From The Partisan Defense Committee

3 May 2013 Defend the NATO 3! Chicago For nearly a year, Brent Betterly, Jared Chase, and Brian Jacob Church have been locked away in Cook County Jail, facing possible 40-year prison stretches on an array of “terrorism” and other trumped-up charges, with bail set at $1.5 million each. Last spring, these Occupy activists traveled from Florida to Chicago in the lead-up to protests against a May 20 summit of the U.S.-dominated NATO imperialist military alliance. The city was under a virtual state of siege orchestrated by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, with thousands of National Guardsmen, troops and cops mobilized to shield the summit from over 10,000 protesters. On May 16, Betterly, Chase and Church—now known as the NATO 3—were arrested for a supposed plot to make four Molotov cocktails and hurl them at police stations and other targets. The highly publicized arrests were part of a campaign to brand the protests as violent, in order to chill opposition to the NATO war criminals who have the blood of untold thousands in Afghanistan and elsewhere on their hands. As the Partisan Defense Committee wrote in a 21 May 2012 protest letter to the Cook County State’s Attorney (printed in WV No. 1003, 25 May 2012), “The arrests of Betterly, Church and Chase have all the earmarks of a classic case of police entrapment and provocation.” The arrests came less than a week after the defendants had posted a video on YouTube of a Chicago cop who had pulled their car over, threatening them: “We’ll come look for you, each and every one of you.” In January, the NATO 3’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the “terrorism” charges on constitutional grounds. The defense motion paints a chilling picture of how undercover cops known as Mo and Gloves tried every trick in the book to set the activists up: “Despite a more than two-week continuing effort by the undercover Chicago police officers posing as fellow members of Occupy to entice and encourage the defendants to carry out some criminal act, the defendants never did anything.... It was only in desperation, after two weeks of nothing to show for their undercover infiltration of the defendants, and the untold resources expended to facilitate those efforts, that the police suggested at least some bottles of gasoline [Molotov cocktails] be put together. The defendants never discussed a specific plan of what to do with these bottles, let alone a plan to use them to intimidate or coerce a significant portion of the civilian population. In fact, the bottles were always in possession of the under-cover police who suggested their own provocative ideas for how to use the bottles.” Just moments after the bottles were filled with gasoline, the undercover cops sent a prearranged signal, and the police then raided the apartment with guns drawn. They proceeded to ransack the place, confiscating computers, cellphones and political literature. The NATO 3 were not the only activists set up and slapped with felony charges prior to the military summit. Sebastian Senakiewicz and Mark Neiweem were charged with “falsely making a terrorist threat” and “attempted possession of an incendiary device” respectively. Both took non-cooperating plea deals and remain imprisoned. In all, over 100 anti-NATO protesters were arrested, from pacifist liberals to anarchoid activists. Also arrested during the weekend of the May 20 protest were the Tinley Park 5, anti-fascists who have been convicted for helping break up a white-supremacist gathering in a Chicago suburb (see accompanying article). On March 27, Judge Thaddeus Wilson denied the NATO 3’s defense motion to dismiss, in a court hearing that was clearly designed to intimidate the defendants and everyone who came out on their behalf. Observers noted that while the judge announced his ruling, the defendants were held in a separate room, sealed off by soundproof glass and away from their supporters, with an armed, uniformed cop for each of them. Meanwhile, four armed cops sat in the audience. “It’s what a lot of scholars and people who pay attention to national security call the ‘new normal’,” said Thomas Durkin, a lawyer for Chase. In simple terms, the “new normal” is a creeping police state. As the NATO 3’s motion pointed out, the Illinois statutory definition of terrorism is so vague and broad that it could include “labor strikes, peaceful occupations and sit-ins, political protests and boycotts.” Ever since the inception of the “war on terror” in 2001, we have warned that while the first targets were mainly immigrants, particularly Muslims and those from the Near East, the ultimate targets would be the labor movement, black people, the left and anyone who would dare to protest the depredations of U.S. imperialism, at home or abroad. And indeed, leftist political activity of many stripes has increasingly become a focal point of “anti-terror” repression. In 2008, a host of undercover agents wormed their way into the organizing of protests at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, entrapping activists on “terrorism” charges. One agent later infiltrated the Minneapolis branch of the reformist Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO—publishers of Fight Back!). This led in 2010 to FBI raids and grand jury subpoenas against 23 leftists and trade unionists in Chicago and Minneapolis, many of them FRSO supporters, as part of a witchhunting investigation falsely identifying solidarity efforts on behalf of Palestinian and Colombian leftists with “material support to terrorism.” Last November, four Cleveland supporters of the populist Occupy movement received prison terms ranging from six to eleven and a half years for a plot concocted by an FBI informant. Meanwhile police “red squads,” which had largely gone underground in the wake of the social upheavals of the 1960s, have resurfaced in many cities under the guise of investigating “terrorism.” A dangerous vise is being tightened around political protest in this country. First Amendment rights and other civil liberties are shredded in the name of “homeland security,” while the state’s moles and rats cook up felonious “plots” aimed at luring political dissenters close enough to slap charges on them. This is a concerted, bipartisan effort. The use of anti-terror laws against leftists has accelerated under the Democratic administration of Barack Obama. From San Francisco, Oakland and Portland to Minneapolis, Chicago and Cleveland, it has been Democratic Party mayors who have led the crackdowns and witchhunts aimed at Occupy and other protesters. The NATO 3 are scheduled for trial on September 16. The PDC, a legal and social defense organization associated with the Marxist Spartacist League, calls on the left and labor movements to join in demanding: Drop all the charges now! The PDC has donated $200 to the legal defense of the NATO 3 and encourages others to do the same. Donations can be made at https://www.wepay.com/donations/nato-5-defense.  * * * (reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 1023, 3 May 2013) Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.

From The Partisan Defense Committee

AIM Leader Leonard Peltier: 37 Years in Prison Hell

Leonard Peltier is known throughout the world as one of the most prominent political prisoners in the United States. His 37 years of incarceration due to his courageous activism in the American Indian Movement (AIM) has come to symbolize the U.S. rulers’ racist repression of the country’s indigenous people, survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier emerged as a Native American leader in the late 1960s. In response to the hideous oppression he experienced and saw all around him, he became involved in struggles for Native American rights and joined AIM. It was in his capacity as a trusted AIM activist that he came to assist the Oglala Lakota people of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in the mid 1970s. AIM came into the government’s crosshairs because it was attempting to combat the enforced poverty of Native Americans and the continued theft of their lands by the Feds and the energy companies, which were intent on grabbing rich uranium deposits under Sioux land in western South Dakota. The hated Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the FBI turned Pine Ridge into a war zone as they trained and armed thugs to terrorize and crush Indian activists. Between 1973 and 1976, these forces carried out more than 300 attacks, killing at least 69 people. In June 1975, 250 FBI and BIA agents, SWAT police and local vigilantes descended on Pine Ridge and precipitated a shootout. Two FBI agents were killed, and Peltier and three others were charged. All charges were dropped against one AIM activist, and two others were acquitted as jurors stated that they did not believe “much of anything” said by government witnesses and that it seemed “pretty much a clear-cut case of self-defense” against the murderous FBI-led assault. The government then went into overdrive to assure a conviction against Peltier. His trial was moved to Fargo, North Dakota, a city with strong bias against Native Americans. The prosecution concealed ballistics tests showing that Peltier’s gun could not have been used in the shootings while the trial judge ruled out any possibility of another acquittal on grounds of self-defense by refusing to allow any evidence of government terror against Pine Ridge activists. In April 1977, Peltier was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to two consecutive life terms. Successive court proceedings have laid bare the evidence of Peltier’s innocence and of massive prosecutorial misconduct. In a 1985 appeals hearing, the government’s lead attorney admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents.” In 1986, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the trial jury could have acquitted Peltier if records improperly withheld from the defense had been made available. In 2003, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals stated, “Much of the government’s behavior at the Pine Ridge Reservation and in its prosecution of Mr. Peltier is to be condemned. The government withheld evidence. It intimidated witnesses. These facts are not disputed.” Nevertheless, in August 2009 the U.S. Parole Commission again turned down Peltier’s request for parole, declaring that Peltier would not be considered for parole for another 15 years! For Peltier, who is now 68 years old, this in effect was a declaration by the state that this courageous man will die in prison. The long trail of injustice against Leonard Peltier has been documented in the film Incident at Oglala, narrated by Robert Redford, and in Peter Matthiessen’s book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. Decades of unjust imprisonment have not only robbed him of the prime years of his life. They have also taken a devastating toll on his physical well-being as he suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure, partial blindness and a heart condition. We join millions around the world in demanding: Free Leonard Peltier now!  * * * (reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 1023, 3 May 2013) Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.

Stop-and-Frisk Trial and Bogus Police “Reform”-New York City

Workers Vanguard No. 1022	19 April 2013

Racist Cops: Guard Dogs of Capitalist Rulers

Stop-and-Frisk Trial and Bogus Police “Reform”

New York City

With black neighborhoods still simmering over the cop killing of 16-year-old Kimani Gray last month in Brooklyn, testimony in the “stop and frisk” class-action lawsuit Floyd v. City of New York continued this week in Federal District Court in Manhattan. Filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in 2008, the suit seeks to have aspects of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policies ruled unconstitutional. On April 1, New York state senator Eric Adams, a former cop, testified that Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told him in a closed-door meeting that stop-and-frisk is intended to “instill fear” in black and Latino youth. Earlier, the court heard a tape recording submitted by Bronx police officer Pedro Serrano in which a deputy inspector told him to target “male blacks 14 to 21.”

None of this is news to ghetto and barrio youth in this city, who already know that they are overwhelmingly the targets of cop terror on the streets. It is right to fight against stop-and-frisk, which recalls the “black codes,” derived from slavery, that were central to Jim Crow—the earlier form of the segregation that is embedded in American capitalism. It’s degrading and humiliating, and deadly. Last year Bronx teenager Ramarley Graham was gunned down in his own home after he tried to elude cops to avoid jail time for the small amount of marijuana he was carrying. Cops said Kimani Gray adjusted his waistband “in a suspicious manner” before they shot him in the streets of East Flatbush in Brooklyn.

With a pretext of searching for guns and drugs, police routinely harass minority youth who, if they so much as ask why they are being stopped, find themselves screamed at with racist slurs and slammed against the wall or forced to the ground, often enough with guns pointed at their heads. Since Michael Bloomberg became mayor in 2002, there have been more than five million stop-and-frisks. How this goes down can be seen in eight blocks of Brooklyn known as the Brownsville Houses, where police blanket the streets every night. Between January 2006 and March 2010, the NYPD made nearly 52,000 stops there—that’s nearly one stop per year for every one of the 14,000 residents of the area. The name of everyone stopped—arrested or not—was logged into a police database.

Judge Shira Scheindlin, who is presiding over the Floyd case, ruled in January that elements of stop-and-frisk as practiced in the Bronx are unconstitutional but then lifted her ban shortly afterward. If she rules for the cops, they will no doubt feel more emboldened as they mete out their daily dose of racist brutality. If she rules against the NYPD, stripping this practice of its legal license, the cops will no doubt move to repackage their systematic abuse. As William Bratton recently blurted out: “For any city to say they don’t do stop-and-frisk…I’m sorry, they don’t know what the hell they are talking about. Every police department in America does it.” Bratton ought to know. He ran police departments in Boston, New York and Los Angeles and now is acting as a “consultant” to the Oakland cops.

The history of the CCR suit itself shows that there should be no illusions in judicial restraint of the cops. Floyd is a sequel to the Daniels, et al. v. the City of New York suit brought by the CCR in 1999 after New York City erupted in protest over the slaying of Amadou Diallo, a black African immigrant gunned down by the cops in a hail of 41 bullets. That suit challenged NYPD racial profiling and sought to disband the Street Crime Unit (SCU) that killed Diallo. The case was settled in 2003 when the City agreed to break up the SCU and to require that the NYPD “monitor” itself and have officers fill out forms documenting all stop-and-frisk encounters. It was because the cops showed “significant non-compliance” with the settlement that the CCR filed the new suit.

The New York Spartacist League joined with those who poured onto the streets of East Flatbush last month in outrage over the gunning down of Kimani Gray and in the face of a cop lockdown of the area. We demand the dropping of all charges against those who have protested stop-and-frisk, including Revolutionary Communist Party supporter Noche Díaz, who faces more than four years in prison. We also demand that all charges stemming from protests against the killing of Kimani Gray be dropped. As we explained in “Kimani Gray Killed in Cold Blood by NYPD” (WV No. 1020, 22 March), the police are the guard dogs of racist American capitalism. There will be no end to the terror they mete out until the working class carries out a socialist revolution that overturns the entire system of capitalist exploitation, and with that the special oppression of black people that lies in its bedrock.

In the five weeks of the Floyd trial so far, a variety of protesters have packed the court, including gay rights activists and Muslims who have themselves been victims of NYPD harassment. Also turning out are the four leading Democratic candidates in this year’s mayoral race—in other words, those running to be the cops’ top boss as Bloomberg ends his reign. Their concern is the tarnishing of the NYPD’s credentials, requiring the application of some cosmetic “reform” to appease public anger and to make the cops more effective as a force of repression.

At a March 19 mayoral forum in Queens, the leading Democratic contender, City Council speaker Christine Quinn, trumpeted a proposal that had been raised by councilmen Jumaane Williams and Brad Lander for a police inspector general to “help the NYPD work more efficiently and effectively.” A spokesman for Communities United for Police Reform claims that this “would be an important first step in ensuring New Yorkers have faith that the NYPD is accountable for their actions” (Amsterdam News, 11 April). NYC already has a 13-person civilian review board (that goes back decades), a police corruption commission and other “control” mechanisms. Yet racist killings of minority youth continue unabated, as does the coast-to-coast mass incarceration of those the racist rulers consider a “surplus” population.

The cops and courts work together as part of the bourgeois state apparatus that represses the working class and the ghetto and barrio poor in order to maintain capitalist rule and profits. This elementary Marxist understanding is obscured by the reformist leftists and liberals who peddle fantasies of police behavior modification. Thus an article on the International Socialist Organization’s SocialistWorker.org Web site (26 March), titled “Stop-and-Frisk on Trial,” breathlessly reports that the Manhattan trial “could possibly set legal precedent in regards to racial profiling.” What the cops think about such “precedent” was expressed a few decades ago by the notorious Frank Rizzo, who told a court magistrate when he was chief of the Philadelphia police, “All right, you’re the boss in here, but we’re the boss on the street.”

In “End Stop and Frisk Now!” Socialist Alternative (June 2012) raised the timeworn reformist call to “place law enforcement and public safety under democratic community control.” The working class and the oppressed will never “control” the police, who are the instruments of the capitalist class that rules this society. The Socialist Alternative outfit tramples on this truth by portraying the cops, whose job is to suppress class and social struggle, as part of the working class.

This suicidal notion is also sold by the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy. When NYC’s Transport Workers Union Local 100 defied the New York state Taylor Law and went on strike in December 2005, then-president of Local 100, Roger Toussaint, invited Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association president Patrick Lynch to speak on the union platform. The cops showed their true colors by enforcing a court injunction against the strike, leading to the arrest of Toussaint himself. The multiracial membership of Local 100 is no stranger to stop-and-frisk and other facets of police terror. The father of Sean Bell, a young black man who was killed in a firestorm of cop bullets in 2006 on the night before his wedding, is a TWU retiree.

Unions like the TWU have enormous potential social power that could be unleashed in defense not only of its own members but of the ghetto and barrio masses. But that potential is sapped by the loyalty of the union officialdom to the capitalist profit system and the state power that enforces it, particularly in its Democratic Party face. Current Local 100 officials helped build a rally in March for greater gun control, denouncing “gun violence.” This campaign gives credence to one of the cops’ major pretexts for stop-and-frisk harassment—purported gun possession—while also reinforcing the notion that the capitalist state must have a monopoly on weapons. In the face of the drive to strengthen gun control following the December killings in Newtown, Connecticut, we stress the importance for working people to defend the population’s right to bear arms. We fight as well to decriminalize drugs as a necessary part of the struggle against the racist “war on drugs.”

Stop-and-frisk is no aberration but a particularly glaring expression of the systematic, organized violence that defines the capitalist state. The working class needs a leadership that understands that this machinery of racist capitalist rule cannot be reformed to serve the interests of the workers, minorities and the poor but must be smashed through proletarian revolution. The Spartacist League is dedicated to building the revolutionary workers party that is the necessary instrument to lead the exploited and oppressed in the fight for workers rule. 

***Tales of the Class Struggle, Part Two-With Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels  In Mind

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Sullivan’s Travels, starring Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake, directed by Preston Sturges, 1941    

Scene: The times, the tail end of the Great Depression times (the 1930s one not the more recent one), sent a lot of things topsy-turvy, set a lot of people who were complacent and well-healed to thinking that something should be done about something (all the while enjoying their something without missing a beat). Take this guy Joel Sullivan, yah, Joel Sullivan the great comedic film director, the guy who got famous in a hurry with the film All That Stuff.  One day, out of the blue, Joel developed a conscience or maybe he had one, undeveloped, and a quick look around got him thinking that the way the world was going to hell in a hand-basket that he ought to do something about it. Of course a guy who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, a guy who started life on third base and thought that was where the starting line was for everybody, would be hard pressed to figure out what was to be done since all he knew was dough and making dough doing silly movies. Then he came up with the bright idea that he had to immerse himself among the dregs of society, down there on skid row, down there in the in the tramp, hobo, bum railroad jungles, down there on the mean streets of broken dreams to get a feel for life.   

And so he did, so he did against great opposition from his fleet of film advisors, against his financial advisers and, well, against his woman. Of course no Mayfair swell was going to travel the mean street of Hollywood, (oops) the mean streets of Depression America alone.  Certainly not when you can have a fetching woman with blond hair stumbling and fumbling over her right eye like his latest paramour Veronica, Veronica Smith, who despite her fetchingness was strictly from cheap street and knew a ton of stuff about those streets of broken dreams. So with Veronica in tow they were off, off to find the soul of the American hard times.           

Hard times at every turn, hard times down at the railroad sidings, hard times in the Sally’s (Salvation Army of blessed memory) flop houses, hard times in the soup kitchens, hard times, well, just hard times all around. And our brother of the road Joel can’t quite figure out what he could do about it, except to make films, socially redeeming films not that tinsel town fluff he had been spewing forth. Then things went a little haywire for the suffering brother. He left his Veronica back in some Podunk town to keep her out of harm’s, some place where no hobos need stop and went off on his own. Went off to find the great hobo night.      

And our boy found it, found out what it was like to go hungry a few days when even the soup lines were empty, when he found himself between towns and had to sleep out in the open, when he found out that the hobo camps were not places of good fellowship where kindred took care of each other. He learned that the hard way when one night he had his serviceable walkable shoes stolen from right off his feet and he was left bare-footed for a while and one another night when he was jack-rolled for the dollar and change he had in his pockets. Veronica, nobody, ever told him, ever could tell him except those who had been there, there in the depths, that down at the edges of society life ain’t pretty. Life is every man for himself and that is the facts jack, straight up. So it came as no surprise, although it brought Veronica nothing but sadness for years afterward, when they found Joel Sullivan, yah, Joel Sullivan the great boy film director face down in some dry riverbed out in Kansas beaten almost to a pulp a few weeks after he set off on his great adventure.          

Now some film director, some real movie guy, someone who knew about how to make a pleasing movie out of Joel’s’ adventures might have had Joel and Veronica immerged in hobo life as a lark, might have even had them flea-bitten, hungry, sleeping in some low-life jungle camp, and then miraculously transformed back in the good life like in some fairy tale. And that might in fact make a very spiffy movie especially if it was cast right. But out there in the mean streets, out there on the edge, out there at the tip of the class struggle that would not play, would not draw a laugh.     

Memorial Day for Peace

May 27, 2013, 1:00 – 3:00 pm

Christopher Columbus Park

105 Atlantic Ave.

Boston, Massachusetts

Please join us

Please join Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter 9 and Samantha Smith, Chapter 45, Military Families Speak Out, Mass Peace Action and United for Justice with Peace as we commemorate Memorial Day on Monday May 27, 2013

There will be no parade, no marching band, no military equipment, no guns and drums, no Air Force fly-overs.

There will be veterans and supporters who have lost friends and loved ones. There will be veterans who know the horrors of war and the pain and anguish of loss. There will be friends and families of soldiers, remembering their loved ones. There will be Iraqi Refugees who have suffered terrible losses and will join us as we remember and show respect for their loss.

There will be flowers dropped into the harbor for each fallen U.S. soldier from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Flowers will also be also be dropped into the harbor remembering the loss of Iraqi family and friends.

ORGANISE AN ACTION ON 1 - 8 JUNE TO DEFEND INTERNATIONAL WHISTLEBLOWER BRADLEY MANNING Register your action here
	“If the public, particularly the American public, had access to this information, it could spark a debate on the military and our foreign policy in general as it applied to Iraq and Afghanistan, it might cause society to reconsider the need to engage in counter-terrorism while ignoring the human situation of the people we engaged with every day … I felt I accomplished something that would allow me to have a clear conscience.” Bradley Manning
			A man of exceptional courage and principle In a statement he read in court on 28 February 2013, gay US Army PFC Bradley Manning proudly admitted having leaked information to Wikileaks in order to inform the public of US war crimes and government skulduggery that was being kept from us. He faces charges up to life in prison. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for the third time in a row.
1 - 8 June: International Actions to Free Bradley Manning So far actions in Canada, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Turkey, UK, USA, Wales…

Bradley Manning’s court-martial begins 3 June The Bradley Manning Support Network is calling for a week of actions across the US and around the world from Saturday 1 June to 8 June. On 23 February, an unprecedented groundswell of international support for Bradley emerged when 70 communities in 19 countries took action. Some actions already planned: Canada: 1 June, Rally at US Consulate in Toronto Germany: 31 May, Meeting at Clearing Barrel GI Café, Kaiserslautern. 1 June Solidarity Rally in Berlin, Brandenburg Gate. South Korea, 3-8 June Press conference and demonstration at US Embassy in Seoul. UK: 1 June, 2 pm Picket outside the US Embassy, Grosvenor Square, London US: 1 June Rally at Fort Meade, Maryland, where the court-martial will take place. Information on latest actions here. Join your nearest protest or organize a solidarity event in your area, register it on the BMSN website, and let us know about it so we can help publicise

Other ways to support Bradley · Write your local press why you support Bradley’s courageous whistleblowing. · Translate this message and/or send to your networks. · Demand media access to the trial, and that court records be released. See BMSN Action Alert. · Show the Collateral Murder video at meetings / put on websites / local TV programs. · Demand San Francisco Pride reinstate Bradley Manning as Grand Marshal · Send messages of support to BMSN. (cc payday@paydaynet.org and we’ll publish on our website.) · Sign Daniel Ellsberg’s petition (Pentagon Papers whistle-blower). · Write to Bradley

	"Let us follow the example of Bradley, let’s battle for peace, let’s battle against wars, without fear of reprisals, let’s learn from Bradley to be truly human." Hugo Blanco, Director of Lucha Indigena, Perú		“This material [passed to Wikileaks] has contributed to ending dictatorships in the Middle East, it has exposed torture and wrongdoing in all the corners of the world”. Julian Assange Wikileaks founder, who remains in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, protected from extradition to Sweden and to the US
Payday men’s network payday@paydaynet.org US: PO Box 11795 Philadelphia, PA 19101 / 215 848 1120 UK: PO Box 287 London NW6 2QU 020 7267 8698Queer Strike queerstrike@queerstrike.net PO Box 287 London NW6 2QU 020 7482 2496 freebradde Germany www.freebradleymanning.de

Sister Assata: This Is What American History Looks Like

Alice Walker
May 13, 2013
Alice Walker's Garden

I believe Assata Shakur to be a good and decent, a kind and compassionate person. True revolutionaries often are. Physically she is beautiful, and her spirit is also. She appears to hold the respect, love and friendship of all the people who surround her.


A Wall is Just a Wall, ,
I don’t know why, given where we are with dronefare, but I didn’t expect the man making the announcement about Assata Shakur being the first woman “terrorist” to appear on the FBI’s most wanted list to be black. That was a blow. I was reminded of the world of “trackers” we sometimes get glimpses of in history books and old movies on TV. In Australia the tracker who hunts down other aboriginals who have, because of the rape and murder, genocide and enslavement of the indigenous (aboriginal) people, run away into the outback. He shows up again in cowboy and Indian films: jogging along in the hot sun, way ahead of the white men on horseback, bending on his knees to get a better look at a bruised leaf or a bent twig, while they curse and spit and complain about how long he’s taking to come up with a clue. And then there were the “trackers” who helped the pattyrollers during our four hundred years of enslavement. When
pattyrollers (or patrols) caught run-away slaves in those days they frequently beat them to death. I’ve often thought of the black men whose expertise at tracking fugitives helped bring these terrors, humiliations and deaths about. When I was younger I would have been in a rage against them; not understanding the reality of invisible coercion, and mind and spirit control, that I do now. Today, only a few years older than Assata Shakur, and marveling at the unenviable state of humanity’s character worldwide, I find I can only pray for all of us. That we should be sinking even below the abysmal standard early “trackers” have set for us: that the US government can now offer two million dollars for the capture of a very small, not young, black woman who was brutally abused, even shot, over three decades ago, as if we don’t need that money to buy people food, clothes, medicine, and decent places to live.
What is most distressing about the times we live in, in my view, is our ever accelerating tolerance for cruelty. Prisoners held indefinitely in orange suits, hooded, chained and on their knees. Like the hunger strikers of Guantanamo, I would certainly prefer death to this. People shot and bombed from planes they never see until it is too late to get up from the table or place the baby under the bed. Poor people terrorized daily, driven insane really, from fear. People on the streets with no food and no place to sleep. People under bridges everywhere you go, holding out their desperate signs: a recent one held by a very young man, perhaps a veteran, under my local bridge: I Want To Live. But nothing seems as cruel to me as this: that our big, muscular, macho country would go after so tiny a woman as Assata who is given sanctuary in a country smaller than many of our states.
The first time I met Assata Shakur we talked for a long time. We were in Havana, where I had gone with a delegation to offer humanitarian aid during Cuba’s “special period” of hunger and despair, and I’d wanted to hear her side of the story from her. She described the incident with the New Jersey Highway Patrol, and assured me she was shot up so badly that even if she’d wanted to, she would not have been able to fire a gun. Though shot in the back (with her arms raised), she managed to live through two years of solitary confinement, in a men’s prison, chained to her bed. Then, in what must surely have been a miraculous coming together of people of courageous compassion, she was helped to escape and to find refuge in Cuba. One of the people who helped Assata escape, a white radical named Marilyn Buck, was kept in prison for thirty years and released only one month before her death from uterine cancer. She was a poet, and I have been
reading her book, Inside/Out, Selected Poems, which a friend gave me just last week. There is also a remarkable video of her, shot in prison, that I highly recommend.
This is what solidarity can look like.
The second time I saw Assata, years later, I was in Havana for the Havana Book Fair. Cuba has a very high literacy rate, thanks to the Cuban revolution, and my novel, Meridian, had recently been translated and published there. However, this time we did not talk about the past. We talked about meditation. Seeing her interest, and that of Ricardo Alarcon, president of the Cuban National Assembly, and others, I decided to offer a class. There under a large tree off a quiet street in Havana, I demonstrated my own practice of meditation to some of the most attentive students I have ever encountered. The mantra: Breathing in: “In,” breathing out: “Peace.”
I believe Assata Shakur to be a good and decent, a kind and compassionate person. True revolutionaries often are. Physically she is beautiful, and her spirit is also. She appears to hold the respect, love and friendship of all the people who surround her. Like Marilyn Buck they have risked much for her freedom, and appear to believe her version of the story as I do.
That she did not wish to live as an imprisoned creature and a slave is understood.
What to do? Since we are not, in fact, helpless. Nor are we ever alone.
I call on the Ancestors
by whose blood
and DNA
we exist
to accompany us
as always
through this lengthening
sorrow.
And to bear witness
within us
to all that we are
aware.

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SAVE THE DATE and get ready to March Together in the DORCHESTER DAY PARADE! Sunday, June 2

Dorchester People for Peace will be marching again this year in the Dorchester Day Parade on June 2 along with our friends and allied organizations. Every year Dorchester People for Peace reserves a place in the parade, then invites our friends. Together we bring our vision and our values to thousands of people along the four-mile route. Join us this year!

Our message will focus on ending the war in Afghanistan and opposing any new military intervention in Iran or Syria; reducing the military budget; and funding urgent needs at home in our neighborhoods and communities. Thousands of marchers and parade watchers will see our banners and get our anti-war flyers!

Marchers will gather around Noon in Dorchester Lower Mills (Richmond St.) with the parade kick-off about 1pm. We’ll have our after-Parade barbeque and celebration at Jeff Klein’s house, 123 Cushing Ave. from about 3:30pm. More details as we get them.

WHERE: Lower Mills, Dorchester

Richmond Street between Dorchester Ave and Adams Street Look for the Dorchester People for Peace van You can’t drive or park anywhere near there on Dorchester Day, so travel early and travel by T (to Ashmont Station on the Red Line, Butler or Milton on the Mattapan trolley) …. Or park a ways away and walk. Please let us know if you can make it by responding to this email, writing to info@dotpeace.org or phoning 617-288-4578

BRING: A sun hat, comfortable walking shoes (it’s four miles), water. You can bring a banner for your organization if you have the people to carry it.

COOKOUT: After the parade at Jeff Klein’s, 123 Cushing Ave (near the end of the parade and near Savin Hill T station)

Dorchester People for Peace works to end the wars; to build a multi-racial peace movement against violence and militarism at home and abroad; to oppose budget cuts, racism and political repression. 617-282-3783 * info@dotpeace.org

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*** We Have Some Unfinished Business From The 1960s To Tend To- A Struggle To The End- For A Workers and Baby-Boomers Government! –Say What!

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman:

The following is in the nature of a stream of consciousness reflection on recent political struggles and the slight breeze that I am feeling starting to push back against defeats of some forty plus years since we last had a shot at “seeking a newer world” and that old-time breeze that pushed me first into the political fray.

***
As fate would have it sometimes a certain conjecture just falls into place for no particular reason other than happenstance, or so it would appear. As noted below I have been on a tear of late trying to get, young and old, but mainly my baby-boomer contemporaries, to get back into the political fray, and if there already to ratchet up their activity, and their political drifts leftward away from the all too familiar liberal complacencies. But that happenstance business is just a front because while one strand of the memory jog occurred just recently with the struggle over the events in Afghanistan and the Middle East in general and those whispered conversations about olden day struggles another strand had been spent on a now extensive review of much of the music from our youth, the youth that came of musically age just at that moment when we began to call rock ‘n’ roll music our own.

And that jail breakout music got reflected, at some level, in the way we looked at the world. We felt that although the world was not of our making, and not what we wanted it to be, it was up for grabs to go in our direction, at least for a cultural moment.

The core of that review of the music of our generation, strangely enough given its imprimatur, was a rather extensive compilation of CDs put out by Time-Life Music (you see what I mean) as its Rock ‘n’ Roll Era series. While the compilations give a wide selection of the most recognizable music for a number of years from about the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s (basically pre-British invasion time, no not the War of 1812, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, groups like that) the real draw for this reviewer was the cover art that accompanied each CD. Those covers, more than the bulk of the music (after all there was a musical counter-revolution of sorts in the late 1950s in reaction to the Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck Berry way to sexy implications of their music) , evoked in me (and I am sure they would in you as well if you are a baby-boomer), a flood of memories. Such subjects as“hot” 1950s cars, drive-in movies, drive-in restaurants complete with to-die-for cute car hops serving them off the arm, the high school dance scene. And so on. I have reposted one such effort below:

"This 1964 art cover piece with its drawing of a high school girl (school used as backdrop here to let you know, just in case you were clueless, that the rock scene was directed, point blank, at high school students, high school students with discretionary money to buy hot records, or drop coins in the local juke box), or rather her high heel sneakers (Chuck Taylor high tops, for sure, no question, although there is no trademark present no way that they can be some knock-offs in 1964, no way, I say). The important thing, in any case, is the sneakers, and that slightly shorter than school regulation dress, a dress that presaged the mini-skirt craze that was then just on its way from Europe. Naturally said dress and sneakers, sneakers, high- heeled or not, against the mandatory white tennis sneakers on gym days and low-heel pumps on other days, is the herald of some new age. And, as if to confirm that new breeze, in the background scouring out her high school classroom window, a sullen, prudish schoolmarm. She, the advance guard, obviously, of that parentally-driven reaction to all that the later 1960s stood for to us baby-boomers, as the generations fought out their epic battles about the nature of the world, our world or theirs.

But see that was so much “wave of future” just then because sullen schoolmarm or not what Ms. Hi-Heel sneakers (and dress, yah, don’t forget that knee-showing dress) was preening for is those guys who are standing (barely) in front of said school and showing their approval, their approval in the endless boy and girl meet game. And these guys are not just of one kind, they are cool faux beat daddy guys, tee-shirted corner boy guys, and well, just average 1964- style average guys. Now the reality of Ms. Hi-Heel sneakers (and a wig-hat on her head if you remember the song) proved to be a minute thing and was practically forgotten in the musical breeze that was starting to come in from Europe (that British invasion led by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones mentioned before) but it was that harbinger of change that the old schoolmarm dreaded and we, teenagers, especially we teenagers of the Class of 1964, were puzzled by. All we knew for sure, at least some of us knew , was that our class, at least for a moment, was going to chase a few windmills, and gladly.

That is the front story, the story of the new breeze coming, but the back story is that the kind of songs that are on this CD with that British invasion coming full blast were going to be passé very soon. Moreover, among my crowd, my hang-out crowd, my hang-out guy and girl crowd of guys who looked very much like those guys pictured on the artwork, if not my school crowd (slightly different), the folk scene, the Harvard Square at weekend night, New York City Village every once in a while folk scene, the Dylan, Baez, Van Ronk, Paxton, Ochs, etc. scene was still in bloom and competitive (although that scene, that folk scene minute, ironically, would soon also be passé).

Thus 1964 was a watershed year for a lot of the genres, really sub-genres, featured in those CDs. Like the harmony-rich girl groups (The Supremes, Mary Wells, The Shangri-Las, Martha and the Vandellas, Betty Everett) and the surfer boy, hot-rod guys of blessed neighborhood memory (Ronnie and the Daytonas, The Rivieras, and The Beach Boys, a little). But it was also a watershed year for the guys pictured in the artwork (and out in the neighborhoods). Some would soon be fighting in Vietnam, some moving to a commune to get away from it all, and others would be raising holy hell about that war, the need for social justice and the way things were being run in this country. And Ms. Hi-Heel sneakers? Maybe, just maybe, she drifted into that San Francisco for the Summer of Love night, going barefoot into that good night. I like to think so anyway.

Watershed year or not, there are some serious non-invasion stick-outs here. Under The Boardwalk (great harmony), The Drifters; Last Kiss, Frank Wilson and The Cavaliers; Dancing In The Streets (lordy, lordy, yes), Martha and the Vandellas; Leader Of The Pack (what a great novelty song and one that could be the subject of a real story in my growing up neighborhood), The Shangri-Las; Hi-Heel Sneakers, Tommy Tucker (thanks for the lead-in, Tommy), and, the boss song of the teen dance club night, no question, no challenge, no competition, Louie, Louieby the Kingsmen”

Note: Those familiar with leftist, Marxist-oriented politics are familiar with the slogan- fight for a workers government. If you will observe in the headline to this entry I have posited a workers and baby-boomers government. No, not to be silly or flip, although I know how to do both, but to make a point. A point that always bears a certain repetition when dealing with variants of this workers’ government slogan. In places like Egypt today, or better, in the old Czarist days, in Russia, the slogan would have been expanded to something like a workers and peasants government. And that gets to the real point. Although we Marxists argue, and argue strenuously, that when the deal goes down there are only two decisive classes in the modern era- the capitalists who own the means of production and the workers who produce the profits and emphatically do not own the means of production. But that begs the point, a little. In the age of capitalism other classes, and parts of classes, have been spun off. Thus, the question, even in the United States, of allies for the working class requires a broader slogan (at times) than just the generic workers government slogan that graces these pages on most related entries. Today’s entry reflects the very real possibility that our best allies might be those who are coming of retirement age, the post- World War II baby-boomer generation.

Now back in the 1930s when there were many more small and family farmers than there are today the proposition of a workers and farmers government was posed as a cutting-edge slogan by our political forbears. And, of course, somebody, some smart- aleck young Marxist who was trying to be silly or flip (probably a college student from New York City where young Marxists were as thick as fleas) noted that there were more dentists in the United States than farmers at that time. Now, from painful personal (and expensive too) experience, I actually could get behind the idea of a workers and dentists government. But that specific variant is just adding to the main point above, the algebraic nature of a workers and XYZ government as a fighting slogan. So for now my workers and baby-boomers government has a certain flare, especially until the grey beards are in the minority of most of the rallies that I have seen lately. Please though don’t expect me to take a job in the Commissariat of Elder Affairs when we win. No way.

Getting to Ft. Meade to support Army whistleblower Bradley Manning

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To date, nearly 1,000 people have RSVPed to come to the June 1st demonstration at Ft. Meade. We look forward to having you join us! Below is some information to make planning your trip to Ft. Meade easier…
Buses
Charter buses are scheduled to Ft. Meade from the following cities: NYC, Washington DC, Baltimore and Hartford, CT.
Find directions from airports to charter buses OR from Amtrak and Greyhound stations to charter buses in Baltimore, DC and NYC using public transit.
If you’re arriving at the BWI Airport on June 1st, there is also a regional bus from the airport to Arundel Mills Shopping Center (Bus 017), from which you can then take the CTC K to the Main Gate. The entire trip is approximately 45 minutes. For a Google Maps public transit view of this option: http://alturl.com/3ehis
Still interested in organizing a bus or van from your city? We’re offering small grants to help.
Driving to Ft. Meade
From most locations, driving will be the quickest way to access Ft. Meade. If you plan to fly into the area and rent a car, priceline.com and hotwire.com are two useful sites for finding budget rentals.
Free parking has been arranged at Meade Heights Elementary School, 1925 Reece Rd, Fort Meade, MD 20755. This parking lot is only half a mile (11 min. walk) from the the Ft. Meade Main Gate.
Additional parking is available at Van Bokkelen Elementary School, 1140 Reece Road, Severn, MD 21144. This parking lot is one mile (24 min. walk) from the Ft. Meade Main Gate. We’ll try to shuttle folks along Reece Road.
There are a small number of unrestricted parking spaces along US 175; however, do not park in the the mini-shopping centers or the Weis Market near Blue Water Blvd.
Housing options
Search Priceline for hotels near Ft. George G. Meade, MD
View a list of other hotels in DC, MD and VA.
Mass housing options
There are also two campgrounds in the area, Cherry Hill Park near Washington D.C. and Greenbelt Park in Greenbelt, MD. The campground fee is $16.
Navigation
Google maps usually has up-to-date road and public transit information. You can also download apps and links for navigation in the DC area, MD and NYC
Carpooling
If you are able to offer rides to others, please e-mail emma@bradleymanning.org with your planned departure date, time, location, and how many seats you are offering. Carpool information for those looking for rides will be posted on this page as it becomes available.
Ft. Meade Security
Our event on June 1st will take place outside the Fort Meade Main Gate at 175 Maryland and Reece Rd. However, if you plan to stay to attend Bradley’s court martial, which begins June 3rd, you’ll need to be prepared to go through security checkpoints.
To enter Ft. Meade, you’ll need a government issued ID, such as a state issued drivers license or passport. Non-US passports are accepted. Be prepared to remove any shirts or buttons that show support for Bradley Manning while on base.
The courtroom is located 1 mile past the main gate, and maps are available at the Visitor Control Center immediately inside the gate and to the right. There is parking by the courtroom, space allowing. To drive onto Ft. Meade:

• Have your up-to-date vehicle registration
• Have your up-to-date vehicle insurance (printed copy–not a electronic version on your mobile phone)
• Obey posted speed limits (they are strictly enforced by military police–especially for “special visitors”)
• Be prepared to cover “political” bumper stickers on your vehicle with tape

Unlike most trials, the government is refusing to release any official transcripts of the trials. It is up to the public to attend, and comment on, what happens inside the otherwise secretive court room. Thank you for your support and please join us at Fort Meade!