This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
The Latest From The "Jobs With Justice Blog"-The Seemingly One-Sided Struggle Continues-It's High Time To Push Back-Push Back Hard-30 For 40 Is The Slogan Of The Day.
Click below to link to the Jobs With Justice Blog for the latest national and international labor news, and of the efforts to counteract the massively one-sided class struggle against the international working class movement.
From the American Left History blog-Wednesday, June 17, 2009
With Unemployment Too High, Way Too High - The Call "30 For 40"- Now More Than Ever- The Transitional Socialist Program
Click Below To Link To The Full Transitional Program Of The Fourth International Adopted In 1938 As A Fighting Program In The Struggle For Socialism In That Era. Many Of The Points, Including The Headline Point Of 30 Hours Work For 40 Hours Pay To Spread The Work Around Among All Workers, Is As Valid Today As Then.
From The Transitional Program Of The Fourth International In 1938- Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment,“structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
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As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Writers’ Corner
In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing business in the world. Yes the artists of every school but the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists andSurrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements, those who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems; writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling cousins; writers of serious and not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gabezo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do, too much sex to harness to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin, neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair of another man. They all professed loudly (and those few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the course.
And then the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, beautiful English poets (we will speak of American poets when they slip into war footing in 1917)like Wilfred Owens before he got religion, e.e. cummings madly driving his safety ambulance, beautiful Rupert Brookes wondering which way to go but finally joining the mob in some fated oceans, sturdy Robert Graves all blown to hell and back surviving but just surviving, French , German, Russian, Italian poets tooo all aflutter; artists, reeking of blooded fields, the battle of the Somme Muirhead Bone's nothing but a huge killing field that still speaks of small boned men, drawings, etchings that no subtle camera could make beautiful, that famous one by Picasso, another by Singer Sargent about the death trenches, about the gas, and human blindness for all to see; sculptors, chiseling monuments to the national brave even before the blood was dried before the last tear had been shed, huge memorials to the unnamed, maybe un-nameable dead dragged from some muddied trench half blown away; writers, serious and not, wrote beautiful Hemingway stuff about the scariness of war, about valor, about romance on the fly, among those women. camp-followers who have been around since men have left their homes to slaughter and maim, lots of writers speaking, after the fact about the vein-less leaders and what were they thinking, and, please, please do not forgot those Whiggish writers who once the smoke had cleared had once again put in a word about the endless line of human progress, musicians, sad, mystical, driven by national blood lusts to the high tattoo, went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate…. The Return of the Soldier
Set during World War I on an isolated country estate just outside London, Rebecca West’s haunting novel The Return of the Soldier follows Chris Baldry, a shell-shocked captain suffering from amnesia, as he makes a bittersweet homecoming to the three women who have helped shape his life. Will the devoted wife he can no longer recollect, the favorite cousin he remembers onlySet during World War I on an isolated country estate just outside London, Rebecca West’s haunting novel The Return of the Soldier follows Chris Baldry, a shell-shocked captain suffering from amnesia, as he makes a bittersweet homecoming to the three women who have helped shape his life. Will the devoted wife he can no longer recollect, the favorite cousin he remembers only as a childhood friend, and the poor innkeeper’s daughter he once courted leave Chris to languish in a safe, dreamy past—or will they help him recover his memory so that he can return to the front? The answer is revealed through a heartwrenching, unexpected sacrifice. The text of this Modern Library Paperback Classic was set from the first American edition, published in 1918, and features original illustrations by Norman Price....more
Eddie Daley’s Big Score –With Paul Newman and Robert Redford’s The Sting In Mind
A Sketch From The Pen Of Frank
Jackman Eddie Daley, Edward James Daley,
to the 1940s slapdash Dorchester triple-decker tenements within earshot of the
rattling Redline subway born, dreamed, dreamed big dreams, ever since he was
knee-high to a grasshopper as the old time used-up now corny expression had it,
of making the big score, making easy street, and in the process leaving behind
a legend that guys, corner boy guys and grifters would talk about long after he
was gone. Talk about in reverent hushed whispers about the guy, Eddie Daley,
thereafter to be dubbed the “king of the grifters” who pulled the biggest con
that there ever was, and walked away from it free as a bird. Not all big
scores, cons, even if consummated, had that final part, that walk away free
part, just ask the shade of Frankie Finn who pulled the big Shiloh Fur scam
worth two million easy (a lot of money back in the 1950s even when split four
ways and a fifth cut for the fence plus his expenses although just walking
around money today), pulled it off with just four guys, a good number for the
haul, but who “forgot” that he was dealing with one “Rocket Kid,” Johnny
Silver, in his entourage who after the heist put two between the eyes of his
three confederates, figuring one is easier to count that three no matter than
two of the guys were his long time corner boys. The Rocket Kid, Johnny, was
subsequently “hit” by one of Buddy Boyle’s boys, everybody though Rolling Rex
Buddy’s main contract man did the deed since he had not been seen around for a
while, when he tried to fence the stuff since Buddy was the front money man on
that caper and Frankie Finn’s cousin to boot. Buddy already rolling to dough
had his own way of figuring one is easier to count when he was the one. So that
walking away free part was no small part of the leaving a legend behind
scenario. Eddie’s dream might seem strange
to the squares, to those who live life on the square, wake up and do the nine
to five bit, or whatever the time bit these days with flexible hours, take two
weeks’ vacation in Maine summer, raise and put three kids through college at
great expense and get a gold watch or a pat on the back when they are turned
out to pasture. Yeah, that dream definitely might seem odd to those who have
never been from hunger, not just “wants” hunger like a million guys have, maybe
more, but no food on the table hunger when the old man drank away the week’s
paycheck at the Dublin Grille or hand-me-down clothes from older brothers in
style or not hunger that ate deeply into every way that Eddie thought about
things from very early on. Those who never worried about big scores, or cons
since they had it coming in whatever they had to put out in expenses would
never figure Eddie’s dreams out. See Eddie was a what they called,
called back in the old days, back in the 1930s, and still called them back in
Eddie’s coming of age time in the 1960s when he came of age in that Dorchester
section of Boston where he triple decker tenement grew up a natural-born
grifter. When Eddie first heard that word used, strangely after he had already
done his first con and somebody on the corner, that hang out corner being Mel’s
Variety on Neponset Avenue near the Fields Corner subway stop, called him a
born “grifter” he faked it and said yeah and then next day went to the library
and looked it up in the dictionary and came up with this-“A grifter is someone
who swindles you through deception or fraud. Synonyms include fraudster, con
artist, cheater, confidence man, scammer, hustler, swindler, etc.” Eddie smiled
the smile of the just on that one. Yeah, a grifter, is a guy like him who
figured some angles, any angles, a guy who did this and that, did the best he
could without working some nine to five hump job. [Here is a practical corner
boy, not Mel’s but Jack Slack’s bowling alleys corner down in Carver about
thirty miles south of Dorchester but still in “from hunger” land definition- “A
grifter to fill in the gaps for the unknowing and clueless was a guy, sometimes
a dame, although usually where there was a dame involved she was a roper
especially if the mark was hopped up on some sex thing, who spent his eternal
life figuring how to go from point A to point B, and point A was wanting dough
and point B was getting it by any means necessary but mainly by stealth. By the
way do not discount women in the grifter society one of the best who ever lived
was a gal who went by the name Delores Del Rio, named herself after the 1940s
movie star, who took some duke over in Europe for a cool two million in jewelry
after she got him all jammed up and picked him clean leaving him with some fake
jewels worth about six dollars in Woolworth’s, beautiful.] So Eddie started figuring the
angles very early on, very early on indeed and would regal, if that is the
right word for it, the corner boys in front of Mel’s Variety Store on Neponset
Avenue with tales of his derring do once he started hanging out there when he
began high school at Dot High. Of course that was all kids’ stuff, baubles and
beads stuff, since nobody expected a kid to have the talents for grifting right
out of the box (having the heart, the “from hunger” wanting habits heart was a
separate and maybe more pressing question) but there are certain guys, certain
Eddie guys, who cling to those dreams pretty hard and give themselves a workout
getting in shape. From what one guy, Southie Slim,
one of the Mel’s corner boys before he moved on to other stuff told me Eddie
started pretty early, started simply conning other kids out of their milk money
in elementary school over at the Monroe Trotter School. Here is the skinny on
that first round according to Slim who got caught out himself before he picked
up the grifter life for a while until he found out dealing high-grade dope to
the Beacon Hill crowd was a great deal more profitable, and social too once you
added in willing women. Eddie somehow had picked up some dice, yeah, a pair and
he would bet other kids, boys or girls it did not matter, their milk money on
the results. Of course he somehow had “loaded” them so he would win. Now that
was a fairly easy thing but here is where Eddie learned his craft. To keep play
going he would let the other kids win occasionally, just enough to keep them
interested rather than be a greed-head like big bully Matty Dugan down at my
elementary school, Myles Standish, down in Carver who just strong-armed a kid a
day for his (or her it did not matter) milk money. But the real tip he picked
up young as he was that as long as kids, people, think they can“pick you clean” you will always have a
willing pool of suckers, of people to swindle, small or large but think large. One night, one slow Friday night
year later after he had settled deeply into the routine of the life, Eddie was
cutting up touches about his old days while smoothing down high-shelf scotch (a
no-no when you are on the hustle by the way save that for slow Friday nights
when you are cutting up old touches Eddie said), about how he moved up after
that dice thing ran its course as all such scams do if for no other reason that
the grifter gets tired of the play, and he related what happened after that
first scam when he got to the Curley Junior High School. Here is how it went,
the basic outline since Eddie was kind of cagey about some of the details like
the guys he was talking to that night were going to run right out and pull the
scam themselves. Eddie basically ran a pyramid scheme on his fellow students. He
conned the kids into giving him their money by saying he knew a guy, a friend
of his older brother, Lawrence, who worked as a stable boy at the track and who
knew when the fix was on in a race and who could place bets for him and get
some bucks fast. Eddie convinced a couple of guys that if they put all their
dough together they could buy a ticket and make some easy dough. And it worked
for a while since Eddie in his devilish way paid off the guys with his own
dough. Each guy getting maybe a buck which to a “from hunger” kid was a big
deal. Word got out and soon plenty of kids, even girls were looking to get in
on easy street. And so he would dole out some more dough. Then he pulled the
plug, told everybody that he was going in for a big score that he was going to
put twenty dollars on a sure thing that the stable boy had tipped him to. In
the event he actually got about thirty five dollars collected altogether. Of
course the horse ran out, never came close so all was lost. Hey, wait a minute
have you been listening? Eddie didn’t know any stable boy, didn’t make any bet,
so minus his seed money expenses he cleared twenty-five bucks. Here is what
Eddie learned though know the “clients” (Eddie’s word) who you are dealing with
and don’t be too greedy. He did that same small con for a couple of years and
it worked like magic, got him his money for the jukebox at Jimmy Jack’s Diner
on Gallivan Boulevard and movie money too. Small con wisdom but still wisdom. Eddie as he got older, got into
high school, got hanging around with his corner boys at Mel’s, got restless,
always had that idea in back of his mind that he would pull a big score if he
learned all the tricks of the trade, if he could get onto something big. For a
while in high school it looked like he was on the fast track, he learned how to
work the charity circuit for walking daddy (his term) walking around money
using the old homeless but proud gag that those private charity donors love
that he picked up one day when he was playing hooky from school and ran into an
old con man, Railroad Bill, on a bench at Boston Common near the Park Street
Station who gave him the tip. Eddie would laugh at how easy it was to pull off
walking into let’s say the United Methodist Church Social Services office up on
Beacon Street dressed in his very real hand-me- downs and unshaven making him
look older but not too old (meaning the old telltale sign that the guy had been
“on the bum” too long to be proud and work him way out of his current jam)
going through his rough things but wanting to get back on track if he only had
a the price of a week’s rent in one of the rooming houses that dotted the other
side of the hill then (a few still there even today, significantly fewer
though). That was good for ten or twenty at a time although the down side of
that caper was that you could only use it once, maybe twice. The upside was
that there were numerous private social service agencies like that looking for
somebody “worthy” to give the dough to. With that walking around money Eddie would
work a variation of his kids’ stuff milk money run, he would sell lottery
tickets (in the days before the state got its greasy hands into that racket),
for different charities, say he was raising it for blind kids or to send kids
to summer camp. Offer as prizes radios, televisions, maybe a record player,
stuff like that which people wouldn’t mind spending a dollar or “three for five
dollars” on to help some crippled-up kids, give them fresh air, or some other
small break or something. So he would grab the dough and then have one or more
of his corner boys rip off what was needed over at Lechmere Sales or someplace
like that (usually using at first “Five Fingers” Riley or “Rat” Malone who
started that racket early once they figured out that if you were fearless in
grabbing stuff nobody was going to catch you, and that worked for a long time
until they “graduated” to armed robberies and did consecutive nickels, dimes
and quarters in various Massachusetts state pens). See nobody gave a good damn
if the charity he was hustling for ever got the dough all they knew was that
for a buck, or three for five, they had a chance for their own television,
radio, or record player important to hard-pressed high school kids who would
not have those items otherwise. Needless to say the corner boys he used were
good and he paid them off well like he should to keep them in line, another
lesson learned, and so he honed his skills. When Eddie graduated from high
school and was to face the workaday world though he panicked a bit, decided
that he needed to move up a step if he was going to avoid the fate of his
belabored father, belabored by drink, yes, but also hard work on the docks, not
always steady and with a brood of kids and a nagging wife to contend with. If
the nine-to-five was not for Eddie neither was staying down in the depths
either. (A history teacher had mentioned one time in class that all of her
charges should seek to move up the latter of society at least one jump ahead of
their parents and that kind of stuck with him.) So he started going into
downtown Boston, started hanging around the Commons regularly unlike in high
school where he would go justwhen
playing hooky but really to blow off steam when something exploded at home in
that damn crowded apartment, started to listen to guys to see if they had any
ideas like that time “Railroad Bill” gave him the scoop on the private charity
gag, had been on easy street at one time. He didn’t bother with the eternal
winos and junkies for they had nothing to say that he could use but to guys and
there always were guys who maybe had been on the hustle and got waylaid, or
just got old in a young man’s racket and so maybe had some words to share. And
before he knew it he met Sidewalk Sam and Bright Boy Benny a couple of guys who
told him about old time scams, about how guys survived by their wits in the
hard-ass Depression days. And come some old Friday night, a slow girl-less
Friday usually, Eddie would hold forth about what he had learned in the world,
learned from Sidewalk and Bright Boy. Here, for example, is what he
told the boys one Friday night, one “Five-Fingers” Malone-less Friday night
marking the first time he got bagged for doing a robbery, unarmed that time, of
a gas station and was doing a six month stretch at Deer Island, which will give
you an idea of where Eddie was heading, a story of a scam that seemed
impossible to pull off given what they were trying to do. Unless you knew how
very greedy some guys, even smart guys were. Let’s call it the wallet switch,
an old scam that Eddie would perform a couple of times later, successfully. You
need two guys for this, at least. In this case two used to be “from hunger”
Great Depression grifters Denver Slim and Gash Lavin. And you must know your
mark’s movements pretty well and whether they have dough on them, a more usual
circumstance than you might think back then than now that we are in this age of
the ATM and cashable credit cards among those a shade to the left of the law
(and a whole new Eddie-less generation tech- savvy grifters with their dreams,
and stories they are telling their confederates on slow Friday nights). I won’t
go into the preliminaries about setting the mark up, but they knew their guy,
knew his movements and knew what he was carrying, so just rest assured that
Denver and Gash had seeded their mark. Well actually Denver had seeded the
mark, one Ricardo “Slice” Russo (you figure out the why of that moniker, okay),
who was the bag man for Lou Thorpe’s numbers racket in New York City, yes the
Lou Thorpe who ran wild back in the day and made a splash in Vegas to top off
his career but this is earlier when he was greedier than Midas and so was
particularly susceptible to any scheme that put money in his waiting hands.
Once a week Slice headed for Chicago on the midnight train to pay off Lou’s
confederates there (at the high end of the rackets there are always
confederates to pay off, cops too so it is just part of the overhead to keep on
the streets. Guys down the bottom of the food chain don’t have such financial
worries they are too busy keeping one eye out for looming John Law.) Now bag men are pretty low in the
food chain of any criminal enterprise but are like Eddie and every other
Eddie-like dreamer also groomed on the con, on easy street dreams. What Denver
did was to ask Slice, whom he cornered by evoking “Shark” Mahoney’s name, a
mutual acquaintance, as he was heading to the station on the way to Chicago to
drop off three thousand to a guy, “Bones” Kelly, also known to both men, on
Division Street in that city for him. That money had been placed in a wallet, a
black leather wallet similar to the one Slice was carrying the twenty thousand
pay-off in, and when Slice got to Chi town he gave the wallet to the Division
Street guy, to Kelly, the one with three thousand in it, three thousand in
counterfeit money as Kelly later found out. See Slice had figured that doing
Denver’s delivery was like finding money on the ground especially when he
thought up the fake dough angle. So tough luck, Denver. Worse though, worse for
Slice anyway, the mob’s wallet also had twenty thousand in counterfeit money
when he delivered the wallet to an office in the Loop. What had happened was
that Gash had been on that train, had in the course of bumping into Slice
switched wallets and got off in Cleveland leaving Slice to his troubles. But
here is what you have to know, know about the mob. They thought Slice, a
troublesome bag man and so an easy fall guy was pulling a fast one on them when
he explained what he thought had happened and he wound up in the Illinois River
face down before anybody investigated anything. Beautiful work by Denver and
Gash who headed out West for a while just to be on the safe side but also know
this-if you are running on the high side expect some blow-back, nasty blow-back
if you don’t walk away clean. Just ask Slice One night, another of those
aimless nights when there was no action, or maybe Eddie was cooling out from a
con, a wise move since overdoing the con scene leads inevitably to trouble,
usually fist, gun or John Law trouble, he told the guys a story, a story about
the granddaddy of all the scores, a haul of almost half a million back in the
1930s when half a million was not just walking around money like it is today. A
story that Nutsy Callahan, another one of the Great Depression guys he would
listen to over on the Commons told him about one afternoon after he had played
out some luscious honey over on Tremont Street who had “curled his toes” and he
was a bit too restless to head home (Eddie wasn’t much for girlfriends or
serious female company on his way up and maybe it was better for him to just
catch a quick “curl the toes” on an off-afternoon with some passing fancy
because no question women are far tougher to deal with that the hardest scam).
The way Nutsy told the story implied that he might have been in on the caper,
although like all good grifters, grafters, percentage guys, and midnight
sifters, he would put the account in the third person just in case the statute
of limitations had not run out on whatever the offenses were, or, more likely,
some pissed off Capo or his descendants were still looking to take some shots
at guys who pulled such scams. Nutsy had told Eddie a few lesser
scams that he had been involved in and Eddie told a few lies of his own but the
important thing for Eddie, or rather Eddie’s future was that he was looking to
break out of the penny-ante grifts and ride easy street so he was looking for
ideas, long ago ideas really because just maybe with a duke here and a juke
there the thing could be played again. Eddie didn’t bother to tell Nutsy that
for Nutsy would probably not have told the story or as likely dismiss Eddie’s
chances out of hand. So Nutsy told the story and Eddie’s eyes went bonkers over
the whole set-up. This one involved “Top Hat” Hogan
so named for the simple fact that as long as anybody had known him, or could
remember, he always wore a fancy day top hat although rarely, very rarely, with
any accompanying evening clothes. Some of his girl friends said he wore the
damn thing when he was in bed with them and that was just fine because Top Hat
was a walking daddy when it came to loving his women. Top Hat had been widely
assumed to have been the brains behind the Silver Smith Fur scam, the Morgan
Bank scam and the Golden Gate Mine dust-up which people talked about almost
until the war (World War II if you are counting). So Top Hat under any
circumstances was a number one grifter who any guy with any dough, any serious
dough, had better check up on to see if Top Hat had been in the vicinity if he
wanted to keep said cash. The other key guy, and the reason Top Hat, who had
been semi-retired at the time of this caper and rightfully so having run the
rack already, was a raw kid, a kid with promise but not much else then, was
“Jet” Jenkins. And the reason that Top Hat even considered teaming up with a
raw kid like Jet, was that he was the son of Happy Heddy Jenkins, a fancy woman
who had “curled his toes” back in his younger days. Heddy had had some good
days and bad days but one of the bad days had been meeting up with the famous
gambler, Black Bart Benson, one of the great flim-flam, flim-flam meaning
simply a cheater without mercy and guys, leg-breaker if anybody had a problem
with that, poker players of the day. Old Bart had nevertheless had run
into a streak of bad luck at cards which even cheaters face at times, had
borrowed and lost almost a one hundred thousand dollars from Heddy (who ran on
the best, friendliest, and easiest to enter if you had the money whorehouses in
Chicago). Somehow things had taken a turn for the worst after Black Bart left
Heddy high and dry and she was back on cheap street trying to raise a
helter-skelter growing boy with short funds. Not so Black Bart who had cheated
his way to a million dollar bonanza when his luck changed. (That cheating not
known, obviously, to the guys taking the beating at the card table but Heddy
knew her Bart and imparted that wisdom onto her son.) When Heddy sent Jet to
see if Bart would ante up the cash he had borrowed from her he dismissed Jet
with a flick of his hand, and after a serious beating by one of his
leg-breakers had him dumped him in some back alley in Altoona one night. Bart
had, with a laugh, as his boys administered that beating, told Jet that he
should sue him in court to get his money back as he wasn’t in the mood to give
some bent whore dough that she had gotten from her whorehouse dollies. So
Heddy, so Jet, and after hearing about what Bart had called Heddy, so Top Hat
were primed for revenge. But more than revenge because that is easy, kids’
stuff, to send Bart back to cheap street hustling winos with three-card Monte
tricks or stuff like that. The key to understanding Black
Bart was that like a lot of con artists, no, most con artists, no, make that all
con artists, is that beside being easy prey to any scam especially a scam that
plays to their greed they always assume that they are smarter than whoever is
making the proposition and can double-back on it to their profit. Top Hat had
easy pickings when he ran across guys like Bart. Here is the way that Top Hat
worked his magic, although when Nutsy finished telling Eddie the lay Eddie
thought the venture had too many moving parts, too many guys in on the score
once Black Bart was brought down. It went like this. “Buggy” Bannon
knew Black Bart, knew he was always interested in an easy score so Buggy put
the word in Bart’s ear about some silver and gold mining stock that was about
to go through the roof once the worst parts of the Depression were over. So
Buggy, who had worked with Top Hat on the Silver Smith scam and so was
trustworthy, or as trustworthy as any guy working on a scam can be introduced
Top Hat to Bart as a chief stockbroker for Merrill Lynch. Then Top Hat went
through the traces, got Bart hooked in with the knowledge about the gold and silver
stock. Of course Top Hat had had “Horseless” Harry sent up a nice brochure in color
all about the various possibilities of the mining stock and Bart got
interested, saw quick dollar signs. Of course even an over-the-top greedy guy
like Bart had to see some real stuff, some real stockbroker operation, so Top
Hat had rented out space in a building in the financial district and created
out of sheer nothing a stock market room complete with ticker-tape, running
around employees (all grifters from out west so that Bart would not recognize
them) or and investors milling around. That was the part that Eddie
thought was over the top, the too many moving parts aspect, but in any case it
all looked good to Bart. Here is the carrot Top Hat told Bart to invest a few
thousand to see how it went. And so Bart did, bringing to the stock room five
thousand in cash as all con artists did then in the days before working kited checks
and credit cards and stuff like that opened out new ways to bilk people,
including smart guys. A few days later Top Hat delivers ten thousand to Bart,
all fresh dough, and so they are off to the races because now he sees that this
thing could make him really rich. Of course Top Hat knowing that you have to bring
a guy, a sucker along, knowing you needed to whet his appetite had just added
five of his own money to Bart’s to bring in the bonanza (writing it off as
overhead just like any other legal or illegal operation). Bart, although no fool and still
had some suspicions, was no question hooked though as Top Hat fed him another
stock tip and told him he should let the ten thousand ride, which he did. About
a week later Top Hat delivers twenty-two thousand to Bart and he was really
hooked, really wants to put more money down. Especially when that twenty-two
went to fifty grand a few weeks later. Bart said to Top Hat that it was like
finding money on the street. Then Top Hat really got to him, let him know that
in South Africa, a known gold, silver and diamond mother lode to everybody in
those days that a new field was within days of being explored and discovered
and that Bart should be ready to go big and get in on the ground floor. Here is
the beauty of the thing though. The financial pages were almost in a conspiracy
with Top Hat because they were also projecting some speculation about new
minefields. One day Top Hat told Bart to get all the cash he could gather
because that South African stock, low, very low at the time would be going
through the roof once the discovery was confirmed. So a few days later Bart
brought a suitcase filled with cash, about a million maybe a little less, and
pushed it over to Top Hat. Top Hat went to the cashier (“Hangman” Henry of all
people) and brought back a receipt to Bart. Now you can figure out the rest.
A few days later news of that new minefield did come in and that stock did rise
although in a world filled with gold and silver with nobody to buy stuff yet
not as much as you would have expected but still a good take. Bart then called
Top Hat to tell him to cash in. No answer at Top Hat’s number. Bart then went to
the stock exchange room to find nothing but a “for rent” sign on the doors. As
for Top Hat and Jet well they were on the train back to New York with that one
hundred grand for Heddy and a twinkle came into Top Hat’s eyes about those old
days when she “curled his toes,” and might again. Beautiful. That story etched in his brain
Eddie Daley started putting together a few ideas in his head, getting on the
phone to a few guys (fewer than Top Hat had in his operation), and started making
some dough connections for financing. Out in the grifter night they still talk
about Eddie Daley, whereabouts unknown, “king of the grifters” after he took Vince
Edwards the big book operator for about a million and a quarter in cold hard
cash. You now know the back story on that one.
Hail Edward Snowden!-Citizenfour: A Review
Free Chelsea Manning! Hands Off Edward Snowden! Hands Off Julian Assange!
Workers Vanguard No. 1060
23 January 2015
Hail Edward Snowden!-Citizenfour: A Review
By A. Stevens
What compels a person to take action on his own and at great personal risk against the most deadly government on earth? Why does a so-called democracy spy on its own citizens, foreign nationals and even allied heads of state? Citizenfour is the story of Edward Snowden, a former private contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) and the CIA who disclosed details of how the U.S. government, in cahoots with the largest telecommunications and internet service companies, spies on virtually everyone, everywhere. Those disclosures revealed Big Brother’s spy apparatus to be far greater than previously known.
Snowden used the alias “Citizenfour” to make contact with Laura Poitras, a writer and filmmaker who for years has tenaciously exposed U.S. surveillance activities. For her courageous truth-telling, Poitras earned a spot on a government watch list. Citizenfour is the third part of her trilogy about how the world has changed since September 11, 2001 under the endless U.S. “war on terror.”
Snowden’s story, which captured the front pages of newspapers across the globe in 2013, is well known. Yet it is riveting to watch it unfold in real time, with Poitras behind the camera as Snowden gives his account to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill in a Hong Kong hotel room. The film also provokes the disturbing recognition that people feel so powerless in the face of relentless government overreach that Snowden’s exposure of the NSA, which caused a tremendous stir just over a year ago, is now met with little more than a collective shrug of resignation. Worse yet is the acquiescence, expressed in the often-heard line: “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.” Tell that to the legions of fighters against class and race inequality in this country whose lives have been wrecked or snuffed out through government surveillance and repression.
Surveillance is a weapon in the arsenal of state repression. Citizenfour reveals that there are 1.2 million people on U.S. watch lists. The small city of Dearborn, Michigan, (population 96,000) has the largest percentage of Arab Americans and Muslim Americans per capita and has thus been racially profiled by law enforcement as the number two place in the country where suspected terrorists reside.
In the aftermath of the cold-blooded killing of black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, where another white cop walked away with a pat on the back, it’s important to recognize the connection between surveillance and racial and political profiling. Protesters against racist American injustice need to be aware that fighters for social change in this country are put on one or another government watch list. And in a nation founded on black chattel slavery, a special place is reserved for fighters for racial equality and opponents of capitalist class rule. As James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time (1962): “People find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”
Capitalist Decay and Attacks on the Right to Privacy
The “war on terror” has been a pretext for unfettered force and violence by the American ruling class abroad and at home, from the wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq to the shredding of the civil liberties of the U.S. population. In Washington’s “anti-terror” crusade, national security is the trump card to quash democratic rights. First the Republican Bush administration and then the Democrat Barack Obama seized on the September 11, 2001 attacks to institutionalize extraordinary government powers and snooping through such measures as the USA Patriot Act. These are merely the top shelf of an entire arsenal of repressive legislation that includes the 1917 Espionage Act, which has always been used to criminalize dissent and repress labor and leftist opposition to the U.S. government during wartime. Among its first and most prominent victims was Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, jailed for his political speech and agitation against the capitalist slaughter of World War I.
Snowden is threatened with prosecution under the Espionage Act if he were to return to the U.S. from temporary asylum in Russia. Chelsea Manning, who was tortured and now languishes in Leavenworth Prison, was sentenced to 35 years under the Espionage Act. Manning was gone after for letting the world see irrefutable government evidence, documented in its own military logs and diplomatic cables, of heinous U.S. war crimes as well as the everyday depredations of imperialist domination. Snowden was inspired by Manning’s outstanding courage to step forward with his own gigantic trove of information. Curiously, Manning is not mentioned in Poitras’s film, yet it is crucial to link all current struggles for justice with the fight to free victims of government repression. Julian Assange, who published Manning’s material on WikiLeaks, is threatened with U.S. prosecution and remains ensconced in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. We demand: Free Chelsea Manning! Hands off Edward Snowden! Hands off Julian Assange!
The film does show tantalizing evidence of yet another insider with a conscience, who was inspired by Snowden to leak new evidence of U.S. government dirty tricks to Glenn Greenwald. The U.S. government has created its own security nightmare, as disillusioned idealistic servants bite back like the multiheaded Hydra and lift the veil on government secrecy.
In the salad days of its struggle against the yoke of the British monarchy’s colonial rule, the American bourgeoisie fought for the right to privacy and enshrined it as the Fourth Amendment in the original 1791 Bill of Rights. This legal protection against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government grew out of English common law, which enjoined the police or other forces of the Crown from entering a private home without an official writ. This protection was effectively nullified in the American colonies, where royal magistrates and judges routinely issued writs and warrants to allow British soldiers to ransack private homes and seize property without so much as a suspicion of crime.
The legitimization of black chattel slavery in the U.S. Constitution bespeaks the limited, conservative goals of the bourgeois-democratic American Revolution. Nonetheless, the so-called “founding fathers,” leaders from a period when the bourgeoisie was historically progressive, would be outlaws today in the period of advanced capitalist decay. America’s rulers would appear to them as King George loyalists and traitors to their own revolution and citizenry. The U.S. government has long served as the gendarme for reaction worldwide and backed the bloodiest regimes on the planet. The silver-tongued Obama intones “freedom” while shredding democratic rights at home, prosecuting more whistleblowers than all prior presidents combined and directly authorizing assassinations of U.S. citizens abroad.
It’s Gonna Take a Revolution
Glenn Greenwald’s latest book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (New York: Henry Holt, 2014), is a good read in conjunction with viewing Poitras’s Citizenfour. The same conversations with Snowden that Poitras captured on film are related in greater detail in Greenwald’s book. Poitras and Greenwald have both moved to other countries to continue their work at greater distance from vindictive and threatening American authorities. Poitras has been detained and had her notes and electronics seized more than 40 times at U.S. airports. Some of Greenwald’s colleagues in the capitalist media howled for him to be prosecuted because he dared print what the government sought to keep under wraps. In a gratuitously vicious move to torment Greenwald, the British authorities, in league with the U.S., detained and terrorized his partner and political collaborator, David Miranda, when he ferried documents from Poitras to Greenwald through London’s Heathrow airport.
Edward Snowden was compelled by his conscience to risk everything he had in life by taking a stand against omnipresent U.S. government surveillance because he thinks people have a right to know what the government is doing and a right to debate and change policy. In this, Snowden shares a moral and political compass with Chelsea Manning. We hail their courageous acts. Despite Manning’s and Snowden’s self-identification as U.S. patriots, their disclosures provide a factual basis for Marxists like us to help working people see through the stupefying fog of patriotism and democracy that is peddled by the bourgeoisie to dull the wits of those they exploit. It is going to take more than leaks and whistles to fundamentally change society. An essential precondition is the understanding that the government is not “ours,” nor can it be made into a neutral arbiter. Rather, it is part of the machine to maintain capitalist class rule, suitably disguised as an expression and tool of “the people.”
Glenn Greenwald expresses the views held by many libertarians, liberals and reformist leftists that the problem with the encroaching police state is simply that it is wildly out of control. Greenwald argues, “The alternative to mass surveillance is not the complete elimination of surveillance. It is, instead, targeted surveillance, aimed only at those for whom there is substantial evidence to believe they are engaged in real wrongdoing.” Asking capitalism’s secret police to play nice is like asking a great white shark to chew softly.
In capitalist society, where a tiny minority of the population lives off the labor of the working class, the rulers will always resort to spying, lying and violence to keep the vast majority down. Anything that challenges property rights and the racial, ethnic, religious and moral prejudices that prop up this whole capitalist system of exploitation and injustice constitutes “wrongdoing.” The liberals are blinded by lofty words like “freedom” and “democracy”—classless terms that snooker working people into believing they have equal rights in an increasingly unequal society. Any talk of achieving freedom that does not involve a struggle for the abolition of classes is simply a lie.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explained the fundamental difference in purpose between petty-bourgeois democrats and communists in their 1850 “Address of the Central Authority to the [Communist] League.” Against a backdrop of the failed German bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1848, in which the bourgeoisie had gone over to the side of the old reactionary classes against the revolutionary proletariat, Marx and Engels observed:
“Far from desiring to transform the whole of society for the revolutionary proletarians, the democratic petty bourgeois strive for a change in social conditions by means of which the existing society will be made as tolerable and comfortable as possible for them....
“While the democratic petty bourgeois wish to bring the revolution to a conclusion as quickly as possible…it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, the proletariat has conquered state power, and the association of proletarians, not only in one country but in all the dominant countries of the world, has advanced so far that competition among the proletarians in these countries has ceased and that at least the decisive productive forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletarians. For us the issue cannot be the alteration of private property but only its annihilation, not the smoothing over of class antagonisms but the abolition of classes, not the improvement of the existing society but the foundation of a new one.”
Out Of The Mouths Of Babes In Boston- No Justice, No Peace- Black
Lives Matter- You Have Got That Right Young Brothers and Sisters-Speaking Truth To
Power-The Struggle Continues
A lot of people, and I count myself among them, see the new
movement against police brutality and their incessant surveillance of minority
youth, mainly black and latino, that seems to be building up a head of steam to
be the next major axis of struggle. The endemic injustices are so obvious and
frankly so outrageous that the pent-up anger at the base of society among we
the have-nots is so great that it needed visible expression. The past six
months have given us that. But below is an example, a beautiful graphic example,
of just how deep the hurts go, and how deep into society these injustices are
felt. Read on.
In Boston-Free All Class-War Prisoners
Free Angela and All Political Prisoner ***** Rescheduled to March 1
*******
When: Thursday, March 1, 2015, 6:45 pm to
9:00 pm
Where: Central Square Cambridge Library
• 45 Pearl Street • In Honor of Black History Month • Cambridge
An Inspiring docudrama that takes a gripping look at the historical incidents
that created an International movement to free activist Angela Davis.
“For more than four decades the world renowned author, activist and scholar
Angela Davis has been one of the most influential activists and intellectuals in
the United States. An icon of the 1970’s black liberation movement, Davis’ work
around issues of gender, race, class and prisons has influenced critical thought
and social movements across several generations.” From Democracy Now,
March 6, 2014
Parking nearby Municipal garage on Green Street
Sponsored by Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
Light refreshments will be served
Upcoming Events:
***Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes- Trumpet Player
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
February is Black History Month
Trumpet Player
The Negro With the trumpet at his lips Has dark moons of weariness Beneath his eyes where the smoldering memory of slave ships Blazed to the crack of whips about thighs
The negro with the trumpet at his lips has a head of vibrant hair tamed down, patent-leathered now until it gleams like jet- were jet a crown
the music from the trumpet at his lips is honey mixed with liquid fire the rhythm from the trumpet at his lips is ecstasy distilled from old desire-
Desire that is longing for the moon where the moonlight's but a spotlight in his eyes, desire that is longing for the sea where the sea's a bar-glass sucker size
The Negro with the trumpet at his lips whose jacket Has a fine one-button roll, does not know upon what riff the music slips
It's hypodermic needle to his soul but softly as the tune comes from his throat trouble mellows to a golden note
Just then he was dribbling a few stray riffs, be-bop, bop-be, see-bop, hell, even one bop-bop-bop got a hand like three bops tops meant the cat’s meow, Jesus, for the early arrivers (and early leavers, two low-shelf scotches and out, the six in the morning wakers, subway riders probably from the low-shelf look not cab-riders like him, his bedtime, maybe if he was not tangledup with some sweet Jane, Jesus what do they do all day but wait upon the night, their own small dream version of the high white note night), the quick scotch and soda crowd before the night bleeds, bleeds all cab fare honking out front to announce their arrival Mayfair white around eleven (and the real stuff, after hours after two, three, four, when the clubs let out and the boys play for each other, and to beat each other, to tag off some phantom riffs ) at this Red Fez gig that he had been working, working for a couple of months now to keep body and soul together and to keep Mister Landlord, a not very understanding fellow, from his door, and to keep the former Mrs. Blast far, far away from his door (and his latest paramour, Miss Lucille Pratt close).
Yes, he dreamed of that high white note, dreamed when or where or how it would come but never, never that it would not come because, he, frankly, frankly you hear, brothers and sisters, had the sheer lung power and muse-magic to turn that big fat note on a dime. So this night, this could be night, Shorty did, as he always work did, once he had a few house scotches in him, or maybe some godsend reefer to change the pace if one of the boys scored. He, having been burnt once with a small container of weed and done a couple up at state prison was not the scorer any more, no way, not with that dream note still out there. No way could that high white penetrate another set of prison walls.
He knew that the note could come out at the Red Fez, the Hi Hat Club, maybe at some wicked jam at LoJo’s, or even while he was up in his tenement room, practicing ,when Miss Lucille was not around since when Miss Lucille was around, around with her wanting habits on, even Gabriel did not want to blow some funky horn but no way, no way in hell was that note coming out in Ossining town, no way. What he knew from previous failures, maybe getting three-forth there, maybe not making it due to that one too many scotches, was to go into a certain state, a certain state where he was not really in the Red Fez , he was not playing for crowds, early or late, was not even in the present time but back to Mother Africa times, to Pharaoh times if anybody was asking, okay.
That Pharaoh time kick had stayed with him since about the sixth grade, yes, it was the sixth grade when he and his older brother (now resting in some European graveyard after having spilled his black brother blood against that damn Hitler) and he, they , were mesmerized by the Egyptian exhibit at the Museum Of Fine Arts in Boston where they grew up complete with pharaonic statues and wondered , wondered out loud about those slave days, about the winds rushing across the Nile, about the rapid river run of the Nile, and about some ancient sound, a sound that sounded very much like the sound that would be produced by that high white note, the note that would bring down pharaoh, bring down Mister’s thousand acre cotton fields, bring down Mister James Crow, bring down that silky smooth Mayfair swell crowd that was starting to fill up the place just then. And so Shorty played, played like Pharaoh was coming to get him, coming to take his deep breath away…
No Killer/No Spy Drones...
Ever since the early days of humankind's existence an argument has always been made by someone and not always the gung-ho warriors that with some new technology, some new strategic gee-gad, warfare, the killing on one of our own species, would become less deadly, would be more morally justified, would bring the long hoped for peace that lots of people have yacked about in the abstract until they get their war blood up. Don't believe that false bill of goods, don't believe the sanity war lies, its the same old killing machine that has gone on for eons. Enough said and enough of killer drones killing and spy drones spying too.
