The Latest From The "Fight For $15"-The Seemingly One-Sided Struggle Continues-It's High Time To Push Back-Push Back Hard-30 For 40 And “Fight For $15” Are The Slogans Of The Day.

The Latest From The "Fight For $15"-The Seemingly One-Sided Struggle Continues-It's High Time To Push Back-Push Back Hard-30 For 40 And “Fight For $15” Are The Slogans Of The Day.

@gimmekimmy

@timfranzen

Click below to link to the Fight For $15 website  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://fightfor15.org/april15/
 

 

Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton a couple of old-time radicals, old-time now in the early 2000s unlike in their youth not being the Great Depression labor radicals who had been their models after a fashion and who helped built the now seemingly moribund unions, (or unions now rather consciously led by union leaders who have no or only attenuated links to past militant labor actions like strikes, plant sit-downs, hot-cargo struck goods, general strikes and such and would go into a dead faint if such actions were forced upon them and are so weakened as to be merely dues paying organizations forwarding monies to the Democratic “friends of labor” Party). They had come of political age as anti-war radicals from the hell-bent street in-your-face 1960s confrontations with the American beast during the Vietnam War reign of hell. Ralph from the hard-shell experience of having fought for the beast in the Central Highlands in that benighted country and who became disgusted with what he had done, his buddies had done, and his government had done to make animals out of them destroying simple peasants catch in a vicious cross-fire and Sam, having lost his closest high school hang around guy, Jeff Mullin, blown away in some unnamed field near some hamlet that he could not pronounce or spell correctly. The glue that brought them together, brought them together for a lifetime friendship and political comity (with some periods of statutory neglect to bring up families in Carver, Massachusetts and Troy, New York respectively) the ill-fated actions on May Day 1971 In Washington when they attempted along with several thousand others to shut down the government if it did not shut down the war. All those efforts got them a few days detention in RFK stadium where they had met almost accidently and steel-strong bonds of brotherhood from then on.     

They had seen high times and ebbs, mostly ebbs once the 1960s waves receded before the dramatic events of 9/11 and more particularly the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003 called off what they had termed the “armed truce” with the United States government over the previous couple of decades. So Ralph and Sam were beside themselves when the powder-puff uprising of the Occupy movement brought a fresh breeze to the tiny American left-wing landscape in the latter part of 2011.  That term “powder puff” not expressing the heft of the movement which was not inconsiderable for a couple of months especially in hotbeds like New York, Boston, L.A. and above all the flagship home away from home of radical politics, San Francisco but the fact that it disappeared almost before it got started giving up the huge long-term fight it was expected to wage to break the banks, break the corporate grip on the world and, try to seek “newer world”). Ralph and Sam were not members in good standing of any labor unions, both having after their furtive anti-war street fights and the ebbing of the movement by about the mid-1970s returned to “normalcy,” Ralph having taken over his father’s electrical shop in Troy when his father retired and Sam had gone back to Carver to expand a print shop that he had started in the late 1960s that had been run by a hometown friend in his many absences. However having come from respectable working-class backgrounds in strictly working-class towns, Carver about thirty miles from Boston and the cranberry bog capital of the world and Ralph in Troy near where General Electric ruled the roost, had taken to heart the advice of their respective grandfathers about not forgetting those left behind, that an injury to one of their own in this wicked old world was an injury to all as the old Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) motto had it. Moreover despite their backing away from the street confrontations of their youth when that proved futile after a time as the Vietnam War finally wound down and yesterday’s big name radicals left for parts unknown they had always kept an inner longing for the “newer world,” the more equitable world where the people who actually made stuff and kept the wheels of society running and their down-pressed allies ruled.   

So Ralph and Sam would during most of the fall of 2011   travel down to the Wall Street “private” plaza (and site of many conflicts and stand-offs between the Occupy forces on the ground and then Mayor Blumberg and his itchy cops) which was the center of the movement on weekends, long weekends usually, to take part in the action after the long drought of such activity both for them personally and for their kind of politics. They were crestfallen to say the least when the thing exploded after Mayor Blumberg and the NYPD the police pulled down the hammer and forcibly disbanded the place (and other city administrations across the country and across the world and police departments doing likewise acting in some concert as it turned out once the dust settled and “freedom of information” acts were invoked to see what the bastards were up to).

Of more concern since they had already known about what the government could do when it decided to pull down the hammer having learned a painfully hard lesson on May Day 1971 and on a number of other occasions later when Ralph and Sam and their comrades decided to get “uppity” and been slapped down more than once although they at least had gone into those actions with their eyes wide open had been the reaction of the “leadership” in folding up the tents (literally and figuratively). Thereafter the movement had imploded from its own contradictions, caught up not wanting to step on toes, to let everybody do their own thing, do their own identity politics which as they also painfully knew had done   much to defang the old movements, refusing out of hand cohering a collective leadership that might give some direction to the damn thing but also earnestly wanting to bring the monster down.

Ralph and Sam in the aftermath, after things had settled down and they had time to think decided to put together a proposal, a program if you like, outlining some of the basic political tasks ahead to be led by somebody. Certainly not by them since radical politics, street politics is a young person’s game and they admittedly had gotten rather long in the tooth. Besides they had learned long ago, had talked about it over drinks at Jack Higgins’ Grille in Boston more than once in their periodic reunions when Ralph came to town, how each generation had to face its tasks in its own way so they would be content to be “elder” tribal leaders and provide whatever wisdom they could, if asked.  Working under the drumbeat of Bob Marley’s Get Up, Stand Up something of a “national anthem” for what went on among the better elements of Occupy are some points that any movement for social change has to address these days and fight for and about as well. Sam, more interested in writing than Ralph who liked to think more than write but who contributed his fair share of ideas to the “program,” wrote the material up and had it posted on various site which elicited a respectable amount of comment at the time. They also got into the old time spirit by participating in the latest up and coming struggle- the fight for a minimum wage of $15 an hour although even that seems paltry for the needs of today’s working people to move up in the world:      

“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! 

******

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.

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

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.” 

Let's Have A Party- The Year 1957

Let's Have A Party- The Year 1957

 

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin: 

 

With an introduction by Sam Lowell

 

I first met Josh Breslin several months after my old corner boy high school friend, the late Peter Paul Markin, brought him around our hang-out, Jack Slack’s bowling alley, in the winter after the summer of love, 1967 (or is it Summer of Love, 1967 I have seen it both ways) out in San Francisco when Josh had gone up on to Russian Hill searching for dope, marijuana at the time the drug of choice among the newly liberated from uptight-ness about the evils of such pleasures, and ran into Markin asking him if he had a joint. Markin, freshly dropped out of college (Boston University) in order to “find himself” had been travelling on one of the ubiquitous psychedelically-painted converted yellow brick road school buses with Captain Crunch (road moniker which we would all take once we hit the road as some form of liberation from tired out old parent-imposed names, the variety and reasons for which could fill an entire book on the “hippie” genealogy of the time) for a few months and had been staying in the park on the hill waiting, waiting for anything at all to happen told Josh “here light this one up, but ‘don’t bogart that joint’ when you are done because we save every twig to build up enough for the pipe.” And with that a 1960s-type friendship started, one that would have them travelling together over the next several years (minus Markin’s two years in the Army in Vietnam but that is a story for another time) until Josh lost touch with him in late 1974 him shortly before he took that last fatal trip to Mexico where he was murdered by parties unknown after a busted drug deal and is now resting in an unmarked grave in potter’s field in Sonora and moaned over to this day by his old friends, including Josh and me.

 

Markin often said, and it proved to be true, that despite a couple of years difference in age and despite the fact that Josh had grown up in Olde Saco in Maine, an old-time textile mill town, his life story, the things that drove him in his younger days were remarkably similar to ours down in North Adamsville, an old industrial town about twenty miles south of Boston. That was why they got along on the road out West and why we who took to the road with Markin later once we got the bug to move along got along with Josh as well. Josh is today an honorary North Adamsville corner boy when we, the remnants still living anyway, get together to speak of those times. (And always wind up with some mention of some madcap, maniacal thing Markin did which only gets us mistier about the bastard these days.)

 

Recently a bunch of us, Frankie Riley, the old corner boy leader now a big-time lawyer in Boston (“of counsel” these days whatever that means other than big dough for saying even word one on the lawyer-o-meter to a client), Jimmy Jenkins, Jack Callahan, Bart Webber, Lefty Malone, Josh and me got together at Jack’s Grille in Cambridge to have a few drinks and swap a few lies. Bart who still lives in growing up town North Adamsville mentioned that while looking up in his attic for something (something old one presumes since that is what attics act as the catch basins for) he spotted his old dusty copy of our yearbook, the Magnet. Naturally that triggered many stories about what did or did happen not back in the day Josh, who is a writer of sorts, a music reviewer mostly these days from what he says, decided after viewing the contents of that fabled item with a little prompting, a little “inside dope” from us, and the memory of what the late Markin told him about the fate of his yearbook to write up something for us to chuckle over. Decided too to tempt the fates by putting the narration in Markin’s “voice.” This one is about a favorite topic of Markin’s, stuff that he would regale us with on misty girl-less, dough-less, car-less corner boy Friday and Saturday night, music, musical trends, and the “deep” meaning of any lyrics that popped into his unwieldy head once he heard something on the radio or fresh from the jukebox at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor where were hung out on those miserable nights (and later, after the pizza parlor changed hands and the new “family-friendly” owners did not want unseemly corner boys hanging their feet off their walls then to Jack Slack’s  bowling alleys where Jack’s son was a classmate of ours). I hope Josh did okay otherwise, moaning over our brother or not, Markin is liable to come after us from that forlorn unmarked grave and give us hell for touching a single word of the eight billion facts he had in his fallen head. 

 

Here is what he had to say which is pretty insightful for a “foreigner”:         


Let's Have A Party- The Year 1957

 

At one time I spilled much ink memory covering, extensively covering, many records compilations from a Rock ‘N’ Rock Era series [that would be, ouch, a classic age of rock and roll series Markin would be talking about now, damn-JB]. A highlight of that series, and the one thing that clearly peaked my interest beyond the songs, or some of the songs, the ones that were able to defy age, and are lyric remembrance etched in my brain, had been the cover artwork that had evoked, and evoked strongly, the themes that dominated our lives, our hubristic teenage lives, in the golden age of rock, say from about the mid-1950s to about the mid-1960s as we watched it unfold (after that things went all over the place, the music and the times both). Things like last dance school dances (and dreams of that she I had been getting sore eyes over all night taking me up on my request for that key dance to make the night worthwhile and dreads of not getting that she for that last one, but in any case god it had better be a slow one in order to make my pitch), lovers’ lanes (down by the seaside sifting sand, against the cold ocean night, against the Seal Rock night, in the back seat of Jimmy’s car, and, well let’s leave it at that, okay since Jimmy Jenkins  might sue me for false advertising, although with fat chance of winning given what I have on that guy and the low-rent girls he hungered after now that he just married Lorraine Parsons, she of the Sunday church novena book and rosary beads crowd, and they “starting a family” as the old saying goes),  drive-in movies (alternative spot for that “and let’s leave it at that” mentioned above), drive-in restaurants (a night cap of burgers and fries after that “and, let’s leave it at that ” hopefully) , summer beach life (watching, intensely watching,  those long-legged college girls home for the summer and restless, freshman year behind them restless, after having dusted the dust from the old town and gotten a little wild at those Frosh mixers everybody who was going to college had heard about and paid serious attention to as a “babe’ magnet trying to look sophisticated but we a few years younger and looking to catch a sly glance just watching high school odd-ball watching between the two yacht clubs where they were preening themselves) and on and on.

 

One part of the series, the one I am thinking of here, driven as it is by year dates, at least as observed through the cover work, seemed to be less concerned with strong old time evocations by flashy artwork but rather used old time photos (Kodak, of ancient memory now that Polaroids and Nikons are in style, of course). Nevertheless sometimes just a simple photograph as appears on the 1957 cover evokes those memories in a more subtle way. Now 1957 was year fraught (nice word, right) with all kinds of perils what with Soviets in that hard-boiled, coiled, foiled red scare “turn in your mommy, if she is a commie (or just for kicks if she denied you something, anything for any reason in that “child-centered” time) Cold War night having blasted American ingenuity and know-how and sent the first satellite up into space and who knew what the hell else they were up to destroy our parents “golden age” dreams. Us, well, we were in thrall to our teen angst, our teen identity crisis, our teen what the hell is this sex business about hormone crazed time of our time and short of some world-wide nuclear explosion where such personal matters would have gone by the boards anyway we could have given a rat’s ass (an old term coined locally by Billie Bradley the king of “the projects” corner boys where I grew up) about that world, when all we knew, all we wanted to know, was whether Betty Bleu or Linda Lou or Peggy Sue was going to show up at some “petting party” and what were we going to do about it. (At the first one nothing since when Betty Bleu did show interest I ran like hell from the “family room” where the party was being held, although that was the last time for a long time I did that when a girl/woman expressed the least interest in me. And later dear Betty and I had plenty of hot kisses and “copped feels” so I did get the hang of it, yes, indeed) So that is the 1957 that I want to talk about, the 1957 of the album cover and of the prospects that Mother Earth would not go to hell in hand-basket before those earth-shattering questions got resolved.  

 

And what does that album cover photograph picture (is that the right way to say it, well you get what I mean-what does it show). Well, Johnny (we’ll just call him that for our purposes here, okay, although it could have been Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Butch, Billy, Ronny, Peter or six thousand other conventional names that when the new age did come in the 1960s we were more than happy to shed and begin again with monikers like Prince of Love, Josh Breslin’s moniker, the Be-Bop Kid, mine, Far-Out Phil, Captains America, Midnight and Crunch and other lesser mock military rankings as almost a joke on the serious action going on in red-infested Vietnam), hair slicked back as was the Elvis-want-to-be style (although no sign of the sneer, that patented Elvis sneer that had many a girl, and not just girls as the wet panties thrown on his stages attested to, thinking midnight dreams about personally taking off his face), no facial hair, jesus, no facial hair, we are not dealing with those low-life reefer mad beat down hipsters, beat beasts bopping around sneering at the squares and I don’t care if big daddy leader Jack Kerouac really meant “beatitude,” mean spiritual beauty when he coined the big beat phrases which drove the edges of youth society in  those years they were persona non grata in the  Amityville night, so no way, that is music for the future, square suited up in sports coat, white shirt, and tie (pants not observed although they had to be black chinos, uncool cuffed or cool uncuffed, and shoes, well, loafers for sure, no silly pennies inserted that was strictly for nerds, thank you, serious nerds). So any one of six zillion guys you would see around town, around school, around America oozing square if for no other reason that that was that, and thinking otherwise didn’t get you anywhere in that good night.  

 

And then there was Susie (ditto Johnny on the name thing although her monikers in the 1960s would reflect royalty rather than military prowess with names like Snow White, Princess Alice, the Czarina, Queen Jane, Countess Clara or frilliness like Mad Alice, Mustang Sally, Olive Oyl, and the like), pulled back pony-tail, blonde, real blonde before that became an issue in boys’ locker rooms, to keep that long hair out of her eyes while fast-dancing with Eddy, Billy and Teddy before lemming on to Johnny , dressed up in her best frilly party dress, long, and not black, not black as night anything for the same reason, the same non-beat in Amityville reason Johnny has not facial hair, (no bobby socks or nylons showing so I cannot discuss that issue here nor will I venture into the girl shoe night any more than I would today into the woman’s shoe night).

 

And they, well, the glue that holds them together is that they are comparing notes on the latest 45s. Nice wholesome kids, white kids just so you know who the record companies were appealing too although most of the best music was black, black and beautiful as the darkest night [like the songs from YouTube that accompanies this sketch-JB]. No mad dog hopheads, or dipsos and no nerds either. Let them go use the library or something.

 

For those not long in the tooth who may have wandered into this review and are not sure why that 45RPM was the size record we played on our old time record players (no, not stereos and, no, not wind-up Victrolas, wise guys) when we wanted to drown out ma, pa, and sibling noises about homework, chores, or just the stuff of everyday life. Each record had a one song A side (the hit) and a one song B side (maybe a hit but usually something to fill the B side grooves), each side a little over two minutes long (Jim Morrison on The End or Bob Dylan on Desolation Row would have gone apoplectic if they had to face those limits although they too grew up on 45s). That idea didn’t last too long before responding to the crush of the market they started making LPs, records with several songs on each side. I have given enough time to the subject of record size in any case.

 

And in the year 1957 what musical chooses might the pair be comparing on this night, this house party night from a look at the décor, maybe some Jenny’s birthday party (or Chrissie’s, Chrissie who gave me my first kiss, not real, not real as far as I know, since it was more like a peck on the lips and she shortly thereafter became our corner boy king Frankie Riley’s girl), or maybe on other nights, school dance nights. As usual another round in the “battle of the sexes” will be played out just like from teen time immemorial, or whenever that guy who invented teen-hood invented it a while back. At least records and record player time immemorial. While Buddy Holly, Patsy Kline, Rickey Nelson, and the Everly Brothers have some spin in the early going the real fight, the real important fight, school dance or house party, is what song will be played for the last dance. Yes, the key last dance to see whether the evening continues when they hold each other tight after a night of apart self-expression fast rock and roll dancing. So the battle really boils down to Could This Be Magic? by The Dubs or Happy Happy Birthday Baby by the Tune Weavers and if Johnny does not want to be lonely tonight he better make the right choice. Good luck, Brother Johnny, good luck. [Listen below and see who wins the “battle”-JB]

 

In Boston- Somerville 18 Need Support

In Boston- Somerville 18 Need Support
by Somerville 18	14 Jul 2015
On January 15, 2015, the #Somerville18, a group of Pan-Asians, Latinos, and white people, some of whom identify as queer or transgender, stood in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement by temporarily blocking the I-93 highway in Massachusetts. The demonstration called for the end to racial profiling, incarceration, murders, and other forms of police violence against Black people in the United States and beyond.
Click on image for a larger version
Now District Attorney Ryan has decided to harshly retaliate against the #Somerville18 with criminal charges and outrageous restitution fines for exercising their First Amendment rights, which guarantee freedom of expression. The #Somerville18 believes DA Ryan's excessive punishments reinforce a nationwide intimidation tactic to suppress demonstrations, particularly those in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. Take action now to stand with the #Somerville18 and push back against the criminalization of demonstrations in Boston and beyond. Tell DA Ryan that 90 days jail time, 18 months probation, and $14,580 in restitution fine are unreasonable punishments for demonstrations. DA Ryan's hostile punishments set a dangerous precedent that restricts civic participation and violates First Amendment rights. Tell DA Ryan to drop the charges now! The Reverend Jason Lydon and several other clergy and ministers recently sent a letter to DA Ryan urging her to drop the charges against the 18. DA Ryan can be reached at the phone number for the Middlesex County prosecutor's office, 781-897-8300.

Out Of The Hills And Hollows- With The Bluegrass Band The Lally Brothers In Mind  

 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

 

You know sometimes what goes around comes around as the old-time expression had it. Take for example Sam Lowell’s youthful interest in folk music back in the early 1960s when it crashed out of exotic haunts like Harvard Square, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chi Town and North Beach/Berkeley out in Frisco and ran into a lot of kids, a lot of kids like Sam, who were looking for something different, something that they were not sure of but that smelled, tasted, felt, looked like difference from a kind of one-size-fits-all vanilla existence. Oh sure, every generation in their youth since the days when you could draw a distinction between youth and adulthood and have it count has tried to march to its own symbolic beat but this was different, this involved a big mix of things all jumbled together, political, social, economic, cultural, the whole bag of societal distinctions which would not be settled until the end of the decade, maybe the first part of the next. But what Sam was interested then down there in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston was the music, his interest in the other trends did not come until later, much later long after the whole thing had ebbed. 

The way Sam told it one night at his bi-weekly book club where the topic selected for that meeting had been the musical influences, if any, that defined one’s tastes and he had volunteered to speak since he had just read a book, The Mountain View, about the central place of mountain music, for lack of a better term, in the American songbook was that he had been looking for roots as a kid. Musical roots which were a very big concern for a part of his generation, a generation that was looking for roots, for rootedness not just in music but in literature, art, and even in the family tree. Their parents’ generation no matter how long it had been since the first family immigration wave was in the red scare Cold War post-World War II period very consciously ignoring every trace of roots in order to be fully vanilla Americanized. So his generation had to pick up the pieces not only of that very shaky family tree but everything else that had been downplayed during that period.

Since Sam had tired of the lazy hazy rock and roll that was being produced and which the local rock radio stations were force- feeding him and others like him looking to break out through their beloved transistor radios he started looking elsewhere on the tiny dial for something different. That transistor radio for those not in the know was “heaven sent” for a whole generation of kids in the 1950s who could care less, who hated the music that was being piped into the family living room big ass floor model radio which their parents grew up since it was small, portable and could be held to the ear and the world could go by without bothering you while you were in thrall to the music. That was the start. But like a lot of young people, as he would find out later when he would meet kindred in Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor, Berkeley he had been looking for that something different at just that moment when something called folk music, roots music, actually was being played on select stations for short periods of time each week.

Sam’s lucky station had been a small station, an AM station, from Providence in Rhode Island which he would find out later had put the program on Monday nights from eight to eleven at the request of Brown and URI students who had picked up the folk music bug on trips to the Village (Monday a dead music night in advertising circles then, maybe now too, thus fine for talk shows, community service programs and odd-ball stuff like roots music.) That is where he first heard the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk, a guy named Tom Rush from Harvard whom he would hear in person many times over the years, and another guy, Eric Von Schmidt whom he would meet later in one of the Harvard Square coffeehouses that were proliferating to feed the demand to hear folk music, well, cheaply alone or on a date (basically as he related to his listeners for a couple of bucks at most admission, the price of a cup of coffee to keep in front of you and thus your place, maybe a pastry if alone and just double that up for a date except share the pasty you had your date deal all set for the evening hearing performers perfecting their acts before hitting the A-list clubs).

He listened to it all, liked some of it, other stuff, the more protest stuff he could take or leave depending on the performer but what drew his attention, strangely then was when somebody on radio or on stage performed mountain music, you know, the music of the hills and hollows that came out of Appalachia mainly down among the dust and weeds. Things like Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow, Gold Watch and Chain, Fair and Tender Ladies, Pretty Saro, and lots of instrumentals by guys like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, The Charles River Boys, and some bluegrass bands as well that had now escaped his memory.

This is where it all got jumbled up for him Sam said since he was strictly a city boy, made private fun of the farm boys, the cranberry boggers, who then made up a significant part of his high school and had no interest in stuff like the Grand Ole Opry and that kind of thing, none. Still he always wondered about the source, about why he felt some kinship with the music of the Saturday night red barn, probably broken down, certainly in need of paint, and thus available for the dance complete with the full complement of guitars, fiddles, bass, mandolin and full complement of Jimmy Joe’s just made white lightening, playing plainsong for the folk down in the wind-swept hills and hollows.                                 

As Sam warmed up to his subject he told his audience two things that might help explain his interest when he started to delve into the reasons why fifty years later the sound of that finely-tuned fiddle still beckons him home. The first was that when he had begun his freshman year at Boston University he befriended a guy, Everett Lally, the first day of orientation since he seemed to be a little uncomfortable with what was going on. See Everett was from a small town outside of Wheeling, West Virginia and this Boston trip was only the second time, the first time being when he came up for an interview, he had been to a city larger than Wheeling. So they became friends, not close, not roommate type friends, but they had some shared classes and lived in the same dorm on Bay State Road.

One night they had been studying together for an Western History exam and Everett asked Sam whether he knew anything about bluegrass music, about mountain music (Sam’s term for it Everett was Bill Monroe-like committed to calling it bluegrass). Sam said sure, and ran off the litany of his experiences at Harvard Square, the Village, listening on the radio. Everett, still a little shy, asked if Sam had ever heard of the Lally Brothers and of course Sam said yes, that he had heard them on the radio playing the Orange Blossom Express, Rocky Mountain Shakedown as well as their classic instrumentation version of The Hills of Home.  Everett perked up and admitted that he was one of the Lally Brothers, the mandolin player. Sam was flabbergasted. After he got over his shock Everett told him that his brothers were coming up to play at the New England Bluegrass Festival to be held at Brandeis on the first weekend of October.

Everett invited Sam as his guest. He accepted and when the event occurred he was not disappointed as the Lally Brothers brought the house down. For the rest of that school year Sam and Everett on occasion hung out together in Harvard Square and other haunts where folk music was played since Everett was interested in hearing other kinds of songs in the genre. After freshman year Everett did not return to BU, said his brothers needed him on the road while people were paying to hear their stuff and that he could finish school later when things died down and they lost touch, but Sam always considered that experience especially having access to Everett’s huge mountain music record collection as the lynchpin to his interest.             

Of course once the word got out that Everett Lally was in a bluegrass group, played great mando, could so a fair fiddle and the guitar the Freshman girls at BU drew a bee-line for him, some of them anyway. BU, which later in the decade would be one of the hotbeds of the anti-war movement locally and nationally but then was home to all kinds of different trends just like at campuses around the country just then, was filled with girls (guys too but for my purposes her the girls are what counts) from New York City, from Manhattan, from Long Island who knew a few things about folk music from forays into the Village. Once they heard Everett was a “mountain man,” or had been at Brandeis and had seen him with his brothers, they were very interested in adding this exotic plant to their collections. Everett, who really was pretty shy although he was as interested in girls as the rest of the guys at school were, told Sam that he was uncomfortable around these New York women because they really did treat him like he was from another world, and he felt that he wasn’t. Felt he was just a guy. But for a while whenever they hung out together girls would be around. Needless to say as a friend of Everett’s when there were two interested girls Sam got the overflow. Not bad, not bad at all.        

But there is something deeper at play in the Sam mountain music story as he also told the gathering that night. It was in his genes, his DNA he said. This was something that he had only found out a few years before. On his father’s side, his grandfather, Homer, whom he had never met since after his wife, Sam’s grandmother, Sara died he had left his family, all grown in any case, without leaving a forwarding address, had actually been born and lived his childhood down in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, down near the fabled Hazard of song and labor legend before moving to the North after World War I. Here is the funny part though when his father and mother Laura were young after World War II and at wits end about where his grandfather might be they travelled down to Prestonsburg in search of him. While they stayed there for a few months looking Sam had been conceived although they left after getting no results on their search, money was getting low, and there were no father jobs around so he had been born in the South Shore Hospital in Massachusetts. So yes, that mountain music just did not happen one fine night but was etched in his body, the whirlwind sounds on Saturday night down amount the hills and hollows with that sad fiddle playing one last waltz to end the evening.                  

 

From The Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty Website- Good News From Connecticut On Death Penalty Abolition

Click on the headline to link to the Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty website.

Markin comment:

I have been an opponent of the death penalty for as long as I have been a political person, a long time. While I do not generally agree with the thrust of the Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty strategy for eliminating the death penalty nation-wide almost solely through legislative and judicial means (think about the 2011 Troy Davis case down in Georgia for a practical example of the limits of that strategy) I am always willing to work with them when specific situations come up. In any case they have a long pedigree extending, one way or the other, back to Sacco and Vanzetti and that is always important to remember whatever our political differences.
**************
Hugo Bedau, Philosopher Who Opposed Death Penalty, Dies at 85

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

Published: August 16, 2012

Hugo Bedau, a philosopher who preferred to wrestle with the knottiest of public policy issues rather than reason from the remove of academia — most notably in confronting capital punishment, which he opposed as immoral, unjust and ineffective — died on Monday in Norwood, Mass. He was 85.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Constance E. Putnam. Professor Bedau’s half-century career encompassed several cycles in the national debate over the death penalty: its decline and eventual rejection by the Supreme Court in 1972, its resurrection by the court later that decade, and its suspension in several states more recently. His most ambitious work, “The Death Penalty in America,” revised several times, has been a standard text since it was first published in 1964.

Professor Bedau (pronounced beh-DOUGH) took up the issue as well in “The Case Against the Death Penalty,” a pamphlet distributed widely for many years by the American Civil Liberties Union. Written with the help of Henry Schwarzschild, a former director of the group’s Capital Punishment Project, the publication brought together a number of arguments against the death penalty: that it failed to deter crime (using supporting data); that it was fraught with racial bias, wrongful convictions and excessive financial costs; and that it was ultimately an act of “barbarity.”

“The history of capital punishment in American society clearly shows the desire to mitigate the harshness of this penalty by narrowing its scope,” the pamphlet said in a section titled “Unfairness.” “Discretion, whether authorized by statutes or by their silence, has been the main vehicle to this end. But when discretion is used, as it always has been, to mark for death the poor, the friendless, the uneducated, the members of racial minorities and the despised, then discretion becomes injustice. Thoughtful citizens, who in contemplating capital punishment in the abstract might support it, must condemn it in actual practice.”

The essay, heavily footnoted, was less than 9,000 words long. Professor Bedau’s curriculum vitae was more than 13,000.

“We called him the dean of death penalty scholarship,” said Michael Radelet, a death penalty expert at the University of Colorado who began working with Professor Bedau in the 1980s. “Bedau was the first guy to put it all together and the first to make the general empirical argument against the death penalty — that is, a little race, a little deterrent, a little innocence.”

Hugo Adam Bedau was born on Sept. 23, 1926, in Portland, Ore., to Hugo Adam Bedau and Laura Romeis Bedau. (His parents chose not to name him Hugo Jr.) Young Hugo grew up in the San Francisco area. His father, who did not go to college, had a small library in which Hugo often spent time. He briefly studied naval science at the University of Southern California through the Navy’s V-12 program for officers but was discharged in 1946, after the war ended and before he had graduated.

He received a bachelor’s degree from University of Redlands in Southern California and did his graduate work in philosophy at Boston University and Harvard. The title of his doctoral thesis at Harvard was “The Concept of Thinking.”

Professor Bedau lectured at several universities but spent most of his career in the Boston area as an anchor of the philosophy department at Tufts, beginning in 1966. Among the many awards he received was the Abolitionist Award, given in 1989 by the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

“He articulated the case against the death penalty as well as anyone ever has,” Paul G. Cassell, a law professor, former federal judge and noted proponent of the death penalty, said in an e-mail.

Professor Bedau’s previous marriage, to the former Jan Mastin, ended in divorce. Besides Ms. Putnam, whom he married in 1990, he is survived by four children from his first marriage: Mark, Paul and Guy Bedau and Lauren Bedau Evans; two sisters, Carol Bell and Renee Larsen; and five grandchildren. He lived in Concord, Mass.

Ms. Putnam, a medical historian, said Professor Bedau was teaching at Princeton in the 1950s when the New Jersey Legislature was weighing measures in support of the death penalty. Struck by how little public debate the issue seemed to generate, he began to research capital punishment and eventually became immersed.

“It was anger, disappointment and frustration over discovering that something this significant in the so-called life of a society was going through the Legislature with so little public discussion or debate,” Ms. Putnam said.

Professor Bedau eventually testified on the issue before state legislatures and Congress, spoke to countless library groups, and delivered a series of lectures in 1994 as the Romanell-Phi Beta Kappa professor of philosophy while at Tufts. The lectures were collected in a book, “Making Mortal Choices,” published by Oxford University Press in 1997.

“He wasn’t a front-line protester; that wasn’t his role,” Ms. Putnam said. “His contribution was clarity of thinking.”

*On The Anniversary Of The Execution- The Trial Of Sacco And Vanzetti- The Case That Will Not Die, Nor Should It

Click on title to link to legal site for information about the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti- The case that will not die, nor should it.

*From The Archives-The Funerals Of Sacco And Vanzetti-The Case That Will Not Die, Nor Should It

Click on title to link to a YouTube film clip of the funerals Of Sacco and Vanzetti executed by the State of Massachusetts on August 23,1927. Never forgive, never forget this injustice.

*Sacco and Vanzetti-Class War Prisoners in the Dock, Circa 1920

Click on title to link to Sacco and Vanzetti commemoration site with links to YouTube.

BOOK REVIEW

Honor the Memory of Sacco and Vanzetti on this the 81st Anniversary of their execution by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Sacco and Vanzetti, Bruce Watson, Viking, New York, 2007

I like to put each item about the Sacco and Vanzetti case that I review in historical context with this well-worn standard first paragraph of mine. It, I believe, holds up today as in the past- Those familiar with the radical movement know that at least once in every generation a political criminal case comes up that defines that era. One thinks of the Haymarket Martyrs in the 19th century, the Scottsboro Boys in the 1930's, the Rosenburgs in the post-World War II Cold War period and today Mumia Abu-Jamal. In America after World War I when the Attorney General Palmer-driven ‘red scare’ brought the federal government’s vendetta against foreigners, immigrants and militant labor fighters to a white heat that generation's case was probably the most famous of them all, Sacco and Vanzetti. The exposure of the tensions within American society that came to the surface as a result of that case is the subject of the book by Professor Bruce Watson under review here.

In the year 2008 one, like myself, who openly proclaims partisanship for the heroic memory of Sacco and Vanzetti when looking for a book to help instruct a new generation about the case is not after all this time afraid of a little partisanship by its author. One is also looking to see if, given advances in modern criminology and technology, those sources have presented any new information that would change the judgments of history. That is apparently not the case with Professor Watson’s book. It is rather another garden variety narrative of the events that have been covered elsewhere by partisans on either side of the divide on the question of the guilt or innocence of the pair. Nevertheless it is good to have an updated narrative so that the youth will know that the pressing issues around the case have not gone away.

Professor Watson has presented a good description of the events that led up to the Sacco and Vanzetti trial in a Dedham, Massachusetts court presided over by an old WASP figure, Judge Webster Thayer. He details the hard work lives of the two Italian immigrants, the problems with foreigners especially South Europeans like them trying to gain a toehold in America, the future troubles to be brought on by their anarchist beliefs and more damagingly their departure for Mexico in 1917 to avoid being drafted into the American army after its entry into World War I.

Professor Watson further links the personal trials and tribulation of Sacco and Vanzetti with the general political atmosphere after World War I with its wave of anarchist bombings, the victory of the Russian Revolution and the response of capitalist America with the Attorney-General Palmer-led “ Red Scare, Part I”. He further details the South Braintree payroll robbery that set in motion the events of the next seven years that would bring world-wide attention to the cause of the two beleaguered anarchists. He gives the factual events of the day of the robbery and double murders, the subsequent search for the robbers, the narrowing of the chase to these two who were found to be armed at a later date in a very different context and their arrest and indictments for murder.

Needless to say any narrative of the Sacco and Vanzetti case needs to pay close attention to the trial itself, the personalities of the players and the evidence. In the background one has to look at the state of the law, especially its procedural aspects, at that time concerning capital punishment and further the social climate against foreigners, specifically Italians here. Watson, more than most accounts, gives special emphasis to chief trial defense lawyer Fred Moore and his various maneuvers, intrigues and, frankly, mistakes.

Of course, the heart of the book is an account of the appeals both legal and political throughout the seven year period. That included various strategies from calls for gubernatorial clemency to mass strikes by labor so the whole litany of class struggle defense policies gets a workout in the case. Although Professor Watson does a creditable job of describing these efforts as far as he goes I object, on political grounds, to his short shrift of the work of the Communist International and its class defense organization the International Labor Defense in publicizing the case. Who do you think brought the masses of workers out world-wide? It was not those Brahmin ladies on Beacon Hill, well-intentioned or not. This is certainly a subject for further comment by any reader of these lines.

The other point that I object to is Watson’s agnostic approach to the question of the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti. At this far remove it is not necessary to be skittish about the question of their guilt or innocence in a legal sense. There is, obviously, not quite the sense of urgency of the call today for Mumia Abu Jamal’s freedom rather than retrial. However, although 80 years separate the two cases there is a steady tendency to limit justice in these cases to calls for retrial. However, in both cases the parties were innocent so the appropriate call would have been and is for freedom. This political ostrich act by Professor Watson, allegedly in the interest of being ‘objective’ and 'letting the new generation decide for itself', does a tremendous disservice to the memories of these class war fighters.

Nevertheless, this is a worthy book to use as a primer toward understanding the background to that long ago case. The end notes are helpful as is the bibliography for further research. Additionally, unlike Professor Watson’s excellent book Bread and Roses that I have previously reviewed in this space here he stays more closely with the subject and avoids bringing in every possible historical fact that might tangentially relate to the case. As always, until ultimate justice in done in the Sacco and Vanzetti case honor their memories today.

*On The Anniversary Of Their Execution- From The Archives-The Funerals Of Sacco And Vanzetti-The Case That Will Not Die, Nor Should It

Click on title to link to a YouTube film clip of the funerals Of Sacco and Vanzetti executed by the State of Massachusetts on August 23,1927. Never forgive, never forget this injustice.

*On The Anniversary Of The Execution- The Trial Of Sacco And Vanzetti- The Case That Will Not Die, Nor Should It

Click on title to link to a legal site for information about the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti- The case that will not die, nor should it.

*On The Anniversary Of The Execution- The Trial Of Sacco And Vanzetti- The Case That Will Not Die, Nor Should It

Click on title to link to legal site for information about the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti- The case that will not die, nor should it.

Artist's Corner- On The Anniversary Of Their Execution-Ben Shahn's "The Passion Of Sacco And Vanzetti"

Click on the headline to link to a viewing of artist Ben Shahn's The Passion Of Sacco And Vanzetti.

http://www.peacehost.net/PacifistNation/SVpic.htm

Markin comment:

As we commemorate the 85th anniversary of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1927 this comment is easy. Those, like artist Ben Shahn, who honor Sacco and Vanzetti are kindred spirits.

*On The Anniversary Of Their Execution- From The Archives-The Funerals Of Sacco And Vanzetti-The Case That Will Not Die, Nor Should It

Click on title to link to a YouTube film clip of the funerals Of Sacco and Vanzetti executed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on August 23, 1927. Never forgive, never forget this injustice.

On The Anniversary Of The Execution- The Trial Of Sacco And Vanzetti- The Case That Will Not Die, Nor Should It

Click on title to link to a legal site for information about the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti- The case that will not die, nor should it.

Veterans For Peace Weekly E-Mail

Join or Renew Membership | Donate | Chapter Contacts | Online Store
	Friday, August 21, 2015 From Japan to Vietnam, Radiation and Agent Orange Survivors Deserve Justice From the U.S. by Marjorie Cohn, VFP  Advisory Board Member We have just marked anniversaries of the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the US government against the people of Japan and Vietnam. Seventy years ago, on August 6, 1945, the U.S. military unleashed an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing at least 140,000 people. Three days later, the United States dropped a second bomb, on Nagasaki, which killed 70,000. And 54 years ago, on August 10, 1961, the US military began spraying Agent Orange in Vietnam. It contained the deadly chemical dioxin, which has poisoned an estimated 3 million people throughout that country.  <More> Back to Top Phil Donahue Joins VFP Advisory Board Phil Donahue, a big supporter of VFP since the 80s, has joined VFP's Advisory Board. View a full list of  Advisory Board members. Back to Top Join VFP at the Picnic For Peace On August 30th At the White House Congress has to vote on the Iran nuclear deal by September 17, and we need your help to ensure that they vote in favor of this historic agreement. Popular Resistance and Code Pink are hosting a Picnic For Peace with Iran event in DC to bring together different sectors of the community who care about peace for a fun action that is visible to the press. Veterans For Peace is organizing a table for the picnic. Please join us at our table. RSVP here. WHEN:  August 30, 2015 at 4pm – 6pm WHERE:  Lafayette Park 16th St & Pennsylvania Ave NW Washington, DC , DC 20006 United States Google map and directions For more information contact the national office at 314-725-6005. Back to Top Travel Opportunities for Activists We will embark on our third VFP trip to Cuba in January 2016. Members and  supporters of our message of peace are welcome to join us.  However, please be advised that we take 15-20 people. Our tours are led by VFP member and Cuban documentary film maker  Jim Ryerson, who has been to the island more than 25 times.  If you are interested, please get on our mailing list. Like the other 2 trips, this one will sell out. Here is the itinerary    http://cubaexplorer.com/tours/jrjan/ Password: jrc  (Click on Book Now to see prices) Location Sponsored by Dates              Contact for Additional Information Palestine Code Pink Nov 1-8, 2015 Visit the Code Pink website Cuba Code Pink Nov 20-29, 2015 Visit the Code Pink website Cuba Jim Ryerson Jan 2016 For more information email Jim Ryerson at jim@cubaconnections.org.. Cuba Code Pink Feb 2016 Visit the Code Pink website Cuba Code Pink May 2016 Visit the Code Pink website Palestine Interfaith Peacebuilders May 21 -Jun 1 2016 For more information email emily@IFPB.org Palestine Palestine Jul 16 - Jul 29 2016 For more information email emily@IFPB.org Palestine Palestine Oct 24 - Nov 6 2016 For more information email emily@IFPB.org Back to Top		In This Issue: From Japan to Vietnam, Radiation and Agent Orange Survivors Deserve Justice From the U.S. Phil Donahue Joins VFP Advisory Board Join The Picnic For Peace On August 30th At the White House Travel Opportunities for Activists Back by popular demand - Vietnam Full Disclosure Shirts Replanting by Kathy Kelly Member/Chapter Highlights Upcoming VFP Endorsed Actions/Events Back by popular demand - Vietnam Full Disclosure Shirts The ‪#‎VietnamFullDisclosure‬ shirts are available again, in both a hoodie and  t-shirt styles. Order your shirt by September 1st! American Apparel Hoodie - $17 Gildan 8 oz Heavy Blend Hoodie - $30 Order yours today! 2015 marks 50 years since U.S. ground troops entered the war in Vietnam -- and 40 years since they left! Wear this beautiful apparel to call for all commemorations to offer Full Disclosure of the Vietnam War. Back to Top Replanting by Kathy Kelly Speaking on behalf of indigenous people in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, earlier this summer, Pope Francis apologized for the role the Catholic Church played in oppressing Latin America’s indigenous people. He called for a worldwide grass roots movement that would shatter global corporate abuses of “the new colonialism.”  Political elites in the U.S. should follow his lead and apologize for the genocidal destruction U.S. people waged against indigenous peoples.  They should look toward indigenous people for guidance about ways to make reparations. In early August, people assembled outside of the Los Alamos nuclear weapon laboratories listened to Beata Tsosie Pena’s advice and perspective during a gathering organized by Campaign Nonviolence.  <More> Back to Top Member/Chaper Highlights VFP Chapter 49 in Indianapolis has worked hard to promote Peace With Iran, including meeting with Sen. Donnelly’s staff and asking you to make your voice hear for peaceful alternatives to conflict.  It paid off and the Senator is supporting the agreement.<More> Harold Trainer, member of VFP Louisville, KY Chapter 168 wrote Letter to the Editor entitled Stop Pay Cuts For the Troops  <More> Back to Top Upcoming VFP Endorsed Actions/Events Aug 27 - 28  - Anniversary of the Kellogg-Briand Pact Sep 21 - International Peace Day in your city Oct 7  - Anniversary of U.S. Invasion of Afghanistan Oct 9-24 - Maine Walk For Peace Nov 20-22, 2015 - SOA Watch 25th Anniversary Vigil Back to Top Did you know? In 1988, VFP proposed the "Combined Statement of Veterans" calling for an end to war as a instrument of state policy and it was signed  on  Jan 21st  by  VFP,  Veterans  Against  Nuclear  Arms  (VANA)  of  Canada,  and  the  Soviet  War  Veterans Committee.  In  future  years,  numerous  other  national  veterans  organizations  from  around  the  globe  also  endorse  the statement.
Forward to a Friend Veterans For Peace, 1404 N. Broadway, St. Louis, MO 63102   Veterans For Peace appreciates your tax-exempt donations. We also encourage you to join our ranks.