US Foreign Policy: Intervention or Restraint? What can we expect from President Trump?

February 21 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Stephen Kinzer, author and journalist, will answer these questions when he discusses his new book The True Flag.

Are Americans imperialist or isolationist? Whether the US should intervene and lead or show global restraint is a recurring theme in US foreign policy.  From the imperialist invasions of the 19th and 20th centuries, to the more recent interventions overseas, any action the US takes has major global reverberations.  This debate takes on new meaning as President Trump prepares his global strategy.

Stephen Kinzer is an award-winning foreign correspondent whose articles and books have led the Washington Post to place him “among the best in popular foreign policy storytelling.”  He has written books about Central America, Rwanda, Turkey and Iran.  He writes a world affairs column for The Boston Globe.  

Sponsored by Watertown Citizens for Peace, Justice and the Environment and Massachusetts Peace Action.  For questions, email watertowncitizens@gmail.com.  Visit our web site at www.watertowncitizens.org, and follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/WatertownCitizensPJE

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Dakota Access Pipeline Protesters Clean Up As Deadline Looms-Stand By Standing Rock-Release All Protesters!

Dakota Access Pipeline Protesters Clean Up As Deadline Looms02:32

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February 22, 2017

By Amy Sisk

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In North Dakota, authorities set Wednesday as the deadline for the dwindling number of protesters against the Dakota Access pipeline to clean up and go home.

At the main protest camp, a massive cleanup effort has been underway. Semi trucks have been hauling debris out of camp and people here are piling garbage into bags.

"It looks like a trash pile. But it's getting picked up and every spot is starting to look better and better as we work together," Dotty Agard of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe says as she sorts through abandoned goods.

The Army Corps wants protesters out so it can clean up its land before the river thaws and floods the camp. Some protesters are moving to higher ground nearby on the Standing Rock reservation. But there is concern that after months of violent protests, it may take law enforcement to remove those who won't budge.

Dotty Agard of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe sorts through abandoned goods at camp. Tribal members and several hundred protesters are assisting with the cleanup.

Morton County Commission Chairman Cody Schulz is concerned about how protesters will respond to decisions made in Washington. At the urging of President Trump, the Army Corps this month granted a final permit to build the last stretch of the pipeline. Standing Rock is fighting that in court.

"They had some hope and a cause," Schulz says. "There's the fear I think from law enforcement that maybe some of that hope may be diminishing and desperation sometimes can set in."

Dana Yellow Fat is helping clean up. He says there's a lot of anger toward Indians right now. He describes hateful Facebook comments and says tribal members are afraid to leave the reservation.

"I might have a different skin color than you, but we still both bleed red," he says. "My culture and my ways might differ from yours, but we can still be friends."

Once this pipeline saga eventually ends, the Standing Rock tribe and North Dakota will have to figure out how to live side by side all over again.

Amy Sisk reports for Prairie Public Broadcasting and for Inside Energy, a public media collaboration focused on America's energy issues.

Copyright NPR 2017.

Related:

• Dakota Pipeline Protesters, Nearby Residents Brace For 2017
• In Their Own Words: The 'Water Protectors' Of Standing Rock

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The Gang That Couldn’t Rob Straight- Owen Wilson's Masterminds (2016)-A Film Review

The Gang That Couldn’t Rob Straight- Owen Wilson's Masterminds (2016)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Masterminds, starring Owen Wilson, 2016

Sometimes when a friend recommends a film it turns out to be a dud, turns out to be less than expected and in the case of the film under review, Masterminds, make that much less than expected considering the cast. Makes one wonder why a great comedic actor like Owen Wilson took the job, took the chance to work on a funky film that had a chance to go in one of two directions, a straight line comic look at a true story or a farce that bombed. It took the latter. The direction toward the farcical led the vehicle astray when all is said and done.  

Here is the skinny, here is why the title of this piece can be called the gang that couldn’t rob straight taking a page from an old Jimmy Breslin book. The story line based on a true incident about the doings around one of the great cash robberies in banking history, the Loomis heist in North Carolina 1997 for seventeen big ones-17 mil, okay not chicken feed then nor now. David Scott Ghantt, a security guard on a Lommis armored truck was hook-winked, no make that bewitched and bewildered by his sexy armored truck partner, Kelly, who had walked  out on the job over some harassment. A while later she wound up working hand and hand with a low-life short end of the stick criminal Steve, played by Wilson, who wants her to con, I am being kind here since this is a family sensitive outlet, David into being the inside man on a big heist of the company’s loot. David balked at first but Kelly lured him with her charms despite the fact he was two minutes to midnight away from getting married to another woman.        

The heist was a piece of cake for an inside job and David was told to lay low in Mexico until the coast was clear. The false lure was Kelly joining him soon, yeah, soon. The idea Steve thought though was that David was to get the short end of the straw, was the odd man out as he, Steve, was not going to share the dough with anybody but his loving wife and two unlovable kids. Meanwhile David was still forlornly expecting Kelly to join him in Mexico. Sucker. Double sucker because Steve threw the Feds onto him and he led them a merry chase before he got wise to what Steve, and Kelly, were up to. Steve in a panic, putting greed before good sense, ordered a hit on David by a screwball hit man who couldn’t hit right-as was to be expected. They wind up switching same identities (it’s a long unfunny story so just go along with me) so that David wound up at Steve’s over-the-top mansion ready to get even.

And he does in a way after the Feds got definitive proof that low-life greedy Steve and not pure-heart David was the evil mastermind behind the caper. Steve did 11 years, David pure-heart drew seven and Kelly a bunch too. With that enticing story-line it was a shame that the film was marred with so many unfunny slapstick jokes, some much low-rent bathroom humor and such a waste of an obviously talented cast. Yeah, what was Owen Wilson thinking. Some day when they do a retrospective of his work this one will not be included, I hope.      

A View From The Left-Bye-Bye to the Mendacity of Hope

Workers Vanguard No. 1105	10 February 2017

Bye-Bye to the Mendacity of Hope

The following contribution, edited for publication, was submitted to Workers Vanguard by Spartacist League Central Committee member Don Alexander.

The charred remains of hopes for equality and freedom—especially among black people—are part of the real legacy of the Barack Obama presidency. Millions put their faith in this Wall Street Democrat. His skin color was supposed to translate into some relief after decade upon decade of assaults on working people and the poorest strata of society by both the Democrats and Republicans. Millions thought they would get some respite from the increasingly unbearable oppression.

But it is Obama’s ruling-class backers, such as the thieving bankers on Wall Street, that could truly say to him as he left office: “Thank you, thank you, thank you. You have been our faithful and able servant. You kept your promise of keeping the pitchforks away from our citadels of power.” And no, ex-president Obama wasn’t “held hostage by Republicans” when he forked out 16 trillion dollars to the parasitic bankers during the financial crisis. He did it because of his loyalty to capitalism.

Obama was a faithful and dependable servant of U.S. imperialism. He served the interests of his class—the bourgeoisie, the moneybags, the exploiters. He also totally screwed workers and the poor.

Obama faded from the picture with his farewell tour. After he recently spoke in Chicago, the city where he first seriously began climbing the greasy pole of bourgeois politics, some shared their thoughts with the press about what his presidency meant to them. The disappointment in American imperialism’s first black president was unmistakable.

For some, it was hard to muster much enthusiasm for his “legacy,” as evidenced by the remarks of a couple of black people interviewed. When asked about what Obama meant to them, one said: “I guess I feel sad,” and another: “He should be embarrassed that he came in as president and the problems have actually worsened.”

You can be sure that isn’t half of it.

The mendacity of hope—the sheer effrontery of having declared in 2007 that black people were 90 percent free (like being partially pregnant) and now boasting about how much progress has been made—is exposed by severe economic, racial and sexual oppression in the country. In his speech Obama cried out: “Yes we did!” But militant workers and youth, men and women, will say: No you didn’t!

A poignant example of the horrible social misery can be seen in the lack of affordable housing. Consider, for example, the devastation of poor people, largely black and female, in Washington, D.C. A recent New York Times article (1 January) noted that in Southeast Washington, “The city and its suburbs accumulate staggering wealth while its poorest residents grow poorer.” And, “In December, a devastating survey of 32 big cities prepared by the United States Conference of Mayors showed Washington with the highest rate of homelessness.”

Given the complete absence of militant leadership for workers and oppressed minorities, it’s no wonder that millions today feel a deep sense of hopelessness, powerlessness and invisibility. The “N” word is hurled at black people with increased brazenness. With the possible connivance of the judge and his lawyer, Dylann Roof, the fascist scum who murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, used his court appearances as a platform to spew his racist filth while some of the victims’ relatives, friends and supporters looked on, their pain evident.

A class-struggle leadership of labor would have mobilized tens of thousands in Charleston and around the country and fought for labor action on the job to send a strong message to the race haters. Today, these fascists have black people, Jews, immigrants and women in their crosshairs. We of the Spartacist League have shown the way in the past: these vermin can be checked by powerful labor-centered mobilizations, relying on labor’s power and drawing behind it all the oppressed. It’s imperative that today’s anti-racist fighters study and assimilate this crucial history because it is a life-and-death matter.

Obama has had “amazing” success with the drone warfare program that he inherited from the Bush administration and the surveillance programs that he vastly expanded. Along with increased repression, his legacy is tied to maintaining Guantánamo.

Obama started using drone strikes the third day after he got into office. The carnage of his imperialist wars has been extensive. Obama mendaciously downplayed the number of civilians killed by his high-tech assassinations. The journalist John Pilger provided a useful summary (johnpilger.com, 17 January): “According to a Council on Foreign Relations Survey, in 2016 alone Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people on earth, in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.” He added: “A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones killed 4,700 people.”

Several black supporters and critics of Obama’s “legacy”—from Michael Eric Dyson to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Van Jones and other petty-bourgeois, self-appointed Democratic Party spokesmen—will walk to the ends of the earth to hold the coat of their “brother.” The “radical” preacher and professor Cornel West, on the other hand, has attacked Obama with increasing vehemence, while aligning himself with the capitalist politician Bernie Sanders and his so-called “political revolution.”

Racist cop terror and the killing of black men, women and children have defined the Obama era. The heterogeneous Black Lives Matter movement clings to the petty-bourgeois perspective of seeking to pressure the Democrats and the capitalist state on a local level. Intelligent anti-racist liberals have gone off the deep end, with historian Eric Foner going so far as to draw a straight line from Reconstruction to the Obama presidency.

Glen Ford and his Black Agenda Report (B.A.R.) group are more critical of the Democrats and Obama. But they explain the oppressed black masses’ fervent embrace of Obama by claiming that “Black America drank deeply from the intoxicating cup” of “ObamaL’aid” (blackagendareport.com, 18 January). This view is fundamentally false and blames black people for the oppression they endured under Obama. This grows out of B.A.R.’s rejection of a Marxist analysis and class-struggle program for black liberation. In not understanding the material basis of black oppression—a legacy of slavery that is rooted in the American capitalist profit system—Glen Ford embraces another bourgeois party, the Greens.

For the oppressed black masses, illusions in Obama’s presidency were bound up with a trans-class racial solidarity growing out of intensifying racial oppression and buttressed by a strong belief in American capitalist “democracy.” This is not the first time that this has happened.

A few decades ago, illusions that a “great” black (male) leader would lead the way out of this racist hell was shown in the support (still going strong) to the liberal, pro-Democratic Party pacifist Martin Luther King Jr. It’s now a well-known and documented fact that King collaborated with the Justice Department during the civil rights era, while the Feds were wiretapping and spreading false rumors about him.

The treachery of the ex-civil rights petty-bourgeois, liberal establishment runs right up to the present. Former civil rights activist John Lewis, an ex-SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) activist and longtime Democrat, was recently in the news calling for a boycott of Donald Trump’s inauguration. Trump basically told him to shut up (“all talk...no action”), and Lewis and his Democratic Party defenders were off and running to show that the now-deflated Democrats are on their game. Lewis’s call for a boycott was an empty stunt, truly a distilled expression of how the capitalist Democrats have nothing to offer the oppressed—never have and never will.

We Marxists remember and seek to instill in the consciousness of black people and anti-racist fighters the real history of why the civil rights movement was derailed. We tell the truth about the betrayals of such “luminaries” as Lewis. He contributed, in his own way, to politically disarming the masses at a critical time when he acquiesced to the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington and dropped from his speech any denunciation of the Democrats or the Republicans.

The struggle for workers revolution and black liberation requires fighting to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party that will smash bourgeois rule. Its task is to mobilize the working class independently from all parties and agencies of capital. The power of labor is in its unique role deriving from its relationship to the means of production. Such a party will arm class-conscious workers with a revolutionary program to fight on behalf of all of the oppressed and exploited and for socialist revolution. An internationally planned economy, effected through a series of socialist revolutions around the globe, will lay the material basis for world communism and the abolition of all classes.

A long history of betrayals and sellouts by the staunchly pro-capitalist union misleadership has led millions of white workers, hit hard by the severe economic depression, to embrace the reactionary demagogue Trump, whose rallies were orgies of racism and anti-immigrant chauvinism. These workers were tired of the lies of the hypocritical Democrats and their constant refrain about an unprecedented “recovery,” while their desperate plight was being ignored. The Democrats believed that their lies would always be swallowed. Their “socialist” helpmates in the reformist International Socialist Organization and Socialist Alternative helped spread illusions in the “people’s president,” Bernie Sanders, as well as the bourgeois Green Party.

Now the workers will be battered by a cabal of billionaire robbers whose government will be a plunderers’ paradise, an unconcealed dictatorship of the rich. We can expect even more brutal attacks on labor and oppressed minorities at home and death and destruction rained on dark-skinned peoples abroad, surpassing what even Obama “accomplished.”

The great Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin once remarked that the toiling masses must possess an experience of their own. This has been consciously distorted by the reformists to mean that Marxists must conciliate the illusions of working people and the poor. Far from it!

The irreconcilable interests of the ruling bourgeoisie and capitalism’s wage slaves will necessarily result in struggles against the “masters” of the planet—bloody U.S. imperialism. With the intervention of a Leninist vanguard party, there will come a time when many of these same workers will heed the call for sweeping away all of the exploiters. They will join with their black and Latino class brothers and sisters, with all the poor and oppressed, and see that their interests and future are bound up with fighting in common integrated class struggle for the eradication of the whole capitalist system of exploitation and oppression. Or we will all go down separately.

In New York City-February 25th Forum -Race, Class and American Populism-Built The Resistance

In New York City-February 25th Forum-Race, Class and American Populism-Built The Resistance   

Out In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program -Six – A Peace Treaty Of One's Own

Out In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program -Six – A Peace Treaty Of One's Own

Jamal Pratt, Boston Boy’s English High School Class of 1965 (touted as the old public high as such in the country ahead of Boston Latin in that regard), was crazy to go into the military right after high school come June, a plan that he had been mulling in the back of his mind for the previous couple of years. In addition to that intense desire to prove his manhood, his righteous black manhood, to prove that he had what it took to step off with the tough guys, the tough guys when and where it counted, he was having troubles with Ma at home (rolling stone Pa, a blur when young, was long gone, gone with some other woman in some other town as far as his mother and his paternal grandmother knew).

You know the steady drumbeat of what are you going to do with your life (he had only vaguely alluded to that service career which she might have freaked at if he explained it in too much detail), why were you hanging out with who you were hanging out with, don't you know those corner boys of yours will just get you in trouble the universal mother drill (in fact she was only about half right about that since Junior was headed for college and Roy the Boy had military ideas too, although Jesse and Preston were slated to do time, black time, for some cheap jack robberies). Moreover he had no steady girlfriend since Sheila had moved back down south with her grandmother after her parents split up and he was just keeping his head above water when it came to that corner boy midnight shifter stuff his mother kept harping on (he was under Jesse’s spell in particular just then). He was desperately in need of a change of scenery, no question.

Besides he wanted, English High proud wanted (the glass case in the front lobby exhibited many of the servicemen and others who had distinguished themselves in service to the country in the long line of campaigns this country has conducted as befitted the oldest public high school in the country, both fact drummed in the boys from day one of grade nine), to do his duty for his country against the communist menace that it was facing, besides big dog Red Russia, from a place called Vietnam, a place where, from all the reports, the citizenry was growing wild, and getting wilder and would take down the whole region with it. That, of course was part of it, part of what any red-blooded American, black or white, feared and Jamal thought rightfully so, although he was loose, pretty loose, on exactly what the hell was happening there. The big part though was that Jamal Pratt was smitten by a John Wayne Army Special Forces action film, The Green Berets, having seen it several times and having bored, bored there was no other word for it, his corner boys as they hung around nights in front of his apartment house over on the corner of Washington Street and Geneva Avenue in the high Roxbury neighborhood of Boston.

What got to Jamal was how smooth these guys were, these Special Forces guys (and how they he heard also got plenty of action from the girls around North Carolina and places like that who were ready to do just about anything to get their kicks with a Green Beret), how they were able to take on about ten gooks (yes, that was the term he used for them and a term of common usage, Charlie only came later when the deal went down in –country, and the more respectful Mr. Charlie even later) and whip their sorry asses before they knew what hit them, about how they saved little rice-growing peasant village after little rice-growing peasant village when those crummy cowardly commie bastards tried to stake out their claim, and about how cool their weapons were that made quick victories possible (especially that quick-action M-16 that every guy got to carry, later he would pray, pray to high heaven for a sweet AK-47 that Mr. Charlie had at his disposal when his goddam M-16 would jam at the wrong freaking time ).He wanted in, wanted in bad on that action, and since he had not planned to go to college anyway for lack of money and interest he figured that when he signed up down at the recruiting station on Tremont Street he would try his luck as a Green Beret recruit even though his physical aspect (thin and short) was just inside the stiff Special Forces regulations. He figured if that didn’t work out, although he was pretty sure he had the stuff that the Green Berets were made of, he would pick a skill school, maybe carpentry or plumbing like his uncle, and be all set for when after he got out.

Well Jamal’s dream, like a lot of things, and not just black things, in this wicked old world, didn’t pan out, the Green Beret part (strangely he couldn't pass the hearing test, although, strangely too it did not disqualify him from the military as a whole), although he did gain a skill school, not exactly the one he had planned on, partly any way. He was assigned to be 11-Bravo, a grunt, a foot soldier, cannon fodder (although that thought term only came later, grunt was the word his used to his friends back on the block when he came home on leave the first time). He did take advantage of an opportunity to go to jump school, paratrooper school, down at Fort Benning in Georgia and was thereafter sent to Fort Bragg (where the Special Forces units were also located) down in North Carolina to be part of the 82^nd Airborne Division.

As luck would have it 1966 was a year that the action was getting hot and heavy in Vietnam and so units, including his unit, of the 82^nd were ordered to that hot spot as President Johnson acceded to every request from the general in charge, General Westmoreland, for more and more troops (that’s when he first heard the term cannon fodder but he did not connect it with himself then). As stories started coming back in about the actual fighting situation in Vietnam and as he gathered from the training he had received in how to kill gooks by the score (although that Mr. Charlie designation and constant rumors about how the night belonged to him was becoming more and more the term of usage among his fellow soldiers whatever  term was being used on the streets or in the barrooms) Jamal started getting more anxious, anxious for a very good reason since he had met a girl, Tonya, from Fayetteville, the town outside the fort, and they had plans to marry and all. (Apparently girls, girls around Fayetteville anyway, were just as happy to get their kicks with airborne guys as with Green Berets or any other elite military units but that attraction is a question for another time).

Jamal did his time in 'Nam, did his rotation (a year and a month’s R&R in Hawaii where Tonya met him on the quiet since she wasn’t supposed to do so), although he never did want to talk about it that much, about the killing (the constant firing part, the fields of fire part,  although he would go on and on about that damn jamming M-16 and when he complained about it being told by the sergeant that he must not have cleaned it properly, Jesus, he could clean it in his sleep), about the burning down of villages to save them (although he never asked the reason for doing so he just heard that some colonel from his brigade had said that was the reason), about having black sweats every night every single fucking night on the perimeter waiting for Mr. Charlie to come back and take his back (and some black sweat nights later in the “real world” too, for a while), and a few things he swore he would never tell anybody about what he had done there, about what he had seen done there, and about who these peasants really were anyway.

What he did want to talk about was the sea-change in his own attitude, him and some of the brothers (a few white guys too but not from the 82^nd they, the white guys anyway, were still gung-ho), about how Cassius Clay turned Mohammed Ali was right-“that no Viet Cong ever called him nigger,” that he had no quarrel with those yellow-skinned people, that this red scare thing was a white man’s idea, a white man’s war, taking down poor black, brown, yellow-skinned peoples and making them like it, or trying to make them like it. He read some stuff given to him by a guy, a fellow soldier, whose brother was what he called a Black Panther, a black hell-raiser out on the streets of Oakland in California, some stuff by a guy named Fanon, a West Indian guy, a doctor who had been all wrapped up helping bring down the French in Algeria (the same French had been kicked out of Vietnam by Mr. Charlie he found out when he started looking into stuff). Some of it made sense, some just flat-out didn’t (like the hokey black nation thing, he already knew about what that looked like, just walk down Washington Street and Geneva, Jesus. 

Well, when he got back to the "real world" he and a few brothers decided, after hearing their unit might be going back to take on Mr. Charlie again , that they didn’t like it, didn’t like it enough to say something about it, say it out loud, and say it in public. At that point, that 1968 point, especially after Charlie went wild during his Tet earlier in the year, a number of guys, dog soldiers like him, were raising hell, white guys too, but mainly brothers because wouldn't you know the brothers were taking an immense amount of the burden in all those hellish fire-fights that was burning up the dreaded Vietnamese countryside. And so they wound up, fistfuls of service combat decorations and all, in that dreaded Fort Bragg stockade for a while before some publicity-conscious general decided that the best thing to do was to get him and the brothers out, give them undesirable discharges and be done with it. He didn’t like the deal but he took it (he would later fight to change it, get it upgraded when that was possible). He had had enough of Mister’s war, enough of killing, and enough of losing everything he held dear (his Fayetteville girl heeding her army father left him in the lurch too) but he had made his peace, his personal peace treaty with the world…

The original "Ten Point Program" from October, 1966 was as follows:^[39][40]



1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.

We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.



2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.



3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.



4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.



5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.



We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.



6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.



We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.



7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.



8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.



9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.



We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.



10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.



When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.



We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

The Battle Of The Titians-Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises Vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side Of Paradise

The Battle Of The Titians-Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises Vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side Of Paradise 

By Zack James

No question as Josh Breslin has seemingly gracelessly aged he has become more perverse in his greedy little mind. That trait has exploded more recently as he has finally hung up his pen and paper and stopped writing free-lance articles for half the small press, small publishing house, small artsy journal nation. All this hubbub boiled over recently when he told his old friend from his growing up in Riverdale days, Sam Lowell, about his “coup,” his term, in upsetting the apple cart of the American literary pantheon by claiming on very flimsy evidence that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early work, the one that gave him his first fame, This Side Of Paradise, could be compared with his masterwork The Great Gatsby. The perverse part came when he told Sam that he had only  written the article as a send-up of all the literary set’s fretting about who and what works belong in, or don’t belong in, the pantheon also based on as very little evidence.        

The whole faux dust-up came up because now that he was retired he could write a little more freely since he had neither the pressure of some midnight deadline from some nervous nelly editor waiting impatiently for him to dot that last “i” and crossing the last “t” before rushing off to the printer nor the imperative of reining in his horns to insure that he could keep up with the gathering payments for alimony, child support and college educations for a three ex-wives and a slew of well-behaved kids. The latter being a close thing that almost broke his spirit. He had accepted a free-lance at-your-leisure assignment from Ben Gold, the editor of the Literary Gazette, who told him he could write a monthly column on some topic that interested him. As long as it was about three thousand words and not the usual five or six thousand that had to be edited with scalpel in hand and arguments every other line about its worthiness as part of the article.          

Josh admitted to Sam that he was intrigued by the idea and after thinking about the matter for a while decided that he would concentrate on reviewing for a 21^st century audience some of the American masterworks of the 20^th century. The beauty of this idea was that he would no longer have to face the dagger-eyed living authors, their hangers-on and acolytes every time he noted that said authors couldn’t write themselves a proper thank you note. Never mind such a huge task as writing a well-thought out novel that they had forced him mercilessly to review the relatively few times he entered the literary fray. He had made his mark in the cultural field by reviewing music and film mostly but would when hard up for dollars for those aforementioned three wives and slew of hungry kids he would take on anything including writing bogus reviews of various consumer products. Now he could leisurely delve back into the past and cherry-pick a few bright objects, write a few thousand words and move onto the next selection.

Or so he thought. Josh had made Sam laugh, had made himself laugh as well, one night when they were at Sam’s favorite watering hole, Teddy Green’s Grille over Lyons Street in their old hometown after he had finished and Ben had published his first “thought” article in the Gazette. He had admitted that his take on the issue was perverse, was a low-intensity tweaking of all those in the literary racket who labored long, hard, and winded to specialize in “deconstructing” some famous author in order to make hay in their own bailiwicks, making their own careers out of the literary mess of real writers. He had stirred up the hornet’s nest by his “innocent” comparison of the two Fitzgerald works.                  

Josh told Sam that he was rather naïve to think that the literary gurus would take his little heresy as mere grumbling of an old man and pass it off as so much blather. He had reasoned that one could get passionate about who would win the World Series or the Super Bowl, one political candidate over another, some worthy cause but that the almost one hundred year old vintage of a couple of books set in the Jazz Age 1920s by a now unfashionable “dead white man” author long since, very long    since dead should be passed in silence. Not so. No sooner had the Gazette come out than some silly undergraduate English major had e-mailed him about how wrong he was to compare the juvenile antics, her term, of privileged white college boy Amory Blaine over up from nowhere strivings after fame and fortune of one Jay Gatsby when all the old-time money and position was against him. Of course he had had to defend his position and sent her a return e-mail summarily dismissing her championship as so much sophomoric half-thinking “politically correct” classist claptrap that has overrun the college campuses over the past decades, mostly not for the better.   

End of debate? No way since thereafter a couple of academic heavyweights, known Fitzgerald scholars had to put their two cents worth in since an intruder was invading their turf, an odd-ball free-lance music and film critic well past his prime according to one of their kind as if that good professor had not been pan-handling the same half dozen admitted good ideas for the previous forty years since he had gotten tenure. In any case no sooner had that undergraduate student dust-up settled down than Professor Lord, the big-time retired English teacher from Harvard whose books of literary criticism set many a wannabe writers’ hearts a-flutter took up the cudgels in defense of Gatsby. Pointed out that  the novel was an authentic slice of life about the American scene in the scattershot post-World War I scene and that Paradise was nothing but the well-written but almost non-literary effort of an aspiring young author telling, retailing was the word the good professor used, his rather pedestrian and totally conventional youth-based comments. Those sentiments in turn got Professor Jamison, the well-known Fitzgerald scholar from Princeton, Scott’s old school, in a huff about how the novel represented the Jazz Age from a younger more innocent perspective as well as Gatsby had done for the older free-falling set who had graduated from proms and social dances to country club and New York Plaza Hotel intrigues. So the battle raged.   

Josh laughed loudest as the heavy-weights from the academy went slamming into the night and into each other’s bailiwicks and stepped right to the sidelines once he had started his little fireball rolling. Laughed harder when he, having had a few too many scotches at his favorite watering hole, Jack’s outside Harvard Square, thought about the uproar he would create when he tweaked a few noses declaring Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as the definite Jazz Age novel and put Gatsby in the bereft dime store novel category by comparison.

It was that idea that Josh wanted to use Sam as a sounding board for, a guy to tussle out the pieces with. After Josh had received the response that he did from the mucksters in the academy to the first article in his monthly column he decided to change tack and actually act as a provocateur, a flame-thrower, and rather than placid kind of educational pieces he would go slightly off-the-wall dragging some of those in the literary pantheon through the mud. So that throwaway idea of pitting two titans like Hemingway and Fitzgerald together to fight mano y mano for kingpin of the Jazz Age literary set began to geminate as the fodder for the next article for his column. Hence, Sam, Sam as devil’s advocate, since Josh and he had had many go arounds over literary subjects ever since they were in high school English classes together.