From The Marxist Archives-Religion and Capitalist Charity

Workers Vanguard No. 1036 13 December 2013 LENIN   TROTSKY   (Quote of the Week)   Especially around the holiday season, the capitalists seek to salve their consciences by throwing a few crumbs to the poor and working masses in the name of “remembering the neediest.” Such self-interested charity normally comes with a heavy dose of religious sentiment, which, as Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin explains in the quote below, helps further capitalist exploitation by diverting the working class from the struggle to improve its material conditions.   The economic oppression of the workers inevitably calls forth and engenders every kind of political oppression and social humiliation, the coarsening and darkening of the spiritual and moral life of the masses. The workers may secure a greater or lesser degree of political liberty to fight for their economic emancipation, but no amount of liberty will rid them of poverty, unemployment, and oppression until the power of capital is overthrown. Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people, overburdened by their perpetual work for others, by want and isolation. Impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better life after death as impotence of the savage in his battle with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the like. Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practise charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.   But a slave who has become conscious of his slavery and has risen to struggle for his emancipation has already half ceased to be a slave. The modern class-conscious worker, reared by large-scale factory industry and enlightened by urban life, contemptuously casts aside religious prejudices, leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois bigots, and tries to win a better life for himself here on earth. The proletariat of today takes the side of socialism, which enlists science in the battle against the fog of religion, and frees the workers from their belief in life after death by welding them together to fight in the present for a better life on earth.   —V.I. Lenin, “Socialism and Religion” (December 1905)

In New York City-Drop Charges Against CUNY Protesters! Workers Vanguard No. 1036	13 December 2013

 

 

Over the past semester, the City University of New York (CUNY) administration has been on a tear to suppress leftist political activity. Its latest reprisal was to bring criminal charges against Khalil Vasquez and Tafadar Sourov for their role in protesting the closure of the Morales/Shakur Center at City College of New York (CCNY) on October 24. The administration had shut down the center, a meeting space for leftist, minority and other student and community groups, after weeks of demonstrations against war criminal David Petraeus teaching at CUNY and the return of the Reserve Officers Training Corps to campus.

Vasquez and Sourov, both of the Revolutionary Student Coordinating Committee, had already been suspended from CCNY following the October 24 protest, as reported in our Young Spartacus pages (see “Rescind Suspensions of CCNY Protesters!”, WV No. 1034, 15 November). On November 22, at a CCNY disciplinary hearing regarding their suspension, both students pleaded “no contest and no admission of guilt.” As a result, they will be allowed to return to CCNY next semester, but the suspension will only be expunged from their record provided they stay in line by the lights of the administration.

Vasquez and Sourov have a court appearance scheduled for January 9, the same day as several of the CUNY 6 protesters who face bogus misdemeanor charges stemming from a September 17 anti-Petraeus protest that was brutally attacked by city cops. We urge our readers to send letters demanding that all charges against the CUNY protesters be dropped. Statements can be directed to: New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., One Hogan Place, New York, NY 10013; telephone: (212) 335-9000; fax: (212) 335-4390. Donations to the CUNY 6 legal defense fund can be made at defendthecuny6.wordpress.com.

We print below a letter sent by the Partisan Defense Committee to District Attorney Vance on November 23.

*   *   *

The Partisan Defense Committee denounces the outrageous prosecution of student activists Tafadar Sourov and Khalil Vasquez. The two City College of New York (CCNY) students face a year in prison for exercising their right to free speech and assembly while protesting the closure of the Morales/Shakur Center at CCNY. We demand that all of the charges be dropped.

In an effort to silence Sourov and Vasquez, and also send a message to other student protesters, the CUNY administration has pressed charges against the students for “rioting” and “inciting to riot,” at an October 24 protest against the closure of the Morales/Shakur Center. They have also accused Sourov of attempting to assault a campus police officer during the protest. These charges are classically pulled out of a hat to stifle dissidents or cover up police misconduct or both. The fact is that the CUNY administration is blatantly punishing students for voicing dissent on campus and using any means necessary to silence them.

The vendetta against Sourov and Vasquez is part of an ongoing campaign to stifle dissent after weeks of protests across the CUNY campuses. Students and activists have been protesting former CIA director David Petraeus teaching at CUNY, the return of Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) to CUNY campuses and the sinister closing of the Morales/Shakur Center at CCNY. At one such protest against Petraeus on September 17, six activists were brutally attacked by police, arrested and charged with several bogus misdemeanors, such as “riot in the second degree.”

We demand that all of the charges against Sourov and Vasquez and the CUNY 6 be dropped immediately.

Democrats, Republicans Take Ax to Food Stamps-Capitalists Starve Workers, Poor Workers Vanguard No. 1036	13 December 2013

 

 

With a growing number of billionaires in its ranks and the stock market booming, the ruling class in the U.S. is giddy with greed. In its quest to stockpile wealth, this tiny capitalist elite keeps bleeding working people dry. As a result, the mass of the population continues to reel from the effects of the Great Recession triggered by rampant financial speculation in the housing market, even as the banks and other big businesses declare a renaissance. The Bloomberg news service, founded by the world’s richest (now departing) mayor, recently trumpeted: “Wages Stagnate as U.S. Manufacturers Reap Record Profits” (21 November). Not satisfied with slashing pay to the bone, the insatiable capitalist rulers are also further gutting those meager social benefits that help keep workers and the poor afloat. And greater hunger and misery are on the horizon, as the $5 billion cut in food stamps last month attests.

Some 47.5 million food stamp recipients, nearly half of them children, were impacted by this step, which was approved by Democrats and Republicans alike. This benefit loss was triggered by the lapse of a temporary increase in funding for food stamps—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—included in the 2009 economic stimulus act. The toll of the cut was immediate, as families were forced to scrimp even more on meals and to seek out emergency food pantries.

For all the talk of government dysfunction and gridlock, both parties of capital have showed proficiency in screwing the poor. And more cuts are on the way—the only real question is how much. In alternate farm bills that set the funding for food stamps, the Democratic-controlled Senate voted for $4 billion in cuts, while the Republican-controlled House voted for $40 billion. This is despite the fact that the number of food stamp recipients has swelled by 80 percent over the last six years of economic downturn.

Although the unemployment rate fell last month to its lowest level since 2008, the prospects of finding a job at anything resembling decent pay remain very dim. So much so that droves of people have simply given up on looking for work, the main factor accounting for that rate drop. In the time since the financial crisis claimed 8.7 million jobs, only 7.4 million have been created, and these overwhelmingly pay low wages. Half of all employees in America now earn less than $26,000 a year, barely above the official poverty level for a family of four. Among the factors swelling the legions of the working poor—from Wal-Mart “associates” to college adjunct professors—is President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The law has encouraged employers to cut hours to avoid providing health care while jacking up insurance costs for much of the workforce.

Working households today constitute 40 percent of food stamp recipients, with one quarter of the overall U.S. workforce depending on some form of public assistance. In a sign of the times, Wal-Mart had the audacity to set up a food bank for its own miserably paid employees before Thanksgiving, and McDonald’s counseled its staff on eating smaller mouthfuls so it would feel like they had more food. Long gone are the days when soup kitchens and food pantries were just for the “down-and-outs” and families in acute crisis. Such charities are keeping countless people alive who would starve on what the employers and government dole out, as food prices rise faster than all other expenses except transportation costs and medical bills. In New York City, food charities were already rationing portion sizes and turning people away before Superstorm Sandy struck last year and threw many more on their mercy.

With affordable housing a rarity in the city, more and more New Yorkers, many of them women with young children, are punching out of work only to sign in to homeless shelters. Pricing working people out of city residences extends to San Francisco, where one worker explained: “Now it’s hard to be a middle-class person with what used to seem like a really good salary in this city” (New York Times, 26 November). When the housing market crashed, sparking the recession, mortgage foreclosures swept the nation, causing ten million largely working-class families to lose their homes. Today, an additional 2.3 million are at risk. One measure of the spread of homelessness over the last five years is the 72 percent nationwide increase in the public school enrollment of children without a residence. Fully one in five children in the U.S. lives in poverty.

Two Democratic Party city councilmen in Los Angeles are plumbing the depths of official abuse by proposing a ban on publicly feeding the homeless, a measure already enacted or under consideration in over 30 cities, including Philadelphia, Seattle and Orlando. Earlier this year, L.A. had sought legal sanction for its police force to seize and destroy the scant personal belongings of those on skid row. In many black-majority cities like Baltimore and Detroit, where poverty and homelessness abound, authorities are demolishing neighborhoods or letting them burn rather than invest in maintaining and restoring housing stock.

The devastation of bankrupt Detroit is a testament to the brutal workings of capitalism, as the auto giants first recruited labor, including many black workers, to toil on the assembly line only to then toss them on the scrap heap when the plants were no longer as profitable. Widely hailed for having “saved” the Big Three by showering tens of billions on the auto bosses (not to mention trillions on the banks), the Wall Street Democrat Obama again has turned his back on the desperate black masses amid the city’s bankruptcy proceedings. Following the recent court ruling that gave the green light to wiping out city workers’ pensions, other government bodies are lining up to do the same. Two days after the ruling, Illinois Democratic governor Pat Quinn signed a bill that stripped away retirement benefits from hundreds of thousands of teachers, nurses and other workers. While the ax-wielders scream about “underfunded” and “mismanaged” pension benefits, Wall Street has for years been looting retirement funds. The message from the bosses is clear enough: work hard, starve and die.

The inability of the richest imperialist power on the planet to provide the necessities of life to the producers of its incredible wealth is a searing indictment of the system of production for profit. This country has the resources to provide well-paying jobs, healthy diets and quality medical care, housing and education for everyone who lives here. But to provide these necessities requires that the rule of the rapacious capitalist class be overthrown by a proletarian socialist revolution.

“Let Them Eat Cake”

The modern food stamp program has its roots in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Enacted following U.S. capitalism’s most serious crash in 1929, the New Deal served to stave off the growing radicalization and militant labor struggles of the 1930s. The precursor to SNAP was introduced in the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), the first farm bill. Although farming has undergone a great transformation in the U.S. from the time of the Great Depression with the virtual disappearance of family farms, the main purpose of the farm bill has remained unchanged: maintaining high prices for agricultural products.

Under the AAA, the government paid farmers to not grow food on a percentage of their land and purchased “excess” crops. The government to this day heavily subsidizes grains, oilseeds, cotton, sugar and dairy products. The money for these subsidies has always far outstripped the sums dedicated to providing food for the poor.

In the AAA’s first year, ten million acres of cotton were destroyed, six million pigs were killed and vast amounts of milk were poured down the sewers in an attempt to stabilize the market. That the bourgeoisie would pursue these measures at the height of a worldwide depression speaks volumes to the irrationality of capitalist production. At a time when many American children were suffering from diseases caused by malnutrition, food stamps and soon thereafter the school lunch program represented a more politically expedient means of disposing of “excess” supply.

The impact of the AAA was especially pernicious in the rural South, where sharecropping and tenancy formed the labor backbone of agriculture. In lieu of wages, the sharecropper worked for a portion of the cash crop as well as a food allowance and other necessities. The tenant farmer paid a share of the crop as rent on the land worked. Government subsidies induced white landlords not to farm, which left black tenants and sharecroppers to starve. Countless poor black and white families were driven off the land and into extreme misery as a result of the New Deal of the Democrats.

In later decades, farm bills would help catapult U.S. agribusiness into becoming the dominant global food supplier. Massive government assistance to farm interests and its enormous grain reserves were deployed to manipulate the world grain market and put the competition out of business. Food production in neocolonial countries was upended, as a wide swath of the world became almost wholly dependent on U.S. agricultural imports. The persistence of starvation as a condition of a large portion of humanity makes clear that under capitalism food is distributed not according to need but according to the ability to pay.

Meanwhile, farm subsidies have padded the accounts of a number of billionaires, among them Charles Schwab and David Rockefeller Sr. Ken Cook, head of the watchdog Environmental Working Group, noted in A Place at the Table (2013): “Taxpayers shelled out more than a quarter of a trillion dollars for various federal farm subsidies between 1995 and 2010. But to characterize this staggering sum as a big government bailout or welfare would be manifestly unfair—to bailouts and welfare.” He adds: “To be clear, the US Department of Agriculture has cracked down on one nagging problem with absentee owners in recent years: the USDA assures Congress that almost none of the subsidies paid to dead farmers are improper.”

In contrast, fruits and vegetables for the living are often hard to come by. Not a single supermarket dots the eight-square-mile landscape of the black neighborhood of West Oakland, California, home to over 30,000 people. Such considerations do not register for moralizing bourgeois spokesmen who blame malnutrition and obesity among the poor on “lifestyle choices.” To much fanfare, in 2010 the Obama administration pushed through the “Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act,” supposedly to improve the quality of food in school lunches. Not only was this measure stripped of any meaningful funding; the money spent on it was taken directly out of SNAP.

The original food stamp program and its revival in 1964 by President Lyndon B. Johnson as part of his “Great Society” offerings were sops in response to social upheaval. Today, with the dearth of class struggle, the capitalists are content to just cast aside those who cannot be put to work. The current House farm bill includes a 20-hour weekly work requirement for receipt of food stamps. Republican majority leader Eric Cantor drew a straight line between this proposal and the welfare “reform” of the 1990s—the attacks under Democratic president Clinton that “ended welfare as we know it” and introduced workfare. That scheme forced people to take jobs, often substituting for unionized workers, to get their welfare checks. What is needed is a fight to organize workfare recipients into the unions as part of broader struggle in the interests of the working and poor masses.

A major force among today’s Republicans is the neo-Confederates of the Tea Party. These racist yahoos are part of a long tradition of bourgeois demagogues railing to ax social programs portrayed as a redistribution of income from hard-working folks to “undeserving” blacks and immigrants. More than a few Tea Party supporters have expressed a willingness to forego such benefits themselves to spite the black masses. The black population, which constitutes an oppressed race-color caste overwhelmingly segregated at the bottom of this society, would be hard hit by the shredding of what remains of the social safety net.

Expropriate the Expropriators!

The prolonged wage squeeze has sparked some fightback from working people. On Black Friday, protesters gathered at 1,500 Wal-Mart stores to demand at least $25,000 annually for full-time employees. Some 110 people were arrested nationwide. The week after the OUR Wal-Mart protests, workers at fast-food outlets across the country held brief walkouts to rally for higher wages. Most minimum-wage workers are employed in retail or food service. As one measure of how paltry wages have become, a Congressional report in May estimated that a single 300-employee Wal-Mart Supercenter costs anywhere from $904,542 to nearly $1.75 million per year in supplemental government assistance for the workforce.

A major backer of the “Fight for 15” campaign, which seeks a doubling of the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, is the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Although Fight for 15 has attracted combative workers, for the SEIU tops it is a public relations ploy to leverage the Democratic Party into supporting a slight minimum wage increase. For decades, the labor movement has been stifled by a leadership that ties workers to the capitalist system, largely through preaching reliance on the Democratic Party. This strategy has provided less cover than an umbrella with holes for the anti-union onslaught on the working class.

Take the 2009 bailout of the auto industry orchestrated by Obama. It was all about making the members of the once mighty United Auto Workers (UAW) “work for less”​—or not at all—to restore the profitability of the companies. With the complicity of the class-collaborationist UAW bureaucrats, it did just that. Today the starting wage at a General Motors plant is $16 an hour, far less than it had been, helping fuel wage-gouging throughout the economy.

Any increase in the minimum wage is long overdue. Obama and his Labor Secretary, Thomas Perez, have made noises in favor of $10 an hour, safe in the knowledge that the measure will never get through Congress. Some states and local jurisdictions have recently voted to increase the minimum wage in order to get more money circulating in area economies. But these increases and the others being proposed are a pittance compared to the actual needs of working people.

Any significant gains will be won not by making alliances with the Democrats but by class-struggle mobilizations of the multiracial working class, particularly at relative union strongholds in industry and along the cargo chain supplying the retailers and fast-food businesses. This road also is the one that can organize these workers into the unions as part of revitalizing a long-weakened labor movement.

America’s capitalist rulers presume that they can just starve the poor, kill off retirees and further impoverish working people and the oppressed without repercussions. This calculation, which owes much to the role of the trade-union bureaucracy in suppressing labor struggle, is an expression of ruling-class arrogance. The grinding down of the working masses creates conditions that can and will boil over into open battle with the class enemy. It is vital that workers break the chains forged by the trade-union misleaders that shackle labor to its exploiters.

To actually resolve hunger, homelessness and unemployment and overcome the crushing oppression of the black population will take far more than a fight for better wages. In Capital (Volume I), Karl Marx explained that the immiseration of the laboring masses, as well as the ever-increasing concentration of production, are inherent to the capitalist system:

“Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”

To realize the expropriation of the expropriators requires the forging of a revolutionary party to lead the proletariat in the fight for working-class rule.

A Little "Rough Justice"- Lynne Stewart Freed-Grandma Goes Home At Last!

Lynne Stewart Coming Home

by Stephen Lendman

For Lynne, husband Ralph, their children, other family members, and legions of worldwide supporters, New Year's day 2014 is special.

It's reason to celebrate. On December 31, Lynne wrote from Carswell federal prison as follows:

"My Dears:

Well, the impossible takes a little longer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We learned this morning that the US Attorney’s office has made the motion for my compassionate release and that the Order was on Judge Koeltl’s desk.  

Since on the last go-round, he stated in Court that he would treat it 'favorably.' We are now just waiting expectantly.

The wonderful thing is that Ralph is here in Ft Worth for a visit and will bring me back to NYC with him.  

We don’t know when but the rules state that the warden has 2 days to let me go after he receives the order so it could be as early as Friday or a few days more. 

Whatever it is, I can’t stop crying tears of Joy!!  

I can’t stop thinking of all the marvelous people worldwide who made this happen. You know because each of you played an integral role. 

My daughter Z is already lining up Sloan Kettering, and we will have to see if there is a probation qualification attached to the Order and how it will affect me.  

After that, Ralph will start making arrangements to rent Yankee Stadium for the Welcome Home...Smile.

So If this reaches you before midnight tonight, raise a glass of bubbly to the joy of all of us that the old girl is OUT!!

Love Struggle,

Lynne"

On December 31, the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York filed a motion before federal Judge John Koeltl. 

He requested Lynne be re-sentenced to time served. Doing so means she's eligible for immediate release. Judge Koeltl complied, saying:

Lynne’s "terminal medical condition and very limited life expectancy constitute extraordinary and compelling reasons that warrant the requested (sentencing) reduction." 

"It is further ordered that the defendant shall be released from the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons as soon as her medical condition permits, the release plan is implemented, and travel arrangements can be made."

She'll be home within a few days at most. Her husband Ralph is in Fort Worth, TX near Carswell federal prison. 

They'll return to New York together. They'll do it joyously. They'll do it despite Lynne's wrongful imprisonment. They'll do it despite her grave medical condition.

She's dying. She has Stage Four cancer. Previous articles explained. Others addressed Judge Koeltl.

He originally sentenced Lynne to 28 months in prison. It shouldn't have been 28 seconds. Lynne never should have been prosecuted in the first place. In passing sentence Judge Koeltl said:

"She has represented the poor, the disadvantaged and the unpopular, (and she had) enormous skill and dedication (earning little money for doing it)." 

"It is no exaggeration to say that Ms. Stewart performed a public service not only to her clients but to the nation."

He cited hundreds of supportive letters. Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark sent one. So did law professors, former prosecutors, retired judges, and former clients.

On April 9, 2002, Lynne was wrongfully and maliciously indicted. At issue was decades of representing clients prosecutors wanted convicted. Bogus charges included:

• "conspiring to defraud the United States; 

• conspiring to provide and conceal material support to terrorist activity; 

• providing and concealing material support to terrorist activity; and 

• two counts of making false statements." 

On February 10, 2005, she was convicted on all counts. Jurors were intimidated to do so. Trial proceedings mocked fairness. Kangaroo court justice followed.

On October 17, 2006, Lynne was sentenced to 28 months imprisonment.

On November 17, 2009, a US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit three-judge panel upheld Lynne's conviction.

They wrongfully accused her of "knowingly and willfully making false statements." They redirected her case to Judge Koeltl. They pressured him to re-sentence. 

They lied demanding enhancements for terrorism, perjury, and abuse of Lynne's position as a lawyer.

On November 19, 2009, Lynne was jailed in New York awaiting re-sentencing.

On July 15, 2010, Judge Koeltl imposed 10 years. A packed courtroom of Lynne's supporters heard him. 

A collective gasp, a few shrieks and sobs followed his re-sentencing. Husband Ralph called it "a death sentence."

Lynne addressed the court as follows:

"I'm somewhat stunned, Judge, by the swift change in my outlook. We will continue to struggle on to take all available options to do what we need to do to change this." 

"I feel like I let a lot of my good people down. Over the last eight months, prison has diminished me. Daily I confront the prospect of death." 

Judge Koeltl ignored the American Bar Association's Model Code of Judicial Conduct. Its preamble calls for:

• "An independent, fair and impartial judiciary." It called it "indispensable to our system of justice;" 

• "Judges...at all times (ensuring) the greatest possible public confidence in their independence, impartiality, integrity, and competence;"

• "establish(ing) standards (of) ethical conduct (including) overarching principles of judicial ethics" (and fairness), consistent with constitutional requirements, statutes, other court rules, and decisional law, and with due regard for all relevant circumstances."

Lynne's lynching showed America's true face. Police state justice rules. It has final say. Fundamental rights don't matter. Guilt by accusation suffices.

Koeltl wasn't finished punishing Lynne. She petitioned for compassionate release. She qualifies in all respects. America's 1984 Sentencing Act grants them "for extraordinary and compelling reasons."

None rise to the level of life threatening illness. Ramsey Clark said Lynne "meets every legal, rational and humane criterion."

Her attorneys argued accordingly. On August 9, 2013, Judge Koeltl denied her. He did so disgracefully.

In sentencing Lynne in 2006, he said he didn't want to impose a death sentence. He didn't want Lynne to die in prison. 

He called her character "extraordinary." She's "a credit to her profession," he said.

Longterm imprisonment would be unjust, he added. It would be "unreasonable." He cited "the somewhat atypical nature of her case." He noted no "evidence that (anyone) was harmed."

It didn't matter. In July 2010, he re-sentenced Lynne to 10 years. On August 9, 2013, he denied her compassionate release request.

At the time, her attorney Jill Shellow said his ruling "is hardly the end of this fight."

Lynne re-petitioned for compassionate release. She wants the right to die at home. She calls prison "a strange and loveless place."

"I want to be where all is familiar - in a word, home," she said. Months passed without resolution. 

She never lost hope. On New Year's eve it came. Jill Shellow informed Lynne. She'll return to New York. 

She'll get expert medical care prison authorities denied her. It may be too late to save her. Her cancer metastasized. 

It spread to her lungs, lymph nodes, bones, shoulder and left arm pit. Other parts of her body are vulnerable. 

She may have only months to live. Whether expert medical care makes a difference remains to be seen.

On New Year's day 2014, Lynne's impending release awaits. She'll be home within days. She'll be reunited with loved ones.

Supporters will greet her. Yankee Stadium isn't big enough to hold them. After over four years of wrongful imprisonment, Lynne will be free at last.

Borrowing from Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech perhaps says it best," saying:

"Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty (Lynne's) free at last."

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. 

His new book is titled "Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity."

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs Fridays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

http://www.dailycensored.com/lynne-stewart-coming-home/

A Little "Rough Justice" At Last- Lynne Stewart Freed-Grandma Goes Home At Last!

Lynne arrives back in New York City Today

January 1st, 2014

Lynne will arrive in New York today, into the loving arms of her family. More updates soon!

Posted in LATEST NEWS | No Comments »

Message from Lynne

December 31st, 2013

12/31/12 3:24 pm
My Dears:
Well, the impossible takes a little longer !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  We learned this morning that the US Attorney’s office has made the motion for my compassionate release and that the Order was on Judge Koeltl’s desk.  Since on the last go-round he stated in Court that he would treat it “favorably”, we are now just waiting expectantly.
The wonderful thing is that Ralph is here in Ft Worth for a visit and will bring me back to NYC with him.  We don’t know when but the rules state that the warden has 2 days to let me go after he receives the order so it could be as early as Friday or a few days more. Whatever it is, I can’t stop crying tears of Joy !!  I can’t stop thinking of all the marvelous people worldwide who made this happen ..you know because each of you played an integral role. My daughter  Z is already lining up Sloan Kettering and we will have to see if there is a probation qualification attached to the Order and how it will affect me.  After that Ralph will start making arrangements to rent Yankee Stadium for the Welcome Home… Smile
So If this reaches you before midnight tonight raise a glass of bubbly to the joy of all of us that the old girl is OUT !!
Love Struggle,
Lynne

Posted in BEHIND BARS (From Lynne) | No Comments »

JUDGE GRANTS COMPASSIONATE RELEASE OF LYNNE

December 31st, 2013

FROM NEW YORK TIMES:
Judge Orders Release of Dying Lawyer
By BENJAMIN WEISER
December 31, 2013
A federal judge in Manhattan ordered a “compassionate release” on Tuesday for Lynne F. Stewart, the former defense lawyer convicted of assisting terrorism who is dying from cancer in a federal prison in Texas.
Ms. Stewart, 74, who was convicted in 2005, sought release in 2013 under a Bureau of Prisons program for terminally ill inmates, but did so without the bureau’s support. The judge, John G. Koeltl of United States District Court, rejected the request in August, but indicated that he would look favorably upon such action if the Bureau of Prisons itself made such a motion.
The request to Judge Koeltl on Tuesday came from the director of the Bureau of Prisons through the office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York. The filing said Ms. Stewart qualified for compassionate release because she had a diagnosis of a terminal, incurable illness with a life expectancy of less than 18 months and because of the relatively limited risk of recidivism and danger to the community if she were released.
“The defendant’s terminal medical condition and very limited life expectancy constitute extraordinary and compelling reasons that warrant the requested reduction” in sentence to time served, the judge’s order said.
Ms. Stewart is to live with her son, a lawyer, in Brooklyn.
Ms. Stewart is best known for her defense of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric who was convicted in 1995 of conspiring to blow up landmarks in New York City. She was later tried and convicted of smuggling messages from Mr. Abdel Rahman in prison to his violent followers in Egypt, and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. She has been serving her sentence at the Federal Medical Center Carswell, in Fort Worth.
Ms. Stewart was found in 2005 to have breast cancer; in 2012, doctors determined that her cancer had spread to her lungs, lymph system and bones, a court filing shows.
Her lawyer, Jill R. Shellow, said earlier on Tuesday, before the judge’s ruling, that she had informed her client of the government’s request, and that Ms. Stewart was looking forward to being with her family.
“It restores my faith in the Justice Department to do the right thing,” Ms. Shellow said. Later, after Judge Koeltl issued his order, Ms. Shellow added, “The judge’s exercise of mercy on New Year’s Eve shows his compassion for Lynne and the depth of his commitment to seeing that justice is done.”
Ms. Stewart, in a 12-page handwritten letter to the judge during the summer, said she did not want to die in prison, “a strange and loveless place,” as she put it. “I want to be where all is familiar — in a word, home.”
Judge Koeltl’s order says that Ms. Stewart shall be released “as soon as her medical condition permits, the release plan is implemented, and travel arrangements can be made.”
Ms. Shellow said Ms. Stewart could be released as early Tuesday night, and would be met by her husband.

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Federal Gov’t Asks Judge to Grant Lynne Stewart Compassionate Release from Prison

December 31st, 2013

From Democracy Now!:

The Bureau of Prisons has submitted a request to the judge in Lynne Stewart’s case, asking him to grant “compassionate release” to 74-year-old jailed civil rights attorney who is dying from stage IV breast cancer. Scroll down to read the order.
“This morning, the government, meaning the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, on behalf of the Bureau of Prisons, filed a motion before Federal Judge John Koeltl, requesting that Lynne Stewart be re-sentenced to time served,” said Bob Boyle, one of Stewart’s lawyers. “This means she would be eligible — if he signs the order — for immediate release. There is every indication that will sign the order, since he said so on the record, when we made the motion back in July to have her be released.”
Boyle says he fully expects Stewart to be released in the next few days, and return to New York City where she will live with her son. He says she and her family have been told the news and are extremely relieved and grateful.

A Little "Rough Justice" At Last- Lynne Stewart Freed-Grandma Goes Home At Last 

Lawyer who aided terrorism released from prison on 'compassionate' grounds

Chip East / Reuters, file

Lynne Stewart, seen here in 2009, is suffering from breast cancer and is expected to live 18 months or less.

 

By Jonathan Stempel, Reuters

NEW YORK - A former defense lawyer convicted of aiding terrorism was granted a "compassionate" release from federal prison on Tuesday because she is dying of cancer.

Lynne Stewart, 74, has been serving a 10-year sentence over her 2005 conviction for helping a client, blind Egyptian cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, smuggle messages from prison to Egypt's Islamic Group, which the government had listed as a terrorist organization.

Earlier this year, Stewart asked U.S. District Judge John Koeltl in Manhattan for early release under a Federal Bureau of Prisons program for terminally ill inmates.

Koeltl, who in August had denied the request, noting that the Bureau of Prisons had not supported it, on Tuesday granted the request, following a recommendation for release from the Bureau of Prisons and the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. Koeltl reduced Stewart's sentence to the time she has already served and ordered Stewart released as soon as her medical condition permits, according to a court filing.

 

The Bureau of Prisons and Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, had recommended that Stewart be released from the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, and to live in Brooklyn, New York, with her son, a lawyer.

The government said Stewart has Stage IV breast cancer that has metastasized to the lung and bone and is expected to live 18 months or less.

It said her terminal medical condition and limited life expectancy were "extraordinary and compelling reasons" to reduce the sentence and that Stewart posed a "relatively limited" risk of recidivism and danger to the community.

Prior to being disbarred, Stewart had been known for representing controversial defendants, including one-time crime underboss Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano.

"My client and I are overjoyed that she will be able to spend her remaining days with her family," said Jill Shellow, a lawyer for Stewart. "It restores my faith in the Department of Justice to do the right thing."

Koeltl imposed the 10-year sentence in 2010 after a federal appeals court found Stewart's original 28-month term too short.

Abdel-Rahman was convicted in 1995 of conspiring to attack the United Nations and other New York City landmarks, following the 1993 truck bombing at the World Trade Center.

Related:

• Detainees who were 'never' suspects leave Gitmo

***Out In The 1950s B-Film Noir Night- William Berke’s Roaring City

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Roaring City, starring Huge Beaumont, directed by William Berke, 1951       

 

Not every Frisco private detective got the high profile, potentially lucrative cases a shamus like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade got chasing skirts, fists and bullets, and some damn bird, a bird who turned out to be the stuff of dreams. Some operatives like our gumshoe Dennis O’Brien in the film under review, Roaring City, got the leavings, the stuff Spade (and even the late Miles Archer, his partner) left for the amateurs and part-timers. Yes, O’Brien was trying to make his coffee and cakes on the side by renting out boats in the Frisco Bay day when he got a couple of calls, a couple of cases, for cheap dough, a couple of skirt chases and plenty of fists in the face for his efforts. Let me tell you about them.    

First off our boy grabs a couple of hundred buck (well only a hundred since the rest was supposed to be paid on completion, a completion that never occurred once the client turned up dead, very dead) for a case he really wanted no part of but the rent was due, he was bored, or some other reason known only to him.  The client; a local boxing promoter who just for that cheap dough wanted O’Brien to place some bets with the bookies against his “champ.” 

 

Now nobody over the age of twelve believes that the pugilistic arts are anything but rigged but it was pretty raw for a guy to bet against his own man so openly (it seemed everybody in the Bay Area knew what was going down-except the cops). And naturally the promoter got his just rewards in the end for sullying the name of the game. Of course, as well, a twist was in the way working for a low-down bookie looking to make a big score. No dice. But along the way to “no dice” O’Brien suffers multiple fists, murders done (with him as the fall guy to take the rap), and an off-hand kiss or too from that twist (don’t worry our boy unlike Sam Spade will not go through hoops for a dame, no way, although he can handle that kissing part just fine). No question though this is one key-hole peeper who earned his damn one- hundred dollars.

So does our shop-worn private eye learn anything from that cheapjack experience.  No.  Next up O’Brien tangles with a scheme hatched up by a couple of femmes, Irma and her step-daughter Sylvia, for cheap dough (a measly one-hundred bucks). Tangles up too with fists, bullets and piled up bodies. But what can a guy, any guy and not just low-rent private detectives, expect when he tangles with femmes. The idea was that O’Brien was paid to be “married” to Sylvia to avoid retribution from an old gangster lover who was now back in the country after being on the lam for a while. Said Sylvia had fallen in love with another guy named Fallon and she doesn’t want him hurt.

 

Of course that is just the cock and bull cover story. The real deal was if that gangster lover went to his final reward before the femme then she got to cash in thirty-thousand dollars’ worth of bonds that he has stashed away (yeah, I know, tip money today and not really much then either-no enough to get three guys killed over). That is where the second femme Irma came in and gummed up the works. She was just a greedy little hustler who killed Fallon, the lover that O’Brien was standing in for. In reaction Sylvia killed her gangster lover and his gunsel thinking they did Fallon in. Yes a mess, no question. And the fall guy all set to take the frame. Well, you know who. But you also know he is not ready for any big step-off just because of some daft scheme by some chiseling femmes and so he walked away clean after delivering the ladies to their just step-off rewards. Leaving O’Brien, well leaving O’Brien wishing like hell that Sam’s Brigit had showed up at his door looking for a jewel-encrusted bird.

From The Marxist Archives -In Honor Of The The Three Ls

Workers Vanguard No. 951

For the Communism of Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht

In January we commemorate the “Three L’s”: Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, who died on 21 January 1924, and revolutionary Marxist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who were assassinated on 15 January 1919 in Germany by the reactionary Freikorps. This was done as part of the suppression of the Spartakist uprising by the Social Democratic government of Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann and Gustav Noske. We reprint below an appreciation of Luxemburg excerpted from Max Shachtman’s “Under the Banner of Marxism,” which was written in response to the resignation of Ernest Erber and originally published in Volume IV, Number 1 of the internal bulletins of the Workers Party in 1949.

Shachtman joined the American Communist Party in the early 1920s. Along with James P. Cannon and Martin Abern, he was expelled in 1928 for fighting for the Bolshevik-Leninist line of Leon Trotsky against the Stalinist degeneration of the international Communist movement. For a decade he was, with Cannon, a leader of the American Trotskyist movement as well as a key leader in the International Left Opposition. However, following an intense faction fight in the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, Shachtman, along with Abern and James Burnham, broke from Trotskyism in 1940, refusing to defend the Soviet degenerated workers state in World War II. Shortly thereafter, he developed the position that the USSR was a new exploitative form of class society, “bureaucratic collectivism.” (For more on this fight, see Trotsky’s In Defense of Marxism and Cannon’s The Struggle for a Proletarian Party.)

Following this split, Shachtman formed the Workers Party, which was a rightward-moving centrist party that existed from 1940 to 1949, when it changed its name to the Independent Socialist League. Under the intense pressure of U.S. imperialism’s anti-Soviet Cold War, Shachtman came to see Stalinism as a greater danger than “democratic” imperialism. He ended his days as an open supporter of U.S. imperialism and a member of the Democratic Party, backing the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the vicious, losing imperialist war against the Vietnamese social revolution.

Shachtman’s 1949 reply to Erber (who went on to become an urban planner in Northern New Jersey) represented the last time he tried to defend revolutionary Marxism against a classical Menshevik. In resigning from the Workers Party, Erber, using stock-in-trade social-democratic arguments to justify support for one’s “own” bourgeoisie, denounced the Bolshevik Revolution and counterposed Luxemburg to Lenin, portraying her as a defender of classless “democracy.” Many self-styled leftists continue to do likewise, distorting Luxemburg’s 1918 criticisms of the Bolsheviks, which she never published in her lifetime and which were based on the very partial information to which she had access while imprisoned for her revolutionary struggle against the First World War. Using previously untranslated articles from the German Communist journal Rote Fahne written by Luxemburg near the end of her life, Shachtman demonstrated her support to the Russian Revolution and how she and Lenin stood shoulder to shoulder in the fight for socialist revolution.

* * *

Contrast Erber and every word he writes with the critical appraisal of the Bolsheviks written in prison by Rosa Luxemburg, who is invoked against revolutionary socialism nowadays by every turncoat and backslider who wouldn’t reach up to her soles if he stood on tiptoes:

“That the Bolsheviks have based their policy entirely upon the world proletarian revolution is the clearest proof of their political farsightedness and firmness of principle and of the bold scope of their policies.”

You will never see that quoted from the turncoats who have drafted Luxemburg into the crusade against Bolshevism against her will. Nor will you see this quoted:

“The party of Lenin was the only one which grasped the mandate and duty of a truly revolutionary party and which, by the slogan—‘All power in the hands of the proletariat and peasantry’—insured the continued development of the revolution....

“Moreover, the Bolsheviks immediately set as the aim of this seizure of power a complete, far-reaching revolutionary program: not the safeguarding of bourgeois democracy, but a dictatorship of the proletariat for the purpose of realizing socialism. Thereby they won for themselves the imperishable historic distinction of having for the first time proclaimed the final aim of socialism as the direct program of practical politics.”

We can see now how much right Erber has to drag Rosa Luxemburg into court as a fellow-detractor of the Bolsheviks, how much right he has to mention her views in the same breath with his own. Fortunately, Luxemburg is not a defenseless corpse. She left a rich political testament to assure her name from being bandied about by soiled lips. Read this, directed right at the heart of Erber:

“The real situation in which the Russian Revolution found itself, narrowed down in a few months to the alternative: victory of the counterrevolution or dictatorship of the proletariat—Kaledin or Lenin. Such was the objective situation, just as it quickly presents itself in every revolution after the first intoxication is over, and as it presented itself in Russia as a result of the concrete, burning questions of peace and land, for which there was no solution within the framework of bourgeois revolution.”

Not much room here, not so much as a crevice, for Erber’s “alternative,” is there? Not much room here for his “capitalist economic relations.” This is a revolutionist writing—not an idol-worshipper of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, but still a revolutionist, a tireless, defiant, unflinching champion of the proletariat in the class struggle.

“In this, the Russian Revolution has but confirmed the basic lesson of every great revolution, the law of its being, which decrees: either the revolution must advance at a rapid, stormy and resolute tempo, break down all barriers with an iron hand and place its goals ever farther ahead, or it is quite soon thrown backward behind its feeble point of departure and suppressed by counterrevolution. To stand still, to mark time on one spot, to be contented with the first goal it happens to reach, is never possible in revolution. And he who tries to apply the home-made wisdom derived from parliamentary battles between frogs and mice to the field of revolutionary tactics only shows thereby that the very psychology and laws of existence of revolution are alien to him and that all historical experience is to him a book sealed with seven seals.”

Read it over again, especially that wonderfully priceless last sentence. And then tell us if it is not directed straight at Erber, word for word and line for line! It is much too exactly fitting to be quoted only once! “And he who tries to apply the home-made wisdom derived from parliamentary battles between frogs and mice to the field of revolutionary tactics only shows thereby that the very psychology and laws of existence of revolution are alien to him and that all historical experience is to him a book sealed with seven seals.” If ever Erber gets up enough of what he lacks to look into a mirror, there is a ready-made one for him. If anyone thinks he can improve on this stinging answer to Erber and his home-made wisdom, to his Grand Coalitions between frogs and mice, he is just wasting good time.

“Still, didn’t Rosa criticize the Bolsheviks for dispersing the Constituent Assembly?” No, she did not. She criticized them for not calling for elections to a new Constituent; she criticized them for the arguments they made to justify the dispersal. But in the first place, her criticism has next to nothing in common with that of the latter-day anti-Bolsheviks (or, for that matter, of the anti-Bolsheviks of the time). And in the second place, she was wrong, just as she was wrong in her criticism of the Bolshevik position on the “national question” and of the Bolshevik course in the “agrarian question.” And in the third place, what she wrote in prison, on the basis of “fragmentary information” (as the editor of the American edition of her prison notes admits), was not her last word on the question. Before her cruel death, she altered her position on the basis of her own experiences, on the basis of the living realities of the German revolution. Lenin’s State and Revolution was checked twice—first in the Russian Revolution and then in the German revolution! We will give the reader an idea of what she wrote before her death so that he may see why our present “champions” of Luxemburg never find time, space or inclination to quote her to the end.

The German workers, a year after the Bolshevik Revolution, overturned the Hohenzollern monarchy and, just as spontaneously as did the Russians before them, they formed their Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils (“Räte,” Soviets). The German Mensheviks—Scheidemann, Noske and Ebert—feared and hated the Councils just as much as did their Russian counterparts. They championed the National Assembly (German counterpart of the Russian Constituent) instead, calculating thereby to smash the Councils and the struggle for socialism. Haase and Kautsky, the centrists of the Independent Socialists, oscillated between the Councils and the Assembly. What position did Rosa Luxemburg take, what position did the Spartacus League and its organ, Die Rote Fahne, take? Here once more was the problem of workers’ democracy versus bourgeois democracy, the democratic republic of the Councils versus the bourgeois republic, dictatorship of the proletariat organized in the Councils versus the National Assembly—not in Russia but in Germany, not in 1917 but a year later, not while Rosa was in Breslau prison but after her release.

Here is Rosa Luxemburg in Die Rote Fahne of November 29, 1918, writing on the leaders of the Independents:

“Their actual mission as partner in the firm of Scheidemann-Ebert is: to mystify its clear and unambiguous character as defense guard of bourgeois class domination by means of a system of equivocation and cowardliness.

“This role of Haase and colleagues finds its most classical expression in their attitude toward the most important slogan of the day: toward the National Assembly.

“Only two standpoints are possible in this question, as in all others. Either you want the National Assembly as a means of swindling the proletariat out of its power, to paralyze its class energy, to dissolve its socialist goal into thin air. Or else you want to place all the power into the hands of the proletariat, to unfold the revolution that has begun into a tremendous class struggle for the socialist social order, and toward this end, to establish the political rule of the great mass of the toilers, the dictatorship of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils. For or against socialism, against or for the National Assembly; there is no third way.”

On December 1st, Luxemburg spoke on the situation at a meeting of the Spartacus League in the hall of the Teachers’ Union. At the end of the meeting, a resolution was adopted setting forth her views and giving approval to them:

“The public people’s meeting held on December 1st in the Hall of the Teachers’ Union on Alexander Street declares its agreement with the exposition of Comrade Luxemburg. It considers the convocation of the National Assembly to be a means of strengthening the counterrevolution and to cheat the proletarian revolution of its socialist aims. It demands the transfer of all power to the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, whose first duty it is to drive out of the government the traitors to the working class and to socialism, Scheidemann-Ebert and colleagues, to arm the toiling people for the protection of the revolution, and to take the most energetic and thoroughgoing measures for the socialization of society.”

In her first editorial in Die Rote Fahne of November 18, she writes under the title, “The Beginning”:

“The Revolution has begun.... From the goal of the revolution follows clearly its path, from its task follows the method. All power into the hands of the masses, into the hands of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, protection of the work of the revolution from its lurking foes: this is the guiding line for all the measures of the revolutionary government….

“(But) What is the present revolutionary government (i.e., Scheidemann & Co.) doing?

“It calmly continues to leave the state as an administrative organism from top to bottom in the hands of yesterday’s guards of Hohenzollern absolutism and tomorrow’s tools of the counterrevolution.

“It is convoking the Constituent Assembly, and therewith it is creating a bourgeois counterweight against the Workers’ and Peasants’ representation, therewith switching the revolution on to the rails of the bourgeois revolution, conjuring away the socialist goals of the revolution.”

[Shachtman mistakenly attributed the following quote to the article, “The Beginning.” It is actually from “The National Assembly” in the 20 November 1918 issue of Die Rote Fahne—ed.]

“From the Deutsche Tageszeitung, the Vossische, and the Vorwärts to the Freiheit of the Independents, from Reventlow, Erzberger, Scheidemann to Haase and Kautsky, there sounds the unanimous call for the National Assembly and an equally unanimous outcry of fear of the idea: Power into the hands of the working class. The ‘people’ as a whole, the ‘nation’ as a whole, should be summoned to decide on the further fate of the revolution by majority decision.

“With the open and concealed agents of the ruling class, this slogan is natural. With keepers of the capitalist class barriers, we discuss neither in the National Assembly nor about the National Assembly....

“Without the conscious will and the conscious act of the majority of the proletariat—no socialism. To sharpen this consciousness, to steel this will, to organize this act, a class organ is necessary, the national parliament of the proletarians of town and country.

“The convocation of such a workers’ representation in place of the traditional National Assembly of the bourgeois revolutions is already, by itself, an act of the class struggle, a break with the historical past of bourgeois society, a powerful means of arousing the proletarian popular masses, a first open, blunt declaration of war against capitalism.

“No evasions, no ambiguities—the die must be cast. Parliamentary cretinism was yesterday a weakness, is today an equivocation, will tomorrow be a betrayal of socialism.”

It is a pity that there is not space in which to quote far more extensively from the highly remarkable articles she wrote in the last few weeks of her life, before she was murdered by those whose “parliamentary cretinism” became the direct betrayal of socialism—by those for whom Erber has now become a shameful apologist by “showing” that the defeat of the revolution in Germany was as much the responsibility of the masses as it was of the Scheidemanns and Noskes! The articles as a whole show the veritable strides that Luxemburg took away from her prison criticism and toward a policy which was in no important respect different from the one pursued by the Bolsheviks toward the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois democrats, toward the Mensheviks and other “socialist opponents,” toward the Constituent Assembly and the Soviets. With these articles of hers in print, to mention her today as an enemy of the Bolsheviks, as a critic of their attitude toward bourgeois democracy and the Constituent is excusable only on the grounds of inexcusable ignorance.

The course of the German Revolution, life, the lessons of the struggle—these left us the heritage of a Rosa Luxemburg who was, in every essential, the inseparable comrade-in-arms of the leaders of the Russian Revolution. To claim that this firm solidarity did not exist, is simply an outrage to her memory. What is worse, it shows that nothing has been learned of the lessons of the Russian Revolution and nothing of the lessons of the German Revolution—the two great efforts of the proletariat to test in practice what is, in the long run, the question of life and death for us: the state and revolution. And on this question, with Lenin and with Luxemburg, the real Luxemburg—we remain under the banner of Marxism.

**********

***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin-Trouble Is Still My Business –Introduction To The Stories     

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler 

I have been on something of a Philip Marlowe run of late, mainly re-reading Raymond Chandler’s major crime novels from the 1930s and 1940s in trying to think about the work of the well-known private detective-Michael Philip Marlin. Many of Marlin’s attributes parallel those of Marlowe’s so it was beneficial to run through those novels that feature the hard- drinking, bonded whiskey-neat drinking, not that Hollywood dry martini sissy stuff, hat-wearing, rakishly tilted to hide those roving eyes when he wants them hidden, tough guy, tough enough no to be afraid to throw a punch or take one, take a slug or fire one, windmill-chasing especially if that structure has a foxy woman hanging off one of the blades, seen-it-all, acres of dope, rivers of booze, seven kinds of sex, maybe more, that would make the guy who wrote the Kama Sutra  blush, every day average day corruption and murder, murder in all shapes and sizes, none pretty private detective.

Those novels ranging from The Big Sleep to Payback (seven in all) also pretty much tell the story of Marlowe’s many bouts with the bad guys (and gals) of the world down in sunny Los Angeles before it exploded after World War II into a big time town. A time long ago when a man (or woman) could know that city, that slumming city and its high and low life without a map. That had been Marlin’s time and place as well. Those novels also developed Marlowe’s trademark approaches to things, his forever chasing after some rough justice in this wicked old world, his fly-by-the-seat-of-the pants code of honor that sometimes went awry on him, usually when helping a dame (twist, frail frill, chick, femme whatever they were called in your neighborhood), a dame in trouble usually but not always, always playing by his own rules though, and not afraid to take a bump or two, or a slug or two, for a client.  

What a lot of people didn't know, including if you can believe this, Raymond Chandler, since he passed away in 1959 before he could have heard the news when it became public was that Michael Philip Marlin got married, married to Fiona Fallon, one of his flames from a caper back in the late 1940s, secretly married, well, not secretly so much as quietly since any wife of his would be in some danger from bad guys (or maybe an irate ex-flame) if that knowledge was widely available on those steamy Southern California streets. And that marriage produced a child, a male child, Tyrone, born in 1946, whom Marlin took on his knee when he was young and told stories to about old Los Angeles and the characters that ran amok there.  Marlin passed away in 1976 having retired from the gumshoe business some years before. Shortly thereafter Tyrone started his own private eye business which he named the Tyrone Agency not trading in on his father’s famous name for obvious reasons.

Joshua Lawrence Breslin, a free-lance journalist out there in the west and a friend of my old friend Peter Paul Markin, had to do some business with Tyrone in the early 1980s, which he handled well, and they struck up something of a friendship, meeting every once in a while over drinks, whiskey, high-shelf bonded whiskey –neat, no that sissy Hollywood dry martini stuff, and he would tell Joshua stories that his father had told him about the old days in wild LA. He also told Joshua about some of his own closed cases where some of what his father had spoken of to him helped him crack more than one case.

Joshua conveyed many of those same stories to Markin over many a flask at their favorite watering hole in Boston, Rick’s, who subsequently told many of them to me. I suggested to Markin that I might like to relate those stories to a wider audience. At first Tyrone bucked a little when Joshua made the suggestion since many of the old stories had already been published. Tyrone then suggested that if I changed up the stories enough and kept his father’s name out of it that it might work, work legally and work to keep the Michael Philip Marlin code of honor before a new reading public. Through negotiation Tyrone finally relented on the use of his father’s name since that would draw the audience I was interested in reaching. The stories below, in no particular order, are the result of those discussions between Tyrone and Joshua - with kudos to Raymond Chandler, and, well, Philip Marlowe too.