A View From The Left- WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

 

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: It's Not Enough to Just Deplore Horrific Violence

I know many people believe that our criminal justice system can be “fixed” by smart people and smart policies. President Obama seems to think this way…  But if we’re serious about having peace officers — rather than a domestic military at war with its own people — we’re going to have to get honest with ourselves about who our democracy actually serves and protects. Consider this: Philando Castile had been stopped 31 times and charged with more than 60 minor violations — resulting in thousands of dollars in fines — before his last, fatal encounter with the police.

Alton Sterling was arrested because he was hustling, selling CDs to get by. He was unable to work in the legal economy due to his felony record. His act of survival was treated by the police as a major crime, apparently punishable by death.  How many people on Wall Street have been arrested for their crimes large and small — crimes of greed and fraud that nearly bankrupted the global economy and destroyed the futures of millions of families? How many politicians have been prosecuted for taking millions of dollars from private prisons, prison guard unions, pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, tobacco companies, the NRA and Wall Street banks and doing their bidding for them.   More

 

Legal Experts Raise Alarm over Shocking Use of 'Killer Robot' in Dallas

As news emerges that police officers in Dallas, Texas used an armed robot to kill the suspected shooter in Thursday night's ambush, experts are warning that it represents a sea change in police militarization that only heightens risks to human and constitutional rights.  Dallas Police Chief David Brown said Friday morning during a press conference that police "saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate" where the suspect had taken refuge in a parking garage as police tried to negotiate with him, adding that he was "deceased as a result of detonating the bomb."   More

 

DPPer Rosemary Kean delivered a sermon last Sunday at the First Church of Boston

After centuries of being divided by race, we have an opportunity now to work to close that division with a strong racial justice movement. Without a strong racial justice movement that involves white America, it is doubtless that certain criminal justice and police reforms will be enacted only to disappear by the next iteration of white supremacist policies, which we, because our lives are not involved in a deep and caring way with black and brown families and neighborhoods, will only realize has happened after the damage is done.  Read it all here

 

Are We in for Another Increase in Military Spending?

Certainly most Americans are not clamoring for heightened investments in war and war preparations… Actually, it appears that, when Americans are given the facts about US military spending, a substantial majority of them favor reducing it. Between December 2015 and February 2016, the nonpartisan Voice of the People, affiliated with the University of Maryland, provided a sample of 7,126 registered voters with information on the current US military budget, as well as leading arguments for and against it.  The arguments were vetted for accuracy by staff members of the House and Senate appropriations subcommittees on defense. Then, when respondents were asked their opinion about what should be done, 61 percent said they thought US military spending should be reduced. The biggest cuts they championed were in spending for nuclear weapons and missile defense systems.  When it comes to this year’s presumptive Presidential candidates, however, quite a different picture emerges.   More

 

After Sanders Endorses Clinton, 'Political Revolution' Faces Hard Choices

For the past months, the Democratic Party, particularly corporate Democrats, clamored for Bernie Sanders to quit the presidential race or endorse Hillary Clinton. He continued his campaign and competed in all 50 states. He challenged the inevitability of Clinton as a nominee, forcing her to stave off his “political revolution.” But now, Sanders has endorsed Clinton, and the Democratic Party can breathe a sigh of relief going into the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.  The critical question of the moment is what the endorsement means for the “political revolution.” To paraphrase what Socialist Seattle City council member Kshama Sawant said at the People’s Summit nearly one month ago, how can the “political revolution” move forward if tens of millions of people, who are angry at the corporate establishment and both the Republican and Democratic Parties, are urged to support a corporate establishment candidate like Hillary Clinton?   More

 

What the Democratic Party Platform Tells Us About Where We Are on War

Bill Clinton’s Labor Secretary Robert Reich described the platform draft as providing “a relatively easy way for so-called mainstream and centrist Democrats to make progressive Democrats feel included without really changing the status quo or ruffling feathers on Wall Street.” Platform language, he said, is “still just rhetoric.… It reveals the current limits of what is acceptable political discourse inside the party.”  … But it does show that committed and strategic movements can have impact. The sections of the platform on Wall Street and tax reforms, in particular, are much bolder than those in the 2012 draft…  But it is on the platform’s dealing with issues of war and peace, militarism and diplomacy, Palestine and Israel, that both the potential and the limitations of social movements are most clear. Discussion of today’s US wars—with thousands of ground troops, warplanes and pilots, drone bombers, special forces, CIA paramilitaries, and so many more now actively at war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and beyond, with thousands dying and millions displaced, with hundreds of billions of dollars squandered on these wars—was virtually absent during the platform debates.   More

 

The Progressive Platform Gains Are Significant—But The Political Revolution Isn’t Stopping There

While the platform is likely the most progressive ever, with enormous thanks to Bernie and his supporters, it will likely stop short of satisfying the tens of thousands who campaigned for him and the 12 million who voted for him.  There is no proposal to end fracking; Medicare for all was voted down; and the platform does not support an end to new Israeli settlements in Gaza or the West Bank…   The future of the political revolution, however, goes far beyond the platform, rules, convention or even the 2016 election.  In the next two weeks, Bernie Sanders will begin to describe how his massive organization of millions can function beyond this moment and help build a movement for social and economic change.    More

 

CORNEL WEST: Obama has failed victims of racism and police brutality

This November, we need change. Yet we are tied in a choice between Trump, who would be a neo-fascist catastrophe, and Clinton, a neo-liberal disaster. That’s why I am supporting Jill Stein. I am with her – the only progressive woman in the race – because we’ve got to get beyond this lock-jaw situation. I have a deep love for my brother Bernie Sanders, but I disagree with him on Hillary Clinton. I don’t think she would be an “outstanding president”. Her militarism makes the world a less safe place. Clinton policies of the 1990s generated inequality, mass incarceration, privatization of schools and Wall Street domination. There is also a sense that the Clinton policies helped produce the right-wing populism that we’re seeing now in the country. And we think she’s going to come to the rescue? That’s not going to happen.   More

 

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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

 

Report Shows How War Profiteers Are Now Refugee Profiteers

Border Wars: The Arms Dealers Profiting from Europe's Refugee Tragedy, released jointly by the European Stop Wapenhandel and Transnational Institute (TNI) on Monday, outlines arms traders' pursuit of profit in the 21st century's endless conflicts.  "There is one group of interests that have only benefited from the refugee crisis, and in particular from the European Union's investment in 'securing' its borders,'" the report finds. "They are the military and security companies that provide the equipment to border guards, the surveillance technology to monitor frontiers, and the IT infrastructure to track population movements."  The report shows that "far from being passive beneficiaries of EU largesse, these corporations are actively encouraging a growing securitization of Europe's borders, and willing to provide ever more draconian technologies to do this."  In the past decade, the report says, corporate players have viewed intractable Middle East warfare as a windfall: "Several large international arms companies cited instability in the Middle East to assure investors about future prospects for their business. The arms companies are assisted by European governments, which actively promote European arms in the region and are very reluctant, to say the least, to impose stricter arms export policies."  More

 

Double game? Even as it battles ISIS, Turkey gives other extremists shelter

Turkey has defended its policy of giving refuge to exiled supporters of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government, which was overthrown in a coup in 2013. But among those offered shelter in Turkey are leaders of the Egyptian group Gamaa Islamiya, , whose members carried out murderous attacks against tourists in Egypt in the 1990s and were later tied to multiple plots to kill Americans…  Such permissive policies stand in contrast to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s newly assertive stance against the Islamic State, the group suspected in last month’s Istanbul airport attack that killed 45 people. Erdogan has moved to tighten lax border controls that allowed terrorist recruits and contraband to flow from Turkey into Iraq and Syria, and last week he vowed a further crackdown against a group that he called “not Islamic.” … Yet Erdogan has taken a softer line toward Jabhat al-Nusra, one of several Islamist groups that Turkish officials supported during the early years of the Syrian civil war before formally breaking with it under Western pressure in 2014. In a speech last month, Erdogan repeated his suggestion that the “terrorist” label was inappropriate for Jabhat al-Nusra’s Islamist rebels, who, after all, also are at war with the Islamic State.   More

 

NATO agrees to reinforce eastern Poland, Baltic states against Russia

NATO leaders agreed on Friday to deploy military forces to the Baltic states and eastern Poland for the first time and increase air and sea patrols to reassure allies who were once part of the Soviet bloc following Russia's seizure of Crimea from Ukraine.  The 28-nation Western defence alliance decided to move four battalions totalling 3,000 to 4,000 troops into northeastern Europe on a rotating basis to display its readiness to defend eastern members against any Russian aggression…  President Barack Obama said the United States would deploy about 1,000 soldiers in Poland under the plan "to enhance our forward presence in central and eastern Europe". Germany will lead the battalion in Lithuania, Britain in Estonia and Canada in Latvia. Other nations such as France will supply troops.  More

 

Time to rethink NATO

Donald Trump angered the D.C. establishment when he said that NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance, may be obsolete and the U.S. should reassess its spending on the alliance. Hillary Clinton has used Trump’s comments as another example that he is a dangerous, loose cannon. But Trump has brought up an issue worth exploring and this month, when NATO will hold its Annual Summit in Warsaw, Poland on July 8-9, is an excellent opportunity to do so. Indeed, activists are planning to show up on in Warsaw during the Summit and in New York City there will be a demonstration on July 9 in Times Square. Formed in the  early years of the Cold War, 1949, with the United States, Canada, Portugal, Italy, UK, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France, by 1952 this post-WWII alliance included Greece and Turkey, and had rejected the Soviet Union’s request to join.  In 1956, when West Germany was admitted to NATO membership, the USSR formed the Warsaw Pact in response and the Cold War was then on, full-blown…  With the recent breakup of the old paradigm after the UK just left the European Union, there may be a new opening for change. It has been reported that Germany and France have been talking about ending the sanctions on Russia imposed after the Ukraine events and are now recommending a less aggressive posture for NATO.    More

 

"NATO versus the EU? "

Many Europeans remain highly ambivalent about whether it is NATO, or the E.U., that better represents their own geopolitical concerns. NATO is at heart an American institution, the E.U. is not.  Indeed any real back-door influence the U.S. had in the E.U. came from the ever-loyal United Kingdom (which is why Brexit is such a disaster for the U.S. in Europe.)… Washington is uncomfortable in watching the E.U., as an economic and political organization, work closely with Russia. Indeed Germany, given its location, history and power, will be the quintessential European interlocutor with Russia — and thus most likely the major voice of reason and balance in East-West relations. Germany, more than any other European power, will also bear the brunt of any potential hostilities with Russia. That is why the German foreign minister himself made cautionary comments a few weeks ago that NATO’s largest ever military exercises off Poland since 1991 constituted provocative saber-rattling towards Russia. In this sense, then, Washington’s geopolitical agenda has in fact served to undermine the E.U. Washington strongly urged the immediate inclusion of as many former states of the East Bloc as possible in the E.U., seeking to glue them into a hopefully more anti-Russian Western “bloc.”  More

 

 

Of Sex And Dough - Bad Business-A Crime Novel by Robert B. Parker-A Review

Of Sex And Dough - Bad Business-A Crime Novel by Robert B. Parker-A Review 

Book Review

By Sam Lowell

Bad Business, Robert B. Parker, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 2003  

Funny what will turn up on your summer reading list and why. Sure I am like any other heated, roasted urban dweller and am looking for a little light reading to while away the summer doldrums. Most days I review high-toned literary masterpieces or squirrelly little historical books fit for the academy. But those kinds of books cannot survive the summer heat siege. Which brings us to the book under review, one of Robert B. Parker’s seemingly never-ending Spenser series efforts, Bad Business.  Or rather I will bring us to the book under review after I go through a little of how I came to read this book. How I came to read yet another Parker crime novel for crying out loud.

See, as I have mentioned elsewhere of late in reviewing some other Parker-etched books every year when the doldrums come I automatically reach for a little classic crime detection from the max daddy masters of the genre Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett from my library to see the real deal, to see how the masters worked their magic, in order to spruce up (and parse, if possible) my own writing. This year when I did so I noticed a book Poodle Spring by Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker. This final Philip Marlowe series book was never finished by Chandler before he died in 1959. Parker finished it up in 1989. Robert B. Parker, of course, had been a name known to me as the crime novel writer of the Spenser series of which I had read several of the earlier ones before moving on to others interests. That loss of interest centered on the increasingly formulistic way Parker packaged the Spenser character continuing through some forty books in the series to dwell on his eating habits, his off-hand racial banter with his black compadre Hawk, continually touting his physical and mental “street cred” toughness and his love affair with Susan. They collectively did not grow as characters but became stick figures serving increasingly less interesting plots.

While checking up on what Parker, who died in 2010, had subsequently written I noticed another Chandler-Parker collaboration Perchance To Dream: Robert B. Parker’s Sequel To Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Since I was on a roll, was being guided by the ghost of Raymond Chandler maybe, I decided to check out what turned out to be Parker’s last Spenser effort, Sixkill. And because we still have several weeks left of summer and crime novels have the virtue of not only being easy on the brain in the summer heat but quick reads I figured to play out my hand a little and read a few other Parker works. Now we are all caught up on genesis.

Sex and dough mesh together in an odd way in the Parker book under review, Bad Business. A woman hired Spenser to find out if her high-level executive of a speculative energy company husband was having an affair seemingly in order bail out of the marriage and take him for all he was worth. This despite the fact that under the guidance of a Boston sex therapist radio host he and she were engaged in an “open marriage,” were screwing other people with each other’s consent . Go figure. So Spenser did his Spenser thing of finding that the husband was in fact having an affair with a fellow high-level executive’s wife. Before long though that philandering husband wound up dead, very dead, murdered in his office, and although that solved the woman’s dough problems it perked, as usual, Spenser’s interest in why he had been killed, and by whom if not the wife. (Wives and girlfriends as the “logical” suspects and visa versa husbands and boyfriends in most murders, crime detection novel murders anyway)      

Naturally Spenser had to figure that the company the husband worked for maybe had something to do with that late husband’s demise after he grabbed some additional facts about the financial state of the business. That suspicion only got additional confirmation when the head of company security was also murdered, murdered most foully. So by an interesting sleight of hand, using his long time amigo tough guy Hawk and Hawk’s then current girlfriend, he was able to con the CEO of the company into having Spenser’s accountant audit the books. What that accounting wizard found out about the “cooked” books would eventually lead back to the sex part of sex and dough. That the sex therapist radio show host turned out to be “light on his feet,” you know a faggot in Spenser and Hawk’s terms, today gay and leave the other stuff out and had a serial killer boyfriend who was trigger-happy twice in this story. Guess what the two trigger-happy events were. Here’s where the sex and dough thing got really squirrely, that gay sex therapist was “boffing” the woman that the dead company executive was boffing in order to grab all the company’s dough (by cashing in proxy-held stock, okay ) before it went belly up.

So sex and dough drove this one for sure but also along the way we got the usual description of every food and drink, hard and soft, that Spenser inhaled, all the usual sex and tough guy black and white together back to back talk between Spenser and Hawk, and the increasingly inevitable sexy pillow talk between Spenser and Susan. I am not sure how much longer I can hold up reading every few pages about their torrent love affair and mutual declarations of love that would embarrass even today’s teenagers.                   

*****Important Mumia Abu Jamal Update-Free Mumia

*****Important  Mumia Abu Jamal Update-Free Mumia

 

Click below to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site.

http://www.partisandefense.org/

Commentary

The legendary social commentator and stand up comic Lenny Bruce, no stranger to the American ‘justice’ system himself, once reportedly said that in the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls. The truth of that statement came home on Thursday March 27, 2008 as a panel of the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals voted two to one to uphold Mumia’s conviction.

The only question left is that of resentencing- the death penalty or, perhaps worst, life in prison without parole. I have not yet read the decision but we are now a long way away from the possibility of a retrial-the narrow legal basis for even appealing in the legal system in the first place. Know this- in the end it will be in the streets and factories through the efforts of the international labor movement and other progressive forces that Mumia will be freed. That is the only way, have no illusions otherwise, whatever the next legal steps might be.

*****

Some facts about the case from the PDC (2006):

Mumia Is an Innocent Man Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty   Mumia Abu-Jamal has been on death row for nearly 24 years, falsely convicted of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Mumia Abu-Jamal is innocent and mountains of evidence show this, including the confession of another man, Arnold Beverly, to the murder. All the elements of the capitalist “justice” system colluded in framing up this former Black Panther and MOVE supporter because he is an eloquent and defiant spokesman for the oppressed. The fight to free Mumia has now reached a critical juncture. Last December, the federal appeals court put Mumia’s case on a “fast track” for decision, marking the last stages of the legal proceedings. Both Mumia and prosecutors are appealing decisions made in 2001 by U.S. District Court judge William Yohn, who overturned the death sentence but upheld every aspect of Mumia’s frame-up conviction. The state is as determined as ever to execute Mumia and has appealed. He has been barred by the courts from presenting evidence that he is innocent. But the district attorney filed legal papers in the federal appeals court in April, opening its case with a venomous, lying statement to portray Mumia as a cop-killer who must be executed. In a short time, even as soon as six months, the court could decide what is next for Mumia: death, life in prison or more legal proceedings. Mumia was locked up on death row in 1982 based on lying testimony extorted by the cops without a shred of physical evidence. The judge at his trial, Albert Sabo—known as the “King of Death Row”—was overheard by a court stenographer saying, “I’m going to help ’em fry the n----r.” Rigging the jury to exclude black people, the prosecution incited jurors with the grotesque lie that Mumia’s membership in the Panthers as a teenager proved he was committed to kill a cop “all the way back then.” The 1982 conviction was secured with arguments that the jury could disregard any doubts about Mumia’s guilt because he would have “appeal after appeal.” In nearly two decades of appeals, each and every court has rejected the reams of documented evidence of the blatant frame-up of Mumia. For over four years, Pennsylvania state as well as federal courts have refused to even consider the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner. The execution of Stanley Tookie Williams by the state of California in December casts an ominous shadow. The legal lynching of Williams, which provoked an outcry nationally and internationally, signaled the determination of the U.S. capitalist rulers to fortify their machinery of death in the face of growing reticence in the population over how the death penalty is applied. Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s foremost political prisoner, is the executioners’ number one target. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made this clear when, in denying clemency for Williams, he cited the fact that Williams’ 1998 book, Life in Prison, was dedicated to—among others—Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia’s case demonstrates what the racist death penalty is all about. It is the lynch rope made legal, the ultimate weapon in the government’s arsenal of repression aimed at the working class and oppressed. A legacy of chattel slavery, the death penalty is maintained in a society where the segregation of the majority of the black population is used as a wedge to divide the laboring masses and perpetuate the rapacious rule of capital. The murderous brutality of the racist capitalist system was displayed for all to see when thousands of people, overwhelmingly black and poor, were left to die in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Mumia’s appeal takes place in the context of the government’s assertion of its “right” to disappear, torture or even assassinate its perceived opponents, and to wiretap and spy on anyone and everyone. In the name of the “war on terror,” rights won through tumultuous class and social battles are being put through the shredder by the Bush administration with the support of the Democratic Party. The purpose is to terrorize and silence any who would stand in the way of the capitalist rulers’ relentless drive for profits and their imperialist adventures, like the colonial occupation of Iraq. As Mumia’s case moves through the final stages of legal proceedings, the fight for his freedom is urgently posed. The Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League/U.S.—stands for pursuing every legal avenue in Mumia’s behalf while putting no faith in the “justice” of the capitalist courts. Through publicity and action, we have struggled to mobilize the broadest social forces, centered on the labor movement, to demand Mumia’s freedom and the abolition of the racist death penalty. As Mumia faced execution in August 1995, a mass outpouring of protest nationally and internationally—from civil liberties organizations and such heads of state as South Africa’s Nelson Mandela to trade unions representing millions of workers—succeeded in staying the executioner’s hand. Today we face greater odds. But if undertaken through a mobilization based on the social power of the working class, the fight for Mumia’s freedom would be a giant step forward in the defense of all of us against the increasingly depraved and vicious rulers of this country.   Anatomy of a Frame-Up In the eyes of the capitalist state, from the time Mumia was a 15-year-old spokesman for the Black Panther Party in Philadelphia in 1969, he was a dead man on leave. Then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover pronounced: “The Negro youth and moderate[s] must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teachings, they will be dead revolutionaries.” This policy was carried out under both the Democratic administration of Lyndon Johnson and his Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, and the Republican Nixon administration. Under the FBI’s “counter-intelligence” program known as COINTELPRO, 38 Panthers were murdered and hundreds of others framed up and railroaded to prison. The 900 pages of FBI files the PDC was able to obtain on Mumia’s behalf, even though highly expurgated, make clear that the FBI and cops used any “dirty trick” in their mission to get him. His every move was tracked and his name put on the FBI’s Security Index, the 1960s version of a “terrorist” hit list. Even with the demise of the Panthers, the state did not call off its vendetta against Mumia. As a journalist known as the “voice of the voiceless,” Mumia’s impassioned defense of black rights continued to enrage them. The Philly cops particularly seethed over his sympathetic coverage of the MOVE organization, which was subjected to an onslaught of state terror. Mumia was targeted for death because of his political beliefs, because of what he wrote, because of what he said. And in the early morning hours of 9 December 1981 at the corner of 13th and Locust Streets in Philadelphia, the cops finally saw their chance. Mumia was driving a cab through the area that night. He heard gunshots. He saw people running, saw his own brother and got out of his cab to help him. Moments later, Mumia was critically wounded by a bullet through the chest. Nearby lay a wounded police officer, Daniel Faulkner. The cops found their long-awaited opportunity and seized on it to frame up Mumia as a “cop killer.” The prosecution’s case rested on three legs, all based on lies: the testimony of “eyewitnesses” coerced through favors and terror; a “confession” purportedly made by Mumia the night of the shooting that was such a blatant hoax that it didn’t surface until months later; and nonexistent ballistics “evidence.” In 2001, this frame-up was completely blown to pieces with Arnold Beverly’s confession that he was the man who shot Faulkner. In a sworn affidavit printed in the PDC pamphlet Mumia Abu-Jamal Is an Innocent Man!, Beverly stated:   “I was hired, along with another guy, and paid to shoot and kill Faulkner. I had heard that Faulkner was a problem for the mob and corrupt policemen because he interfered with the graft and payoffs made to allow illegal activity including prostitution, gambling, drugs without prosecution in the center city area.   “Faulkner was shot in the back and then in the face before Jamal came on the scene. Jamal had nothing to do with the shooting.” Beverly stated that the second shooter also fled the scene. This is supported by a sworn affidavit by Mumia’s brother, Billy Cook, who testified that his friend Kenneth Freeman was a passenger in Cook’s VW at 13th and Locust that night. Freeman later admitted to Cook that he was part of the plan to kill Faulkner and had participated in the shooting and then fled the scene. This is further corroborated by the testimony of a witness at the scene, William Singletary, who said he saw a passenger get out of Cook’s VW, shoot Faulkner and then flee the scene. At least half a dozen witnesses who were on the scene the night of the shooting saw, from several different vantage points, one or more black men flee. Police radio “flashes” right after the shooting reported that the shooters had fled the scene with Faulkner’s gun. Five witnesses, including two cops, describe someone at the scene wearing a green army jacket, which both Beverly and Freeman were wearing that night. Neither Mumia nor Cook wore a green army jacket: Mumia wore a red ski jacket with wide vertical blue stripes and Cook had a blue jacket with brass buttons. Beverly said that Mumia was shot by a cop at the scene. This is confirmed by no less an authority than the state Medical Examiner’s office, whose record written the same morning as the shooting quotes a homicide officer saying that Mumia was shot by “arriving police reinforcements,” not by Faulkner. Other witnesses have corroborated Beverly’s testimony that undercover and uniformed police were in the vicinity at the time of the shooting, which Beverly assumed meant that they were in on the plan to kill Faulkner. One witness, Marcus Cannon, saw two undercover cops on the street across from the shooting. William Singletary also saw “white shirts” (police supervisors) at the scene right after the shots were fired. The prosecution dismisses the idea that the cops would kill one of their own as an outlandish invention. Leaving aside that Beverly passed two lie detector tests, his account fits with the fact that at the time of Faulkner’s killing in 1981, there were at least three ongoing federal investigations into police corruption in Philadelphia, including police connections with the mob. Police working as FBI informants were victims of hits in the early 1980s. A former federal prosecutor acknowledged that the Feds had a police informant whose brother was a cop, just as Faulkner had a brother who was a cop. A sworn affidavit by Donald Hersing, a former informant in an FBI investigation into police corruption, confirms that at the time of Faulkner’s shooting the word was out that the Feds had an informant in the police force. The commanding officer of the Central Police Division, where the murder of Faulkner took place, the chief of the police Homicide Division and the ranking officer at the scene of Faulkner’s killing, Alfonzo Giordano, were all under investigation at the time on federal corruption charges. These cops were literally the chain of command in the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Giordano had been the right-hand man for Philadelphia’s notoriously racist police chief and later mayor, Frank Rizzo. From 1966 to 1970, Giordano was in charge of the cop “Stakeout” squad, which led the police raid on the Black Panthers’ headquarters in 1970. He was also the supervisor of the 15-month police siege of MOVE’s Powelton Village house in 1977-78, which resulted in nine MOVE members being sent to prison on frame-up charges of killing a cop. Giordano knew exactly who Mumia was. The senior officer on the scene, he had both motive and opportunity to frame up Mumia for the killing of Faulkner. Giordano originated the claim that Mumia’s gun—the putative murder weapon—was lying beside him on the street. But according to police radio records, the cops were still looking for the gun some 14 minutes after hordes of police had arrived on the scene. Giordano arranged the identification of Mumia by cab driver Robert Chobert, who became a witness for the prosecution. Giordano was the central witness for the prosecution at Mumia’s pretrial hearing. But he was never called as a witness at Mumia’s trial. Shortly before the trial, he was assigned to a desk job. One working day after Mumia was convicted, Giordano resigned from the force. In 1986, Giordano copped a plea on federal charges based on his receiving tens of thousands of dollars in illegal payoffs from 1979 to 1980. He didn’t spend a day in jail.   Prosecution’s Web of Lies The prosecution’s story is that two people were on the corner of 13th and Locust where Faulkner was shot: Mumia’s brother Billy Cook and Faulkner. They claim that Mumia ran across the street when he saw his brother being beaten by Faulkner. According to police and prosecutors, Mumia shot the cop in the back, the cop shot back at Mumia and then Mumia stood over the fallen cop and shot him “execution style” several times in the head. Even a close examination of the cops’ and prosecution’s own evidence gives the lie to this scenario. A look at the “three legs” of the prosecution’s case provides not only stark confirmation of Mumia’s innocence but clear corroboration of Beverly’s testimony. The Prosecution’s Witnesses: Even with police and prosecution threats and favors at the time of the 1982 trial, no witness testified to seeing Mumia actually shoot Faulkner. Only one, Cynthia White, the prosecution’s star witness, testified that she thought she saw a gun in Mumia’s hand when he crossed the street. A prostitute working in the area, White claimed to have witnessed the events from the southeast corner of 13th and Locust. Yet the other two prosecution witnesses, as well as two defense witnesses who knew White, all denied she was at the scene during the shooting! Other prostitutes testified in subsequent court hearings that White alternately got police favors or was threatened by police in order to extract her testimony. As for Robert Chobert, at first he told police that the shooter “ran away.” After further interrogation, he changed his story, claiming that Mumia stood over Faulkner while the shots were fired and that no one ran away. A cab driver using a suspended license while on probation for felony arson, Chobert was given favors by the prosecution in exchange for his testimony. He later admitted that he never saw the shooting. The third state witness was Michael Scanlan. He initially identified Mumia as the VW driver but then claimed that the shooter ran across Locust Street, which Beverly admits that he did. He also admitted that he did not know if Mumia was the man he saw. Ballistics and Forensics: The prosecution claimed that ballistics evidence was “consistent” with Mumia’s gun being the murder weapon even while admitting that the “consistency” applied to millions of handguns. There is no evidence that Mumia’s gun was even fired that night. There was every opportunity to test Mumia’s hands, or the gun, for evidence that it had been recently fired. But according to police no such tests, which are standard operating procedure, were ever done! The Stakeout officer who claimed he picked up Mumia’s gun did not turn it over for more than two hours, providing more than ample time to have it tampered with. The Medical Examiner’s report states that Faulkner was shot with a .44 calibre bullet, yet Mumia’s gun was a .38 calibre. Although the crime lab claimed that the main bullet fragment removed from Faulkner’s head was too damaged to test, the defense team’s ballistics expert denied this. A second bullet fragment removed from the head wound simply disappeared without a trace. Evidence at the scene—bullet fragments, blood stains, the absence of divots in the sidewalk—refutes the prosecution claim that Faulkner was shot repeatedly while lying on the ground. The bullet patterns are far more consistent with multiple shooters, as Beverly testifies. A copper bullet jacket found at the scene was inconsistent with either Faulkner’s or Mumia’s guns, suggesting that a different gun was fired. Similarly, type O blood was found at the scene, but Faulkner, Mumia and Cook were all type A, suggesting that another person was present and injured. The angle of Mumia’s own wounds is impossible if he was shot while standing over Faulkner as the prosecution claimed. However, Mumia’s wounds are consistent with Beverly’s testimony that Mumia was shot by a cop at the scene. The “Confession”: The frame-up’s final leg was the claim that Mumia, lying in a pool of blood at the hospital where he was taken for treatment, shouted out that he had shot the cop. Yet the police officer assigned to guard Mumia there reported that same day that Mumia “made no comments.” In reality, he was so badly wounded, with a bullet hole through one lung, and had been so badly beaten by police on the street and at the hospital, that he could not have “shouted” anything. The “confession” was manufactured by the prosecution at a roundtable meeting with cops two months after the shooting. Priscilla Durham, a security guard, was the only hospital employee who backed up the cops’ “confession” lie. In 2003 Durham’s stepbrother Kenneth Pate swore that Durham said she was pressured by the cops to say Mumia confessed. Pate also said Durham heard Mumia say, “Get off me, get off me, they’re trying to kill me.” Mumia Abu-Jamal has always categorically maintained his innocence. As he declared in a 2001 affidavit: “I did not shoot Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. I had nothing to do with the killing of Officer Faulkner. I am innocent…. I never confessed to anything because I had nothing to confess to.” Mobilize Now to Free Mumia! The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal is an object lesson in the class nature of the capitalist state. Its justice system is class- and race-biased to the core. The cops and courts who framed up this innocent man, the living tomb of the prison system in which he is jailed, the executioner who stands ready to kill—all are instruments of organized violence used to preserve the rule of the capitalist class through the forcible suppression of the working class and oppressed. Smashing this racist frame-up machine will require a socialist revolution that overturns the capitalist system. Demands for a “new trial” which have been raised by liberals, self-proclaimed socialist organizations, black nationalists and others have fed illusions that there can be justice in the capitalist courts. Those illusions demobilized a movement of millions around the world in Mumia’s defense. The time is now to rekindle mass protest—nationally and internationally—on behalf of Mumia. Mumia’s freedom will not be won through reliance on the rigged “justice” system or on capitalist politicians, whether Democrat, Republican or Green. The power that can turn the tide is the power of millions—working people, anti-racist youth, death penalty abolitionists—united in struggle to demand the freedom of this innocent man. Crucial to this perspective is the mobilization of the labor movement, whose social power derives from its ability to shut down production. As we have stated since we first took up Mumia’s defense in the mid 1980s, what’s necessary are labor-centered united-front actions, generating effective protest across a spectrum of political beliefs while assuring all the right to have their own say. The time is now to make Mumia’s case a rallying cry against the racist death penalty, against black oppression, against government repression. Raise your voice and organize now in your union, on your campus, in your community to demand: Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the racist death penalty! —Partisan Defense Committee, 27 May 2006

An Open Letter to Mumia Abu-Jamal Supporters-A Personal Commentary (April 2008)



The Partisan Defense Committee has passed "An Open Letter to All Supporters of Mumia‘s Freedom" to this writer. Those few who might not know of the torturous legal battles to free this innocent man can find further information at the above-mentioned Partisan Defense site. I make my own comments below.

Normally I pass information about the case of political prisoner Mumia abu-Jamal on without much comment because the case speaks for itself. The case has been front and center in international labor defense struggles for over two decades. However, in light of the adverse ruling by a majority of a federal Third Circuit Court of Appeal panel in March 2008 that affirmed Mumia’s 1982 conviction for first-degree murder of a police officer and left the only issue for decision that of resentencing to either reinstate his original death sentence or keep him imprisoned for life without parole I have some things to say about this fight.

Occasionally, in the heat of political battle some fights ensue around strategy that after the smoke has cleared, upon reflection, leave one with more sorrow than anger. Not so today. Today I am mad. Am I mad about the irrational decision by the majority of the Third Circuit panel in Mumia’s case? Yes, but when one has seen enough of these cases over a lifetime then one realizes that, as the late sardonic comic and social commentator Lenny Bruce was fond of saying, in the Hall of Justice the only justice is in the halls.

What has got me steamed is the obvious bankruptcy of the strategy, if one can use this term, of centering Mumia’s case on the question of a new trial in order to get the ‘masses’- meaning basically parliamentary liberal types interested in supporting the case. This by people who allegedly KNOW better. The bankruptcy of this strategy, its effects on Mumia’s case and the bewildered response of those who pedaled it as good coin is detailed in the above-mentioned Open Letter. Read it.

Today, in reaction to the Third Circuit court’s decision, everyone and their brother and sister are now calling for Mumia’s freedom. At a point where he is between a rock and a hard place. However, it did not have to be that way. Mumia was innocent in 1982 and he did not stop being innocent at any point along this long road. Freedom for Mumia was (and is) the correct slogan in the case. A long line of political criminal cases, starting in this country with that of the Haymarket Martyrs if not before, confirms that simple wisdom. Those who consciously pedaled this weak ‘new trial’ strategy as a get rich quick scheme now have seen the chickens come home to roost. And Mumia pays the price.

I would point out two factors that made a ‘retrial’ strategy in the case of an innocent man particularly Pollyanna-ish for those honest militants who really believed that Mumia’s case was merely a matter of the American justice system being abused and therefore some court would rectify this situation if enough legal resources were in place. First, it is illusory that somehow, as exemplified in this case, a higher court system would remedy this egregious wrong. Long ago I remember a lawyer, I believe that it might have been the late radical lawyer Conrad Lynn no stranger to political defense work, telling a group of us doing defense work for the Black Panthers, that all these judges belong to the same union. They do not upset each other’s work except under extreme duress.

Second, and this is where the ‘wisdom’ of the reformists about reaching the ‘masses’ by a stagest theory of defense work (fight for retrial first, then freedom) turns in on them. As witness the list of names of those who have signed the Partisan Defense Committee’s call for Mumia’s freedom, excepting professional liberals and their hangers –on, those interested in Mumia’s case (or any leftwing political defense case) will sign on just as easily for freedom as retrial. Thus, opportunism does not pay, even in the short haul. That said, Free Mumia- say it loud, say it proud.

*****When The Bourgeoisie Was In Full Flower- With The French Painter Caillebotte In Mind

*****When The Bourgeoisie Was In Full Flower- With The French Painter Caillebotte In Mind 

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Yeah, the Baron, Baron Haussmann if you need a name to go with the damage, the social damage done, had done a good job, a damn good job of breaking up beloved Paris with his squeaky clean street lines and wide boulevards. Yeah, changed the face of Paris, the Paris of squalid throw your leavings out the window and heaven help who is below, and heaven help what awful thing was thrown down to the trash-filled streets. The Paris of funny crooked cul de sac streets, which reflected the add-ons over centuries to make a great city from the piss-pot small town back in the Middle Ages when the university was the center of attraction and the good bourgeois in embryo were trying to hold off the barbarians, the wayward no account peasant drifters who snuck off the land, or tried to in order to sulk and menace in the shadows down by the Seine, the river of life and of intrigue.

The Paris of the small craftsman working his trade in some lonely workshop, maybe an indentured apprentice by his side if the craft was skilled enough to warrant such service, his “home” and hearth in the back rooms where the dutiful wife and undutiful screaming children scratched out their pitiful existence. Said craftsman working furiously always brow-beaten worrying about being edged out by Monsieur So and So with plenty of capital and fifty men in his employ underselling him by virtue of economy of scale (or just plain greed at having anybody even a single slave craftsman in his “invisible hand” market place). The Paris too of the jack-roller, the pick-pocket, the wharf rats, the tavern-dwellers, the drifters, the grifters, and the midnight sifters along the shallow shadows of that same beloved Seine     

He, Jean Villon, was called Jean-bon out of respect for his courage under fire in the hell-hole barricade days of 1848  when he and his neighbors, all working-men, held out to the last when the vicious petty-bourgeois who would have benefited most from victory deserted the barricades and he and his took to their fallen losses and jail cells with equanimity (he and his comrades ever after called ‘48ers and no further explanation was necessary, none what-so-ever in any street or boulevard in the town). And called Jean-bon as well for his general good humor when he was not talking politics or scheming the next plot that would bring on the newer world that he and his brethren were seeking. This morning he had had to laugh about the changes in the Rue Madeleine, the urine-laned street where he grew up, about the smell to high heaven of tanning chemicals, rough blacksmith coals, clothe dyes, slaughtered cattles and poultries. Laughed too that in those days, the days before the Baron got the itch (Baron dreams prodded on by ’89 dreams of san-culottes crowds demanding his head on a platter, or maybe just his head any way they could get it preferably via the people’s justice of the guillotine and more recent close calls in ‘48) none of the government’s men dared to enter those quarters even to look for the treasonous or seditious whoever was in power was always nervously pacing the floor about (it did not matter-king-premier-emperor-they all nervously paced their respective floors).

Yeah, back then nothing but crooked little streets leading to harmless little cafes, where he, workingman Villon held “court” with the riff-raff so-called of the old society. Calmly and cautiously quartered where no king’s men would bother to penetrate for they might not come back. Villon descended in some cousin-age degree never quite figured out back to the 15^th century from the outlaw poet mad monk bastard saint Francois Villon who wrote longing "exile in his own country" verse with one hand and stole whatever was not nailed down with the other a fact which Jean never tired of pointing out when back in the day, back in ‘48 on the barricades when it counted comrades would wonder whether his revolutionary energies were flagging and he would drag out his pedigree to small-mouthed scoffs and tittles.

Yeah, the Baron was a slick one tearing down the old quarters to let the rising petty-bourgeois have their elegant apartments tucked away from the steamy stinking markets, the riff-raff cafes, the shadow men of the Seine. Let the bourgeoisie laugh in their clubs about how the riff-raff, meaning their working-men, those who slaved for them, those they had fired for being what some wag called “master-less men” for their habit of robbing said masters whenever the shadows fell, and robbing the once innocent peasant girls who followed in their train and cast their fate with the lot of their virtue, would get a belly-full of lead from the phalanx encircling infantry the next time they tried to pull up brick number one in order to build a barricade.

Although for a while when Thiers, that wizened troll who never uttered anything but treacherous remarks and never stopped for one minute to give the orders to  send whatever troops against the barricades which remained loyal to keep him in power. Rammed those troops against the brave Paris communards of blessed memory back in 1871 when the frightened bourgeoisie realized that the barricades could still be constructed when the working-men rose up in righteous anger at the betrayals put upon them. (Those communards like their earlier brethren of ’48 called communards and no further explanation was necessary, none what-so-ever in any street or boulevard in the town.)

But those days were long gone now. The Baron had won, had won his victory over the riff-raff and Jean-bon Villon knew it would be a long time before the blood of the communards dried. Dried and avenged.  

 

Now the picture before Villon as he walked along Rue Madeline a place foreign to his eyes this rainy Sunday morning is that of prosperous petty bourgeois walking under the shadows of their handsome umbrellas along the well-trodden brick-laid slippery street taking in the sullen airs of the day. Each pair, male and female from a rough look at the scene, in their own world heading perhaps to some café breakfast (under awnings this morning) maybe going to the gardens up the road. Villon, the old revolutionary, looking down and noticing that every spattered brick had been inlaid (although that never stopped them from tearing them up in the old days), noticed that  as one wag put it that now the streets were big enough for all of Paris without regard to class to walk and fete wherever they cared to. Here is the waggish joke though, except for some ragman with his cur of a dog his sort were nary to be seen on these wet streets and intersections. Yeah, the Baron did his work well.      

 

 

 

*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor The Jacobins

Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the Jacobin club, eventually providing the politicans and leadrship that was the key to stabilizing a French republic out of the turmoil of the revolution.

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Leibknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

A View From The Left-Organize All Wireless Workers!-Verizon Strike Beats Back Company Attack-An Analysis

Workers Vanguard No. 1092	1 July 2016

Organize All Wireless Workers!-Verizon Strike Beats Back Company Attack

Verizon workers along the East Coast organized in the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) have voted overwhelmingly to ratify contracts agreed to at the end of their hard-fought seven-week strike this spring. The company had been out for blood against the unions, which are concentrated in the wireline (landline and FiOS broadband) division, aiming to further gut the shrinking union workforce. Instead, the strike forced Verizon to back down from its “last, best and final offer,” a litany of giveback demands ranging from pension concessions to attacks on job security that would have led to layoffs and more outsourcing.

The company was also forced to relent on work-rule changes that would have let management deploy workers far from their homes at whim. Several workers told Workers Vanguard that they were happy to see that the hated Quality Assurance Review (QAR) program, which the company had used to enforce discipline, was done away with. Undoubtedly the company will try to implement a new draconian discipline system that the workers have to be ready to confront; as one veteran union steward told WV, “You can have a contract and the company can violate it all the time. They always try that,” adding, “You always have to fight.”

In the end, the one big concession obtained by Verizon was hundreds of millions of dollars in health care cost savings. Union officials had offered this giveback long before the strike began. The additional cost to workers will eat up much of the 10.9 percent increase in wages agreed to over the four-year life of the contracts.

Verizon was also hell-bent on blocking union inroads into its highly profitable wireless sector, which is dependent on the infrastructure of the unionized wireline business but is virtually unorganized. The company had rebuffed all attempts at negotiation with nearly 80 retail workers in Brooklyn and Everett, Massachusetts, who voted for union representation by the CWA in 2014. Now, as a direct result of the strike, these workers have finally won their first contract, timed to expire with the wireline contracts and the contract of 100 wireless technicians who were already CWA members. This common expiration date backs up the handful of organized wireless workers with the leverage of the entire unionized workforce. Union tops say they “plan to build on this foothold” to unionize the wireless workers. In fact, if this Rottweiler of a company is to be kept at bay, every wireless worker must be organized, making all of Verizon a union shop. The future of the CWA and IBEW at Verizon is on the line.

But the strategy of the union bureaucrats is to rely on the agencies of the capitalist class enemy and its state, including mobilizing votes for Democratic politicians who would putatively appoint “pro-labor” officials to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). After the 2000 contract, union officials touted a “neutrality agreement” with Verizon that supposedly ensured that the company would not interfere in organizing efforts. But the bosses are never neutral when it comes to profits, and Verizon flouted that agreement from day one. After nearly 16 years of “neutrality,” the unions have managed to organize fewer than 200 wireless workers. It took a strike to win a contract for the wireless store workers, and it will take unions flexing their muscle and relying on their power and organization—not appeals to the capitalist government and the bosses—to organize and win decent contracts for Verizon’s 70,000 wireless workers.

The success of the Verizon strike demonstrates that the only way to repel the vicious attacks of the capitalist bosses is through class struggle. This point was underscored on the first day after the strike ended, when workers at multiple garages returned to work wearing the CWA’s signature red T-shirts instead of regulation Verizon gear. The color red is meant to memorialize CWA chief steward Gerry Horgan, a member killed on the picket lines in the 1989 strike when the daughter of a plant manager hit him with her car (see “CWA Striker Murdered on the Picket Line,” WV No. 484, 1 September 1989). Acting as if the recent strike had never happened, Verizon managers demanded that the workers take off the shirts. Instead, they walked out.

However, if the union tops have their way, that militancy will be channeled into stumping for the Democratic Party in the presidential elections. The pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy has time and time again pushed the strategy of electing “friend of labor” Democrats who, once in power, would supposedly act in the interest of the workers. In reality, this strategy has served to demobilize the power of the workers and their unions, resulting in one defeat after another and helping to lay the basis for the decimation of the unions.

Union officials timed the strike to coincide with the April primaries in New York and elsewhere on the East Coast. Last year, the outgoing president of the CWA, Larry Cohen, became a senior campaign adviser to Bernie Sanders. Months afterward, the CWA endorsed this capitalist politician who is touted as “socialist.” Both Sanders and Hillary Clinton stated that they supported the strike, though Clinton’s “support” was far more muted. Now, with the Sanders campaign folding, union members will be told that they must mobilize to defeat Republican reactionary Donald Trump at all costs—i.e., to vote for Clinton. But reliance on the Democrats, or on any capitalist party, is a losing strategy. The Democratic Party is a bosses party no less than the Republicans. Democratic claims to be the “friends of labor” are merely aimed at hoodwinking working people into supporting a party that represents the interests of the capitalist exploiters.

CWA and IBEW officials expressed gratitude that Obama’s labor secretary, Thomas Perez, and federal mediators got Verizon to negotiate with the unions. In fact, Perez only intervened because the strike was hurting Verizon’s bottom line. Despite months of preparation by the company, including training a scab army of 20,000 managers and non-union workers, the strike began to bite a few weeks in. The scabs did not have the skill sets to do the work of the strikers, and Verizon ran up a backlog of installs, new orders and customer complaints. The profit-hungry giant burned through cash reserves. With the strike hurting Verizon, Perez moved to broker negotiations to end the labor action and prevent further damage to the company. All the actions of the mediators were in the long-term interests of Verizon investors and the American capitalist class as a whole.

Or take the actions of the NLRB early on in this strike. When CWA pickets at hotels, backed up by Teamsters and honored by Hotel Trades Council members, caused scabs to be evicted from New York hotels from which they were being dispatched, the NLRB got a federal judge to slap the CWA with a picket ban. The capitalists’ labor boards, along with their courts and their cops, are on the side of the bosses. Having Democrats in power does not change this basic truth.

Speaking to Jacobin (15 June), CWA political director Bob Master told a rather telling joke: “Remind us never to go on strike again unless it’s a week before a contested New York primary when a socialist is running for president.” In reality, it was the defiance and resolution of the 39,000 striking workers that staved off Verizon’s anti-union assault. Picketers remained determined to fight and win, despite having their health insurance cut off by the company and experiencing up close and personal the scabherding by the police, for whom strikebreaking is a job description.

The political program of the union bureaucracy is based on the lie that there is a “partnership” between the workers and their capitalist class enemies. At bottom, these misleaders promote the myth that capitalism can be “fair” to working people, and that companies like Verizon should give workers their “fair share.” But capitalism is a system of production for profit, and that profit comes from the exploitation of the working class. That’s why Verizon has been determined to scuttle organizing efforts of its wireless workers: the weaker the unions, the lower the wages and benefits, the greater the profits.

The company did not win this battle. But as American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon, who played a key role in the 1934 victory of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes, observed in 1936, any settlement between the employers and the workers “is only a temporary truce and the nature of such a settlement is decided by power” (see Notebook of an Agitator, 1958). The four-year contracts between Verizon and the unions represent such a truce between two forces whose interests are irreconcilable. Skirmishes between the workers and the bosses will continue, whether there is a piece of paper with signatures on it or not.

What’s key is the relative strength of the opposing forces, and this depends in large part on the leadership of the unions. The track record of the CWA and IBEW labor bureaucrats is written in the contracts themselves, each of which preserves the core of previous settlements. Like many labor agreements, they carry a no-strike clause forbidding labor action until the contract expires. This shackles the membership’s ability to defend itself, and the workers should fight to scrap it. Even when contracts expire—along with their no-strike clauses—the union bureaucrats try mightily to avert strikes. When Verizon workers went on strike in 2011, the labor tops sent them back to work after two weeks without a contract. When the last contract expired in August, the workers were itching to strike but the union misleaders held them back until April. This time around, the workers were brought back to work before voting on the contract, or even seeing it.

The union tops point to the promised creation of 1,300 new union call center jobs, which were won in exchange for granting management more flexibility in routing customer calls. Assuming the company even creates these jobs, they will come with a big asterisk. In the 2003 and 2012 contracts, the CWA and IBEW negotiators made concessions that created a second tier for new hires. At the time, Verizon was not hiring. But now new jobs will fall into the second tier. New hires will not enjoy the same job security provisions as existing workers. Even if they make it to retirement, they would not receive retiree health care—instead, getting a stipend—nor would they get the defined benefit pension that retirees who were on the payroll in 2003 get. The bureaucrats have built in the basis for corrosive divisions in the ranks, which will be an obstacle to future organizing. What is vital is for the unions to fight for equal pay and benefits for equal work.

America’s union movement can only be rebuilt through persistent, clear-eyed class battles waged against the bosses, with no illusions in the capitalists’ parties and their state. It will be in the course of such battles that union militants will be able to forge a new, class-struggle leadership in the unions. Such a leadership will be crucial in the building of a workers party that fights for a workers government, whose task will be to expropriate the capitalist exploiters and build a planned, socialist economy. Those who labor must rule!

*Artist's Corner- The Political Art Of Jacques-Louis David

Click on title to link To Wikipedia's entry for the great French political artist, Jacques-Louis David. Like Tallyrand and a few others he seemed to have been able to twist and turn with the winds as they shifted throughout the revolutionary period. The book reviewed on this date by Professor Lynn Hunt, "Politics, Culture,and Class in the French Revolution", has much to say about Citizen David's influence of the political imagery of the times.