From Our Forebears The Diggers Of The English Revolution-The World Turned Upside Down

From Our Forebears The Diggers Of The English Revolution-The World Turned Upside Down

A YouTube film clip of Billy Bragg (Known In This Space As Narrator Of Woody Guthrie And His Guitar: This Machine Kills Fascists )performing The World Turned Upside Down.

 

An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The International Working Class Everywhere! ********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

 

THE FOLLOWING IS A SONG BASED ON THE DIGGER EXPERIENCE IN 1650

If John Milton was the literary muse of the English Revolution then the Diggers and their leader, Gerrard Winstanley, were the political muses.

The World Turned Upside Down

We will not worship the God they serve, a God of greed who feeds the rich while poor folk starve.

In 1649 to St. George's Hill

A ragged band they called the Diggers came to show the people's

will

They defied the landlords, they defied the laws

They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs.

We come in peace, they said, to dig and sow

We come to work the lands in common and make the waste

ground grow

This earth divided we will make whole

So it may be a common treasury for all "**

The sin of property we do disdain

No man has any right to buy or sell the earth for private gain

By theft and murder they took the land

Now everywhere the walls spring up at their command

They make the laws to chain us well

The clergy dazzle us with heaven, or they damn us into hell

We will not worship the God they serve,

a God of greed who feeds the rich while poor folk starve

We work and eat together, we need no swords

We will not bow to masters, nor pay rent to the lords

Still we are free, though we are poor

Ye Diggers all, stand up for glory, stand up now!

From the men of property the orders came

They sent the hired men and troopers to wipe out the Diggers'

claim

Tear down their cottages, destroy their corn

They were dispersed - only the vision lingers on

Ye poor take courage, ye rich take care

This earth was made a common treasury for everyone to share

All things in common, all people one

They came in peace - the order came to cut them down

WORDS AND MUSIC BY LEON ROSSELSON, 1981

 

*A Communist Before His Time –Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger Colonies in the English Revolution

 

DVD REVIEW

Winstanley, starring Miles Harriwell, directed by Kenneth Brownlow, 1975

The time of the English Revolution in the 1640's, Oliver Cromwell's time, as in all revolutionary times saw a profusion of ideas from all kinds of sources- religious, secular, the arcane, the fanciful and the merely misbegotten. A few of those ideas however, as here, bear study by modern left-wing militants. As the film under review exemplifies, True Leveler (a. k. a. Diggers) Gerrard Winstanley's agrarian socialist utopian tracts from the 1640's, the notion of a socialist solution to the problems of humankind has a long, heroic, and storied history. The solutions presented by Winstanley had and, in a limited sense, still do represent rudimentary ways to solve the problem of social and economic distribution of the social surplus produced by society. Without overextending the analogy Winstanley's tract represented for his time, the 1600's, what Communist Manifesto represented for Kaarl Marx's time-and ours-the first clarion call for the new more equitable world order. And those with property, those who controlled and gained from the means of production, hated both men with the same amount of venom, in their respective times.

One of the great advances Marx had over Winstanley was that he did not place his reliance on an agrarian solution to the crisis of society as Winstanley, by the state of economic development of his times, was forced to do. Marx, moreover, unlike Winstanley, did not concentrate on the question of distribution but rather on who controlled the means of production a point that all previous theorists had either failed to account for, dismissed out of hand, or did not know about. Thus, all pre-Marxist theory is bound up with a strategy of moral as well as political persuasion as a means of changing human lifestyles. Marx posed the question differently by centering on the creation of social surplus so that under conditions of plenty the struggle for daily survival would be taken off the human agenda and other more lofty goals put in its place. Still, with all the True Levelers' weaknesses of program and their improbabilities of success in the 1640's militants today still doff our hats to Winstanley's vision.

Notwithstanding the utopian nature of the experiment discussed above the filmmaker, Kenneth Brownlow, and his associates here have painstakingly, lovingly and with fidelity to the narrative and detail that are known from the researches of the likes of Christopher Hill and George Sabine, among others, that make for an excellent snapshot of what it might have been like up on Winstanley's St. George's Hill long ago. Two things add to that end.

First, the use of black and white highlights the bleak countryside (after all although the land was "common" it was waste that the landlord did not find it expedient to cultivate) and the pinched appearances of the "comrades" (especially the deeply-farrowed expressions of Miles Harriwell as Winstanley). Secondly, the director has used to the greatest extent possible Winstanley's own pamphlets that dealt with what was going on in Surrey and what his political purposes were (expressed as almost always in those days in religious terms- but taking land in common for use rather than profit is understandable in any language. I might add that the attempts to replicate the costumes of the period, the furnishings and the music round out a job well done.

Note: Part of this DVD contains a section on the hows and whys of the making of the film, including in-depth coverage of its making and commentary by Mr. Brownlow. You are getting this film for the Winstanley reenactment but this section is interesting if you are interested in filmmaking as well.

 

 

 

Never Trust A Cop As Far As You Could Throw One-With Otto Preminger’s Where The Sidewalk Ends In Mind

Never Trust A Cop As Far As You Could Throw One-With Otto Preminger’s Where The Sidewalk Ends In Mind

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

“You know my grandfather told me when I was just a kid, maybe twelve or thirteen years old when you start to think about getting in trouble one way or another and when things that are said by older people still stick, never to trust a cop. They are not our friends no matter about all that stuff about protecting us and helping little old ladies across the street, they work the other side of the street and will cut you down just as soon as look at you. And Grandpa Eaton was a guy who knew the story from both sides, knew it as an official of the boilermakers’ union when they went on strike more than once down at the Fore River shipyards looking for more money and better conditions and the company let the “bulls,” that what they called them back them, run rampart on the picket lines. Bad blood all the way around, not forgotten blood not by Grandpa and his buddies which was in any case partially revenged one night when they has a copper yelling “uncle” although Grandpa wouldn’t get more specific since you never know when the statute of limitations runs out on something like that, with cops anyway.

Knew about cops as well, up close and personal since his drunken sot of a father, who died a few years before I was born so I never knew him, just off the boat from Ireland but because he had been connected someway, at least he told everybody he was,  to the Fenian Brotherhood had gotten himself on the force, had been a beat cop, which didn’t keep him from beating his wife, my great- grandmother and his kids, including my grandfather, when he was in a drunken frenzy and when they complained to the coppers the guys at the station said they didn’t handle domestic disputes. That settled it for Grandpa. A couple of Grandpa’s brothers too, learning nothing from their father’s brutal ways when they in their turn hit their women and kids when they were in a drunken frenzy. And the ghost of his father’s cronies were at play too since when those women complained at the station they got the same stonewall. Probably would today too, no, make that would today too. Later, after he told me this wisdom about cops, a couple of my uncles, his sons, wound up on the Carver force and he would barely speak with them since he had given the same wisdom to them that he gave to me and my brothers.”

“Yeah, Grandpa Eaton had it down pat, said that other than grabbing coffee and crullers those guys were worthless to do anything good, would cut you as soon as look at you,” harangued, there was no other word for it, Sam Lowell to his old friend from Troy, New York met long ago on the political protest trail Ralph Morris.

Ralph nodded his head not so much in agreement with Sam’s sentiments with which indeed he was in solidarity with having had his own fair share of run-ins with the coppers every time he and his anti-war veteran protestor buddies out in Troy or in Albany got uppity and challenged the government’s authority to wage war in their names as he was in agreement at the part about the coffee and crullers. He could just picture the “beat” cops all huddled on the stools at Jimmy Miller’s Donut Shoppe on Ferry Street, the one donut shop in Troy that he knew about from visits to Ralph there oblivious to anything going on outside the steam fogged windows. Could have been murder and mayhem but there they would be sipping coffee regulars and honey-dipped donuts.

Strangely the reason for Sam’s harangue had not been as a result of being recently personally bullied by some flatfoot or being shaken down in his printing business by some cop looking for more than coffee and crullers but having just watched a film, a black and white film from the 1940s starring Dana Andrews and the fetching Gene Tierney, Where The Sidewalk Ends, where said Andrews, something of a front line matinee idol around that time, played a cop, a cop turned rogue cop, or maybe Sam said he should say he had been all along.      

Over the past several years Sam had via the beauties of Netflix been ordering all the old film noir-type black and white DVDs that he could get his hands on even those that he had seen back in the day at the old Strand Theater on River Street in Carver where he would while away a Saturday afternoon watching double feature re-run classic features and munching on popcorn like the film he was talking about before he would go to that matinee with some teen girl he was steamed up about and spent time in the balcony not watching the movie. Most of the time he would just watch the DVD and then move on but the theme of this film got under his skin and when Ralph came to Boston for one of his periodic trips to gab about old times with Sam and a few other guys from the old anti-war political days, days when they had more of cops than they could shake a stick at on their asses for one thing or another mainly just blocking stuff, buildings, traffic, sidewalks, so he decided he would tell him the plot, and ask what Ralph thought about what he had to say about it. See if Ralph still agreed after all these years filled mostly without too much strife about a cop being a bastard and best handled with no respect, or like a snake, very carefully.     

In the film plainclothes detective Steve Blair (Andrews’ part) started out from frame number one roughing up guys, bad guys from what he said to the police commander when he has to go on the carpet for his rough behavior. Of course dressing down an underling about this rough behavior business is just the higher-ups responding to the local crime padrones’ complaints about Blair since they had paid said higher-ups very handsomely not to be roughed up by some gung-ho cop who had his own graft going. See Blair was working off an old-time grudge. Blair’s father was nothing but a three-time loser who wound up taking the big step-off for some rinky-dink murder which he had committed when he was in the gangs the shame of which sent his mother to an early grave and made Blair a hard-assed copper and nothing but a scourge against hard-boiled criminals. Here is the funny duel standard though Blair had no problem shaking down every businessman in town and every independent drug dealer and second-story artist as well for his graft. So Blair was put on notice-no rough stuff or he would wind up on cheap street just another beat cop hustling for coffee and cakes and nickel and dime graft hassling highs school kids and drunsk.         

Cops make enemies though like the rest of us, although maybe rougher and tougher, and Blair’s enemigo numbero uno was Silky Tommy, the kingpin craps guys in all of New Jack City who was so well-connected both with the guys who talked funny through their noses and with the brass downtown that he was not going to take any fall guy play from Blair. Not even take any gaff for the night when Joe Bates, yeah that Joe Bates who got a fistful of medals in the war that everybody had heard about in Jack Gannon’s by-line for the Times, World War II to keep the wars straight, steered this Texas oil guy with plenty of dough into one of Silky’s hotel room crap shoots using his wife Laura (played by fetching Gene Tierney or did I already say the fetching part, no, I see I didn’t so fetching), Christ his wife like some kind of high class whore, as the hook, as catnip.

See since the war Joe had been on a downward spiral first with Father Whiskey and then with cousin cocaine and so to keep his nose good and clogged Joe worked for Silky whenever he needed to “get well. Dragging Laura down with him. Nobody ever heard that he had her turning tricks but you never know with a junkie, they are hard on their women war heroes or not. Problem was that the night in question the Texas oil man was hot with the dice, took Silky for fifty thousand and then wanted to walk away before the house percentages took him down that night. Bad idea though, always a bad idea, for anybody to walk out on Silky Tommy with that much of his dough so one of Tommy’s heavies, Eddie the Knife, bonked the poor oilman. Bonked him too hard and he passed on to wherever Texas oilmen pass. Silky Tommy called the coppers, claimed it was an accident and that Joe was the guy who brought him up and it was Joe who put the bonk on him. An easy pick-up and off to the slammer for Joe to go cold turkey or whatever was going to happen to him without his nose candy. Trouble for Tommy, trouble for Joe too was that the detective on duty that night was Steve Blair. Blair said he smelled a rat and when Tommy said he didn’t give a rat’s ass what Blair thought Blair roughed him up, roughed him up good. Of course he would be before the Precinct Captain in the morning bright and early but worse than roughing up Silky was that Blair bought the story, bought the Joe did have some part in doing the deed in the big story and so he went over to Joe’s place and roughed him up trying to get a confession about what happened or if did do the killing tag him for it and get the heat off from downtown.  Roughed Joe up too much and wound up killing him accidently. Killing him so bad that he knew he would take the fall if he tried to tell the story like it really happened so he disposed of Joe’s body just like any other guy would, dumped him in the East River to sleep with the fishes.         

Except he came up a couple of days later a lot worse for wear. Now most coppers aren’t bright although Blair was brighter than most so he knew he needed a fall guy, or fall gal if it came to that. So he went over to Laura’s place to see who had reason to knock Joe off after news got out that he had surfaced in the East River. Bingo. Easy tag. Joe in one of his stupors, drugs or whiskey it was not clear, had beaten Laura up, and that had not been the first time. Her father, Timmy Taylor, the cab driver well-known around town and to the beat cops told everybody who would listen that if Joe hit Laura again he was a dead man. Beautiful, like finding money on the ground. Between Timmy’s own bravado and Blair’s machinations of the evidence pointing it all in old Timmy direction he was set-up for the big step off, especially after he was taken down the in the bright lights of the dungeon and a confession was sweated out of him.

Here’s the best part though Blair a good-looking guy with a decent line around the ladies started hitting on the fetching Laura with the idea that he could get the old man free, said he would work night and day to save him from the gallows. All of this cop doing his duty stuff did get him into Laura’s bed, no problem since she had her needs and Joe, well, remember Joe had been wedded to his dope. Got him under the sheets more than once when he conned her with information that would seem to have cleared her father and place the blame on enemigo numbero uno Silky Tommy. Blair, along the way, did take Tommy down, took him down hard, took him about three slugs in the head down to finally settle old scores. But there was nothing that Silky had which would exonerate Timmy, help the old man. That was all cop bull. Still Blair spend his  plying Laura with all kinds of false hope, all kinds stuff about moving heaven and earth to get the old man cleared and getting to her bed on a steady basis. Bull, Blair was sitting on his hands like any smart guy who had bloody hands and had gotten rid of a nasty gangster in the bargain, wound up getting himself promoted to Captain of Detectives for taking Silky Tommy down. Got married to Laura too, thought nothing of it even though her father was then on death row. You know love got in the way, maybe better to say sex. As for Timmy he went to the gallows proclaiming his innocence but they all do, they all really do.  Case closed.         

The story told Sam couldn’t resist saying once again the cautionary tale “don’t trust a copper they are on the other side, they are poison.” Ralph just nodded his head in agreement.