Democrats Are Also Guilty As Hell! Flint’s Poisoned Water: Five Years of Cover-Up

Workers Vanguard No. 1159	23 August 2019

Democrats Are Also Guilty As Hell!

Flint’s Poisoned Water: Five Years of Cover-Up

“This news today is like being hit in the back of the head with a two-by-four.” That’s how one black Flint activist in late June expressed the deep anger against prosecutors from the Democratic Attorney General’s office who had dropped charges against eight government officials for deliberately poisoning the municipal water supply beginning in 2014. The prosecutors were trying to sell their whitewash investigation of the Flint water crisis and were shamefully offered the United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 659 union hall by the labor bureaucrats for a community forum. The meeting was yet another chapter in a massive bipartisan cover-up of a completely man-made public health disaster visited on an impoverished, majority-black city of nearly 100,000 people. A long trail of lies cannot hide the fact that this population, including an entire generation of children, suffered serious damage from extremely high lead levels—and Flint still does not have safe water.

The culprits include former Republican governor Rick Snyder and his crew, as well as Democrats, from the local level on up to the Obama White House. However, the problem is not simply one of bad actors. This racist atrocity is a searing indictment of a capitalist system based on the profit drive and built on a foundation of black oppression. Flint’s plight is an outcome of the workings of that system; the birthplace of General Motors was once truly Vehicle City, although it has long since been ravaged by deindustrialization. Back in the day, it boasted one of the highest per capita incomes in the nation—now 40 percent of its residents live in poverty, surrounded by shuttered factories and foreclosed homes. The crimes committed against the people of Flint underscore how we need a whole new ruling class: the workers.

Bourgeois politicians from both parties have had blood on their hands from the outset. In April 2014, with a Snyder-appointed “emergency manager” at the helm, the city began drawing water from the polluted Flint River rather than Lake Huron, its water source for a half-century. Democratic mayor Dayne Walling, a vocal advocate of the project, literally flipped the switch. The purported rationale for going off the Detroit water network and onto a source that had been a longtime industrial dumping ground for GM was to save cash-strapped Flint a few million dollars per year. Yet again, working people were expected to bear the brunt of “balancing” the city budget.

Every corner was cut in the process. Perhaps the most egregious: the water was not treated with corrosion control chemicals. River water, which is often acidic, will leach lead from pipes unless these chemicals are added to it. So, when the water source was changed, the untreated water supply became contaminated with lead, a dangerous neurotoxin. As the Centers for Disease Control has concluded, there is “no safe blood lead level.”

Immediately, residents complained about the foul water and the illnesses, rashes, nausea, hair loss and headaches it caused. That’s when the cover-up kicked into high gear. So-called experts were trotted out who pronounced the brown water pouring out of faucets to be perfectly fine. Four months after the switch, researchers found harmful bacteria in the water. Meanwhile, an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease killed 12 people. The campaign of deception picked up steam, with government officials swearing up and down that there was no problem and dismissing mounting evidence of widespread lead poisoning.

In September 2015, Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician at the city’s public hospital, faced a backlash after releasing a study demonstrating a dramatic elevation in blood lead levels among children. A Michigan health department spokeswoman attributed the study results to “seasonal spikes” having nothing to do with the water supply. The governor’s office complained that whistle-blowers were turning the lead issue into a “political football.” No government body gave a damn about Flint. Or as Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency regional water branch chief stated: “I’m not so sure Flint is the community we want to go out on a limb for.” The bourgeois rulers have nothing but contempt for black people, who in the majority are forcibly segregated at the bottom of U.S. society. Poor whites and Latinos in Flint are also deprived of clean water, demonstrating how the structural oppression of the black masses profoundly impacts all working people in capitalist America.

When the polluted water impacted General Motors, the reaction of the city bosses was very different. The river water was so corrosive to precision motor parts that the GM engine plant in the city was churning out a lot of duds. The automaker, not about to tolerate lost profits for any length of time, had the city switch the water source for the plant back to Lake Huron in October 2014. The rest of Flint, though, was not switched back for another year. Here is revealed a basic truth: the capitalist government, whether administered by Democrats or Republicans, serves only the interests of the owners of industry and the banks.

Today, well after the return to Lake Huron water, the nightmare is not over. Some 2,500 lead pipes are still in the ground, even with a replacement effort launched over three years ago. Flint residents still have to shell out for tap filters and bottled water to curtail risks.

The residents of other heavily black and Democrat-run cities, notably Newark, New Jersey, are also plagued by lead-tainted water, while other pollutants have made the water unsafe from West Virginia to California. For many decades, the high-profit lead industry sold large quantities of pipes and paint as cheap alternatives for construction especially in working-class and black neighborhoods, while openly disputing lead’s toxicity, which scientists had well established. To this day, millions of lead pipes are part of water networks across the country, and authorities regularly cheat when testing water to fudge lead levels. Any number of Flint-like public health disasters could be set off by an austerity scheme or one bad management decision.

No Illusions in the Democrats!

Democrats today blame Snyder and his emergency managers for the Flint disaster. Presidential contenders and the new crop of “progressives,” including U.S. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib from Detroit, feign shock and horror at the events in Flint in order to score cheap points against the Republicans. Current Democratic mayor Karen Weaver and governor Gretchen Whitmer are doing what politicians from the “lesser evil” bourgeois party do: attempting to dampen discontent and “restore trust” in government officials.

In fact, the very legislation granting the Michigan governor the power to hijack local governments in the event of an “emergency” was signed by Democrat James Blanchard in the 1980s. Over the years, Democrats and Republicans alike have decreed such takeovers in order to impose cuts in social services and as a club against public workers unions. Snyder’s Democratic predecessor put the Detroit Public Schools into this form of receivership in order to rob the pensions of union teachers and staff. By the end of 2013, most of the majority-black cities in Michigan were under the control of emergency managers, a tool of racist disenfranchisement.

At the time, Michigan, and most other states, had seized on budget crises following the 2007-08 financial meltdown of U.S. capitalism to squeeze working people and the poor for every last penny. The standard-bearer for this offensive was the Obama White House, which bailed out the banks and the auto industry. Massive concessions, including the extension of the low-wage tier for new hires, were wrested from the UAW, with the complicity of the union tops, in order to restore the profitability of the auto giants. Tens of thousands of UAW members were thrown out of their jobs; black workers, as always, were particularly hard hit.

In a high-profile publicity stunt, Obama visited Flint in May 2016, toward the end of his presidency. Grotesquely, he put a glass of city water to his lips (likely drinking nothing) to “prove” that it was safe, before reminiscing about eating lead paint chips as a child. The message to Flint residents was crystal clear: shut up and stop causing trouble.

Capitalism Must Go!

Over the decades, General Motors brought in wave after wave of labor to toil on the assembly lines, only to throw workers on the scrap heap beginning in the 1980s when the plants were no longer sufficiently profitable. A deindustrialized Flint was left to rot, as the auto bosses pulled up stakes.

From the early 20th century, Flint was shaped by the guiding influence of GM, which took an “apartheid approach to city building” in the words of Anna Clark, author of The Poisoned City (2018). For example, the company’s “Modern Housing Corporation” prohibited any of its properties from being “leased to or occupied by any person or persons not wholly of the white or Caucasian race.” GM promoted racial and ethnic antagonisms to pit workers against one another and forestall union organization.

At the time of the great sit-down strike of 1936-37 that forged the UAW, all GM’s Flint operations were strictly segregated, with only a few hundred black workers on the payroll. That victorious strike saw auto workers occupy the factories and hold them for over 40 days, as the Democratic governor conspired with the company to oust them with machine-gun-toting National Guardsmen. In the course of subsequent struggles, black workers were fully brought into the union. While they were the last hired and first fired by the auto bosses, their entry into the proletariat and later the Congress of Industrial Organizations marked a great advance for both the black population and the working class as a whole.

Today, the union is a far cry from what it once was. UAW membership in Flint has plummeted to some 7,000 workers, from around 80,000 in the late 1970s. Nonetheless, these auto workers still have significant social power—the 1998 strike at the GM Metal Center and East Delphi shut down the automaker’s production across North America. There is no lack of outrage among union members at what has happened in Flint—what’s lacking is leadership.

Where were the “labor statesmen” of the UAW throughout the water debacle? These bureaucrats, who identify with the capitalist profit system and are stalwarts of the Democratic Party, limited the union response to passing out bottled water, including to promote campaign appearances by Democrats. The devastation of Flint owes much to the role of the craven UAW tops in subordinating workers to the class enemy. As revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky explained in his 1940 article “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay,” monopoly capital “demands of the reformist bureaucracy and the labor aristocracy, who pick up the crumbs from its banquet table, that they become transformed into its political police before the eyes of the working class.”

A fight inside the unions is required to oust these political police, whose allegiance to the Democrats is not simply an impediment to labor struggle but also to the fundamental task of the working class: the shattering of the capitalist order. It is crucial to forge a new union leadership armed with a class-struggle program, one aimed at breaking labor’s chains to the Democrats. This fight is linked to building a workers party dedicated to ending capitalist wage slavery altogether. Under a class-struggle leadership, the labor movement would fight for the highest-quality health services and public education, including the remedial programs essential to mitigate the impact of child lead poisoning. It would also fight for union safety committees to enforce safety standards and practices in order to protect the well-being of workers, as well as the general public.

The Flint River project is a prime example of socially unnecessary public works—and it still would have been even if its implementation had adhered to basic safety protocols. Any water infrastructure overhaul in Flint should have begun by replacing all the lead pipes. A labor movement with a class-struggle leadership would demand a full mobilization of resources to locate, excavate and swap out such pipes, in Flint, Newark and elsewhere, including by hiring those thrown out of factory jobs and the rest of the unemployed to perform the work under union control at union-scale wages.

Since capitalism cannot meet basic human needs, like providing clean water, it deserves to perish. But for that to happen requires forging a revolutionary workers party that will rip power out of the hands of the exploiters and create a society organized to meet human needs, not private profit. This party would champion black freedom, immigrant rights and the cause of all the oppressed, striving to win to its banner a core leadership component of black and Latino workers. The only way to guarantee good living conditions, jobs for all and an end to capitalist exploitation and racist oppression is by expropriating the bourgeoisie through socialist revolution. A workers America will waste no time in cleaning up the deadly legacies of rapacious capitalism.

The Centennial Of Pete Seeger’s Birthday (1919-2014)- From The Archives Of Marxism-*On The Passing Of Folklorist And Ardent Stalinist Irwin Silber- A Short Note

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the late folklorist and political activist Irwin Silber.

Markin comment:

In a recent post linking to a New York Times obituary concerning the passing of Irwin Silber, well- known folklorist and left political activist I made a point, as I have in this headline, of mentioning his ardent and long time Stalinist inclinations. I also noted in the post that if one wanted examples of that political bent then one could Google the Guardian (U.S.) archive for anti-Trotskyist (using the classic giveaway “Trotskyite”) material that he wrote during the 1970s when his Stalinist bent tilted in the direction of the Maoism. As it turns out, at least for now, I have been unable to Google any articles by Silber, or for that matter the Guardian itself. That newspaper ceased publication in the 1990s and, apparently, no one has deemed it necessary, as of yet, to see that the archives enter cyberspace. However, in order to give a flavor of what I am speaking of I have enclosed the link to a twelve-part series run in the Guardian in 1973 (while Silber was on the editorial staff) by Carl Davidson entitled Left in Form, Right in Essence: A Critique of Contemporary Trotskyism. (http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/critiques/guardian/index.htm).

Let’s make something clear on Stalinism, at least what is essential about it for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, while we are on the subject. In the United States, at least when anyone utters the epitaph Stalinist (or Stalin) that conjures up the KGB, gulags, Moscow Trials, slave labor camps, the Cold War, totalitarianism, and assorted other negative labels. As Trotskyists, whose forbears lost the political battle to Stalinism in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, we are painfully aware of all of that, including the lost of our historic leader to assassination at the hands of a Stalinist agent in 1940.

But for us, and this is where a bloodline is drawn between the Stalinists and us, including Irwin Silber, it is our perspectives for revolution that distinguish us. In shorthand, does one stand in the tradition of “socialism in one country", or "half a country", or "one island', or whatever political franchise one is craving for and extolling or for international revolution? Does one stand for one-stage workers revolution in the modern age (basically post-1848) or two-stage revolution, first “democratic” (maybe) and then socialist (never, or in the very, very distant future- witness South Africa today for the latest edition). The fight in the international working class movement, at least of its Marxist component, has always, in the end, been fought on that axis. That is the sense is which one Irwin Silber was, from the time he was a pup, an ardent Stalinist.

Note: In the Marxist movement it has always been, or always should have been the case, that in writing political obituaries one should not take a pass on a person’s political life. I have taken my shots at Silber’s politics, and that is that. However, if one reads the whole of the Wikipedia entry one will find that Brother Silber (the brother will be explained presently) wrote a non-political book on the struggles involved with hip and knee replacements. This is one subject on which aging Stalinists and aging Trostkyists can make a principled united front. Hell, we can throw in the anarchists and social democrats as well. That said, back to the political struggles.

Happy, Happy 100th Birthday Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti-Max Daddy Of Famed “City Lights Bookstore” In “Beat” San Francisco When It Counted And Muse Of His Generation’s Poets

Happy, Happy 100^th Birthday Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti-Max Daddy Of Famed “City Lights Bookstore” In “Beat” San Francisco When It Counted And Muse Of His Generation’s Poets

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)

By Book Critic Zack James

To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe the truth, maybe just for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in flea-bit hotels, all-night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. (Yes,  I know that the actual term “beat” was first used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis) Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my older brother Alex they called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard achieved one skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, dead beat, run out on money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the mean streets of New York, Chi town, North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps, half stirred left on corner diners’ coffees and cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).

I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50^th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers, connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to trash those connection when they acolytes came calling looking for the “word.” So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth Hostel brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother and his crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a place like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands). Literary stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter of which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life as a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back).             

Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add my brother’s Alex name into the mix that automatically brings up memories of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh (he a separate story from up in Olde Saco, Maine),   Bart, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967, their birthright event, just mentioned.  Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker who got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of years before (and which nobody in the crowd paid any attention to, or dismissed out of hand what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie  and a bunch of other guys who took a very different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of a very different world.

But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s book which had caused a big splash in 1957(after an incredible publishing travail since the story line actually related to events in the late 1940s and which would cause Jack no end of trauma when the kids showed up at his door looking to hitch a ride on the motherlode star, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s (and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway, like I say I think the best part, have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.    

Like I said above Alex was out on the road two years and other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more years upon his return before his untimely and semi-tragic end. With maybe this difference from today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and pinkos called it that for fear of being tarred with those brushes. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin included, were strictly “from hunger” working class kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some   hot chick’s pants any way they could as anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little bit “from hunger” takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.

What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley the “Scribe” from the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the “midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would have the inept Markin actually execute the plan. That was for smooth as silk Frankie now also a high-road lawyer to lead. That operational sense was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.

The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny Bob Dylan above all else) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road. They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my brother Alex’s memory bank.)

Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring. So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping almost like Jack wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll in about three weeks. So it was through Markin via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60^th anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.           

Puerto Rico Por un partido obrero revolucionario ¡Abajo la Junta colonial! ¡Por el derecho a la independencia!

Workers Vanguard No. 1159	23 August 2019

Puerto Rico

Por un partido obrero revolucionario

¡Abajo la Junta colonial!

¡Por el derecho a la independencia!

Puerto Rico enfrenta una crisis política después de que algunas de las protestas más grandes en su historia forzaron la renuncia del odiado gobernador Ricardo Rosselló el mes pasado. La chispa que encendió la llama fue la filtración del registro de mensajes privados entre Rosselló y sus compinches, los cuales exudaban intolerancia, misoginia y burla hacia los pobres. Para los 3.2 millones de ciudadanos que residen en un territorio que se encuentra bajo la bota de la dominación colonial estadounidense, los agravios van más allá: austeridad brutal, desempleo masivo; y escuelas, hospitales y el sistema de transporte en deterioro. Ahora, los amos estadounidenses, con la ayuda de los políticos burgueses puertorriqueños, están planeando abiertamente intensificar su férreo control sobre su colonia. En primer lugar, están imponiendo los dictados del consejo de control fiscal de Wall Street, conocido como la “Junta”, para hacer pagar a las masas empobrecidas miles de millones de dólares de deuda a los mismos capitalistas estadounidenses quienes arruinaron la economía del país.

Después de cinco días de gobierno del sucesor designado por Rosselló, Pedro Pierluisi, un abogado de la Junta, la nueva ocupante de la mansión del gobernador, La Fortaleza, es la antigua secretaria de justicia Wanda Vázquez, otra compinche de Rosselló. Washington tiene en la mira a Jenniffer González, una partidaria de Trump y comisionada residente de Puerto Rico en la Cámara de Representantes de EE.UU., en caso de que Vázquez encuentre oposición generalizada. Vázquez, notoria por encubrir la corrupción del gobierno en su puesto previo, es repudiada por haberse rehusado a investigar el desvío de fondos y ayuda para aliviar los estragos del huracán María. Ese desastre en 2017 estuvo marcado por el desdén criminal y chovinista de los gobernantes estadounidenses hacia los puertorriqueños: más de 4 mil fueron abandonados para morir en la secuela de María y sectores completos de la cadena de islas permanecen devastados hasta ahora.

Desde que se apoderó del territorio caribeño durante la Guerra Hispano-Estadounidense hace 121 años, el imperialismo de EE.UU. ha saqueado Puerto Rico, explotado a sus trabajadores y luego, devastado. Aunque Puerto Rico ha sido designado eufemísticamente desde 1952 como un “estado libre asociado” para dar la ilusión de autogobierno, hasta el día de hoy el gobierno de EE.UU. lleva la batuta, controlando todo desde la moneda y las comunicaciones hasta las relaciones comerciales y los embarques. Esta subyugación colonial es una versión actual de white man’s burden [la carga del hombre blanco], por la cual la potencia imperialista blanca domina a sus súbditos de piel oscura con la excusa de “civilizarlos”. Los puertorriqueños son ciudadanos estadounidenses de segunda clase, y aquellos que viven en Puerto Rico están privados de voto en las elecciones federales (incluso su representante en el congreso no tiene voto oficial) pero son mantenidos por completo como rehenes del poder federal, incluyendo al FBI y el ejército. Exigimos: ¡Todas las tropas y agentes federales de EE.UU. fuera de Puerto Rico ahora!

Esperando apaciguar la agitación reciente y volver a la normalidad, demócratas y republicanos llamaron a Rosselló a dimitir. El 2 de agosto, la Casa Blanca anunció que suspendería, a manera de castigo, 8 mil millones de dólares en ayuda federal a Puerto Rico debido a los disturbios políticos. Mientras que Trump es una personificación abierta de la arrogancia racista y la avaricia capitalista, los demócratas representan a la misma clase imperialista dominante. Fue Barack Obama quien implementó la ley PROMESA de 2016 mediante la cual se nombró al consejo de control fiscal de banqueros y directores de empresas, extraídos de compañías que se han beneficiado directamente de décadas de estafas financieras, para seguir desangrando y matando de hambre a Puerto Rico. Declarando cerca de 74 mil millones de dólares sólo en bonos de deuda, la junta es una agencia tiránica de recaudación para los acreedores buitres y toma sus decisiones a puerta cerrada.

Aunque algo de calma ha regresado a las calles por ahora, los puertorriqueños están más que hartos. Lo que es vital es que la clase obrera emerja como líder de los desempleados, los estudiantes y todos los oprimidos del país, particularmente las mujeres quienes sufren de violencia y un estatus degradado. La clase obrera es la fuerza con el poder social y el interés histórico para poner fin tanto a la opresión colonial como a la miseria capitalista mediante la revolución socialista.

Los obreros en EE.UU. y en Puerto Rico comparten un enemigo de clase en común: los gobernantes capitalistas estadounidenses. También hay un vínculo de carne y hueso: los puertorriqueños constituyen un componente clave de la clase obrera organizada en varias ciudades de EE.UU., donde son sujetos a abuso racista por las fuerzas del estado capitalista. La clase obrera estadounidense debe tomar lado con sus hermanos y hermanas de clase y exigir: ¡Cancelar la deuda de Puerto Rico! El oponerse al sistema entero de peonaje de deuda respondería a la ira justificada de los puertorriqueños sobre las maquinaciones secretas de la Junta, la cual se rehúsa a divulgar sus planes de austeridad.

Favorecemos la independencia de Puerto Rico como parte de nuestra oposición al imperialismo estadounidense. Al mismo tiempo, estamos conscientes de que la mayoría de los puertorriqueños se sienten ambivalentes sobre la independencia. Al tiempo que detestan su estatus colonial y tienen un fuerte sentido de nacionalidad, se les permite vivir y trabajar legalmente en EE.UU., como lo hacen más de 5 millones, sin la misma amenaza de deportación o detención por el I.C.E. que enfrentan los inmigrantes latinos. Debería ser decisión de las masas puertorriqueñas decidir cómo quieren ejercer su autodeterminación nacional. Por tanto, insistimos en el derecho a la independencia de Puerto Rico.

Nuestro objetivo es construir un partido leninista de vanguardia en Puerto Rico que pueda intervenir en las luchas en contra de la opresión colonial, luchando por dirigirlas no sólo contra los amos estadounidenses, sino también contra sus lacayos burgueses locales, con la meta de establecer el dominio de la clase obrera. Sólo el proletariado en el poder puede comenzar a sentar las bases materiales para emancipar a las masas puertorriqueñas de la subyugación imperialista.

Una república obrera puertorriqueña enfrentaría enormes obstáculos y enemigos poderosos, centralmente la burguesía estadounidense. El dominio proletario en Puerto Rico tendría que ser extendido internacionalmente. Lo que se plantea es forjar partidos leninistas en el centro imperialista y en todo el Caribe como parte de una internacional revolucionaria. Un partido obrero multirracial en EE.UU. ganaría a los obreros estadounidenses a avanzar las luchas por la liberación nacional de Puerto Rico que son indispensables para derribar el orden capitalista en casa.

Por una perspectiva de lucha de clases

La consigna popular de protesta “que se vayan todos” era una expresión de la intensa desconfianza hacia los títeres leales a Washington, incluyendo tanto al gobernante Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP), partidario de la anexión como estado, como al históricamente partidario del “estado libre asociado” Partido Popular Democrático (PPD). La alcaldesa de San Juan del PPD, Carmen Yulín Cruz, participó en las manifestaciones, declarando su oposición a la corrupción y a la Junta. Pero por más de seis años como jefa del ejecutivo de la capital, ella ha supervisado las medidas de austeridad y comanda la fuerza policial represiva de San Juan. Cruz, quien ha sido blanco de la cólera de Trump y copresidenta de la campaña de Bernie Sanders, está promocionándose como una populista para capitalizar el descontento generalizado hacia su aspiración electoral para ser gobernadora en 2020.

Muchos políticos de los dos principales partidos en Puerto Rico están directamente afiliados a los partidos burgueses estadounidenses que dominan lo que consideran su “patio trasero” colonial. (Rosselló y Cruz son ambos demócratas.) En EE.UU. los demócratas “progresistas” como Sanders apuntan a renovar la imagen del partido y con eso manejar la misma maquinaria de dominación imperialista. Un obstáculo importante para que la clase obrera se movilice en su propio interés es la mentira de que los demócratas —quienes mantienen el mismo orden dirigido por las ganancias como los republicanos— pueden ser presionados para actuar en nombre de los explotados y los oprimidos. Esta estrategia es promovida por gran parte de la izquierda y la burocracia sindical, esta última constituye un estrato del Partido Demócrata.

En Puerto Rico durante los últimos años las movilizaciones masivas de estudiantes, maestros y otros, así como las huelgas obreras, han sido llevadas a cabo en contra de amenazas de privatización, cierre de escuelas, robo de pensiones y recortes presupuestales. Los sindicatos UTIER de trabajadores electricistas y FMPR de maestros han estado en la primera línea de las protestas contra la destrucción de los sindicatos y los recortes, y ambos jugaron un papel en el paro de un millón de personas el 22 de julio para destituir a Rosselló. Pero en vez de colocarse a la cabeza de las masas oprimidas y desposeídas, el proletariado fue disuelto en “el pueblo” por sus falsos líderes sindicales, lo cual sirve para desaparecer el poder social único de la clase obrera, cuyo trabajo hace funcionar a la sociedad.

Los dirigentes sindicales contienen a la clase obrera combativa con la noción nacionalista de que “todos somos puertorriqueños”, lo que se traduce en unidad con los capitalistas locales y sus representantes políticos. Después de la toma de protesta de Vázquez como gobernadora, una formación de sindicatos, que incluía a UTIER y FMPR, publicó una apelación formal al gobierno. Un comunicado de prensa del 17 de agosto describe cómo los líderes sindicales llamaron al nuevo gobierno a “definir una posición de defensa de los intereses del pueblo puertorriqueño frente a la Junta de Control Fiscal” y “se atiendan los reclamos de justicia laboral y social”.

Las masas trabajadoras no tienen nada en común con el gobierno capitalista. Lo que se requiere es una dirección de lucha de clases de los sindicatos que actúe con esta perspectiva, oponiéndose a todos los políticos y partidos que apoyan al capitalismo —desde el PNP y el PPD hasta el Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño pequeñoburgués—. Tal dirección estaría comprometida con ayudar a construir un partido obrero revolucionario.

Una perspectiva nacionalista también se puede ver en las apelaciones frecuentes a los policías como compañeros trabajadores y víctimas de los recortes presupuestales. La policía, conocida como “la uniformada”, no es un conjunto de trabajadores o de aliados potenciales, sino una parte central del estado burgués. Su papel es el de rompehuelgas, y sus asociaciones no tienen lugar en el movimiento sindical. Incluso si vienen de un origen pobre u obrero, los policías son los violentos encargados del funcionamiento del sistema de subyugación colonial y los matones de los patrones. Cuando los policías se movilizan por salarios y pensiones, lo hacen para estar en mejores condiciones para reprimir. Desde sus orígenes en 1899, el año después de que el ejército de EE.UU. invadió y tomó posesión del país, la policía puertorriqueña ha ayudado a mantener a los súbditos coloniales de Washington bajo su bota, incluyendo la guerra sangrienta de décadas contra los independentistas.

En medio de la crisis actual, algunos izquierdistas han impulsado alternativas que simplemente buscan reformar el orden colonial y el dominio capitalista. Tal es el caso de los reformistas alrededor de la publicación estadounidense Left Voice, afiliada a la Fracción Trotskista-Cuarta Internacional. Aunque afirman oponerse al régimen colonial y estar por la revolución socialista, Left Voice plantea la convocatoria por una “asamblea constituyente libre y soberana” que “permitiría a la clase obrera, al calor de la lucha, desarrollar sus propios cuerpos de autoorganización” (“A Revolutionary Perspective for Puerto Rico” [Una perspectiva revolucionaria para Puerto Rico], 3 de agosto). Ellos afirman que una asamblea constituyente “debe discutir y tomar decisiones democráticas sobre las grandes transformaciones estructurales que requiere el país para imponer su liberación nacional, terminar con el saqueo imperialista y reconstruir su economía”.

De hecho, el llamado por una asamblea constituyente es un obstáculo para que la clase obrera desarrolle el tipo de conciencia y organización revolucionaria de clase necesarias para su propia emancipación. Una asamblea constituyente es un gobierno burgués, y su llamado ha sido usado históricamente para descarrilar la revolución proletaria. Sólo después de que la clase obrera haya tomado el poder estatal y establecido un gobierno obrero podrá decidir cómo reconstruir la sociedad para beneficio de la vasta mayoría de la población, incluyendo la provisión de empleos, así como de vivienda, educación y servicios de salud de calidad.

En última instancia, sólo la extensión internacional de la revolución socialista puede satisfacer las necesidades básicas de las masas: el fin de la pobreza, libertad del yugo imperialista, igualdad social para las mujeres y otros estratos profundamente oprimidos como los gays y los transexuales. Para nosotros en las entrañas de la bestia imperialista estadounidense, la lucha por la liberación nacional de Puerto Rico es especialmente importante. Como enfatizan las “21 condiciones” de membresía en la entonces revolucionaria Internacional Comunista, adoptadas en 1920, es el deber de los comunistas “apoyar todo movimiento de liberación nacional en las colonias no sólo en palabras sino en los hechos”. Esta tarea incluye infundir “en los corazones de los trabajadores de su país una actitud verdaderamente fraterna hacia el pueblo trabajador en las colonias y hacia las naciones oprimidas”.

A View From The American Left- Which Side Are You?- Union Busting Coal Bosses, Sellout Labor Tops Harlan County Miners: Pay Them Now!

Workers Vanguard No. 1160	6 September 2019

Union Busting Coal Bosses, Sellout Labor Tops

Harlan County Miners: Pay Them Now!

“No Pay, We Stay!” echoes across Harlan County, Kentucky, Appalachian coal country where heroes and martyrs of labor battles past lie buried. Since July 29, laid-off miners have occupied railroad tracks to stop coal from being sold off by non-union Blackjewel, the bankrupt mining company that axed 1,800 jobs without notice in Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming. Court documents show that management knew there was no money in its accounts when it cut paychecks on June 28.

Now the determined former mine workers, who have no union to defend them, are being jacked around by the bosses’ bankruptcy courts and the bloodsucking banks, which heaped financial penalties on the miners when their checks bounced, forcing them to scramble to pay bills. Even unemployment claims have been held up because Blackjewel issued no pink slips. The company also failed to make proper reports to Social Security and payments to the health savings plan for its workforce. In Kentucky alone, miners are owed at least $2.5 million. Kopper Glo Mining has since bought the Harlan mines, offering a pittance of $450,000 to the miners and a paper promise to rehire some of them. Pay the miners now!

While the new bosses seek to tamp down the anger of the miners by offering them a few crumbs, finance capitalists feast on the main course as Blackjewel assets are liquidated. Riverstone Holdings stands first in line, having declared itself “super-priority senior secured debtor-in-possession” when loaning the mining outfit $32 million beginning two years ago. The very purpose of bankruptcy law and the courts that enforce it is to protect the interests of capital.

Bankruptcy proceedings have been used by the bosses in industry after industry to slash labor costs and gut unions, and coal mining is a prime example. In the 1970s, the coal barons hatched a plan to move production from the heavily unionized, labor-intensive coal fields of Appalachia and the Midwest to more efficient, high-profit strip mining in the West, far from the historic base of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Today, Wyoming is home to some 40 percent of U.S. coal production.

As the mine owners packed up and went west, bankruptcies became their favored weapon for busting the UMWA. Operations were reorganized under Chapter 11 to close union mines piecemeal and reopen them without union labor. This wave of bankruptcies, particularly over the past decade, goes some way toward explaining why the Blackjewel mines were non-union, including in Harlan County. “Bloody Harlan” was the site in the 1930s and again in the ’70s of pitched battles between miners fighting for union organization and the bosses’ armed attack dogs, both in and out of uniform. Immortalized in the 1976 documentary Harlan County, U.S.A., the 1974 Brookside strike was won when the UMWA ranks engaged in a nationwide week-long memorial strike in response to the murder of a union supporter by one of the Duke Power Company’s gun thugs.

In the course of the 1930s, the UMWA became the largest and arguably most powerful union in the U.S., with 800,000 members. Today, it is a shadow of its former self, representing 20,000 active miners, less than half of the roughly 50,000 remaining. As the coal bosses shuttered mines and slashed jobs over the years, the UMWA bureaucracy facilitated the decline in union power, preaching reliance on the bosses’ political representatives, especially the Democrats but also Republicans.

In a sign of the times, there is not a single working UMWA member in all of Kentucky. The state’s last union mine, the Highland Mine, belonged to Patriot Coal. That company, spun off by Peabody Energy in 2007, had been “set up to fail” in a bid by the mine owners to purge their books of UMWA pension and health care liabilities. After Patriot declared bankruptcy in 2013, the UMWA tops pinned the union’s fortunes on its status as a creditor, as well as on the good graces of Democrat Jay Rockefeller, then U.S. Senator from West Virginia and great-grandson of oil magnate John D. Rockefeller. The Highland Mine closed two years later.

The plight of the Blackjewel miners is emblematic of the plight of coal miners throughout Appalachia and beyond. The industry has for years experienced job contraction, a trend fueled by capitalist market forces and technological development, including greater resort to strip mining. With the boom in hydraulic fracking, natural gas is now abundant and cheaper. Last year, the electricity-generating capacity of natural gas-fired power plants in the U.S. surpassed that of coal-fired plants for the first time. The accompanying devastation of laid-off mine workers and their communities is a testament to the irrational destructiveness of capitalist production for private profit. Miners who for decades put their lives and lungs at risk to perform backbreaking labor deep underground are now deemed expendable by the capitalists.

There is a burning need for a class-struggle fight to organize the unorganized, in the coal industry and throughout the entire energy sector, in order to bolster the fighting capacity of the workers against the bosses. Unions are vital to enforce safety standards on the job and to wrest real gains from the employers, like the cradle-to-grave health care miners once had. At the same time, though, trade-union struggle alone cannot stop the capitalist rulers from looting the wealth of society and discarding their wage slaves when operations are no longer profitable.

Such struggles must be linked to a fight to expropriate the mines, gas and oil wells and other means of production through socialist revolution, which would lay the basis for a rational planned economy. Crucial to this perspective is the forging of a multiracial workers party, the necessary instrument to bring the working class to power. When those who labor rule, production will serve human need, and only then will everyone be provided for, with new technology serving to better the lives of all, rather than to pauperize whole swaths of the population.

For a Class-Struggle Union Leadership!

Earlier this year, the UMWA tops held a “30th Anniversary Pittston Strike Celebration.” Far from a “victory for the labor movement,” as was claimed there, the eleven-month strike was betrayed by the bureaucrats, especially then UMWA head and current AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka and his lieutenant, Cecil Roberts, who is today the union president. With miners industrywide champing at the bit to fight the coal bosses and their government, UMWA leaders instead threw everything into a toothless “corporate campaign” that appealed to the supposed good conscience of the ruthless capitalist class. Among other things, union members were sent to beg the big banks not to lend money to the Pittston Coal Company. After wildcat strikes broke out in ten states and a coal-processing plant was occupied, Trumka & Co. herded the ranks back to work, bowing before court injunctions and bending over backward to appease the “friend of labor” Democrats they supported.

Over the decades, the combativity of the miners often ran up against the UMWA bureaucracy’s allegiance to the capitalist order. For example, a series of hard-fought strikes in the 1970s saw miners revolt against every wing of their union officialdom, from the despotic Tony Boyle to the treacherous Arnold Miller, notorious for asking the Labor Department to intervene against his opponent in a union election. In fact, the Great Coal Strike of 1978 was waged in defiance of both Miller and a Taft-Hartley back-to-work order issued by Democrat Jimmy Carter. (For more, see WV pamphlet “The Great Coal Strike of 1978.”)

Pittston proved a turning point for the union, as Trumka was able to hogtie the historically militant UMWA membership by playing by the bosses’ rules. His successor, Roberts, has followed suit. In recent months, the UMWA president invited the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls to coal country to drum up support for candidates of that party of the class enemy, while also praising the Trump administration for its efforts boosting the coal companies. Truth is, as the Blackjewel bankruptcy attests, Trump’s claim to have “saved coal” is a cruel hoax. But so is the “just transition” offered the miners by Democratic Party politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders under the “Green New Deal.” The transition in question is the pie-in-the-sky promise of job retraining for workers in the fossil fuel industries that these Dems want to wipe out in the name of combating climate change.

The Democratic Socialists of America and other “progressive” Democrats advocate this scam, which is little more than a ploy to garner votes, especially from student youth, liberal environmentalists and select union bureaucrats, by putting a “worker friendly” spin on anti-carbon bourgeois energy policy. The reformists of Socialist Alternative peddle the same rubbish, calling their version of how best to power the capitalist economy a “Green New Deal for working people.” The proposition that the capitalist rulers will provide miners with decent jobs outside the mining industry is ludicrous. Under successive Democratic and Republican administrations, coal communities have been totally impoverished.

The anarchic and crisis-ridden capitalist system not only devastates the working masses but also is the main obstacle to addressing human-induced global warming on the necessary global scale. Only in the context of a world socialist economy that relegates poverty to the past can a rational plan be hammered out to modulate climate change and minimize its human toll. At the end of the day, those touting a “Green New Deal” are using the issue of global warming to advance an anti-worker agenda.

Its backers place themselves in the tradition of liberal hero Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal legislation was designed to restore capitalist profits and contain working-class struggles within bounds acceptable to the ruling class. The 1935 Wagner Act, which is hailed by labor officialdom to this day, set up a mechanism to put union organizing under the thumb of the capitalist state. In so doing, FDR was intent on keeping the new wave of unionization from falling under the sway of avowed Marxists. The year prior, three victorious citywide strikes led by communists and socialists—in Minneapolis, San Francisco and Toledo—had opened the door to the organization of the CIO industrial unions.

The UMWA and other unions need a leadership that won’t crawl on its knees for any capitalist politician but will fight on the picket lines. A leadership proceeding from the standpoint of class against class would break all union ties to the Democrats and launch important struggles, not least a concerted campaign from Wyoming to West Virginia to bring workers in the strip mines, the vast fracking fields and everywhere else into the unions. In the face of the catastrophe of joblessness, workers armed with a class-struggle program would fight for a sliding scale of hours to divide up the available work at no loss in pay, among other transitional demands aimed at uniting the proletariat and the unemployed in struggle to sweep away the capitalist exploiters. The Spartacist League/U.S., uniquely on the American left, has as its perspective the building of a revolutionary workers party to make a new society possible.

A Slice Of Teenage Life-Circa 1960s-With Myrna Loy And Cary Grant’s “The Bachelor And The Bobby-Soxer” In Mind

A Slice Of Teenage Life-Circa 1960s-With Myrna Loy And Cary Grant’s “The Bachelor And The Bobby-Soxer” In Mind    

By Guest Film Critic Prescott Blaine

[Prescott Blaine, now comfortably retired, comfortably for those editors, publishers and fellow writers particularly those who have tangled with him on the film criticism beats for the past forty years or so decided he just had to comment about his own growing up in the 1950s teenage life. I had done a short film review on a 1940s film The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer. Cary Grant the bachelor to Shirley Temple’s bobby-soxer with Myrna Loy more well-known as the helpful detective in her own right wife Nora Charles opposite William Powell’s Nick in the seemingly never-ending The Thin Man series of the same decade. I had in passing mentioned my reasoning for even touching this piece of fluff. The key was in the title, or part of it, the “bobby-soxer” part which represented to my mind one of the key terms from teenage times in the 1940s where bobby-soxers were associated with the fast jitter-bugging set since those socks made it easier to traverse those slippery high school gym floor where sock hops have been held since, well, since they started having school dances to keep unruly and wayward kids in check. I figured I would get a low-down on what was what.

I had followed a false lead though since despite the enticing possibility that I would learn something about teenage life in the immediate post-World War II period the real thrust of the film was the inevitable romancing between Grant and Loy’s characters. I should have sensed that if goody-goody Shirley Temple was holding forth I would learn less about that decade’s teen concerns than if I had asked a surviving elderly uncle of mine.

Oh sure I did learn that girls went crazy for guys with “boss” cars, worried, worried somewhat about their reputations meaning worrying about being known as high school sluts and that they were as perfidious when the deal went down as the teenage girls in Prescott’s and my generation and probably now too. When I mentioned that to him one day in his office at the American Film Review where he still shows up occasionally to do pinch-hit work when the editor Ben Goldman needs a quick “think” piece to fill up an issue he laughed at me. Laughed at me foremost because of my, his term, sophomoric idea that you could learn anything about teen life in any age when you had certified stars like Grant and Loy tangling just short of the satin sheets and because it would not be until the 1980s when Hollywood produced some films based on S.E. Hinton’s novels that you would get anything like an informative look at a slice of real teen life.        

Follow me here to get an idea of what Mr. Blaine is like when he gets on his hobby-horse. From that “profound” (my quotation marks) comment he asked, I won’t say begged because Prescott is not like that most of the time, or at least he wasn’t in the old days, to let me use my space here to go back into his teenage days in the 1950s, the mid-1950s when rock and roll came running up the road (although we are near contemporaries my coming of age teenage time was about five years later and reflected a drought period in rock and roll which I filled in by “discovering” the blues). Needless to say since this piece has Prescott’s by-line he sold me on the idea-for one shot anyway. Below is what he wants to share about 1950s teenage culture-Sam Lowell]    

WTF Sam (a term I would not have used in my professional career in print and certainly not to start an article but as Sam has mentioned I am comfortably ensconced in retirement and besides I am playing on his dime) even a wet behinds the ears kid in the 1950s who didn’t figure out what was what until sometime in the mid-1960s knows that when the fresh breeze of rock and roll hit the planet the whole thing opened up the big three that was on every alive and awake teenager, teenage boy (the girls can speak for themselves but they will tell the same basic story) mind-drive-in theaters, drive-in restaurants and grabbing every loose girl not tied down. (Not literally but then we had a strange male-driven code honored I think more in the breech than the observance that if a girl had a guy that meant she was off-limits to other guys. Like I said honored in the breech much mother that the observance.)

WTF sex is what I am talking about because all three things were connected by a million threads, a million threats that made up  1950s teenage life (maybe now too but since drive-in movies and restaurants and maybe access to girls too depended on the golden age of the automobile car, borrowed or sweated for, which today’s youth are not nearly as enamored of, hell, some of them don’t even have driver’s licenses that premise may be questioned). Tie all that in with rock and roll and the rest of what I have to say makes total sense even to a guy like Sam.

A lot of what was what then had to do with corner boy life something that has for the most part gone by the boards between the rise of the malls (and “mall rats” a totally different thing than on the edge, quasi-illegal corner boy life reflecting certain hungers that never could be satisfied in a strictly legal way which the denizens of the mall do not exhibit since they are fixed up pretty well) and the totally bizarre actions of local police departments to hustle kids off the street corners on behalf of  local businessmen and satraps. Let’s face it the whole mix had to be cemented with dough, dough anyway we could get it, or we would still be standing on those forlorn corners (or doing time in some state or county institution).

Not to belabor the point but it bears notice it is amazing how much our waking hours, maybe dreaming hours too centered on girls (and those dreaming hours included the then forbidden talk about masturbation, about what Father Lally up at Sacred Heart Catholic Church called “touching” yourself but we all knew what he meant even if we were not quite sure what masturbation was and would have never dared asked parents about such an evil thing (according to Lally who would later be transferred out because he “touched” boys and girls and was an early figure of interest in the breakthrough Catholic priest abuse scandal that rocked  the archdiocese of Boston, via the spotlight from The Boston Globe). Nor would they have voluntarily or involuntarily been forthcoming about sex issues and so we learned most of it on the streets-mainly wrong or stupid.                 

There were some funny parts, maybe not funny at the time but funny now and stuff I want to tell about for the record since not only are we fading from the scene but the two- generation social media-driven gap between my growing up time and today is far greater than between box-soxers of the 1940s and the cashmere sweaters of the 1950s. A staple of existence then for poor boys especially was the weekly school and/or church dance since we could not afford other pay dances held in various locations for the progeny of the town swells. The dances although touted by the school and church authorities as keeping us youth from going over the edge on the rock and roll craze which they saw as just an episode, a fade really were our lifeline into social existence. (That Father Lally mentioned early used the dances for laying a trap for his prey as it turned out and more than one teacher chaperone at school dances got a little over the top when the girls came along looking all sexy and serene.)   They at least got us to bathe, shave if necessary, use deodorant, slick our hair and wear something other than cuff-less chinos or blue jeans since sports jackets and dress shirts were required.

But that was all social graces stuff. What we craved, what we spent the week day-dreaming and talking about was who we would dance with (or who would dance with us). Above all else who would we dance the last slow dance of the night with after our night’s efforts. Most of the music of the times, mercifully in many cases, was geared to fast dancing which meant each partner was more or less free to do their own gyrations and keep a safe distance from toes and other vulnerable body parts of that partner but the last dance was always a slow one, one that those “going steady” immediately got up and danced to, and others who had some prior arrangement as well.