In Crime As In Politics Follow The Money, Follow Very Closely And If You See Your Spot Grab And Grab Hard-Modern Crime Novelist (Meaning Not Chandler Or Hammett) Lem Kane’s Latest Thriller- “Cup Runneth Over” (2019)

In Crime As In Politics Follow The Money, Follow Very Closely And If You See Your Spot Grab And Grab Hard-Modern Crime Novelist (Meaning Not Chandler Or Hammett) Lem Kane’s Latest Thriller- “Cup Runneth Over” (2019)

By Rav Wilson

[These days the fetish for transparency is almost overwhelming as if you couldn’t make a statement about anything in the public prints unless you gave a detailed description about your relationship, or lack or relationship to the subject of your work. Here goes. I went to graduate school with Lem Kane the author under review back in the early 1990s and have stayed in regular contact with him since then although this will be the first review by me of one of his works.

I should also mention that one of the writers here, Seth Garth, has done many such book reviews on Lem’s work. Moreover Seth draws a small royalty on every book Lem sells since he is the one who gave Lem his signature statement in the mouth of his main protagonist, John David Nicolas -“ come on and play ball with the law or you will find your ass in stir” which finds its way somewhere in every Kane crime novel.

The odd thing is that the statement is not original with Seth but is an old saying, according to another old-timer who grew up with him, Sam Lowell, from when they were what they called themselves, corner boys, where they grew up as a negative sign. Some copper, some coffee and cakes copper once said to one of their number, one tough corner boy, that very statement and the guy laughed at him since he had already done a few nights in the hoosegow and said “what are you going to do throw me in jail, been there done that.” That became the gold standard for corner boy responses to coppers reflecting the very tight honor bound tradition in the neighborhood that you don’t snitch to the coppers from nothing, no way. RW]           

Lem Kane was quite a character, a holy goof in old Jack of Lowell speak, a guy who would have been  prophet back in the day when the world needed such to succor the day, looking for new types to fit a post-World War II world, a then modernist world, under the Merrimac parlance, when I knew him back in graduate school in in New York City in the 1990s. Shaggy hair, ruffled shirt not always the fashionable color of the day but maybe off purple or crimson stuff my mother used to grab at the local Bargain Center nothing but a precursor to Walmart’s, jeans or maybe chinos with freaking cuffs for God’s sake (a no-no even in the desperately poor neighborhood I grew up in), some kind of sneaker usually not a name brand who loved to hang out at Matty’s in the Village to get what he called “ a feel for the meshing masses, a feel for what makes them tick.” That part I understood although the clientele at Matty’s ran to suburban brats out on a haul or hot almost virgin chicks from the Long Island high schools slumming for a while at NYU waiting to go elsewhere to graduate school to get their own “meshing masses” gaff, since except maybe the garb tricks I was running that same gambit. But in those days I was confounded more than once when Lem told a group of us, more than once, that his fervent desire was to create a memorable private detective in the manner of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Chester Burns, Lester Delray, maybe Dust MacDonald or Kenny Millar before Kenny’s shocking expose as nothing but a second-rate third rate repo man fucking up Lew Archer big time along the way. Although, as he too liked to point out, point out endlessly, given the new sensibilities not the hard-boiled fists flailing first let god sort it out later, slugs burping the air stuff cutting into god’s play that animated those classics.        

The “confounded” part by me was that Lem never wrote or presented in workshops, at least as far as I knew, any material that even closely related to the detective fiction that he has now become a best-seller author of and a subject of envy in some quarters by those who went the more plebian routes of journalism or traditional novelistic treatments. (Read” me, Jack Devine, Hoagy Lewis and Liam Leahy, all fellow grad students). Enter John David Nicolas, private detective out in the inevitable Southern California sweat holes of greed, avarice, maybe sloth too while we are on the trail of earthly sins but you will have to fill in the other four sin I have been too wasted of late to remember such stuff and with deadline hours away I am just writing as fast as I can and am willing on my own hook to let god sort the stuff later. Enter Nicolas in the seventeenth novel of which he is the main protagonist sparring with felonious, evil folk who need to be taken down a peg or two. (Jesus seventeen crime books since the 1990s and I haven’t even gotten pass the galleys of my first book, not a crime novel but a piece on what makes America tick these days which Lardner Press has paid me good advance money to produce.

This private dick John David (the name used most often although there are stretches where the three-name moniker gets a full workout which somebody should have red-penciled big time) lately, the last six crime novels as far as I can see, assisted on the psychological profile side by Doctor Alexis Newcome and while there is thus far no budding romance between the pair of singularly driven personalities, churning up evil and evil-doing they work well together even though most of their collective work is shifting and sifting through whatever archival data any given case throws at them. (By the way am I the only person old enough to be shocked to discover that this Alexis of no fixed sex through the first five books turned out to be a male found out only when somebody mentioned boxer shorts as his undergarment, opening up a whole different kind of era from the guys and dolls of my youthful reading where guys had a fistful of women and the women had a fistful of men and no cross-over stuff, not for public consumption anyway although everybody knows that deep in Hollywood and its environs whole gay and lesbian subcultures thrives with blinked eyes, especially if Lem goes all out and has them get married).     

This gun moll case, this gangsters from the past case really highlights that John David-Alexis collective work since this nail-biter beyond the expected horrendous crimes, and bang-bang quick murder is the least of them here, calls for many insights that a normal case would not require. Remember, or if you have not read a Kane crime novel, John David only takes cases that the public coppers, usually the Bay City or Long Branch cops but occasionally the LAPD when he is pissed off after they went on another rampage against some master-less black kid in a white neighborhood, have thrown their hands up at, have put into deep freeze cold storage. Best forgotten. This, let’s stick with the facts of the gun moll case, is a classic of the type the public coppers drop like a lead balloon after about two days work. Maybe three but that is just to file the paperwork and put the ice cubes on the damn thing.

This old dame, called Tammy by the staff but as usual in La La Land, Hollywood names are a dime a dozen, maybe cheaper so don’t get too hung up on that score, the gun moll of some forgotten second-rate gangster, second behind Bugsy, Meyer, Jimmy The Turd, and the Viper from the 1930s is found dead in her swank Bel-Air hotel. (For the rubes the difference between a hotel and another gaga condo in seven figures is that staff services and meals figure in the bill). The public coppers, scratching their heads figured it simple, figured from her fragile body for her just falling down with old age and left it at that even though the name Theda Barrows was a well-known gun moll for Zeke Fallon back in the 1930s when LA really was the Wild West. Guy like Zeke who even second rate third rate P.I.s like Kenny Millar before the fall and Lew too knew as part of knowing the links to the past and what was still out there for the pickings if times got tough, were planning a heist a week, maybe more depending on available manpower and enough guys smart enough to jimmy doors and cut some wires. Good stuff too, jewels, art, whatever the market would bear, remember this was flashy Hollywood not the later Wharton School play. Guys like Zeke, what the hell half the time they grew up on the same abandoned city blocks sometimes cutting the coppers in, sometimes no. Here is the very smartest part every once in a while letting the owners, mainly Hollywood directors, producers, their wives, more likely their mistresses and concubines after being robbed in on the grab by splitting the insurance money to keep things quiet. Nice play.

Jenny Dale, something of a handmaiden, servant girl to this Theda (who knew her as Tammy) although actually employed by the hotel thought something was wrong even though Theda could have easily been just a regular fall down case of old age. After the cold storage play by the public coppers this Jenny who figured in Theda’s will and distributions contacted John David (who would bring in Doc Alexis later once he had enough evidence to see which ways the wind blew), signed a contract, gave him a nice retainer for his dailies and expenses and off he went. (I had to laugh one fifty a day, three day minimum and one hundred per for expenses or no go when I though about poor Phil Larkin toward the end back in the late 1940s trying to squeeze a Jackson and some car fare, maybe gas money, out of some frail looking for her lost sugar daddy, never found). Off he went after Jenny lured him in with two pieces of information, one some bruises on Theda’s neck and two, a few things were missing from Theda’s digs that Jenny had seen recently. Enough to put hound dog Nicolas in the trail.                         

Your usual cold case is maybe some unsolved murder of mayhem which nobody gave a fuck about except maybe the family after a few years. Maybe they grabbed some dough, enough to pursue the case a little, maybe that loss of kin gnawed at their souls when all they had was the monthly trip to Mount Calvary to shed some salty tears. Christ this Theda deal was going back almost three quarters of a century with the added weight on the shoulders that nobody would be around to give any serious info about why a kindly old lady who was some gangsters’ frill in her day was murdered, murdered most foul. Nicolas with a three-day retainer to start and what looked like plenty of dough coming darling Jenny’s way figured to milk this one dry, very dry and maybe he could get around to asking Alexis the big question if he played his cards right.  

But enough of side play because as it turned out between them, between John David and Alexis working very slowly they finally saw a pattern to where this thing was going. Finally saw that kindly Theda had a very checkered past almost as bad as Zeke’s who would wind up dying in prison but not before taking care of his sweetie. Digging that “taking care of his sweetie” card by Zeke made everything else almost fall into place by itself. See if a big-time crook, even a second-tier big time crook, wanted to take care of his sweetie (or whoever) then given the nature of the profession somebody else had to take the fall, somebody did not get their cut. Normally one would think that that just the cost of doing crooked business, a little sideways overhead and move on if the big guy had enough guns to keep things at the steady. Not this time. A guy, a Bay City copper as twisted and corrupt as any you find in the LAPD say which back in Wild West days was saying a lot, was the inside man on a serious jewelry heist back in the later 1930s where one of the items taken was something like the Hope diamond to give you an idea of what Zeke meant when he wanted to take care of Theda even though he was heading to the Q for silly tax evasion and would wind up very dead not long afterward.      

This inside man, Chester Davis had a serious grudge against Zeke when he came up on the short end of the stick and got no dough for his efforts, no dough and a couple of well-placed slugs to finish that branch of the story. Well, not quite, see old Chester had kids, and when nothing happened to aid in some revenge in that generation they turned over their unresolved hatreds to their kids, nice DNA right,  who almost by accident found out Theda had a ton of dough and more importantly that fat diamond worth a ton of dough. With very little planning except grabbing a dinky suite a few doors down to keep an eye on her movements Theda fell down, took the gaff and quickly if you think about it. But Chester’s grandkids, actually one sullen granddaughter had big dreams, had a very common big dream that the fewer ways the stash needed to be cut up the better, to have the whole thing for herself just like Zeke had set up Theda. One by one her confederates, a couple of lifers, or wannbe lifers who got caught in her sexual lair, what did Allan Jackson call it one time- “went to sleep the fishes,” then anybody like the hotel manager looking to get out from under a mountain of debt who was on the second layer and finally naturally Jenny had to fall although she was not part of the caper, she was going to have the whole deal, dough, stocks, bonds, jewelry the way Theda had worked things out. That granddaughter would fall down to a John David hard case bullet, fall down hard leaving Jenny in the clear as to title though.

Here is the funny thing Theda had lived too long and had about three or four dollars in hard cash to her name. The stocks and bonds were lightweight stuff that should have sold many moons before but to top things all off though that so-called Hope diamond gag was just that, glass which some smart financier or hedge fund operator had placed in public display back in the 1930s leaving the real stuff elsewhere (and probably grabbing the insurance dough with no questions asked when Walter Neff came to call about the account). So Jenny got a few thou, maybe a little more but not enough to pay John David more than that three days retainer and some gas money. Needless to say, smitten John David never asked Alexis for his hand. Lem went way out on  the edge on this one.   

  

The Day The Son Of Man, Jesus, Saved A Wretch Like Me-I Once Was Lost But Now Am Found, Once Was Blind But Now I See- The “Fallen” Speaks-A Rebuttal

The Day The Son Of Man, Jesus, Saved A Wretch Like Me-I Once Was Lost But Now Am Found, Once Was Blind But Now I See- The “Fallen” Speaks-A Rebuttal

By Allan Jackson

     

I had a strange dream last night that my dear old friend whom I have spent many an hour planning some mischief although that mainly in the distant past, Bart Webber, a guy from the old neighborhood, the Acre down in North Adamsville south of Boston found himself in Neptune’s ditch, found himself sucking salty air searching for Davey Jones” locker, found himself like a million other tars, sailors you know gung ho sea guys, dreaming about voluminous rescuing mermaids coming to wipe away their sins as they lose all senses, about going home to our mother the sea. Yeah, I was dreaming the dream about old Bart going to sleep with the fishes. A strange dream granted under usual circumstances but even stranger since Bart had the ill-disposed idea that he would, what did he call it, oh yeah, snitch on me about the time that I almost drowned when I was eight, nine years old down at Nollie Point, the beach nearest the Acre. Decided to snitch, what the hell were the words we actually used, yes, drop a dime on me after I had sworn him to never tell of the incident, especially not to my mother who would have still had me grounded. And who knows what other hells.  

Bart forgetting for a minute the Code of Omerta (yes, in capitals) attached to all selected information deemed to be kept from the public, including coppers and “the authorities.” No, especially coppers and that ilk. Decided, perhaps unwisely given that dream and how vivid it was, to bleed all over the place about a very small incident. Decided to risk some feckless fate and all for, well, all for some momentarily inside track with some female classmate whom he (or I) hadn’t seen for some fifty years but who struck his fancy, especially at my expense. Under the norms of the ancient brotherhood feeding gossip, bullshit mostly if we gave it a real name, to interesting women would be a yawner, wouldn’t draw an hard breathe never mind strange portentous dreams but under the seal of the code something very different.                   

[Let’s use this bracketed space to get some “housekeeping” chores out of the way. First when I say “last night” it does not literally mean last night but merely serves as a frame of reference after I saw the scandalous and maybe libelous article by one Bartlett Webber, that Bartlett some kind of poor as church mice affectation from his people, people from the North, the North of Ireland for the geographically clueless so you know what awful things that brethren are capable of, concerning privileged information he had about a long ago incident at Nollie Point when we were mere kids.

Moreover since Bart decided in that same piece the world needed to know that I am no longer the editor at this publication, and have not been for years, he had to go on and on about how I am now a contributing editor meaning I can write whatever I want, whenever I want without worry about nervous Nellie editors redlining every other sentence and such. The gist of the sentiment being that in the old days I would take forever on my own for publication assignments and this dagger at wayward Bartlett’s heart I have done in super-speed time of a couple of days. But back to the transgression]    

The attentive reader here may already know the outline of the tale Bartlett Webber thought he had to tell but let me go through a quick summary and a couple of necessary corrections. Yes, Bart had been at the beach that day with me as I faced my first uncertain confrontation with Father Death (see singsong Allan Ginsberg). He is also correct, and admits as much, that he was sworn to secrecy around the facts of the event under the long-held Code of Omerta standard. What he has failed to tell the candid world, the unsuspecting reader, is that while he was physically present at the beach that day he was busy with another more pressing task, more pressing to his mind which he freely admitted to me later.

Bart is what we today would be called an early bloomer in the boy-girl universe. Meaning for one thing I think we were closer to ten, eleven than his silly eight-year old bullshit that I truly believe he used just to deflect his real motives that hot as hell in Hades day. Meaning for another that he had seen a classmate, had seen a girl named Ginny Garland from our class whom he had a serious crush on and whom even before I hit the tepid waters with my newfound “canoe” (read: tree log) he was chatting with intensely. More about that later but for now any good lawyer like Frankie Riley our mutual corner boy from high school who did pretty well for his larcenous self would have Bart hanging by his thumbs as any kind of witness to the day’s events, to my dire situation.         

Of course, sixty years later old Bart claims some razor- sharp memory somewhat akin to his presidential favorite Sleepy Joe Biden. To set the scenario up, to set me up he has declared on the basis of no evidence that since that time I have been deathly afraid of the seas, have gone well beyond the rational fear than anybody, maybe even more so today when Mother seas are furious for some reason to do with climate change, to avoid contact beyond the beach with our dear homeland. Like a lot of corner boys over the years before we started losing them to sickness and that dreaded Father Death (you really should check Allan Ginsberg on that) Bart and I lost some contact as he went to his family life and I to my families lives so he did not know of my California island surf times. Had not seen the ten thousand photographs my first and second wives had taken in sunnier days (and less expensive in several ways). Now seen all young, long-bearded, long brown haired with some swimsuit deep in surf, deep in towed boats filled with collective wives and broods of children. Photos on request for the curious and family-dwelling.      

Then Bart compounded his error but stating that he could not vouch for whether before this incident I was much of a swimmer. That part was actually right although he seemed to think that reducing me to some life raft suck ass, to some lifesaver float bullshit hanger-on or no was a real state. Again time and elsewhere would have shown him with a very vivid photograph of me in college, NYU, swimming competitively against Hobart for glory and love. No question I would not have been an individual candidate for an Olympic berth unless like with the rowing eights, say that fantastic Yale club that blew them all away in Melbourne in 1956, in those days if the whole team would be represented in some relay and I would get tagged in.  

I will merely quote what Bart thinks happened because what he actually knew was what I reported to him later and what he has blabbed all over the Internet-“ Somehow he (me) got in his eight-year old mind that he would “ride the waves” on an old washed-up log as the tide was coming in to see how fast he could come ashore. I had seen the log and frankly to this day thought nothing of it, although I should have.  Should have realized that I would not have attempted such a feat and I was a pretty fair swimmer.

“To the plot though. Allan rolled the log into the wash and hung on for a while until the log was heading across the point to a place where he would be over his head. That decision is the key because somehow during that period when he was over his head he decided that he would let go of the log, would try to swim to shore. Fatal, or almost fatal. Somehow the surf started coming up, the water got green and edgy meaning that it would be serious work to get to shore. Allan (as he told me later) went down once, then he yelled out to me, told me to get somebody because he was drowning, couldn’t make it to shore. Fortunately in the height of summer there was a lifeguard there. Not some muscle-bound college guy or slinky college girl with connections to get some summer dough but a young mother who had her daughter in tow. In any case after I screamed bloody murder she swam out to Allan (who said he went down twice and did not think he was coming up the third time.) He did since she saved him.”  

A sad little childhood in America story mostly bullshit and filler if I had been the editor even today. Finally, Bart gets to the real point, what he called irony- “Here is a bit of irony, a bit of why I am spilling the beans, snitching as old as I am and as dedicated to the code of silence as anybody.  A few weeks ago I was at a class reunion and started talking to one of the fellow classmates whom I had not known in high school except she was a Squaw Rock girl and hence out of reach for Acre boys. I mentioned Allan Jackson’s name whom she remembered not for whatever publishing skills he possessed but because she had been on the beach that day when Allan almost drowned. Apparently Allan had given his name to the worthy young mother lifeguard in her hearing. She confessed to me that she had known all about Allan’s situation for as long as I had. See she was the little girl in tow while her mother did lifeguard duty on Nollie’s Point that day.”

What whistle-blower, truth-teller Bartlett Webber has failed to tell the candid world is that the girl whose mother had dragged her to the beach was one Ginny Garland, the same young thing he had had a crush on in elementary school and somehow had amnesia about that high school stuff which was true enough about hands off Squaw Rock girls for lots of reasons but which did not preclude him a few times from making some play for her. Finally, fifty years later at my expense he connects with a more chastised Ginny Garland with me as the bait. And you wonder why I had strange dreams about one Bartlett Webber sleeping with the fishes.      

  

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-Redux

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-Redux

By Liam Leahy

When the deal went down the hell with street ruffian and gangster of words and thefts Gregory Corso spinning tall tales to Times Square hipsters willing to sell junkie dreams to Hoboken, New Jersey (where else would Hoboken be) runaways who wind up bed-sheeted in piss-wet rooming house flops, cold water flops; the hell when you think about it too with high Marin County guest house sandal-strewn Golden Gate golden boy Zen Buddha lotus flowers sulks of Portland pines and crater mountain fire ways Gary Snyder; and while we are at it the hell with bright lights in the headlights like some virgin Bambi up high on Sugar Mountain with max daddy Carol, yeah, Neal’s wife tugging her desire away from hopeless homosexual desire phase with college clean including sparkling white shirt and penny loafers Mike McClure; while I am on a roll  double the hell with clear the coffeehouses out (so some get rich junkie owners can fill the floor with those Hoboken, no need to say New Jersey, right, runaways caught out on Friday night banishments playing fucking folk music when the be-bop bad boy poets were asunder and jazz bars cried out to the new dispensation with his primal wailing to Keil, devil servant down in ancient Zoroastrian times along with simply homages to the whore of Babylon (small “w” before she got into the history book), Phil Larkin; ditto double the hell with trying to hit that high white note, that silky note even the Duke had trouble blasting and Charlie almost lost his junkie soul to that only jazz boys and girls can aspire to Billie’s hustling Dan man, the fixer, MaJohn Dupree; back to single hells (watch for the semi-colons)for Dante boys wishing they knew what the seven circles were all about before they were deflowered all choir practice glow bum-tucked like Kenneth Rexforth (and don’t forget Rexforth’s daughter who everybody took a run at and why not even gay boys like Ginsberg, maybe especially gay boys trying to figure out why they were different when different was except in havens like Frisco town not cool, subjected devotees to racks and faggots); and, I don’t care if I used this lead-in before to hell as well the flaming drag queen hiding out in Nantasket drag queen boats (who knew) artless (then) except strong knuckles and a quick jab Tim Riley before he fanned the flames of Miss Judy Garland’s hem in North Beach cellars and made bluegrass green in ocean spray to the China seas bays filled with oil tankers and sodomites sing his naughty boy praises. Close out, and note separation and no fucking semi-colon so something new in the world, in the end, the bookend when the town, no, let’s go back to New Jack town, three Howard Johnson hot dog fucks, with relish and mustard if you must know, like Miss Julie Johnson one of the few female beat hipsters although not one of the quick lays in some Joe and Nemo alley.

More retrospective, more circumspect after down-loading trash on lesser sinners comes the big boys time starting with a rumbling fullback out of some Merrimack estuary looking hot dog hungry (already knowing that Miss Julie awaits him in some Ho Jo hot spot a few years down the lane he was that good looking and hip too even if never getting that mill town dust off his boots. Looking cigarette in hand, hobo’s bindle sliding off his back like some holy goof displaced out of European DP camps and he only Icelandic run bound dropping to the titanic seas (after serious German encounters doing some Murmansk run).  Name him brother name him now or forever how your peace. So Jack, Jack, say it Kerouac, the fuck with that Jack stuff Ti Jean of ten million Allan Ginsberg homosexual dreams and Neal Cassidy, Adonis of the West found in some Larimer Street gin mill, lost father’s gets some play out in that fucking Jersey shore, okay  

Very much more circumspect now that we have entered the poetic pantheon leaving the Garys, Phils and Michaels behind to waterfront sailor joints headingout to China seas with small be-bop patter to seet hem on their ways, by speaking names beyond Kaddish ceremonials. There is no way around it this time Moloch destroyer of modern times stripping poor Tom Eliot (St. Lou’s Tommy boy okay) of everything but his shoddy bedding and his lost in the hills and trenches of Eastern France cursive language as wave after wave fell to complete one square yard Carl Solomon’s dear friend and his mother howler in the dust for all the good it did him, or her, Allan Ginsberg. Yeah, the beat down, beat around, beat sound, beatitude beat to hear holy goof Jack tell it in his Tanqueray, no, Tokay, even cheaper when times were tighter and the panhandling fell flat  funks, crowd that took up plenty of air come 1950s in the states come desolation row time. Spoke truth about the great nos, homosexuality, communism the Moloch, rationality in deep freeze Cold War America without blushing all in one massive half hour singsong (I have said plainsong elsewhere but let me amend that)

Hell all those guys were so light they couldn’t hold feathers without flying into spinoff Bay streams on some outbound freighter. Would have sold their zillion fucking books (if some editor could rein them in) and spoke their damn half hour half understood poems (although everybody in the room even underage high school students on the slum knew this was not their high school Tom and Robert noise). Then there was the glue, a sideman to the pretty boys although he could do Coney Island of the mind, or was it mine, Ferlinghetti, Lawrence some stray cat who had glue aplenty, the guy who kept the torch bright, the guy who had enough knowledge of business which almost to a man (or woman for that matter), beats heating squares up like toast, scorned except come poetry reading time some foggy and rainy nights, book signing when Random House said piss off, putting money in the bucket for the Thunderbird struck nights(Tokay as always a backup in case the day’s take was short), back room shacking up to keep from the coldest days in August world. Yeah, Happy Birthday Baby, Buddha in cowboy boots and tepid wrangler jeans Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the magic 100 years. Connection, you always had the connection brother.

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.