leon Trotsky-led Left Opposition (and later the International Left Opposition) concentrated on Communist International policies. And chief among them was the contour and fate of the Second Chinese Revolution of 1925-27. While Leon Trotsky was not around to write about the successful revolution of 1949 he did write many polemics on that second revolution and how, in the end, it like in Russian would have to follow the path that he outlined in his Theory Of Permanent Revolution in order to be successful. In the event, although successful, it never developed those soviet forms that would have eased the transition to socialism. This material is still very helpful in sorting things out, and readable.
Markin comment:
After the struggle inside the Russian Communist Party in the mid-1920s around internal party democracy and the economics of the transition period the Leon Trotsky-led Left Opposition (and later the International Left Opposition) concentrated on Communist International policies. And chief among them was the contour and fate of the Second Chinese Revolution of 1925-27. While Leon Trotsky was not around to write about the successful revolution of 1949 he did write many polemics on that second revolution and how, in the end, it like in Russian would have to follow the path that he outlined in his Theory Of Permanent Revolution in order to be successful. In the event, although successful, it never developed those soviet forms that would have eased the transition to socialism. This material is still very helpful in sorting things out, and readable.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
The Latest From The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee- Free Lynne Stewart And Her Co-Workers Now!-Lynne's Message To Supporters On Her Appeal
Click on the headline to link to the Justice For Lynn Stewart Defense Committee for the latest in her case.
Markin comment:
Free Lynne Stewart and her co-workers! Free Grandma Now!
Markin comment:
Free Lynne Stewart and her co-workers! Free Grandma Now!
The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-Free The Class-War Prisoners-Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Free Leonard Peltier, Free Lynne Stewart And Her Co-Workers-Free The Remaining Ohio 7 Prisoners!-SYC Speaker at NY Holiday Appeal-Only Workers Revolution Can End Capitalist Immiseration
Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class struggle defense in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
********
3 February 2012
SYC Speaker at NY Holiday Appeal-Only Workers Revolution Can End Capitalist Immiseration
We print below a speech, edited for publication, by Rosie Gonzalez of the New York Spartacus Youth Club. The speech was given on January 6 at the Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners in New York.
Welcome! My name is Rosie and this is my third Holiday Appeal. I joined the Spartacus Youth Club a little over a year ago, after I broke from radical-liberal activism. I came to understand the class nature of the capitalist state, the social power of the labor movement, and based on this I learned that it is simply not enough to just have good intentions and to put your body on the street. One must have a party based on a Marxist program, developed through the study of victories and defeats of the past. Now I can stand here and say: We Trotskyists of the Spartacus Youth Clubs demand the immediate freedom of all class-war prisoners and all fighters against capitalist oppression! We say they should not have spent one second in jail.
We do not rely on the capitalist injustice system to free these brave men and women. The SYCs fight against any illusions in the bourgeois state on the campuses, in demonstrations, and in the streets. We fight to win youth to the side of the working class—this is where the social power lies in the struggle for the liberation of blacks, women and all of the oppressed. We of the SYC understand that only through workers revolution will the racist horrors of American capitalism be tossed into the dustbin of history—all the fighters against oppression, the women and men that are behind bars today, tomorrow will be free.
The Spartacus Youth Clubs are the youth groups of the Trotskyist Spartacist League, the U.S. section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). We intervene into social struggles armed with a revolutionary-internationalist program. At Zuccotti Park we intervened into different demonstrations surrounding the “Occupy” movement. We did sales, gave a presentation about Marxism to a left-wing group called “Class War Camp” and we protested the police repression of the Occupiers.
We also took students and other youth with us to the Verizon strike pickets to show them some class struggle and why the defense of unions is so central. The working class has been on the defensive for years now, particularly since the capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. At the same time, every strike is an opening for the Spartacist League to show the need to fight for class-struggle leadership.
The politics of the protesters whom we met at Occupy Wall Street ranged anywhere from open patriotism to anarchoid idealism. We found that the best way to show them the power of the revolutionary working class was to study the Russian Revolution. We encountered real interest at our class series on the Russian Revolution at City College (CCNY). We presented the lessons of this world-historic working-class victory as a counterposition to the stupefying, populist, anti-Marxist slogan of “We are the 99 percent,” which does not recognize the sharp class divisions in society and instead disguises the class nature of the capitalist state and all of its political parties. It lumps the working class together with the petty bourgeoisie and even parts of the capitalist class as well. The truth is that the problem is not the “greed” of the bankers (although there is plenty of that); the problem is the whole capitalist system itself. What is really necessary is the mobilization of the working class against the property-owning capitalist class. The working class has the social power and the historic interest to overthrow the whole capitalist profit system and lay the basis for a socialist society free from exploitation and oppression.
The Russian Revolution showed us how the Bolsheviks led the workers, organized in soviets, to power and threw off the chains of oppressive imperial Russia. The working class took state power and got rid of the capitalist profit system altogether. This is our model—for new October Revolutions worldwide!
This sets us apart from so-called socialists like Workers World Party and the International Socialist Organization (ISO) who are lapping up the liberal politics of the Occupy movement. Workers World called the Occupy protests a “fledgling revolution” and the ISO recently stated that they had “fundamentally shifted the political landscape in the U.S.” Tell that to workers like the militant ILWU pickets in Longview, Washington, who were attacked by the cops last year. That’s the political landscape! So the question is why would these self-proclaimed socialist organizations be uncritically hailing a movement that has no intention of dismantling capitalism? Because they have no interest in dismantling capitalism. In essence, these groups lend ardent support to bourgeois democracy. Just take, for example, the enthusiastic support the ISO gave to the Libyan “rebels” last year. These “rebel” forces were supported by U.S. imperialism and its Commander-in-Chief, Obama, who bombed Tripoli in the name of “democracy.” At home, the reformist left’s support to the Occupy movement is just another expression of its “fight the right” agenda, which amounts to nothing more than building illusions in and support for the Democrats.
The Occupy protesters constantly talk about “reclaiming our democracy.” This country was founded on the enslavement of blacks and the genocide of Native Americans. Its history is riddled with the bodies of working-class fighters killed at the hands of the police or the courts. The purpose of this government has always been to defend the property and profits of the ruling class.
We, as communist revolutionaries, always ask the question—democracy for which class? The facade of democracy serves to obscure the fact that the capitalist state is an instrument of organized violence—at its core the police, military, courts and prisons—for maintaining capitalist rule. From CCNY to Zuccotti Park, we are constantly arguing against illusions in the cops. Cops are not workers—they are strikebreakers who act in the interest of the fundamentally racist ruling class, the bourgeoisie. And that’s why we read and teach Lenin’s The State and Revolution.
In November, at a demonstration at City College, students protested a planned tuition hike and we led the chants, “Cops off campus! Free quality education! Abolish the administration!” We raised the call for worker/teacher/student control of the schools. The student protesters, many of whom were black and Latino, had picked up some of our slogans. These chants were counterposed to the politics of the liberal leadership of the demonstration, Students United for a Free CUNY, who accept the framework of capitalism by begging for a few crumbs.
Our starting point is to have a clear class opposition to capitalist politicians like Obama and the Democratic Party. The Democrats were once the party in defense of slavery and later the party of Jim Crow. They aim, as does the bourgeoisie as a whole, to “divide and conquer” so their profits will rise. Racism is all part and parcel of the maintenance of the capitalist order. The “war on terror,” the “war on drugs,” the war against abortion rights—these are wars on blacks, women and the working class as a whole! Just look at Obama’s outrageous ban on over-the-counter access to morning-after pills for teenagers. These are young women under 17 years old who will not have easy access to a simple pill, making it harder for them to avoid having children. This is criminal! It serves to tighten the grip of social control and enforce the sexual repression of young women. Again and again you can see that the Democrats are really just the other party of capitalism and war. This is why we have always and consistently raised the slogan “Break with the Democrats!” and why we call to build a multiracial workers party that fights for a workers government.
The only way out of this hell is through workers revolution. The victory of the socialist revolution in this country will be achieved only through the struggle of the multiracial working class, under the leadership of the revolutionary vanguard party. In the course of the struggle, unbreakable bonds will be forged between these different sections of the working class. Then, we will ensure at last the end of wage slavery, racism, and exploitation. Join this fight! Join the Spartacus Youth Club!
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 995, 3 February 2012)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class struggle defense in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
********
3 February 2012
SYC Speaker at NY Holiday Appeal-Only Workers Revolution Can End Capitalist Immiseration
We print below a speech, edited for publication, by Rosie Gonzalez of the New York Spartacus Youth Club. The speech was given on January 6 at the Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners in New York.
Welcome! My name is Rosie and this is my third Holiday Appeal. I joined the Spartacus Youth Club a little over a year ago, after I broke from radical-liberal activism. I came to understand the class nature of the capitalist state, the social power of the labor movement, and based on this I learned that it is simply not enough to just have good intentions and to put your body on the street. One must have a party based on a Marxist program, developed through the study of victories and defeats of the past. Now I can stand here and say: We Trotskyists of the Spartacus Youth Clubs demand the immediate freedom of all class-war prisoners and all fighters against capitalist oppression! We say they should not have spent one second in jail.
We do not rely on the capitalist injustice system to free these brave men and women. The SYCs fight against any illusions in the bourgeois state on the campuses, in demonstrations, and in the streets. We fight to win youth to the side of the working class—this is where the social power lies in the struggle for the liberation of blacks, women and all of the oppressed. We of the SYC understand that only through workers revolution will the racist horrors of American capitalism be tossed into the dustbin of history—all the fighters against oppression, the women and men that are behind bars today, tomorrow will be free.
The Spartacus Youth Clubs are the youth groups of the Trotskyist Spartacist League, the U.S. section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). We intervene into social struggles armed with a revolutionary-internationalist program. At Zuccotti Park we intervened into different demonstrations surrounding the “Occupy” movement. We did sales, gave a presentation about Marxism to a left-wing group called “Class War Camp” and we protested the police repression of the Occupiers.
We also took students and other youth with us to the Verizon strike pickets to show them some class struggle and why the defense of unions is so central. The working class has been on the defensive for years now, particularly since the capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. At the same time, every strike is an opening for the Spartacist League to show the need to fight for class-struggle leadership.
The politics of the protesters whom we met at Occupy Wall Street ranged anywhere from open patriotism to anarchoid idealism. We found that the best way to show them the power of the revolutionary working class was to study the Russian Revolution. We encountered real interest at our class series on the Russian Revolution at City College (CCNY). We presented the lessons of this world-historic working-class victory as a counterposition to the stupefying, populist, anti-Marxist slogan of “We are the 99 percent,” which does not recognize the sharp class divisions in society and instead disguises the class nature of the capitalist state and all of its political parties. It lumps the working class together with the petty bourgeoisie and even parts of the capitalist class as well. The truth is that the problem is not the “greed” of the bankers (although there is plenty of that); the problem is the whole capitalist system itself. What is really necessary is the mobilization of the working class against the property-owning capitalist class. The working class has the social power and the historic interest to overthrow the whole capitalist profit system and lay the basis for a socialist society free from exploitation and oppression.
The Russian Revolution showed us how the Bolsheviks led the workers, organized in soviets, to power and threw off the chains of oppressive imperial Russia. The working class took state power and got rid of the capitalist profit system altogether. This is our model—for new October Revolutions worldwide!
This sets us apart from so-called socialists like Workers World Party and the International Socialist Organization (ISO) who are lapping up the liberal politics of the Occupy movement. Workers World called the Occupy protests a “fledgling revolution” and the ISO recently stated that they had “fundamentally shifted the political landscape in the U.S.” Tell that to workers like the militant ILWU pickets in Longview, Washington, who were attacked by the cops last year. That’s the political landscape! So the question is why would these self-proclaimed socialist organizations be uncritically hailing a movement that has no intention of dismantling capitalism? Because they have no interest in dismantling capitalism. In essence, these groups lend ardent support to bourgeois democracy. Just take, for example, the enthusiastic support the ISO gave to the Libyan “rebels” last year. These “rebel” forces were supported by U.S. imperialism and its Commander-in-Chief, Obama, who bombed Tripoli in the name of “democracy.” At home, the reformist left’s support to the Occupy movement is just another expression of its “fight the right” agenda, which amounts to nothing more than building illusions in and support for the Democrats.
The Occupy protesters constantly talk about “reclaiming our democracy.” This country was founded on the enslavement of blacks and the genocide of Native Americans. Its history is riddled with the bodies of working-class fighters killed at the hands of the police or the courts. The purpose of this government has always been to defend the property and profits of the ruling class.
We, as communist revolutionaries, always ask the question—democracy for which class? The facade of democracy serves to obscure the fact that the capitalist state is an instrument of organized violence—at its core the police, military, courts and prisons—for maintaining capitalist rule. From CCNY to Zuccotti Park, we are constantly arguing against illusions in the cops. Cops are not workers—they are strikebreakers who act in the interest of the fundamentally racist ruling class, the bourgeoisie. And that’s why we read and teach Lenin’s The State and Revolution.
In November, at a demonstration at City College, students protested a planned tuition hike and we led the chants, “Cops off campus! Free quality education! Abolish the administration!” We raised the call for worker/teacher/student control of the schools. The student protesters, many of whom were black and Latino, had picked up some of our slogans. These chants were counterposed to the politics of the liberal leadership of the demonstration, Students United for a Free CUNY, who accept the framework of capitalism by begging for a few crumbs.
Our starting point is to have a clear class opposition to capitalist politicians like Obama and the Democratic Party. The Democrats were once the party in defense of slavery and later the party of Jim Crow. They aim, as does the bourgeoisie as a whole, to “divide and conquer” so their profits will rise. Racism is all part and parcel of the maintenance of the capitalist order. The “war on terror,” the “war on drugs,” the war against abortion rights—these are wars on blacks, women and the working class as a whole! Just look at Obama’s outrageous ban on over-the-counter access to morning-after pills for teenagers. These are young women under 17 years old who will not have easy access to a simple pill, making it harder for them to avoid having children. This is criminal! It serves to tighten the grip of social control and enforce the sexual repression of young women. Again and again you can see that the Democrats are really just the other party of capitalism and war. This is why we have always and consistently raised the slogan “Break with the Democrats!” and why we call to build a multiracial workers party that fights for a workers government.
The only way out of this hell is through workers revolution. The victory of the socialist revolution in this country will be achieved only through the struggle of the multiracial working class, under the leadership of the revolutionary vanguard party. In the course of the struggle, unbreakable bonds will be forged between these different sections of the working class. Then, we will ensure at last the end of wage slavery, racism, and exploitation. Join this fight! Join the Spartacus Youth Club!
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 995, 3 February 2012)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-Free The Class-War Prisoners-Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Free Leonard Peltier, Free Lynne Stewart And Her Co-Workers-Free The Remaining Ohio 7 Prisoners!-Victimized for Protesting Israeli War Criminal-Overturn the Convictions of the Irvine 11!
Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class struggle defense in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
*******
3 February 2012
Victimized for Protesting Israeli War Criminal-Overturn the Convictions of the Irvine 11!
LOS ANGELES—On 23 September 2011, an Orange County, California, court convicted ten of eleven Muslim students charged with “conspiracy to disrupt a public meeting” and “disruption of a public meeting” for protesting Michael Oren, Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S., during his speech on 8 February 2010 at University of California Irvine (UCI). For the crime of exposing this Zionist butcher, who the students decried as an “accomplice to genocide,” they were each sentenced to three years of informal probation, 56 hours of community service and $270 in fines! The ten defendants have filed to appeal their convictions. We in the Spartacus Youth Clubs demand: Overturn the convictions!
The students are fully justified in denouncing the likes of Michael Oren. A former paratrooper and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman, Oren coordinates Israeli and U.S. bloody interests in the Near East and shares responsibility for the relentless oppression of the Palestinian people. This war criminal praises the IDF massacre of some 1,400 Palestinians during its heinous assault on the Gaza Strip in 2008 and lauds Israeli commandos who slaughtered nine people aboard the Turkish aid ship Mavi Marmara in May 2010. Among the many victims of the 2008 attack on the Gaza Strip were cousins of one of the Irvine protesters.
The legal offensive against the Irvine 11 followed in the wake of discipline by the UCI administration. Based on big-brother surveillance of e-mail traffic, UCI accused the Muslim Student Union (MSU) of organizing the protest against Oren. The administration suspended the group for a quarter, placed it on probation for another two years and ordered its members to collectively perform 100 hours of community service. The UCI administration, the D.A. and the courts are making it clear that they will tolerate no protest against Washington’s alliance with Israel, U.S. imperialism’s staunchest ally in the Near East. As the Partisan Defense Committee, the class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, stated in a 14 February 2011 letter sent to the D.A., “These prosecutions serve as well to engender an atmosphere of paranoia and hysteria, especially targeting Muslims, and to intimidate into silence anyone who speaks out against the brutal colonial occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan, or who defends the Palestinians against murderous assault by the Zionist state.” Down with the UCI administration’s disciplinary measures against the MSU! Reinstate the MSU!
To manufacture a case against the Irvine 11, the D.A. issued five search warrants for the private e-mails of the defendants and other UC Irvine students without their or their lawyers’ knowledge. Among the thousands of e-mails read by the D.A. and turned over to the court were those supposedly protected by attorney-client privilege. Since the case was based entirely on this illegally obtained communication, prosecutors dropped the charges against one of the students in exchange for community service. The D.A. also attempted to intimidate students to testify against their peers, in at least one case sending the D.A.’s Special Prosecutions Unit to bang on a student’s windows at 7 a.m. yelling, “Police, open up!” In another instance, they went to the house of a student’s grandmother and accused her of hiding her granddaughter.
The MSU is a religious organization that has sponsored public events at UCI in defense of the Palestinians. These events have featured speakers espousing generally liberal politics, including anti-Zionist rabbis and capitalist politicians like Cynthia McKinney. Religion and nationalism are bourgeois ideologies, and in the Near East they are the main obstacles to the workers achieving class consciousness. But regardless of political differences, students and workers must defend everyone who is targeted by the capitalist state and reactionary forces for protesting U.S. imperialism and its bloody allies and for expressing solidarity with the oppressed.
The outrageous criminal conviction of the Irvine 11 for “disrupting” Michael Oren occurs in the context of the decade-long “war on terror,” which began under Republican George W. Bush and has been continued with a vengeance by Democrat Barack Obama. Designed to justify wars abroad, at home the “war on terror” has provided a new justification for government repression against its perceived opponents. For example, the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) gives the state nearly unlimited powers to abduct and imprison anyone it deems as a threat, including U.S. citizens (see “Obama Ramps Up ‘War on Terror’ at Home,” WV No. 993, 6 January).
Zionist groups on campuses across the country have for years smeared anyone who dares even suggest the Palestinian people have a right to exist as an “anti-Semite” or “terrorist.” At UCI, groups like the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) and StandWithUs have undertaken a years-long campaign against the MSU. In 2004, when a few dozen Muslim UCI students wore green stoles with Arabic writing at graduation, the ZOA complained that the stoles incited terrorism against Jews and Israel. That year, the ZOA also filed complaints against the university with the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, alleging that talks given by speakers invited by the MSU were anti-Semitic. And when the MSU invited George Galloway (then a British Member of Parliament) to come to UCI and raise money for medical aid to the people of Gaza, the ZOA wrote to the Chief Campus Counsel claiming that the MSU was using the university as a fund-raising base for Hamas! In today’s climate, being accused of supporting a “terrorist” group has led to imprisonment, or even disappearance into the torture chambers of a military brig.
Defend the Palestinians and Their Supporters!
As revolutionary Trotskyists, we seek to win students and youth to a Marxist worldview, to taking a side with the exploited and oppressed against capitalist imperialism. Against Zionism as well as all variants of Arab nationalism, we understand that the only solution to the problem of Israel/Palestine, where two peoples have valid, conflicting claims to a small territory, lies through the joint struggle of Jewish and Palestinian Arab workers, connected to class struggle throughout the region. A just solution is not possible under capitalism. The only road to peace in the Near East is socialist revolution. This requires a revolutionary struggle not only against the Zionist butchers and the various dictators, mullahs and monarchs who rule the rest of the region, but also against the paymaster of oppression in the Near East—the American bourgeoisie. Defend the Palestinians! All Israeli troops and settlers out of the Occupied Territories! Down with U.S. imperialism!
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 995, 3 February 2012)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class struggle defense in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
*******
3 February 2012
Victimized for Protesting Israeli War Criminal-Overturn the Convictions of the Irvine 11!
LOS ANGELES—On 23 September 2011, an Orange County, California, court convicted ten of eleven Muslim students charged with “conspiracy to disrupt a public meeting” and “disruption of a public meeting” for protesting Michael Oren, Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S., during his speech on 8 February 2010 at University of California Irvine (UCI). For the crime of exposing this Zionist butcher, who the students decried as an “accomplice to genocide,” they were each sentenced to three years of informal probation, 56 hours of community service and $270 in fines! The ten defendants have filed to appeal their convictions. We in the Spartacus Youth Clubs demand: Overturn the convictions!
The students are fully justified in denouncing the likes of Michael Oren. A former paratrooper and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman, Oren coordinates Israeli and U.S. bloody interests in the Near East and shares responsibility for the relentless oppression of the Palestinian people. This war criminal praises the IDF massacre of some 1,400 Palestinians during its heinous assault on the Gaza Strip in 2008 and lauds Israeli commandos who slaughtered nine people aboard the Turkish aid ship Mavi Marmara in May 2010. Among the many victims of the 2008 attack on the Gaza Strip were cousins of one of the Irvine protesters.
The legal offensive against the Irvine 11 followed in the wake of discipline by the UCI administration. Based on big-brother surveillance of e-mail traffic, UCI accused the Muslim Student Union (MSU) of organizing the protest against Oren. The administration suspended the group for a quarter, placed it on probation for another two years and ordered its members to collectively perform 100 hours of community service. The UCI administration, the D.A. and the courts are making it clear that they will tolerate no protest against Washington’s alliance with Israel, U.S. imperialism’s staunchest ally in the Near East. As the Partisan Defense Committee, the class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, stated in a 14 February 2011 letter sent to the D.A., “These prosecutions serve as well to engender an atmosphere of paranoia and hysteria, especially targeting Muslims, and to intimidate into silence anyone who speaks out against the brutal colonial occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan, or who defends the Palestinians against murderous assault by the Zionist state.” Down with the UCI administration’s disciplinary measures against the MSU! Reinstate the MSU!
To manufacture a case against the Irvine 11, the D.A. issued five search warrants for the private e-mails of the defendants and other UC Irvine students without their or their lawyers’ knowledge. Among the thousands of e-mails read by the D.A. and turned over to the court were those supposedly protected by attorney-client privilege. Since the case was based entirely on this illegally obtained communication, prosecutors dropped the charges against one of the students in exchange for community service. The D.A. also attempted to intimidate students to testify against their peers, in at least one case sending the D.A.’s Special Prosecutions Unit to bang on a student’s windows at 7 a.m. yelling, “Police, open up!” In another instance, they went to the house of a student’s grandmother and accused her of hiding her granddaughter.
The MSU is a religious organization that has sponsored public events at UCI in defense of the Palestinians. These events have featured speakers espousing generally liberal politics, including anti-Zionist rabbis and capitalist politicians like Cynthia McKinney. Religion and nationalism are bourgeois ideologies, and in the Near East they are the main obstacles to the workers achieving class consciousness. But regardless of political differences, students and workers must defend everyone who is targeted by the capitalist state and reactionary forces for protesting U.S. imperialism and its bloody allies and for expressing solidarity with the oppressed.
The outrageous criminal conviction of the Irvine 11 for “disrupting” Michael Oren occurs in the context of the decade-long “war on terror,” which began under Republican George W. Bush and has been continued with a vengeance by Democrat Barack Obama. Designed to justify wars abroad, at home the “war on terror” has provided a new justification for government repression against its perceived opponents. For example, the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) gives the state nearly unlimited powers to abduct and imprison anyone it deems as a threat, including U.S. citizens (see “Obama Ramps Up ‘War on Terror’ at Home,” WV No. 993, 6 January).
Zionist groups on campuses across the country have for years smeared anyone who dares even suggest the Palestinian people have a right to exist as an “anti-Semite” or “terrorist.” At UCI, groups like the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) and StandWithUs have undertaken a years-long campaign against the MSU. In 2004, when a few dozen Muslim UCI students wore green stoles with Arabic writing at graduation, the ZOA complained that the stoles incited terrorism against Jews and Israel. That year, the ZOA also filed complaints against the university with the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, alleging that talks given by speakers invited by the MSU were anti-Semitic. And when the MSU invited George Galloway (then a British Member of Parliament) to come to UCI and raise money for medical aid to the people of Gaza, the ZOA wrote to the Chief Campus Counsel claiming that the MSU was using the university as a fund-raising base for Hamas! In today’s climate, being accused of supporting a “terrorist” group has led to imprisonment, or even disappearance into the torture chambers of a military brig.
Defend the Palestinians and Their Supporters!
As revolutionary Trotskyists, we seek to win students and youth to a Marxist worldview, to taking a side with the exploited and oppressed against capitalist imperialism. Against Zionism as well as all variants of Arab nationalism, we understand that the only solution to the problem of Israel/Palestine, where two peoples have valid, conflicting claims to a small territory, lies through the joint struggle of Jewish and Palestinian Arab workers, connected to class struggle throughout the region. A just solution is not possible under capitalism. The only road to peace in the Near East is socialist revolution. This requires a revolutionary struggle not only against the Zionist butchers and the various dictators, mullahs and monarchs who rule the rest of the region, but also against the paymaster of oppression in the Near East—the American bourgeoisie. Defend the Palestinians! All Israeli troops and settlers out of the Occupied Territories! Down with U.S. imperialism!
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 995, 3 February 2012)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-Free The Class-War Prisoners-Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Free Leonard Peltier, Free Lynne Stewart And Her Co-Workers-Free The Remaining Ohio 7 Prisoners!-Mumia Out of Solitary
Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class struggle defense in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
******
3 February 2012
Mumia Out of Solitary
On January 27, class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal was finally released from solitary confinement into the general prison population at SCI Mahanoy in Frackville, Pennsylvania. In the last issue of WV, we published a letter by the Partisan Defense Committee protesting that prison authorities had vindictively kept Mumia in solitary under onerous special restrictions following the decision by the Philadelphia district attorney to not seek a new death sentence. In a message thanking those who signed petitions on his behalf—some 5,500 people, according to freemumia.com—or wrote statements of support, Mumia noted that “this is only part one” in the struggle for freedom. Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 995, 3 February 2012)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class struggle defense in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
******
3 February 2012
Mumia Out of Solitary
On January 27, class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal was finally released from solitary confinement into the general prison population at SCI Mahanoy in Frackville, Pennsylvania. In the last issue of WV, we published a letter by the Partisan Defense Committee protesting that prison authorities had vindictively kept Mumia in solitary under onerous special restrictions following the decision by the Philadelphia district attorney to not seek a new death sentence. In a message thanking those who signed petitions on his behalf—some 5,500 people, according to freemumia.com—or wrote statements of support, Mumia noted that “this is only part one” in the struggle for freedom. Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 995, 3 February 2012)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-Free The Class-War Prisoners-Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Free Leonard Peltier, Free Lynne Stewart And Her Co-Workers-Free The Remaining Ohio 7 Prisoners!Oakland Cops Attack Occupy Protesters, Again (January, 28, 2012)
Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class struggle defense in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
*******
Oakland Cops Attack Occupy Protesters, Again
JANUARY 30—Two days ago, the Oakland Police Department (OPD)—aided by 14 other police agencies—turned downtown streets into a virtual war zone, firing tear gas, smoke bombs, flash-bang grenades and “less lethal” beanbag and rubber bullets at Occupy Oakland demonstrators. The protesters had assembled to take over an abandoned building and turn it into a neighborhood community center. By the end of the night, the cops, with batons swinging, had trapped hundreds of protesters outside a downtown YMCA. In total, some 400 people were arrested, many for “failure to disperse,” even as the trapped demonstrators were chanting, “Let us leave!” A 19-year-old woman was hospitalized with internal bleeding after being beaten by the cops. Free the protesters! Drop all the charges!
At a press conference the next day, Democratic mayor Jean Quan denounced the protesters as “violent” while City Council member Ignacio De La Fuente accused them of engaging in “domestic terrorism.” Coming in the wake of Obama’s National Defense Authorization Act, which enshrines into law the indefinite detention of American citizens, this is a deadly serious charge.
It is the OPD that terrorizes the streets of Oakland, attacking protesters, occupying the ghettos and gunning down blacks and other minorities with impunity. The brutality of the OPD is so notorious that it is being threatened with federal receivership. This stems from the nearly decade-old settlement of the infamous Oakland “Riders” case, where a murderous gang of cops (named after the KKK nightriders) was unleashed on the West Oakland ghetto as part of the racist “war on drugs.”
Such federal interventions are not about “justice”; they are a con game designed to clean up the image of the police. As a Bay Area Spartacus Youth Club comrade underlined at an October 29 Occupy Oakland rally held to protest the police attack that left Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen fighting for his life (see WV No. 990, 11 November 2011): “Along with the courts, prisons and military, the cops make up the armed fist of the state, which defends the property and profits of the capitalist ruling class. Cops are not workers, they are strikebreakers. They shot Oscar Grant down in cold blood. Cops are not potential allies, they are our enemy.”
Addressing the populist politics of the Occupy movement, our comrade continued:
“The slogan ‘We are the 99 percent’ actually blurs the class line and disguises the class nature of the capitalist state and all its political parties....
“The current economic crisis has sparked the mass protests. But to actually end exploitation and oppression, you have to do something fundamentally different. We are fighting to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party that will lead the workers in smashing the capitalist state, expropriating the banks and corporations and building a socialist world in which those who labor rule.”
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 995, 3 February 2012)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class struggle defense in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
*******
Oakland Cops Attack Occupy Protesters, Again
JANUARY 30—Two days ago, the Oakland Police Department (OPD)—aided by 14 other police agencies—turned downtown streets into a virtual war zone, firing tear gas, smoke bombs, flash-bang grenades and “less lethal” beanbag and rubber bullets at Occupy Oakland demonstrators. The protesters had assembled to take over an abandoned building and turn it into a neighborhood community center. By the end of the night, the cops, with batons swinging, had trapped hundreds of protesters outside a downtown YMCA. In total, some 400 people were arrested, many for “failure to disperse,” even as the trapped demonstrators were chanting, “Let us leave!” A 19-year-old woman was hospitalized with internal bleeding after being beaten by the cops. Free the protesters! Drop all the charges!
At a press conference the next day, Democratic mayor Jean Quan denounced the protesters as “violent” while City Council member Ignacio De La Fuente accused them of engaging in “domestic terrorism.” Coming in the wake of Obama’s National Defense Authorization Act, which enshrines into law the indefinite detention of American citizens, this is a deadly serious charge.
It is the OPD that terrorizes the streets of Oakland, attacking protesters, occupying the ghettos and gunning down blacks and other minorities with impunity. The brutality of the OPD is so notorious that it is being threatened with federal receivership. This stems from the nearly decade-old settlement of the infamous Oakland “Riders” case, where a murderous gang of cops (named after the KKK nightriders) was unleashed on the West Oakland ghetto as part of the racist “war on drugs.”
Such federal interventions are not about “justice”; they are a con game designed to clean up the image of the police. As a Bay Area Spartacus Youth Club comrade underlined at an October 29 Occupy Oakland rally held to protest the police attack that left Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen fighting for his life (see WV No. 990, 11 November 2011): “Along with the courts, prisons and military, the cops make up the armed fist of the state, which defends the property and profits of the capitalist ruling class. Cops are not workers, they are strikebreakers. They shot Oscar Grant down in cold blood. Cops are not potential allies, they are our enemy.”
Addressing the populist politics of the Occupy movement, our comrade continued:
“The slogan ‘We are the 99 percent’ actually blurs the class line and disguises the class nature of the capitalist state and all its political parties....
“The current economic crisis has sparked the mass protests. But to actually end exploitation and oppression, you have to do something fundamentally different. We are fighting to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party that will lead the workers in smashing the capitalist state, expropriating the banks and corporations and building a socialist world in which those who labor rule.”
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 995, 3 February 2012)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-Free The Class-War Prisoners-Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Free Leonard Peltier, Free Lynne Stewart And Her Co-Workers-Free The Remaining Ohio 7 Prisoners!-Spartacist Speaker at Occupy Oakland Forum-No Illusions in Police “Reform”—For Workers Revolution!
Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class struggle defense in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
********
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.
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 996, 17 February 2012)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class struggle defense in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
********
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.
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 996, 17 February 2012)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-Free The Class-War Prisoners-Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Free Leonard Peltier, Free Lynne Stewart And Her Co-Workers-Free The Remaining Ohio 7 Prisoners!-Protest Prison Vendetta Against Jalil Muntaqim
Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class struggle defense in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
*******
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.
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 996, 17 February 2012)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class struggle defense in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
*******
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.
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 996, 17 February 2012)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
From The "Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives" Website- The Alba Blog
Click on the headline to link to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive blog page for all kinds of interesting information about that important historic grouping.
Markin comment:
This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. More, later.
abraham lincoln brigade, popular front, POUM, spanish civil war, spanish revolution, spanish trotskyists, Stalinism
http://www.albavolunteer.org/category/blog/
Click on the headline to link to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive blog page for all kinds of interesting information about that important historic grouping.
Markin comment:
This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. More, later.
Markin comment:
This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. More, later.
abraham lincoln brigade, popular front, POUM, spanish civil war, spanish revolution, spanish trotskyists, Stalinism
http://www.albavolunteer.org/category/blog/
Click on the headline to link to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive blog page for all kinds of interesting information about that important historic grouping.
Markin comment:
This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. More, later.
The Latest From The SteveLendmanBlog
Below is the link to the SteveLendmanBlog. Or Google it.
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/
Markin comment:
I am always happy to post material from the SteveLendmanBlog, although I am not always in agreement with his analysis. I am always interested in getting a left-liberal/radical perspective on some issues that I don’t generally have time to cover in full like the question of Palestine, the Middle East in general, and civil rights and economic issues here in America and elsewhere. Moreover the blog provides plenty of useful links to other sources of information about the subject under discussion.
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/
Markin comment:
I am always happy to post material from the SteveLendmanBlog, although I am not always in agreement with his analysis. I am always interested in getting a left-liberal/radical perspective on some issues that I don’t generally have time to cover in full like the question of Palestine, the Middle East in general, and civil rights and economic issues here in America and elsewhere. Moreover the blog provides plenty of useful links to other sources of information about the subject under discussion.
The Latest From "The National Committee to Free the Cuban Five" Website -Free The Five Ahora! -The Defense Of The Cuban Revolution Begins With The Defense Of The Cuban Five
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
Markin comment (re-post from July 26, 2011):
On a day, July 26th, important in the history of the Cuban revolutionary movement it is also important, as always, to remember that the defense of the Cuban revolution here in the United States, the "heart of the beast", starts with the defense of the Cuban Five.
Markin comment (re-post from July 26, 2011):
On a day, July 26th, important in the history of the Cuban revolutionary movement it is also important, as always, to remember that the defense of the Cuban revolution here in the United States, the "heart of the beast", starts with the defense of the Cuban Five.
The Latest From The "National Jericho Movement"- Free All Our Class-War Prisoners
Click on the headline to link to the National Jericho Movement website for the latest news on our brother and sister class-war political prisoners.
Markin comment:
Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners
Markin comment:
Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners
The Latest From The "Leonard Peltier Defense Committee" Website-Free Leonard Peltier Now!-Free All Our Class-War Prisoners!-An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!
Click on the headline to link to the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee website for the latest news on our class-war political prisoner brother, Leonard Peltier.
Markin comment:
Long live the tradition of the James P. Cannon-founded International Labor Defense (via the American Communist Party and the Communist International's Red Aid). Free Leonard, Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners!
Markin comment:
Long live the tradition of the James P. Cannon-founded International Labor Defense (via the American Communist Party and the Communist International's Red Aid). Free Leonard, Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners!
We Are All Greeks - Commentary via "Boston IndyMedia"
Click on the headline to link to a commentary via Boston IndyMedia on the recent events in Greece and the struggle ahead.
Markin commentary:
The Greek workers have shown incredible militancy. What they need is a party that is ready and willing to lead them to form workers councils and a struggle for state power. And quickly. Victory to the Greek workers!
Markin commentary:
The Greek workers have shown incredible militancy. What they need is a party that is ready and willing to lead them to form workers councils and a struggle for state power. And quickly. Victory to the Greek workers!
From The StevenLendmanBlog- The latest On Lynne Stewart's Case
Click on the headline to link to the SteveLendmanBlog for information about the Lynne Stewart case.
Markin comment:
Today appears to be one of those days when we have lots of unfinished business to discuss. Free Leonard Peltier! for one. And Free Lynne Stewart, also now!
Markin comment:
Today appears to be one of those days when we have lots of unfinished business to discuss. Free Leonard Peltier! for one. And Free Lynne Stewart, also now!
“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
“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
http://www.facebook.com/editprofile.php?sk=basic&success=1#!/smedleyvfp?sk=wall
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.
http://www.facebook.com/editprofile.php?sk=basic&success=1#!/smedleyvfp?sk=wall
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.
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
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