*****Mimi’s Glance - With Richard Thompson’s Vincent Black Lightning, 1952 In Mind

*****Mimi’s Glance - With Richard Thompson’s  Vincent Black Lightning, 1952 In Mind

 

 

Mimi’s Glance, Circa 1963

 

 

 

 

Mimi Murphy knew two things, she needed to keep moving, and she was tired, tired as hell of moving, of the need, of the self-impose need, to keep moving ever since that incident five years before, back in 1958, with her seems like an eternity ago sweet long gone motorcycle boy, her “walking daddy,” Pretty James Preston, although he as long as she had known him never walked a step when his “baby,” his bike was within arm’s length. I knew this information, knew this information practically first hand because the usually polite but loner Mimi Murphy had told me her thoughts and the story that went with it one night after she had finished a tough on the feet night working as a cashier at concession stand the Olde Saco Drive-In Theater out on Route One in Olde Saco, Maine.

That night, early morning really, she had passed me going up to her room with a bottle of high-end Scotch, Haig& Haig, showing its label from a brown bag in her hand while I was going down the stairs in the rooming house we lived in on Water Street in Ocean City, a few miles from Olde Saco. A number of people, including Mimi and me, were camped out there in temporary room quarters after the last of the summer touristas had decamped and headed back to New York, or wherever they came from. The cheap off-season rent and the short stay-until-the-next-summer-crowd-showed-up requiring no lease drew us there. Most residents, mostly young and seemingly unattached to any family or work life kept to themselves, private drinkers or druggies (probably not grass since I never smelled the stuff which I had a nose for from youthful smoke-filled dreams while I was there so coke, opium, speed, maybe horse although I saw no obvious needle marks on arms or cold turkey screams either), a couple of low profile good looking young hustling girls, probably just graduating from amateur status and still not jaded “tarts” as my father used to call them, who didn’t bring their work home, guys maybe just out of the service, or between jobs, and so on. I had seen a couple of guys, young guys with horny looks in their eyes, maybe an idea of making a play, making passes at Mimi but thought nothing of it since they also targeted the hustling girls too.

 

Since I had never bothered Mimi, meaning made a pass at her, she must have sensed that being contemporaries, she was twenty-one then and I twenty-two, that maybe she could unburden her travails on a fellow wayward traveler. That no making a pass business by the way due to the fact that slender, no, skinny and flat-chested Irish red-heads with faraway looks like Mimi with no, no apparent, warm bed desires, that year and in those days not being my type after tumbledown broken-hearted youthful years of trying to coax their Irish Catholic rosary bead novena favors to no avail over in the old Little Dublin neighborhood around the Acre in Olde Saco.

 

Whatever she sensed and she was pretty closed-mouth about it when I asked her later she was right about my ability to hear the woes of another wanderer without hassles, and she did as she invited me up into her room with no come hither look (unlike those pretty hustling girls who made a profession of the “come hither look” and gave me a try-out which after proving futile turned into small courtesy smiles when we passed each other). But she showed no fear, no apparent fear, anyway.

After a couple of drinks, maybe three, of that dreamboat scotch that died easy going down  she loosened up, taking her shoes off before sitting down on the couch across from me. For the interested I had been down on my uppers for a while and was drinking strictly rotgut low-shelf liquor store wines and barroom half empty glass left-overs so that stuff was manna from heaven I can still taste now but that is my story and not Mimi’s so I will move on. Here is the gist of what she had to say as I remember it that night:

She started out giving her facts of life facts like that she had grown up around this Podunk town outside of Boston, Adamsville Junction, and had come from a pretty pious Roman Catholic Irish family that had hopes that she (or one of her three younger sisters, but mainly she) might “have the vocation,” meaning be willing, for the Lord, to prison cloister herself up in some nunnery to ease the family’s way into heaven, or some such idea. And she had bought into the idea from about age seven to about fourteen by being the best student, boy or girl, in catechism class on Sunday, queen of the novenas, and pure stuff like that in church and the smartest girl in, successively, Adamsville South Elementary School, Adamsville Central Junior High, and the sophomore class at Adamsville Junction High School.

As she unwound this part of her story I could see where that part was not all that different from what I had encountered in my French-Canadian (mother, nee LeBlanc) Roman Catholic neighborhood over in the Acre in Olde Saco. I could also see, as she loosened up further with an additional drink, that, although she wasn’t beautiful, certain kinds of guys would find her very attractive and would want to get close to her, if she let them. Just the kind of gal I used to go for before I took the pledge against Irish girls with far-away looks, and maybe red hair too.

 

About age fourteen thought after she had gotten her “friend” (her period for those who may be befuddled by this old time term) and started thinking, thinking hard about boys, or rather seeing that they, some of them, were thinking about her and not novenas and textbooks her either she started to get “the itch.” That itch that is the right of passage for every guy on his way to manhood. And girl on her way to womanhood as it turned out but which in the Irish Roman Catholic Adamsville Junction Murphy family neighborhood was kept as a big, dark secret from boys and girls alike.

Around that time, to the consternation of her nun blessed family, she starting dating Jimmy Clancy, a son of the neighborhood and a guy who was attracted to her because she was, well, pure and smart. She never said whether Jimmy had the itch, or if he did how bad, because what she made a point out of was that being Jimmy’s girl while nice, especially when they would go over Adamsville Beach and do a little off-hand petting and watching the ocean, did not cure her itch, not even close. This went on for a couple of years until she was sixteen and really frustrated, not by Jimmy so much as by the taboos and restrictions that had been placed on her life in her straight-jacket household, school and town. (Welcome to the club, sister, your story is legion) No question she was ready to break out, she just didn’t know how.

Then in late 1957 Pretty James Preston came roaring into town. Pretty James, who despite the name, was a tough motorcycle wild boy, man really about twenty-one, who had all, okay most all, of the girls, good girls and bad, wishing and dreaming, maybe having more than a few restless sweaty nights, about riding on back of that strange motorcycle he rode (a Vincent Black Lightning, a bike made in England which would put any Harley hog to shame from rev number one when I looked for information about the beast later, stolen, not by Pretty James but by third parties, from some English with dough guy and transported to America where he got it somehow, the details were very vague about where he got it, not from her, him) and being Pretty James’ girl. One day, as he passed by on his chopper going full-throttle up Hancock Street, Mimi too got the Pretty James itch.

But see it was not like you could just and throw yourself at Pretty James that was not the way he worked, no way. One girl, one girl from a good family who had her sent away after the episode, tried that and was left about thirty miles away, half-naked, after she thought she had made the right moves and was laughed at by Pretty James as he took off with her expensive blouse and skirt flying off his handle-bars as he left her there unmolested but unhinged. That episode went like wildfire through the town, through the Monday morning before school girls’ lav what happened, or didn’t happen, over the weekend talkfest first of all.

No Pretty James’ way was to take, take what he saw, once he saw something worth taking and that was that. Mimi figured she was no dice. Then one night when she and Jimmy Clancy were sitting by the seawall down at the Seal Rock end of the beach starting to do their little “light petting” routine Pretty James came roaring up on his hellish machine and just sat there in front of the pair, saying nothing. But saying everything. Mimi didn’t say a word to Jimmy but just started walking over to the cycle, straddled her legs over back seat saddle and off they went into the night. Later that night her itch was cured, or rather cured for the first time.

Pouring another drink Mimi sighed poor Pretty James and his needs, no his obsessions with that silly motorcycle, that English devil’s machine, that Vincent Black Lightning that caused him more anguish than she did. And she had given him plenty to think about as well before the end. How she tried to get him to settle down a little, just a little, but what was a sixteen-year old girl, pretty new to the love game, totally new, new but not complaining to the sex game, and his well-worn little tricks to get her in the mood, and make her forget the settle down thing. Until the next time she thought about it and brought it up.

Maybe, if you were from around Adamsville way, or maybe just Boston, you had heard about Pretty James, Pretty James Preston and his daring exploits back in about 1957 and 1958. Those got a lot of play in the newspapers for months before the end. Before that bank job, the one where as Mimi said Pretty James used to say all the time, he “cashed his check.” Yes, the big Granite City National Bank branch in Braintree heist that he tried to pull all by himself, with Mimi as stooge look-out. She had set him up for that heist, or so she thought. No, she didn’t ask him to do it but she got him thinking, thinking about settling down just a little and if that was to happen he needed a big score, not the penny ante gas station and mom and pop variety store robberies that kept them in, as he also used to say, “coffee and cakes” but a big payday and then off to Mexico, maybe down Sonora way, and a buy into the respectable and growing drug trade.

And he almost, almost, got away clean that fatal day, that day when she stood across the street, an extra forty-five in her purse just in case he needed it for a final getaway. She never having handled a gun mush less fired one was scared stiff it might go off in that purse although she Pretty James had her in such a state that she would have emptied the damn thing if it would have done any good. But he never made it out the bank door. Some rum brave security guard tried to uphold the honor of his profession and started shooting nicking Pretty James in the shoulder. Pretty James responded with a few quick blasts and felled the copper. That action though slowed down the escape enough for the real coppers to respond and blow Pretty James away. Dead, DOA, done. Her, with a tear, sweet boy Pretty James.

According to the newspapers a tall, slender red-headed girl about sixteen had been seen across the street from the bank just waiting, waiting according to the witness, nervously. The witness had turned her head when she heard the shots from the bank and when she looked back the red-headed girl was gone. And Mimi was gone, maybe an accessory to felony murder or worst charge hanging over her young head, and long gone before the day was out. She grabbed the first bus out of Braintree headed to Boston where eventually she wound up holed up in a high-end whorehouse doing tricks to make some moving on dough. (She mentioned some funny things about that stay, which was not so bad at the time when she needed dough bad, and about strange things guys, young and old, wanted her to do but I will leave that stuff out here.)

And she had been moving ever since, moving and eternally hate moving. Now, for the past few months, she had been working nights as a cashier in the refreshment stand at Olde Saco Drive-In to get another stake to keep moving. She had been tempted, a couple of times, to do a little moon-lighting in a Portland whorehouse that a woman she had worked with at her last job, Fenner’s Department Store, where she modeled clothes for the rich ladies, had told her about to get a quick stake but she was almost as eternally tired at that prospect as in moving once again.

And so Mimi Murphy, a few drinks of high-shelf scotch to fortify her told her story, told it true I think, mostly. A couple of days later I saw her through my room’s window with a suitcase in hand looking for all the world like someone getting ready to move on, move on to be a loner again after maybe an indiscrete airing of her linen in public. Thinking back on it now I wish, I truly wish, that I had been more into slender, no skinny, red-headed Irish girls with faraway looks that season and maybe she would not have had to keep moving, eternally moving.

 

ARTIST: Richard Thompson
 
TITLE: 1952 Vincent Black Lightning
 

Said Red Molly to James that's a fine motorbike

A girl could feel special on any such like

Said James to Red Molly, well my hat's off to you

It's a Vincent Black Lightning, 1952

And I've seen you at the corners and cafes it seems

Red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme

And he pulled her on behind

And down to Box Hill they did ride

/ A - - - D - / - - - - A - / : / E - D A /

/ E - D A - / Bm - D - / - - - - A - - - /

Said James to Red Molly, here's a ring for your right hand

But I'll tell you in earnest I'm a dangerous man

I've fought with the law since I was seventeen

I robbed many a man to get my Vincent machine

Now I'm 21 years, I might make 22

And I don't mind dying, but for the love of you

And if fate should break my stride

Then I'll give you my Vincent to ride

Come down, come down, Red Molly, called Sergeant McRae

For they've taken young James Adie for armed robbery

Shotgun blast hit his chest, left nothing inside

Oh, come down, Red Molly to his dying bedside

When she came to the hospital, there wasn't much left

He was running out of road, he was running out of breath

But he smiled to see her cry

And said I'll give you my Vincent to ride

Says James, in my opinion, there's nothing in this world

Beats a 52 Vincent and a red headed girl

Now Nortons and Indians and Greeveses won't do

They don't have a soul like a Vincent 52

He reached for her hand and he slipped her the keys

He said I've got no further use for these

I see angels on Ariels in leather and chrome

Swooping down from heaven to carry me home

And he gave her one last kiss and died

*From The Partisan Defense Committee- 24th Annual Holiday Appeal-

Click on title to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site. The following is passed on from the PDC concerning the 24th Annual Holiday Appeal

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!

Free All Class-War Prisoners!

Build PDC Holiday Appeal

“The path to freedom leads through a prison. The door swings in and out and through that door passes a steady procession of ‘those fools too stubborn-willed to bend,’ who will not turn aside from the path because prisons obstruct it here and there.”

—James P. Cannon, “The Cause that Passes Through a Prison,” Labor Defender, September 1926

Twenty-four years ago, the Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—revived a key tradition of the International Labor Defense under James P. Cannon, its founder and first secretary: sending monthly stipends to those “stubborn-willed” class-war prisoners condemned to capitalism’s dungeons for standing up against racist capitalist repression. We are again holding Holiday Appeal benefits to raise funds for this unique program, calling particular attention to the fight to free America’s foremost class-war prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who remains on death row in Pennsylvania.

Our forebear, Cannon, also affirmed a basic principle that should be no less applicable today: “The class-conscious worker accords to the class-war prisoners a place of singular honor and esteem…. The victory of the class-war prisoners is possible only when they are inseparably united with the living labor movement and when that movement claims them for its own, takes up their battle cry and carries on their work.”

The PDC calls on labor activists, fighters for black and immigrant rights and defenders of civil liberties to join us in donating to and building the annual Holiday Appeal. An injury to one is an injury to all! We print below brief descriptions of the 16 class-war prisoners who receive monthly stipends from the PDC, many of whom were denied parole over the last year for refusing to express “remorse” for acts they did not commit!

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” This past April, the U.S. Supreme Court summarily threw out Mumia’s efforts to overturn his frame-up conviction based on the racist exclusion of black jurors from his 1982 trial. Ominously, this same court has yet to rule on the prosecution’s petition to reinstate the death penalty. The Philadelphia district attorney’s office states that, whatever the Supreme Court decides, it will continue to push for Mumia’s execution.

December 9 is the 28th anniversary of Mumia’s arrest for a killing that the cops know he did not commit. Mumia was framed up for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Mountains of evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner, have been submitted to the courts. But to the racists in black robes, a court of law is no place for evidence of the innocence of this fighter for the oppressed.

While others plead with the current U.S. president and his attorney general to “investigate” violations of Mumia’s “civil rights,” the PDC says that Mumia’s fate cannot be left in the hands of the government of the capitalists. The racist rulers hate Mumia because they see in him the spectre of black revolt. The stakes are high and the situation is grim, but any real fight for Mumia’s freedom must be based on a class-struggle opposition to the capitalist rulers, who have entombed this innocent black man for more than half his life.

Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier’s frame-up trial, for the 1975 deaths of two marauding FBI agents in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation, shows what capitalist “justice” is all about. Although the lead government attorney has admitted “We can’t prove who shot those agents” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 65-year-old Peltier is still locked away. Outrageously, in August, the U.S. Parole Commission again turned down Peltier’s parole request and coldbloodedly declared they would not reconsider his case for another 15 years.

Eight MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa—are in their 32nd year of prison. They were sentenced to 30-100 years after the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops. This year, again, after more than three decades of unjust incarceration, nearly all of these innocent prisoners had parole hearings, but none were released.

Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison. They were convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. Their children were kidnapped at gunpoint by the Feds.

The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals during the Vietnam antiwar movement and by New Leftists who wrote off the possibility of winning the working class to a revolutionary program and saw themselves as an auxiliary of Third World liberation movements. But, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not a crime. They should not have served a day in prison.

Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They were victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and they have now served more than 37 years in jail. This year, the Nebraska Supreme Court denied Poindexter a new trial despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a long-suppressed 911 audio tape, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.

Hugo Pinell is the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with George Jackson, his comrade and mentor, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite numerous letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 28 years, Pinell was again denied parole this year. Now in his 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence at the notorious Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit in California.

Jamal Hart, Mumia’s son, was sentenced in 1998 to 15 1/2 years without parole on bogus firearms possession charges. Hart was targeted for his prominent activism in the campaign to free his father. Although Hart was initially charged under Pennsylvania law, which would have meant a probationary sentence, Clinton’s Justice Department intervened to have Hart thrown into prison under federal law. The U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals has turned down Hart’s habeas corpus petition, and he has faced myriad bureaucratic obstacles and racist targeting throughout his incarceration.

Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeal will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.

As The Obama Regime Ends-Mister President Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!

As The Obama Regime Ends-Mister President Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!

 

 

HONOR THE MEMORY OF JOHN REED

COMMENTARY
HONOR A FOUNDING MEMBER OF THE AMERICAN COMMUNIST MOVEMENT –AND A CLASS TRAITOR, TO BOOT

John Reed, Harvard Class of 1910, epitomized the best of the pre-World War I bourgeois radicals. Unlike the vast majority of his Class and class he cast his fate with the working people and oppressed of America at a time when the dominant left bourgeois movement- the Progressive movement- was busy applying band aids to the increasingly inequitable capitalist system. The radical movement is always in need, sometimes like now desperately in need, of intellectuals to tell its side of the story. Despite some exceptions, like Reed, the intellectuals then, as now, either stood on the sidelines or at most acted as ‘fellow travelers’ to the movement. Reed on the contrary put all his energies into the movement. As a journalist he sought out all the radical hotspots of his time starting with his coverage of the Mexican Revolution, through the various workers’ strikes of the 1910’s in America culminating in his coverage of the heroic period of the Russian Revolution. His journalistic account of the Bolshevik seizure of power, Ten Days That Shook the World, stands even today as one of the best eyewitness accounts of that turbulent time in Russia.

John Reed’s political development also offers today’s militant leftists an insight into how the swirl of events drives the best militants leftward. Reed started out in the typically Bohemian milieu of New York City's Greenwich Village and imbibed its avante guarde cultural offerings and its pretensions. However, as the United States lurched into participation into World War I he grew stronger as an anti-war advocate and placed himself on the line to oppose that war. This was the great dividing point in the radical movement of the time. This separated the dilettantes and mere reformists from serious revolutionaries. Not an unusual political development, but an important one.

Under the influence of the Russian Revolution Reed led the left wing of the American Socialist Party on a program of opposition to the war and defense of the Bolshevik Revolution. When the left wing was forced out of the Socialist Party he formed a communist organization based on the centrally of the native American working class as the vanguard of the American Revolution. Opposed to that were left-wingers, mainly foreign born elements based on the various language federations of the old Socialist Party, who essentially wanted to act as cheerleaders for the Russian Revolution-and no much else. The result was the creation of two communist organizations that caused no end of problems both here and in the Communist International. But the fights to lead the Socialist Party leftward and later between the communist organizations are stories for another time, and worth separate space.

Reed’s political trajectory parallels that of some of the more serious elements of the radical generation of ’68, the class traitors of that generation, in this country who were won to radicalism by the civil rights movement and early opposition to the Vietnam War. As always some remained dilettantes, lost energy or capitulated to the power of parliamentary politics. However, the better elements came to understand, sometimes fitfully and haphazardly, the need for a Leninist-type organization if one was to fight the monster of American imperialism to the end. Reed would have applauded such efforts. Reed’s untimely death in 1920 before the Communist movement got off the ground has left some room for speculation about what his ultimate position would have been toward the Soviet Union. And that is where it remains, speculation. What we know for sure is that when the deal went down he was on the side of the angels. Damn, we could use a few more class traitors like him these days. Are there any out there?

From The Partisan Defense Committee-Notes-Free Chelsea Manning Now!

Average Global Temperatures Explanation by Prof Guy McPherson + Webinar Abrupt Climate Change

Average Global Temperatures Explanation by Prof Guy McPherson + Webinar Abrupt Climate Change

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMv1sNtkO44

Birthday Vigil for Chelsea Manning In Boston December 17th

Birthday Vigil for Chelsea Manning In Boston December 17^th  

In honor of Chelsea Manning’s 29th birthday Saturday December 17^th 2016, responding to a call from the Chelsea Manning Support Network, Payday Men’s Network and Queer Strike, long-time supporters of freedom for Chelsea Manning from the Boston Chelsea Manning Support Committee, Veterans For Peace, along with the weekly Saturday vigil at Park Street organized by the Committee for Peace and Human Rights will celebrate Chelsea’s birthday. We invite you to join us. Currently actions are planned for London and other cities.

Supporters are encouraged to also organize an event in their area, and The Chelsea Manning Support Network and Payday Men’s Network and Queer Strike will publicize it.  Write to http://www.chelseamanning.org/ or payday@paydaynet.org for more information and to share details of your event.

Boston vigil details: 1:00-2:00 PM Saturday, December 17
Park Street Station Entrance on the Boston Common

Imprisoned in 2010 and held for months under torturous conditions, Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in August 2013 for releasing many military secrets about US crimes in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan among other things. If this stands, she’ll be out in 2045. We cannot let this happen- we have to get her out! We will not leave our sister behind. Bring yourself and encourage others to attend and sign the petition for a presidential pardon from President Barack Obama in this important show of support to Chelsea Manning.  

Supporters rally for Chelsea outside Ft. Leavenworth military prison-President Obama Pardon Chelsea Now!

Supporters rally for Chelsea outside Ft. Leavenworth military prison

Chelsea Manning Support Network
November 20, 2016

More the the 60 persons came on short notice to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to rally for Chelsea Manning, on Sunday, November 20, 2016. Photos and reports by Chelsea Manning Support Network Advisory Board member US Army Col. Ann Wright (retired).

Peaceworks Kansas City peace activist and attorney Henry Stoever as the MC for our vigil for Chelsea Manning.

More the the 60 persons who came on short notice to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas for the vigil for Chelsea Manning.

New banner for Clemency for Chelsea Manning at the vigil at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas on November 20, 2016. From left to right, Ian, Chase Strangio, attorney and friend of Chelsea’s, Dr. Yolanda Huet-Vaughn, a former US Army doctor who refused to go to Gulf War I, was court-martialed and sentenced to 30 months in prison, of which she spent 8 months in Leavenworth, Ann Wright, retired US Army Colonel (29 years in Army and Army Reserve and former US diplomat who resigned in 2003 in opposition to Bush’s war on Iraq, and Ron Faust, retired minister, with suspended sentence for challenging US assassin drone program at Whiteman Air Force Base and Poet.

Caroline Gibbs of Transgender Institute (transinstitute.org) and transgender woman who had been in Kansas prison speak to Chelsea Manning vigil at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

The Source tells Chelsea’s story in operatic form-President Obama Pardon Chelsea Now!

The Source tells Chelsea’s story in operatic form

By Trudy Ring, the Advocate. October 17, 2016
Read the full article here at the Advocate

At its best, art not only entertains but makes us think — and that’s what the creators of The Source, an opera about Chelsea Manning and her leak of confidential government information, wish to do.

“The piece is about asking how we can process this massive amount of information … how we deal with war,” says composer Ted Hearne. It’s also asking audiences to consider what Manning, while in the U.S. Army, was feeling as she was reading the information and sharing it, all as she was confronting questions about her own identity, which eventually led her to come out as a transgender woman.

The Source was first performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York in 2014, and it will have its West Coast premiere and only its second production ever this week in Los Angeles, under the auspices of L.A. Opera and Beth Morrison Projects. It’s slated to be staged at the San Francisco Opera in February as well.

Read the full article here at the Advocate

Chelsea makes appeal for release before Trump takes office-We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind!

Chelsea makes appeal for release before Trump takes office

Sign the whitehouse.gov petition today!

By the Guardian. November 14, 2016

Chelsea Manning has made a last-ditch appeal to Barack Obama to commute her sentence for leaking state secrets to time served, calling on him to release her from military prison so that she can have her “first chance to live a real, meaningful life”.

With the clock running down on the current presidency, the US soldier is making her last, and what her supporters hope will be the most promising, stab at persuading Obama to set her free after more than six years in custody. Their assumption is that the prospects of incoming president Donald Trump showing her leniency rank as slim, to none.

Manning has already served considerably more time behind bars than any other official leaker in recent US history. In a letter that accompanies the petition, her lawyers, Nancy Hollander and Vincent Ward, liken the soldier’s plight to the many other criminal offenders that have already been given a second chance by Obama through his clemency powers.

The lawyers remind the sitting president that Manning carried out her massive leak of state secrets in 2010, that included hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables and war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, at a time when she was under huge psychological stress as a result of being a transgender woman. They also emphasize the prisoner’s harsh treatment when she was first brought from Iraq to the US including a prolonged spell in solitary confinement – an issue that Obama has embraced in recent moves to restrict the use of solitary in federal penal institutions.

“Since Ms Manning’s arrest she has been subjected to torturous conditions while in military confinement. For nearly a year Ms Manning was held in solitary confinement while awaiting trial, and since her conviction, has been placed in solitary confinement for an attempted suicide,” they write.

The new petition, which was first reported by the New York Times, comes on top of a previous clemency request and an ongoing appeal against her 35-year military sentence. In supporting material, Daniel Ellsberg, the source of the legendary Pentagon Papers that revealed secrets about the Vietnam war, tells Obama: “It is my firm belief that Ms Manning disclosed this material for the purpose of informing the American people of serious human rights abuses, including the killing of innocent people by the United States troops in Iraq.”

Chelsea tried committing suicide a second time in October-It Is Desperately Necessary For President Obama To Pardon Her Now! G

Chelsea tried committing suicide a second time in October

Chelsea has been informed that the Army will hold another disciplinary hearing on the second attempted suicide, which was prompted by the punishment given by the first disciplinary hearing following her initial suicide attempt.

The New York Times. November 4, 2016
Read the full NYT article here

Chelsea Manning tried to commit suicide last month as she was starting a week of solitary confinement at the prison barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., her punishment for a previous attempt to end her life in July.

Ms. Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who is serving a 35-year sentence for leaking archives of secret documents to WikiLeaks, disclosed the attempted suicide, which took place Oct. 4, in a statement she dictated over the phone to a member of her volunteer support network. She asked that it be sent this week to The New York Times, according to members of the network who want to keep their identities private.

Chase Strangio, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer representing Ms. Manning, formerly known as Bradley Manning, confirmed the attempt, which raised new questions about the military’s handling of the troubled soldier, dating to when she was permitted to deploy to Iraq and kept at her post in a secure facility despite signs of erratic behavior.

During Ms. Manning’s trial in 2013, testimony showed that she had been deteriorating, mentally and emotionally, during the period when she downloaded the documents and sent them to WikiLeaks. Then known as Pfc. Bradley Manning, she was struggling with gender dysphoria under conditions of extraordinary stress and isolation while deployed to the Iraq war zone. At that time, military rules made being openly gay a ground for discharge without the college tuition benefits that were her prime motive for enlistment.

Mr. Strangio said his client has endured a long series of “demoralizing and destabilizing assaults on her health and her humanity,” adding: “I worry about the sustainability of her current conditions and her ability to keep fighting under these relentless abuses.” Mr. Strangio, who is representing Ms. Manning in a lawsuit accusing the military of refusing to adequately treat her gender dysphoria, had predicted that putting Ms. Manning in solitary confinement could exacerbate her problems.

A support network member said Thursday that Ms. Manning had been informed by the Army that it would hold another disciplinary hearing on the second attempted suicide and that she possibly faced new punishment.

Read the full NYT article here

Words We Could Use Right Now From Chelsea Manning-President Obama Pardon Chelsea Now!

Chelsea Manning: I can’t vote. If you can, you must

Despite what they say, suffrage isn’t universal. If you’re privileged enough to be able to vote, don’t waste the opportunity that not everyone is afforded

By Chelsea Manning. November 2, 2016
Reprinted from the Guardian

In an era of increasing dissatisfaction with and disengagement from governments, political parties, and much of the rest of the democratic establishment, it’s more important than ever that you show up and vote.

Suffrage is not a right afforded to everyone. Rather, voting is a privilege in the United States – and a hard-earned privilege at that.

At the beginning of the republic, only those white men with land were allowed a hand in electing our leaders and lawmakers. Later, under President Andrew Jackson, that decision-making power was extended to most white men. After a lengthy civil war – shedding a staggering amount of blood and treasure – successive amendments to the US constitution granting broader voting rights followed. Women, at this time, were entirely disregarded – until the 19th amendment passed in 1920.

Although some people of color were allowed to vote, many still faced disenfranchisement prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. With the recent gutting of that act by the supreme court, the systematic disenfranchisement of people of color is alive and well today.

Progress on suffrage has always tended to be incremental. And, far from being a closed chapter in our history, the fight to keep things moving forward continues to this day.

For every thousand people living in the US, seven are incarcerated. That population consists disproportionately of black and brown people, whether accused and convicted of crimes or held by immigration authorities.

Even when the incarcerated leave prison, they often return to our communities without the ability to vote. That means the people most affected by our political institutions and processes today often have absolutely no say in how they are run. This group includes me. In Maryland, my state of residence, for instance, I will not be able vote until the year 2045.

Disenfranchisement and legal exclusion – whether by race, gender, class, immigration status, or otherwise – from our democratic institutions is one of the most significant failures of American society today.

One of the most contentious general elections in modern US history is in front of us. Next Tuesday, if, instead of making your way to the booth, you decide to go shopping, out for lunch or dinner, stay at home, play a video game, or whatever, just remember that many of us cannot vote but would dearly like to. While universal suffrage remains an ideal yet to be attained, if you’re lucky enough to be able to vote, don’t let that privilege go to waste.