For The Frontline Defenders Of The Working Class!-Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up!”

 

An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The International Working Class Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Ralph Morris and Sam Lowell a couple of old-time radicals, old-time now not being the Great Depression labor radicals who had been their models after a fashion and who helped built the now seemingly moribund unions but anti-war radicals from the hell-bent street in-your-face 1960s confrontations with the American beast during the Vietnam War reign of hell 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 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”). Although 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, New York when he retired and Sam had gone back to Carver to expand a print shop that he had started in the late 1960, but 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, and 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 falloff 2011   travel down to the Wall Street plaza 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 the then reigning mayor 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). Of more concern since they had already known about what the government could do when it decided to pull down the hammer was thereafter when the movement 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 did 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 even over drinks at Jack Higgin’s Grille more than once, how each generation will 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. Here 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.       

 

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, those who have just plain quit looking for work and critically those who are working jobs beneath their skill levels was this high in the American labor force, although it is admittedly down from the Great Recession of 2008-09 highs. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around to all who want and need it. 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 when the union-run hiring hall ruled supreme in manning the jobs 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 first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling, where, and at what skill level,  and equitably divide up current work.

Here is the beauty of the scheme, what makes it such a powerful propaganda tool-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 and less in the formerly pivotal private industries like auto production.  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. (Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, the North American auto industry employed almost a million workers but only a third or less are unionized whereas in the old days the industry was union tight.)

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 service-oriented  economy. Everyone should 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 center workers, the place where the whole thing comes together. We have seen mostly unsuccessful organizing of individual retail stores and victimizations of local union organizers. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone, probably Bart Webber in his more thoughtful moments,  once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant mainstay of the run to the bottom capitalist ethos. Well, as to the latter point 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. Defeat all “right to work” legislation. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.

*** Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray, the very 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, make that the very rich but don’t forgot to include them on the fringes of the one percent and poor has risen even more in this period. For those bogus fruitless efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea presented, an old idea going back to the initial formation of the working class in America, in those elections was that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor” and the Republicans are the 666 beasts but the Obama administration does not take a back seat to the elephants on this one. 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. They always have their hands out.

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. One egregious example from the recent past from around the time of the Occupy movement where some of tried to link up the labor movement with the political uprising- 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 when the deal goes 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 Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle when some form of general strike was required to break the anti-union backs (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, we argued, Sam more than I did since he had been closer to the initial stage if the opposition 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 (common moniker for the 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! Stop The Bombings In Syria, Iraq, Yemen! Stop The Arms Shipments To The Middle East Especially To Israel and Saudi Arabia! Defend The Palestinian People-End The Blockade of Gaza-Israel Out Of The Occupied Territories. And as always since 2001 Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of Every Single U.S./Allied Troops (And The Mercenaries) From Afghanistan!  

U.S. Hands Off Iran! Hands Off Syria!- Despite a certain respite recently during the Iran nuclear arms talks  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 and Syria 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 us we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalists 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, like Saudi Arabia and France over the recent period 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 the 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 whatever political disagreements we may have with the Cuban leadership like Cuba, and whatever their other internal political problems caused in no small part the fifty plus year U.S. blockade, 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 already 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 a big chuck from the bloated military budget and the bank bail-out money, things like that, 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 into 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!

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Bob Marley Get Up, Stand Up Lyrics

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!

Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!

Preacher man, don't tell me,

Heaven is under the earth.

I know you don't know

What life is really worth.

It's not all that glitters is gold;

'Alf the story has never been told:

So now you see the light, eh!

Stand up for your rights. come on!

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!

Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!

Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!

Most people think, Great god will come from the skies,

Take away everything
And make everybody feel high.

But if you know what life is worth,

You will look for yours on earth:

And now you see the light,
You stand up for your rights. jah!

Get up, stand up! (jah, jah! )

Stand up for your rights! (oh-hoo! )

Get up, stand up! (get up, stand up! )

Don't give up the fight! (life is your right! )

Get up, stand up! (so we can't give up the fight! )

Stand up for your rights! (lord, lord! )

Get up, stand up! (keep on struggling on! )

Don't give up the fight! (yeah! )

We sick an' tired of-a your ism-skism game -

Dyin' 'n' goin' to heaven in-a Jesus' name, lord.

We know when we understand:

Almighty god is a living man.

You can fool some people sometimes,

But you can't fool all the people all the time.

So now we see the light (what you gonna do?),

We gonna stand up for our rights! (yeah, yeah, yeah! )

So you better: Get up, stand up! (in the morning! git it up! )

Stand up for your rights! (stand up for our rights! )

Get up, stand up!

Don't give up the fight! (don't give it up, don't give it up! )

Get up, stand up! (get up, stand up! )

Stand up for your rights! (get up, stand up! )

Get up, stand up! (... )

Don't give up the fight! (get up, stand up! )

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We Don’t Want Your Ism-Skism Thing- Dreadlocks Delight- “One Love: The Very Best of Bob Marley And The Wailers”- A CD Review By Ralph Morris (2012)

One Love: The Very Best of Bob Marley And The Wailers, Bob Marley And The Wailers, UTV Records, 2001
 

Admit it, back in the late seventies and early eighties we all had, Sam and me included, our reggae minute, at least a minute anyway. And the center of that minute, almost of necessity, had to be a run-in with the world of Bob Marley and the Wailers, probably I Shot The Sheriff. Some of us stuck with that music and moved on to its step-child be-bop, hip-hop when that moved onto the scene. Others like me just took it as a world music cultural moment and put the records (you know records, those black vinyl things, right?) away after a while. And that was that.

Well not quite. Of late the Occupy movement, the people risen, has done a very funny musical thing, at least funny to my ears when I heard it. They, along with the old labor song, Solidarity Forever, and, of course Brother Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land , have resurrected Bob Marley’s up-from-under fight song, Get Up, Stand Up to fortify the sisters and brothers against the American imperial monster beating down on all of us and most directly under the police baton and tear gas canister. And that seems, somehow, eminently right. More germane here it has gotten me to dust off those old records and give Brother Marley another hear. And you should too if you have been remiss of late with such great songs as (aside from those mentioned already) No Woman, No Cry, Jamming, One Love/People Get Ready (yah, the old Chambers Brother tune), and Buffalo Soldier. And stand up and fight too.

Originally Posted 10th February 2012 on Amazon  

On Veterans Day-There Is A Wall In Washington …..With The Brothers Under The Bridge In Mind

There Is A Wall In Washington …..With The Brothers Under The Bridge In Mind

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Ralph Morris shed a tear that day, that hot sweaty humid even for Washington July day, an average Vietnam sweat day back in the day which he still wondered how he survived, since he a Northern climes boy would perspire even lifting a few bags of groceries as a kid and learned the magic of deodorants early on, down at the black granite (he could not say even now, out loud, out loud in public anyway Vietnam War Memorial so “black granite”). Shed more than one tear for his lost comrades, his fallen fellow soldiers, from those now receding but not forgotten years. Every time he went to Washington which over the previous few years had been mainly to protest something, the endless wars, the degradation of the environment, or the struggle for marriage equality he made sure that he paid his respects whatever the psychic drama he would feel for some time after. That last reason, the marriage equality one, the reason he was here this time, by the way,  ironic proving some things can change in this wicked old world since he would often think with a flush of red about the days when he and his corner boys who hung around Miller’s Diner in the Tappan section of Troy, New York would mercilessly fag/dyke bait anybody who seemed the least bit homosexual (“light on their feet” a common expression for guys in those days). Did a couple of nasty things too to such people. Jesus. Every time though whatever the reason that he was in the nation’s capital Ralph would force himself to go to the far end of the National Mall to shed his tears, and remember.   

Remember Jimmy Jenkins from across the street, Van Dorn Street, in Troy, a good guy whom he had hung around in those Miller Diner’s days who, aside for his leadership of the fag/dyke baiting antics was a straight-shooter, would have your back in any situation and could back it up with plenty of two hundred and twenty pounds of pure heft and power, nothing fatty about him. Nothing fatty about his stance in the world, a seriously patriotic kid, at least in those days when red-baiting anybody who said anything left of Ghenis Khan was suspected by him of being a “commie dupe” and subject to abuse only slightly less than fags and dykes, who when the word went out in 1965 for volunteers to stop the “red menace” in Vietnam was gung-ho, enlisted specifically as an infantryman figuring to get his share of kills and glory.

Ralph wasn’t sure, since he had lost contact with Jimmy after he went into the service and Ralph had drifted into his father’s high skill electrical business, whether he had changed his mind “in country,” probably not he was that kind of guy. Jimmy was one of the first guys from around Albany who took the hit, took it early in the war when such casualties were seen as part of the price of righteous battle, took some awful death from the reports back down in the Mekong Delta where “Charlie” ruled both day and night. Charlie the name given to the Viet Cong enemy first with derision by the American soldiers when the build-up in that country looked like a cakewalk and later with some begrudging respect when it turned out he was willing to fight like hell for his land. In other parts of the country he, Charlie, ruled only at night, mostly. Something the Americans could never break for any length of time and all the wasted Jimmys could not change that. Yeah a tear for old Jimmy, and a trembling hand too.

Remember Tyrone Young and Sammy Davis, a couple of black kids from Harlem in his own unit up in the bloody Central Highlands. A couple of kids, kids who did not know each other back on the block around 125^th Street but who had been tight right through Basic and Advanced Infantry Training and wound up in the same unit as Ralph had. A couple of kids who saved his “white ass” (their term) a couple of time before they got waylaid on a patrol when they all were on patrol out in the “boonies,” where they were on the point and the unit, at company strength for this action, was overrun by a battalion-sized DNV unit which had run in their unit by accident (at least that was the story from HQ when the Captain tried to explain why they were surprised and why guys like Tyrone and Sammy, just kids, “bought it” that day). Ralph always thought it was funny that Tyrone and Sammy pulled point whoever the Captain was. His unit had had three in the eighteen months he was “in country,” that last six months an extension to get out a few months early if he was still alive and that was the sole reason since by then he had become, quietly, very quietly, anti-war since he, like every    guy, including Tyrone and Sammy, did not want to pull point duty since there was a greater danger of booby-traps and sniper action. It took a long while to figure out that blacks were pulling that duty a lot more than white guys and there was a racial component to that situation.

Funny, maybe ironic, since lately Ralph had become through his association with Veterans For Peace a supporter of the booming Black Lives Matter movement a thing that in his youth in the early 1960s when all hell was breaking loose in the Civil Rights movement, North and South, would have been impossible, totally impossible since he had spent those years standing side by side with his father, Ralph Morris, Senior to keep blacks from moving into the Tappan section of Troy. It took ten thousand nightly conversations with Tyrone and Sammy who had some sympathies with the Black Panthers although they were more just a couple of street kids to shake his white racist attitudes a little (and their black separatist attitudes and fear and distrust of whitey, him). It took that couple of “saving his white ass” situations though to get him straight that they were his brothers and not just some woe begotten street brothers back home in the “real” world. So a couple of tears and a trembling hand touching their names on that black granite.  

Remember Jed Caldwell, a white guy from Maine, another guy who “saved his ass” once (Jeff’s term but not with “white” in front of ass this time though). Jed loved motorcycles (as it seemed every guy he or I ran into from up there), had a real passion for them not so much in the Hell’s Angel gang bang kickass sense but for the sheer joy of riding out in the misty Route One nights along the secluded (then) areas around Mechanicsville above Bar Harbor with this exotic Norton, a British bike Ralph understood. Just a poor tough kid, probably the toughest guy in the unit, from rural Maine. Here’s the kick though Jed’s passion wound up costing him his life when you think about it. Or maybe Jeff was just a “doomed” guy like Sammy always used to say, would say “doomed n----r” except white. See that bike cost plenty, plenty of money which he did not have since he was a son of a lobsterman, a father whom he hadn’t then seen in years. So Jed took to robbing stores, variety stores, gas stations, a couple of small banks which you could do then up in rural Maine Ralph guessed. Did it boldly from what he said like some small-time John Dellinger until he finally got caught. Got caught at a First National Bank heist solo, his only method of work, and at seventeen in 1966 got the “choice.” The judge choice-three to five for armed robbery or “go into the service.” Since Jeff said he wasn’t built for prisons and places like that he took the latter offer. Yeah shed a tear and another trembling hand on black granite for Jeff.              

Remember also a few years back hearing a song by his “Arky Angel,” Iris Dement whose Wall In Washington always evoked strong emotions in him when he heard the lyrics. The gist of those lyrics, lyrics written long after the conflict was over about those who had been left behind to take their hands and “trace” the name of their fallen loved one, a bereft father, a waiting girlfriend, a fretful mother, or a son who had never, and would never, know his father. Strong stuff.         

That “tracing” business something that he had constantly witnessed at the “black granite” with all kinds of grieving left behinds putting shaky hands to the wall and etching like the effort to trace the sacred name would bring the fallen back. Ralph said he could never bring himself to do that “tracing” for it was hard enough for his to press a kiss to the fallen he went to remember. Just brought up too many sad memories of guys who were as alive as he was then and now sat in some lonely graveyard in the towns and cities across America. So shed a tear for the fallen, and for his inability to trace those names too.    

Remember, always, always remember Kenny Morris, his younger brother Kenny, who had actually joined before him (theirs also a patriotic family just like all the others back then, maybe questioning the government’s actions but not challenging them), had served with distinction in Vietnam (unlike him who was just lucky and had guys who saved his ass, white or otherwise) and got out alive like him. Got back to the “real” world in one piece for a while. Did okay for a couple of years, then the other shoe fell. Something snapped, some horror he had witnessed or took part in the war got to him. It started when he began setting fire alarms off at first overlooked by the family (and the justice system which had a skewed sense of how to honor service). Then the midnight walks naked going down Tappan Street. Eventually VA help, with drugs and therapy which kept his demons away, for a while. Then when that in the end failed institutionalization for a while. Kenny was eventually released when the trend was to get guys out of mental institutions. Then one night he jumped off the Mohawk River Bridge. Gone. So yeah shed a tear for Kenny too. Yeah, there is a wall in Washington although not for Kenny….but maybe there should be.      

 

From The Chelsea Manning Archives

Report: Boston-Park Street Station Weekly Vigil-May 30th-Five Years In Jail Is Enough, More Than Enough- President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!

 

Chelsea Manning’s Five Years Of Confinement

A spirited rally on behalf of freedom for the heroic Wikileaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning was held in Boston at the historic protest spot, Park Street Station on the Common, on May 30^th to note the fifth anniversary of her incarceration by the United States government (three plus years pre-trial and almost two on the conviction). Member of Veterans for Peace and other organizations stood in solidarity with efforts to win freedom for Private Manning via the Amnesty International/Chelsea Manning Support Network on-line petition campaign to pressure President Obama to pardon her.      

 

Taken into Army MP custody on May 27, 2010 and later held for months under torturous conditions at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia Chelsea Manning was tried and sentenced in a military court-martial at Fort Meade in Maryland to 35 years in August 2013 for releasing many military documents through Wikileaks about U.S. crimes in the wars in Iraq

Chelsea Manning 'feels like a freak' with 2-inch prison haircut, sues Army

Michael Isikoff

Chief Investigative Correspondent

November 09, 2015

U.S. soldier Bradley Manning (left) leaving a military court facility on July 30, 2013, in Fort Meade, Md., and an undated photo courtesy of the U.S. Army showing Chelsea Manning. (Photo: AFP)

It would be hard to imagine the saga of Chelsea Manning getting any stranger — or more poignant. But it did one night in September when the former U.S. Army intelligence analyst, who is serving a 35-year prison term for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified government documents to WikiLeaks, broke down in tears after authorities at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., told her she had to cut her hair.

It was the latest in what Manning — who was born a male named Bradley — saw as a cascade of indignities and injustices. Just weeks earlier, she had been temporarily deprived of recreational and library privileges after guards seized unauthorized reading materials (including a copy of Vanity Fair magazine with Caitlyn Jenner on the cover) as well as expired toothpaste in her prison cell.

Only now, as Manning perceived it, the U.S. military was messing with her right to be who she is — a woman — and reinforcing the idea that she is a misfit.

“I felt gross — like Frankenstein’s monster wandering around the countryside avoiding angry mobs with torches and pitchforks,” she wrote in a blog post from prison. Feeling “humiliated, hurt and rejected,” she felt like “giving up” and said she “cried and cried and cried and sniffled a little bit, and then cried some more.”

But Manning, in comments sent from prison to Yahoo News, says she has now overcome her despair and is once again ready to fight the U.S. government in court.

With the help of a premier civil liberties law firm, she is working on an appeal —likely to be filed early next year — of her 2013 conviction for violations of the Espionage Act. She will argue, among other points, that she was in fact a whistleblower who exposed U.S. government abuses and was never given the opportunity to present her motives during her court martial.

Simultaneously, Manning is pursuing a separate lawsuit challenging her treatment in prison. It is a novel case that could pose an awkward dilemma for the Obama administration, which has publicly championed the rights of transgender individuals, including those in prison, yet now stands accused of violating those rights when it comes to the most high-profile transgender inmate in U.S. custody.

In recently filed court papers, Manning, who began receiving hormone therapy at taxpayer expense earlier this year, alleges that prison officials are undermining her treatment for “gender dysphoria,” the medical term used for individuals who feel trapped in the wrong sex, by forcing her to cut her hair to the same 2-inch length as male prisoners, thereby depriving her of her ability to express herself in a “feminine manner.”

“Plaintiff feels like a freak and a weirdo,” Manning asserts in her complaint, “not because having short hair makes a person less of a woman — but because for her, it undermines specifically recommended treatment and sends the message to everyone that she is not a ‘real’ woman.”

Demonstrators hold signs calling for the release of imprisoned WikiLeaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning during a gay pride parade in San Francisco in June. (Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters)

In Cambridge-TONIGHT: Understanding Syria

TONIGHT: Understanding Syria

When: Monday, November 9, 2015, 7:00 pm

Where: First Church in Cambridge - Hastings Room • 11 Garden St • Harvard T • Cambridge

What is really happening in Syria?  The mainstream media in our country are full of one-sided propaganda and not much help.  Come hear from two Syrians, Wafaa Arbash and Ali Aljundi, now in the US, and MAPA board member Jeff Klein.
Wafaa Arbash is a Syrian graduate student in Development and Peace at Brandeis University with a focus on being an effective agent of social change and rights-based development in complex humanitarian settings like my country. She volunteered in Syria for more than 5 years in social development programs where she spearheaded several projects to empower local citizens, increase their leadership skills and provide refugee advocacy. With Syrian Arab Red Crescent, she planned and implemented children’s activities to help them heal from trauma. During the civil war in Syria, she worked with local organizations where she was a trainer. In the training, providing workshops that included people from different perspectives, some supporting the government, others against. Through sharing their experience, she helped them create nonviolent initiatives in their local community. Wafaa is MAPA’s Membership Outreach Coordinator.
Ali Aljundi, a Syrian refugee, civil activist and project officer at Oxfam America, focuses his work on peacebuilding and empowering the Syrian civil society. Before leaving Syria in 2012, Ali participated in establishing a local NGO in his home district and helped in securing funds for sustainable community empowerment projects. He contributed also to launching the Syrian NGO’s platform. Ali worked on youth employment and career development through his profession at United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA). Ali holds a B.A. in economics from Damascus University and a M.A. in Sustainable International Development from Brandeis University. Read his story

Jeff Klein is a Massachusetts Peace Action board member who has traveled widely in the Middle East, including Syria.  Read a recent article.  A retired machinist and union activist, he worked at GE in Lynn and for the Mass Water Resources Authority on Deer Island, where he was president of his local union for ten years. Since 2003 he has been active with Dorchester People for Peace in opposing US wars abroad and promoting social justice at home, and edits the weekly newsletter DPP Update. He is a member of MAPA’s Palestine/Israel Working Group as well as its Middle East Working Group. He speaks regularly about the Israel-Palestine conflict in schools, churches, mosques, community and peace organizations, has appeared on local TV and radio.
Sponsored by Massachusetts Peace Action

In Cambridge-The U.S. - Saudi Alliance: Disaster for the Middle East

The U.S. - Saudi Alliance: Disaster for the Middle East

Boston area launch of the Coalition against the US-Saudi Alliance

With Medea Benjamin and Rabyaah Althaibani

Friday, November 13

Rally 5pm at the Harvard Square T-stop

Forum 7pm First Church in Cambridge • 11 Garden Street • just out of Harvard Square

The US-Saudi Arabia alliance was founded after World War II for oil and empire. Saudi Arabia crushed Arab Spring in Bahrain, is bombing innocent civilians in Yemen, exports extremism and is creating closer ties with Israel.

The US-Saudi relationship is a key reason for the instability and terror inflicted across the Middle East by murderous sectarian groups, repressive governments and US and Saudi bombing campaigns. Breaking up this destructive US-Saudi relationship will be a major step towards peace in the region.

Medea Benjamin

Code Pink, speaking on the corrupt US-Saudi alliance; Code Pink is a co-founder of the Coalition Against the US-Saudi Alliance

Rabyaah Althaibani

on war & human rights abuses in her homeland of Yemen
Sponsored by United for Justice with Peace
Cosponsored by: American Friends Service Committee, Massachusetts Global Action, Massachusetts Peace Action, UNAC (United National Antiwar Coalition), and Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
contact: info@justicewithpeace.org, 617-383-4857
Related Event:
Saturday 10am: Brunch with Medea Benjamin hosted by Women's International League for Peace & Freedom - Newton - call 617 244 8054

Upcoming Events: 

Code Pink Leader In Boston This Week

Dear Lee, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK and author of Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control, hopes to see you in Boston, MA this weekend for some exciting events! On Friday, November 13th at 12 pm, Medea will be atNortheastern University (room 340 in the Curry Student Center) speaking on Money in Politics: Who Profits from War? Parking is very limited around the campus so taking public transportation is advisable (green line to Northeastern or orange line to Ruggles). This is a free event. Later on Friday, Medea will be speaking on The U.S.- Saudi Alliance: Disaster for the Middle East at 7 pm at the First Church in Cambridge (11 Garden Street near Harvard Square). This event is free and open to the public. Medea would love to see you there, and hopes you can also join for a rally against the U.S.- Saudi alliance before the forum at theHarvard Square T-stop at 5 pm.    Finally on Saturday, November 14th at 10 am, there will be a networking brunch with Medea hosted by Women's International League for Peace & Freedom in Newton. There is limited space for this event, so please call Joan at 617-244-8054 for more information! Medea hopes to see you at one of these events!  Onward towards a peaceful world, Michaela, Medea and the CODEPINK team

Photos of the Boston Veterans for Peace Veterans Day Parade-2014

Photos of the Boston Veterans for Peace Veterans Day Parade

Photo captions, from left to right:

1) Veterans for Peace Veterans Day Parade in Boston, with police escort
2) Marchers in Veterans for Peace Parade in Boston
3) Marchers carrying Peace Action sign (a reference to "police action," used to refer to the Korean and Vietnam Wars while they were being fought because they were undeclared wars)
4) Veterans Day Parade marchers carrying reminders of the costs of war
5) Members of brass band marching in Veterans for Peace Veterans Day Parade
6) Veterans Day Parade marcher wearing hoodie with a statement attributed to Major General Smedley Butler, U.S. Marine Corps, "War is a racket.  A few profit - the many pay."
7) Marchers carrying Veterans for Peace banners
8) More banners carried by Massachusetts members of Veterans for Peace
9) Boston Veterans Day Parade marchers at the corner of Boylston and Tremont Streets
10) Veterans Day Parade marcher with "No War on Iran" sign

- See more at: http://www.boston-discovery-guide.com/veterans-day.html#sthash.lAlrxqXU.dpuf