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.

http://www.jwjblog.org/

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.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/index.htm

Guest Commentary
 

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.

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

Victory To The Fast-Food Workers......Fight For $15 Is Just A Beginning-All Labor Must Support Our Sisters And Brothers- Free All The Striking Fast Food Protesters!

Comments of a supporter of the “Fight for $15” action in Downtown Boston on September 4, 2014 as part of a national struggle for economic justice and dignity for the our hard working sisters and brothers:

No question in this wicked old world that those at the bottom are “the forgotten ones.” Here we are talking about working people, people working and working hard for eight, nine, ten dollars an hour. Maybe working two jobs to make ends meet since a lot of times these McJobs, these Wal-Marts jobs do not come with forty hours of work attached but whatever some cost-cutting manager deems right. And lately taking advantage of cover from Obamacare keeping the hours below the threshold necessary to kick in health insurance and other benefits. Yes, the forgotten people.

But let’s do the math here figuring on forty hours and figuring on say ten dollars an hour. That‘s four hundred a week times fifty weeks (okay so I am rounding off for estimate purposes here too since most of these jobs do not have vacation time figured in).That’s twenty thousand a year. Okay so just figure any kind of descent apartment in the Boston area where I am writing this-say one thousand a month. That’s twelve thousand a year. So the other eight thousand is for everything else. No way can that be done. And if you had listened to the young and not so young fast-food workers, the working mothers, the working older brothers taking care of younger siblings, workers trying to go to school to get out of the vicious cycle of poverty you would understand the truth of that statement. And the stories went on and on along that line all during the action. 

Confession: it has been a very long time since I have had to scrimp and scrim to make ends meet, to get the rent in, to keep those damn bill-collectors away from my door, to beg the utility companies to not shut off those necessary services. But I have been there, no question. And I did not like it then and I do not like the idea of it now.  I am here to say even the “Fight for $15” is not enough, but it is a start. And I whole-heartedly support the struggle of my sisters and brothers for a little economic justice in this wicked old world. And any reader who might read this-would you work for slave wages? I think not. So show your solidarity and get out and support the fast-food and Wal-Mart workers in their just struggles. 

Organize Wal-Mart! Organize the fast food workers! Union! Union! 

**********A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force, although it is admittedly down from the Great Recession highs. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work.

The basic scheme, as was the case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions, is that the work would be divided up through local representative workers’ councils that would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work.

Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as to implement “30 for 40” –with the no reduction in pay proviso, although many low –end employers are even now under the “cover” of the flawed Obamacare reducing hours WITH loss of pay-so that to establish this work system as a norm it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.

Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy. Support the recent militant efforts, including the old tactic of civil disobedience, by service unions and groups of fast-food workers to increase the minimum socially acceptable wage in their Fight For 15.

Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Hey, nobody said it was going to be easy.

Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of company-owned trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. The key here is to organize the truckers and distribution workers the place where the whole thing comes together. We have seen mostly unsuccessful organizing of retail stores. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.

Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more defeats like in Wisconsin in 2011, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, courts or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.

* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 and 2012 labor, organized labor, spent over 450 million dollars respectively trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The “no show, no go” results speak for themselves as the gap between the rich and poor has risen even more in this period. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea in those elections was that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the-back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.

The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example that I can recall- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks in the summer of 2011 when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.

This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go. And not on recall elections against individual reactionaries, like in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle (and which was overwhelmingly unsuccessful to boot-while the number of unionized public workers has dwindled to a precious few).  

*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reached its final stages back in 2011, the draw- down of non-mercenary forces anyway, I argued that we must recognize that we anti-warriors had failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006).As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and other proxy wars) continue now with a new stage against ISIS (Islamic State) in Iraq we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the U.S. troop escalation we know is coming before that fight is over. Not Another War In Iraq! No Intervention In Syria! Stop The Arms Shipments To The Middle East! Stop The Bombing Campaign! Defend The Palestinian People-End The Blockade of Gaza. And as always since 2001 Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan!  

U.S. Hands Off Iran! Hands Off Syria!- American (and world) imperialists have periodically ratcheted up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner on this issue, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in Iran in our own way in our own time.

U.S. Hands Off The World! And Keep Them Off!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.

Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that in 1915 in the heat of war and paid the price unlike other party leaders who were pledged to stop the war budgets by going to prison. The only play for an honest representative of the working class under those conditions. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now no new funding in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.

*Fight for a social agenda for working people! Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs. Be clear Obamacare is not our program and has been shown to be totally inadequate and wasteful however we will defend that program against those who wish to dismantle it and leave millions once again uninsured and denied basic health benefits.  

Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!

This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle-class as well.

Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students from broken homes and minority homes in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money if you want to find the money quickly to do the job right), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.

Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while low-cost aid has not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!

Stop housing foreclosures and aid underwater mortgages now! Although the worst of the crunch has abated there are still plenty of problems and so this demand is still timely if not desperately timely like in the recent past. Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to beat down, beat down hard in all kinds of ways the mass of society for the benefit of the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.

Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.

Build a workers’ party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.

As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):

“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.” 

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

As Obama, His House And Senate Allies, His “Coalition Of The Willing” Ramp Up The War Drums-Again

As Obama, His House And Senate Allies, His “Coalition Of The Willing” Ramp Up The War Drums-Again- Stop The Bombings-Stop The Incessant Escalations-- Immediate Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops And Mercenaries From The Middle East! –Stop The U.S. Arms Shipments …

Ralph Morris comment:

This is my first effort at writing for a blog so bear with me but I have been incensed, no, worse than that, in a rage, over the recent announcement by the Obama administration that he is sending more American “advisers” into the hell-hole in Iraq. The classic incremental mission creep anybody who knew anything about the situation in Iraq could have told you was going to happen after the last set of escalations Obama announced over a year ago. My old friend Sam Easton whom I have worked with in the anti-war struggles since we met in RFK stadium in Washington, D.C. when we were trying to shut down another government, the Nixon one of unblessed memory, to end the bombing escalations of the already lost Vietnam War, and got nothing but a few days in the bastinado for our efforts is also livid about the latest Obama stunt which has all the earmarks of previous “mission creeps”-escalations to call a thing by its right name. Sam usually is the one who actually likes, if you can believe this, to write his little pieces about what is on his mind and I contribute on the ideas end but Sam has convinced me that I should go public on this one.

See Sam is always one for symbolism, has been as long as I have known him and learned why he was back in 1971 so incensed about the Vietnam War since he had had an exemption due to the fact that he was the sole support of his mother and four younger sisters. Actually I had met him first on that May Day after my own arrest for trying to march with a group of ex-veterans to the Pentagon to stage a symbolic shutdown and I had noticed him wandering around the football field wearing a button as a supporter of my organization, Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) and asked if he was a member since I had not seen him at any of our actions. Then he told me the story about Jeff Mullin his closest high school friend being blown away in 1968 in some nondescript village near Pleiku up in the Central Highland not all that far from where my unit was located for most of 1967.

He said that he had become an anti-warrior with a vengeance and a supporter of VVAW in Jeff’s memory sitting in at draft boards, military bases, recruiting stations and the like in the Boston area and had come down with a group of radicals from Cambridge when they, he, had gotten totally fed up with the Nixon government’s continuation of a war that could only tear the country apart further.

My own story when I told it to Sam as we lingered in that stadium for a few days before we figured out (based on somebody else’s information) that there were some unguarded side exits in which to get out was not untypical of a lot of guys, a lot of working class guys anyway, maybe a few college guys too early on in the war. I had been working in my father’s high skill electrical shop in Troy, New York which had a number of contracts with General Electric, in those days the largest private employer in the area, who had a ton of contracts with the Defense Department. When my draft notice came in early 1967 I flipped out, decided that I did not want to be “cannon fodder” (I did not know that term then or would not have used it then if I did, that can later) and joined up, RA (Regular Army), figuring or rather my recruiting sergeant figuring that I would get into electronics, something I could be useful at. But see in 1967, 1968 what Uncle wanted was cannon fodder in Vietnam to go out into the bush and kill commies. And I did, extending my tour six months in 1968 to get out of my three year commitment a little early. But when I got out I freaked out, freaked out about what I had done to those poor villagers who got in the way, got in the cross-fire, freaked about what my buddies had done too, but mainly was disgusted that the government had made animals out of us, nothing less. So sure I headed to VVAW like a moth to a flame.

And not just giving a couple of years in my youth either since Sam and I have been putting on the good fight against this damn government’s endless wars ever since, especially since the start of the 2003 Iraq endless war. So when a guy like Obama, a Nobel Peace Prize winner if you can believe that (hell, whatever criterion they used probably George Bush I and II could have qualified too), starts rattling off about how we need to go in and stiffen up the Iraq Army which has this tendency to run the minute there is an conflict (heck, maybe they should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, or some prize for running away) then I dust off my “Not Another War in Iraq” sign and hit the streets. Sam too.

You know why-because we have heard that one before, heard it in the American death pits of Vietnam, know it is the same old government rot with a new name, ISIS this time but Viet Cong then (we called them Charlie amongst ourselves when we had to face his relentless fire). So Sam and I urge you to get out in the streets-again. It is the only way to make them listen. And if they don’t well remember May Day 1971 and maybe this time we can shut down the damn wars.        

That is the political action part here is how Sam and I have been putting our heads together over the last couple of years as we could see with un-blinkered eyes the nightmare scenario which Obama and his military gurus and hangers-on have unleashed. Listen up:     

One night not long ago when my friend from Carver High Class of 1967 down in southeastern Massachusetts, Sam Eaton, who I hadn’t seen in a while were, full disclosure, having a few high-shelf whiskeys at Jack Higgin’s Sunnyvale Grille in Boston, arguing over the increasing use of and increased dependence on killer/spy drones in military doctrine, American military doctrine anyway. I also mentioned which is germane here in discussing the broader category of the seemingly endless wars that the American government is determined to wage at the close of our lives so that we never again utter the word “peace” with anything but ironic sneers that I, again for full disclosure, am a supporter of Veterans For Peace and have been involved with such groups, both veteran and civilian peace groups, since my own military service ended back during Vietnam War days. For those not in the know that organization of ex-veterans of the last couple of generations of America’s wars has for over a quarter of a century been determinedly committed to opposing war as an instrument, as the first instrument, of American policy in what it sees as a hostile world (a view that it has held for a long time, only the targeted enemy and the amount of devastation brought forth has changed).  

But Sam is nothing if not determined just like me to carry on in his views and so another night at Jack Higgin’s found us arguing over the more recent egg-in-face aspects of American war policy in the Middle East with the rise of ISIS, the demise of the failed states of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan and with it whatever rationale made the American government built a thing from which it had to run. Here is some of our thinking as this damn Iraq War started escalating a couple of years ago:

“Nobel “Peace” Prize Winner, U.S. President Barack Obama (and yes that word peace should be placed in quotation marks every time that award winning is referenced in relationship to this “new age” warmonger extraordinaire), abetted by the usual suspects in the House and Senate (not so strangely more Republicans than Democrats, at least more vociferously so) as internationally (Britain, France, the NATO guys, etc.), has over the past year or so ordered more air bombing strikes in the north of Iraq and in Syria, has sent more “advisers”, another fifteen hundred at last count (but who really knows the real number with all the “smoke and mirrors” by the time you rotate guys in and out, hire mercenaries, and other tricks of the trade long worked out among the bureaucratiti), to “protect” American outposts in Iraq and buck up the feckless Iraqi Army whose main attribute is to run even before contact is made, has sent seemingly limitless arms shipments to the Kurds now acting as on the ground agents of American imperialism whatever their otherwise supportable desires for a unified Kurdish state, and has authorized supplies of arms to the cutthroat and ghost-like moderate Syrian opposition if it can be found to give weapons to,  quite a lot of war-like actions for a “peace” guy (maybe those quotation mark should be used anytime anyone is talking about Obama on any subject ).

 

Of course the existential threat of ISIS has Obama crying to the high heavens for authorizations, essentially "blank check" authorizations just like any other "war" president, from Congress in order to immerse the United States on one side in a merciless sectarian war which countless American blunders from the get go has helped create.

 

All these actions, and threatened future ones as well, have made guys who served in the American military during the Vietnam War and who, like me, belatedly, got “religion” on the war issue from the experience (and have become a fervent anti-warrior ever since), learn to think long and hard about the war drums rising as a kneejerk way to resolve the conflicts in this wicked old world. Have made us very skeptical. We might very well be excused for our failed suspension of disbelief when the White House keeps pounding out the propaganda that these actions are limited when all signs point to the slippery slope of escalation (and the most recent hikes of whatever number for "training" purposes puts paid to that thought).

 

And during all this deluge Obama and company have been saying with a straight face the familiar (Vietnam-era familiar updated for the present)-“we seek no wider war”-meaning no American combat troops. Well if you start bombing places back to the Stone Age, or trying to, if you cannot rely on the weak-kneed Iraqi troops who have already shown what they are made of and cannot rely on a now virtually non-existent “Syrian Free Army” which you are willing to give whatever they want and will still come up short what do you think the next step will be?

 

Now not every event in history gets repeated exactly but given the recent United States Government’s history in Iraq those old time Vietnam vets who I like to hang around with might be on to something. In any case dust off the old banners, placards, and buttons and get your voices in shape- just in case. No New War In Iraq!–Stop The Bombings!- Stop The Arms Shipments!-Vote Down The Syria-Iraq War Budget Appropriations!     

Here is something to think about picked up from a leaflet I picked up at a recent [2014] small anti-war rally:  

 

Workers and the oppressed have no interest in a victory by one combatant or the other in the reactionary Sunni-Shi’ite civil war in Iraq or the victory of any side in Syria. However, the international working class definitely has a side in opposing imperialist intervention in Iraq and demanding the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and mercenaries. It is U.S. imperialism that constitutes the greatest danger to the world’s working people and downtrodden.

[Whatever unknown sister or brother put that idea together sure has it right]  

Down With The Death Penalty-For The Innocent-And The Guilty-Where Was The Ma. Committee Against The Death Penalty and Amnesty International On Judgment Day!   

 

Ralph Morris comment:

You know when I was a kid I had all the traditional working-class attitudes toward crime and criminals. At least in the sense that those who committed grievous crimes should pay the full penalty that society can deliver to such conduct. In short in the interest of retribution the state should be able to put to death those who go far off the norms of society. Now it wasn’t that I had such a sophisticated view of the matter or had it all worked out. You know picking the retribution argument out of the several reasons that the death penalty should be an option as against say its deterrent effect, the cost to society of keeping the prisoner alive through the arduous appeals process, or to bring closure to the victims of the heinous crimes committed.

Probably a lot of my attitude came from listening at the family dinner table to my father spewing forth about how criminals, demented and crazed criminals like rapist Caryl Chessman who a bunch of do-gooders in California were trying to save, should face their maker rather quickly, maybe something like summary execution according to his view. My father for days was happy when they put that “rat” Chessman (his word) down.  A little probably had to do too with the guys who I hung around with at Van Patten’s Drugstore in my old working-class neighborhood in the Tappan Street section of Troy, New York where I grew up. Those guys driven by what they saw at the movies or learned from their own family dinner tables would also go out of the way to say those “dirty rats” should sizzle. I know when the film adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood came out when we watched the end we said “yes!” when that trap-door sent the pair to their maker.         

Here is the funny thing though, funny since I grew up a Catholic on both sides of the family and the Catholic position on the death penalty has always been in the interest of the sanctity of life to oppose that measure. Frankly, I did not really know that was the position of our church (my then church since seriously lapsed for many reasons, not all of them religious differences) until I was about fourteen and my maternal grandmother, Anna Kelly, who had been influenced by the Dorothy Day-led Catholic Worker movement of the 1930s told me so one time when I asked about the church’s attitude while staying at her house during a school vacation. That knowledge made me think, not then so much because I was still under the influence of my father and my high school corner boys but later when I had a serious sea-change in a lot of my attitudes. Then it kind of naturally followed.    

Of course for me, a child of the 1960s and thus of lots of sea-changes brought about in lots of different ways, it had been my tour of duty in the United States Army in the Central Highlands in Vietnam where I, and a lot of my Army buddies, did things that it is hard to speak of even now to people who never bothered mine or theirs. More importantly during my eighteen months of duty (the normal tour was twelve months but I had extended my tour not so much because I was gung-ho as I wanted to finish my three year enlistment early which they offered to do for the extension and get the hell out) I became more and more disgusted with what was going on, going on in what even then seemed a senseless war. Truth though some of that sense was developed later once I got out and could think through things a little, take stock of what was going on in the world then.    

A couple of key events that pushed me around, make me think a little differently about life. One day in early 1970 I was delivering a special motor from my father’s high-precision electrical shop where I worked for a while after I got out of the service to a customer on Vanderbilt Street near Russell Sage College in Albany and saw a ragtag group of ex-veterans in consciously mismatched uniforms walking almost silently down the street carrying individual signs and a big banner in the lead calling for “Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal from Vietnam” and signed by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). It was impressive as the passers-by stood in, I think, stunned into silence since here were guys who knew what it was all about saying get the hell out, pronto. One of the lead ex-soldiers shouted out for any veterans to join them. Like a lemming to the sea I did so, did march that day with my new-found “band of brothers.”   

I would do more marches, rallies, sit-ins with the VVAW in Albany and down in New York City when they needed bodies but the big turnaround event was May Day 1971 when we planned to symbolically shut down the Pentagon, our former bosses, as part of a larger action of thousands of people working under the slogan-“if the government does not shut down the war, we will shut down the government.” For our efforts that day all we got was tear-gassed, billy-clubbed and sent to the bastinado holding area at the RFK football stadium. That is where I met my longtime friend and political associate Sam Eaton who had come down from Boston with a group of red and radicals from Cambridge whose task was to “capture” the White House. Like I said we met at RFK stadium as a result of our collective efforts.

The most important result from that disastrous episode was that we both spent the next several years until we both saw the 1960s high promise alternate vision ebbing joining various study groups (and studying on our own) run by various kinds of socialists, un-joined some as well and wound up generally working with whatever ad hoc groups had need of bodies for whatever they were protesting. It was during this period, which was also a period in which there was turmoil around the use of the death penalty and its uneven application by each state which caused a moratorium to be called on executions for several years, that I readjusted my views on the death penalty to jibe with the changes in my other views (and this is also the period where I changed my view on abortion from anti to pro-choice, that position partially induced by a personal situation at the time). My father was furious but Grandmother Kelly just smiled a knowing smile.    

Over the next few decades although we would not put the frenzied 24/7 energy into political activism that we did in the early 1970s as we pursued our careers and began raising families we would response to any calls from social activist groups who needed bodies. Then the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2002 made us both abandon our “armed truce” (Sam’s term) with the American government and have continued to be active, although with a greater sense now that we had to hope younger activists would show up to take over the main struggles. So we have done our fair share of anti-war vigils, rallies, marches, especially after I joined Veterans for Peace (VFP), progeny of the old VVAW (and Sam who was military exempt during Vietnam as the sole support of his mother and four younger sisters after his father had died suddenly of a massive heart attack in 1965 became an non-veteran associate member). Did some work around the Occupy movement in 2011 too.        

Around the death penalty though over the years we probably had not done much except donate to various anti-death penalty organizations in New York and Massachusetts when the pro-death penalty forces reared their heads after some particularly egregious crime stirred up the issue again. That is until we got involved in the last stages of trying to save the life of Troy Davis down in Georgia in 2011. We failed there after the United States Supreme Court turned down a last minute appeal. And until now in Massachusetts where Sam had commandeered me to stand with him around the Boston Marathon bomber case, the case of the surviving Tsarnaev, in Federal District Court.

Sam and I both recognized this as a tough one given the horrendous actions of the brother bombers consciously killing and gravely maiming many people who were among the crowd at the finish line on the afternoon of Patriot’s Day 2013. Sam admitted, since he knew a few people in the running community who had been affected that day, that he had taken something of a “dive” on showing up at the Moakley Courthouse in Boston to oppose the death penalty the federal prosecutors were asking for without question, and without any plea deal for life without parole. In Troy the matter riled up many people for a while but it did not have the same intensity that it still had for Boston where the wounds ran deep. 

Nobody would be on the side of the angels on this one. But here is where little quirky things done by individuals kind of make you stand up and take notice. One VFP-er, Joe K., whom I knew vaguely from his coming down to New York City for a solidarity action, had taken it upon himself to show up at the courthouse every day the trial was in session from jury selection until the forgone guilty verdict conclusion. He had received a certain amount of attention for carrying a simple homemade sign each day stating “Down with the Death Penalty.” Sam who works with the Boston VFP chapter, the Smedley Butler Brigade, received a message on their website sent by Joe that bodies were needed at courthouse for the critical sentencing stage since the guilt issue had been essentially conceded by the defense team. In federal court the jury makes the recommendation on sentence in capital cases (murder, one) and thus had options of execution by lethal injection, the preferred federal method, or life without parole. The “hook” was that if one jury voted against the death penalty on every count the sentence would automatically be life without parole. The problem though was that the jury had been “death-qualified” meaning, in practice that no anti-death penalty advocate could have served on the jury. Joe’s idea, the right one, was to have a presence each day of anti-death penalty people show up and to show the world that death was not the answer. And if nothing else to get that message across to the milling around press corps in front of the building.                

Sam and I worked to get the word out, worked all the lists we had accumulated over the years of social and progressive groups to come stand with us. Not many did most days, a few to a couple of dozen or so but we got the word out, got the word that people were willing to stand-up and say no to death by the state. One guy had a sign saying- “we do not grant the state the right to kill the innocent-or the guilty.”  Those who wrote the accompanying article from a left-wing newspaper that was handed out one day at an anti-war Iraq and Syria war rally would appreciate such sentiments.

Of course as the headlines have screamed out the young bomber, Tsarnaev, has been formally sentenced to death by the judge in the case and our efforts thus far have gone for nought. Here is what I want to know though, a question which formed the “hook” headline   to this piece. Why were the natural organizations (beside VFP which has a long history of opposition to the death penalty as well) to lead the public vigil against the death penalty in Massachusetts-the Committee Against The Death Penalty (who have the martyred Sacco and Vanzetti as their logo) and the local branch of Amnesty International absent from the front of the Moakley Federal Courthouse. They were repeatedly asked to join the vigil and their answers were not forthcoming. Rumor, which you can contact them to verify or not, has it that the case “was too hot to handle.” Yeah, do ask them about that one.       

The Sex Lives Of Physicists-Steven J. Hawking’s The Theory Of Everything

The Sex Lives Of Physicists-Steven J. Hawking’s The Theory Of Everything

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

The Theory of Everything, starring Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, 2014     

No question one the striking and permanent questions that humankind has ponders since the beginning of existence, put many different ways depending of what is known, is how the universe was formed. In the old days that was a “no-brainer” because of course God did the deed and that ended the question, perhaps. But when humankind put aside that part of the question the guys and gals who were still interested in how it was formed had a field day, and are still doing so waiting for the next big idea to take root. For now though people, or rather professional observers, physicists and astronomers, are hovering around the black hole theory and the rest of us are going along. And the film under review, The Theory of Everything, the bio-pic rather semi-bio-pic of the extraordinary physicist Steven J. Hawking based on a memoir by his ex-wife Jane goes a long way to acknowledging his efforts at pitching that theory to the scientific community.    

Of course that is not the only part the story that gets played out here since, except for nerds and geeks and their hangers-on, a story about a guy and a scientific theory would be a “snorer.” What makes this film’s plotline extraordinary is that Hawking (played by Eddie Redmayne) plugged on while suffering the debilitating effects of motor neuron disease which almost took his life and did take his voice and some other functions. So even if you are a little weak on your late unlamented attempts at understanding high school physics you can still appreciate the human struggle against all odds to survive that this ordeal thrown his way. (He was not expected to live more than a couple of years back in the 1960s when he developed the disease but as of 2015 he is still with us, hats off.)  

Better yet this film avoids the “snorer” problem that Hollywood dreads and which follows films about science guys by putting plenty of romance, even if awkward and geeky romance, in the story-line. Everybody can get into the boy-girl thing (or all the contemporary other relationship combinations which produce a romance) and wonder, star-gazing wonder if you like, how Hawking and his wife, Jane (played by Felicity Jones) got through the whole thing as well as they did, and for as long as they did. Wonder too if we are missing something in that star-gazing when we undercover stuff about the sex lives of those geeky physicists in this film. See this one.

 

June Is Class-War Prisoner Month-Free All The Class War Prisoners!