Wednesday, December 05, 2018

SocialistWorker.org Publication of the International Socialist Organization Mike Heichman sent you an article from SocialistWorker.org: http://socialistworker.org/2018/11/27/the-case-against-the-case-against-open-borders FYI from Mike Heichman Justin Akers Chacón The case against “The case against open borders”

SocialistWorker.org<no-reply@socialistworker.org>

SocialistWorker.org

FYI from Mike Heichman

The case against “The case against open borders”

November 27, 2018
In a recent article in the conservative journal American Affairs, liberal author Angela Nagle argues that leftists should back immigration crackdowns as a way of standing with native-born workers in their own countries. Echoing a theme of Democratic Party leaders, Nagle claims that solidarity activists who support open borders are “useful idiots for big business” because we provide cover for the way capitalism uses immigrant labor to undermine working-class living standards.
Justin Akers Chacón, author of the recently published Radicals in the Barrio, a rich history of the Mexican and Chicano working class in the U.S., provides a response that sets the record straight for the left.
ANGELA NAGLE’S “The Left Case Against Open Borders” is not a perspective from the “left,” and it isn’t a new argument.
It is a liberal appeal to reactionary nationalism that offers nothing constructive to a new generation of people standing in solidarity with migrant workers and refugees, acting against militarized borders, Gestapo-like ICE enforcement, and brutal family separation and deportation.
While Nagle decries some of the crimes of capitalism — such as unprecedented global inequality, wealth transfer from poor to rich nations, imperial plunder of poor countries and the displacement of millions — she draws the backward and fundamentally flawed conclusion that the left’s best response is to join with the far right in blaming immigration for the attacks on working-class living standards.
Protesters in Los Angeles march against Trump’s war on immigrants
Protesters in Los Angeles march against Trump’s war on immigrants (Molly Adams | flickr)
Much of the article reads as a puffed-up opinion piece, without much in the way of examples or substantive evidence, aside from some cherry-picked quotes and decontextualized statistics to make her arguments sound empirical and authoritative. Nagle strings together right-wing tropes, misconceptions, stereotypes and outright falsehoods about immigration and labor history, but peppers them with left-sounding rhetoric to sound like a bona fide radical.
In reality, though, she sounds more similar to Hillary Clinton, that paragon of the globalized neoliberalism that Nagle claims to be trying to oppose.
Last week, Clinton joined with former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and former Italian leader Matteo Renzi on a European “center-left” publicity tour to offer a global alternative to rising right-wing populism. Her solution? Incorporate anti-immigration into the framework of liberalism:
I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame...We are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support...because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic.
The Clinton family’s entire political career is testament to the fact that these types of rightward shifts may (or may not) win a few elections, but they cede the ideological ground to the forces of reaction. Just as this right turn of official liberalism against immigration will only validate and legitimize Trumpism, pseudo-left appeals like Nagle’s to incorporate xenophobia into the ranks of the left and the labor movement would also be disastrous.
Under scrutiny, Nagle’s article falls backwards onto the sword of her own twisted logic, revealing her as the “useful idiot” for far-right forces grasping for an intellectual beachhead into the working class.

No Class Analysis

Nagle’s arguments are predicated on several false premises, which reveal the absence of a class analysis, even though she opportunistically backs her argument with select quotes from Karl Marx.
First, she echoes right-wing talking points by implying that working-class people today have the freedom to move across national boundaries without persecution. In fact, open borders only exist for the global ruling classes, which enjoy the right to move freely across borders and invest their capital in all corners of the world. Nowhere in the essay does she advocate for any restrictions on capital, the wealthy or anyone or anything other than workers.
Global capital investment in 2017 was nearly $1.5 trillion, with $671 billion flowing into “developing” countries, and $712 billion pouring into “developed” nations. This free flow of capital is facilitated by trade rules, agreements and treaties that favor the movement of capital while restricting labor.
Of the existing 288 free-trade agreements recorded by the World Trade Organization, only 40 contain provisions that allow for some form of labor migration, typically reserved for highly specialized professions, limited by time and constrained to certain industries. Meanwhile, the global 1 Percent plays by a different set of rules, relying on a set of investor-class visas to bypass the barriers that others face.
Most of the world’s population, especially the working classes and poor, do not have the freedom to cross borders and must take great pains to gain entrance into the economies that employ them. In fact, borders exist almost exclusively for the world’s working classes, with deadly militarized borders facing the Global South.
For most of the global migrant population, there is no legal route or “open border” to await them. For Hondurans, for example, the U.S. only granted about 4,500 visas per year between 2008 and 2017, with about two-thirds based on family reunification. Over that same period, about 32,000 Hondurans migrated to the U.S. each year.
At the same time, capitalist classes across the globe have increasingly militarized their frontier regions, leading to a massive increase in deaths and disappearances, and giving lie to the phony idea of “open borders.” Since 2000, more than 60,000 migrants worldwide have died or disappeared attempting to cross dangerous borders.
In the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the deadliest crossing zone in the world, at least 8,600 people have died and thousands more disappeared since the early 1990s trying to cross mountains, vast expanses of desert, or bodies of water.
Nagle claims that the global wing of the capitalist class is the fundamental base of support for these “open borders.” In fact, the whole capitalist system has come to rely on the super-exploitation of immigrant labor through criminalization. Ramped-up enforcement has become a means not to stop immigration, but to disenfranchise and subjugate undocumented workers within the bottom tier of a segmented labor economy.
Extensive research shows that there is a correlation between increased immigration enforcement and a relative decline in wages among undocumented workers. A 2010 study documents how prior to the onset of employment-based immigrant criminalization in the passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act — in which business owners were required to check Social Security documentation of their employees — wages between citizen and immigrant labor were in relative parity.
In practice, employers were rarely scrutinized or punished for employing undocumented workers, and instead used this “law” to their own advantage, which is how immigration policy is designed. They pushed wages downward by having the ability to reveal those without papers, fired workers who protested, and got rid of those who tried to unionize.
As the study shows, undocumented laborers weren’t driven out of the economy. Rather, wages for undocumented workers as a whole declined in relation to other workers, as this approach was used widely by employers to structure lower-wage tiers within and across whole industries, setting the low-wage standard of “immigrant labor” by the early 1990s.
The declining wage benchmarks for undocumented labor had the further effect of holding all wages down within those same industries.
Ironically, the approach of empowering employers to have more control over their workers to weed out those who are undocumented is the model that Nagle holds up as a success. It is precisely the restriction of immigration and persecution of migrant workers that has allowed employers to divide and weaken organized labor as a whole.
The proliferation of entire industries devoted to secondary immigration enforcement is also a strange characteristic of a supposed “open borders” society.
Over 42,000 people have been held in custody each day throughout fiscal year 2018, the highest rate since 2001. About 70 percent of ICE-administered detention centers are contracted to private, for-profit detention corporations, making immigrant repression a booming business.

Who Is the U.S. Working Class?

A SECOND misrepresentation that Nagle promotes is an ethnocentric and nationalistic mischaracterization of the U.S. working class, one that has allegedly achieved its greatest gains during outbreaks of xenophobic exclusion and reaction. Again, these misrepresentations turn labor history on its head.
The U.S. working class has always been a multinational amalgam, consisting in large part of immigrants who arrive in staggered waves corresponding to world events.
The U.S. in 2018 is as much a reflection of this process as it was a hundred years ago. The difference has been the policies in place regarding immigration, which has corresponded to how immigrant labor fits into patterns of capital accumulation and labor exploitation in each period.
Nagle’s conception of labor is situated in the antiquated idea of the “citizen worker,” an atavism of the old white, nativist, AFL craft worker. The actual U.S. working class is very different. Of the 153 million people employed, an estimated 47 million workers, or about 31 percent, are naturalized citizens, permanent residents, temporary residents and workers, refugees and undocumented workers. An additional large percentage is made up of the children or grandchildren of immigrants, while many other workers have mixed citizenship-status families.
From a demographic standpoint, immigration sustains the “reproduction rate” of the U.S. population, as the fertility rate has precipitously dropped to 1.76 — below the 2.1 threshold necessary for replenishment. Although concentrated in manual labor jobs, foreign-born workers tend to have higher employment rates than U.S.-born workers, showing how their labor is integral to the U.S. economy and made even more profitable--by artificial means--as a result of state repression and subjugation.
Furthermore, any discussion of the U.S. working class today has to extend beyond borders, because multinational corporations employ workers in the U.S. and those in other countries as part of integrated, transnational assembly, production and distribution networks.
In Nicaragua, for instance, over 120,000 garment workers create clothing for major U.S. companies that is transported by U.S. workers to retail outlets, where it is sold by another group of workers. An estimated 600,000 people are employed making auto parts in Mexico, a large share of whom produce car components as part of a supply chain linking them to GM, Chrysler and Ford workers in Detroit and other parts of the U.S.
These workers are employed by the same corporations as workers in the U.S., but divided by borders and subject to more intensive (and U.S.-abetted) degrees of labor repression in their home countries, typically underwritten by U.S. “security” policy.
Another one of Nagle’s false premises is that most workers see immigrants as a threat to their livelihoods. “Whether [solidarity activists] like it or not,” she writes, “radically transformative levels of mass migration are unpopular across every section of society and throughout the world. And the people among whom it is unpopular, the citizenry, have the right to vote.”
Nagle fails to provide evidence for her claim, which doesn't hold up under a basic investigation. One-and-a-half years into the Trump administration and amid a new resurgence of white nationalism, a June 2018 Gallup poll shows the resilience of a pro-immigrant majority in the U.S. : Only 29 percent of those polled feel that the current level of immigration into the U.S. should be reduced, while 39 percent believe current levels are beneficial and 28 percent believe it should be increased.
This 67 percent of the population supporting current or increased levels of immigration reflects a large segment of working-class opinion, far beyond the narrow strata of Nagle’s “open borders”-pushing globalist elites. The rate of those supporting more immigration has actually increased since Trump and the right wing have controlled the federal government.
There are certainly anti-immigrant political forces on the march. But they are not being led from the ranks of the working class.

Immigrant Exclusion: The History of Labor’s Failures

Right-wing labor populism has always has always been present as a reactionary current in the working class, even when draped in pseudo-left rhetoric. There is a long and cyclical history of the ruling class parties (and their intellectual popularizers) whipping up xenophobia and racism against immigrants at times of increased labor struggle, economic crisis and social and political polarization.
The diffusion of anti-immigrant racism and xenophobia to divide workers along racial and national lines, and to deflect or demobilize class struggle, is as old as the class struggle itself.
Each epoch of left-labor support for immigration restriction has failed the working class miserably. Conversely, the greatest gains of organized labor have occurred when the left has had its greatest influence within the working class, and when workers make the greatest strides.
Nagle gets this history horribly wrong. She holds up late-19th century exclusion of Chinese workers and the United Farm Workers’ (UFW) collaboration with the Border Patrol as two examples of the successful utilization of immigration restriction in the service of union-building:
From the first law restricting immigration in 1882 to Cesar Chavez and the famously multiethnic United Farm Workers protesting against employers’ use and encouragement of illegal migration in 1969, trade unions have often opposed mass migration. They saw the deliberate importation of illegal, low-wa…
But these are two examples of unqualified failure.
Nagle conflates immigration with strikebreaking, which was not the source of defeat for labor in the 1870s or the 1970s. She fails to provide any historical context for the strikes, examples of how immigration was relevant, or outcomes to what happened; she just expects us to accept that immigrants played some kind of negative role.
In both cases, a turn towards anti-immigrant racism or a strategy of restriction contributed to major setbacks.
In 1877, a profound capitalist crisis mired the U.S. in economic depression. In the fast-growing rail industry, the bosses used the opportunity to cut wages across the industry, provoking a strike of over 700,000 workers. One of the central demands was for union recognition.
Because of police and company repression, when workers fought back, the strike took on an insurrectionary character, with pitched battles between strikers and their supporters against police and company guards across 13 states. The strike was violently suppressed after President Rutherford Hayes deployed thousands of heavily armed federal troops.
It was that same year that both Democratic and Republic and Parties incorporated an anti-Chinese plank into their election platforms. At a time in which rail workers were organizing nationally, the ruling parties, acting on behalf of the railroad tycoons, attacked the small number of Chinese rail workers, some of whom had previously participated in their own strike for equal pay and working conditions.
The concerted denunciation of the “Yellow Peril” at our shores and the subsequent rallying for restrictions on Chinese labor were used to deflect class anger away from the railroad bosses and the failing capitalist system, and to prevent unionization by dividing the work groups by race and nationality.
In the aftermath of the railroad strike, a San Francisco-based right-wing labor populist named Denis Kearny launched the California Workingman’s Party. This populist party combined opposition to capitalism and immigration, which was posited then, as it is now, as a ploy by the capitalists to undermine unionization.
Combining anti-capitalist and anti-Chinese rhetoric, the party grew to become the second-largest in the state. At its height, it became less opposed to the capitalist class and more virulent in its opposition to the Chinese. According to one historical account:
Kearney then began agitating for a new state constitution, which was approved by the voters in 1879. Workingmen delegates comprised the largest voting bloc (one-third) at the constitutional convention. A Committee on the Chinese was established to draft anti-Chinese provisions for the proposed const…
During this period, there were anti-Chinese pogroms carried out by lynch mobs, and other acts of terror to further marginalize Chinese workers. In 1882, Congress banned most forms of Chinese migration, which was then extended to all Asians by 1917.
By 1906, the American Federation of Labor and even sections of the fledgling Socialist Party had embraced opposition to Chinese immigration as official policy, wrongfully believing that their complicity would curry favor with employers who would be more accepting of “citizen unions.”
The opposite occurred. With organized labor now dividing itself against Asian labor, the employers redoubled their efforts to break the AFL by maintaining a fervent commitment to the anti-union “open shop” across the country. Right-wing populism contributed to a profound weakening of the labor movement, inflicting setbacks that prevented the unification of a multinational, multiethnic and multiracial working class.
The union movement remained weakened and sclerotic until the period of the First World War, when the rise of the Industrial Workers of the World revitalized labor organizing through industrial unionism, internationalism, cross-border solidarity and the active organization of migrants, immigrants, women and people of color.
Nagle also points to how the United Farm Workers collaborated with the Border Patrol to deter and detain undocumented workers when they were used to cross picket lines, insinuating that this helped grow the union. This assertion is also historically inaccurate.
The success of the UFW was predicated on several factors: multinational unity between Mexican and Filpino farmworkers, the incorporation of socialists into the ranks of the union as organizers and a painstaking organizing strategy, initially built from the bottom up, which welded together a broad base of support from an array of organizations, including unions, religious groups and student organizations.
Militant strike strategy was combined with far-reaching solidarity boycotts, marches and protests, as well as a multitude of other tactics of disruption. These collaborative campaigns broke the resolve of powerful grower alliances and forced them to the negotiating table.
After compelling the grower-aligned Democratic Party of California and then-Gov. Jerry Brown to sign the Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, which guaranteed collective bargaining rights for farmworkers in the state, the UFW under Chavez’s leadership changed strategy. The union moved away from class struggle, instead becoming a campaigning vehicle for the Democratic Party.
The drift into the Democratic Party represented a significant break with labor radicalism and the very structure and function of the union. Chavez centralized control, purged the union of its left-wing leadership and sought to use its relation to the Democratic Party as a legislative route to future growth. Organizers now spent more time campaigning for Democrats than building up farmworker-led locals.
The reorganization of the UFW as an auxiliary for the Democratic Party pushed the union into a precipitous decline. No further significant legislation favoring protection of the union or protections for farmworkers saw the light of day. Growers gained the upper hand without having to face further mass mobilization and the union relied more on desperate, top-down strategies to try and win the declining number of strikes it had the capacity to conduct.
It was only after this transition that Chavez adopted a policy of calling the Border Patrol when undocumented workers crossed picket lines. But this practice backfired, as most farmworkers had familial and other social ties to undocumented populations and resented collaboration with la migra.
Those without papers who did cross picket lines to work, as well as later waves of migrants working in agriculture, distrusted the union thereafter. By the early 1990s, the UFW had become irrelevant to the overwhelming majority of agricultural workers, becoming a shell of what it once was, and it has failed to recover ever since.

Immigrant Inclusion: The History of Labor’s Gains

On the other hand, where the labor movement has embraced immigrant inclusion, there is a different story to be told.
In Nagle’s telling, immigrants are at best ignorant victims incapable of any kind of collective organizing. “[W]orkers from economies devastated by U.S. agriculture will continue to be invited in with the promise of work, in order to be cheaply and illegally exploited,” she warns. “Lacking full legal rights, these noncitizens will be impossible to unionize and will be kept in constant fear of being arrested and criminalized.”
It is precisely the role that immigrant labor has played as part of the U.S. labor movement that has led the capitalist parties to curtail their access to citizenship and democratic rights. In the caricature of labor created by Nagle, immigrants are outside the sphere of unions, and as such, pose an existential threat.
So while she feigns sympathy for the displacement of immigrant workers by neoliberal trade agreements such as NAFTA, she deprives them of any agency in challenging the conditions of exploitation, rendering them hapless victims whose incapacity for self-advocacy reduces them to a threat to those who do resist capitalist exploitation.
In fact, immigrant workers have revitalized an otherwise moribund labor movement in the last three decades, providing the most militant action and class-conscious challenge to capital.
With the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986, the Reagan administration traded amnesty for the first significant shift toward workplace-based enforcement.
The 2.5 million people who were legalized went on to join labor unions in droves, establishing a new vanguard of immigrant organizers, campaigns and organizing drives, and assuring that the most vital sections of the union movement have been those that organized immigrants.
This surge in immigrant-led union organizing led to a substantial rise in wages. According to a study by the Department of Labor, real wages of workers naturalized through the amnesty program increased by an average of 15 percent within five years, which also led to wage increases for other workers in the same industries.
This militancy and pro-union orientation of the undocumented working class led the AFL-CIO to reverse its longstanding anti-immigrant policies in 2000, and commit resources and support to organizing the undocumented. The federation led the Immigrant Freedom Rides for full legalization in 2003.
In 2005, right-wing forces united to push for the recriminalization of the undocumented with the passage of the Sensenbrenner-King bill, which contained extreme policy proposals like making it a felony to be undocumented. This and a raft of other anti-immigrant bills were explicitly designed to prevent the sociopolitical integration of immigrants — and more importantly — their proclivity to organize once legalized.
In response to Sensenbrenner, mass mobilizations involving at least 3 million people took place in over 100 cities between March and May of 2006, culminating in school and workplace walkouts, mass marches and rallies for a new amnesty. The Sensenbrenner bill was killed, and the Democrats were swept into office in 2006 and 2008 in a mass repudiation of the Republicans.
The potential for a new legalization, promised by the incoming Obama administration and the congressional Democratic majority, carried with it the potential for another mass surge of legalized immigrants pouring into labor unions.
Instead, the Democratic Party abandoned legalization and became the executors of the most intensive campaign of immigrant repression and deportation to date.

A Caricature of the Left

NAGLE IGNORES labor history, treats immigrants as if they aren’t part of the working class, and blames them for the decline of unions.
She then criticizes the left for supposedly ignoring the working class she mischaracterizes — and she again makes the baseless assertion that “the destruction and abandonment of labor politics [by the left] means that, at present, immigration issues can only play out within the framework of a culture war, fought entirely on moral grounds.”
In reality, the radical U.S. left, including the immigrant left, has played an instrumental role in facilitating the growth and militancy of unions in various ways. This includes building left currents in the labor movement to incorporate immigrants and other marginalized populations into the ranks and opposing imperialist policies abroad that are harmful to workers in other countries.
Currently, the left is at the forefront of opposing the bipartisan repressive apparatus used against immigrants — the biggest obstacle to rebuilding a vibrant and militant labor movement in the current period.
At best, Nagle has a confused or misguided understanding of what the “left” is in the U.S. At worst, she is purposely smearing and belittling it in order to prop up an otherwise weak argument.
She doesn’t seem to understand the distinctions between liberalism, “progressivism” and anti-capitalism — making it hard to pinpoint the substance of her criticisms. Nor is she clear about who supports the globalist project of “open borders,” characterizing them at one point as the “libertarian left” and at another as the “upper-middle class.”
To give her argument weight, she cites support from none other than Karl Marx, “whose position on immigration would get him banished from the modern left,” according to Nagle. She claims that Marx “expressed a highly critical view of the effects of the migration that occurred in the nineteenth century.”
Rather than elaborate on this major point, she quotes extensively and misleadingly from a famous 1870 letter in which Marx argued that because of Irish displacement and forced migration to England:
[e]very industrial and commercial center in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life.
Nagle uses this statement to illustrate Marx’s supposed anti-immigration stance, even though she includes his next sentence, which argues something very different:
In relation to the Irish worker [an English worker regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself... This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the…
Marx, unlike Nagle, is not celebrating or accommodating anti-immigrant sentiment. He is making the case that that the bigotry, racism and chauvinism of the English working class have to be overcome! And not by immigration restriction, as Nagle would have us believe, but by the left actively organizing inside the working class to overcome nationalist prejudices and forge solidarity — as he explains only a few sentences later:
Hence it is the task of the International everywhere to put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with Ireland. It is the special task of the Central Council in London to make the English workers realize that for them the national emancipation of I…
Far from being unwelcome on today’s left, Marx would be with us organizing solidarity with Syrian refugees, rallying for those in exodus from Honduras and other Central American countries to be let in, and arguing within the union halls that all undocumented workers need to be organized.
Nagle then moves on to shaming the left for not opposing the conditions that cause migration. “Progressives should focus on addressing the systemic exploitation at the root of mass migration,” she writes, “rather than retreating to a shallow moralism that legitimates these exploitative forces.”
It is statements like this that make one question whether she has ever been around the left. Socialists, anarchists and communists have a long and consistent history of opposing U.S. military and economic intervention abroad, from active support and participation in the Mexican Revolution 100 years ago through building opposition to the U.S.-aided overthrow of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras in 2009.
The radical left has also played a leading role in struggles against the institutions of corporate globalization that promote the neoliberal orthodoxies and trade frameworks that Nagle claims to deplore.
The 1999 “Battle of Seattle” against the World Trade Organization played a momentous role in raising public opposition to corporate greed internationally. Since then, the U.S. left has built mass mobilizations that defeated the Free Trade Area of the Americas and contributed to the undoing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.
Left groups building solidarity with Central Americans afflicted by repressive regimes led to a broad-based sanctuary movement that helped thousands of Central Americans escape brutal U.S.-supported military dictatorships by providing safe haven for refugees fleeing conflict zones who were denied asylum by the U.S. government.
Activists have since extended the sanctuary concept to push for policies that prevent local or statewide government and law enforcement agencies from cooperating with federal immigration agents in their pursuit of deportable populations.
This solidarity movement has long linked human rights activities to campaigns against U.S. funding for repressive regimes.
Since 1990, the School of the Americas Watch (SOAW) has protested U.S. military training of Latin American military personnel with long histories of human rights abuses. Several iterations of the school have been closed due to the persistent opposition, public education campaigns, and annual high-profile protests at military sites.
So while Nagle claims that advocacy of “open borders” — i.e., immigrant rights and freedom of movement — is a “new phenomenon...that runs counter to the history of the organized left in fundamental ways,” in fact, this internationalism is embedded in the very DNA of the U.S. radical left over most of its history.
This historical ignorance extends to Nagle’s understanding of the U.S. labor movement. “[I]n the days of strong trade unions,” she writes, “they were also able to use their power to mount campaigns of international solidarity with workers’ movements around the world. Unions raised the wages of millions of nonwhite members, while deunionization today is estimated to cost Black American men $50 a week.”
Nagle doesn’t seem to see the irony that she is harkening back to the period when many of the strongest unions were led or heavily influenced by Communist Party (CP) members and other radicals in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The years between 1937 and 1946 saw the largest strike wave in U.S. history and coincided with CP-led campaigns in the working class against racism, xenophobia and sexism.
As I write about in Radicals in the Barrio, immigrants from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean were concentrated in 11 CIO-affiliated unions created over this period, while women and people of color joined the labor movement in the hundreds of thousands, the greatest gains in labor’s history.

Left-Right Unity against Immigration?

AT TIMES in the essay, Nagle runs out of convoluted pronouncements and imprecise historical references, and falls back on the common litany of right-wing fallacies. For example:
With “no human is illegal!” as the protest chant goes, the left is implicitly accepting the moral case for no borders or sovereign nations at all. But what implications will unlimited migration have for projects like universal public health care and education, or a federal jobs guarantee? And how wi…
and:
[M]igration increasingly presents a crisis that is fundamental to democracy.
In other words, immigrants are "taking our jobs, living off our welfare system and threatening our way of life". In passages like these, Nagle seems to shed any pretense of speaking for the left.
In fact, the essay as a whole reveals a deep-seated contempt for the left she professes to be part of, while also divulging a willful ignorance of labor history and left-wing political thought. To accomplish the ambitious task of selling right-wing ideas to the left, Nagle combines a nationalist critique of capitalism with a condemnation of the left and opposition to immigration, using language hardly discernible from that of the far right.
It should not be surprising, therefore, that such an article would be welcomed at a right-wing publication. The essay was written for a journal named American Affairs, a small start-up publication launched in 2016 to provide “intellectual support” for Trump’s project of nationalism, although editor Julius Krein has since distanced himself from Trump’s overt racism.
The point of convergence between Nagle and Krein is their self-professed disdain for “Reaganism” and the trajectory of free-market capitalism, which has benefitted a class of “globalists” at the expense of the nation-state. They both reject “neoliberalism,” albeit for different reasons.
Krein is attempting to position his journal as a voice for the section of capital that laments the decline of the U.S. economy relative to its competitors, and the emergence of destabilizing social inequality and its attendant political polarization. He is attempting to stake out a nationalist ideological position within the Republican Party, calling for a “strong state,” protectionism, reindustrialization and infrastructural investment.
For Nagle, the “Reagan Revolution” of neoliberalism has ushered in the ascendancy of a cabal of global capitalists who place profit above national interests. The most significant result of globalism — according to her argument — is that these neoliberals have leveraged “open borders” and immigrant labor to undermine the standard of living for U.S. workers by decimating labor unions.
This characterization of bad neoliberals versus implicitly good national capital allows for some theoretical overlap with the right, from neo-conservative protectionists such as Krein to far-right bigots who view “Jewish globalists” such as their bogeyman George Soros as the biggest threat to the nation.
Separating the agents of globalization from national capitalist interests, therefore, requires an active state which protects the interests of the nation — through which Nagle frames her call for excluding immigrants. As she states, “most people need — and want — a coherent, sovereign political body to defend their rights as citizens.”
While taking different routes, both Klein and Nagle argue in favor of a nationalism that puts “America first.” In the context of the rise of the far right internationally and Trumpism nationally, Nagle’s line of argument does not represent an innovative left-wing analysis, but rather a liberal accommodation to racism and xenophobia.
Nagle claims that the left has “painted itself into a corner” with an anti-borders politics that leads to us offering no concrete proposals other than tailing neoliberal policies.
But there are obvious demands — for those who are willing to look — being made by the left every day. We are for dismantling the immigration-enforcement complex, from the border wall to ICE to the detention industry — the same violent, destructive and divisive force for which Angela Nagle is attempting to provide intellectual cover with some false claims and a phony left accent.

Original article

print print reply reply

[SocialistWorker.org] A call to action to support the caravan

DAVID KEIL<bmdc@lists.riseup.net>
To  Michael Heichman   Copy  BMDC Working Group  
Let's join the very significant endorser list to this action so as work with the others for future actions. 

On Tue, Dec 4, 2018 at 10:13 PM SocialistWorker.org < no-reply@socialistworker.org> wrote: 

SocialistWorker.org

FYI from Mike Heichman
Statement

A call to action to support the caravan

November 20, 2018
With thousands of asylum seekers in the refugee caravan gathering in the city of Tijuana, the time has come for people in the U.S. who support human rights to demand that the Trump administration follow the law and let the caravanistas into the country. A coalition of solidarity activists in San Diego has put out an “International Call to Action for the Refugee Caravan and Central American Exodus” for Sunday, November 25.
AS THOUSANDS of our refugee relatives — children, elders, brothers, sisters, LGBTQI+ siblings and people with disabilities — make their way to the border, we are calling for an International Day of Action in Solidarity with the Caravan and Exodus from Central America on Sunday, November 25, 2018.
We, an ad-hoc Migrant and Refugee Solidarity Coalition, composed of migrant rights and social justice groups, invite individuals and organizations across the country and globe to organize demonstrations in their cities, and if they have the capacity, to join our rally and march to the border.
We call for an action on November 25 to commemorate the anniversary of the 2017 Honduran election stolen by the U.S. government-backed, right-wing military dictator Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH). We are demonstrating on this day to acknowledge and draw attention to the current social and political crises driving the exodus from Central America.
We understand that these crises — drug wars, military coups, destruction of Indigenous lands for the benefit of corporations and environmental catastrophe in the region — are all symptoms of U.S. foreign policy, corporate profiteering and war-making.
Refugees and asylum seekers on the journey north
Refugees and asylum seekers on the journey north
Moreover, we see that the Trump administration is creating a warlike atmosphere against the caravan. It should be clear that they are not just acting with the support of a cabinet of white supremacists and a majority GOP in the Senate, but are also emboldened by the last few decades of bipartisan militarization of the border, mass raids, expansion of for-profit detention centers and mass deportations — with more than 2.5 million migrants under Obama and Trump alone. Further, these policies are a continuation of a long history of anti-Indigenous colonial violence and genocide.
These attacks have been complemented by decades of pushback against the migrants’ rights movement and years of terror against all who participated in the mega-marches for Migrant’s Rights back in 2006 and since. We must continue to build and consolidate our gains no matter how large or small.
Legal precedent, “civility,” regard for life: the administration has no respect for any of it. The only thing that it responds to is resistance from below.
The U.S. government, as with all governments, and the people of the United States have a choice: We can reject the humanity of the refugees and buy into the racist anti-migrant rhetoric of the Administration and the media. Or we can do what humans have an obligation to do and what the U.S. government owes the people of Central America: Insist on allowing all the refugees the right to seek asylum!

Demands

1. Respect for the right of asylum for all members of the Central American Exodus. Stop the profiling and criminalization of refugees; lift the executive order limiting access to asylum.
2. Process all asylum claims made at Ports of Entry with expediency. We reject Custom and Border Protection’s claim that Port of Entries lack capacity to let in refugees. We also reject the shift away from decades of international asylum agreements that allow for requests to be made anywhere on the border.
3. The U.S. government must publicly acknowledge: a) its role in Honduran Coup in 2009, b) that the Honduran government is a U.S.-supported dictatorship, and c) recognize the political and social crises throughout Central America as caused by US foreign policy.
4. Call for international solidarity beyond the U.S. and Mexico. The United Nations and Red Cross must also recognize the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.
5. We demand freedom for incarcerated migrants now and free movement for asylum seekers. No incarceration of migrants in shelters or for-profit detention centers.
6. No impunity for governments that violate international asylum agreements and processes. Prosecute officials who violate the human right to seek asylum in any country of their preference.

Endorsing Organizations

Pueblo Sin Fronteras
Otay Mesa Detention Resistance
Union Del Barrio
People over Profits
QTPOC colectivo
American Federation of Teachers
Border Angels, San Diego
Defend Boyle Heights
Yano Project
Cosecha
Democratic Socialists of America-San Diego chapter
International Socialist Organization
Party For Socialism and Liberation
American Friends Service Committee
Enclave Caracol
Centro Cultural Dela Raza
Las Luchonas
QTPOC
Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft
Coalición Fronteriza de CentroAmericanxs
CARECEN
Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice
Enclave Caracol TJ
Raices sin Fronteras
San Diego Workers World Party
The Coalition to Free Mumia Abu Jamal and All Political Prisoners
San Diego Committee Against Police Brutality
Leonard Peltier Defense Committee
San Diego County Central Committee of the Peace and Freedom Party
43 San Diego
Democratic Autonomous Federation
Food Not Bombs
Freedom Road Socialist Organization
Legalization for All, No Space for Hate Racial Justice Coalition

Original article

Follow Us
---
To unsubscribe: <mailto: bmdc-unsubscribe@lists.riseup.net>
List help: < https://riseup.net/lists

Legend-Slayer Will Bradley Rides Again-Don’t Believe All That Dime-Store Zane Grey Nonsense About How The West (Western United States) Was Won-Gary Cooper’s “Man Of The West” (1958)- A Film Review, Of Sorts


Legend-Slayer Will Bradley Rides Again-Don’t Believe All That Dime-Store Zane Grey Nonsense About How The West (Western United States) Was Won-Gary Cooper’s “Man Of The West” (1958)- A Film Review, Of Sorts



By Will Bradley

I must admit that when I started out back in late 2016 feuding back and forth with fellow film reviewer Seth Garth over the overblown reputation of English private investigator or whatever he called himself back then Sherlock Holmes (since exposed as a master criminal who was responsible for half the crime in greater London in his time whose real name was Larry Lawrence, no relationship to our own Lance) that I would have never believed that I could gather a following in my lonely attempts to destroy, eliminate, banish or whatever word you like some pretty bad characters. Guys, and it has been mainly guys thus far, maybe reflecting his-story not her-story on the evil side of life in the past and elsewhere who must have had pretty good press agents, publicity guys, who wrote whatever drivel the hard-pressed populations would believe just to keep their guys in the limelight. Keep their reputations all bright and shiny when the reality was quite different.

I have already given the example of the shoddy Holmes, oh, Lawrence and his dear friend Doc Watson (I don’t want to get into that “gay” Homintern business that Seth tried to run by a candid world which didn’t buy his take for a minute after my expose about Larry and Doc’s serious criminal enterprises which helped deflate those bastards’ reputations forthwith). There has also been since I began my work a noticeable decline in the reputations of others I have exposed like cheapjack slave-driver, sorry tenant farmer, peasant, serf, yeoman-driver Robin Hood, besotted Don Juan (real name Jose Rios out of Aragon who gained his “fame” via some convent beauties’ depraved fantasies while held captive those unholy dungeons, impotent, yes impotent we now have some scientific evidence for what for years was mere speculation, imposter Casanova and the wicked chattel owner Captain Blood out of Jamaica slavery markets working night and day to expand the fucking empire.

Strangely the only one who I have not been able to bring down is the so-called legendary early aviator and aeronautic innovator Johnny Cielo who claimed his whole worthless life to have invented flight despite the fact that he was born in 1910 several years after the Wright Brother joined Icarus in the legendary category down at Kitty Hawk. Maybe it is because he is a more modern example of bloated reputation which people are more inclined to believe but if anything people I run into despite the reams of documents proving he was nothing but a bush pilot, never ran guns to Fidel and the hermanos in the old days, never knew Rita Hayworth either have elevated this heel to some kind of god or something rather than bum of the month. Despite my documentation, despite the manifest on that last flight telling the whole candid world, or even the non-candid world, that he was taking high-end passengers between Key West and Naples down in Florida and had perished in the Gulf of Mexico not in the Caribbean heading toward Cuba with a shipment of guns as the legend has it.  I will have to see who his press agent was, is. He or she should get a ton of money for their commissary at whatever prison they should wind up in.                   

After all that foreplay today we are going big again, going down and dirty with what in America is something like the holy of holies-the Old West, the Wild West when men, mostly men settled things with iron and plenty of slugs-bullets and whiskey. From Jesse James to the famed and underrated Johnny Young just before World War I which is really the last time you can talk about the Old West. You didn’t have to be Professor Turner over at Harvard to know that once you got to the Pacific your chances that the frontier was vanishing were pretty strong. Yeah from Jesse and Johnny and everybody in between these bums have gotten a free ride, have been made legends out of whole cloth. Got their respective legendary starts from some guy in New York writing dime-store novels from the comfort of his room at the Brown Hotel-in New York City. That in any case is how I was able to track down the legend of a guy named Link Jones who went by a million other names in his stealing, thieving murdering time like Dock Tobin, Billie Ellis, and I think Gary Cooper, stealing the rangy homespun actor’s name even before he had it although I couldn’t definitely confirm that last one.

This one defies belief, belief that an admitted stone-cold killer and robber like Link could throw sand in our eyes and go straight after a lifetime of crime, that should have set alarms off right there. (Admitted his transgressions to Jackie Jenkins, the famous, make that infamous New York World reporter who did more than his fair share of bulling us about these “men of the west” who downplayed the bloodthirsty part to make Link readership worthy) But see old Mister Grey, Louie Le Marr, Cormac McCormick, Larry Murphy and their ilk did their jobs well, sold a million copies of the bogus book, books really detailing the bush-whackers, tramps, bums and sociopaths who really populated the West back in the day all prettified and there you have it. Like I said without leaving Manhattan. Nice work if you could get it, right. Reality check: you had to have chewed up your chances in the East, had to have been on the run or had no other recourse to pick up stakes and head West to drought, famine, desperadoes, “injuns,” now indigenous peoples or Native American depending on where you are, coyotes, avalanches, sod-busting, range wars, grifters, water wars, coal dust, cannibals, train smoke and dreams, poison wells, buffalo stampedes, social diseases, do I have to explain that, drifters, con men and women and craven insects and tumbleweed.         

With all those strikes again success old Zane and his crowd really had their work cut out for them although since they were writing for city-slickers who were not heading west, not going to the aforementioned hazards except in books naturally the guy, here one Link Jones, had to be ramrod straight in the saddle, long and tall, with that “aw shucks” manner and slow-rolling drawl. Christ they cookie-cut these guys except maybe the real deal Sam Shepard who really was long and tall and slow-draw talking (not slow at shooting though as many a man found out). Sam could have been on the cover of old Professor Turner’s opus, could have shown rum brave Link Jones a thing or two.

Of course today a million sociologists, and maybe half a million psychiatrists, will defend Link, will say it was a dysfunctional homelife, no mother, a bastard of a “father” figure in Dock Tobin, whose real name after my research was Cobb, wanted in six states-dead or alive as was Link- and his natural sons, Jack and Slim, plus a couple of stray villains in the mix, who taught him every evil known to man, woman too. Bullshit. Link, at least according to legend which we will bust quickly below, broke loose one day, repented, went straight after serving some time in some purgatory town out in the prairie somewhere, got married, had kids. Nice story right. More Grey-like malarkey.     
Here is the legend in all its glory with my refutations. Link, supposedly “reformed” was sent on a mission from his Podunk town to go to Forth Worth down in Texas to get the town a schoolteacher and had enough money to pay the required year’s salary to get her to leave everything in a big city (for the time) to teach a bunch of wooden-headed kids out on the prairie. Reel them in. Christ Link couldn’t spell teacher never mind get one. Truth: he took the dough alright but spent it all in a couple of days in Dallas on some whore named Billie, Billie something, although the only one I was able to find who spent time with Link was a whore named Julie who in the end ran off with the last of his dough when he was running low after another blood-simple kill streak. Even better, with no dough and nothing better to do he just happens to borrow some dough from some grifter with a sad story and took a train ride to Fort Worth which just happened to get robbed by Dock Tobin, remember Cobb, and his boys. Just happens to take some Judy, Julie, some woman met on the rebound, there were almost as many desperate to leave the East as men who figured to make a killing selling themselves and then maybe see what happened when the dust settled, Billie if you like to the gang’s hiding place, just happens to “play along” with Dock to the rob the El Dorado Bank of their dreams and when that flushed down the toilet wastes the whole lot of them after they had ravished Julie, his woman.       

Believe all that at your peril. Real deal, Link masterminded the robbery, had planted himself on the train in order to get to Dock and his own worn-out dreams and only wasted the gang, wasted Dock and the boys because they had wasted his time on a freaking ghost town exploit. Had it planned he would take all the dough and was pissed off when Dock hadn’t done his homework on the real situation in El Dorado. Killed one cousin just for the hell of it. By the way all that reformed married and kids’ stuff was just a cover when women “took a shine to him” like this Julie. He might have begotten kids but he wasn’t claiming them, not supporting them. The real Link would finally face the hangman in Colorado after about six more cold-blooded murders and a dozen more bank and train robberies. Julie fell by the wayside some time before Link’s end taking what was left of his and was never heard from again probably went back to whoring in Denver when they became a big cattle stockyard. Women like her always landed on their feet. I hope to high hell that Link Jones doesn’t like Johnny Cielo prove to be “Teflon man” just because half the American populations is enthralled by Old West nostalgia bits and pieces.

Deal Them Off The Top, Brother, Deal Them Straight Off The Top--With Eric Holden’s “The Cincinnati Kid” In Mind

Deal Them Off The Top, Brother, Deal Them Straight Off The Top--With Eric Holden’s “The Cincinnati Kid” In Mind     






[Every once in a while a subject comes up, here gambling through the prism of  high stakes poker to be the top dog, that someone has written about previously, then gambling through the prism of high stakes pool to be the top dog, and did such a well thought of job at it that good sense requires that person to take a stab at the new subject which in this case is really a variation on the older subject-who and how to get to be number one, numbero uno, in your chosen profession when the guy at the top seems immovable, seems immortal. That was the case when Josh Breslin wrote when he was younger for the East Bay Eye in the late 1960s and which subsequently has been posted in this space with some additional editing about young, handsome and here is the fatal kicker impetuous “Fast Eddie” Felton’s rise in the world of cigarette-strewn and whiskey bottle smoky pool halls until he came up against the king of the hill a guy named Jackie “Tubby” Gleason and got his clock cleaned. Lost his angel girl too to some one-eyed pimp daddy whom she took around the world on the rebound once Fast Eddie had that “loser” tag tattooed on him, on his forehead although anybody even vaguely familiar with that sport didn’t need that identification mark to know he had tapped out, news in such circles moves fast. Yeah impetuous had to go against the tiger before he was ready, before he broke his “impetuous jones” lost everything until he faded and went back to cheap street just another guy hustling nickels and dimes from punk kid amateurs out in some Joe’s Pool Hall in Peoria who didn’t know he touched the big time before he became pimp meat.

So we, the soon to be retired administrator on this site, Pete Markin, and I, Greg Green, now the acting administrator to see how I like it and see if I can help reverse some narrowing of perspective on this site over the past several years when a lot of the action has centered on the turbulent 1960s and not much else, invited Josh to give us what film critic emeritus Sam Lowell loves to call the “skinny” on the biggest poker game, stud poker of course what else, that ever hit the wicked sun- drenched and fucking humid town of New Orleans back in the 1930s, the time of the great hunger among plenty of guys looking to be top dog on the sly. Just to set the stage this is a tale about the rise of another young, handsome and here is without making this thing a cautionary tale the fatal kicker impetuous in the world of stud poker, a guy named Steve McQueen although he went by a million names. I think Josh said at the time of this event Eric Holden, but everybody called him the Cincinnati Kid although as Josh mentioned this kid had never been to that Ohio River city, had never really been north of Memphis and probably couldn’t pinpoint the place if you gave him three chances for a buck.

The rise of the Kid until he hit the buzz saw of ancient Lance Robinson who like Tubby Gleason with Fast Eddie cleaned his clock and sent him back to cheap street to nurse his wounds is what interested Josh. Interested the same way young Eddie Felton interested him when he got the story from Georgie Boy Scott out in some sleazy back-water pool hall when Tubby Gleason finally cashed his check and Josh wanted to what had happened to guys who had taken a run at him when he was in his prime. So when we sent him on the trail after hearing that Lance Robinson had recently gone on to his just rewards as an ancient warrior king of the poker parlors he was almost as eager as when he first sniffed that cigarette-strewn whisky besotted pool hall back in his young reporting days (That changing of names by the way according to Josh pervasive in gambling circles since you never know when you have to skip town owing a million markers to some rough guys and have to head into a dive town where if you used your real name to grab a stake from the hotshot local amateurs they would tar and feather you-they would know how to do that little number no matter how bad they were at your profession.)-Greg Green]          

By Joshua Lawrence Breslin

I got this story straight from the “Shooter,” a guy whose real name or at least that is what I always knew him by when I got tipped that he was the guy to get whatever I needed to know about Lance and about his most famous challenger was Carl Malden. I had run into him around Jackson Square in New Orleans. Somebody from the now long faded Lafayette Hotel known more now for fast-hustling hookers paying room rent by the hour (or rather their Johns doing the honors) than poker-faced poker players had tipped me that Shooter might know where world historic defeated pool-player “Fast Eddie” Felton might be nursing his wounds and the Shooter told me that was old hat, Fast Eddie was working the steamboat tourist trade up and down the Mississippi since he got stripped naked by Tubby Gleason and was not story, zero in the pool hall world where it counted down in the human sink along with the whores, pimps and stone ass junkies. I got the Felton story almost despite the Shooter once he knew that I knew he, the Shooter, had taken his liberties like a lot of guys had with this kinky stone ass junkie Angelica who used to be Fast Eddie’s girl until he tanked out while she was riding high with Fast Eddie. I threatened Shooter with the hard ass fact that when I found Fast Eddie which I would do eventually I would lay that very juicy piece of information on him and the guy crumbled like a bent fender in the days when such things happened to fenders almost at the touch. (You already know from Greg Green’s thoughtful introduction that I did get the story, did get some awards for the piece, the coveted Globe for one, and that I did not tell Fast Eddie who had not aged gracefully what with a booze and jone habit stacked together that his angel girlfriend had taken Shooter around the world while Eddie was playing some rich Memphis banker downstairs in his hillside mansion. Fuck it he probably would not have cared one way or the other-yesterday’s news but Shooter was shaky to buy my line.)       

The story Shooter really wanted to tell was about a guy named Eric Holden, something like that who was the cat’s meow at poker, five card stud poker in case anybody was asking, the only kind, serious kind to get a man’s blood up and who knew Fast Eddie in passing since they both had hung out at Sam Levine’s pool hall over on the low rent end of Bourbon Street where the amateurs, the rising stars with no dough backing them up hung looking for attention and the guys on the run who kept a low profile in the smoking background. I don’t think from what I learned later that Eddie and Eric knew each all that well since they were running different sides of the street once this Eric figured he would end up in some back alley face down if he played any serious money pools but had this almost mathematically precise mind for stud poker (and nerves of steel a not unimportant attribute if you are going up against the king of the hill). The Shooter told a story about how Fast Eddie always the hustler told Eric that he would spot him three balls if he would “shoot pools” his favorite expression for a hundred bucks. Eric told him to fuck off that “it was not his game.” Yeah both young, from hunger, handsome, ladies handsome but both young men maybe a little bit too blue-eyed pretty boy for the serious aficionados of pool or poker and fatally flawed with those impetuous natures like they were gods, gods pure and simple.        

This Malden who got that Shooter moniker for always playing it straight, always telling the story true or as true as any guy who is around any gambling circles will tell the tale. This is the story of the rise and fall of his protégé, Eric, I will tell about how Eric  got his moniker in a minute and then if you have been around gambling circles you might recognize the name before he dropped down among the peons, con men and cutthroat artists back in the old days. Back in the hard-bitten wide open days after World War II where there was loose money around and plenty of hungry guys ready to scoop it up around drifter towns like New Orleans and a million other port cities. His protégé being none other than real name, fuck that Eric Holden con, Steve McQueen who always except when he was laying low in some dive town trying to work up a stake to get back in the action carried the moniker Cincinnati Kid. The Kid a real comer until one Lance Robinson took him gently to the cleaners and pushed him back to cheap street and the low rent dive town hustle. Happens every time to those impetuous fools.     

Before I retell the Shooter’s tale I had better give you his bone fides. Shooter like a lot of guys before World War II was pretty footloose, was from what later guys up my way in Olde Sacco in Maine would call “from hunger,” I know they were, I, was. Very early on he would hustle his friends for dimes and quarters playing card tricks to while away the time until he got his first stake. Maybe a hundred bucks which was real money then among the squares although before he hit bottom he was using hundred dollar bills as straws for his cocaine habit lines. He moved pretty quickly up the stud poker food chain, got a reputation as a tough guy to beat which is an excellent advertisement in that profession since it will draw all kind of guys to “prove” you are a one-shot wonder, just lucky with the rubes. Probably helped that build-up with about twenty shots of straight whisky. His aim all that time was to build a reputation in order to get a shot at the reigning king of the hill, guess who even back then, Lance Robinson. Well the long and short of it was that when that big match occurred in Memphis old King Lance kicked out the jams on the Shooter in less that twenty-four hours, something of a record in high stakes poker at the time among the top contenders.     

That experience left the Shooter very shaken, left him always working the percentages thereafter, win a little, lose a little, and keep your hand in until you find a guy who could beat this Lance. Now when the Shooter is telling me this story he is already an old man, is reliving some younger dreams about bringing the Kid along.  After his defeat at the hands of Lance the Shooter also began to toy with other gambling ventures which makes senses since win a little, lose a little makes for very tight budgets and screams from irate landlords and bill collectors. He took up horses, pool, and cock fights which is how his honey to be introduced in a minute got her sexual juices up watching those cocks go at it, strange bitch it seemed to me but the Shooter remained true blue to her even when she blew town on him the last time with a half a hundred thou. (On that barbarian cock fight stuff remember this is Louisiana, Cajun country where such “traditions” were still honored even though the sport was illegal in the state.)

Shooter would drift through the towns all up and down the Mississippi trying as he said “to do the best he could.” It was in Shreveport where he ran into the Kid the first time who was working in a pool hall. Shreveport is also where he met his first wife, this Maggie Ann, the cock fight frill, who was working in Madame LaRue’s whorehouse when he picked her out of the line-up and she took him around the world. This Maggie Ann is important to the story later when the big match comes around but every time the Shooter mentioned her name to me he added “that whore” so he was still hot under the collar about her whorish strutting ways even when they were married, maybe especially when they were married and he was out of town a lot trying hustle dough to keep her in clover. No dice in the end although not for the Shooter’s not trying since she led him a merry chase and that ain’t no lie.          

So the Shooter once the Kid hits New Orleans teams up with him, teaches him a few things and starts working to get him a bankroll in order to face down this Lance. Things were moving along well until the Kid ran into some country girl, Laura, whom the Kid always called Tuesday since that was the day that they met and he had had big night cleaning up five Gs off the big boys at the Lafayette Hotel weekly game, with blonde hair and doe-like eyes all blue and he fell, fell hard for her (this despite grabbing Maggie Ann’s free ass for getting his ashes hauled every time Shooter was out of town-and a couple of times when he was in town and Maggie Ann was testing her coquettish whorish ways to see if he would belt her one). Although Shooter didn’t know about the stuff between Maggie Ann and the Kid until she was ready to leave town and wanted to rub it in, rub salt in Shooter’s loveless wounds and told him every detail about every guy she had done, and a couple of girls too, told him she had blown all his friends for good measure, he knew that having a girl hanging over the Kid as he was trying to go for the brass ring was the kiss of death, would be an albatross around his neck. He wouldn’t listen, told Shooter he could beat Lance, beat the old man like a gong without working up a sweat. Almost broke the whole thing off when just before the big Lafayette Hotel game he snuck down to Cajun country to see this Tuesday and have some sex with her which would, no doubt in the Shooter’s mind, make him too loose, too unfocused on his mission.                

So the big day comes and everybody who is anybody around Louisiana gambling circles showed up for the Kid-Lance show-down. The Shooter could tell after about fifteen seconds that the Kid had had his way with this Tuesday and that his energies would be sapped. Jesus. Now the way these games, this high stakes stud poker works is a lot different from some back room at Mick’s gin mill where Mick has paid off the coppers for the amateurs to play for a few bucks and he gets a cut off the top for his services. They have certain protocol or they did until guys like Reno Red build a casino on up in the mountains just short of California and Bugsy Segal built Xanadu out in the Los Vegas deserts. A big game would take place in an up-scale hotel where the manager paid off the coppers to keep away and the gamblers would rent out a suite of rooms to do their business in.

High stakes stud poker was, is, played to the death, played until somebody cries “uncle” and can’t or won’t raise anymore dough to stay in the game. So the whole process can take hours, days and a suite with bedrooms and the like is a bare minimum requirement. Besides a high stakes game will draw many interested spectators to see if the champ will be dethroned but more likely to bet on the oncome, bet big. (One of the fastest pieces of action on the sidelines which would put those who bet today on each play in a football or basketball game to shame is to bet on every turn of the card for say $100 a shot-the money changes hands very quickly and somebody can get very rich very fast-or tap out the same way.

In the old days the once elegant now faded Lafayette Hotel down near the breakwaters of the Mississippi River was the stop for high rollers coming to play in New Orleans. Every half decent stud poker player dreamed of showing his (or occasionally her) stuff in those large well-provisioned rooms against all-comers. Up and coming guys would say “I’m heading to the Lafayette” even when they were stumbling around to get stakes to play in Riley’s Pub back room dollar limit games. That included the Kid when he was coming up, when the Shooter was bringing him along and wanted to entice him with that glitter. So the big game was played up in Suite 606, a suite specifically reserved for poker players who chipped into pay the freight, to pay the room rate.                    

Like I said these events would draw a crowd from all over, all over the East sometimes all the way up to Boston. I mentioned the side bettors but as well in most games others beside in this case the young Kid and the old Lance opted for a seat in the game to see if that day maybe their luck would change and they could by default become king of the hill. Such dreams keep certain men (and occasionally women) afloat in a tough and grimy world. This day would find a few guys who had been “gutted” somehow that inelegant word used to describe cutting up fish or livestock was the term of art for those thrown on the scrapheap by either the Kid or Lance. 

There was Pig, a low rent guy who made his money from chiseling cheapjack guys in those back alley games enough to grab a stake and take his chances. Pig that day very early on sweating like a pig would fall early since he always worried about whether his stake would last long enough. Lance made toast of him. There was Doc who kept his numbers book, his lined drawn tables which showed him the percentages with each upturned card. He faded without a whimper once his figures went south on him as they naturally would when one is betting on whether a guy is bluffing or really has that down card to complete some combination that looked promising. Gone.

Then there was “Yella,” a name from a term familiar in race-conscious New Orleans which meant that somewhere along the way he had white blood in him which made him acceptable in white society somewhat, that somewhat being good enough to get “gutted” by both the Kid and Lance at the poker table in his time. Although Doc and Pig were pretty non-descript second-rate actors in this game Yella had an interesting past having gone to New York City when he was younger and set the town on fire at the Cotton Club when he had his own jazz band back in the 1920s Age of Jazz that the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald endlessly wrote about and coined the term. A New Orleans guy like Louie Armstrong was just too black for the white upper-crust crowd which frequented that uptown Harlem establishment but Yella fit right in. Then the Great Depression set in and jazz and jazz bands took a back seat. When he saw the writing on the wall the resourceful Yella won a handful of dough in a game at the Plaza Hotel against a bunch of Mayfair swells and returned to New Orleans and first pimped on Bourbon Street and the teamed with Madame LaRue to set up a high end bordello complete with girls for every kind of taste from a trip around the world to a quick blow-job when the latter was kind of an exotic treat unlike later when high school girls were doing it as a rite of passage in some places to keep some car freak lover at bay down in some Squaw Rock lovers’ lane.  (As it turned out although nobody talked about it Yella had pimped for Maggie Ann when she first hit town from Podunk down in the bayou and he would later get Tuesday as a favor to the Kid going down that road although not before as he said “sampling the wares” in both cases.) Despite that interesting background when the deal went down Yella tapped out early. Gone too. 

Taking up the last seat, usually six was the maximum number at the table at any one time, was the Shooter who was in for a while as a player until things settled out and he just dealt them out, dealt them from the top. We know Shooter’s story or enough to get us by once we know that he had been “gutted” by the old man and once we know his trials and tribulations trying to keep Maggie Ann in style and away from every stray dog of a man who caught her eye. Tough work which made dealing high stakes poker games to get some dough like child’s play. Shooter would fold after the first day and so deep into the second day it was Lance against the Kid, one on one.

Of course these high stakes games, actually even those back room ones, had a certain rhythm, a certain protocol. One was since the games were long, could be days long, any player could call himself out for a while and not lose his play at the table. Another was that if a player tapped out he or she had half an hour to raise additional cash. For known players, markers, IOUs, were acceptable and many times the only way to keep players going until they had to lay low and pay some dough toward the markers was to take markers or they would be shut out of games. Players, if they agreed, could deal themselves if there was no back-up dealer available that any players trusted enough. The dealer could also call himself out and that is why in most games a back-up dealer was hanging around.

In this meet they back up was none other than Missouri Moll who just then had tapped out having had a bad run at blackjack. She like Yella was interesting being one of the few high stakes female players. They say Moll had gotten her start in the famous Mrs. McCabe’s whorehouse up in the Klondike, up in gold country before that panned out where the girls in that girl-starved country charged (or rather Mrs. McCabe charged) five hundred dollars cash or gold for their “favors,”  a quaint term of the times before World War II. This Mrs. McCabe (she was not married but having the Mrs. kept the men away from her door-mostly) is reputed to be the “inventor” of “going under the table,” of giving guys playing cards blowjobs, head, whatever you call oral sex in your neighborhood without having to leave the table to keep up their spirits so to speak (she did not do missionary sex just the blow-jobs although more than one guy would be willing to give her a fistful of gold when she was younger for the pleasure).

Whatever the truth of Mrs. McCabe’s invention Moll learned that little trick as she rose in the ranks of high stakes poker players. Any time she tapped out and needed to raise cash fast she would go to work (not always “under the table” giving new meaning to that expression but in an adjacent bedroom) and within a half hour would have five hundred or a thousand just like that. (Many guys would hope for her to tap out including Lance when he was younger just to keep their “spirits” up.). Now older and maybe wiser she was just backing up the action although she still had enough looks for the older guys to maybe take a run at her if she needed some dough.

Not all the action as I pointed out was around the table. Money is a magnet for the pure bettor and the interested parties with cash to wager on any outcomes. A couple of guys, Mack from Detroit (don’t ask for any other part of his moniker you might wind up floating down the Mississippi) and Ruby Red, can be seen here betting on every flip of the card, on every  hand just like today’s sports junkies   which as I mentioned before is a tough dollar, is very wearying. The guy though that is important to this part of the story is a guy named Varner, Jody Varner, who father Will left him 28,000 acres of the best bottom land in Mississippi and a company town to feed what he wanted to feed off of. This Jody Varner though was not present by happenstance but because he desperately wants to see Lance fall down. All I have to say is that he had been gutted by Lance and you by now know what the deal is. This Jody seems ready to go through Will’s lifetime of struggle fortune in as short a time as he could between his mulatto mistress and his sporting habits. (As an equal opportunity sexual partner he had his way with the very white Maggie Ann on more than one occasion and would later after the Kid’s fall have his way with that Tuesday when the Kid needed a stake and needed it quickly).

Jody wants Lance beaten so badly that he did not want to leave anything to chance. He has conned the Shooter who after-all only had his reputation for fair-dealing on the line to send a few off-hand high cards the Kid’s way. The Shooter balked but being vain about Maggie Ann and her tramp-like ways which were not generally known he succumbed when Jody told him he was going to send her back to some backwater whorehouse going down on Cajun boys if he did not do as told.

In the end it didn’t do Shooter any good since the Kid spotted what he was doing from the first hand he tried to do it. In the end it didn’t matter for Shooter either since that Maggie Ann ran off with some travelling salesman who promised her the world. More importantly in the end it didn’t matter as well since ancient Lance played the Kid like a fiddle. See the Kid never having played the old man and had only stories about how he gutted one guy or another the Kid had no clue, no clue at all about how Lance played out the play. About how without saying a word he would stand up and seem in pain over a back spasm. How he would after a couple of hours call for a rest while the Kid was hot and in the meantime went crazy waiting for Lance to return. Worse of all he was clueless when he mistook a few false hands that Lance let him win and left him suspecting Lance of senility. That was the real action leading up to the “kill”-that last hand when everything matter and the Kid was like putty in Lance’s hands.   

Even though the Kid gave Lance the battle of his life he forgot the first rule of high stakes stud poker when two or more savvy guys are playing. If a guy keeps calling and raising, calling and raising at thousand dollar increments then you best fold and wait for a change of luck because as sure as shooting a guy like Lance has the goods. When he throws a check for five thou and takes your marker it is way too late-you are a goner. The Kid found out $5000 in the hole hard way when Lance turned over a Jack to complete a flush. Yeah, back to cheap street until Lance retired or kicked the bucket. It would never happen. Maybe he should have checked out where Fast Eddie Felton was hanging and take him up on that three ball handicap for a hundred bucks because he was finished as a big daddy stud poker player now that everybody knew he could be rattled. The only thing for certain after the Kid fell down was that sweet girlfriend Tuesday was going to wear out a few beds and maybe her knees getting that dough for the Kid when Lance called in that marker. (Jody even before she and the Kid  left the room gave her his calling card and said he expected to see her soon-the bastard.)