*A Taste Of The Later Career Of R&B's Ike Turner

Click On To Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Bill Haley Performing Ike Turner's "Rocket 88". Wow!

CD Review

Here is a little taste of Ike Turner's later work.

Risin’ With The Blues, Ike Turner, Zoho Roots, 2006

I have mentioned the recently departed Ike Turner’s rough and tumble drug-induced later lifestyle and his problems with ex-wife Tina Turner elsewhere in this space so there is no need to repeat that here. I have also mentioned Ike’s key role as ‘talent spotter’ in the 1950’s for Chess Records (and Sun Records' Sam Phillips, I believe) and his pivotal role in the early move from R&B to rock & roll with the super-classic hit “Rocket 88”. Thus, his place in musical history (with the appropriate asterisks) is secure. And should be.

“Risin’ with the Blues” is a late effort (2006) where Ike goes out in front and does many of the lead vocals, some successfully, some not. The instrumental work is excellent, as is to be expected on a Turner platter. But, to be honest, not all of the vocals made me want to jump, which I assume was Ike’s intention here since some of the works are tributes to those like Louis Jordan who influenced the young Ike Turner. That said, his version of “Eighteen Long Years” (usually five in most versions but the number is used as a dig at Tina) is fine, as is “Big Fat Mama” and “Rockin’ Blues”. We part company, however, on “Jesus Loves Me” his musical retort to Tina’s charges in her book and in the movie.

You know what, go out and get some early Ike and the Rhythm Kings. Then you will be sure to get what Ike was all about and why he has a secure place in musical history. And remember that seminal “Rocket 88”. I went crazy when I listened to it recently after not hearing it for a long time.

*******

Songfacts:

In 1991, after a great deal of debate, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame recognized this as the first Rock and Roll song ever recorded. Turner was in jail at the time for cocaine possession, so his daughter accepted the award.

The song is about a car. The Oldsmobile "Rocket 88" just came out and was the fastest car on the road at the time. It was advertised as having a V-8 "Rocket" engine.

This was produced by Sam Phillips, who formed Sun Records in 1954. Phillips discovered Elvis in 1955.

Jackie Brenston, who was a member of Ike Turner's Rhythm Kings, sang lead. The single was credited to "Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats" because Phillips wanted to release a different record credited to Turner.

This was a #1 R&B hit. There were no rock charts at the time.

Turner and his band were playing black clubs in the American South when B.B. King set up a recording session for them in Memphis with Phillips. They wrote most of this on the way to the session.

On the drive to the session, the band's amplifier fell out of the car and broke the woofer. Turner shoved paper in it at the studio to cover the problem, which ended up providing a more distinct sound. The sounds that came from the damaged amp resulted in this being cited as one of the first songs to feature guitar distortion.

Brenston was credited with writing this, although he admitted he stole the idea from a 1947 song called "Cadillac Boogie."

General Motors gave Brenston a Rocket 88 to thank him for the publicity this generated for the car.

Brenston did not handle success well. He quickly spent the money he made from this, became an alcoholic, went broke, and died in 1979.

Turner played piano on this. It was a huge influence on Little Richard, who used the piano intro on his 1958 hit, "Good Golly Miss Molly."

There were other songs recorded before this that could be considered Rock and Roll, but this was unique in that it appealed to a white audience.

Turner recorded a new version of this in 2000.

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine (issue 93) in 1971, Ike Turner recalled how despite this being a local hit, he made little from it: "Some dude at the record company beat me, and I only got $40 for writing, producing, and recording it. And the lead singer (Jackie Brenston) took the band from me and went on his own."

Rocket '88 lyrics

You may have heard of jalopies,
You heard the noise they make,
Let me introduce you to my Rocket '88.
Yes it's great, just won't wait,
Everybody likes my Rocket '88.
Gals will ride in style,
Movin' all along.(Guitar solo, leading into steel guitar solo.)
V-8 motor and this modern design,
My convertible top and the gals don't mind
Sportin' with me, ridin' all around town for joy.(
Spoken) -- Blow your horn, Rocket, blow your horn!(Horn sound effect leading into guitar solo.)
Step in my Rocket and-a don't be late,
We're pullin' out about a half-past-eight.
Goin' on the corner and-a havin' some fun,T
akin' my Rocket on a long, hot run.
Ooh, goin' out,Oozin' and cruisin' along.(Guitar solo.)
Now that you've ridden in my Rocket '88,
I'll be around every night about eight.
You know it's great, don't be late,Everybody likes my Rocket '88.
Gals will ride in style,
Movin' all along.(Fade out, ending with sound effect of a car driving away.)

From The Partisan Defense Committee- 31st Annual Holiday Appeal-Free the Class-War Prisoners!

From The Partisan Defense Committee- 31st Annual Holiday Appeal-Free the Class-War Prisoners! Workers Vanguard No. 1100	18 November 2016

31st Annual Holiday Appeal

Free the Class-War Prisoners!

Featured NYC Speakers: Albert Woodfox and Robert King of the Angola 3

“The path to freedom leads through a prison....

“In one sense of the word the whole of capitalist society is a prison. For the great mass of people who do the hard, useful work there is no such word as freedom. They come and go at the order of a few. Their lives are regulated according to the needs and wishes of a few. A censorship is put upon their words and deeds. The fruits of their labor are taken from them. And if, by chance, they have the instinct and spirit to rebel, if they take their place in the vanguard of the fight for justice, the prisons are waiting.”

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

As the Partisan Defense Committee mobilizes for its 31st annual Holiday Appeal to raise funds for monthly stipends and holiday gifts to class-war prisoners, the capitalists’ jails are being filled with hundreds of young activists who have protested the election of racist demagogue Donald Trump, adding to the many more who have been jailed for protesting racist cop terror over the past couple of years.

At this year’s New York City benefit, featured speakers will be Albert Woodfox and Robert King, who along with Herman Wallace were known as the Angola 3. These intransigent opponents of racial oppression spent decades in prison, victims of a state vendetta for forming a Black Panther Party chapter in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison. Woodfox and Wallace were falsely convicted of the 1972 killing of prison guard Brent Miller. King, who was framed up for the killing of a fellow inmate in 1973, was released in 2001, and dedicated himself to fighting to prove the innocence of his imprisoned comrades. Wallace was released in October 2013—just three days before dying of liver cancer! Despite seeing his conviction overturned twice, Woodfox spent nearly 44 years in solitary confinement—the longest stint of any prisoner in the U.S.—before being released this past February, on his 69th birthday.

The PDC stipend program is a revival of a tradition of the International Labor Defense (ILD) under its first secretary, James P. Cannon (1925-28), an early leader of the Communist Party who went on to become the founder of American Trotskyism. Like the ILD before us, we stand unconditionally on the side of the working people and the oppressed in struggle against their exploiters and oppressors. We defend, in Cannon’s words, “any member of the workers movement, regardless of his views, who suffered persecution by the capitalist courts because of his activities or his opinion” (First Ten Years of American Communism [1962]). In its early years, the ILD adopted 106 prisoners—socialists, anarchists, union leaders and militants victimized for their struggles to organize the working class and for opposition to imperialist war.

The PDC started our class-war prisoner stipend program in 1986, during the Reagan years, a period of rampant reaction. Those years were marked by vicious racist repression, brutal union-busting, anti-immigrant hysteria, malicious cutbacks in social services for the predominantly black and Latino poor as well as government efforts to equate leftist political activity with “terrorism.” Over the decades since, we have supported dozens of prisoners on three continents, among them militant workers railroaded for defending their unions during pitched class battles—including coal miners in Britain and Kentucky.

The 1980s were a time of waning class and social struggle, but the convulsive battles for black rights in the 1960s and ’70s still haunted America’s capitalist rulers, who thirsted for vengeance. Among the early recipients of PDC stipends were members and supporters of the Black Panther Party, the best of a generation of black radicals who sought a revolutionary solution to black oppression—a bedrock of American capitalism. Other early stipend recipients were members of the largely black Philadelphia MOVE commune. Among those prisoners to whom we continue to provide stipends are Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s foremost class-war prisoner, and Ed Poindexter, a leader of the Omaha, Nebraska, Committee to Combat Fascism, whose comrade and fellow stipend recipient Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa died in March after 45 years in prison.

There is every reason to believe that the period we are entering will be no less reactionary than the one we faced 30 years ago. Class-struggle legal and social defense, including support for class-war prisoners—those today behind bars and any militants who join them—is of vital importance to labor activists, fighters for black rights and immigrant rights and defenders of civil liberties. In a small but real way, our prisoner stipend program expresses the commonality of interests between black people, immigrants and the working class. The struggle to free the class-war prisoners is critical to educating a new generation of fighters against exploitation and oppression—a schooling centered on the role of the capitalist state, comprising at its core the military, cops, courts and prisons. Join us in generously donating and building our annual Holiday Appeal. An injury to one is an injury to all!

The 12 class-war prisoners receiving stipends from the PDC are listed below.

*   *   *

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.” Framed up for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer, Mumia was sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Federal and state courts have repeatedly refused to consider evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed the policeman. In 2011 the Philadelphia district attorney’s office dropped its longstanding effort to legally lynch Mumia. In a significant development in the decades-long battle for his freedom, on August 7, attorneys for Mumia Abu-Jamal filed a new petition under Pennsylvania’s Post Conviction Relief Act (PCRA). Mumia’s application seeks to overturn the denial of his three prior PCRA claims by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. If successful, he would be granted a new hearing before that court to argue for reversal of his frame-up conviction. In the meantime he remains condemned to life in prison with no chance of parole. Mumia also faces a life-threatening health crisis related to active hepatitis C, which brought him close to death in March 2015. On August 31, eight months after oral argument in Mumia’s lawsuit to obtain crucial medication, a federal judge rejected his claim on the pretext that the lawsuit should have been directed against the members of the state’s hepatitis committee—a secretive body which Mumia’s attorneys had no way of knowing even existed at the time the suit was initiated! The Pennsylvania prison authorities have adamantly refused to treat his dangerous but curable condition.

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 was framed up for the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents marauding in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 72-year-old Peltier is not scheduled to be reconsidered for parole for another eight years. Peltier suffers from multiple serious medical conditions and has received a confirmed diagnosis of an abdominal aortic aneurysm—a life-threatening condition which the federal officials have refused to treat. He is incarcerated far from his people and family and is currently seeking executive clemency from Barack Obama.

Seven MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa and Eddie Africa—are in their 39th year of imprisonment. After the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, they were sentenced to 30-100 years, 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 when a bomb was dropped on their living quarters. After nearly four decades of unjust incarceration, these innocent prisoners are routinely turned down at parole hearings. This year Eddie, Debbie, Janet and Janine were all denied parole.

Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, 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. The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals 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 crimes. They should not have served a day in prison.

Ed Poindexter is a former Black Panther supporter and leader of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. He and his former co-defendant, Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa, 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 was railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and he has now spent more than 45 years behind bars. Nebraska courts have repeatedly denied Poindexter a new trial despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a 911 audio tape long suppressed by the FBI, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjury.

All proceeds from the Holiday Appeal events will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. This is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity with those imprisoned for their opposition to racist capitalism and imperialist depredation. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252. For more information about the class-war prisoners, including addresses for correspondence, see: partisandefense.org.

A View From The Left- Death on the Docks in Europe Unions Must Fight for Job Safety!

Workers Vanguard No. 1101	2 December 2016

Death on the Docks in Europe

Unions Must Fight for Job Safety!

The following is an edited translation of an article from Spartakist No. 214 (Fall 2016), newspaper of the Spartakist-Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, German section of the International Communist League.

In the past few years, fatal accidents have been on the rise at container terminals in Europe. According to the European Transport Workers Federation (ETF), in 2015 workplace deaths were reported at ports in Belgium (Antwerp), Spain (Bilbao and Valencia), Germany (Bremerhaven), Finland (Helsinki), Sweden (Oxelösund) and Portugal (Sines). These are in addition to injuries that can leave workers totally incapacitated, not to mention the increase in debilitating and exhausting work-related stress. In a phenomenon typical of capitalism—a crisis of overproduction—the shipowners have been building ever-larger container ships despite a weakening of world trade, thereby creating massive overcapacity. Now the shipping companies want to preserve their profits via massive “cost reductions,” i.e., making seamen and dock workers pay the bill.

For the shipping companies and port operators, workplace injuries and deaths are collateral damage in their quest for higher profits, reflecting the brutal reality of the relationship between the working class and the capitalists. Workers, including those who are somewhat better paid, must sell their labor power in order to live, whereas the capitalists, who own the means of production, extract their profits from workers’ labor. How much profit the capitalists can extract from the workers is determined by the struggle between the working class and the capitalists. In addition to limiting pay raises or even slashing wages, the bosses seek to increase the number of workdays, to make them longer and to push speedup. Trade unions should be the defense organizations of the workers, fighting not just for higher wages and benefits but also for better working conditions and against increasing labor “flexibility.” The fight for better workplace safety could strengthen the unions, especially in industry and logistics.

Ports are strategic junctions of international trade, critical for the economy and for the bourgeoisie of industrialized countries. German imperialism, with its heavy reliance on industrial exports, is dependent on the functioning of its ports. Hamburg and Bremerhaven along with Rotterdam in Holland and Antwerp in Belgium are particularly important. The German bourgeoisie has ratcheted up the rate of exploitation of the working class through the creation of a large low-wage sector, using these super-profits to expand its leading position as an exporter. German capitalism dominates Europe, bleeds dry the working class in smaller countries and oppresses those countries via the imperialist European Union (EU). At the same time, this means that dock workers internationally hold tremendous potential social power in their hands. Given their role in the economy, dock workers and seamen should understand their power to bring the capitalist profit system to a halt. What stands in the way are the nationalist and protectionist policies of the bureaucratic trade-union leadership, which has pledged fealty to the bosses.

The worldwide attacks by shipowners and port companies along with the accidents affecting dock workers led the two umbrella organizations of dock worker unions, the ITF (International Transport Workers’ Federation) and IDC (International Dockworkers Council), to carry out a joint “Global Day of Action” on July 7, seeking to “draw attention to their work situation” and “create a clearly visible signal for healthy and secure jobs,” as well as to commemorate those dock workers who had died on the job. While there was a one-hour work stoppage in some ports, as in Le Havre, France (as well as on the U.S. West Coast), in others there were only short interruptions. Though this Day of Action did not significantly affect shipping, it symbolically demonstrated the potential of international dock worker solidarity. Effective international class struggle is necessary to resist the murderous chase after profits in the ports and aboard the ships. French dock workers showed their power when, beginning on May 24, they struck the oil terminals at Le Havre and Marseille for over two weeks. This action was in solidarity with the strike of the refinery workers and many others against the anti-union El Khomri law, a strike that paralyzed virtually all of France.

Deadly Industrial Accidents in Hamburg and Bremerhaven

The preventable death of 37-year-old Bülent Benli shines a light on the situation of the dock workers. Employed as a lasher, he was killed on 10 October 2014 while he was in a “lasher basket” (a cage for transporting personnel between the dock and the ship) at the Burchardkai terminal of Hamburg Port and Logistics Inc. (HHLA). Bülent Benli was a casual, working day to day without a fixed work contract, and had gotten the job through the dock worker dispatching agency Gesamthafenbetrieb (GHB). His death must be laid at the feet of the HHLA bosses, who make their huge profits at the expense of on-the-job safety. The City of Hamburg owns around 70 percent of HHLA. Burchardkai is the largest container terminal in Hamburg and a showpiece terminal, one of the great pearls among the treasures of the Hamburg moneybags, who still use day laborers just as they did 100 years ago.

As dock workers told us, there are various procedures and security equipment, any one of which could have prevented Bülent Benli’s death, but which are not in use at Burchardkai. Lashers there have to use hand signals to “communicate” with crane operators 125 feet or more above them, as if it were the Middle Ages. Conditions would be safer if there were a radio link between lashers and the crane operators and if there were an additional worker who could communicate when the lashers are busy. The crane operators at Burchardkai also lack a standard safety feature, which, when engaged, automatically limits the speed of the lash basket when people are being transported. The HHLA bosses would rather skimp on the expense of safe procedures, which would require more personnel and equipment and would decrease profits. Instead they prefer to play with the lives of the lashers.

Lashers secure containers to ships and other containers using twistlocks and turnbuckles. In the play Tallymann un Schutenschubser [Tallyman and Barge Pusher], which is set in Hamburg, a former seaman and harbor worker characterizes the lashers as “the gold of the coast.” Volker Ippig, former goalkeeper for the Hamburg soccer team FC St. Pauli and also a casual and lasher, stated in a 28 June 2009 interview with the newspaper Die Tageszeitung (taz): “When you’re pulling the twistlocks fast as hell, then things really move. You can’t hold out doing this for hours, just for a certain period. Hard work? Yes. But good work, decent work.” Lashing is the most dangerous and hardest work in the port. The terminal operators save money by employing workers from small, low-wage lashing outfits. And even though companies like GHB pay the union contract rate, lashers are always on pay scales much lower than crane operators and other port workers.

An additional factor in Bülent Benli’s death was that he was dispatched to the job even though he had worked only a few weeks as a lasher and had not been adequately trained. The GHB website nonetheless boasts: “Crucial to GHB’s success is its highly skilled workforce. That is why we place the highest value on initial and continuous training. We offer top training opportunities in all our fields.” Nice words from the bosses, but the union had better see to it that the jobs are safe and that workers receive the necessary initial and ongoing training.

Another fatal accident occurred on 14 May 2015 at Bremerhaven’s North Sea Terminal (NTB), when an undetected crack led to a crane boom collapsing, killing the 52-year-old crane operator, Volker Hermann, who was buried beneath it. Regular, adequate inspections could have prevented this accident. Why wasn’t this crack discovered earlier and couldn’t similar accidents occur on other cranes? An article in the February 2015 issue of Verkehrsreport [Transport Report], journal of the trade union ver.di, alludes to Hermann’s colleagues’ fear of more such accidents, but the article gives no perspective for a fight by the union. Instead, the paper uncritically recounts how the harbor police have assumed “responsibility for uncovering the facts.” But the police will always “investigate” in the interest of the bosses. The police and courts are central parts of the capitalist state and protect its system of exploitation.

Trade-union actions could have ensured that similar cranes would be examined at the known weak points. The death of one dock worker in Bremerhaven due to a crane component failure was obviously not seen by other terminal companies as any reason to inspect their own cranes. When crane operators at various Hamburg terminals expressed their justified anger, the situation was smoothed over by management while the trade-union tops maintained silence. Thus, less than a year later, on March 11, there was an accident similar to the one in Bremerhaven. An undiscovered crack led to a boom “draw bar” dangling from a crane at the container terminal Altenwerder (CTA, the automated terminal in Hamburg operated by HHLA and Hapag-Lloyd), fortunately without serious consequences. To keep their business running smoothly, the capitalists lied to the workers. Safe operation of container cranes demands frequent, extremely detailed inspections. Ver.di must fight for the implementation of appropriate safety measures, including by carrying out job actions if necessary.

While the collapse of the crane boom in Bremerhaven received wide media coverage, generally the port bosses do everything they can to keep news of major accidents (even when there is a death) from reaching the workforce, let alone the public. When Uwe Kröger, a 45-year-old crane operator, suffered a fatal heart attack while working at Eurogate Hamburg on 31 December 2009, it took an hour and a half for medical assistance to arrive, according to Rolf Geffken (labor lawyer and author of Arbeit und Arbeitskampf im Hafen [Labor and Labor Struggle on the Docks]). It takes considerable effort to retrieve a dead or severely injured worker from a container crane. A special rescue team is needed to lower him down with ropes, but there isn’t such a team in the whole Hamburg container terminal! Aside from first-aid workers, there are no emergency workers at the terminals, and the nearest hospital emergency rooms are far away. When Kröger’s widow pressed charges and asked for the dangerous conditions to be investigated, she was insulted by the company. Later the newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt printed a full-page article glorifying the crane operator’s cabin as a “sky box,” without even mentioning the death of the worker. Geffken responded in an interview with Junge Welt (11 October 2011): “In the Hamburg media there’s something like a conspiracy of silence when such an accident occurs.” The Hamburg capitalists, who cover up such accidents, control the bourgeois media, which refrains from any critical reporting and instead prettifies the wretched conditions.

For a Class-Struggle Union Leadership!

Serious and fatal accidents also happen with straddle carriers, huge machines that move the containers at the terminals and load them onto trucks. On 30 November 2015, straddle carrier driver Kai Weinhold was killed at the Eurogate terminal in Bremerhaven when his vehicle overturned. Tipping over, crashing into another vehicle and even catching on fire are not uncommon. Speedup, bad pavement conditions, inadequate lighting, antiquated or untested new technology, along with failures to conduct scheduled maintenance and inspections, lead to life-threatening injuries and even to death. Harbor work is one of the most dangerous jobs, but under these intolerable conditions, otherwise preventable accidents leading to mutilation or death are inevitable: it’s industrial murder! With their round-the-clock operations, the harbor bosses are more concerned with operating their equipment at full capacity than about safety inspections and maintenance schedules.

Blaming individual workers for causing accidents by not adhering to safety rules is standard practice for the bosses. It is the duty of the trade unions to collectively shield their members from the immense pressure they are under to “get the job done” without interruptions. Workers are forced into a vicious circle: either they are disciplined by the company for pointing out too many safety problems, or they risk their health or even their lives by ignoring safety instructions. For the workers to protect themselves, the collective strength of the unions must be brought to bear. What is needed is a determined and continuous struggle to establish and maintain safe working conditions, especially given changing conditions in the port. Workers and the union must have control over job safety. The unions and factory councils must demonstrate that they are capable of shutting down the whole operation in the event of danger. Safe working conditions require constant vigilance and struggle against the bosses. Union control instead of confidence in the bosses! Harbor workers need their own union safety committees, with representatives who have the right to stop unsafe work immediately on the spot. The question of safety on the job touches directly the opposing class interests of workers and capitalists. Safe working conditions for dock workers means less profit for the shipowners and terminal operators. A fight for safe equipment, safe work procedures and adequate training is counterposed to the interests of the capitalists. Thus, awareness that the workers are in irreconcilable class conflict with the capitalists is needed.

In 1934, American longshoremen, with a class-struggle leadership, successfully struck West Coast ports, laying the basis for the forging of the powerful West Coast longshore union, the ILWU. The strike resulted in key gains, including in regard to safety. In disputes over safety, individual ILWU members covered by the master longshore contract have the contractual right to “stand by” (stop work) until the issue is resolved. But just as in Germany, such gains are continually subject to assault by the bosses; as with ver.di, the ILWU has a lengthy history of agreeing to giveback contracts. For a detailed depiction of how struggles were fought to a victory see our pamphlet Then and Now.

What is necessary is a class-struggle union leadership, but the present leadership of German unions stands under the political control of the social democracy. Both the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Left Party are bourgeois workers parties—they have a working-class base but a bourgeois, capitalist program. They promote reliance on the institutions of capitalism and its state even when the safety of workers is at stake. Instead, workers need a revolutionary multiethnic workers party independent of the bosses. And they need a union leadership that understands that the interests of the workers and bosses are directly counterposed and mobilizes the power of the union. Strong class-struggle unions are a necessary counterweight to the capitalist bosses. But as long as society is in the hands of the capitalists and centered on maximizing profit, any victories will only be transitory. Only when workers take state power into their own hands and smash the profit system will it be possible to bring about genuine, lasting safety in the workplace and, moreover, to satisfy the material needs of all mankind.

*****When The Tin Can Bended…. In The Time Of The Late Folk-Singer Dave Van Ronk’s Time

*****When The Tin Can Bended…. In The Time Of The Late Folk-Singer Dave Van Ronk’s Time

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

 

Sometimes Sam Lowell and his “friend” (really “sweetie,” long time sweetie, paramour, significant other, consort or whatever passes for the socially acceptable or Census Bureau bureaucratic “speak” way to name somebody who is one’s soul-mate, his preferred term) Laura Perkins whose relationship to Sam was just described in parenthesis, and righteously so, liked to go to Crane’s Beach in Ipswich to either cool off in the late summer heat or in the fall before the New England weather lowers its hammer and the place gets a bit inaccessible. That later summer  heat escape valve is a result of the hard fact that July, when they really would like to go there to catch a few fresh sea breezes, is not a time to show up at the bleach white sands beach due to nasty blood-sucking green flies swarming and dive-bombing like some berserk renegade Air Force squadron lost on a spree who breed in the nearby swaying mephitic marshes.

The only “safe haven” then is to drive up the hill to the nearby robber-baron days etched Crane Castle to get away from the buggers, although on a stagnant wind day you might have a few vagrant followers, as the well-to-do have been doing since there were well-to-do and had the where-with-all to escape the summer heat and bugs at higher altitudes. By the way I assume that “castle” is capitalized when it part of a huge estate, the big ass estate of Crane, now a trust monument to the first Gilded Age, not today’s neo-Gilded Age, architectural proclivities of the rich, the guy whose company did, does all the plumbing fixture stuff on half the bathrooms in America including the various incantations of the mansion. 

Along the way, along the hour way to get to Ipswich from Cambridge Sam and Laura had developed a habit of making the time more easy passing by listening to various CDs, inevitably not listened to for a long time folk CDs, not listened to for so long that the plastic containers needed to be dusted off before being brought along, on the car CD player. And is their wont while listening to some CD to comment on this or that thing that some song brought to mind, or the significance of some song in their youth.  One of the things that had brought them together early on several years back was their mutual interest in the old 1960s folk minute which Sam, a little older and having grown up within thirty miles of Harvard Square, one the big folk centers of that period along with the Village and North Beach out in Frisco town, had imbibed deeply. Laura, growing up “in the sticks,” in farm country in upstate New York had gotten the breeze at second-hand through records, records bought at Cheapo Records and the eternal Sandy's on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge and a little the fading Cambridge folk scene when she had moved to Boston in the early 1970s to go to graduate school.     

One hot late August day they got into one such discussion about how they first developed an interest in folk music when Sam had said “sure everybody, everybody over the age of say fifty to be on the safe side, knows about Bob Dylan, maybe some a little younger too if some hip kids have browsed through their parents’ old vinyl record collections now safely ensconced in the attic although there are stirrings of retro-vinyl revival of late according a report he had heard on NPR. Some of that over 50 crowd and their young acolytes would also know about how Dylan, after serving something like an apprenticeship under the influence of Woody Guthrie in the late 1950s singing Woody’s songs imitating Woody's style something  fellow Woody acolytes like Ramblin’ Jack Elliot never quite got over moved on, got all hung up on high symbolism and obscure references. Funny guys like Jack actually made a nice workman-like career out of Woody covers, so their complaints seen rather hollow now. That over 50s crowd would also know Dylan became if not the voice of the Generation of ’68, their generation, which he probably did not seriously aspire in the final analysis, then the master troubadour of the age.

Sam continued along that line after Laura had said she was not sure about the connection and he said he meant, “troubadour in the medieval sense of bringing news to the people and entertaining them by song and poetry as well if not decked in some officially approved garb like back in those olden days where they worked under a king’s license if lucky, by their wit otherwise but the 'new wave' post-beatnik flannel shirt, work boots, and dungarees which connected you with the roots, the American folk roots down in the Piedmont, down in Appalachia, down in Mister James Crow’s Delta. So, yes, that story has been pretty well covered.”  

Laura said she knew all of that about the desperate search for roots although not that Ramblin’ Jack had been an acolyte of Woody’s but she wondered about others, some other folk performers who she listened to on WUMB on Saturday morning when some weeping willow DJ put forth about fifty old time rock and folk things a lot of which she had never heard of back in Mechanicsville outside of Albany where she grew up. Sam then started in again, “Of course that is hardly the end of the story since Dylan did not create that now hallowed folk minute of the early 1960s. He had been washed by it when he came to the East from Hibbing, Minnesota for God’s sake (via Dink’s at the University), came into the Village where there was a cauldron of talent trying to make folk the next big thing, the next big cultural thing for the young and restless of the post-World War II generations. For us. But also those in little oases like the Village where the disaffected could put up on stuff they couldn’t get in places like Mechanicsville or Carver where I grew up. People who I guess, since even I was too young to know about that red scare stuff except to you had to follow your teacher’s orders to put your head under your desk and hand over your head if the nuclear holocaust was coming, were frankly fed up with the cultural straightjacket of the red scare Cold War times and began seriously looking as hard at roots in all its manifestations as our parents, definitely mine, yours were just weird about stuff like that, right, were burying those same roots under a vanilla existential Americanization. How do you like that for pop sociology 101.”

“One of the talents who was already there when hick Dylan came a calling, lived there, came from around there was the late Dave Van Ronk who as you know we had heard several times in person, although unfortunately when his health and well-being were declining not when he was a young politico and hell-raising folk aspirant. You know he also, deservedly, fancied himself a folk historian as well as musician.”    

“Here’s the funny thing, Laura, that former role is important because we all know that behind the “king” is the “fixer man,” the guy who knows what is what, the guy who tells one and all what the roots of the matter were like some mighty mystic (although in those days when he fancied himself a socialist that mystic part was played down). Dave Van Ronk was serious about that part, serious about imparting that knowledge about the little influences that had accumulated during the middle to late 1950s especially around New York which set up that folk minute. New York like I said, Frisco, maybe in small enclaves in L.A. and in precious few other places during those frozen times a haven for the misfits, the outlaws, the outcast, the politically “unreliable,” and the just curious. People like the mistreated Weavers, you know, Pete Seeger and that crowd found refuge there when the hammer came down around their heads from the red-baiters and others like advertisers who ran for cover to “protect” their precious soap, toothpaste, beer, deodorant or whatever they were mass producing to sell to a hungry pent-ip market.  

Boston and Cambridge by comparison until late in the 1950s when the Club 47 and other little places started up and the guys and gals who could sing, could write songs, could recite poetry even had a place to show their stuff instead of to the winos, rummies, grifters and conmen who hung out at the Hayes-Bickford or out on the streets could have been any of the thousands of towns who bought into the freeze.”     

“Sweetie, I remember one time but I don’t remember where, maybe the Café Nana when that was still around after it had been part of the Club 47 folk circuit for new talent to play and before Harry Reid, who ran the place, died and it closed down, I know it was before we met, so it had to be before the late 1980s Von Ronk told a funny story, actually two funny stories, about the folk scene and his part in that scene as it developed a head of steam in the mid-1950s which will give you an idea about his place in the pantheon. During the late 1950s after the publication of Jack Kerouac’s ground-breaking road wanderlust adventure novel that got young blood stirring, not mine until later since I was clueless on all that stuff except rock and roll, On The Road which I didn’t read until high school, the jazz scene, the cool be-bop jazz scene and poetry reading, poems reflecting off of “beat” giant Allen Ginsberg’s Howl the clubs and coffeehouse of the Village were ablaze with readings and cool jazz, people waiting in line to get in to hear the next big poetic wisdom guy if you can believe that these days when poetry is generally some esoteric endeavor by small clots of devotees just like folk music. The crush of the lines meant that there were several shows per evening. But how to get rid of one audience to bring in another in those small quarters was a challenge.

Presto, if you wanted to clear the house just bring in some desperate “from hunger” snarly nasally folk singer for a couple, maybe three songs, and if that did not clear the high art be-bop poetry house then that folk singer was a goner. A goner until the folk minute of the 1960s who probably in that very same club then played for the 'basket.' You know the 'passed hat' which even on a cheap date, and a folk music coffeehouse date was a cheap one in those days like I told you before and you laughed at cheapie me and the 'Dutch treat' thing, you felt obliged to throw a few bucks into to show solidarity or something.  And so the roots of New York City folk according to the 'father.'

Laura interrupted to ask if that “basket” was like the buskers put in front them these days and Sam said yes. And asked Sam about a few of the dates he took to the coffeehouses in those days, just out of curiosity she said, meaning if she had been around would he have taken her there then. He answered that question but since it is an eternally complicated and internal one I have skipped it to let him go on with the other Von Ronk story. He continued with the other funny story like this-“The second story involved his [Von Ronk's] authoritative role as a folk historian who after the folk minute had passed became the subject matter for, well, for doctoral dissertations of course just like today maybe people are getting doctorates in hip-hop or some such subject. Eager young students, having basked in the folk moment in the abstract and with an academic bent, breaking new ground in folk history who would come to him for the 'skinny.' Now Van Ronk had a peculiar if not savage sense of humor and a wicked snarly cynic’s laugh but also could not abide academia and its’ barren insider language so when those eager young students came a calling he would give them some gibberish which they would duly note and footnote. Here is the funny part. That gibberish once published in the dissertation would then be cited by some other younger and even more eager students complete with the appropriate footnotes. Nice touch, nice touch indeed on that one, right.”

Laura did not answer but laughed, laughed harder as she thought about it having come from that unformed academic background and having read plenty of sterile themes turned inside out.       

As Laura laugh settled Sam continued “As for Van Ronk’s music, his musicianship which he cultivated throughout his life, I think the best way to describe that for me is that one Sunday night in the early 1960s I was listening to the local folk program on WBZ hosted by Dick Summer, who was influential in boosting local folk musician Tom Rush’s career and who was featured on that  Tom Rush documentary No Regrets we got for being members of WUMB, when this gravelly-voice guy, sounding like some old mountain pioneer, sang the Kentucky hills classic Fair and Tender Ladies. It turned out to be Von Ronk's version which you know I still play up in the third floor attic. After that I was hooked on that voice and that depth of feeling that he brought to every song even those of his own creation which tended to be spoofs on some issue of the day.”

Laura laughed at Sam and the intensity with which his expressed his mentioning of the fact that he liked gravelly-voiced guys for some reason. Here is her answer, “You should became when you go up to the third floor to do your “third floor folk- singer” thing and you sing Fair and Tender Ladies I hear this gravelly-voiced guy, sounding like some old mountain pioneer, some Old Testament Jehovah prophet come to pass judgment come that end day time.”

They both laughed. 

Laura then mentioned the various times that they had seen Dave Von Ronk before he passed away, not having seen him in his prime, when that voice did sound like some old time prophet, a title he would have probably secretly enjoyed for publicly he was an adamant atheist. Sam went on, “ I saw him perform many times over the years, sometimes in high form and sometimes when drinking too much high-shelf whiskey, Chavis Regal, or something like that not so good. Remember we had expected to see him perform as part of Rosalie Sorrels’ farewell concert at Saunders Theater at Harvard in 2002 I think. He had died a few weeks before.  Remember though before that when we had seen him for what turned out to be our last time and I told you he did not look well and had been, as always, drinking heavily and we agreed his performance was subpar. But that was at the end. For a long time he sang well, sang us well with his own troubadour style, and gave us plenty of real information about the history of American folk music. Yeah like he always used to say-'when the tin can bended …..and the story ended.'

As they came to the admission booth at the entrance to Crane’s Beach Sam with Carolyn Hester’s song version of Walt Whitman’s On Captain, My Captain on the CD player said “I was on my soap box long enough on the way out here. You’re turn with Carolyn Hester on the way back who you know a lot about and I know zero, okay.” Laura retorted, “Yeah you were definitely on your soap-box but yes we can talk Carolyn Hester because I am going to cover one of her songs at my next “open mic.” And so it goes.                      

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-We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind! 

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.”

From The Class Struggle Archives-Stop The Trans-Pacific Partnership-Then- And Now Too!

From The Class Struggle Archives-Stop The Trans-Pacific Partnership-Then- And Now Too!   

 

Stop The Sweetheart Deals For International Big Business-Organize the Unorganized Internationally-Built The International Workers Front!

 

 

 

Building A Thing From Which You Have To Run-With The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) In Mind 

By Sam Lowell

“I’m not a Luddite, I’m not a guy who thinks we should go back and live in the caves, fearful of beasts, natural disasters, smirking shadows on the walls, bemoaning fate dealt by some unmerciful god. Not a guy either, maybe even less so these days when we are trying to downsize our lives, Melinda and me, who needs the latest gadget to prove that he has made something of himself in his ordinary clay life,” Josh Breslin told his three companions (plus that down-sizing- crazed Melinda) one night as they sat across from each other in Lenny’s, the best place by far in Portland (east side America version up in Maine not tree-hugger-crazed Oregon) for super local wines and equally super crabs and clam-cakes. They, Frank Jackman, Zack James, and Jimmy Jenkins were in Maine as guests of their old-time friend Josh who after many years of living in Cambridge down in Massachusetts when he had finished up a half-bright feet of ordinary clay career as an independent writer for half the unread radical magazines and journals in the country. You know the ones that every half-sensate intellectual or wannabe had on his or her coffee table to display come small intimate party time to show-off to their compatriots how “hip” they are (and Josh in his more candid moments grateful for those guilt-edged subscription bases which helped with alimony, child support and college tuitions for two ex-wives and four bright kids, two and two).

That last point, the point about Josh’s writing for many of the glossy and un-glossy publications of the past half century is important since the subject under discussion that night that bought out a spark of Josh’s old confrontational self was the recent passage by the United States Congress of President Obama’s negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership. Trans-Pacific that is with everybody who wanted in on the cozy deal, for oligarchs, big business and governmental bureaucrats except the elephant in the room, China (formerly known in Josh’s and his kindred’s youth as Red China, to distinguish it from the “real” China of the day-Taiwan). This whole pact was meant as nothing else than as a move to counter growing Chinese influence in that section of the world to the advantage of the United States, to the serious advantage of the United States.         

Josh, and his fellows at table, all politicos, mostly left of the Democratic Party leftists, not so much independents which in the current coin of political usage means independent but subject to selecting between those two non-choices, elephants (no relations to China, an elephant in the room of a different sort) and donkeys (not asses, which are a different animal no matter how appropriate a mascot they might rightly be) but the kind who might support Ralph Nader in his various candidacies, Cindy Sheehan, Bernie Sanders if he ran as an independent socialist had spent plenty of hours opposing previous international big-business rip-offs. Rip-offs like super-rip off of the Mexican peasant NAFTA, CAFTA and Frank’s favorite, LAFTA (who being born and raised in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston made everybody chuckle when he said it-LAFTAH, like a response to a joke, a poor joke on the peasants and urban poor of South America).

They had not taken up their opposition to these accords so much as pro-working class opponents like a lot of national and international labor organizations who saw, correctly saw good jobs going out of their countries of origin, to lower wage areas without benefit to those new employees and the lowering of the standard of living of those left behind-the now much vaunted and talked about increasing international standard of living gaps between rich and poor. Although not much done about that situation, much done about smashing the gap by a radical redistribution of wealth, for all the talk, plenty of parlor talk.            

But let’s get back to Josh and Lenny’s and that statement that he made about not being a Luddite, not being a “back to primeval nature guy,” not being a material objects-collector which raised a few eyes in the room since they had all, all the men had met in San Francisco in the late 1960s when they were all interested in turning the world upside down. Breaking for the lust for a ton of dough and all that brought with it. Still were but with a more measured if less passionate thrust. (Josh had met Melinda after his second painful and costly divorce in the late 1980s and he ever after wished that he had met her back in the 1960s when it would have changed lots of things for the better-if nothing else saving costly alimonies, child support and college tuitions).         

Jimmy, who had been the last to go west to California and the last to meet Josh, to be introduced to him by Jimmy’s hometown friend along with Frank and Zack from Carver High School the late, long lamented Pete Markin got the ball rolling he let out, “Hey Josh weren’t you the guy who after a couple of years on Captain Crunch’s yellow-brick road bus wanted to settle down in New Mexico or one of those square states and set up a communal farm, did so for a couple of months before scurrying back to San Francisco. Didn’t you also say another time that living on that primitive yellow-brick road bus was too “bourgeois” and that you were talking off with Butterfly Swirl to live in a cave in Todo el Mundo just south of Big Sur and abandon the decadent world to commune with nature (and commune with foxy Butterfly Swirl who knew how to “play the flute” for you which is a whole other story for another day). And weren’t you the guy who said that the down-pressed of the world had the right idea about keeping things simple, and that you “renounced” all worldly possessions, except what you could carry in your rucksack-and that damn typewriter of yours.

Everybody chuckled at Jimmy’s remarks, Jimmy whose sharp wit kept the Carver guys laughing in front of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor all through high school had hit the nail on the head. (Melinda didn’t chuckle not having heard the story before but who would get filled in later that night by Josh, except about Butterfly Swirl and her charms, leaving her wishing that she had known him back then as well.) Everybody expected that Josh would say something back but he just kept what he called (according to Melinda) his own counsel and let it pass. Let Frank go back to that time and tell one and all that they all had, under Markin’s cryto-mysto- Catholic-etched “from hunger” influence, been willing to break with their youthful dreams, become one with the fellahin as Markin called them before finding out the world-historic reality that every farm boy, maybe every farm girl, their stuck-on-the-land mothers and fathers too, wanted to get the fuck off the land at just the time that a big portion of 1960s youth nation was ready to go “live off the land.”

Frank continued in that same vein, “Hell even those of us from the “from hunger” Atlantic neighborhood, the neighborhood where most of the “boggers,” the guys who worked in the cranberry bogs which employed half the town were ready to forsake our “bourgeois” dreams, our mothers’ dreams that we get nice civil service jobs and move up the ladder one step above them to live more simply, to live in some intentional communes where all would be shared out among all those who put in their fair share to make the thing work.”

With that remark Josh said he had agreed with Markin back then since he had grown up in the same kind of town, except the big deal was textiles which had when he was a kid left first to head south in America and then overseas leaving guys like his unskilled labor father with not much left to dignify his life except hustling for every job he could land to keep four hungry growing boys, him and his three brothers, from the county farm. That in the end, after the fall, after he, they and their kindred had been defeated by the greed-heads in the early 1970s was why he had opposed all those unequal trade pacts, why he to belatedly honor his father and his desperate attempts to gain dignified employment, fought tooth and nail against their ratifications.      

That was the serious part of the evening, the righteous political part but when Melinda left the table to go to the Women’s Room Josh signaled to the assembled men, now a bit “in their cups” after a night of wines and seafood to come closer and admit that he had left Todo el Mundo when Butterfly Swirl decided to go back to “civilization” down in Carlsbad where she haled from, decided to go back to be a surfer boy’s girl he made a swift shift in his plans. Josh flushed when he wistfully murmured to the assembled that Butterfly Swirl sure knew how to “play the flute.” Some things never change about guys, even serious guys.                

Wall Street Versus Main Street-Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” (2010)-A Film Review

Wall Street Versus Main Street-Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” (2010)-A Film Review      

DVD Review 

By Sam Lowell 

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, starring Michael Douglas, Shia LeBeouf, Cary Mulligan, directed by Oliver Stone, 2010      

Yeah, Wall Street versus Main Street those kids from Occupy down the street from the august brokerage and financial towers of American business were on to something. Something that their grandparents called back in the Great Depression of the 1930s the economic royalists and today the one percent (1%-actually much less than that if you cut out the mere millionaires who are walking around with nothing but chump change these days when a billion is the starting point for anybody taking notice of your good fortune). Of course in the post-meltdown period since 2008 that idea has been played out many ways-not all to the benefit of Main Street in fact mostly not to the benefit of the great unwashed. 
Still it is a little hard to understand why in 2010 the director Oliver Stone felt compelled to revisit his 1987 production of Wall Street from the days when half of America was in love with the Street and the other half wishing that they had some dough to throw at their dreams with his second coming of that classic-Wall Street-Two or to follow form Money Never Sleeps (true enough). In other words did we need to see a chastised Gordon Grekko giving his take on what ailed the Street in those bummer days after 2008 when one half of America got wiped out and the other half got conked with “under water” debt? Probably not but here were are so a few comments on the story-line seem warranted.      
For those who remember Gordon Grekko, played by Michael Douglas, from the first film he was the consummate insider. A couple of decades and some serious stir time later he is a wiser man-sees where things are heading on the Street and like Cassandra wants to warn a candid world. A wiser man he may be but as the sub-theme notes money never sleeps and so our boy Gordon has seemingly lost a step or two since he was king of the hill. The big boys grabbling all the dough are now seen as heroes not bums of the month. But their day is coming.    
This one takes a few big curves away from the machinations of the Street and tries to deal with things on a more personal level. It seems that Gordon’s estranged daughter Winnie, played by Cary Mulligan, has a boyfriend/fiancé who is an up and coming, well, Gordon Grekko, working his ass off in a big investment house that is going under because it is carrying too much bad paper (and being undermined by a competitor investment house partner with a grudge). The boyfriend Jacob Moore, played by Shia LeBeouf,  is a go-getter for sure and winds up meeting Gordon on a book tour (Gordon has written a gloom and doom book portending the impending financial meltdown) and they strike up a bargain. Jacob tries to work to get Winnie to meet him and he will see what he can do to push Jacob up the Wall Street food chain (and especially get some traction for his clean energy project-the wave of the future).          
For a while it was no soap-Winnie is still resentful about how Gordon let her brother fall through the cracks with a drug addiction problem that took his life. But eventually she softens (as well as being proudly pregnant). Then Gordon pulls a classic Grekko-proving that an old con will always be an old con (artist or vict). He has a cool one hundred million stashed in Switzerland just waiting for Winnie to grab it. She doesn’t want it until Jacob talks her into using the dough to help finance the clean energy research. She does and signs for technical reasons the dough over to dear old dad. And he runs off and turns that nothing big one hundred million into a billion. Yeah, Gordon Grekko is back, the bad ass is in the saddle once again. But here is where the stir time or something plays-Gordon is worried about seeing his grandchild so he anonymously dumps the nothing big one hundred million on that research project. Nice touch. And they say Wall Street is just a big Ponzi scheme. Shame on them. But here is the big picture-those Grekkos are still in the saddle and who knows what they are up to now-no good for Main Street. Like I said I am not quite sure why Stone felt an urge to run this storyline again. What is needed is a plan to get rid of the bums.