From Socialist Alternative -West Virginia Teachers Defeat Republican Establishment! Lessons from the working class revolt - Spread the spirit of West Virginia!

Teachers Defeat Pro-Trump Republicans

Socialist Alternative

3/22/2018 4:13 PM

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West Virginia Teachers Defeat Republican Establishment! Lessons from the working class revolt - Spread the spirit of West Virginia! by Charles Cannon (Eyewitness to West VA strike, Socialist Alternative, Phliadelphia) Read article online: https://goo.gl/cuqRvM “Until they sign it, shut it down!” chanted West Virginia teachers from all 55 counties across the state at a demonstration in the capitol building on the eighth day of an illegal strike. The teachers, three quarters of them women, defied insults hurled at them by politicians, being called “dumb bunnies” and “rednecks”, showing up to the capitol building wearing bunny ears and red bandanas. Winning a 5% raise for all public employees in a “red” state that only recently passed right-to-work, the teachers exposed the mass anger in society against the neoliberal agenda of cuts to education, health care, and social services alongside handouts to the super rich and corporations. While the mainstream media largely ignored the strike at the start, workers around the country followed the events in West Virginia on social media. The victory is likely to inspire an increased determination by working people to fight for a decent standard of living. In Oklahoma, one of the few states that pays teachers less than West Virginia, teachers are now planning a statewide walkout that may take place in April. There is also talk of strike action by teachers in Kentucky, Arizona and New Jersey. As the Supreme Court considers the Janus case - an attempt to impose the type of right to work conditions that exist in West Virginia on the whole public sector nationally - the teachers’ stand is all the more inspiring. This fight shows that working people and unions do not need to take these attacks as done deals - they can be beaten back! For workers to learn the many lessons of the West Virginia teacher’s strike, it is important to understand the way it happened. After 30 years of retreat by the labor movement which has decimated union membership, West Virginia teachers have drawn a line in the sand. In a rousing chorus that should send a clear message to the billionaire class, West Virginia teachers amassed in the capitol building chanted their refusal to accept less than a 5% pay raise with “Not 1, not 2, not 3, not 4, 55 are at your door.” Background Third lowest paid in the nation and facing not only a teacher shortage but increasingly difficult challenges with many students coming from impoverished homes in the midst of a raging opioid epidemic, West Virginia teachers have had enough. Echoing the ghosts of past militant labor struggles, the strike was born out of a rank and file revolt and deep reservoirs of class consciousness. Reacting to pitiful wage increases that did nothing to cover out of control health costs, teachers demanded a five percent pay hike for all public employees and for the legislature to address the ballooning costs of the Public Employees Insurance Agency (PEIA). Represented by two unions, the West Virginia Educators Association (WVEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), it was an emerging layer of rank and file leaders who had organized the strike in the weeks and months leading up to it, while the top leadership of the unions had failed to mobilize teachers. West Virginia Governor Jim Justice, a billionaire coal baron, has, like previous governors, given huge tax breaks to extractive industries such as coal and natural gas. His administration has asked the working class of West Virginia to make sacrifices and accept austerity while he owes millions in back taxes in West Virginia as well as Kentucky. Bernie Sanders won all 55 West Virginia counties in the 2016 primary. No wonder, since Hillary Clinton was quoted as saying “I’ll put coal miners out of business.” Clinton’s neoliberal policies in the general election were overwhelmingly rejected by voters. But without a credible pro working class candidate on the ballot, this opened the door to the right populism of Donald Trump. While anti-immigrant sentiment certainly played a significant role, West Virginians primarily voted for promises of jobs and protectionist trade policies. While much of the American liberal left concluded that the working class in states like West Virginia, which voted 68% for Trump, should be dismissed as one reactionary mass, Socialist Alternative explained the contradictory reality and the need for the labor movement to take a stand and build a movement that spoke to the common interests of all working people while also boldly fighting racism, nativism and sexism. The West Virginia teachers, less likely to vote Trump than the state as a whole and also inspired by the emerging women’s movement,  point precisely to the class contradictions in Trump country. Led in part by leftists, the rank and file revolt won the support of the mass of the West Virginia working class in a stand-up fight with a reactionary, Republican dominated legislature . How the Strike Was Organized In the months leading up to the strike, the WVEA and AFT leaders attempted in vain to prevent a strike through backroom negotiations with the state legislature. At the same time, within the rank and file, teachers were preparing themselves for a wider struggle. Despite mainstream media framing the wildcat strike as spontaneous, the strike began because of the work of dedicated rank and file teachers who had been organizing in their schools to politically and logistically prepare for a strike. The union leaders, not anticipating or wanting a strike, failed , in the words of one teacher to “do the job we are paying them to do, organize a strike.” When the strike began, they had little ability to contain it as action had been organized from the bottom up. As a result of this organizing and the experience of the strike, a new radical leadership is developing within the teachers’ unions in West Virginia, some of them identifying as socialists. The teachers built solidarity with other school service personnel and more broadly, through demanding a 5% raise for all public sector workers. The strike vote included non-union members and the community was actively involved in the strike. This built a strong movement that was able to stand up to hardline tactics from the state legislature and public attacks on the strike by Republican legislators. Through their own families, many teachers were connected to militant labor traditions of the past, especially of the mineworkers. Wearing red bandanas, teachers and fellow workers echoed the working class revolt of Blair Mountain. One teacher, echoing a common sentiment, said “if the strike is illegal, all that means is that we don’t have to play by the rules they made for us.” “Until They Sign It, Shut It Down” When union leaders and the Democrats announced on Tuesday, February 27, three days into the strike, that a deal had been made with the governor to give teachers a 5% raise and all other public employees a 3% raise, they asked teachers to trust them to finalize the deal and go back to work. The teachers were seething with anger.  Faith in the politicians’ “guarantees” had evaporated and they saw that the status of PEIA was not addressed. As the union leaders failed to respond to workers’ questions about the deal,  rank and file leaders encouraged teachers to stay on strike. One teacher expressed that up until that point he had been confident in the union leadership to lead the strike but ordinary teachers lost faith as it became clear that the leadership were  not able to deliver on their promises.The teachers voted the next day with their feet to continue the strike. Community support was organized for the striking teachers and, as the state legislature attempted to punish the strikers by lowering the raise to 4%, teachers threatened to occupy the capitol building. The strike being already underway, teachers prepared over the weekend for the long haul, vowing to remain until their demands were met and to accept no compromises or promises. By Monday night, it appeared that the strike would continue indefinitely.   Seeing the rank and file revolting and the process of radicalization underway, on the morning of March 6, union leaders and the Democratic Party politicians attempted to demobilize and end the strike yet again. Alongside the governor, they appeared before the striking teachers massed outside the state senate doors to announce that the strike had been won and that the teachers should go home. Shouting from the crowd, many teachers asked to see this victory in writing. Teachers and other workers chanted “Words mean nothing, sign the bill!” It quickly became clear that no one would leave until the bill was signed. The Democratic Party responded that, according to the state senate rules, they had to wait 24 hours for the finance committee to review the bill before they could sign it. To this the teachers responded with chants of “Until they sign it, shut it down!” Some teachers began to sit as many prepared to occupy the capitol building. As a militant occupation looked inevitable, teachers waited, and after a few hours, all the supposed red tape that Democrats had used as an excuse for why the bill could not be finalized disappeared and both houses had signed the bill. And while the 5% increase is a clear victory, the question of health care costs remains to be properly addressed. This could spark another phase of the struggle in coming months. The Democratic Party Before and during the strike, the Democrats played the role of middlemen between the teacher unions and the Republican-controlled legislature. They attempted to channel anger into the November election and attempted to divert anger towards a handful of specific legislators, such as Mitch Carmichael, leader of the Senate Republicans and the face of opposition to the teachers. Carmichael was vilified throughout by the Democrats in an attempt to absolve Governor Justice and other legislators, who - until forced to move by the strike - had been just as opposed to the teachers’ just demands. While the call to get out and vote in November was taken up by the teachers, such as in the popular and frequent chant “In November, we’ll remember,” it will be important for the teachers and their allies of West Virginia to seriously discuss how their interests can be represented in the political arena.  The terrible choice between corporate liberal Hillary Clinton and the racist populist in Donald Trump shows the danger of expecting establishment politicians to be a viable path forward. Beyond electoral politics, the strike shows that even with reactionary politicians in office, gains can be won through mass mobilizations and class struggle. Many teachers have expressed that, after a week of empty promises, they trusted neither the Democrats nor the Republicans nor the union leadership to give them victory. Action was needed immediately and teachers would not calmly wait until the next election. What Solidarity Looks Like The West Virginia strike showed the country what solidarity looks like. The $320,000 plus raised online for the strike fund and the hundreds of pizzas rolled in on carts daily, paid for by the San Francisco teachers union are the most visible examples. Union members from across the country arrived to stand shoulder to shoulder with the teachers. The strongest show of solidarity came from the working class across the state of West Virginia itself. Socialist Alternative members from Pittsburgh, Columbus, Philadelphia, and Seattle traveled to Charlestown to stand in solidarity with the striking teachers. We engaged in many conversations, listening to what workers had to say and expressing our support for their struggle. Teachers were more than happy to talk to us even though there was some suspicion of “socialism”. But once we established that we were there to listen and support their struggle, they were actually excited to speak with open socialists. DSA members and other self-described socialists on the ground in West Virginia and embedded in the unions deserve credit for helping to lead and radicalize the strike in opposition to union leadership. Some far left groups however, who arrived after the strike began, approached the workers as outsiders and felt the need to lecture them. This only helps those who would try to discredit the left in the eyes of workers. Lessons for the Future The key question coming out of this strike for the labor movement nationally is whether this is the beginning of a real turnaround after decades of retreat. It has to be acknowledged that there were specific factors that helped the teachers in West Virginia including powerful traditions of solidarity and the serious shortage of qualified teachers. Given poor pay and the very difficult nature of the work, the authorities could not realistically threaten to fire and replace the teachers with people from outside the state. The current threat of strike action by teachers in other states points to how this can spread but, at this stage, the upsurge is centered on teachers and there are very specific reasons for that. Twenty years of savage attacks on public education have left teachers across the country deeply discontented. And despite the unrelenting anti-teacher propaganda from the mainstream media, there is mass support for teachers when they stand up. This was seen when the Chicago Teachers Union went on strike in 2012. The role of women in these movements can’t be understated. The West Virginia strike was led in part by radical women in the rank and file. Predominantly female workforces such as teachers and nurses have been on the forefront of militant labor struggles over the last period. In the midst of a budding mass women’s movement around issues like equal pay and sexual harassment in the workplace, women in labor unions have a pivotal role to play in building a wider fightback by working people. The momentum coming out of the West Virginia victory is a crucial opportunity to start a serious fightback of public sector workers, led by militant teacher unions. To quote Amy Fauber of Stonewall Jackson Middle School in Kanawha County: “As long as people stick together, change happens. Communication across the whole group is imperative to make sure everyone is united for the same cause.” The West Virginia teachers have demonstrated, as the Chicago teachers did, how unionized teachers can mobilize much wider forces by championing the interests of their students. As the Chicago teachers said “Our working conditions are our students' learning conditions.” But there are real obstacles facing insurgent forces in the public sector unions including the leadership of the national teacher unions which have favored trying to use its “political influence,” rather than collective power to push back. In practice, this almost always means supporting and lobbying Democrats. But under Obama, the Democrats were in the lead in attacking teachers through high stakes testing, attacking seniority rights, and privatization schemes, including trying to replace public schools with charter schools. The unions' “political strategy” is completely bankrupt. Bernie Sanders' 2016 campaign started to point the way toward a real political strategy for labor by refusing corporate money and raising tens of millions of dollars for a pro-working-class program including a $15 minimum wage, Medicare for All, and tuition-free college. Bernie should have gone further and run all the way to November 2016. As well as reclaiming the traditions of collective struggle including the strike weapon, we need to lay the ground for a new party that represents the interests of working people and all the oppressed. Now we live in the era of Trump and the stakes are even higher. Trump's solicitor general was in front of the Supreme Court right before the West Virginia strike presenting arguments supporting Janus and attacking the role public sector unions for allegedly “compelling” people they represent to give money for work, like raising wages, they don’t agree with. As we have consistently said in relation to Janus and the previous Friedrichs case which ended in a draw because of the death of Justice Scalia, labor needs a strategy that is not based on accepting that we inevitably will lose. The boldness of the West Virginia teachers shows that there is no time to waste. Workplace meetings and rallies should be held at every unionized public sector workplace in the country against Janus. This should be the launching point for a massive national day of action where millions of unionized workers come on the streets to say that they won't be pushed back to the pre-union era and to declare that they are fighting not just for themselves but for the entire working class. This will put the labor movement on a direct collision course with Trump, the Republicans and the whole corporate elite but that's exactly what needs to happen. There are some hopeful signs for the labor movement nationally including a slight uptick of membership last year concentrated among younger workers. But there is also a desperate need to relearn the militant traditions of the past and to forge a new leadership that can assimilate the lessons of battles like West Virginia and point the way forward. West Virginia shows that even under reactionary administrations, offensive struggles can be waged and gains won. As in previous periods, socialists will have a key role to play in that effort.

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Real ID Act: A new attack on immigrant rights

By Ben Becker

Jul 01, 2005

How do you make an $82 billion war appropriations bill worse than it already is? By attaching to it a piece of viciously anti-immigrant legislation that endorses racist vigilantism, gives unlimited power to the Department of Homeland Security, denies due process, limits free speech, and paves the way for national identification cards. The Bush administration attached the Real ID Act to its war-funding bill knowing that no Democratic senators would dare to take a stand against any so-called “support our troops” legislation. None did.

On May 10, the bill passed the Senate unanimously. Regardless of its periodic anti-war posturing, the Democratic Party—the party that claims to be for progressive people and people of color—again acted as accomplice not only to Bush’s foreign war but also to its attacks on civil liberties at home.

An attack on immigrant communities

To expose the Real ID Act as an aggressive attack on immigrant communities barely requires analysis. The new laws, which will take effect in 2008, expose themselves.

For example, the Real ID Act requires applicants seeking political asylum in the United States to provide documentary evidence that they are fleeing persecution. This will in effect make it impossible for most asylum applicants to come to the United States, since it requires the persecuted to obtain confirmation letters from their persecutors. Over 14,000 immigrants sought political asylum status in the United States in 2003.

Often, immigrants facing deportation appeal to a judge to have their case reviewed. The Real ID Act will not allow judges to delay the deportation of immigrants in order to hear their appeals, effectively eliminating such judicial review. In other words, immigrants will only be able to appeal their deportation after they’ve been deported.

The Real ID Act empowers the Department of Homeland Security to waive all laws in order to construct walls and fences at United States borders. The barriers are not subject to any judicial review.

The Real ID Act gives unprecedented authority to bounty hunters to arrest immigrants subject to deportation. Any bounty hunter—private vigilantes—who is simply of the opinion that an immigrant is a “flight risk,” can apprehend and turn in that immigrant to the Department of Homeland Security. Bounty hunters will be given access to all information possessed by the government that “may be helpful” in the hunt for undocumented immigrants. In essence, the fascist Minutemen now “patrolling” the borders could be given full license to prowl the streets. 

The Real ID Act enables the federal government to deport any immigrant who gives material support to any organization claimed by the U.S. government to be terrorist. The Act gives no clear definition of “material support” and the federal government, of course, defines as terrorist practically any organization struggling against U.S.-allied governments. 

Under the Patriot Act, an immigrant could be deported for giving material aid to “terrorist activity.” The Real ID Act gives the government even more authority. Even an immigrant giving purely humanitarian aid—such as to a hospital or charity in Palestine—could be deported if the U.S. government claims the charity has any ties whatsoever to the Palestinian Liberation Organization. 

This part of the Real ID Act effectively makes it a crime for immigrants to support liberation struggles against unjust and brutal governments abroad. Juan José Gutiérrez of Latino Movement USA, speaking at a May 17 ANSWER meeting in Los Angeles, said, “If today Nelson Mandela were still incarcerated, any immigrant who sent money to a fund to win his freedom could be placed in deportation proceedings.” 

Taking away driver’s licenses

Undocumented immigrants in eleven states can obtain driver’s licenses. Since undocumented immigrants need to drive anyway, the best way to make the roads safe is to make licenses available to all drivers. 

The Real ID Act will now force states to issue specially marked or stamped licenses to undocumented immigrants. Very few undocumented immigrants will likely seek any document that earmarks them as “illegal”—especially since that information could immediately be turned over to bounty hunters.

Although technically a state could ignore this provision of the Act and continue issuing driver’s licenses as before, in order for federal agencies and airports to accept a particular state’s driver’s licenses, the state must adhere to the Department of Homeland Security’s rules. Similarly, states that refuse to adopt DHS rules are subject to losing federal money.

Also under the Act, citizens and non-citizens alike will have to present more documents to obtain a driver’s license, and all documents will have to be verified. This will be impossible for many immigrants, whether legal residents or not. Foreign governments, for instance, will surely be unable to verify every passport and birth certificate in a timely way. 

The government’s excessive cross-checking and matching of all documents could pose serious difficulties for the transgender community. Many transgender people have since changed the information—including name and gender—initially put on their birth certificates. Members of that community have expressed great concern about how the Real ID Act will affect their ability to acquire official identification, such as a driver’s license. The government has made no attempt to address the issue.

For such a thorough checking of documents, the Department of Homeland Security requires states to integrate their databases, and requires the new state IDs to be “machine-readable.” These changes effectively will make the standard driver’s license a national ID. It also opens the door for the installation of technology like the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip, which would enable the DHS to track and follow anyone with an ID. 

The government plans to take virtually all rights away from undocumented immigrants, one of the most vulnerable sectors of the working class. Although the media discusses the Real ID Act in terms of the “War on Terror,” it has nothing to do with terrorism—like every other facet of Bush’s phony war. The Real ID act does much more than regulate driver’s licenses—it is a comprehensive attack on immigrants’ rights and further erodes all workers rights.

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Veterans For Peace (Gals and Guys Who Know About Gun Unfortunately)-On Gun Violence

Veterans For Peace Statement on Gun Violence

END THE GUN VIOLENCE, AT HOME AND ABROAD!
An Urgent Message from Veterans For Peace

As veterans who have been traumatized by the violence of war, we were shocked and saddened by the recent mass murder of 17 high school students in Parkland, Florida. This horrible slaughter, carried out by a troubled young man with a military assault rifle, would be tragic enough if it were a freak occurrence. But sadly, this appalling event is part of a well-established pattern – an unchecked epidemic of mass killings in the U.S.

Typically, these killings have been perpetrated by troubled young men, using military style assault weapons, which are bought and sold in stores across the nation, to anyone 18 or over. Typically, there is a public outcry after these massacres. Typically, the National Rifle Association (NRA), one of the most powerful lobbies in this country, pressures politicians to do little or nothing to restrain unfettered access to these weapons of mass destruction. Somebody is making a lot of money off the sale of these weapons, and they are sharing some of it with the politicians. Plain and simple.

We applaud the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and other students around the country who have decided to directly challenge the corrupted politicians and the NRA's lobby for violent death (and profits).

Veterans For Peace will have a contingent in the March For Our Lives in Washington, DC, on March 24, including several members of our national Board of Directors. We encourage our members to join us in that march, and also to participate in the many local March For Our Lives actions around the country on Saturday, March 24th.

Veterans For Peace is also concerned about the culture of violence and hyper-masculinity that has been cultivated in the United States. While extreme violence is most visible in video games and movies it has become the normal part of all aspects of our culture. Young men are taught that to be a man they must prepare to be violent. Recently Mother Jones compiled a study that shows of all the mass shooting since 1982, they found that 97% were male. We must start talking about and working on ways to dismantle notions of patriarchy that tells men domination and violence are the only way.

Many military veterans see gun violence as a reflection of our culture which teaches that force or the threat of using force is the most effective and honored way to address conflict resolution. That issues are always simple with "bad guys and good guys" and the bad guys must be killed. This reflection of gun violence is most starkly seen in the "permanent wars" that the U.S. is carrying out in multiple countries. At last count, the United States was bombing at least seven nations (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia), as well as using drones to carry out targeted assassinations. Here at home, deaths of students and others killed in mass shootings and gun violence, including suicide gun deaths, are said to be the price of freedom to bear arms. Civilian casualties in war are written off as "collateral damage," the price of freedom and U.S. security. But the truth is, at home or abroad, violence begets violence. These U.S. wars have only served to create more violence, and despite more and more gun access and the spread of open carry and other gun friendly laws, we see more and more mass shootings and gun violence here at home. In both cases, nobody wins except those who are making armloads of money through the sale of guns and bombs.

Here in the U.S., the epidemic of killing is not limited to young disgruntled men with assault weapons. We must also address an epidemic of police killings, which take place in virtually every U.S. city. According to a well-researched article by Michael Harriot in The Root, police officers killed 1,129 people in 2017.

"More people died from police violence in 2017 than the total number of U.S. soldiers killed in action around the globe (21). More people died at the hands of police in 2017 than the number of black people who were lynched in the worst year of Jim Crow (161 in 1892). Cops killed more Americans in 2017 than terrorists did (four). They killed more citizens than airplanes (13 deaths worldwide), mass shooters (428 deaths) and Chicago's "top gang thugs" (675 Chicago homicides)."

A highly disproportionate number of those killed by police are people of color, primarily Black people, Native Americans and Latinos. The percentages are even higher for people of color who were unarmed when gunned down by police. Only 12 officers were charged with a crime related to a shooting death, and certainly fewer were convicted.

We must also oppose the militarization of the police, who are being armed with weapons of war and trained to treat communities of color as occupied enemy territory.

To fully address gun violence, we must also talk about domestic violence, violent crime and gun deaths by suicide. A few statistics from the website Everytown tell a violent story.

Women in the U.S. are 16 times more likely to be killed with a gun than women in other high-income countries.

• Every year U.S. women suffer from 5.3 million incidents of intimate partner violence.
• In an average month, 50 U.S. women are shot to death by intimate partners
• Nearly 1 million women alive today have been shot, or shot at, by an intimate partner.
• About 4.5 million U.S. women alive today have been threatened with a gun by an intimate partner.
• Everytown's analysis of mass shootings from 2009 to 2016 shows that in 54 percent of mass shootings, the shooters killed intimate partners or other family members.

Unfettered gun rights advocates claim that more guns will make us safe. While it is true that legal gun owners commit a small fraction of gun violence offenses, there is a growing body of research that shows the presence of a gun in a home increases the likelihood of someone in the home being killed by a gun. For example, of the 93 people who die from gun violence in the U.S. every day, 58 of those deaths, or nearly two-thirds, are suicides with guns. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows suicide with a gun is the most common and by far the most deadly suicide method. This is close to home for us as veterans because 20 to 22 of us die by suicide a day. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, in 2014, 66% of those deaths were the result of firearms injuries. If we couple these suicide statistics with the above domestic violence numbers, it is easy to see that violent crime, like mass shootings and street violence are only part of our nation's gun death epidemic.

This is the holistic view of gun violence that Veterans For Peace wants to share with all those who share a sense of urgency that something must be done. Yes, military assault weapons should be banned. High capacity ammo magazines too. Thorough background checks should be required of all those wishing to purchase firearms, without exceptions. Those are obvious common sense steps that are being demanded by the March For Our Lives. We must work to support these young folks and others who have been engaged to continue getting to the root of the epidemic of violence.
We must also take steps to rein in racist police killings and to change the violent, hyper-masculine culture in this country. We must demilitarize U.S. society, and reverse the violent U.S. foreign policy which is causing death and destruction in too many countries. We must address domestic violence and suicide.We must ask who is benefiting from flooding U.S. urban and rural communities with guns? Are they the same manufactures and investors that gain from global arms sales that ensures gun violence around the world?

The toll of this violence on our society, on the working class men and women who are pressed into fighting the nation's wars, as well as the violence the U.S. government exports and kills innocent people around the world is tragic and intolerable. It must end.

Veterans For Peace (and allied organizations) contingent for D.C. march will meet at 11am next Saturday in front of the Harrington Hotel (436 11th Street. NW, Washington, DC.)

After the march there will be an informal gathering at  Bus Boys and Poets at 5th and K (1025 5th St NW)

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In Boston-Protest Saudi Crown Prince at MIT

Noon FRIDAY: Protest Saudi Crown Prince at MIT

Paul Shannon

12:16 AM

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Protest Saudi Crown Prince at MIT 

Friday, March 23, 12:00 Noon

MIT Main Entrance, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge

Dear Paul,

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the architect of the Saudi/US war in Yemen, is planning avisit this Saturday and Sunday to Cambridge and Boston, where he is expected to visit both MIT and Harvard. Join us on Friday as we protest at MIT and ask MIT to decline to host him.

Since 2015, Saudi Arabia, with vital support from the United States, has been waging war in Yemen. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed; over one million cases of cholera have been reported; and 22 million civilians are threatened by famine. Two million Yemenis are displaced and they are living in squalid conditions, lacking basic amenities such as clean water and healthcare.

Please join us in protest of MBS' visit to MIT!

MIT and Saudi Arabia cooperate on cybersecurity, technology, and economic development. Saudi Aramco is a founding member of the MIT Energy Initiative, and Saudi Arabia has an active partnership with the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), which it should terminate, due to Saudi’s human rights violations.

We will present a petition to MIT President Rafael Reif on Friday.  Sign the petition now!

 Massachusetts Peace Action joins with Action Corps Boston, the Green-Rainbow Party, Veterans for Peace/ Smedley Butler Brigade, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Boston Branch, Harvard Law School Justice for Palestine, and Harvard Law School National Lawyers Guild to say:

Stop the US/Saudi War on Yemen!

Saudi Prince Not Welcome!

Yemen Can't Wait!

Please RSVP on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/976637582491005/.

Click this google form to let us know you will be there, or if your organization wishes to endorse the protest:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScq-Kxny4hHTKqzU-3P6kfJT2EoBMnumm6ahALKsCM1wzYCsg/

Cole Harrison Executive Director P.S. Join us on Friday, noon, at the MIT main entrance!

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Visit our website to learn more about joining the organization or donating to Massachusetts Peace Action!

We thank you for the financial support that makes this work possible. 

Massachusetts Peace Action, 11 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138
617-354-2169  • info@masspeaceaction.org • Follow us on Facebook or Twitter

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Yeah, Talk To Me Of Mendocino-The Voices From Up North The Music Of The McGarrigle Sisters

Yeah, Talk To Me Of Mendocino-The Voices From Up North The Music Of The McGarrigle Sisters   

By Zack James

“Jesus, Seth did you hear that Kate McGarrigle of the McGarrigle Sisters had passed away,” lamented Jack Callahan to his old-time high school friend and fellow folk music aficionado Seth Garth. Seth replied that since he no longer wrote music reviews for anybody, hadn’t since The Eye the newspaper that he had written for had gone out of business that he did not always keep up with the back stories of those who were still left standing in the ever decreasing old-time folk performer world. Jack’s sad information though got Seth to thinking about the times back in the early 1970s when he and Jack had gone out to Saratoga Springs to visit a cousin of Sam Lowell, also an old time friend and part-time folk aficionado, who thenn lived in nearby Ballston Spa and had invited them to go to the Caffe Lena to listen to a couple of young gals from Canada who would make the angels weep for their inadequate singing voices. In those days Seth was free-lancing for The Eye so he had called Oakland, California where the newspaper then had its offices to see if they would spring for a review, a paid review of the performance. They agreed although there was the usual haggling over money and whether they would actually use the sketch.            

That night after Lena’s introduction (the late Lena the legendary, now legendary, owner and operator of the coffeehouse) the McGarrigle Sisters did two sparking sets, a few songs in French, since they were steeped in the increasing bilingual Quebec culture which was demanding French language equality in the heated nationalist period when many were looking for independence. They also did a wonderful cover Heart Like A Wheel, a song that Linda Rhonstadt had had a hit with. But the song that Seth found his hook on, the one that he would center on to insure that his piece was published (and paid for) was Talk To Me Of Mendocino, their homage to Lena who desired to go out and see the place along the rocky ledges of Northern California, land’s end. (Whether Lena ever went out there subsequently Seth was not sure but he rather thought not since she was totally committed to the club in those days, was something of a homebody and perhaps wanted the memory more than the actual experience.)    

Seth mentioned to Jack that night that the sisters had evoked just the right mournful tone in presenting the song, and recalled how majestic they had thought they place was when they and their wives (Seth’s first  wife, first of three, all failed, Martha, and Jack’s one and only Chrissy) had gone from San Francisco up the Pacific Coast Highway and basically stumbled on the place with its sheer rock formations, fierce ocean waves beating against the rocks and the then quaint and unadorned town that sat just off the rocks. So Seth was able to close his eyes and envision travelling from the overheated, over-crowded over-wrought East and pinpoint a map to head out West “where the rocks remain.” The rocks, the ocean, our mother and some solitude in world gone mad with having to run away from what it had built. Seth was sorry that he had not been back there in many years. Hoped that Lena did get to go out to the rocks and glad that Kate and Anna McGarrigle spoke of the place, made it immortal in song.    

In The Time Of The 1960s Ebbtide-The Patty Hearst Case And The Symbonise Liberation Army (SLA)

In The Time Of The 1960s Ebbtide-The Patty Hearst Case And The Symbonise Liberation Army (SLA)  

Link to hear an NPR Terry Gross interview with the author of a book on the subject of 1970s Patty Hearst case and the fate of the Symbonise Liberation Army

http://www.npr.org/2016/08/03/488373982/whose-side-was-she-on-american-heiress-revisits-patty-hearst-s-kidnapping

By Frank Jackman

It is funny what you will see or hear that will provide a subject for comment. Mostly these days I find myself writing about the fate of the segment of the ever decreasing baby-boomer generation that had been driven by idealism, self-sacrifice and a bit of hubris thrown in to try and smite down the monster known then and now as the American government and its addiction to endless wars and endless waste of resources on programs other than social programs that might help some folks out. That fate had, and has, not been kind to those of us who are still standing and still tilting at windmills against the monster. We lost, lost badly, when you consider that we have been fighting a long forty plus years of rearguard action against the assorted night-takers who we have run up against since that time. 

The stuff that I have been writing about though had generally been about how far removed a lot of the generation that I came of age with, the so-called generation of ’68, a significant year in the chronology of the times, from that old youthful fervor, how they have either dropped away from political struggle or have retired to the laptop and other technological wonders to give them all. They have abandoned the streets, the streets where you sometimes have to be to fight the good fight. I have also chronicled some of the efforts of my old comrades and street politicians like Josh Breslin, Sam Lowell, Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris who are still punching away, although in ways that they would have never assumed back in the day.

Today though I don’t want to discuss personal memoirs but want to step back a little to the ebbtide, the early 1970s, to the time when we more or less were caught up in the counter-offensive started by the American government trying to take back the offensive after the long losing war in Vietnam burned a lot of bridges for a lot of people who could not go back to the old ways that they had been expected to do coming out of the 1960s high schools and colleges. As the Vietnam War ground on and domestic minorities were still being ground down despite the endless promises of the civil rights movement earlier in the decade the more radical, one might even say revolutionary elements of the “movement” began to chaff under the idea that all one could do was continue to march and continue to seek redress of grievance from the government, put pressure on public officials to do the right thing (whether they gave a fuck or not)     

Of course a generation whose only apparent progressive veneer was the Democratic Party, the party of many of their parents really who grew up in the hard-bitten 1930s Great Depression and slogged through World War II, their fight against fascism as they saw it and whose hero was Franklin Delano Roosevelt had no access to something like a labor party or viable communist party to attach their loyalties when those very Democrats were ankle, no let’s take an expression from folksinger’s song, were waist-deep in the Big Muddy called Vietnam and other repressive policies at home. So whole layers of that radicalized milieu began drifting in many different direction-some to the dope fields, some to “music is the revolution,” some, some city kids who wouldn’t know a turnip from a tomato, to the land, some out of politics in general taking shelter from the storm. That is the incomplete list of those who gave up the struggle against the monster-called a truce- just leave me, us, alone. The group I want to talk about today though were the mostly young people who stayed with radical opposition to the government but had righteous given up as a lost cause begging establishment politicians to do the right thing-had given up trying to “hold their feet to the fire.” They kept fighting but in the end lost their way, we lost our way.         

A great dividing line is that 1968 that I have for convenience given the name for the generation who continued the fight against great odds. The debacle of the Democratic Convention in Chicago, a city presided over by a Democrat, was a keystone in the turn away from electoral politics as many saw how raw the workings of a government that thought it was under threat reacted to what were at worse some silly pranks. The organizational component of that understanding came at the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) convention in 1969 where a couple of radical factions (turn to the working class and massive actions and the fashionable post-Cuban revolution guerilla warfare factions far removed from poll booths) brought almost decisively from tradition pressure politics. Some, maybe some of the best if misguided elements wound up under the various banners of the Weathermen in their struggle to build a second front, a military front, in support of the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. You can look up their various actions some of them dangerous and some maybe criminal but guided by an overwhelming desire to stop the damn war and other governmental policies. Whatever their shortfalls in policy, and despite their substituting themselves, sometimes heroically, for decisive mass action they had come out of the left, were known quantities, had names on the left and as long as they were directing their actions against military-industrial targets were worthy of political and legal defense. (Unfortunately a lot of the left-the “holding their feet to the fire” left did not defend the groups that morphed into what would turn into the Weather Underground).              

With the decisive defeat of the street left on May Day in Washington after taking massive arrests trying to shut down the government if it would not shut down the Vietnam War and the demobilization of American troops from that benighted country the radical left, hell, anybody, who wanted to continue to struggle got waylaid. Moreover out on the hinterlands, out in little unknown collectives, and who knows what other kinds of formations people, isolated people left adrift after the great social movements of the 1960s had run their courses began to get weird. And that is where this discussion is leading. What do you do about groups that had no history, had unstable and unknown leaderships, had frankly odd-ball programs and demands. Were they also to be defended under the same umbrella that one covered the various SDS factions with, the Weather Underground? That was a question that the diminishing organized left (and various independent radicals) had to contend with. I know the organizations I was close to had many arguments about whether to support this thing called the Symbonise Liberation Army (SLA) that gained widespread notoriety with its kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. Most of us, and I was one, did not support the actions of this organizations as acts against the American imperial state. Angela Davis and Ruchell McGee yes. SLA no. Yeah, I know sometimes politics gets weird, gets you in some strange situations but there you have it for what it is worth. Enough said.