Hillary Clinton and the Dogs of War Nicolas Davies, February 19, 2016 9 Comments Former Secretary of State Clinton grudgingly admits her Iraq War vote was a “mistake,” but it was not a one-off misjudgment. Clinton has consistently stood for a war-like U.S. foreign policy that ignores international law and relies on brinkmanship and military force, writes Nicolas J S Davies. By Nicolas J S Davies A poll taken in Iowa before the presidential caucus found that 70 percent of Democrats surveyed trusted Hillary Clinton on foreign policy more than Bernie Sanders. But her record as Secretary of State was very different from that of her successor, John Kerry, who has overseen groundbreaking diplomatic breakthroughs with Iran, Cuba and, in a more limited context, even with Russia and Syria. In fact, Clinton's use of the term 'diplomacy' in talking about her own record is idiosyncratic in that it refers almost entirely to assembling 'coalitions' to support U.S. threats, wars and sanctions against other countries, rather than to peacefully resolving international disputes without the threat or use of force, as normally understood by the word 'diplomacy' and as required by the UN Charter. PHOTO:  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meeting with Israel’s right-wing Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in Jerusalem on July 16, 2012. (Photo credit: Department of State) There is another term for what Clinton means when she says 'diplomacy,' and that is 'brinksmanship,' which means threatening war to back up demands on other governments. In the real world, brinksmanship frequently leads to war when neither side will back down, at which point its only value or purpose is to provide a political narrative to justify aggression. The two main 'diplomatic' achievements Clinton gives herself credit for are: assembling the coalition of NATO and the Arab monarchies that bombed Libya into endless, intractable chaos; and imposing painful sanctions on the people of Iran over what U.S. intelligence agencies concluded by 2007 was a peaceful civilian nuclear program. Clinton's claim that her brinksmanship 'brought Iran to the table' over its 'nuclear weapons program' is particularly deceptive.  It was in fact Secretary Clinton and President Obama who refused to take 'Yes' for an answer in 2010, after Iran agreed to what was originally a U.S. proposal relayed by Turkey and Brazil. Clinton and Obama chose instead to keep ratcheting up sanctions and U.S. and Israeli threats. This was a textbook case of dangerous brinksmanship that was finally resolved by real diplomacy (and real diplomats like Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif) before it led to war. That Clinton can peddle such deceptive rhetoric to national prime-time television audiences and yet still be considered trustworthy on foreign policy by many Americans is a sad indictment of the U.S. corporate media's coverage of foreign policy, including a willful failure to distinguish between diplomacy and brinksmanship. But Michael Crowley, now the senior foreign affairs correspondent for Politico, formerly with Time and the New Republic, has analyzed Clinton's foreign policy record over the course of her career, and his research has shed light on her Iraq War vote, her personal influences and her underlying views of U.S. foreign policy, all of which deserve serious scrutiny from American voters. The results of Crowley's research reveal that Clinton believes firmly in the post-Cold War ambition to establish the U.S. threat or use of force as the ultimate arbiter of international affairs. She does not believe that the U.S. should be constrained by the UN Charter or other rules of international law from threatening or attacking other countries when it can make persuasive political arguments for doing so. This places Clinton squarely in the 'humanitarian interventionist' camp with her close friend and confidante Madeleine Albright, but also in underlying if unspoken agreement with the 'neocons' who brought us the Iraq War and the self-fulfilling and ever-expanding 'war on terror.' Neoconservatism and humanitarian interventionism emerged in the 1990s as parallel ways to exploit the post-Cold War 'power dividend,' each with its own approach to overcoming legal, diplomatic and political obstacles to the unbridled expansion of U.S. military power. In general, Democratic power brokers favored the humanitarian interventionist approach, while Republicans embraced neoconservatism, but their underlying goals were the same: to politically legitimize U.S. hegemony in the post-Cold War era. PHOTO: Prominent neocon Robert Kagan The most self-serving ideologues, like Robert Kagan and his wife Victoria Nuland, soon mastered the nuances of both ideologies and have moved smoothly between administrations of both parties. Victoria Nuland, Dick Cheney's deputy foreign policy adviser, became Secretary Clinton's spokesperson and went on to plan the 2014 coup in Ukraine. Robert Kagan, who co-founded the neocon Project for the New American Century with William Kristol in 1997, was appointed by Clinton to the State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board in 2011. Kagan wrote of Clinton in 2014, 'I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue, it''s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.' In the Clinton White House In her husband''s White House in the 1990s, Hillary Clinton was not an outsider to the foreign policy debates that laid the groundwork for these new ideologies of U.S. power, which have since unleashed such bloody and intractable conflicts across the world. In 1993, at a meeting between Clinton''s transition team and Bush''s National Security Council, Madeleine Albright challenged then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell on his 'Powell Doctrine' of limited war. Albright asked him, 'What''s the point of having this superb military you''re always talking about if we can''t use it?' Hillary Clinton found common ground with Albright, and has likewise derided the Powell doctrine for limiting U.S. military action to 'splendid little wars' like the invasions of Grenada, Panama and Kuwait, apparently forgetting that these are the only wars the U.S. has actually won since 1945. Hillary Clinton reportedly 'insist(ed)' on Albright''s nomination as Secretary of State in December 1996, and they met regularly at the State Department during Bill Clinton''s second term for in-depth foreign policy discussions aided by White House and State Department staff. Albright called their relationship “an unprecedented partnership.” With Defense Secretary William Cohen, Albright oversaw the crystallization of America''s aggressive post-Cold War foreign policy in the late 1990s. As UN Ambassador, she maintained and justified sanctions on Iraq, even as they killed hundreds of thousands of children. As Secretary of State, she led the push for the illegal U.S. assault on Yugoslavia in 1999, which set the fateful precedent for further U.S. violations of the U.N. Charter in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and Syria. James Rubin, Albright''s State Department spokesman, remembers strained phone calls between Albright and U.K. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook during the planning for the bombing of Yugoslavia. Cook told Albright the U.K. government was having problems “with its lawyers” because attacking Yugoslavia without authorization by the U.N. Security Council would violate the UN Charter. Albright told him the U.K. should 'get new lawyers.' Like Secretary Albright, Hillary Clinton strongly supported NATO''s illegal aggression against Yugoslavia. In fact, she later told Talk magazine that she called her husband from Africa to plead with him to order the use of force. 'I urged him to bomb,' she said, 'You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?' After the U.S.-U.K. bombing and invasion, the NATO protectorate of Kosovo quickly descended into chaos and organized crime. Hashim Thaci, the gangster who the U.S. installed as its first prime minister, now faces indictment for the very war crimes that U.S. bombing enabled and supported in 1999, including credible allegations that he organized the extrajudicial execution of Serbs to harvest and sell their internal organs. On Clinton''s holocaust reference, the U.S. and U.K. did carpet-bomb Germany at the height of the Nazi Holocaust, but bombing could not stop the genocide of European Jews any more than it can have a 'humanitarian' impact today. The Western allies’ decision to rely mainly on bombing throughout 1942 and 1943 while the Red Army''s 'boots on the ground' and the civilians in the concentration camps died in their millions cast a long shadow on today''s policy debates over Syria, Iraq and Libya. War is always an atrocity and a crime, but relying on bombing and drones to avoid putting 'boots on the ground' is uniquely dangerous because it gives politicians the illusion that they can wage war without political risk. In the longer term, from London in the Blitz to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to Islamic State and drone victims today, bombing has always been the surest way to provoke righteous anger, stiffen resistance and reap a whirlwind of blowback. The 140,000 bombs and missiles the U.S. and its allies have rained down on at least seven countries since 2001 are the poisonous seeds of a harvest of intractable conflict that is still gathering strength after 14 years of war. The Clinton administration formalized its illegal doctrine of unilateral military force in its 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review, declaring, 'When the interests at stake are vital '¦ we should do whatever it takes to defend them, including, when necessary, the unilateral use of military power. U.S. vital national interests include'¦ preventing the emergence of a hostile regional coalition '¦ (and) ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources.' Arguments based on 'vital interests' are dangerous precisely because they are politically persuasive to the citizens of any country. But this is precisely the justification for war that the U.N. Charter was designed to prohibit, as the U.K.''s senior legal adviser, Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice, explained to his government during the Suez crisis in 1956. He wrote, 'The plea of vital interest, which has been one of the main justifications for wars in the past, is indeed the very one which the U.N. Charter was intended to exclude.' Senator Clinton''s Iraq War Vote Sixteen years after the bombing of Yugoslavia, bombing to 'prevent holocausts' and wars to 'defend' ill-defined and virtually unlimited U.S. interests have succeeded only in launching a new holocaust that has killed at least 1.6 million people and plunged a dozen countries into intractable chaos. PHOTO: President George W. Bush pauses for applause during his State of the Union Address on Jan. 28, 2003, when he made a fraudulent case for invading Iraq. Seated behind him are Vice President Dick Cheney and House Speaker Dennis Hastert. (White House photo) As Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee wrote of his colleagues who voted to authorize war on Iraq in 2002, 'Helping a rogue President start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment…' As the results of that decision keep spinning farther out of control, it seems increasingly remarkable that U.S. officials who authorized a war based on lies with millions of lives in the balance still have careers in public policy. If it costs Clinton another presidential nomination, that is a small price to pay when weighed against the holocaust she helped to unleash on tens of millions of people. But what if her vote for an illegal and devastating war was not a momentary “lapse of judgment”, but was in fact consistent with her views then and her views now? As the Bush administration lobbied senators to support the Iraq AUMF in 2002, Senator Clinton had several private chats with Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, an old friend from Yale Law School. An unnamed Bush official, possibly Hadley, told Michael Crowley, 'I was kind of pleasantly surprised by her attitude.' But Albright''s former assistant James Rubin was not surprised by Clinton''s vote on Iraq. He found it consistent with the position of the Clinton administration and Albright''s State Department that U.S. 'diplomacy' must be backed up by the threat of military force. 'I think there is a connection to her vote,' Rubin told Michael Crowley, 'which is recognizing that the right combination of force and diplomacy (sic) can achieve America''s objectives. Sometimes, to get things done – like getting inspectors back into Iraq -  you do have to be prepared to threaten force.' But this evades the critical question of U.S. obligations under the U.N. Charter, which prohibits the threat and use of force. Senator Levin introduced an amendment to the Iraq AUMF bill that would have only authorized the use of force if it was approved by the U.N. Security Council. Senator Clinton voted against that amendment, making it clear that she supported the threat and use of force against Iraq whether it was legal or not. Clinton has defended her vote on the basis of providing a credible threat of force to back up the call for inspections, in keeping with her long-standing preference for threats and brinksmanship over diplomacy. But the problem with threats of force is that they often lead to the use of force, as we have now seen repeatedly since the U.S. has embraced this aggressive and illegal approach to international affairs. This is exactly why the U.N. Charter prohibits the threat as well as the use of force. The absolute priority of world leaders in 1945 was peace, and so the U.N. Charter prohibited both the threat and use of force, based on bitter experience of how the one so easily leads to the other. The fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy since the 1980s has been to renounce peace as an overriding priority and to politically legitimize U.S. war-making. The U.S. has therefore, without public debate, abandoned FDR’s post-WWII “permanent structure of peace” based on the U.N. Charter. The U.S. also withdrew from the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, after it found the U.S. guilty of aggression against Nicaragua in 1986, and it likewise rejects the jurisdiction of the new International Criminal Court. U.S. government lawyers now pass off political arguments as legal cover for aggression, torture, killing civilians and other war crimes, secure in the knowledge that they will never be forced to defend their legally indefensible opinions in impartial courts. When President George W. Bush unveiled his illegal 'doctrine of preemption' in 2002, Sen. Edward Kennedy called it, 'a call for Twenty-first Century American imperialism that no other nation can or should accept.' But the same must be said of this entire decades-long effort by the Clintons, Bushes, Albright, Cheney and others to liberate the U.S. military industrial complex from the restraints placed upon it by the rule of international law. Secretary of State – Iraq and Afghanistan Hillary Clinton''s actions as Secretary of State were consistent with her role working with her husband and Madeleine Albright in the 1990s, and in the Senate with the Bush administration, to fundamentally corrupt U.S. foreign policy. Robert Gates''s book, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, has provided revealing insights into Clinton’s personal contributions to White House foreign policy debates on the vital issues of Obama''s first term, in which she was always the most hawkish of Obama''s senior advisers, more hawkish than his Republican Secretary of Defense. At Clinton''s first 'town hall' with foreign service officers at the State Department, Steve Kashkett of the American Foreign Service Association asked Clinton how soon the State Department''s deployment of 1,200 staff to the massive U.S. occupation headquarters in Baghdad would be reduced 'to that of a normal diplomatic mission' to ease critical understaffing at other U.S. embassies all over the world. Clinton instead launched a 'civilian surge,' doubling the already overweight State Department deployment in Baghdad to 2,400. When the Iraqi government refused to allow 3,000 U.S. troops to remain in Iraq to protect the embassy staff – and Clinton had wanted even more than that – she hired 7,000 heavily-armed mercenaries to do the job instead. As Clinton doubled down on the failed U.S. effort to control a puppet government in Iraq whose courageous people''s resistance had already made U.S. military occupation unsustainable, she was also keen to put the lives of more U.S. troops on the line in the even longer-running quagmire in Afghanistan. When President Obama took office, there were 34,400 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, but only 645 had been killed in seven years of combat. A Pew poll found that only 18 percent of Afghans surveyed wanted more U.S. troops in their country. Secretary Clinton backed Obama''s first decision to commit an additional 30,000 troops to the war. Then, in mid-2009, General Stanley McChrystal submitted a request for a second increase of 40,000 troops. He also submitted a classified assessment that a genuine campaign to defeat the Taliban and its allies would require 500,000 U.S. troops for five years, acknowledging that neither 65,000 nor 105,000 troops could possibly achieve that. Clinton supported McChrystal''s request and was eager to match it with a State Department 'civilian surge' like the one in Iraq. Among Obama''s other advisers, Vice President Joe Biden opposed any further escalation, while Secretary Gates recommended a smaller increase of 30,000 troops, which was what Obama ultimately approved. When Obama and his aides debated the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Clinton was again the most hawkish, arguing for no reduction in troop strength until 2013.  In a typically arbitrary political compromise, Obama split the difference between Clinton and the doves and ordered the first withdrawals to begin in September 2012. By the time the U.S. 'combat mission' ended in 2014, 2,356 U.S. troops had met their deaths in the “graveyard of empires.” In 2016, the Taliban and its allies control more of Afghanistan than at any time since 2001, as they fight to expel the 10,000 U.S. troops still deployed there. A complete withdrawal of foreign troops has always been the Taliban''s first precondition for opening serious peace talks with the government, so the 2009-10 escalations, which Clinton backed to the hilt, served only to kill 1,711 more Americans and tens of thousands of Afghans, prolonging the war and undermining diplomacy in the futile hope of saving a corrupt regime of U.S.-backed warlords and drug-lords. President Obama''s latest plan, to keep at least 5,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan indefinitely, ensures that the war will continue into the next administration, even as Islamic State begins to move into another failed state already devastated by more than 60,000 U.S. bombs and missiles. Secretary of State – Libya and Syria President Obama''s advisers were even more divided over launching a new war to overthrow the government of Libya. Despite Secretary Gates telling a Congressional hearing that the first phase of a 'no-fly zone' would be a bombing campaign to destroy Libyan air defenses, a Pew poll found that, while 44 percent of the public supported a 'no-fly zone,' only 16 percent supported 'bombing Libyan air defenses.' Even after being caught with its pants down over Iraq, the U.S. corporate media has not lost its talent for confusing Americans into war. PHOTO:  President Barack Obama talks with members of his national security team, from left, UN Ambassador-designate Samantha Power, outgoing National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, and incoming National Security Advisor Susan Rice on June 5, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza) Secretary Gates wrote in Duty that he was so opposed to U.S. intervention in Libya that he considered resigning.  President Obama was so undecided that he called his final decision a '51-49 call.'  The other advocates for bombing were U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and National Security Council staffers Ben Rhodes and Samantha Power, so Secretary Clinton was the most senior, and almost certainly the decisive voice in sealing the fate of Muammar Gaddafi and the people of Libya. Despite a U.N. resolution that authorized military force only to 'protect civilians,' the U.S. and its allies intervened to support forces who were explicitly fighting to overthrow the Libyan government. NATO and its Arab monarchist allies conducted 7,700 air strikes in seven months, while NATO warships shelled coastal cities. The rebel forces on the ground, including Islamist fundamentalists, were trained and led on the ground by Qatari, British, French and Jordanian special forces. In their short-sighted triumphalism over Libya, NATO and Arab monarchist leaders thought they had finally found a model for regime change that worked. Seduced by the blood-drenched mirage in the Libyan desert, they made the cynical decision to double down on what they knew very well would be a longer, more complicated and bloodier proxy war in Syria. PHOTO: ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi shortly before he was murdered on Oct. 20, 2011 Only a few months after a gleeful Secretary Clinton hailed the sodomy and assassination of Gaddafi, unmarked NATO planes were flying fighters and weapons from Libya to the 'Free Syrian Army' training base at Iskenderum in Turkey, where British and French special forces provided more training and the CIA and JSOC infiltrated them into Syria. Residents of Aleppo were shocked to find their city invaded, not by Syrian rebels, but by Islamist fighters from Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Egypt. Despite the already brutal repression of the Syrian government, a Qatari-funded YouGov poll in December 2011 found that 55 percent of Syrians still supported their government, understanding that the alternative could be much worse. Secretary Clinton and French President Nicolas Sarkozy assembled the Orwellian 'Friends of Syria' coalition that undermined Kofi Annan''s 2012 peace plan by committing more funding, arms and support to their proxy forces instead of pressuring them to honor Annan''s April 10th ceasefire and begin negotiations for a political transition. When Annan finally got all the countries involved to sign on to the Geneva communique on June 30, 2012, providing for a new ceasefire and a political transition, he received assurances that it would quickly be formalized in a new U.N. Security Council resolution. Instead, Clinton and her allies revived their precondition that President Assad must resign before any transition could begin, the critical precondition they had set aside in Geneva. With no possibility of agreement in the Security Council, Annan resigned in despair. Almost four years later, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed in an ever more convoluted and dangerous war, now involving the armed forces of 16 countries, each with their own interests and their own relationships with different proxy forces on the ground. In many areas, the U.S. supports and arms both sides. Turkey, a NATO member and major U.S. arms buyer, is attacking the YPG Kurdish forces who have been the U.S.''s most effective ally on the ground against Islamic State.  And the sectarian government to whom the U.S. handed over the ruins of Iraq is sending U.S.-armed militias to fight U.S.-armed rebels in Syria. Obama''s and Clinton’s doctrine of covert and proxy war, by which they still tout drone strikes, JSOC death squads, CIA coups and local proxy forces as politically safe “tools” to project U.S. power across the world without the deployment of U.S. “boots on the ground,” has destroyed Libya, Yemen, Syria and Ukraine, and left U.S. foreign policy in an unprecedented crisis. Hanging over this escalating, out-of-control crisis is the existential danger of war between the U.S. and Russia, who together possess 14,700 nuclear weapons with the destructive power to end life on Earth as we know it.  With her demonstrated, deeply-held belief in the superiority of threats, brinksmanship and war over diplomacy and the rule of law, surely the last thing the world needs now is Hillary Clinton playing chicken with the Russians while the fate of life on Earth hangs in the balance. Based on Sen. Bernie Sanders'' record in Congress, his prescient floor speech during the Iraq War debate in 2002 and his campaign’s position statement on “War and Peace”, he at least understands the most obvious lesson of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, that it is easier to unleash the dogs of war than to call them off once they have tasted blood. Incredibly, this makes him almost unique among U.S. leaders of this generation. But there are real flaws in Sanders’s position statement. He cites “vital strategic interests” as a justification for war, dodging the thorny problem that international disputes typically involve “vital strategic interests” on both sides, which the U.N. Charter addresses by requiring them to be resolved peacefully without the threat or use of force.  And instead of pointing out that Clinton’s brinksmanship with Iran risked a second war in 10 years over non-existent WMDs, he repeats the canard that Iran was “developing nuclear weapons” before the signing of the JCPOA in 2015. Sen. Sanders has launched an unprecedented campaign to challenge the way powerful vested interests have corrupted our elections, our political system and our economy. [oh come OOOON - his act is in the quadrennial playbook, for gawd sake: get the peons running around, wishin and a hopin, and thinking they're free] But the same interests have also corrupted our foreign policy, squandering our national wealth on weapons and war, killing millions of people and plunging country after country into war, ruin and chaos. To succeed, the Sanders “revolution” must restore integrity to our country’s role in the world as well as to our political and economic system. Nicolas J S Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.  He also wrote the chapters on 'Obama at War' in Grading the 44th President: a Report Card on Barack Obama''s First Term as a Progressive Leader.

From The Marxist Archives-Bourgeois Elections and the Dictatorship of Capital

Workers Vanguard No. 1083 12 February 2016 TROTSKY LENIN Bourgeois Elections and the Dictatorship of Capital (Quote of the Week) As the presidential primary circus kicks off, America’s rulers tout this country’s political system as a model of democracy. The First Congress of the Communist International in 1919 contrasted the fraud of bourgeois democracy, a fig leaf for the class dictatorship of capital, to the system of proletarian rule in the form of soviets (councils) in the early workers state established through the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. So-called democracy, that is, bourgeois democracy, is nothing but a veiled dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The highly touted general “will of the people” is no more real than national unity. In reality, classes confront each other with antagonistic, irreconcilable wills. But since the bourgeoisie is a small minority, it needs this fiction, this illusion of a national “will of the people,” these high-sounding words, to consolidate its rule over the working class and impose its own class will on the proletariat. By contrast the proletariat, the overwhelming majority of the population, openly wields the class power of its mass organizations, its councils, in order to abolish the privileges of the bourgeoisie and to safeguard the transition to a classless, communist society. Bourgeois democracy puts the primary emphasis on purely formal declarations of rights and freedoms, which are beyond the reach of working people, the proletarians and semiproletarians, who lack the material resources to exercise them. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie uses its material resources, through its press and organizations, to deceive and betray the people. In contrast, the council system, the new type of state power, assigns the highest priority to enabling the proletariat to exercise its rights and freedom. The power of the councils gives the best palaces, buildings, printing plants, paper stocks, and so forth to the people for their newspapers, meetings, and organizations. Only thus does real proletarian democracy even become possible. —“Platform of the Communist International” (March 1919), reprinted in Founding the Communist International (1987)

A View From The Left-Break with the Democrats!-Bernie Sanders: Imperialist Running Dog-For a Revolutionary Workers Party!

Frank Jackman comment: Usually when I post something from some other source, mostly articles and other materials that may be of interest to the radical public that I am trying to address I place the words “ A View From The Left” in the headline and let the subject of the article speak for itself, or let the writer speak for him or herself without further comment whether I agree with the gist of what is said or not. After all I can write my own piece if some pressing issue is at hand. Occasionally, and the sentiments expressed in this article is one such time, I can stand in solidarity with the remarks made. I do so here.        Workers Vanguard No. 1083

12 February 2016

Break with the Democrats!-Bernie Sanders: Imperialist Running Dog-For a Revolutionary Workers Party!

 

FEBRUARY 8—The Democratic Party nomination of Hillary Clinton was thought to be a foregone conclusion. But the Iowa caucuses ended in a virtual draw between her and Bernie Sanders, disrupting the expected coronation of part two of the Clinton dynasty. A self-proclaimed “independent” with a “democratic socialist” veneer, Sanders has for the past quarter century been a member of the Senate Democratic Caucus. As the party’s former National Committee chairman Howard Dean observed in 2005: “He is basically a liberal Democrat.... The bottom line is that Bernie Sanders votes with the Democrats 98 percent of the time.” So it’s hardly an aberration that he is running for the presidency, the top executive office of U.S. imperialism, on the ticket of one of the two parties of American capitalism. What is an aberration is that Sanders’s candidacy is seen as introducing the idea of “socialism” to the United States.

Tapping into widespread anger against the stark economic inequalities in America, Sanders has made his rallying cry the populist appeal for a “political revolution against the billionaire class.” Yet he has long served the interests of this class, particularly with his support for the bloody wars, occupations and other military adventures of U.S. imperialism that have devastated countries around the globe. Now this longtime Vermont Senator promises to provide some relief for the folks “at home” from poverty wages, skyrocketing college tuition and student debt and the profit gouging of the “health care” industry.

Faced with the alternative of mainstream Democratic Party hack Hillary Clinton, Sanders’s promises of some economic relief have proved attractive. This is especially the case for white petty-bourgeois youth who are in hock for tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, with dim prospects for the future they hoped would be open to them. In this, the “movement for Bernie” echoes the Occupy movement with its populist cries of representing the “99 percent” against Wall Street bankers and high-rolling corporate magnates. Occupy dissolved during the 2012 campaign to re-elect Wall Street Democrat Barack Obama. And, much as Obama’s election as America’s first black president aroused great expectations of change that were necessarily dashed, Sanders’s campaign is directed at refurbishing illusions in the democracy of American capitalist rule.

Amid chants of “feel the Bern” from his supporters at a closing rally in Iowa, Sanders declared: “What the American people understand is this country was based and is based on fairness.” On the contrary, this country was built on the brutal enslavement of black people and is maintained through their continuing segregation in the mass at the bottom of this society. It was established on the genocide of Native Americans. And American history is replete with the bodies of fighters for the working class, killed at the hands of the bosses’ thugs, their police and their courts.

While some of what Sanders calls for—like free tuition, Medicare for all and higher wages—would certainly be welcome, the true purpose of his campaign is to promote the myth that the capitalist Democratic Party is the party of the “little guy.” What he is introducing into “the conversation” has nothing to do with socialism but is rather the fraudulent idea that the “people” can vote into office a benevolent capitalist government that will defend their interests against the robber barons of Wall Street. Such illusions have long served to tie the working class to the rule of its exploiters.

The populist view that “99 percent” of the population share common interests is false. Society is divided into two fundamental classes: the capitalists—the handful of families who own the banks and corporations—and the working class, whose labor is the source of the capitalists’ profits. The working class is not just one more victim of capitalist austerity. It is the only force with the potential power and historic interest to sweep away the capitalist system, which is based on the exploitation of labor and rooted in racial oppression. To lead this fight, the workers need their own party—a revolutionary workers party that takes up the cause of all the oppressed.

The Face of Capitalist Oppression Abroad and at Home

Contrary to the myth peddled by Sanders that the banks and corporations have hijacked “our democracy,” the purpose of the American government since its foundation has been to defend the property and profits of the ruling class. The capitalist class runs both the Democratic and Republican parties. The main difference is not what they do but how they do it. The racist, reactionary, Christian fundamentalist lunacy of the current Republican Party is one expression of a decaying system whose masters are driven to further starve the poor, bust the unions, drive down wages and slash such threadbare social programs as still exist. The Democrats lie and do the same thing because they serve the same interests. They just try to put a nicer face on it.

America is ruled by a single class: it is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The facade of democracy is designed to facilitate capitalist class rule. It obscures the fact that the capitalist state, with its cops, courts, prisons and military, is not some neutral arbiter. It is an instrument for organized violence to preserve the rule of capital. The choice at election time is simply over which capitalist party will oversee the exploitation of the working class as well as the repression of black people, immigrants and all the oppressed at home, while prosecuting U.S. imperialism’s wars abroad.

Many are revolted by U.S. war crimes, including the bombing of civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Yemen, committed under Hillary Clinton’s watch as Obama’s secretary of state. While Sanders scored some debating points against her by citing his refusal to vote for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he has a long record of support to U.S. military depredations around the world. He backed the United Nations sanctions against Iraq that led to the deaths of some 1.5 million people and eviscerated the country in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion. He voted for the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force that launched the war on Afghanistan. Sanders has since regularly voted for military funding to these wars and occupations. Today he supports the U.S. bombing campaign in Syria and vows that, if elected, he would continue the murderous drone strikes that Obama has unleashed in the Near East, Africa and Central Asia. In 2014 Sanders joined the other 99 Senators in endorsing the Israeli massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.

Indeed, Sanders’s record on the foreign policy score is so shameful that even his most ardent supporters on the left, Socialist Alternative (SAlt), have felt compelled to address it. A 28 January article on socialistalternative.org concedes that Sanders’s foreign policy is “mistaken” and “falls short,” but assures the reader that this “does not negate enormously progressive aspects of his campaign.” But imperialist war abroad is a counterpart of increased misery and repression for the working masses and oppressed at home.

In the face of massive protests against racist cop terror, both Clinton and Sanders have been trying to woo Black Lives Matter leaders. To hear the mainstream pundits, Hillary Clinton has the “black vote” sewn up, particularly in the South. However, Sanders, backed by black preacher/professor Cornel West, a leader of the Democratic Socialists of America, has been playing up his credentials as a participant in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Sanders recently won support from former NAACP president Ben Jealous, as well as from left-wing academic Adolph Reed and a number of other prominent black activists.

The truth is there isn’t much daylight between Clinton and Sanders when it comes to promoting racist “law and order.” Both backed Bill Clinton’s 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which vastly expanded the crimes punishable by death at the hands of the federal government and provided for 100,000 more cops on the streets and billions more in prison funding. Twenty years later, with countless more black and Latino people gunned down by cops and the prisons overflowing, the Clintons cynically regret their “mistake.” With equal hypocrisy, Sanders today decries “the disgrace of having more people in jail than any other country, disproportionately African-American and Latino.”

Since the time of slavery, the racist rulers have oppressed black people in America based on the color of their skin. The capitalists foment racial and ethnic hostilities to obscure the irreconcilable class divide between labor and its exploiters. This is supplemented by the great lie that the Democratic Party, the historic party of slavery and Jim Crow segregation in the South, represents the interests of black and working people. This lie has in turn been reinforced by the misleaders of the unions, who have shackled the power of labor to the class enemy, particularly through support to the Democrats. The results can be seen not only in the wreckage of once-powerful unions but also in the absolute devastation of the lives of the ghetto poor.

The road to black freedom lies in the struggle to smash this racist capitalist system through socialist revolution, and the power to do that lies in the hands of the multiracial working class. But this power cannot and will not be realized short of forging a class-struggle workers party that champions the cause of black liberation and mobilizes in defense of immigrants and all the oppressed.

Reformism vs. Revolutionary Politics

The bottom line for Sanders’s more left-talking supporters is the notion that he is motivating people, notably youth, to take at least a first step to the left. Some even admit, in the words of a 5 February counterpunch.org article, that “socialism” for Sanders is really “Scandinavian-style capitalism (capitalism with a ‘human face’).” But the crucial thing, they claim, is that he is starting a “public discourse” about socialism. In reality, Sanders’s radical liberal acolytes are leading youth straight into the demoralizing dead end of the Democratic Party.

Early in the Sanders campaign, the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO) took SAlt to task for supporting a candidate running on the capitalist Democratic Party ticket. This is rich coming from an organization whose own leaders have run on the ticket of the Green Party, a small-time capitalist party that serves as a liberal pressure group on the Democrats. Following Sanders’s strong showing in Iowa, the ISO is singing a new tune. In an article titled “Iowa’s Radical Message” (socialistworker.org, 2 February) they opine: “Pretty much no one—Socialist Worker included—guessed that the wave of discontent could lift him to more than perhaps a single victory in New Hampshire.” The ISO goes on to enthuse that Sanders’s Iowa result has “demonstrated a deep dissatisfaction with the status quo” which “blasts open the lie that America is a fundamentally conservative country.”

There are indeed many boiling discontents in American society, and not all of them “progressive.” To gauge that anger, just look at the crowds at Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” election rallies or the evangelical Christians thumping their Bibles for Ted Cruz. Whipped up by the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, these reactionary yahoos see “illegal immigrants,” Muslim “terrorists,” Planned Parenthood, Black Lives Matter activists and the political establishment (read: a White House that is occupied by a black president) as driving America down the road to a socialist Sodom and Gomorrah. This is one reflection of the declining economic might of the world’s “only superpower.”

For their part, the Democrats are looking to cash in electorally among the millions who are desperate for decent jobs, housing, food, education for their children, health care. Sanders’s campaign provides a useful vehicle for luring people into believing that the Democrats will deliver. But the fact of the matter is that any significant gains won by labor and the oppressed in this country were wrested through hard-fought class and social struggle against the exploiters and their parties. Today, what remains of these gains continues to be ravaged in a one-sided capitalist class war enabled by union misleaders who have long forsaken the very means through which the unions were built.

As communists, we champion the fight for jobs at good wages; for quality, fully government-funded health care for all; for free, quality education for all at all levels. Our purpose is to link such demands to building a multiracial revolutionary working-class party that will lead the working class to overthrow this decaying system of exploitation, oppression and imperialist war. The resulting workers government will expropriate the capitalist owners of industry and the banks and use the wealth produced by labor for the benefit of the many, not the profits of a few. Fight, don’t starve! For a workers America!

The Guy Who Got Left In Elvis’ Wake-With The Legendary Sonny Burgess In Mind

The Guy Who Got Left In Elvis’ Wake-With The Legendary Sonny Burgess In Mind

 By Lester Lannon

“You know I was built for stardom, built bigger than that hillbilly truck driver from down in godforsaken Tupelo, down in damn Mississippi. Elvis waved up his hair, grew some silly sideburns that the rest of us had to imitate or we wouldn’t get a look see, swiveled a little hip which all the girls took for doing the act, doing the act with them, snarled a lot to show how alienated he was and took a bunch of Negro songs from Negro singers on the “race” records like Smiley Jackson’s One Night With You and rode that to the top based on nothing more than that. Sam Phillips, hell I knew Sam when his selling shoes door to door in Memphis before he got that raggedy record studio and a lot of kids with a couple of bucks and some piped-up dreams went in to have their shot at stardom at least for their girlfriends,” muttered Sonny Burrows one night at Johnny Dee’s, his old time hang-out when he had a few bucks or when he was looking for something, looking for a gig, talking to Les Drover, the owner.

Sonny had been in the midst of a long dry spell looking for work, looking for those mystical gigs that kept every performer, good or bad, going and he was trying to connect once again with Les in order to pick up a few playing dates on the weekend to make ends meet, to make the room rent over on Tappan Street before the landlord gave him the boot. He had laid the Elvis story on Les for what Les could not remember but maybe the fiftieth time over the years and while he never said anything about it while Sonny was going on and on Les was utterly tired of the rag. See he knew what Sonny didn’t. Couldn’t get through his head. Elvis had something besides all those things Sonny was running off about which Sonny thought had made the nut for him. There was something inside, some desire, some eternal showman that one-hit wonder Sonny could never touch. But he listened in silence as Sonny continued.            

“You know Red-Headed Woman went right to the top of the rockabilly charts, you couldn’t hear it enough on the jukeboxes all over the country, kids asking DJs to play it more than once at Saturday night dances. The whole nine yards. Then Elvis came out with Good Rockin’ Tonight, not even his song, not written by him, or for him, and he does a couple of wiggles and giggles and that was that. No showmanship, no craft, just pure animal drive.” Les looked wearily over his glasses and thought back to those glory days when Sonny had his moment in the sun, had made Johnny Dee’s the place to be on a Friday or Saturday night and made Les himself a local legend-for a minute. Such was fate, Sonny just never got over that one minute when he was the king. Too bad, maybe he should have stayed on the farm out in Loring and played his Saturday nights in some roadside dive and be done with it.      

Sonny was like a lot of kids though, a lot of kids who had come through World War II too young to fight and so nothing to brag about against older brothers and fathers who had war stories to tell as long as people would listen before everybody got back to their lives again. Had that same sense of alienation that everybody talked about later with Marlon Brando and his motorcycle boys, the surfers out on the West Coast, JD kids in the cities, Jimmy Dean out in the suburbs with that rebel without a cause label. But all that was later when everybody wanted to explain what the hell was wrong with American youth. What was happening in places like Loring, Tupelo, Jackson, Grand Rapids was that kids were cleaning out their parents’ garages or chicken coops, who knows, and putting together little bands with a new beat, not the swing and be-bop of jazz, not the crooner stuff like Frank but something more like the stuff that was on the “race” records, stuff that made you jump, let you go, and Les didn’t know if this was part of it but let you dance to your own beat with or without a partner like you needed to have in jitterbug. Some kind of free-form expression. But the beat drove the thing. 

So six million guys, and it was mostly guys, put something together. Most of it stayed in the garage but a few like Sonny made it out for a while. Made that trip to Memphis or to some record studio where for a few bucks they could make a demo and try to push it around the radio stations. Those too wound up mostly being played for girlfriends as kicks. Sonny had one great idea, one idea about a sexy feckless red-headed woman, his girlfriend at the time who was two-timing him from what he said and he had put that angst into a song that a million guys could relate to and had a beat that a million girls could dance too and maybe daydream about two-timing their guys just for the hell of it. Who knows what drove them to the song, except it was always the beat in the back that put the thing over.

Like all records though the thing got played out. Went to the back of the record collection to be played not fifty times a day but once in fifty days, if that. That is where Sonny got stuck, got all bent out of shape over Elvis. He had steady work at Johnny Dee’s for a year or so after the heyday of Red-Headed Woman, filled the club up most weekend nights and then didn’t as people moved on to other sounds to the rock and roll without the hillbilly touch that drove Sonny. Worse Sonny couldn’t adjust to the times, could see that he needed another idea and so he was left off to the sidelines. Went downhill a little since he swore he would never go back to the farm. And so he picked up day jobs here and there, mostly manual labor, and tried to write songs in the old way. Tried to get gigs based on that stuff but except for Les who would humor him a little and give him some nights out of kindness nobody was interested.

Over the years Sonny kept plugging away, still working day labor and writing and playing at night in his lonely room except those times when he had to hock his guitar for some small expense to keep from going to the missions. Periodically, like this night, some twenty years after that Sonny minute he would show up to have a drink, talk to Les, and start to rant about Elvis and how he took all the air out of rockabilly. That is when Les knew Sonny would be putting the bite on him to get some dates. And Les, remembering the old days, would go into his worn out schedule book and see if he had a couple of openings. Such is life.      

In Honor Of The 97th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Two –A Child Of The Revolution

In Honor Of The 97th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Two –A Child Of The Revolution

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

 

He was a child of the revolution, the big old Bolshevik Revolution that had enveloped Russia couple of years back, back in November 1917 (new calendar, new like everything else that was good happening in that formerly benighted land although there was plenty that was still bad, bad as human experience could fathom going on what with the Whites raising their ugly heads wherever they could find an opening like with that damn Czech Legion that almost did the country in before Kazan and the stout defense there to speak nothing of the bloody imperialists and the bloody rumors of famine), if anybody was asking. And if while you were asking you wanted a name to attach to that child then Boris Yanoff (or Yanov, if you like), all of sixteen but already with a couple of revolutionary years under his belt.

See Boris had lost his father in one of those ill-advised Russian Army advances if you could it an army what with the old weapons the old General Staff that was no good except to put down workers and peasants in their factories and fields against the Germans on the eastern front, maybe at Tannenburg, or someplace like that and around that same time so he would tell everybody that had been the place where his father fell defending the Czar, the bloody bastard Czar and his bloodless off-spring .

The upshot of that father death was that Boris had travelled to Moscow from his wretched family farm in Omsk to find work in the textile mills that were in need of help to supply the huge needs of the Russian Army in advance, or retreat, mostly the latter. Hell, that family farm thing was really a joke it had only been barely a garden plot, and the crops wouldn’t show up half the time and the landowner had his old father (and his father before him) in hock up to his neck forever so he probably did himself a favor by getting killed in that Eastern front and all that but he was done with that he was a working man now, a proud young worker.

Boris, like a lot of fourteen -year old coming to the city, any city but particularly Moscow, was kind of a hayseed, in one country bumpkin set of clothes and a couple of things in a small valise, a kind of a know-nothing kid when he came to get that factory work which the foreign owners were desperate to get workers for since it seemed every able-bodied male over sixteen was at some front or dead. But he was a fast learning, fast learning how to operate the machinery but also to figure out where he stood in the world, his new working-class world. So when the Bolsheviks in the textile plant in the summer of 1917 started going on and on about the wretched war and how it wasn’t the Germans, the rank and file German soldiers anyway but their own government that was the enemy that needed to be dealt with, needed to be swept away,  about how the Czar and now the bourgeois government, some coalition between socialists and capitalists, wanted to stay in the damn war, wanted to let the big landowners keep their land, wanted to let the factory owners keep their blood-stained profits he was all ears. It was icing on the cake when one Bolshevik rank and filer whom he worked with got him going by saying that if he went with the Bolsheviks that would help avenge his father’s cruel death for no reason out in some forgotten Czarist killing field. So Boris was in, read the newspapers, and, more importantly joined the factory defense committee and learned how to shoot, shoot for real, not that silly goose pop gun stuff back on the farm.

Then the day of reckoning came. November 7, 1917 (again new calendar to herald a new era). He had heard through the factory grapevine that the Bolsheviks had risen in Saint Petersburg and had declared the Provisional Government null and void, the war null and void, and the big landowners and capitalists null and void and in their place the Soviets, the workers, peasants, and soldiers councils, the people’s voice. Right after that his factory committee was put on notice that they would try to take power in Moscow and while Saint Petersburg’s had been relatively bloodless they, he and his comrades, had a hell of fight, a bloody fight where he lost more than a few shop mates, before they could declare the Moscow Soviet.

As he sat at his bench reading a much passed copy of Pravda now in early March 1919 he thought about that bloody fight, about how he had joined the Red Guards after that, had been called up a couple of times to go out on the outskirts of Moscow and defend the city against the White Guard bastards who were trying to take the land and factories back. No way, no way in hell not after what he and his father had been through in Old Russia. Now they, his Bolshevik comrades, were going to hold a conference, an international conference, where the idea was that what he and his comrades had done in Russia would get done all over the world.

That idea, that idea of other countries getting their soviet power and then helping poor Russia appealed to him. He was not so sure about Lenin, although he was the head of the government and  he had heard him speak in Red Square after the government had moved here to Moscow when things got tough but he read where Trotsky was all for this Communist International and was going to speak at the conference.  And if Trotsky and his fighting phantom train mates were for it then it must be okay. He kind of got a lump in his throat when he thought about that, about how, for once, he was among the first to be fighting for that new world that got him motivated in1917. Yes, he was a child of the revolution and he hoped juts that minute that he would see it through to the end…           

 

*****The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With The Late B.B. King’s Lucille In Mind

*****The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With The Late B.B. King’s Lucille In Mind 

 

 From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Here is the drill. Bart Webber had started out life, started out as a captive nation child listening to singers like Frank Sinatra who blew away all of the swirling, fainting, screaming bobbysoxers who really did wear bobby sox since the war was on and nylons were like gold, of his mother’s generation proving that his own generation, the generation that came of age to Elvis hosannas although to show human progress they threw their undergarments his way, was not some sociological survey aberration before he, Frank,  pitter-pattered the Tin Pan Alley crowd with hip Cole Porter champagne lyrics changed from sweet sister cocaine originally written when that was legal, when you could according to his grandmother who might have known since she faced a lifetime of pain could be purchased over the counter at Doc’s Drugstore although Doc had had no problem passing him his first bottle of hard liquor when he was only sixteen which was definitely underage, to the bubbly reflecting changes of images in the be-bop swinging reed scare Cold War night, Bing Crosby, not the Bing of righteous Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? when he spoke a little to the social concerns of the time and didn’t worry about Yip Harburg some kind of red pinko bastard raising hell among the workers and homeless guy who slogged through World War I  but White Christmas put to sleep stuff dreaming of very white Christmases along with “come on to my house” torchy who seemed to have been to some Doc’s Drugstore to get her own pains satisfied Rosemary Clooney (and to his brother, younger I think, riding his way, Bob and his Bobcats as well), the Inkspots spouting, sorry kit-kating scat ratting If I Didn’t Care and their trademark spoken verse on every song, you know three verses and they touched up the bridge (and not a soul complained at least according to the record sales for a very long time through various incantations of the group), Miss Patti Page getting dreamy about local haunt Cape Cod Bay in the drifty moonlight a place he was very familiar with in those Plymouth drives down Route 3A  and yakking about some doggie in the window, Jesus (although slightly better on Tennessee Waltz maybe because that one spoke to something, spoke to the eternal knot question, a cautionary tale about letting your friend cut in on your gal, or guy and walking away with the dame or guy leaving you in the lurch), Miss Rosemary Clooney, solo this time, telling one and all to jump and come to her house as previously discussed, Miss Peggy Lee trying to get some no account man to do right, do right by his woman (and swinging and swaying on those Tin Pan Alley tunes of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, the Gershwin brothers and Jerome Kern best with Benny Goodman in wartime 1940s which kept a whole generation of popular singers with a scat of material), the Andrew Sisters yakking about their precious rums and cokes (soft drinks, not cousin, thank you remember what was said above about the switch in time from sweet sister to bathtub gin), the McGuire Sisters getting misty-eyed, the Dooley sisters dried-eyed, and all the big swing bands from the 1940s like Harry James, Tommy Dorsey (and his brother Jimmy who had his own band for some reason, maybe sibling rivalry, look it up if you like) as background music on the family radio in the 1950s.

The radio which his mother, Delores of the many commands, more commandments than even old Moses come down the mountain imposed on his benighted people, of the many sorrows, sorrows maybe that she had picked a husband more wisely in the depths of her mind although don’t tell him, the husband, his hard-pressed father or that she had had to leave her own family house over on Young Street with that damn misbegotten Irish red-nosed father, and the many estrangements, something about the constant breaking of those fucking commandments, best saved for another day, always had on during the day to get her through her “golden age of working class prosperity” and single official worker, dad, workaday daytime household world” and on Saturday night too when that dad, Prescott, joined in.

Joined in so they, mother and father sloggers and not only through the Great Depression and World War II but into the golden age too, could listen to Bill Marley on local radio station WJDA and his Memory Lane show from seven to eleven where they could listen to the music that got them (and their generation) through the “from hunger” times of the 1930s Great Depression (no mean task not necessarily easier than slogging through that war coming on its heels)  and when they slogged through (either in some watery European theater or the Pacific atoll island one take your pick) or anxiously waited at home for the other shoe to drop during World War II. A not unusual occurrence, that shoe dropping, when the lightly trained, rushed to battle green troops faced battle-hardened German and Japanese soldiers until they got the knack of war on bloody mudded fronts and coral-etched islands but still too many Gold Star mothers enough to make even the war savages shed a tear. 

Bart, thinking back on the situation felt long afterward that he would have been wrong if he said that Delores and Prescott should not have had their memory music after all of that Great Depression sacking and war rationing but frankly that stuff then (and now, now that he had figured some things out about them, about how hard they tried and just couldn’t do better given their circumstances but too later to have done anything about the matter, although less so) made him grind his teeth. But he, and his three brothers, were a captive audience then and so to this very day he could sing off Rum and Coca Cola, Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree (the Glenn Miller version not the Andrew Sister’s) and Vera Lynn’s White Cliffs of Dover from memory. But that was not his music, okay. (Nor mine either since we grew up in the same working class neighborhood in old Carver, the cranberry bog capital of the world, together and many nights in front of Hank’s Variety store we would blow steam before we got our very own transistor radios and record players about the hard fact that we could not turn that radio dial, or shut off that record player, under penalty of exile from Main Street.)     

Then of course since we are speaking about the 1950s came the great musical break-out, the age of classic rock and roll which Bart “dug” (his term since he more than the rest of us who hung around Jimmy Jack’s Clam Shack on Main Street [not the diner on Thornton Street, that would be later when the older guys moved on and we stepped up in their places in high school] was influenced by the remnant of the “beat” generation minute as it got refracted in Carver via his midnight sneak trips to Harvard Square, trips that broke that mother commandment number who knows what number), seriously dug to the point of dreaming his own jailbreak commandment dreams about rock star futures (and girls hanging off every hand, yeah, mostly the girls part as time went on once he figured out his voice had broken around thirteen and that his slightly off-key versions of the then current hits would not get him noticed on the mandatory American Bandstand, would not get him noticed even if he was on key) but that Elvis-etched time too was just a bit soon for him, us, to be able to unlike Bart’s older brother, Payne, call that stuff the music that he, I came of age to.

Although the echoes of that time still run through his, our, minds as we recently proved yet again when we met in Boston at a ‘60s retro jukebox bar and could lip-synch, quote chapter and verse, One Night With You (Elvis version, including the salacious One Night Of Sin original), Sweet Little Sixteen (Chuck Berry, of course, too bad he couldn’t keep his hands off those begging white girls when the deal went down and Mister wanted no interracial sex, none, and so send him to hell and back), Let’s Have A Party ( by the much underrated Wanda Jackson who they could not figure out how to produce, how to publicize -female Elvis with that sultry look and that snarl or sweet country girl with flowers in her hair and “why thank you Mister Whoever for having me on your show I am thrilled” June Carter look ), Be-Bop-a-Lula (Gene Vincent in the great one hit wonder night, well almost one hit, but what a hit when you want to think back to the songs that made you jump, made you a child of rock and roll), Bo Diddley (Bo, of course, who had long ago answered the question of who put the rock in rock and roll and who dispute his claim except maybe Ike Turner when he could flailed away on Rocket 88), Peggy Sue (too soon gone Buddy Holly) and a whole bunch more.   

 

The music that Bart really called his own though, as did I, although later we were to part company since I could not abide, still can’t abide, that whiny music dealing mainly with mangled murders, death, thwarted love, and death, or did I say that already, accompanied by, Jesus, banjos, mandos and harps, was the stuff from the folk minute of the 1960s which dovetailed with his, our coming of chronological, political and social age, the latter in the sense of recognizing, if not always acting on, the fact that there were others, kindred, out there beside us filled with angst, alienation and good will to seek solidarity with which neither of us tied up with knots with seven seals connected with until later after getting out of our dinky hometown of Carver and off into the big cities and campus towns where just at that moment there were kindred by the thousands with the same maladies and same desire to turn  the world upside down.

By the way if you didn’t imbibe in the folk minute or were too young what I mean is the mountain tunes of the first generation of the Carter Family coming out of Clinch Mountain, Buell Kazell, a guy you probably never heard of and haven’t missed much except some history twaddle that Bart is always on top of (from the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music times), Jimmy Rodgers the Texas yodeler who found fame at the same time as the Carters in old Podunk Bristol, Tennessee, the old country Child ballads (Northwest Europe old country collected by Child in Cambridge in the 1850s and taken up in that town again one hundred years later in some kind of act, conscious or unconscious, of historical affinity), the blue grass music (which grabbed Bart by the throat when Everett Lally, a college friend of his and member of the famed Lally Brothers blue grass band let him in on his treasure trove of music from that genre which he tried to interest me in one night before I cut him short although Everett was a cool guy, very cool for a guy from the hills and hollows of Appalachia). Protest songs too, protest songs against the madnesses of the times, nuclear war, brushfire war in places like Vietnam, against Mister James Crow’s midnight hooded ways, against the barbaric death penalty, against a lot of what songwriter Malvina Reynolds called the “ticky-tack little cookie-cutter box” existences all of us were slated for if nothing else turned up by the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk and Phil Ochs. Bart said that while he was in college (Boston College, the Jesuit school which was letting even heathen Protestants like Bart in as long as the they did not try to start the Reformation, again on their dime, or could play football) the latter songs (With God On Our Side, Blowin’ In The Wind, The Time They Are A-Changing, I Ain’t Marching No More, Universal Soldier and stuff like that) that drove a lot of his interest once he connected their work with the Harvard Square coffeehouse scene (and the adjacent hanging out at the Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria which he has written plenty about elsewhere and need not detain us here where he hung on poverty nights, meaning many nights.

Bart said a lot of the drive toward folk music was to get out from under the anti-rock and rock musical counter-revolution that he, we although I just kept replaying Elvis and the crowd until the new dispensation arrived, kept hearing on his transistor radio during that early 1960s period with pretty boy singers (Fabian, a bunch of guys named Bobby, the Everly Brothers) and vapid young female consumer-driven female singer stuff (oh, you want names, well Sandra Dee, Brenda Lee, Patsy Cline, Leslie Gore say no more). I passed that time, tough time it was in that cold winter night where the slightest bit of free spirit was liable to get you anywhere from hell form commandment mother to the headmaster to some ill-disposed anonymous rabid un-American committee which would take your livelihood away in a snap if you didn’t come across with names and addresses and be quick about it just ask the Hollywood Ten and lesser mortals if you think I am kidding which I agreed was a tough time in the rock genre that drove our desires, feeling crummy for not having a cool girlfriend to at least keep the chill night out playing my by the midnight phone classic rock and roll records almost to death and worn down grooves and began to hear a certain murmur from down South and out in Chicago with a blues beat that I swear sounded like it came out of the backbeat of rock. (And I  was not wrong, found out one night to Bart’s surprise and mine that Smiley Jackson big loving tune that I swear Elvis ripped off and just snarled and swiveled up. Years later I was proven right in my intuition when it turned out that half of rock and roll depended on black guys selling scant records, “race records” to small audiences.)  

Of course both of us, Bart and me, with that something undefinable which set us apart from others like Frankie Riley the leader of the corner boy night who seemed to get along by going along, being nothing but prime examples of those alienated teenagers whom the high-brow sociologists were fretting about, hell, gnawing at their knuckles since the big boys expected them to earn all that research money by spotting trends not letting the youth of the nation go to hell in a handbasket without a fight, worried that we were heading toward nihilism, toward some “chicken run” death wish or worse, much worse like Johnny Wild Boy and his gang marauding hapless towns at will leaving the denizens defenseless against the horde and not sure what to do about it, worried about our going to hell in a handbasket like they gave a fuck, like our hurts and depressions were what ailed the candid world although I would not have characterized that trend that way for it would take a few decades to see what was what. Then though the pretty boy and vapid girl music just gave me a headache, a migraine if anybody was asking, but mostly nobody was.  Bart too although like I said we split ways as he sought to seek out roots music that he kept hearing in the coffeehouses and on the radio once he found a station out of Providence  (accidently) which featured such folk music and got intrigued by the sounds.

Part of that search in the doldrums, my part but I dragged Bart along a little when I played to his folkie roots interests after he found out that some of the country blues music would get some play on that folk music station, a big search over the long haul, was to get deeply immersed in the blues, mainly at first country blues and later the city, you know, Chicago blues. Those country guys though intrigued me once they were “discovered” down south in little towns plying away in the fields or some such work and were brought up to Newport for the famous folk festival there, the one where we would hitchhike to the first time since we had no car when Steve  when balked at going to anything involving, his term “ faggy guys and ice queen girls” (he was wrong, very wrong on the later point, the former too but guys in our circle were sensitive to accusations of “being light on your feet” and let it pass without comment) to enflame a new generation of aficionados. The likes of Son House the mad man preacher-sinner man, Skip James with that falsetto voice singing out about how he would rather be with the devil than to be that woman’s man, a song that got me into trouble with one girl when I mentioned it kiddingly one time to her girlfriend and I got nothing but the big freeze after that and as recently a few years  when I used that as my reason when I was asked if would endorse Hilary Clinton for President, Bukka White (sweating blood and salt on that National Steel on Aberdeen Mississippi Woman and Panama Limited which you can see via YouTube), and, of course Creole Belle candy man Mississippi John Hurt.

But those guys basically stayed in the South went about their local business and vanished from big view until they were “discovered” by folk aficionados who headed south in the late 1950s and early 1960s looking for, well, looking for roots, looking for something to hang onto  and it took a younger generation, guys who came from the Mister James Crow’s South and had learned at their feet or through old copies of their records like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and the guy whose photograph graces this sketch, the late B.B. King, to make the move north, to follow the northern star like in underground railroad days to the big industrial cities (with a stop at Memphis on Beale Street to polish up their acts, to get some street wise-ness in going up river, in going up the Big Muddy closer to its source as if that would give them some extra boost, some wisdom) to put some electric juice in those old guitars and chase my blues away just by playing like they too had, as the legendry Robert Johnson is said to have done one dark out on Highway 61 outside of Clarksville down in the Delta, made their own pacts with the devil. And made a lot of angst and alienation just a shade more bearable.  

B.B. King was by no means my first choice among electrified bluesmen, Muddy Waters and in a big way Howlin’ Wolf, especially after I found out the Stones were covering his stuff (and Muddy’s) got closer to the nut for me, But B.B.  on his good days and when he had Lucille (whichever version he had to hand I understand there were several generations for one reason or another) he got closer to that feeling that the blues could set me free when I was, well, blue, could keep me upright when some woman was two-timing me, or worst was driving me crazy with her “do this and do that” just for the sake of seeing who was in charge, could chase away some bad dreams when the deal went down.

Gave off an almost sanctified, not like some rural minster sinning on Saturday night with the women parishioners in Johnny Shine’s juke joint and then coming up for air Sunday morning to talk about getting right with the Lord but like some old time Jehovah river water cleaned, sense of time and place, after a hard juke joint or Chicago tavern Saturday night and when you following that devil minister showed up kind of scruffy for church early Sunday morning hoping against hope that the service would be short (and that Minnie Callahan would be there a few rows in front of you so you could watch her ass and get through the damn thing. B.B. might not have been my number one but he stretched a big part of that arc. Praise be.

In Honor Of Women's History Month-From The Archives-Women And Revolution

In Honor Of Women's History Month-From The Archives-Women And Revolution