How Come So Many Bernie Bros Are Women and People of Color? Despite data to the contrary, the media continues to distort Sanders' politics and the diversity of his supporters byKatie Halper

How Come So Many Bernie Bros Are Women and People of Color?

Despite data to the contrary, the media continues to distort Sanders' politics and the diversity of his supporters

by

Katie Halper

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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks at "Workers' Right=Civil Rights" rally in Canton, Mississippi on March 4, 2017. (Photo: Youtube/Screenshot)

A recent CNN poll shows that among potential Democratic candidates in Iowa caucuses Senator Bernie Sanders has the highest approval rating from people of color. And the diversity of the Sanders-inspired left was on display at the Sanders Institute Gathering in Burlington Vermont earlier this month, which I covered on my podcast, The Katie Halper Show.

But empirical evidence has not stopped much of the corporate press—including many "liberal" or "progressive" outlets and commentators—from condemning the senator as having "a race problem."

Over the past week we saw Jonathan Martin of the New York Times (who happens to be white) claim that Sanders "has done little to broaden his political circle and has struggled to expand his appeal beyond his base of primarily white supporters." Meanwhile, Clara Jeffery, the editor-in-chief of Mother Jones (also white), recently presented not only Sanders' supporters but the left movement in general as white. Linking to a written exchange between two Splinter journalists about Sanders, she tweeted, "In which white lefties have a debate that somehow does not discuss the fact that Bernie has no real purchase among the POC base of the Democratic party. And that problem has not improved for him, if anything it seems larger…"

Even those who openly mock the concerns of the white working class, undermine their own alleged commitment to marginalized voices when they ignore the diversity of Sanders' supporters.

But despite evidence like the new CNN poll, in which Sanders had the highest approval among non-white voters, outlets reporting on the survey studiously avoided mentioning that key finding which undermines the media narrative about Sanders' struggle to appeal to minority voters. While it's only one poll, and his favorability among voters of color isn't far ahead of Joe Biden's, it's newsworthy and significant precisely because it undermines the media narrative about Sanders' alleged struggle to appeal to non-white voters. On social media people who happily call Sanders #FakeJews, and defend Hillary Clinton's use of prison slave labor, continue to vilify Sanders as somehow "racist."

Most politicians could "do better," when it comes to addressing and speaking about racial inequities, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and classism. But the claim that Sanders is exceptionally problematic is absurd, given, for example, that Biden opposed integrated busing in the 1970's; mistreated Anita Hill during the confirmation process of Clarence Thomas; called Obama "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy"; and said "You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking."

Sanders' critics smear him as blinded by straight, white, male privilege. The mere mention of class gets Sanders and others condemned as class reductionists. The irony is that many of the most vocal critics attacking him for being insufficiently intersectional fail to address class altogether as an aspect of identity.

It's cruel, immoral and politically disastrous to dismiss the experience of working class people of all colors and backgrounds. But even those who openly mock the concerns of the white working class, undermine their own alleged commitment to marginalized voices when they ignore the diversity of Sanders' supporters. By ignoring the people of all ages, backgrounds, genders, sexuality, and ethnicity who support Sanders, they engage in the very erasure and marginalization of the women, people of color, LGBTQ people (and all the intersections thereof) that they claim to oppose.

The real story is very different, as I found at the Sanders Institute Gathering. Organized by Jane Sanders and David Driscoll, the 3-day event was more about the movement that Sanders helped spark than it was about the man. Though Sanders delivered the keynote and participated in several panels, the gathering focused on issues, bringing together leaders, thinkers, organizers and activists. Participants included physician and public health activist Abdul El-Sayed; San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz; actor and activist Danny Glover; executive director of Good Jobs Nation, Joseph Geevarghese; Our Revolution director, Nina Turner; Presente.org's executive director Matt Nelson; and many others. Over the weekend, the panels and roundtables addressed healthcare, climate change, criminal "injustice," civil rights, immigration, Puerto Rico, the housing crisis, the international progressive movement, and other issues with attention to class, race, and gender.

The following are excerpts from my interviews, which you can hear in full here and here:

Bernie Sanders: Bringing people together

The first person I ran into at the gathering was, believe it or not, Bernie Sanders himself. I told the senator, "One of the things that's really frustrating to progressives who support you is this narrative about your not being a feminist or not being anti-racist." Then I asked, "How can we push back on that, given how much the corporate media seems to be interested in that narrative?"

"What we are fighting for is to bring people together—Black and White and Latino, Native American and Asian American—around an agenda that speaks to the needs of ordinary Americans and not just the one percent." 
—Sen. Bernie SandersTo which he replied:

What we are fighting for is to bring people together—Black and White and Latino, Native American and Asian American—around an agenda that speaks to the needs of ordinary Americans and not just the one percent. We want Medicare for All, we want to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, we don't want our kids to be living in a planet ravaged by climate change. So we are making progress. We expect opposition to continue. And we're gonna do the best in this fight that we can.

When you look at corporate media, you're looking at media owned by large, often international corporate conglomerates, which are owned by some of the wealthiest people in this country or in the world. They will do anything and everything they can do to protect their own interest and they will say anything about anybody that they want.

During a panel discussion later that day, he went spoke further about the dangers of divide-and-conquer strategies deployed by the enemies of equality:

When people are pushed aside, when people are hurting, you have demagogues who step in and say "Our problem is that Mexican who is picking strawberries." So you take that anger and frustration and pain that people are feeling and you turn them against people who are in worse shape than [they] are. And our job is to bring people together and say, "No. It is not some Mexican who is picking strawberries who is our enemy. It is Wall Street, it is the fossil fuel industries, it is the drug companies, it's the insurance companies." Let's stand together and take those people on.

Mayor Michael Tubbs: We absolutely have to be intersectional

I also interviewed Stockton, California Mayor Michael Tubbs, who—as he put it during a panel at the Gathering in Burlington—grew up a "poor black child on the south side of Stockton with an incarcerated father and a mother who had me at sixteen as a teenager. The things we fight for like affordable healthcare, affordable childcare, entitlement programs like WIC and Head Start all paved the way for me to be here today."

After the round table he spoke to me about how Sanders' 2016 run pushed him to embrace bolder more progressive ideas:

Senator Sanders came and spoke in Stockton in a presidential campaign, which was unheard of—someone running for president to come to Stockton. And I was able to introduce him. And I was also impressed with the number of people who were at that rally in the middle of the day like five- or six-thousand people. And Stockton's not a super rabid political town and I was like, "Wow, this message is resonating." And I think that gave me the confidence to be a little more bold in my policy prescriptions or pilot programs that we're doing in the city because I saw the hunger and the want for a government that is actually responsive and works for regular everyday people.

The mayor sees such bold progressive policies as crucial to defeating the equally bold but opposingly reactionary policies of Trumpism. There is "no middle ground," Tubbs said, when you're battling fascism. "Some of Trump's supporters wanted to see—and I don't think that discounts racial resentment—something bold, shocking, say something that's different, that's not vanilla."

"We absolutely have to be intersectional in how we think about things. It's not just one thing, we have to be intersectional in our policies and programs." 
—Mayor Michael TubbsThe president's rhetoric and policies are xenophobic, Tubbs continued, and his solutions are bad. "But some of the problems he articulated with trade deals and the way they impact regular people are clear problems that we have to address," he said. "So I think it's about how do we give people something bold that relates to their everyday life that says [to them]: 'I am seen. I am heard. This leader cares about what I'm dealing with.'"

Tubbs sees intersectionality and multiracial organizing as challenging but crucial. 

"Historically since Bacon's Rebellion," Tubbs explained, "poor white folks have voted against their best interest and I don't think we've done enough work to actually show people why is it in your best interest to cast your lot with these folks that don't look like you. We absolutely have to be intersectional in how we think about things. It's not just one thing, we have to be intersectional in our policies and programs."

Mayor Gus Newport: Neoliberals are single-issue people

Right before speaking to the mayor of Stockton, I interviewed the former mayor of another California city. Eighty-three year old Eugene "Gus" Newport worked with Malcolm X, is the great grandson of a slave and was the mayor of Berkeley from 1979-1986. He and Sanders were mayors at the same time and Newport had stumped for Bernie earlier during Sanders' unsuccessful runs for governor of Vermont in 1972 and 1976.

Newport recalls that as the two campaigned in Burlington, a reporter asked Sanders, "Why does a Jew from Brooklyn, who's a Socialist, invite Gus Newport, a former black nationalist and a socialist from Berkeley to campaign for him in a state that is 97% white?" Bernie's answer was short: "Because we're gonna talk about the issues." After that, Newport explained, the reporters had no more questions. "I've loved him ever since," he said.

"Why does a Jew from Brooklyn, who's a Socialist, invite Gus Newport, a former black nationalist and a socialist from Berkeley to campaign for him in a state that is 97% white?" Bernie's answer was short: "Because we're gonna talk about the issues."

Sanders would later appoint Newport to the Democratic Unity Commission in 2017 in the wake of Hillary Clinton's loss to Trump. "I found out more than I ever wanted to know about the Democratic National Committee than I ever wanted to know," he said, but "nobody in the Democratic Party has ever spoken to all the issues in the depth that Bernie Sanders has."

When I asked him what he thought about the claim, often perpetuated by the media, that socialism is a white project, Newport responded:

The media—look who they work for, that's corporate America. You must remember Malcolm X was a socialist and Martin Luther kIng was moving towards socialism when he talked about the war against Vietnam. But a lot of Black leaders didn't go along. We've got to educate our own to become an integral part of this. And we're gonna do it. Danny Glover and I, we've gone down to Mississippi and South Carolina with Bernie. And the minute it appears that Bernie's going out there [to run in the 2020 primary], we're gonna go organize. I'm gonna be ready to campaign 9 to 10 months out of the year. I'm going to rehab now for this bad knee but as soon as I can—I'll do a lot of walking.

While some smear Sanders for being a "single issue" candidate, Newport believes it's the centrist "neoliberal" Democrats who deserve that label. "They are a single issue people," he declared. "They do not work around other issues [like class or poverty]. They're usually not a part of the working class. We're looking for real people."

Newport was thrilled that the Gathering—for which "Jane Sanders needs to be given all the credit in the world"—provided participants with "a challenge to pull ourselves together and make sure there's a worthwhile future for the next generation."

Though people often consider the intersection of race, gender and sexuality—class and age are often excluded. A popular narrative which pits people of different ages against each other is that of the spoiled, entitled and lazy millennial. Newport has sympathy, empathy and righteous outrage for the bleak economic reality that millennials face.

As he said at the Democratic Unity Commission, it is time to get "past our own egos and look at the issues." He added, "Too many of us who get into body politic eventually just focus on ourselves. We got retirement for life, we got healthcare for life. But what about the people? You gotta think of the reality: the millennials have had enough. Many of them know they won't be able to buy a house in their life times. They gotta pay student loans. So I'm proud. But we have a lot more work to do."

Naomi Klein: connecting the dots between all issues

In some ways climate change affects us all, as writer and journalist Naomi Klein told me: "Climate change impacts everything because we're all inside the climate so there's no prying anything apart from it."

"[The left has to] deepen its analysis of what racial capitalism means. Too often race is an add-on. Too often gender is an add-on. And we have to take that on board and do a better job." 
—Naomi KleinIn some ways, climate disasters don't discriminate: "As anyone who's lived through a hurricane knows, no matter how rich you are or how powerful you are those winds are absolutely terrifying; no matter how rich you are or how powerful you are if the flames are coming towards your house in Malibu, you're not safe." But, Klein added class perspectives to her analysis. "Climate change doesn’t affect all of us equally." She explained:

It's tricky. [Climate change] isn't a leveler. In the short term what it does is exacerbate pre-existing inequalities. It's already here for people who are very precarious and who have no protections. And it is true that wealth can buy you protection for a couple of generations. And in the meantime there are enormous profit potentials. It's not very comforting that there's such a keen interest in Mars. Because that really does start to feel like a Plan B. Not that it's a realistic one.

Ultimately this is a system that will collapse on everyone's head... eventually. But in the short term there are definitely rooms that are going to collapse first.

I'm not making the argument that it has to be the issue to trump all other issues. I think we need to have an analysis that is all about connecting the dots between all of these issues.

Klein pointed to the distinctions among Democrats that the Sanders campaign exposed. There were liberal centrists who were liberal centrists "because they honestly didn’t believe that more progressive, more redistributive policies were popular or possible. But when they saw that they might be, they got on board." And then there were liberal centrists who didn't shift to the left because, it turned out, they "just opposed those ideas."

"We've all have our eyes opened by that," Klein said. "And then you realize, we're not all on the same side."

Roseann DeMoro: The duplicitous Bernie Bro smear

Former executive director of National Nurses United and of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, Roseann DeMoro does not mince words when describing the dishonesty of the latter group.

"I was just talking to Susan Sarandon," she explains. "We were all accused of being Bernie Bros. It's to delegitimize us. It's a lie. It's a duplicitous, ugly, malicious, horrendous, calculated lie. It's a calculated lie by the DNC. It's a PR campaign masquerading as politics."

I agreed that many of the people who spread the Bernie Bro smear are, indeed, disingenuous and malicious. Others, however, are more misinformed by the coordinated propaganda campaign which portrays Sanders as "bad on race and gender" whose supporters are a monolith of white men or people who want to curry their favor.

DeMoro objected to prioritizing identity over policy and profits over people. "People are suffering across the spectrum," she said. "They can't take care of their families or of themselves. Their personal dignity is going down the drain. Ultimately, what we were supposed to do was to buy into a neoliberal paradigm to elect a neoliberal woman who didn't share our values because she was a woman. Well, Margaret Thatcher was a woman."

Of course, as DeMoro and I agreed, one of the differences between Clinton and Thatcher is that neither Thatcher, nor her fans, ever claimed the Iron Lady was a feminist.

An ardent supporter for Sanders to run again in 2020, DeMoro is prepared for more of the smears which started in 2016 and never really went away. "They're gonna throw everything at us, when it comes to Bernie, and we're gonna be like Wonder Woman and bounce 'em right back. So put on your bracelets."

Maria Svart: You can’t understand class without understanding gender and race and vice versa

I also interviewed Maria Svart, the national director of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), for The Real News Network and my podcast. She also criticized the Bernie Bro narrative.

"Look at Bernie Sanders," Svart said, "the most popular politician in the country. And yet people that support Bernie are called Bernie Bros. You look at DSA. I am a Latina. I'm leading the organization. And there are many women of color in leadership, and yet we are characterized as a bunch of Bernie Bros."

Svartz went on to describe her own intersectional identity:

"You look at DSA. I am a Latina. I'm leading the organization. And there are many women of color in leadership, and yet we are characterized as a bunch of Bernie Bros."  
—Maria Svart, Democratic Socialists of America

You can't understand class without understanding gender, and race—and vice versa. How can you possibly understand, for example, the life experience of my grandmother, who was an undocumented Mexican immigrant, without understanding the much bigger picture, the whole systems of our society, whether it's white supremacy or xenophobia or capitalism? They all intersect. And we need to talk about the complexity of that reality all the time, and we have to push back against lean-in feminism, mainstream feminism, all the time.

Whether or not Sanders decides to run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination (and in case you can't tell, I hope that he does), the movement he sparked is deepening its understanding and analyses of the intersectionality for the electoral and organizing work ahead in 2020 and beyond.

According to Klein, the left has to "deepen its analysis of what racial capitalism means. Too often race is an add-on. Too often gender is an add-on. And we have to take that on board and do a better job."

No matter what the landscape looks like in 2020, Klein continued, "we have to spend 2019 building as broad a coalition as possible, understanding as deeply as we possibly can that all these issues are so profoundly intertwined. To me what's clear is that if we fail, it is not because our ideas are unpopular. It is because we failed as organizers."

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Katie Halper is a writer, comedian, filmmaker and the host of "The Katie Halper Show," a weekly WBAI radio show and podcast (become a patron of the show on Patreon here). Her writing has appeared in New York Magazine, Common Dreams, Rolling Stone, Salon, The Guardian, and The Nation, and she has appeared on MSNBC, Sirius Radio, Fox News Radio and "The Young Turks."  Follow her on Twitter: @Kthalps

DECEMBER 21, 2018 For What It’s Worth: The Yellow Vests and the Left by JIM KAVANAGH FacebookTwitterGoogle+RedditEmail Something’s happening here…

DECEMBER 21, 2018 For What It’s Worth: The Yellow Vests and the Left by JIM KAVANAGH FacebookTwitterGoogle+RedditEmail Something’s happening here… Class Act The “yellow vest” (gilets jaunes) movement has upended French politics, at least. It has delivered a sharp and refreshing smack in the face to the smuggest of smug, entitled neoliberal brats, Emmanuel Macron, forcing him to retreat on substantive tax and minimum wage issues. It has also raised a raft of issues from wealth inequality (including demands for higher taxes on the rich) to a rejection of austerity and the dreaded Frexit. Most importantly, it has acted outside the gatekeeping of traditional opposition parties and institutions–including those of the left, which have all been thoroughly decaffeinated and beguiled by the fantasia of Third-Way EU becoming “Social Europe.” The Yellow Vest movement is millions of people out in the street, engaged in militant, confrontational protest, talking to and acting with each other unsupervised, telling the governing elite: “Va te faire foutre!” A self-mobilization of the working class: This is the specter of Europe past, which Third-Way politicians and intelligentsia thought they had once and for all banished to the netherworld a few decades ago. The Yellow Vest movement, now spreading to other counties, is striking a new body blow to the teetering edifice of neoliberalism that has been built on the bones of the working-class lives in Europe and America over those decades. This explains why the American mainstream media has avoided focusing on the Yellow Vest movement. The left, on the other hand, must be overjoyed, right? Well, it’s more like: Comme-ci, comme ça. Why? “Identity politics” is, of course, the term that immediately comes to mind, though that term oversimplifies, particularly regarding the French context. As C. J. Hopkins put it: “Nothing scares the Identity Politics Left quite like an actual working class uprising.” Scares and confuses. Historically, the core definition of the left has been solidarity with the working class (everyone who depends on wages to live), which includes the majority of people of all races and genders. But a new definition has taken hold among American/Western/college-educated liberals and progressives, as well as socialists and Marxists, who are perceived and think of themselves as on the “left”, and it has given rise to a new pattern of solidarity. These leftists have trained themselves to quickly embrace movements defined in terms of race and gender. Critical interrogation will come from within an assumed position of solidarity, and it will usually be in terms of those categories: Does your racial justice movement x have the right attitude and/or demographics in terms of gender? Much less frequently and urgently, and virtually never as a condition of support, will a race or gender movement be interrogated regarding its position—its attitude and demographics—in terms of class. There’s a different default setting for working-class movements. They will almost always be looked upon with suspicion, until and unless they prove their attitudinal and demographic race and gender bona fides to the satisfaction of American/Western/college-educated “leftists.” That interrogation has effectively become a prior condition of solidarity for working-class movements. Leftists have adopted a kind of checklist of concerns, and class has moved way down. So that’s been affecting the slow uptake of left support and coverage of Yellow Vest movement, which is, centrally and unashamedly, a working-class movement. Though the spark was a hike in the diesel gas tax, the flame quickly engulfed a wide range of issues. Far from being an “anti-tax” revolt, as some on the right and the left rushed to characterize it, Yellow Vest has called for the re-imposition of the wealth tax that Macron had so kindly abolished for the French elite. Fundamentally, it’s an eruption of a lot of people who are rightly raging about economic inequality. Diana Johnstone sums it up well: The gasoline tax was the last straw in a long series of measures favoring the rich at the expense of the majority of the population….Briefly, the message was this: we can’t make ends meet. The cost of living keeps going up, and our incomes keep going down. We just can’t take it any more. And the French people make it clear repeatedly: Embedded video The Intercept ✔ @theintercept “The Europe of the rich. We have a president who’s insulting us, and treating us like illiterate workers.” https://interc.pt/2QxW64D (video by @raulgaab) 251 2:46 PM - Dec 14, 2018 223 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy The Yellow Vest movement is a widespread working-class revolt against economic injustice and the neo-liberal state. Exactly what the left should embrace. Neera Tanden ✔ @neeratanden I don’t understand why any progressive is cheering French protesters who are amassing against a carbon tax. 4,867 3:15 AM - Dec 8, 2018 Twitter Ads info and privacy 2,962 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy When we see a “Center for American Progress (CAP), progressive, feminist,” like Neera Tanden tweeting, from the checklist: “I don’t understand why any progressive is cheering French protesters who are amassing against a carbon tax,” and a correspondent for the “leftist” French publication Libération ,calling Yellow Vest a “movement of hicks” or a “band of polluting oafs, addicted to their cars, who need to be dealt with by the police,” we are seeing the sorry, degraded, utterly clueless state of what passes for the left. Neera should talk to, or have clue one about, Colette, age 83, who “doesn’t own a car, but explained to whoever would listen that the steep raise of gasoline prices would also hurt people who don’t drive, by affecting prices of food and other necessities. She had done the calculations and figured it would cost a retired person 80 euros per month.” Or the young woman in southwestern France who “cares for elderly people who live at home alone in rural areas, driving from one to another, to feed them, bathe them, offer a moment of cheerful company and understanding. She loves her vocation, loves helping old people, although it barely allows her to make a living. She will be among those who will have to pay more to get from one patient to the next.” Another “polluting oaf.” As commentator O Societyr astutely put it: “The Paris protests aren’t over a fuel tax any more than Colin Kaepernick is about the American National Anthem. Kaepernick is protesting police brutality and the Gilets Jaunes are protesting their ‘Let them eat cake’ government.” The ability of leftists to reject the diversions and cut through to the crux of the matter in one case, while quickly succumbing to them in the other is a perfect example of the left’s diminished attention to, and concern for, class. As Tanden and Libé remarks indicate, it’s not just “identity” that’s up there in the hierarchy of the checklist. As I’ve said before, the left has succumbed to deprecating a politics of class solidarity in favor of a politics of solidarity based on like-mindednesson a checklist of issues. But this has things backward. Solidarity is not a matter of prior agreement. It’s bedrock socialism that you can only build a movement with the working-class we have, not the one we wish for. Which means solidarity must start with material interest, not like-mindedness, You don’t have to agree with me for me to defend your interests. Agreement doesn’t precede, it results from, solidarity. You get—earn and build—popular support for progressive, socialist, and revolutionary ideas and programs by defending and fighting for people’s material interests, not by interrogating people who are in actual revolt against the neo-liberal state to see whether they have the correct ideas regarding everything on your checklist, and insulting and attacking them if they don’t. That’s the approach of the liberal intellectual, not the left socialist. Agreement will come from respectful engagement in a common fight for a dignified life for everyone. Or it won’t. There are no guarantees. Because everybodyin a capitalist society gets “taught wrong on purpose,” a lot of people with a lot of half-assed ideas—whether kinda-sorta racist or sexist, or kinda-sorta authoritarian, or kinda-sorta in thrall to liberal capitalist politicians, or kinda-sorta self-righteous, or kinda-sorta skeptical of global warming—must get together and learn what ideas, attitudes, and actions help the movement, and what kind of bullshit will guarantee defeat and has to go. Or they won’t, and the movement will fail, or turn nasty. Furthermore, the change from “normal” opposition to a radical, insurrectionary, or revolutionary movement always starts with an abrupt, unforeseeable explosion over a relatively minor “final straw” slight. And it never starts with an agenda of all the correct demands. What that explosion does, precisely, is initiate a process of struggle and learning, through which the working classes, acting outside of any preconceived agenda, and joined by those who have had the time and privilege to study history and politics, can define not only an agenda of specific demands, but a new type of polity. I certainly have my pessimism of the intellect about where this movement can go without more clearly defining itself politically and organizationally. And it must and will do that, through the work and influence of someone(some persons or groups), if it doesn’t disappear or get destroyed by the repressive and ideological power of the neoliberal capitalist state. It’s not that, because it’s a working-class movement, Yellow Vest is sure to be socialist and successful. Given the actual socio-economic, ideological and political state of neo-liberal capitalist societies, it would be foolish to think such a thing. It’s that: that someone can only be a participant. Rather than hold its nose in pre-judgement, for the self-satisfaction of “Tsk, tsk,” and “I told you so,” any self-respecting left has the responsibility to support and participate, as it can, in a working-class uprising, in order to make a better outcome more likely. The Gilets-Jaunes is clearly a movement of the rightfully pissed-off working classes against the smug capitalist elite. it deserves our solidarity. Union Gap Across the West, the left has struggled to know how to respond to the populist uprisings of recent years. There is a tendency on the left to denounce any shock to the status quo as driven by reactionary forces. The revolting masses are often written off as fascists. –Fraser Myers For some two or three hundred years, people one could call “left” hoped that popular movements would lead to changes for the better. Today, many leftists seem terrified of popular movements for change, convinced “populism” must lead to “fascism. –Diana Johnstone Let’s also dispel the elitist liberaloid night in which all populisms are black. Enough of ceding popular democracy—including combative, even insurrectionary, democratic movements (i.e, those seeking to really—socially and politically—empower the majority of people) to the right. Sure, Yellow Vest, the Brexit vote in England, and the vote for Donald Trump in the United States are all expressions of politically-amorphous class anger. But, A) That’s not intrinsically “fascist”; and B) The social overdeterminations and political alliances differ from each other in Important ways, Particularly as Americans, we should have the humble good sense not to confuse the politico-ideological situation of the French working class with our own. Unlike its American cousin, the French working class is not steeped in libertarian, casino capitalist, market-worshipping, Shark Tank ideology. Yellow Vest is precisely fighting against the encroachment of that ideology. Indeed, that’s what Macron has been trying to foist on France, as the agent of the neoliberal finance globalism in which he sincerely believes—and which has, just coincidentally, netted him “a few quick millions during his passage through the Rothschild Bank.” ($31.5 millionin four years, in fact. Nice Work.) Macron, known as “the president of the rich,” has been “on a mission… to change things across the board in a way that I consider right.” That has involved introducing “a raft of tax reforms in a bid to dispel France’s reputation as a country that soaks the rich and stifles enterprise.” As a result of his zeal, the French can now celebrate that “Paris has overtaken London for the first time in a global league table of the world’s ultra-rich.” Mission accomplished. That is what the French working class is protesting against. It is not taken in by this market-worshipping crap, and never was. There was no wave of enraptured workers who thought Macron would make France great again for them. He was elected “only because a majority felt they had to vote against the ghost of “fascism” allegedly embodied by his opponent, Marine Le Pen… the French voted two to one in favor of a man whose program most of them either ignored or disliked.” Macron has been trying to impose the American paradigm, promoting “a profound ideological transformation of the French ideal of égalité, equality, from a horizontal concept, meaning equal benefits for all, to the vertical ideal of ‘equality of opportunity’, meaning the theoretical chance of every individual to rise above the others.” Fortunately, “The French have traditionally been logical enough to understand that everyone can’t rise above the others.” Like many of its counterparts throughout Europe, the French working class, including its unions and political parties, has historically been infused with socialist and communist ideologies. Though capitalist ideology has been making inroads, French workers are far from persuaded that casino capitalism is the best of all possible worlds. The core understanding of class struggle remains, and is a primary engine of the Yellow Vest movement. This is left populism. It is nothing like the American working-class—the exceptionalism of which is its thorough and consistent saturation with capitalist social ideology, which leaves so many of them with the fantasy that they are, as Steinbeck (apocryphally) put it: “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” That ideological formation sets the American working class up for capture by the two proudly capitalist parties—today, by Trumpian right-wing faux populism through which working-class anger is eaten by the reactionary Republican party; yesterday and tomorrow, by kindler, gentler, “we’recapitalistand that’s just the way it is” Clintonism, through which working-class anger is euthanized by the Democratic party. In the Yellow Vest movement, the French working class is defending its social state, a form of social democracy that doesn’t exist in the United States. Their fight—actual fighting in the streets—is forrobust, publicly-funded public services, to defend them againstbeing privatized. As Diana Johnstone explains Macron’s attempted neo-liberal healthcare “reforms” they are fighting: France has long had the best public health program in the world, but this is being steadily undermined to meet the primary need of capital: profit. In the past few years, there has been a growing government campaign to encourage, and finally to oblige people to subscribe to a “mutuelle”, that is, a private health insurance, ostensibly to fill “the gaps” not covered by France’s universal health coverage. The “gaps” can be the 15% that is not covered for ordinary illnesses .., or for medicines taken off the “covered” list, or for dental work, among other things. The “gaps” to fill keep expanding, along with the cost of subscribing to the mutuelle. In reality, this program, sold to the public as modernizing improvement, is a gradual move toward privatization of health care. It is a sneaky method of opening the whole field of public health to international financial capital investment. This gambit has not fooled ordinary people and is high on the list of complaints by the Gilets Jaunes. Meanwhile, in the home of the brave, establishment liberals are trying to prevent the American people from getting anything close to what the French working class is fighting to defend, as Adam Cancryn writes in a Politico article, sharply titled, “Establishment looks to crush liberals on Medicare for All”: “The private-sector interests, backed in some cases by key Obama administration and Hillary Clinton campaign alumni, are now focused on beating back another prospective health care overhaul”. The Yellow Vest movement is not a repeat of, but a model for, American working-class populist protest. A few million working-class Americans out on the street busting things up to get Medicare-for-All is exactly what we need. It got the French people some major “impossible” concessions right quick, and it’s probably the only way we’re going to get even the one social-democratic advance of Medicare-for-All. Wonking with the Neera Tandens and other Clintonite Democrats is certainly a waste of time. So the Yellow Vest movement is a protest against international a neoliberal, sometimes called “globalist,” project to destroy European social democracy. The Yellow Vest protest is demonstrating, if not entirely recognizing, that the European Union—and especially its capstone, the Euro—isthat project. Too many Western leftists, including among the working-class, bought the idea that the European Union was a progressive project. This was understandable, as it was sold as a prophylactic against the recurrence of the kind of horrendous wars among European nations that ravaged the continent. Leftists let themselves be persuaded that it could also be the foundation of a new, united “social Europe” that would spread and strengthen the achievements of progressive social democracy andthe values of new identity, diversity, ecology, and human rights movements. It would be a project for overcoming both military conflict and archaic social attitudes. All good things. Through one good thing to rule them all. But that was, and is, hogwash. For its architects—the ones who had real power in government, business and finance, not the professors in their post-modern symbolic-exchange seminars—the primary purpose of the EU was always clear: to increase the power of capital over labor. European capital (in conjunction with and under the tutelage of American capital) needed to find a way around the power of national labor movements embedded in strong unions and allied socialist and communist political parties. European capital didn’t give a damn about diversity and human rights, but was happy to use those tropes as needed to marginalize class-based politics. Anything that would promote the idea that class was passé, and thereby help hasten the victory of the European capitalist classesover national labor movements, was fine by them. (Ecology is a little trickier, but they have some workarounds for that.). Wrapping class disdain in the patter of progressive, universal vs. backward, local values was a shrewd tactic that helped capital misdirect the attention of liberal intellectuals.to what the trick actually was. Comes the reveal. The real point of the EU was to force the member states into the neo-liberal austerity program dictated by international capital (and now particularly finance capital), from its headquarters in Washington/New York through its satellite in Berlin/Frankfurt. With leftist eyes fixed elsewhere, capital proceeded with its economic “reforms”—i.e., elimination of labor protections and capital controls. the privatization of public goods and services, budget restrictions that force the state to take loans from private banks, “competition” rules that favor private and foreign capital over public investment, etc. It’s the program to which, international capital and Third-Way politicians have decreed, There Is No Alternative. And the EU is there to discipline the various states with rules and regulation of political economy that ensure that, indeed, there can be no alternative for them For capital, it’s moving from public constraint to market freedom. For the working-class, it’s moving from secure public services to sauve-qui-peut. Every incipient entrepreneur for him or her self. And the extra-special reveal: the left discovers the card in its own pocket, discovers that it’s been recruited, with various degrees of wittingness, to move from its historical place with the working class to up on the stage as “the left-wing of neoliberalism.” In a specific example of how the imposition of the neoliberal TINA regime has played out in France, Macron’s government abandoned a Tidal Energy project because it wasn’t profitable—because new industrial projects rarely start out profitable, and need government subsidies to succeed. At the same time, General Electric came in and bought a big energy company. De-industrialization provides another example. France has lost 40% of its industry as capital moves to lower-wage EU countries like Poland (The dismantling of the post-capitalist Soviet bloc was another huge boost for European unitycapital freedom). Auto-workers in central France, desperate to save their jobs, threaten to blow up the plant if the government doesn’t intervene. But workers have lost their greatest weapon, the strike, the power to shut down an industry, when capital has beaten them to it. The EU’s real mission was to forge this single neo-liberal political economy to which all its states and all their citizens are subjected. Johnstone sums it up nicely for France, where all the ruling parties “have followed European Union directives requiring member states to adopt neoliberal economic policies. Especially since the adoption of the common currency, the euro, a little over fifteen years ago, those economic policies have become tangibly harmful to France, hastening its deindustrialization, the ruin of its farmers and the growing indebtedness of the State to private banks.” Thus, the neoliberal austerity offensive of the EU is a war on social democracy, That’s what the yellow vests and other European populists and “nationalist” movements are responding to. What’s also taken so many on the left and in the working class too long to get is that it has been a war on social democratic economic arrangements, carried out by the Social Democratic political parties. When asked to name her greatest achievement, Margaret Thatcher said instantly and correctly: ‘Tony Blair and New Labour.” Similarly, Reagan’s greatest legacy was Bill Clinton and the Clintonite Democratic Party. And Mitterrand became the best bud of Reagan and Thatcher, creating the Socialist Party of Hollande and Macron. Turning the Socialist Party of France into one of the midwives of neoliberalism in Europe. Rinse and repeat throughout Europe. For thirty years, the ostensible Social Democratic parties steadily but surreptitiously–under false pretenses–introduced elements of the austerity project, until austerity was all that was left. It’s been a neat trick of political-economy substitution—switching social-democracy with austerity right before your eyes. And one day—after a gas-tax hike or whatever—the working class woke up to realize that all the incremental changes had added up to a qualitative difference. The great post-war social democratic arrangement–whereby the capitalist classes agreed to provide a set of essential public services and decent-life guarantees, in exchange for being allowed to maintain their decisive control of society’s capital wealth–was gone. “Macron is a bubble that has burst.” There are a few conclusions to be drawn from all this that are severely discomfiting to, and have been assiduously avoided by, too many leftists who have been entrenched in anything-but-class discourse. One is that the European Union itself (with the Euro) was one of the main weapons, and falsest of pretenses, in this flim-flam. The EU was the pretty box the rabbit went into, and came out cooked. The EU is, and always was, a project of capitalist globalization, which, despite much wishful thinking, is not—in fact, is the opposite of—proletarian internationalism. It’s a nasty simulacrum thereof, that pushes European society in the opposite direction. Many leftists, grounding themselves solely in a humanitarian and altruistic paradigm, resist thinking about the disruptions and depressions of labor pools and markets, and the transfer of cheap labor around the continent and the world, as part of a process of capitalist globalization, as a complement and enhancement to the “free” movement of capital, as a process created and managed by capital in its interest and antithetical to the interest of proletarian internationalism. In so resisting, they are again forgoing the critique of the political economy of capitalism and resting within a paradigm of concern shared with wealthy elites. Angela Nagle’s argumentdeserves to be taken seriously. There are many difficult things to unpack here, but altruism is not solidarity, and we have to start thinking the difference. A corollary conclusion is that it turns out the European nation-state is now the last redoubt of social democracy. As Michael Hudson frequently points out, we have to think of what the EU (especially through the Euro) has been doing to European nations—and especially to the working classes of those nations—as war with financial and economic weapons: “It’s a financial war. And finance really is war by other means, the way it’s being conducted today, because the objective of finance in Western Europe is the same as that of war.” It’s not a metaphor; it’s a war of the bankers and capitalists to wrench the public wealth of European nations from the political control of their working-class populations, with deadly consequences. The working classes are besieged and are fighting back, for social democracy, from the territory in which they are cornered, and in which they still have some power: the national polity. If leftists can’t think of it this way, and only see the expressions of nationalism as “fascism,” if they decry the Yellow Vests for singing the Marseillaise…Well, all I can say is: If it was good enough for Rick… The important thing isn’t what song you sing, it’s whom your song is defying. Euro, Trash A crucial point about the EU and the key role of the Euro is perfectly summarized by Greg Palast (echoing Hudson): “currency union is class war by other means.” Palast explains: “The euro is doing exactly what its progenitor – and the wealthy 1%-ers who adopted it – predicted and planned for it to do.” Palast’s “progenitor” is University of Chicago economist Robert Mundell, who “produced the blueprint for European monetary union and a common European currency.” Mundell hated the fact that, in his words: “It’s very hard to fire workers in Europe,” so he designed a tool that would make it easier. As Palast says, the Euro was designed specifically to “remov[e] a government’s control over currency.. [and be] a weapon that would blow away government rules and labor regulations.” And Mundell, its architect, said it himself: “It [the Euro] puts monetary policy out of the reach of politicians, [And] without fiscal policy, the only way nations can keep jobs is by the competitive reduction of rules on business.” Diana Johnstone explains that this is exactly how the Euro has ravaged France: it has become more and more obvious that EU monetarist policy based on the common currency, the euro, creates neither growth nor jobs as promised but destroys both. Unable to control its own currency, obliged to borrow from private banks, and to pay them interest, France is more and more in debt, its industry is disappearing and its farmers are committing suicide, on the average of one every other day. This is the result of the EU and the Euro, and the “eco-tax” that provoked the protest has everything to do with it: Johnstone again: Indeed, it is perfectly hypocritical to call the French gas tax an “ecotax” since the returns from a genuine ecotax would be invested to develop clean energies – such as tidal power plants. Rather, the benefits are earmarked to balance the budget, that is, to serve the government debt. This “ecotax” is a fraud in every way. Macron’s “ecotax” is nothing but a means of restricting spending and balancing books—zeroing out numbers—at the insistence of the banksters running the EU. As Johnstone points out, it does not “pay for” anything. And, really, think about how utterly silly that would be. The premise is that the tax a measure to stop catastrophic global warming. So: “We’re facing an apocalyptic disaster that will drown half the earth in a few decades. What should we do?” Answer: “Levy a tax.” That’ll do what? All it will do is stop people who can’t “pay for” the tax to stop driving (or be driven deeper into debt). Everyone in the 1%, who can afford it, will keep on destroying the earth. That’s all “pay for” can mean in this context: The wealthy will pay a few more euros; the working class will pay with even more degraded lives. The problem will remain. If you’re a serious political authority facing a global apocalypse—if the asteroid is heading for Earth—you don’t sit around trying to figure out: “What should we tax?” You decide what you have to do, and you do it, paying for it with your sovereign currency. If you have one. You’d also need world-wide, cooperative public planning unconcerned with profit—something like, you know, socialism. Taxes, along with their obverse, profit “incentives,” are precisely the capitalist workaround for pretending to tackle the complex, global and systemic ecological problems that can only be solved by a socialist commonwealth. So, while the masters of the EU universe are pushing us away from that, the Yellow Vests are perfectly right to say: “I’m more worried about the end of the month than about the end of the world.” That’s the succinct, populist version of Pepe Escobar’s observation:“Why is it easier to imagine the total destruction of mankind, from nuclear war to a climate catastrophe, than to work on changing the system of relations spawned by neoliberal capitalism?” This also has everything to do with the point about money and taxes that I’ve made in a previous essay—namely, that taxes do not fund government spending, and that monetary sovereignty, which France and other European countries fatally surrendered to the EU and the Eurobank, is an indispensable tool for progressive policy initiatives. The Yellow Vest revolt is implicitly, and must be explicitly if it is to succeed, a revolt against the Euro. And leftists need to understand why that is so. Finally, a point alluded to above is worth reprising: Social Democracy killed social democracy. And it wasn’t by accident. The Social Democratic parties and politicians (like Macron) that spent 30 years undoing social democracy, and now firmly perceive their identity as uber-State stewards of global finance capitalism, are not going to bring it back. Willingly. The only reason we had post-war European social democracy in the first place was because of the threat of socialist revolution. The only thing that could get it back is precisely the same threat. We are in a conjuncture—the Social Democratic parties have brought us here—where: If you want social democracy, you have to fight for full-on socialism. But, hey, if you succeed so well as to threaten a socialist victory, why stop short? If you again leave the capitalist class with their control of the capital wealth of society, they will again use it relentlessly to erode whatever social democracy they concede, and you’ll repeat the same cycle. That’s what a classanalysis tells you. Of course, the Yellow Vest movement, though it may be in that conjuncture, is nowhere near that choice. And I do not know, and have serious doubts about, whether it ever will be. This percolating crisis of European neo-liberalism has been throwing up a lot of disappointing false-hope movements, like Syriza (which I critiqued sharply at the time here and here). As the song goes: “What it is ain’t exactly clear.” But what’s happening here, with the Yellow Vests, is a self-actuated working-class movement against austerity, inequality, and the neo-liberal uber-State. It’s a hell of a start, and deserves the support of the left. It’s the classic scene, where the detached American decides to take the risk of siding with a movement that’s not what he asked for. Play the Marseillaise. Join the debate on Facebook More articles by:JIM KAVANAGH Jim Kavanagh edits The Polemicist.

Support The Class-War Prisoners During The Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build The Resistance

Support The Class-War Prisoners During The Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build The Resistance 

By Josh Breslin 

My yearly comment on behalf of the Holiday Appeal

I like to think of myself as a long-time fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. Cases from early on in the 1970s when the organization was founded and the committee defended the Black Panthers who were being targeted by every police agency that had an say in the matter, the almost abandoned by the left Weather Underground (in its various incantations) and Chilean miners in the wake of the Pinochet coup there in 1973 up to more recent times with the Mumia death penalty case, defense of the Occupy movement and the NATO three, and defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley) and more recently the courageous anti-fascist fighters who have been rounded up for protesting the alt-right, Nazi, KKK, white supremacist bastards.      

Moreover the PDC is an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers like the late Lynne Stewart, articulate death-row prisoners like Mumia and the late Tookie Williams, the Anti-fa anti-fascist street fighters to black liberation fighters like the Assata Shakur, the Omaha Three and the Angola Three and who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters like the working-class based Ohio Seven and student-based Weather Underground who took Che Guevara’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Of course a couple of years ago  we lost Hugo Pinell, George Jackson’s comrade-in-arms from the San Quentin Six to a murderous vendetta. Others, other militant labor and social liberation fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.

Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. One year though, and it now bears repeating each year, after I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson’s present class-war prisoner the late Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers in their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven,  as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and the late wa Langa), in their younger days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today (also Black Panther-connected); the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.

That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.

And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year. 

The class-war prisoners must not stand alone. 

                                                                                                

PDC    

Box 99 Canal Street Station                        

New York, N.Y. 10013

Google Partisan Defense Committee for more information and updates 

Let’s start this new year of action together The Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival

As we enter 2019, Repairers of the Breach, the Kairos Center and the North Carolina Poor People’s Campaign invite you to a national Watch Night Service tomorrow, New Year's Eve. We will bring together people of faith and conscience and recommit ourselves to the fight against systemic racism, poverty, the war economy and ecological devastation. The first Watch Night Service took place in 1862 when both enslaved and free Black people came together in churches and homes across the nation while they waited for the news of the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation—an act of bravery and hope that helped the United States move forward. More than 150 years later, we must continue this tradition with all those who, despite the challenges that arise every day, believe and are working towards a more just and equitable society today. Tune into this year’s Watch Night Service in Raleigh, NC, to hear directly from Rev. Dr. Barber, Rev. Dr. Theoharis and those impacted by our nation’s distorted moral narrative and experience powerful music that will inspire the heart. Watch the event here >> Want to join us at the event? You can sign up to attend here >> Let us move into 2019 with our sights set on the America that is yet to be. Forward together, not one step back, The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival Sent via ActionNetwork.org. To update your email address, change your name or address, or to stop receiving emails from The Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, please click here.

Last chance: Donate and your gift will be doubled! Coalition of Immokalee Workers

Last chance: Donate and your gift will be doubled! Coalition of Immokalee Workers 1:29 PM Dear Fair Food Nation, This month, hundreds of supporters have celebrated 25 Years of Fair Food by helping us raise nearly $20,000 to usher in the next quarter-century of human rights in agriculture. And last week, we announced that every donation made before the New Year will be matched dollar-for-dollar up to $10,000 by a generous donor. Will you give today to help us reach our goal? We’ve come such a long way since 1993. The very same fields once dubbed “ground zero for modern-day slavery” are now known as the best work environment in U.S. agriculture. And the world of Fair Food is growing. Today, the Fair Food Program has expanded its unprecedented protections to tens of thousands of workers across seven states and three crops, and counting. And we couldn’t have done it without you being right there with us every step of the way. As we continue building this 21st century human rights revolution, there's still time to make a gift in honor of the women and men leading the way in the fields . Happy New Year,  Your friends in Immokalee Donate today to support Fair Food and your donation will be doubled! Coalition of Immokalee Workers (239) 657 8311 | workers@ciw-online.org | www.ciw-online.org Connect with us Facebook ‌ Twitter ‌ Instagram ‌ YouTube ‌ Coalition of Immokalee Workers | 110 S 2nd St, Immokalee, FL 34142

The Golden Age Of Screwball Comedy-Katharine Hepburn And Cary Grant’s Bringing Up Baby (1938)- A Film Review

The Golden Age Of Screwball Comedy-Katharine Hepburn And Cary Grant’s Bringing Up Baby (1938)- A Film Review

DVD Review

By Kenny Jacobs

Bringing Up Baby, starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, directed by Howard Hawks, 1938  

[WTF-Hell now Phil Larkin has got me in a foul swearing mood.  (Phil in his youth bore the sobriquet Foul-mouthed Phil which may still be an appropriate moniker) The old time writer for this space and close friend of the recently departed to parts unknown and unlamented from what I have heard around the water cooler former site manager Allan Jackson is once again belly-aching about an assignment given to him by new manager Greg Green. Green had given him another Marvel Studio production The Avengers to review I assume because he did a good job on the first effort Captain America; Civil War.  Belly-aching at my expense which is why I am, again, doing a bracketed introduction. (Unlike Phil I still have put my screed in the traditional brackets to forewarn disinterested reader who could give a f—k about the internal disputes in an on-line publication operation to move on down the page to the story.)    

Quickly Phil’s first dispute was having to do a modern review of that Marvel comic production Captain America: Civil War mentioned above rather than the one Greg Green rightly assigned to me Humphrey Bogart’s lesser film Deadline-USA. He actually did an okay job on the film including what will be a classic line about Captain America having the brain of sea-pod despite his brawny exterior. I, in turn, this according to Greg himself, gave a very good account of myself on the Bogie article. That is what has me steamed this time when Phil once again assumed that somebody not born in 1930 or so could ever do justice, could ever have any insights into those by-gone productions like the classic screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby where Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn playing somewhat against type sparkled up the screen with their antics and budding romance.          

Yeah that haughty, I am being nice to the bastard now, attitude has driven me to distraction young as I in this publication business. Phil has obviously not seen fit to read my previous introduction or decided to consciously ignore that information when I gave my “credentials” for be able, young as I am, to do a review on a Bogie film. I had been reared by black and white film crazed parents who from an early age carted me off to various film festival retrospectives both in college and later. I, in my turn, when I came off age would go myself, and later with various cheap date dates to my own slew of such features. I say again for Phil or anybody else I don’t need some certificate to prove that I can write intelligently about Bogie or about the golden age of screwball comedy. An age when the likes of Preston Sturgis, George Cukor, and the director here Howard Hawks made America laugh at itself for a few minutes in the heat of the 1930s Greta Depression and later the slogging through World War II that my grandparents and great-grandparents went through. WTF how hard is that to understand . Kenny Jacobs] 

********

I had to laugh when I read Phil Larkin’s review of The Avengers since he gave it short shrift in the story-line department. Wrote the whole thing as some kind of ghoulish nightmare in about three lines so what he really wanted to write about was the “injustice” done to him-again. Which is maybe why Greg wanted me to do the Bringing Up Baby. Wanted to get more than three lines about the actual film he was reviewing. Of course with Baby, with any film you can do a sabotage job dismissing a film in a few words. You can also get the kernel of truth the film is trying to get at as well.

Here you have goof paleontologist Huxley, maybe vibes of Aldous, played by Cary Grant playing a little against type, fussing over finishing the construction of his pet project dinosaur bones getting that one last piece. Strangely just the day before he is to get married to his wet blanket assistant who only apparently wants him for his brain and fame potential. No way is Cary going to marry that person so let’s segue into later when to hustle some hard cash to finish up the project he winds up on a golf course trying to hustle dough from a rich matron’s lawyer. Enter poor little holy goof rich girl Susan, played by Katharine Hepburn playing pretty far from type and which ended up with poor box office haunting her career for a couple of years until she got all wistful and delightful in The Philadelphia Story. From that first meeting the pair exchange, mainly her exchange, a comedy of errors including a lot of dipsy-doodle around a dog and that last piece dinosaur bone. But you know as well as I do that through all the misadventures that holy goof Susan starts to grow on the good ancient bone goof Doctor. Of course there has to be one last pratfall by Susan to cement their mutual love with the poor innocent dinosaur taking a beating once more as if that millions of years ago extinction wasn’t humiliating enough. Short summary but more three lines to wrap up another Hollywood boy meets girl story that frankly was not hard for me to figure out or watch with interest. Touché Phil.         

***Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘50s Song Night- Warren Smith’s “Rock And Roll Ruby”-A Story Goes With It

***Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘50s Song Night- Warren Smith’s “Rock And Roll Ruby”

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

WARREN SMITH ROCK´N´ ROLL RUBY LYRICS

Well I took my Ruby jukin'
On the out-skirts of town
She took her high heels off
And rolled her stockings down
She put a quarter in the jukebox
To get a little beat
Everybody started watchin'
All the rhythm in her feet

She's my rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
Rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
When Ruby starts a-rockin'
Boy it satisfies my soul

Now Ruby started rockin' 'bout one o'clock
And when she started rockin'
She just couldn't stop
She rocked on the tables
And rolled on the floor
And Everybody yelled: "Ruby rock some more!"

She's my rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
Rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
When Ruby starts a-rockin'
Boy it satisfies my soul

It was 'round about four
I thought she would stop
She looked at me and then
She looked at the clock
She said: "Wait a minute Daddy
Now don't get sour
All I want to do
Is rock a little bit more"

She's my rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
Rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
When Ruby starts a-rockin'
Boy it satisfies my soul

One night my Ruby left me all alone
I tried to contact her on the telephone
I finally found her about twelve o'clock
She said: "Leave me alone Daddy
'cause your Ruby wants to rock"

She's my rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
Rock'n'roll Ruby, rock'n'roll
When Ruby starts a-rockin'
Boy it satisfies my soul
Rock, rock, rock'n'roll
Rock, rock, rock'n'roll
Rock, rock, rock'n'roll
Rock, rock, rock'n'roll
When Ruby starts a-rockin'
Boy it satisfies my soul
*****
Nobody had seen Billie (William James Bradley for those who are sticklers for detail and, by the way, not Billy, not some billy-goat thing like the boys in first grade called him, called him the last time anybody did so and he made Billie stick, and you will call him that too unless you want more, much more, than you can handle from a wiry, deceptively strong guy) for a while, a few months anyway back then, back in the late 1950s. I had drifted away from his circle, his corner boy circle, when my family moved across town to the other side of Adamsville, North Adamsville a couple of years before. And when Billie got into some stuff, some larceny stuff, mainly “clipping” things (you know five-finger discount at jewelry stores and drugstores mainly to get his girls, that’s plural, not a typo, some pretty “gift” to show his Billie love), and stealing cars if you must know, and when I decided, decided almost at the last minute, that I wanted no part of that scene that pretty much ended our best friend friendship. I still kept in touch with him for about a year or so after that and then when he got into his new “jag,” robbing stores, gas stations and the like, through keeping in touch with others.

Rumor had it, and it was always rumor with Billie whether he was right in the room or got his fate reported by one of his boys, one of his legend-producing boys which definitely including me at one time (I was the fawning flak par excellence and would have made Tony Curtis’s Sydney Falco in the film Sweet Smell Of Success look like nothing but kid’s stuff with my Billie build-ups), that he was shacked up with some “broad.” I admit I did my fair share to build up the Billie legend but that’s all, he just naturally filled in the empty spaces, empty spaces that he hated, and that characteristic goes a long way in telling why we hadn’t heard from him for a while except through that rumor mill.

The rumor mill also had it, to fill in the particulars, that he had stolen some car, a classic hopped-up 1949 Nash owned by a tough guy, real tough guy, named “Blindside” Buckley (that moniker tells you all you need to know about that august gentleman just keep clear of him, alright. So that’s two hombres to stay clear of in this sketch) or something like that, or maybe it was that he had stolen one car, abandoned it, and had stolen another. Either way sounds about right. Stole the cars and was holed up somewhere with a honey, Lucy (description to follow), that he had met down at the Sea and Surf teen nightclub across from the Paragon Park Amusement Park in Nantasket, a few miles outside of the town limits of Adamsville. Now this honey, this Lucy honey, was a little older than Billie but, and like I say this is rumor, she jumped on him from minute one when he walked in the door, leaving the guy she was with looking kind of stupid. And in the scheme of things he was probably prepared to commit mayhem on Billie (no brother, bad move, bad career, hell, bad life move).

Billie, no question, was a good-looking guy, was a real good dancer and, best of all, he had a great voice, a great rock and roll voice, that fit nicely, very nicely into the music that we were all listening to, listening to like crazy, on our little transistor radios back in the 1950s, mostly late 1950s. So maybe, for all I know, Lucy had heard Billie sing, sing at one of the two billion talents shows that he was always entering in order, as he constantly said, to win his fame and fortune. Like I said he was good, good at covering Top Forty stuff, but just short, just a short, I guess, of making that “projects” jail break-out move that he was always confident would occur once the talent guys heard him, really heard. At some point that dream faded like a lot of projects dreams faded early and hence his alternative career as a stick-up man.

And this honey, this red-headed Lucy, a luscious red-lipped honey was, reportedly, just the exact kind of honey that Billie dreamed of grabbing for his own. Great shape (great shape then meaning all fill-out curves and leggy legs, or something like that), great boffo hair (dark red, an obviously Irish girl), kittenly sexy, and most importantly ready to go all night whether dancing, doing this and that (figure it out, okay), or helping plan some caper. Just the kind of girl the priests and parents of even the projects neighborhood were always warning us against but which we boys still secretly dreamed of running up against, dreamed of hard. Yah, this Lucy was just Billie’s action, just his catnip. And so when I first heard that rumor, that Billie holed- up and out of sight rumor, I said yah, that seemed about right.

See Billie one night, one twelve- year old summer night, down in back of old Adamsville South Elementary School where we used to hang out because that was the only real hang-out place around, and talk, talk of futures, talk of dreams just like everybody else, every twelve- year old everybody else Billie kind of laid the whole thing out for us. He was going to parlay his singing voice, his rock and roll singing voice, into fame and fortune and when his ship came in he was going to search for his rock and roll soul-mate. He didn’t put it just this way but the idea was to get the hottest, sexiest, dancing-est girl around and sail off into the sunset leaving that dust of the projects behind, way behind.

So it looked like Billie had one part of his dream coming true, although being on the lam, being big time on the lam, from the cops, the owner of that hopped-up classic 1949 Nash, and maybe even that guy Lucy left looking stupid, take your choice, wasn’t part of the description back in those twelve- year old summer nights. But being sixteen, being in some dough, and being with the rock and roll queen of the seaside night still seems like a bargain worth having made with whatever devil Billie needed to consult to pull the caper off. Hell, it makes me think that maybe I made a mistake moving away from Billie’s orbit. But just call that a rumor too in case any cops are around, alright. Anyway, my reaction was now that Billie was holed up, any girls, red-headed or otherwise, who wanted to dance the night away please just call out my name. Hey, I could dream too.