In Honor Of May Day 2015-From The American Left History Blog Archives-All Out On May Day 2012: A Day Of International Working Class Solidarity Actions- An Open Letter To The Working People Of Boston From A Fellow Worker

 

 

All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!

Why Working People Need To Show Their Power On May Day 2012

Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. I will stop there although I could go on and on. Sounds familiar though, sounds like your situation or that of someone you know, right?

Words, or words like them, are taken daily from today’s global headlines. But these were also similar to the conditions our forebears faced in America back in the 1880s when this same vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind, Jay Gould, stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.

What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight connected with the heroic Haymarket Martyrs in 1886 for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.

No question over the past several years (really decades but now it is just more public and right in our face) American working people have taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Start off with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers like at General Electric or the auto plants). Move on to paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, in some cases literally paying nothing, we pay). And finish up with mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a life-time deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”

Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and many women and the grievances voiced long ago in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, for some of us, great-grandparents).

That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like hell, against the ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling class of that day by their front-man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.

The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under. All Out On May Day 2012.

I have listed some of the problems we face now to some of our demand that should be raised every day, not just May Day. See if you agree and if you do take to the streets on May Day with us. We demand:

 

*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! No More Wisconsins! Hands Off All Our Unions!

* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!

*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!

* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!

* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!

* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!

* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!

*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! For free quality public transportation!

To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:

*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day strike around some, or all, of the above-mentioned demands.

*We will be organizing at workplaces where a strike is not possible for workers to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.

*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to graduate school and the off-hand left-wing think tank to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, and to rally at a central location.

*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.

All out on May Day 2012.

 

*************

 

It was still raining, raining hard, when old-time Cambridge radical and political organizer Frank Jackman got to the underground parking facility at the corner of Franklin and Congress Streets near the State Street Bank at about 7:00 AM on May Day 2012. The reason why Frank was at that locale at that time was that as one who had helped organize the May Day protests that year he had volunteered to bring the various materials, signs, sound equipment, food and such that would be needed by the gathering troops that day. Since he was one of the few organizers or supporters who had an automobile large enough to fit all the materials in he was the natural choice. He had gotten up a couple of hours earlier to make sure the materials were packed and ready to move.

 

As Frank walked up the stairs to start to walk the couple of blocks from the garage to the bank he thought about the reasoning behind the organizing committee’s agreement that the State Street Bank and its nefarious doings in the financial crisis of 2008 should be highlighted by the protest actions that day. The group had spent some time and energy at its weekly meetings discussing the best possible target and the one that would draw the most media attention to what the Occupy Wall Street movement was calling for that day. Actions to stop business as usual on the international workers holiday. The idea this day in Boston was to attempt by main force to block off the entire bank and then court probable arrest if necessary in order to keep the bank closed for as long  as possible. Realistically Frank thought the site could be held for a couple of hours although all their leaflets, flyers, and on-line networking materials stated the times to be 7:00 AM to noon.   

 

Frank had been a little leery about the project especially when a couple of black and red anarchists wanted to chain themselves to the main door of the bank as some symbolic act but the overall scheme sounded fair enough. Such actions, such shutdowns, had successfully occurred before and had had a good media effect. Frank, however, was not naïve enough at his age to think they could hold out for a long period. As a veteran of the May Day action down in Washington, D.C. in 1971 when they tried to shut down the entire government and took nothing but thousands of arrests for their efforts he was always cautious in his expectations for any given action although the hoopla over this General Strike call had made him more optimistic. Still to think that they could hold the bank with its many entrances against a strong police presence for long with the thousand or so people who had signed up on one of the social networking sites to put their bodies on the line gave him pause. As he finally entered the street level Frank did take a certain pride that the organizing committee had created some buzz around the General Strike idea they had been harping on all spring unlike the tepid responses on several previous May Day actions.  

 

As Frank put up his umbrella to walk that couple of blocks to get some help with the materials in his car another deluge of rain hit him, a rain that continued on until he reached the planned meeting point on the corner of Franklin and Congress. As he approached the area he was delighted to see several now well-known media vans ready to film the action. He was however a little suspicious that there was not a large open police presence as he arrived at his destination. He figured that, as on other occasions in Boston, the main force was being held in reserve and in the ready in some of the back streets. To his greater surprise at a few minutes after seven he counted only fifteen people ready to rally at that meeting point. That number would swell to no more than fifty over the next two or three hours that they held forth there. And as the rains continued throughout the morning Frank was certainly disheartened by the turn-out. They held an impromptu rally and march through some streets for effect but with no media coverage since all those glorious vans had taken off before 8:00 AM for as one reporter said “real news” it flagged considerable. Frank Jackman, an old-time political organizer from the school where you actually physically gathered people to plan and participant in actions, had just gotten his first taste of the limits of “social network” organizing in America. 

 

Chelsea's free speech & press Guardian Op-Ed, Bill Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. We have the right to criticize govt without fear: Chelsea's new Guardian op-ed Chelsea Manning calls for an increase in freedom of information and transparency in her May 6th Guardian opinion article, "We're citizens, not subjects. We have the right to criticize government without fear." "The American public needs more access to what the government is doing its name," Manning states. When the public does not have access to, "what its governments and militaries are doing in their names, then they cease to be involved in the act of citizenship" However, since 2006, "there have been more national security and criminal investigations into journalists and prosecutions of their sources than at any other time in the nation’s memory..." Chelsea Manning, Guardian OpEd May 5, 2015 When freedom of information and transparency are stifled, then bad decisions are often made and heartbreaking tragedies occur – too often on a breathtaking scale that can leave societies wondering: how did this happen? Think about the recent debates on torture, assassination by unmanned aircraft, secret warrants and detentions, intelligence and surveillance courts, military commissions, immigration detention centers and the conduct of modern warfare. These policies affect millions of people around the world every day and can affect anyone – wives, children, fathers, aunts, boyfriends, cousins, friends, employees, bosses, clergy and even career politicians – at any time. It is time that we bring a health dose of sunlight to them. Click here to read the complete op-ed Chelsea Manning's idea for Congress: the National Integrity and Free Speech Protection Act of 2015 A day after her Guardian op-ed where she suggests, "a media 'shield' law with teeth," Chelsea Manning illustrates her point by proposing a, "Bill to Re-Establish the National Integrity and to Protect Freedom of Speech, and the Freedom of the Press." #NIFSPA Click here to read the complete bill #NIFSPA & Chelsea's section-by-section analysis Chelsea explains via Twitter that NIFSPA would amend the Freedom of Information Act to make records more accessible to the public, narrow the Espionage Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to apply only to those intentionally harming the US and anyone else, and create a federal privilege for journalists and their sources without any nat.l security exemptions. Click here to read the complete bill #NIFSPA and Chelsea's section-by-section analysis Chelsea can continue to be a powerful voice for reform, but we need your help to make that happen. Help us support Chelsea in prison, maximize her voice in the media, continue public education, fund her legal appeals team, and build a powerful movement for presidential pardon. > > > Please donate today! < < <

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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-Artists’ 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 the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists/Constructivists, Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements (hell even the hide-bound Academy filled with its rules, or be damned, spoke the pious words of peace, brotherhood and the affinity of all humankind when there was sunny weather), those who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society in its squalor, it creation of generations of short, nasty, brutish lives just like the philosophers predicted 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 gazebo 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, putting another man to ground or laying their own heads down for some imperial mission.

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 poets like Wilfred Owens who would sicken of war before he passed leaving a beautiful damnation on war, its psychoses, and broken bones and dreams, and the idiots who brought humankind to such a fate, like e. e. cummings who drove through sheer hell in those rickety ambulances floors sprayed with blood, man blood, angers, anguishes and more sets of broken bones, and broken dreams, like Rupert Brooke all manly and old school give and go, as they marched in formation leaving the ports and then mowed down like freshly mown grass in their thousands as the charge call came and they rested, a lot of them, in those freshly mown grasses, like Robert Graves all grave all sputtering in his words confused about what had happened, suppressing, always suppressing that instinct to cry out against the hatred night, like old school, old Thomas Hardy writing beautiful old English pastoral sentiments before the war and then full-blown into imperium’s service, no questions asked old England right or wrong, like old stuffed shirt himself T.S. Eliot speaking of hollow loves, hollow men, wastelands, and such in the high club rooms on the home front, and like old brother Yeats speaking of terrible beauties born in the colonies and maybe at the home front too as long as Eliot does not miss his high tea. Jesus what a blasted night that Great War time was.  

And as 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, artists, beautiful artists like Fernand Leger who could no longer push the envelope of representative art because it had been twisted by the rubble of war, by the crashing big guns, by the hubris of commanders and commanded and he turned to new form, tubes, cubes, prisms, anything but battered humankind in its every rusts and lusts, all bright and intersecting once he got the mustard gas out of his system, once he had done his patria duty, like speaking of mustard gas old worn out John Singer Sargent of the three name WASPs forgetting Boston Brahmin society ladies in decollage, forgetting ancient world religious murals hanging atop Boston museum and spewing trench warfare and the blind leading the blind out of no man’s land, out of the devil’s claws, like Umberto Boccioni, all swirls, curves, dashes, and dangling guns as the endless charges endlessly charge, like Gustav Klimt and his endlessly detailed gold dust opulent Asiatic dreams filled with lovely matrons and high symbolism and blessed Eve women to fill the night, Adam’s night after they fled the garden, like Joan Miro and his infernal boxes, circles, spats, eyes, dibs, dabs, vaginas, and blots forever suspended in deep space for a candid world to fret through, fret through a long career, and like poor maddened rising like a phoenix in the Spartacist uprising George Grosz puncturing the nasty bourgeoisie, the big bourgeoisie the ones with the real dough and their overfed dreams stuffed with sausage, and from the bloated military and their fat-assed generals stuff with howitzers and rocket shells, like Picasso, yeah, Picasso taking the shape out of recognized human existence and reconfiguring the forms, the mesh of form to fit the new hard order, like, Braque, if only because if you put the yolk on Picasso you have to tie him to the tether too.          

And do not forget when the war drums intensified, and the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they, other creative souls made of ordinary human clay as it turned out sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate ….           

The Latest From The Justice For Lynne Stewart Website

 

 Click below to link to the Justice For Lynne Stewart website

http://lynnestewart.org/

Although Lynne Stewart has been released by “Uncle” on medical grounds since last winter (2014) after an international campaign to get her adequate medical attention her case should still be looked at as an especially vindictive ploy on the part of the American government in post-9/11 America to tamp down on attorneys (and others concerned about the fate of "los olvidados," the forgotten ones, the forgotten political prisoners)  who  have been zealously defending their unpopular clients (and political prisoners). A very chilling effect on the legal profession and elsewhere as I have witnessed on too many occasions when legal assistance is desperately needed. As a person who is committed to doing political prisoner defense work I have noted how few such “people’s lawyers” there around to defend the voiceless, the framed and “the forgotten ones.” There are not enough, there are never enough such lawyers around and her disbarment by the New York bar is an added travesty of justice surrounding the case. 

Back in the 1960s and early 1970s there were, relatively speaking, many Lynne Stewarts. Some of this reflecting the radicalization of some old-time lawyers who hated what was going in America with its prison camp mentality and it’s seeking out of every radical, black or white but as usual especially black revolutionaries, it could get its hands on.  Hell, who hated that in many cases their sons and daughters were being sent to the bastinado. But mostly it was younger lawyers, lawyers like Lynne Stewart, who took on the Panther cases, the Chicago cases, the Washington cases, the military cases (which is where I came to respect such “people’s lawyers” as I was working with anti-war GIs at the time and we needed, desperately needed, legal help to work our way in the arcane military “justice” system then, and now witness Chelsea Manning) who learned about the class-based nature of the justice system. And then like a puff those hearty lawyers headed for careers and such and it was left for the few Lynne Stewarts to shoulder on. Probably the clearest case of that shift was with the Ohio Seven (two, Jann Laamann and Tom Manning, who are still imprisoned) in the 1980s, working-class radicals who would have been left out to dry without Lynne Stewart. Guys and gals who a few years before would have been heralded as front-line anti-imperialist fighters like thousands of others were then left out to dry. Damn.      
***********

If you have looked at the Lynne Stewart website of late (February 2015) you will notice that whatever Lynne Stewart’s medical problems she sis still carry on the best she can, still fighting for freedom for her now fellow political prisoners who are still on the inside. She has learned, no, that is not right, her DNA dictates that she keep up the struggle with whatever tools at hard. She knows deep down that the cause that passes through the prisons is the movement’s and has once again stepped up to do her part. Thanks, comrade.   

 

******

The following paragraph is a short description of the Lynne Stewart case from the 2013 Holiday Appeal  when she was a recipient of a stipend by the class-war prisoners’ defense organization, the Partisan Defense Committee, as part of their solicitation for funds to continue their work of seeing those of our people behind bars are not forgotten.

“Lynne Stewart is a lawyer imprisoned in 2009 for defending her client, a blind Egyptian cleric convicted for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. Stewart is a well-known advocate who defended Black Panthers, radical leftists and others reviled by the capitalist state. She was originally sentenced to 28 months; a resentencing pursued by the Obama administration more than quadrupled her prison time to ten years. As she is 74 years old and suffers from Stage IV breast cancer that has spread to her lungs and back, this may well be a death sentence. Stewart qualifies for immediate compassionate release, but Obama’s Justice Department refuses to make such a motion before the resentencing judge, who has all but stated that he would grant her release!”

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Lynne Stewart’s pressing continuing medical needs and the need for funds to get that attention is also of continuing concern so click on to the link on the site where you can help defray her medical expenses.  

When The Tin Can Bended…. In The Time Of Dave Van Ronk’s Time

Sure everybody, everybody over the age of say fifty to be on the safe side, knows about Bob Dylan, maybe younger too if kids have browsed through their parents’ old record collections now safely ensconced in the attic although there are stirrings of retro-vinyl revival of late. Most also would know about how Dylan, after serving something like an apprenticeship under the influence of Woody Guthrie in the late 1950s singing his songs in his style something a fellow acolyte like Ramblin’ Jack Elliot never quite got over when he moved on but who actually made a career out of Woody covers, became if not the voice of the Generation of ’68, my generation, which he probably did not seriously aspire in the final analysis, then the master troubadour of the age. (Troubadour in the medieval sense of bringing news to the people and entertaining them by song and poetry as well.) So, yes, that story has been pretty well covered.

But of course that is hardly the end of the story since Dylan did not create that now hallowed folk minute of the early 1960s but was washed by it when he came to the East, came into the Village where there was a cauldron of talent trying to make folk the next big thing, big cultural thing for the young and restless of the post-World War II generations. People frankly fed up with the cultural straightjacket of the red scare Cold War times and seriously looking as hard at roots in all its manifestations as their parents’ were burying those same roots under a vanilla existential Americanization.  One of the talents who was already there, lived there, came from around there was the late Dave Van Ronk who deservedly fancied himself a folk historian as well as musician.    

That former role is important because we all know that behind the “king” is the “fixer man,” the guy who knows what is what, the guy who tells one and all what the roots of the matter were like some mighty mystic (although in those days when he fancied himself a socialist that mystic part was played down). Dave Van Ronk was serious about that part, serious about imparting that knowledge about the little influences that had accumulated during the middle to late 1950s especially around New York which set up that folk minute. (New York like Frisco, maybe in small enclaves in L.A. and in precious few other places during those frozen time a haven for the misfits, the outlaws, the outcast, the politically “unreliable,” and the just curious. People like the mistreated Weavers, you know, Pete Seeger and that crowd found refuge there when the hammer came down around their heads.   Boston/Cambridge by comparison until late in the 1950s could have been any of the thousands of towns who bought into the freeze.)     

Von Ronk told a funny story, actually two funny stories, about the folk scene and his part in that scene as it developed a head of steam in the mid-1950s which will give you an idea about his place in the pantheon. During the late 1950s after the publication of Jack Kerouac’s ground-breaking road wanderlust adventure novel that got young blood stirring, On The Road, the jazz scene, the cool be-bop jazz scene and poetry reading, poems reflecting off of “beat” giant Allen Ginsberg’s Howl the clubs and coffeehouse of the Village were ablaze with readings and cool jazz, people waiting in line to get in to hear the next big poetic wisdom if you can believe that these days when poetry is generally some esoteric endeavor by small clots of devotees just like folk music. The crush of the lines meant that there were several shows per evening. But how to get rid of one audience to bring in another in those small quarters was a challenge. Presto, if you wanted to clear the house just bring in some desperate “from hunger” snarly nasally folk singer for a couple, maybe three songs, and if that did not clear the high art be-bop poetry house then that folk singer was a goner. A goner until the folk minute of the 1960s who probably in that same club played for the “basket.” (You know the “passed hat” which even on a cheap date, and a folk music coffeehouse date was a cheap one, one felt obliged to throw a few bucks into to show solidarity or something.)  And so the roots of New York City folk.

The second story involved his authoritative role as a folk historian who after the folk minute had passed became the subject matter for, well, for doctoral dissertations of course just like today maybe people are getting doctorates in hip-hop or some such subject. Eager young students, having basked in the folk moment and with an academic bent, breaking new ground in folk history who would come to him for the “skinny”. Now Van Ronk had a peculiar if not savage sense of humor and a wicked snarly cynic’s laugh but also could not abide academia and its’ barren insider language so when those eager young students came a calling he would give them some gibberish which they would duly note and footnote. Here is the funny part. That gibberish once published in the dissertation would then be cited by some other younger and eager students complete with the appropriate footnote. Nice touch, nice touch indeed on that one, Dave .       

As for Van Ronk’s music, his musicianship which he cultivated throughout his life, I think the best way to describe that for me is that one Sunday night in the early 1960s I was listening to the local folk program on WBZ hosted by Dick Summer (who was influential in boosting local folk musician Tom Rush’s career and who is featured on a recent Tom Rush documentary No Regrets) when this gravelly-voice guy, sounding like some old mountain pioneer, sang the Kentucky hills classic Fair and Tender Ladies. After that I was hooked on that voice and that depth of feeling that he brought to every song even those of his own creation which tended to be spoofs on some issue of the day.

I saw him perform many times over the years, sometimes in high form and sometimes when drinking too much high shelf whiskey not so good, and had expected to see him perform as part of Rosalie Sorrels’ farewell concert at Saunders Theater at Harvard in 2003. He had died a few weeks before. I would note when I had seen him for what turned out to be my last time he did not look well and had been, as always, drinking heavily and his performance was subpar. But that is at the end. For a long time he sang well, sang us well with his own troubadour style, and gave us plenty of real information about the history of American folk music.                   

In Honor Of May Day 2015-From The American Left History Blog Archives-All Out On May Day 2012: A Day Of International Working Class Solidarity Actions- An Open Letter To The Working People Of Boston From A Fellow Worker

 

 

All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!

Why Working People Need To Show Their Power On May Day 2012

Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. I will stop there although I could go on and on. Sounds familiar though, sounds like your situation or that of someone you know, right?

Words, or words like them, are taken daily from today’s global headlines. But these were also similar to the conditions our forebears faced in America back in the 1880s when this same vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind, Jay Gould, stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.

What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight connected with the heroic Haymarket Martyrs in 1886 for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.

No question over the past several years (really decades but now it is just more public and right in our face) American working people have taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Start off with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers like at General Electric or the auto plants). Move on to paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, in some cases literally paying nothing, we pay). And finish up with mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a life-time deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”

Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and many women and the grievances voiced long ago in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, for some of us, great-grandparents).

That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like hell, against the ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling class of that day by their front-man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.

The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under. All Out On May Day 2012.

I have listed some of the problems we face now to some of our demand that should be raised every day, not just May Day. See if you agree and if you do take to the streets on May Day with us. We demand:

 

*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! No More Wisconsins! Hands Off All Our Unions!

* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!

*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!

* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!

* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!

* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!

* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!

*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! For free quality public transportation!

To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:

*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day strike around some, or all, of the above-mentioned demands.

*We will be organizing at workplaces where a strike is not possible for workers to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.

*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to graduate school and the off-hand left-wing think tank to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, and to rally at a central location.

*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.

All out on May Day 2012.

 ************

Five in the morning, maybe five-thirty, still a bit dark due to the heavy rain falling as the dawn was ready to break and he was up and about. Today Frank Jackman was in charge of making sure that the materials, the equipment for today action, today’s May Day action, which had been planned for weeks got to the meeting place by the State Street Bank at the corner of Franklin and Congress in downtown Boston.

He had been working on the organizing committee for the event, an even that came with the imprimatur of the now somewhat faded Occupy movement. The task this day, this international workers holiday, was to do no less than shut down the banks, or rather in Boston a bank, the State Street, if possible. Thus he had come out of his Cambridge home with the materials, signs, mikes, food supplies and other necessities to get the crew expected to show up in proper spirit for the hard day ahead.

As he loaded up the car, made sure that everything on his list has been taken he noticed the rain getting heavier, not a good sign for turn-out from past experiences, especially early morning events, and most especially morning events where  young students and unaffiliated radicals were expected to attend. Still he thought in his most generation of ’68 mood the times called for the big actions in the year 2012 when all hell was being cast among working people and others and the banks, the banks that were central to the cause of the current economic malaise and for the moment a juicy target.

State Street Bank had its tentacles everywhere and was ripe for selection as the target for early morning mass action. The slogan “Close It Down” was on his mind as he headed over the Longfellow Bridge (damn when are they going to finish the never-ending construction on the thing it seems like years already) and to the underground parking facility on Congress where he would later ask for help unloading his materials. Yes, May Day, he had not felt this good about the day since that May Day down in Washington, D.C.in 1971 when they tried a bigger target-the whole freaking government- and got waylaid for their efforts.    

***************

It was still raining, raining hard, when old-time Cambridge radical and political organizer Frank Jackman got to the underground parking facility at the corner of Franklin and Congress Streets near the State Street Bank at about 7:00 AM on May Day 2012. The reason why Frank was at that locale at that time was that as one who had helped organize the May Day protests that year he had volunteered to bring the various materials, signs, sound equipment, food and such that would be needed by the gathering troops that day. Since he was one of the few organizers or supporters who had an automobile large enough to fit all the materials in he was the natural choice. He had gotten up a couple of hours earlier to make sure the materials were packed and ready to move.

 

As Frank walked up the stairs to start to walk the couple of blocks from the garage to the bank he thought about the reasoning behind the organizing committee’s agreement that the State Street Bank and its nefarious doings in the financial crisis of 2008 should be highlighted by the protest actions that day. The group had spent some time and energy at its weekly meetings discussing the best possible target and the one that would draw the most media attention to what the Occupy Wall Street movement was calling for that day. Actions to stop business as usual on the international workers holiday. The idea this day in Boston was to attempt by main force to block off the entire bank and then court probable arrest if necessary in order to keep the bank closed for as long  as possible. Realistically Frank thought the site could be held for a couple of hours although all their leaflets, flyers, and on-line networking materials stated the times to be 7:00 AM to noon.    

 

Frank  had been a little leery about the project especially when a couple of black and red anarchists wanted to chain themselves to the main door of the bank as some symbolic act but the overall scheme sounded fair enough. Such actions, such shutdowns, had successfully occurred before and had had a good media effect. Frank, however, was not naïve enough at his age to think they could hold out for a long period. As a veteran of the May Day action down in Washington, D.C. in 1971 when they tried to shut down the entire government and took nothing but thousands of arrests for their efforts he was always cautious in his expectations for any given action although the hoopla over this General Strike call had made him more optimistic. Still to think that they could hold the bank with its many entrances against a strong police presence for long with the thousand or so people who had signed up on one of the social networking sites to put their bodies on the line gave him pause. As he finally entered the street level Frank did take a certain pride that the organizing committee had created some buzz around the General Strike idea they had been harping on all spring unlike the tepid responses on several previous May Day actions.   

 

As Frank put up his umbrella to walk that couple of blocks to get some help with the materials in his car another deluge of rain hit him, a rain that continued on until he reached the planned meeting point on the corner of Franklin and Congress. As he approached the area he was delighted to see several now well-known media vans ready to film the action. He was however a little suspicious that there was not a large open police presence as he arrived at his destination. He figured that, as on other occasions in Boston, the main force was being held in reserve and in the ready in some of the back streets. To his greater surprise at a few minutes after seven he counted only fifteen people ready to rally at that meeting point. That number would swell to no more than fifty over the next two or three hours that they held forth there. And as the rains continued throughout the morning Frank was certainly disheartened by the turn-out. They held an impromptu rally and march through some streets for effect but with no media coverage since all those glorious vans had taken off before 8:00 AM for as one reporter said “real news” it flagged considerable. Frank Jackman, an old-time political organizer from the school where you actually physically gathered people to plan and participant in actions, had just gotten his first taste of the limits of “social network” organizing in America.  

On The 100^th Birthday Of Citizen Welles-A Review Of Orson Welles Classic For The Ages- Citizen Kane  

 

The BBC celebrates Orson Welles 100th Birthday 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3r2qyBrTFpTPv2rZxGrJBtT/cinema-giant-orson-welles-at-100

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-American Left History blog (2011)

Citizen Kane, starring Orson Welles, Everett Sloane, Joseph Cotton, directed by Orson Welles, hell, written by Orson Welles, RKO Radio Pictures, 1941

Recently I reviewed the 2011 Academy Award –winning film The Artist and commented in that review that the silent movie directors and producers of the 1920s (the actors I am not quite as sure of) would have given their eye-teeth (or at least their first born) to have had the technology available now back then to produce higher technical quality films. I am not so sure that I could say the same about director Orson Welles’ 1941 film classic, Citizen Kane.

Oh sure some of the technical stuff today could (and has on the re-mastered versions ) enhance the sound, and maybe some of the production values but this magnificent film does not rely on technical skill so much (although some of the scenes and backdrops are of high quality) as the driving plot line, the script, and above the acting of director Orson Welles’s merry band of Mercury Theater players (think Joseph Cotton, Agnes Moorehead, Everett Sloan and, oh yes, Orson Welles, among others).

The plot line and the way it unfolds beginning with a clever news-of-the-week video of Charles Foster Kane’s life after he passed away to bring us up to speed really is something to watch. Of course it did not hurt that this piece was a thinly-veiled portrait of the famed newspaperman and arch imperialist war-monger (the Spanish-American War and other little adventures be exact) William Randolph Hearst. He of “yellow journalism” fame although today he would be strictly minor league, maybe scandalous in Toledo or someplace like that but passe in the real war of scandal sheets.

Then to have the strong cinematic personality of actor Orson Welles (shown as well in other films like Falstaff, The Lady From Shang-hai, and The Third Man) play that strong Hearst personality just added to the drama. As well as did the flashbacks by various parties who knew Kane, had worked for Kane, had loved Kane, had hated Kane or were just pure baffled by him. And then that dramatic undercurrent throughout the film of Kane’s characteristic that would banish him from the godly pantheon, his utter incapacity to love anybody but himself that left him alone at the end. Yet he was still able to go back into deep childhood to remember the good part of his life, the part many of us harken back to as we age. We all, or almost all, have our Rosebud memories and maybe that is the connecting thread to the continuing relevance of this classic film. Just make sure you don’t go for popcorn out at the concession stand at some retro-theater or something out in the kitchen at the beginning of the film, okay. Trust me on that, please.

The Hills And Hollas Of Home- In Honor Of “Our Lady Of The Mountain” The Late Hazel Dickens

 

The Hills And Hollas Of Home- In Honor Of “Our Lady Of The Mountain” The Late Hazel Dickens

 

Kenny Jackman, the well-known classic rock and roll and early 1960s folk music minute blogger and website contributor Frank Jackman’s younger brother, had heard the late “First Lady Of The Mountains” Hazel Dickens (d. 2011) for the very first time on her CD album It’s Hard To Tell The Singer From The Song some years back, maybe in 2005. At that time he was in thrall to mountain music after being hit hard by Reese Witherspoon’s role as June Carter in the film Walk The Line (and maybe a little too under the spell of the film The Song Catcher whose soundtrack also had many classic mountain tunes). At that time he got into all things Carter Family, June’s mother Maybelle and June’s sisters who constituted the second wave of the Carter Family experience at first then reaching back to the first Clinch Mountain threesome once he heard Maybelle performing Blue-Eyed Boy accompanied by her on the mountain harp. So Kenny knew the Carter mountain roots unto the nth generation. A friend, a Vermont mountain boy, Jeffrey Salem, who had been a classmate of his at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst back in the early 1970s, and a man whose knowledge of mountain music was sincere and deep although in school had gone over Kenny’s head anytime he mentioned it had “hipped” him to Hazel during his frenzy. He had picked up the CD second-hand in a Harvard Square record shop one of the few places around before the advent of Amazon where one could get an off mainstream second hand recording of anything. The shop, really Sandy’s located between Harvard and Central Squares, a folk institution around that town where until recently Sandy had been holding forth since the early 1960s folk minute when everybody was desperately looking for roots music and that was the place to look first. Hazel’s You’ll Get No More Of Me, A Few Old Memories and the classic Hills of Home from that CD had knocked him out.

All of this mountain dew business you understand came out of left field for Kenny since he was if anything more of a man of the rock and roll era than Frank who at least had been bitten by that early 1960s folk minute that Kenny was too young for, and which he had winced at every time Frank put on some obscure folk song by guys like Buell Kazee and Hobart Smith on the record player in their shared bedroom. (Later where older brothers Lawrence and Phillip in their turns moved out of the family house and Frank moved up the food chain Kenny would finally not have to hear the stuff and considered himself lucky, foolish him.)   

The latter mentioned song, Hills Of Home, moreover, seemed kind of familiar and later, a couple of months later, he finally figured out why. He had really first heard Hazel back in 1970 when he was down in the those very hills and hollows that are a constant theme in her work, and that of the mountain mist winds music coming down the crevices. What was going on though? Was it 2005 when he first heard Hazel or that 1970 time? Let me go back and tell that 1970 story.

Kenny Jackman like many of his generation who were just brushed by the counter-cultural events of the 1960s like older brother Frank had been just brushed by the “beat” uprising of the late 1950s, was feeling foot loose and fancy free, especially after he had been mercifully declared 4-F by his friendly neighbors at the local draft board in old hometown Carver (declared 4-F in those high draft days because he had a seriously abnormal foot problem which precluded walking very far, a skill that the army likes its soldiers to be able to do. This classification system in place before the lottery which would presumably still placed him outside the clutches of the military, unlike Frank’s fate and that of Frank’s friend, the late Benjamin Smith who laid down his head in Vietnam for no got purpose no good Benny purpose). So Kenny, every now and again, took to the hitchhike road, not like his mad man brother Frank with some heavy message purpose a la Jack Kerouac and his beat brothers (and a few sisters) after On The Road whacked everybody with the get away from home and the routine bug but just to see the country while he, and it, were still in one piece no pun intended Kenny told me since the country was in about fifteen pieces then.

On one of these trips he found himself stranded just outside Norfolk, Virginia at a road-side campsite. Feeling kind of hungry one afternoon, and tired, tired unto death of camp-side gruel and stews he stopped at a diner, Billy Bob McGee’s, an old-time truck stop diner a few hundred yards up the road from his camp for some real food, maybe meatloaf or some pot roast like grandma used to make or that was how it was advertised. When Kenny entered the mid-afternoon half-empty diner he sat down at one of the single stool counter seats, usually red-topped, that always accompany the red vinyl-covered side booths in such places. But all of this was so much descriptive noise that could describe a million, maybe more, such eateries. You know the chalkboard menu listing the daily specials, which turned out to be the same as the items listed on the plastic embossed menu in front of each paper placemat complete with napkin-folded silverware, coffee cup at the ready to answer the inevitable “coffee” call from the professional waitress behind the counter whose seniority gave her that spot which as any professional waitress will tell you is the goldmine in the diner business since those counter stools are usually the preserve of single truckers, or single guys, who for a kind smile or at least no surliness will leave a larger tip than any hard-pressed father with wife and four kids in one of the booths will leave despite a much larger bill. You know too the menu contained “breakfast all day” in honor of the eighteen hours a day on the road truckers who frequent such places (don’t tell the ICC, about the eighteen hours, please), the meatloaf dinner, the turkey dinner, the grandmother-like pot roast diner, and of course no self-respecting diner worthy of the name would leave you without bread pudding, and that settling the nerves second cup of coffee.      

 

What really caught his attention though was a waitress serving them “off the arm” that he knew immediately he had to “hit on” (although that is not the word used in those days but “hit on” conveys what he was up to in the universal boy meets girl world attractions). As it turned out she, sweetly named Fiona Fay, and, well let’s just call her fetching, Kenny weary-eyed fetching, was young, footloose and fancy free herself, had decided like half of those under about thirty to spent her summer break travelling east from her hometown of Valparaiso, Indiana since she had never seen the ocean, had drawn a bead on him as he entered the place. Had drawn that bead knowing with some kind of female knowing that he was not a family man and definitely not a trucker and dressed in his semi-hippie garb (emulating older brother Frank as to dress although with no long hair and no beard, no way) struck her fancy since he had never talked to a hippie guy before. (Jesus.) And as they eyed each other and Fiona came over to his stool disregarding her other family customers in the booths and the evil eye of that inevitable professional waitress with her pencil in her hair, her too tight steam stained uniform who was about to approach Kenny’s spot she asked “coffee.” And, …well this story is about Hazel, so let us just leave it as one thing led to another and let it go at that.

Well, not quite let’s let it go at that because when Kenny left Norfolk a few days later one ex-waitress Fiona Fay was standing by his side on the road south. And the road south was leading nowhere, nowhere at all except to Podunk, really Prestonsburg, Kentucky, and really, really a dink town named Pottsville, just down the road from big town Prestonsburg, down in the hills and hollows of Appalachia, wind-swept green, green, mountain mist, time forgotten . And the reason two footloose and fancy free young people were heading to Podunk is that a close cousin of Fiona’s lived there with her husband and child and wanted Fiona to come visit (visit “for a spell” is how she put it but I will spare the reader the localisms). So they were on that hell-bend road but Kenny, Kenny was dreading this trip and only doing it because, well because Fiona was the kind of young woman, footloose and fancy free or not, that you followed, at least you followed if you were eye-weary Kenny Jackson and hoped things would work out okay.

What Kenny dreaded that day was that he was afraid to confront his past. And that past just then entailed having to go to his father’s home territory just up the road in Hazard. See Kenny saw himself as strictly a Yankee, a hard “we fought to free the slaves and incidentally save the union” Yankee for one and all to see back in old Carver, a pose that he had learned from Frank who was about fifty times more political than him (the older brothers and indeed their father never got beyond calling those “stinking” blacks they worked with “n-----s”). And denied, denied to the high heavens, that he had any connection with the south, especially the hillbilly south that everybody was making a fuse about trying to bring into the 20th century around that time what with Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. (Frank had had it worse since during his high school time Michael Harrington’s shocking expose of Appalachian poverty, including mention of his father’s birthplace had everybody trying to help out with various book, clothes, and food drives right in Carver High School announced each day for a while over the loud speaker.) And here he was with a father with Hazard, Kentucky, the poorest of the poor hillbillies, right on his birth certificate although Kenny had never been there before. Yeah, Fiona had better be worth it.

Kenny had to admit, as they picked up one lonely truck driver ride after another (it did not hurt in those days to have a comely lass standing on the road with you in the back road South, or anywhere else, especially if you had what was short hair in the north but longish hair down there and a wisp of a beard from not shaving for few days), that the country was beautiful. As they entered coal country though and the shacks got crummier and crummier he got caught up in that 1960s Michael Harrington Other America no running water, outhouse, open door, one window and a million kids and dogs running around half-naked, the kids that is, vision. But they got to Pottsville okay and Fiona’s cousin and husband (Laura and Stu) turned out to be good hosts. So good that they made sure that Kenny and Fiona stayed in town long enough to attend the weekly dance at the old town barn (red of course, run down and in need of paint to keep red of course) that had seen such dances going back to the 1920s when the Carter Family had actually come through Pottsville on their way back to Clinch Mountain from visiting legendary yodeler Jimmy Rodger down in Texas some place. (The first Carter Family combination and Jimmy had been “discovered” at the same Bristol, Tennessee 1920s record sessions by an RCA agent who had conducted these demonstration to expand the audience for records and radios.)  

Kenny buckled at the thought, the mere thought, of going to some Podunk Saturday night “hoe-down” and tried to convince Fiona that they should leave before Saturday. Fiona would have none of it and so Kenny was stuck. Actually the dance started out pretty well, helped tremendously by some local “white lightning” illegal corn liquor that Stu provided and which he failed to mention should be sipped, sipped sparingly by guys who were not practically breast-fed on the stuff. Not only that but the several fiddles, mandolins, guitars, washboards and whatnot made pretty good music. Music like Anchored in Love and Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies, stuff that Frank had heard in the folk clubs in Harvard Square when he used to hang out there in the early 1960s and which had driven Kenny up the wall before liberation day when Philip had moved out. And music that even Kenny, old two left-feet, one way out of whack, draft-free out of whack, Kenny, could dance to with Fiona.

So Kenny was sipping, well more than sipping, and dancing and all until maybe about midnight when this woman, this local woman came out of nowhere and began to sing, sing like some quick, rushing wind sound coming down from the hills and hollas (hollows for Yankees, okay, please). Kenny began to toss and turn a little, not from the liquor but from some strange feeling, some strange womb-like feeling that this woman’s voice was a call from up on top of these deep green hills, now mist-filled awaiting day. And then she started into a long, mournful version of Hills of Home, and he sensed, sensed strongly if not anything he could articulate that he was home. Yes, Kenny Jackson, Yankee, city boy, corner boy-bred was “home,” hillbilly home. So Kenny did really hear Hazel Dickens for first time in 1970, see.

[As for Fiona Fay she stayed on the road with Kenny until they headed toward the Midwest where she veered off home to Valparaiso in Indiana, her hometown, back to the business school she was attending and had taken time off from to “find herself” just as Kenny and ten million other generational wanderers were trying like hell to do. Kenny headed west via Denver and the Utahs to California, to Big Sur and a different mountain ethos, splashed by the sea, splashed by the Japan seas, splashed by everything that in his everlasting life needed to be washed clean. They were supposed to meet out there a few months later after she finished up the semester and attended to some family business. They never did, a not so unusual occurrence of the time when people met and faded along the way, but Kenny thought about her, about that red barn dance night, about that lady of the mountains and that wind-swept mountain coming down the hollows night for a long time after that.]