A View From The Left- WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

More Americans Died From Hurricane Maria Than 9/11. Does Anyone Care?

A new study shows that, even by conservative estimates, more people were killed by Maria than those who died during the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The 3.5 million Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, a fact not understood by more than half the U.S. stateside population, according to a poll from September 2017. Still, the Trump administration and majority-GOP Congress treated post-Maria Puerto Rico with malignant neglect, delivering help expeditiously to the parts of Louisiana and Texas hit hard by Hurricane Irma earlier that month while failing to prepare for or launch an effective response to the two-hurricane punch delivered to Puerto Rico. As the 2018 hurricane season fast approaches, Puerto Rico remains in dire straits. Ultimately, however, the blame for the death and destruction in Puerto Rico really lies with all of us, their fellow Americans.   More

TAKING ON THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

Last week, with little fanfare, Connecticut governor Dannel Malloysigned a bill that officially adds his state to the National Popular Vote Compact.   The compact, which only goes into effect when states totaling 270 electoral votes legally enter into it, allocates all participating states’ electoral votes to the presidential candidate that wins the national popular vote…  The compact had widespread public support in the state: with 92 percent of Democrats, 62 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of unaffiliated voters in support. “The vote of every American citizen should count equally, yet under the current system, voters from sparsely populated states are awarded significantly more power than those from states like Connecticut…This is fundamentally unfair,” explained Governor Malloy when the bill passed the CT state senate.  The electoral vote total of the compact’s members now reaches 172.   More

FEDERAL WORKERS UNION SUES DONALD TRUMP

The nation's largest union of federal workers filed suit against the Trump administration on Wednesday over an executive order signed by President Donald Trump that seeks to deny workers the right to job site representation—an established guarantee in existing labor law…  "This president seems to think he is above the law, and we are not going to stand by while he tries to shred workers' rights," said  AFGE national president J. David Cox Sr., in a statement announcing the lawsuit. "This is a democracy, not a dictatorship. No president should be able to undo a law he doesn't like through administrative fiat."  …"This is more than union busting – it's democracy busting," Cox said on Friday after the president's signing of the orders was announced.    More

THE TRUMP EFFECT:

New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism

…many political observers are concerned that increasing political polarization on left and right makes compromise impossible, and leads to the destruction of democratic norms and institutions.  A new study, however, suggests that the main threat to our democracy may not be the hardening of political ideology, but rather the hardening of one particular political ideology. Political scientists Steven V. Miller of Clemson and Nicholas T. Davis of Texas A&M have released a working paper titled "White Outgroup Intolerance and Declining Support for American Democracy." Their study finds a correlation between white American's intolerance, and support for authoritarian rule. In other words, when intolerant white people fear democracy may benefit marginalized people, they abandon their commitment to democracy…  In practice, the GOP has increasingly been embracing a politics of white resentment tied to disenfranchisement. "Since Richard Nixon's ‘Southern Strategy,’ the GOP has pigeon-holed itself as, in large part, an aggrieved white people's party,"    More

PENTAGON PAID FOR NFL 'PATRIOTISM'

A key component is missing from the current controversial discussion surrounding football players and the national anthem. In the recent days of argument over whether NFL players havethe right to protest racial inequality and systemic injustice in the United States, few have brought up the fact that less than a decade ago, professional football players didn’t even appear on the field during the national anthem.  That changed in 2009, as the Department of Defense poured millions of dollars into the NFL in exchange for displays of patriotism during games. “Until 2009, no NFL player stood for the national anthem because players actually stayed in the locker room as the anthem played,” ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith explained in 2016. “The players were moved to the field during the national anthem because it was seen as a marketing strategy to make the athletes look more patriotic. The United States Department of Defense paid the National Football League $5.4 million between 2011 and 2014, and the National Guard $6.7 million between 2013 and 2015 to stage onfield patriotic ceremonies as part of military-recruitment budget line items.”   More

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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong

U.S. House Makes Clear That There is No Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iran

On Tuesday night, the House unanimously passed an amendment making clear Congress’s position that no law exists which gives the President power to launch a military strike against Iran. Today, that amendment passed the U.S. House as part of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2019.  “The unanimous passage of this bipartisan amendment is a strong and timely counter to the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Iran deal and its increasingly hostile rhetoric,” Rep. Ellison said. “This amendment sends a powerful message that the American people and Members of Congress do not want a war with Iran. Today, Congress acted to reclaim its authority over the use of military force.”   More

MOTIVATIONS FOR THE DEAD-END POLICY ON IRAN

The attraction of forever keeping Iran as a bête noire for the United States is even more obvious for Iran’s regional rivals. This especially means Saudi Arabia, along with its sometime ally the United Arab Emirates and its satellite Bahrain, and Israel. Those regimes are content to see a dead-end U.S. policy toward Iran that offers no prospect of any thawing of relations between Washington and Tehran. Such a policy assures that Washington always will take their side in their local disputes. It means continued U.S. cover for their own excesses and contributions to regional instability, with blame always focused on Iran. Thus Saudi leaders were delighted to hear Pompeo demand an end to Iranian aid to Houthi rebels in Yemen, while he said nothing in his speech about the far larger role of Saudi bombardment in turning Yemen into a humanitarian disaster. Israeli leaders were delighted to hear demands about ending Iranian aid to Hamas, in a speech that made no mention of the role of the Israeli military in the killing of scores and the wounding of thousands of what were overwhelmingly unarmed protestors in the Gaza Strip.     More

TRUMP’S KOREAN SHELL GAME

Donald Trump wants a summit with Kim Jong Un. He wants the spectacle. He wants to demonstrate that he’s better than all the presidents who came before and failed to solve the nuclear crisis. He wants to prove that he, alone, can do diplomacy the right way (and so why not cut the State Department budget by a third?).  But ham actors are acutely aware of the prospect of being upstaged. Trump wants a Korean drama, but only one that he controls…  Pay attention to the key person in this account. It’s not Trump, who remains as always blithely unaware of what lies beneath the froth of current events. It’s John Bolton. Ostensibly he’s just the bearer of bad news in this story. But the national security advisor knew exactly how to play the president. He provided just the intelligence necessary to further Bolton’s own agenda: undermining the summit.   More

THE HYPOCRISY OF THE WEST'S SYRIA POLICY

American diplomats do not try to justify, or even explain, their inconsistent attitudes towards the authority of the UN veto, despite the starkness of the contradiction. Perhaps it is a textbook example of what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. More accessibly, it is a prime instance of American exceptionalism.  The US, as the anointed guarantor of virtue and perpetual innocence in world politics, is not bound by the rules and standards by which we judge the conduct of others, especially adversaries…  The end result is the reigniting of the Syrian war just when it seemed to be nearing its end, with the widespread recognition that Damascus prevailed, for better or worse. Now Israel has been given the opportunity to pour oil on the dying embers in Syria to sustain its policy of making sure that chaos and conflict persist, with neither side being allowed to win and end the violence. In the process, the West, led by the US, has again shown its contempt for international law and UN authority.    More

The Ghost Of Lawrence Landon-With Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart” In Mind

The Ghost Of Lawrence Landon-With Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart” In Mind   

By Zack James

[The Pete Markin mentioned in the sketch below and in a previous one about Delores Landon, Lawrence Landon’s wife and Si’s mother, is the late Peter Paul Markin who despite a lot of serious work as a journalist back in the early 1970s fell off the edge of the world down south of the border and fell down shot dead with a couple of slugs in some desolate back alley in Sonora after a busted drug deal as far as anybody in America was able to find out (after being seriously warned off the case by the Federales and some guys who looked like they ate gorillas for breakfast). The Peter Markin who moderates this site is a pseudonym for a guy, Frank Jackman, who along with Si Landon, Jack Callahan, Frankie Riley, Josh Breslin and a bunch of other guys knew Markin in the old growing up days and has taken the pseudonym in honor of his fallen comrade who before his untimely end had taught him a lot about the world and its ways, quite a lot. “Peter Paul Markin”]         

Memory floods. Memory flows unstaunched down to the endless sea of time. Some people shut off that memory flow to preserve their sanity others, others like Si Landon from the old corner boy Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville make it their business, go a long way out of their way to make it their business to remember, to be known among their circle as great rememberers. Si Landon had recently had occasion to test that theory out in a sort of roundabout way. He had been driven to remember one set of memories and that exploded another set in his face almost by happenstance.    

The whole episode had started when due to irreconcilable differences with his third wife, Maria, he had been given “the boot,” had been given his walking papers by her after almost a decade together. We will not get bogged down with the particulars of the causes for the separation except to say that Maria’s complaints were centered on Si’s increased moodiness and distance (that was Maria’s polite way, as was her way, of putting the matter) as well as her own need to “find herself”. The long and short of the situation was that both had agreed that “rolling stone” Si would leave the house they had shared for the previous decade. He wound up for several months staying at various friends’ places and in a sublet from a friend’s daughter before he realized that he needed some rootedness, some familiar surroundings now that he was alone again with only his thoughts and memories.

One tough “exiled” day, that was the way Si described his various experiences since the breakup with Maria he had an epiphany which led to his decision to head back to the old neighborhood after an almost fifty year absence. After a certain amount of searching he was able to find a condo for rent (he was not ready to seek a permanent condo-type situation or quite sure that he was up for that experience since he had spent the previous forty or so years in single family housing so a rental was testing the waters). The condo was located a couple of blocks from his growing up family tumbled down shack of a house in a school which had been closed when the demographics in the area changed and converted to the condo complex. Although he had not gone to school there since his family had moved from “the projects” back into his mother’s old neighborhood when he was in junior high school three of his four younger brothers (no sisters to his mother’s dismay) had gone there and that memory had helped determine his move to location.                     

He had strong recollections of his brothers’ time there and that was a source of some solace once he got settled in. Then a couple of days after that moving in he noticed in the front foyer that the developers of the place had kept some of the historic aspects of the place by keeping a series of graduating class photographs on one wall. On another was the 1907 announcement in the North Adamsville Gazette of the opening of the school. That hard fact triggered a sudden re-emergent long suppressed fear in Si once he realized that that 1925 date meant that his mother had also gone to school there something that he probably know way back when but had forgotten about. Sure enough looking at those old graduating class photos there was Delores Landon (nee Riley) sitting in the front row. All the battles from early childhood until just a few years before her death came rushing back into his head.

[Their relationship as described in a previous sketch had consisted of longer and longer periods of withdrawal after recrimination until there was a point of no turning back reflected in the fact that Si had not even attended his mother’s funeral for a lot of reasons but that one primarily.-Markin]

One late night when he could not get to sleep a couple of weeks after he had moved in Si thought he heard his mother’s voice calling out to him from the foyer that he would never amount to anything her favorite taunting mantra for him whenever he got in trouble.  Si freaked out over the idea that he would have to re-fight all the old memory battles. Damn. (Si by the way turned out to have been a better than average lawyer so he put paid to that eternal standard Delores notion.)              

No question the dominant force in the Landon household, the five surly boys household, was one Delores Landon. That sad fact was no accident, or if it was accident it was so by virtue of the circumstances which befell Delores Riley and Si’s father, Lawrence Landon. Delores and Lawrence had met through the contingencies of World War II when Lawrence Landon had been stationed before being discharged from the Marines at the famous Riverdale Naval Depot, a place which had earned its fame then for producing something like one troop transport vessel per day on those manic twenty-four-even shifts throughout the war. Delores had worked in an office in the complex doing her bit for the war effort. They had met at a USO dance one Friday night and the rest was history for the next forty or so years until he passed away at 65. Part of that history was the production of a crop of five boys, five hungry boys as it turned out led by Si. The other part was that Lawrence had originally come from the south, had been born and raised in coal country, in Harlan County down in Kentucky in the heart of “white trash” poor Appalachia. Before the Marines broke the string he had been the latest in about five generations of Landons to work the coal mines.

Coming and staying in the Boston area with nothing but a tenth grade education and useless coalmining skills meant that Lawrence was always scrabbling for last hired, first fired work. It also meant that scrambling to do his best as a father to provide for his own that he was a very distant figure in the day to day Landon household which in practice meant that Si was from an early age the “surrogate” father a fate which almost destroyed him before he finally left the family house. It also meant that beyond the distant figure of his father he also knew next to nothing about him. Except, and this was a big except, Lawrence Landon never ever sided with Si against his mother whether she was right or wrong in whatever accusations she made against him. Tough work, tough work indeed although he never was as bitter against his father as he had been against Delores. (A lot of what Si would learn about his father would only come after Lawrence had passed on from his youngest brother Kenneth who made serious effort to try and understand what his father had gone through. So Kenneth had known, which will become important in a minute, that his father had been called “the Sheik” by his fellow Marines for his abilities with the women what with his soft Southern accent and black hair and eyes. Kenny had known as well that beyond a young coal-miner’s skills his father had some talent as a musician, as a better than average guitar player and singer who was locally known in the Saturday night “red barn” circuit throughout Appalachian Kentucky for his prowess in song and with the girls along with his band The Hills and Hollows Boys.)

That is perhaps why when Si was old enough and thoughtful enough to know better he recognized that Lawrence had done the best he could with what he had to offer. It had been a hard lesson to learn even with some leeway. So it was no accident that a few weeks after Si’s strange nocturnal “encounter” with his mother (being a man of science he had eventually dismissed, or half dismissed that “voice” as just some gusts of wind coming from outside his windows) he had an “encounter” with the ghost of his father. Si had for many years, going back to his college days been something of a folk music aficionado. Had breathed in the folk minute that passed through the world starting in the very early 1960s.

For some thirty years previously well after the folk minute had burst and the remnants were to be seen playing before small crowds in church basement monthly coffeehouses Si had dilly-dallied with playing the guitar and singing along some folk songs which he had picked up through a famous folk music book which had the imprimatur of the late folksinger extraordinaire Pete Seeger (and lately had picked up songs from another source-the Internet- which moreover provided the chordal arrangements for many of the songs requested). His attention to the guitar and to practice had always been a hit or miss thing through three marriages and an assortment of children and lots of work to keep them in clover (and alimony and child support when those times came). Still Si never completely abandoned either singing or playing. (For lots of reasons but mainly to keep out of the family’s hair during the Maria marriage he had done his sporadic efforts on the third floor of their house far away from other distractions. But also to be able to say when serious folksingers, including Maria, asked about his abilities that he was a “third floor” folksinger, meaning third-rate which seemed about right. That would draw a laugh from those, again including Maria, whom he considered “first floor” folksingers.)            

While he was in “exile” Si had had a fair amount of time on his hands not having to attend to family matters or the million and one other things that are required in a relationship. (Si had had to laugh, a  bitter laugh, one night when he was thinking about those million and one things that he had been about nine hundred thousand, maybe closer to a  million short on keeping the Maria relationship going.) He began one of the most consistent sustained efforts at playing and singing that he had ever done. He continued those efforts when he moved back to his hometown.

What he had begun to notice in exile was that the new material that he was picking up from the Internet or from song books were a lot of old time Hank Williams ballads. Now Si was a city boy, always made it clear when younger that he hated country music, the music of the Grand Ole Opry being his standard for what passed for country music except for one very brief period in the early 1980s when he was attracted to the music of “outlaw” country singers and songwriters like Willie Nelson and Townes Van Zandt. But he always had had something of a soft spot for the anguished Williams. Had done so ever since not knowing that it was country music at the time he would pester Lawrence to play Williams’ Cold, Cold Heart for him when he was a kid. (Lawrence always had a guitar around the house and always like Si would sporadically play when he had a few minutes from the never-ending toil of providing for the five hungry boys and the one overwhelmed wife.)                       

One night in his condo in North Adamsville he began to practice on the guitar when he suddenly thought about his father’s playing of that Williams’ song. He went on the Internet to get the lyrics and chords and began to play. As he played a few times he got a very strong feeling that something was pushing him to play that song far better than he played most songs. On a final attempt Si felt that he had played the song almost like he had heard his father cover the classic. That night he began to realize that the ghosts of his youth weren’t always going to haunt his dreams. That present in that old neighborhood former schoolhouse were lots of things that would surface. Mostly though that night he shed a tear as he finished up knowing that he had cursed his father more than he should have and he once again called out to the winds “Pa, you did the best you could, you really did.”      

A View From The American Left-For Union Control of Hiring! Waterfront Commission, NJ State Troopers: Hands Off the ILA!

Workers Vanguard No. 1133	4 May 2018

For Union Control of Hiring!

Waterfront Commission, NJ State Troopers: Hands Off the ILA!

On his final day in office on January 15, New Jersey’s Republican governor Chris Christie signed a bill to end the state’s support for the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, a government agency that polices union members of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) on the New York and New Jersey docks and controls hiring and job allocation. The law, which is being challenged in court by the Waterfront Commission (and will very likely not be put into effect), directs the governor to turn over responsibilities for policing New Jersey’s docks—as well as the vast bulk of the commission’s $13 million annual funding—to the New Jersey State Police. Outrageously, the ILA tops joined the bosses’ New York Shipping Association in endorsing Christie’s measure. The ILA bureaucrats are promoting the lie that the racist New Jersey troopers will be more favorable to longshore workers than the Commission.

Government policing of the waterfront, whether done by the state police, the Waterfront Commission or directly by the Feds, is counter to the interests of longshore workers. Under federal law, all port workers, including longshoremen and port truckers, have to submit to extensive criminal background and immigration checks in order to receive a Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC card), which is mandatory for work. This process has been used by the government to deny tens of thousands of port workers their jobs. In a country where prisons are overflowing with young black and Latino men and women, many of them rounded up for drug offenses, this screening has a viciously racist thrust, while also being directed against immigrants.

While the federal government’s TWIC screening is bad enough, workers in the New York/New Jersey harbor are subject to even more onerous targeting by the Waterfront Commission. All applicants are interrogated and then must be approved by the Commission before getting hired. If the Commission revokes a longshore worker’s ID pass, he or she is banned from working on the docks. The Commission can pull a worker’s ID pass if they fail to report any arrest, including a DUI off the job, and could still decide to take away the job even if the worker does report the arrest! Longshore workers can have their passes revoked if they are not available to work 15 days each month without an “acceptable” reason.

But the Waterfront Commission does not only threaten the livelihoods of longshore workers. A Commission investigation can lead—and has led—to criminal charges being brought against workers. Moreover, the Commission effectively has the power to decide who works, irrespective of the contract. For example, the ILA and shipping bosses negotiated a “second chance” program under which longshore workers who test positive for marijuana can reclaim their jobs after going through a rehabilitation program. However, the Commission can still stop the worker from returning to work.

1953: ILA Against Government Union-Busting

Regardless of the mechanism, the purpose of government policing of the ILA has nothing to do with fighting corruption or discrimination and everything to do with trying to undermine a powerful union with considerable social weight. This is proved by the entire history of the Waterfront Commission.

When announcing their support to the law to effectively eliminate the Waterfront Commission, the ILA tops recycled the myth that the Commission once served a useful purpose but then became “outdated and counterproductive” (ILA statement, January 15). In truth, the Commission was established in 1953 in order to cripple the union in the wake of militant longshore strikes, many of them wildcats. As World War II drew to a close, New York’s longshoremen began to rebel against the dictatorial rule of ILA president “King Joe” Ryan, who worked directly with the bosses for years to suppress strikes, purge Communists and other militants from the union and ensure sweetheart deals for the shipping companies.

In 1945, longshoremen held a port-wide strike against a sellout contract agreed to by Ryan and the shipping bosses. Strikes broke out again in 1947, 1948 and 1951. According to historian Howard Kimeldorf, author of Reds or Rackets? The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront (1988), there were 18 recorded work stoppages between 1945 and 1951, accounting for more than a half million workdays lost on the New York/New Jersey docks.

These strikes prompted New York governor Thomas E. Dewey to establish a waterfront Crime Commission, memorialized in the 1954 anti-union film On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando. For decades, the employers and politicians hadn’t raised a peep of protest about the mob corruption, the racial discrimination or the degrading “shape-up” system that required longshoremen to pay bribes to get work. After all, the employers were the main beneficiaries of the miserable working conditions. But when Ryan could no longer control his membership, the government suddenly viewed him as a crook who needed to be driven from office. Ryan was accused of siphoning off money, which the shipping bosses had paid for “fighting communism,” for his personal use. In November 1953, after Ryan’s indictment for “misusing” union funds, a special ILA convention forced him to resign from office.

Longshore workers fought back when the government and the leadership of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) under George Meany tried to replace the ILA, which had been expelled from the AFL, with an AFL affiliate on the docks. They understood that this was an attack on their union and refused to believe the lie that the government just wanted to stop corruption. In 1954, ILA members in New York staged a massive 29-day strike. Despite the imposition of a Taft-Hartley injunction and heavy state intervention, the workers prevailed and won back recognition of the ILA (see “How Longshoremen Stopped the Finks,” WV No. 414, 24 October 1986).

The Crime Commission directed at the ILA became the model for a major campaign by the federal government to use “corruption” and “racketeering” to spearhead attacks on the unions. These attacks were principally directed at the Teamsters and ILA, which have the power to shut down economically vital areas like trade and transportation. A Senate select committee was set up on a resolution by anti-Communist witchhunter Joe McCarthy. Under chairman John McClellan and staff counsel Robert F. Kennedy, this committee set up the conviction of Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa, whose first-ever master freight contract raised the specter of a nationwide truckers strike.

The Crime Commission hearings also led to establishing the Waterfront Commission. One of its first acts in the 1950s was to purge 5,000 union longshoremen from the docks. William J. Mello’s book New York Longshoremen: Class and Power on the Docks (2010) describes the Commission’s long, dirty history of blacklisting communists and other trade-union militants.

Anti-Union Policing Today

Today, the Waterfront Commission spearheads investigations and prosecutions against elected ILA officials as well as members of the union. Insofar as there is corruption in the ILA, this is a matter to be dealt with by the union membership, not the capitalist government. Labor must clean its own house!

In 2005, ILA officials Harold Daggett and Arthur Coffey were hauled into court on fraud and conspiracy charges based on testimony by known mob informants. They were acquitted by a federal jury. As noted by reporter Tom Robbins, “Part of the government’s problem was that the defendants were not accused of violent crimes, while its own witnesses had murder and mayhem on their résumés” (Village Voice, 15 November 2005).

On 29 January 2016, thousands of ILA members walked off the job for several hours in what ILA spokesman Jim McNamara reported was a wildcat strike against the Waterfront Commission’s interference in the hiring process and induction of new union members. Immediately afterward, the Commission subpoenaed ILA members and officials in retaliation for what it called “an illegal walkout.”

Then in September 2016, the Waterfront Commission stripped ILA member Mario Gutierrez of his Waterfront registration (i.e., his job) because he refused to be a rat when called to testify about the January 29 walkout. (See “Special Craft Longshoreman Revoked for Refusing to Cooperate with the Commission’s Investigation of the January 29, 2016 Illegal Walkout,” 13 September 2016, wcnyh.org/newspage232.html.) Reinstate Mario Gutierrez!

For Trade-Union Independence from the Capitalist State!

That the shipping bosses favor government policing of the ILA is hardly surprising given that this benefits their attempts to curb and ultimately break the union. That the ILA misleaders have joined with the shipping association in trying to impose oversight by the NJ state cops speaks volumes about their own commitment to collaboration with the racist capitalist order. In addition to breaking strikes, New Jersey state troopers are notorious for their vicious racism, which gave birth to the term “Driving While Black.” In one infamous example, state cops in 1998 pulled over a van with four black and Latino men, shooting and wounding three of them. The state eventually agreed to pay the men nearly $13 million to settle a lawsuit.

The fundamental division in society is between the capitalist class, which owns the means of production, and the working class, which is forced to sell its labor power to the capitalists in order to survive. The capitalist class uses its state—i.e., the police, courts, military and prisons—to maintain its rule over the working class. It is necessary to fight for the class independence of the trade unions from the capitalist state.

The pro-capitalist misleaders of the ILA and other unions act to subordinate the labor movement to the employers and their government, courts and police. This is politically expressed in their allegiance to the Democratic Party. Accepting the capitalist profit system, they promote the illusion that the government acts—or can be pressured to act—in the interests of the working class. But history proves the opposite. The federal government, under Democratic and Republican presidents alike, has imposed strikebreaking Taft-Hartley injunctions on this powerful and hard-nosed union numerous times. A wide array of laws continues to treat the ILA and other unions as though they were, in effect, “criminal conspiracies.”

As part of defending itself and its members, the union—not the Waterfront Commission—must control hiring. Job allocation should be done through one union hiring hall. On the West Coast, longshore workers won the hiring hall through the 1934 strike, which smashed the old “shape-up” system. West Coast longshore workers, who were then organized in the ILA, repeatedly defied the attempts of Joe Ryan to throttle the strike. Key to this strike’s success was that it was led by reds—i.e., militants who at the time were committed to a program of class struggle. They did not buy into illusions in “labor friendly” government bodies and understood that the only possible road to victory lay in the workers mobilizing their power as a class against all the parties and agencies of the capitalist class enemy. (For more, see our pamphlet Then and Now.)

But over the years, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) hiring hall has been increasingly eroded by concessions made by the West Coast union bureaucrats. These include the division of ILWU members into “A men,” who have first choice of available work, and lower tiers (who are not union members). The introduction of “steady men,” consisting of higher paid skilled longshore workers who are not dispatched by the union but work directly for individual stevedoring companies, further undermined the hiring hall. However, despite its erosion, the ILWU hiring hall remains a thorn in the side of the bosses.

We are for a union hiring hall in the New York/New Jersey ports that would dispatch all jobs equitably on a rotating basis. Access to skills training and job promotion should be based on seniority. We are for the elimination of company lists, under which individual employers generate a roster of workers who get first preference at jobs. The aim of these lists, which tie longshoremen to the bosses, is to create a more docile workforce.

A union hiring hall makes it more difficult for employers to victimize or blackball workers for refusing to work under unsafe conditions. It would also help undercut the ability of the boss to discriminate against workers on the basis of political views or union activity. There is a long history of racist discrimination on the New York/New Jersey docks that the ILA bureaucrats have accommodated over the years, thereby playing into the bosses’ schemes to divide and rule their wage slaves. A hiring hall would help undercut discrimination on the basis of racial and ethnic origin.

Workers need a union leadership that understands that the interests of the workers and the employers are directly counterposed, and will mobilize the power of the unions accordingly, on the basis that the government and police forces exist only to serve the interests of the bosses. There will be no end to attacks on labor so long as the capitalist system exists. It is necessary to build a workers party to fight for workers revolution to end the whole system of wage slavery.

A View From The American Left-Starbucks Arrested for Sitting While Black

Workers Vanguard No. 1133	4 May 2018

Starbucks

Arrested for Sitting While Black

The online video of two black men in handcuffs being hauled out by police from a Starbucks in Philadelphia’s ritzy Rittenhouse Square neighborhood on April 12 has sparked widespread outrage. The video, taken by a white customer, illustrates what happens all the time to black people: shopping while black, sitting while black, driving while black—just being black puts you at risk in capitalist America. The Jim Crow laws mandating segregation have been overturned, but the normal workings of the capitalist system still keep the mass of black people forcibly suppressed and segregated.

The two men, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, sat at a table in Starbucks to meet a business associate. When Nelson asked the manager to use the restroom, he was told that restrooms are for paying customers only. Within two minutes of their arrival, a manager called the cops. Charged with trespassing, Nelson and Robinson were thrown into a squad car, not read their rights and detained for nine hours before they were released. Afterward, Nelson said that he “wondered if he would make it home alive,” conscious of the fact that any encounter with the cops can turn deadly.

What happened at Starbucks is an atrocity but not an aberration. Black people are denied access to bathrooms while whites are given the entry code. Black people are told to get a move on after shelling out money for overpriced coffee while whites are allowed to linger at tables as long as they like. An appalled white customer present at the Philadelphia Starbucks said she had been there for hours; another stated that he had used the bathroom without purchasing anything. But in racist America, what is innocently “waiting” for whites is criminally “loitering” or “trespassing” for blacks. The charges of trespassing leveled against Nelson and Robinson echo the “Black Codes” and vagrancy laws implemented to oppress freed black people after the Civil War had smashed chattel slavery.

Philadelphia’s Democratic mayor Jim Kenney declared his town “a diverse city that is welcoming to all.” Really? Two-thirds of the stop-and-frisks by his cops in the posh Rittenhouse Square neighborhood are hits on black people, despite the fact that they constitute only 3 percent of the population. The “city of brotherly love” has always been a racist nightmare. A white mayor, Frank Rizzo, waged bloody war on the Black Panther Party. The 1982 frame-up conviction of Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s foremost black political prisoner, was presided over by District Attorney Ed Rendell, who would later become mayor (and then Pennsylvania governor and a leading national figure in the Democratic Party). In 1985, black mayor Wilson Goode ordered that a bomb be dropped on the Philadelphia MOVE commune, killing eleven people, including five children, and burning a black neighborhood to the ground.

Just ten days after the assault on Nelson and Robinson at the Philadelphia Starbucks, another video went viral of cops viciously brutalizing Chikesia Clemons, a black woman, in an Alabama Waffle House. She had the audacity to object to paying extra for plastic utensils to eat her meal and asked to speak with the manager. The cops threw her to the ground in the middle of the restaurant, exposing her breasts. One cop threatened to break her arm while throttling her.

Twenty-five years ago, the Spartacist League and Labor Black Leagues, with support from integrated labor unions, initiated demonstrations around the country to protest outrageous racist policies at Denny’s restaurants against black and Latino diners. Recalling the Woolworth lunch counter sit-ins of the civil rights movement, the integrated groups of protesters, after picketing outside, went into Denny’s and demanded that the diner deliver equal services. Denny’s discrimination against black customers was so systematic that in 1994 the company was forced to pay millions after a class-action suit was filed.

While the South Carolina-based Denny’s made no effort to conceal its racism, the Seattle-based Starbucks hides behind a mask of liberalism, hypocritically selling itself as an urban oasis and a “progressive,” “socially responsible” enterprise. In a cheap publicity stunt to head off a backlash against their business and loss of profits, Starbucks announced plans to briefly close their stores on May 29 to carry out “unconscious bias” training of their employees.

Anti-bias training is the ubiquitous trendy policy of American liberals and a means by which the capitalist rulers wash their hands of endemic racist abuse by blaming it on the population. They posit that if people weren’t prejudiced, then there would be no racist incidents. This is fundamentally false. Prejudice is not the cause of discrimination but the product of American capitalism’s subjugation of black people as a race-color caste. Anti-black racism is the prime means used by the white ruling class to keep the multiracial working class divided. Rooted in chattel slavery, black oppression forms the bedrock of American capitalism and is maintained through force and violence by the capitalist state’s cops and prison system. As veteran Trotskyist Richard S. Fraser noted in a 1953 lecture, “Only the destruction of the economic and social foundation upon which prejudice is built will eliminate it” (“In Memoriam—Richard S. Fraser,” Prometheus Research Series No. 3, August 1990).

Among those whom Starbucks is commissioning to help in its “unconscious bias” training workshop is former top cop for the Obama administration, Eric Holder, who protected cops as they gunned down black people and led the assault on whistle-blowers like Chelsea Manning. Starbucks sparked further outrage when it also engaged the notoriously racist Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for “anti-bias” training. For more than 50 years, the ADL has violence-baited anti-fascist protesters and spied on black activists, Palestinian rights activists, labor unions, leftists and others for the FBI, CIA, the Israeli Mossad, apartheid South Africa and Latin American death squad regimes. It might as well have hired Steve Bannon. In response to the backlash, Starbucks now claims that it will only “consult” the ADL.

While it accrues profits to the tune of millions on the backs of an overworked workforce, Starbucks pays poverty-level wages that average nine to ten dollars an hour. The company claims it offers workers decent health insurance, but in fact fewer than 42 percent of Starbucks baristas are insured by the company. In 2008, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Starbucks had broken the law by firing union organizers and prohibiting employees from even talking union. The Industrial Workers of the World have fought Starbucks’ nationally coordinated anti-union operation and organized a handful of shops. But the majority remain unorganized and many workers endure the torment of “clopening”—i.e., closing down the store late at night, commuting home and returning back just a few hours later to open for the morning shift. What’s needed is a hard class-struggle fight to organize Starbucks and other companies in the service industry. This perspective requires a political struggle against the current union tops, who shackle the labor movement to the capitalist Democratic Party.

As Marxists fighting to build a workers party that will act as the tribune of the people, we oppose every manifestation of oppression. Our strategy is to mobilize the social power of the multiracial labor movement. We underline that full equality for black people requires a revolution where the working class rips the economy out of the hands of the capitalist rulers and reorganizes it on a socialist basis. Only then will it be possible to lay the basis for eliminating the material roots of black oppression through the integration of black people into an egalitarian socialist society based on a collectivized economy with jobs and quality housing, health care and education for all.

Tom Wolfe-Fashionista Of His Own Kind-And A Hell Of A Writer When The Deal Went Down Has Cashed His Check -The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love,1967- Hunter S.Thompson-The "Gonzo" King Near The End

Tom Wolfe-Fashionista Of His Own Kind-And A Hell Of A Writer When The Deal Went Down Has Cashed His Check

By Bart Webber

I had been, strangely enough, in La Jolla out in California attending yet another writers’ conference which seems to be the makings of my days these days, attending writers’ conferences that is instead of taking pen to paper or rather fingers to word processor keyboard, when I heard Tom Wolfe had cashed his check. “Cashed his check” a term (along with synonymous “cashed his ticket”) grabbed from memory bank as a term used when I was “on the bum” hanging out in hobo jungle camps and the whole trail of flop houses and Salvation Army digs to signify that a kindred had passed to the great beyond. Was now resting in some better place that a stinking stew-bitten, flea –bitten, foul-aired and foul-person place. No more worries about the next flop, the next jug of cheapjack wine, the next run-in with vicious coppers and railroad bulls, and the next guy who was ready to rip whatever you had off to feed his own sullen addiction.

By the way this is not Thomas Wolfe of You Can’t Go Home Again, Look Homeward, Angels, etc. but the writer, maybe journalist is a better way to put the matter of tons of interesting stuff from acid trips in the 1960s hanging with Ken Kesey and his various tribes of merry pranksters, the Hell’s Angels, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters, to marveled space flights in the 1970s to Wall Street in the reckless 1980 and back who had cashed his check. The strange part of the “strangely enough” mentioned above was that on Monday May 14^th 2018, the day he died, I was walking along La Jolla Cove and commenting to my companion without knowing his fate that Tom Wolfe had made the La Jolla surfing scene in the early 1960s come alive with his tale of the Pump House Gang and related stories about the restless California tribes, you know those Hell’s Angels, Valley hot-rod freaks and the like who parents had migrated west from dustbowl Okies and Arkies to start a new life out in Eden. These next generation though lost in a thousand angsts and alienation not having to fight for every breath of fresh air (with the exception of the Angels who might as well have stayed in the Okies and McAllister Prison which would have been their fate.   

I don’t know how Tom Wolfe did at the end as a writer, or toward the end, when things seemed to glaze over and became very homogenized, lacked the verve of hard ass 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s times. Although I do note that he did a very although I note he did an interesting take on the cultural life at the Army base at Fort Bragg down in North Carolina in a book of essays around the theme of hooking up. That hooking up angle a sign that social cohesiveness in the age of the Internet was creating some strange rituals. Know this those pound for pound in his prime he along with Hunter Thompson could write the sociology of the land with simple flair and kept this guy, me, flipping the pages in the wee hours of the morning. RIP, Tom Wolfe, RIP.  

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love,1967- Hunter S.Thompson-The "Gonzo" King Near The End

Zack James’ comment June, 2017:

Maybe it says something about the times we live in, or maybe in this instance happenstance or, hell maybe something in the water but certain things sort of dovetail every now and again. I initially started this commentary segment after having written a longest piece for my brother and his friends as part of a small tribute booklet they were putting together about my and their takes on the Summer of Love, 1967. That event that my brother, Alex, had been knee deep in had always interested me from afar since I was way too young to have appreciated what was happening in San Francisco in those Wild West days. What got him motivated to do the booklet had been an exhibit at the de Young Art Museum in Golden Gate Park where they were celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the events of that summer with a look at the music, fashion, photography and exquisite poster art which was created then just as vivid advertising for concerts and “happenings” but which now is legitimate artful expression.

That project subsequently got me started thinking about the late Hunter Thompson, Doctor Gonzo, the driving force behind a new way of looking at and presenting journalism which was really much closer to the nub of what real reporting was about. Initially I was interested in some of Thompson’s reportage on what was what in San Francisco as he touched the elbows of those times having spent a fair amount of time working on his seminal book on the Hell’s Angels while all hell was breaking out in Frisco town. Delved into with all hands and legs the high points and the low, the ebb which he located somewhere between the Chicago Democratic Convention fiasco of the summer of 1968 and the hellish Rollins Stones Altamont concert of 1969.     

Here is what is important today though, about how the dots get connected out of seemingly random occurrences. Hunter Thompson also made his mark as a searing no holds barred mano y mano reporter of the rise and fall, of the worthy demise of one Richard Milhous Nixon at one time President of the United States and a common low-life criminal of ill-repute. Needless to say today, the summer of 2107, in the age of one Donald Trump, another President of the United States and common low-life criminal begs the obvious question of what the sorely missed Doctor Gonzo would have made of the whole process of the self-destruction of another American presidency, or a damn good run at self-destruction. So today and maybe occasionally in the future there will be some intertwining of commentary about events fifty years ago and today. Below to catch readers up to speed is the most recent “homage” to Hunter Thompson. And you too I hope will ask the pertinent question. Hunter where are you when we need, desperately need, you.       

*******

Zack James comment, Summer of 2017 

You know it is in a way too bad that “Doctor Gonzo”-Hunter S Thompson, the late legendary journalist who broke the back, hell broke the neck, legs, arms of so-called objective journalism in a drug-blazed frenzy back in the 1970s when he “walked with the king”’ is not with us in these times. (Walking with the king not about walking with any king or Doctor King but being so high on drugs, your choice, that commin clay experiences fall by the way side. In the times of this 50^th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love, 1967 which he worked the edges of while he was doing research (live and in your face research by the way) on the notorious West Coast-based Hell’s Angels. His “hook” through Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters down in Kesey’s place in La Honda where many an “acid test” took place, where many walked with the king, if you prefer, and where for a time the Angels, Hunter in tow, were welcomed. He had been there in the high tide, when it looked like we had the night-takers on the run and later as well when he saw the ebb tide of the 1960s coming a year or so later although that did not stop him from developing the quintessential “gonzo” journalism fine-tuned with plenty of dope for which he would become famous before the end, before he took his aging life and left Johnny Depp and company to fling his ashes over this good green planet. He would have “dug” the exhibition, maybe smoked a joint for old times’ sake (oh no, no that is not done in proper society, in high art society these days) at the de Young Museum at the Golden Gate Park highlighting the events of the period showing until August 20^th of this year.   

Better yet he would have had this Trump thug bizarre weirdness wrapped up and bleeding from all pores just like he regaled us with the tales from the White House bunker back in the days when Trump’s kindred one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal was running the same low rent trip before he was run out of town by his own like some rabid rat. He would have gone crazy seeing all the crew deserting the sinking U.S.S. Trump with guys like fired FBI Director Comey going to Capitol Hill and saying out loud the emperor has no clothes and would not know the truth if it grabbed him by the throat. Every day would be a feast day. But perhaps the road to truth these days, in the days of “alternate facts” and assorted other bullshit would have been bumpier than in those more “civilized” times when simple burglaries and silly tape-recorders ruled the roost. Hunter did not make the Nixon “hit list” (to his everlasting regret for which he could hardly hold his head up in public) but these days he surely would find himself in the top echelon. Maybe too though with these thugs who like their forbears would stop at nothing he might have found himself in some back alley bleeding from all pores. Hunter Thompson wherever you are –help. Selah. Enough said-for now  

BOOK REVIEW

Kingdom of Fear, Hunter S. Thompson, Penguin, New York, 2004

Make no mistake the late, lamented Hunter Thompson was always something of a muse for me going way back to the early 1970's when I first read his seminal work on outlaw bikers, The Hell's Angels. Since then I have devoured, and re-devoured virtually everything that he has written. I have reviewed many of those efforts elsewhere in this space. As I noted recently in reviewing his 2004 work Hey, Rube, a screed on the misadventures of a gambling freak (himself), not all his efforts have been equally compelling. That was the case in my panning of Hey, Rube but here we are back on much more solid `gonzo' style from the old days. Maybe it is because this work is in the form of a memoir and thus intentionally places the good Doc's actions in the center of the writing that puts this effort in the mold of his better compilations like the Great Shark Hunt and Songs of the Doomed.

Thompson uses his patented stream of consciousness trope to create amusing stories starting from the then present (early 2000's) and his then current doings and splices them together, in some segments randomly, to events as far back as his childhood in Louisville, Kentucky. Along the way we find him at age nine in trouble with the FBI, and none the worst for the confrontation. Later, it is down and dirty in Rio with the crazies. Throughout, we find him incessantly testing his beloved guns and various ‘hot’ motorcycles at various and sundry appropriate and inappropriate times.

Additionally, we have some compelling and insightful stories as this radical journalist tours the news breaking global spots, taking trips to places like Vietnam just before the fall, Cuba, Grenada just after the invasion and elsewhere wherever the journalistic action might be and a story, in the Thompson style, might develop. Needless to say there is plenty of ink about sex, drugs and rock and rock including his deeply affecting and traumatic tangle with the law in Aspen the early 1990's. That, my friends, was a close call.

And throughout, as usual, there are pithy political comments about the various idiots-in-chiefs, their henchmen and hangers-on that he spent his life hammering. Maybe not hammering your way, definitely not my way, but his way. His fateful run for Sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket in 1970 probably accurately set the tone as a lifelong description of his politics. For those who have read other works by Thompson some of the signature language may be old hat as he meanders along in this volume. For others it is a chance to learn the lingo. Damn, especially this election year, I miss him. Read on.

The Literary World Lamp Goes Dim Again-“Portnoy’s Complaint” Author Philip Roth Has Cashed His Check At 85

The Literary World Lamp Goes Dim Again-“Portnoy’s Complaint” Author Philip Roth Has Cashed His Check At 85

A link to an NPR Open Source program hosted by Christopher Lydon who interviewed Philip Roth at his Connecticut home in 2006

http://radioopensource.org/philip-roth/

By Bart Webber

As usual Scribe, the late Peter Paul Markin, who was what amounted to our intellectual-in- residence that residence being our 1960s corner boy haven in front of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor in the Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville, was the first to hip us to the recently deceased American author Philip Roth. The book he hipped us to was the first big Roth novel Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969 while Scribe was doing his psychologically fatal tour in Vietnam. He kept raving about it being the first truly honest, if over the top, depiction of sexual acts including the no-no talk masturbation along with serious dirty language not known in earlier books, at least books we knew about. Previously he had like half the literary world touted guys like his heroes Hemingway and Fitzgerald with a little John Dos Passos thrown in (and it was mostly guys in his literary pantheon although Dorothy Parker and strangely Edith Wharton were on his top writers list). Beyond that he dared not go in our crowd, our crowd of Irish Catholic corner boys who while pissing against the wall about the ill effects of that doctrine on our love lives and our guilt trips still maintained some semblance of adherence if only as background noise in our brains.       

  

That Irish Catholic stranglehold was no small matter when it came to anything involving Jews. That despite Vatican II of our later youth eliminating the idea of Jews as Christ-killers (my grandmother who had many good qualities never reconciled herself to that elimination and to her dying day cursed John Paul XXII for his infamy. Also hated the idea of the Mass in the vernacular although she could speak no Latin phrases when in church). Mostly this was a “street” gentile anti-Semitism, a little Jew-baiting of Jewish kids in our high school who were all the smart ones in the academic sense and we, even Scribe for a time, hated that book smart idea. It was fine to be street smart like our leader Frankie Riley but book smart was off the charts. Except when Scribe went into one of his raves. He went to his grave cursing himself for in high school not hanging out with the Jewish kids who filled up the Great Book Club which he had refused to join because of the ban on book smarts which even he tended to adhere to inside our corner boy circle. So this was not some neo-Nazi thing but a common, too common, gentile distaste and disparagement of the “other” (nice term, right). The one Jewish kid, a good kid and an athlete which held some cache with us, who tried to hang with us on the Tonio corner got the cold shoulder and after a while stopped trying to bust into our ignorant little crowd.         

The fact is part of the reason we didn’t go for book smarts, except as always when Scribe got on his high horse, was we, and I in particular then did not give a fuck about books, high-brow or low. Never read much except a few times to get next to some girl who would mention some book and had I read it and off I would go to the Thomas Knowles Public Library and grab a copy. Most of the stuff was too gushy romance which I held my nose as I read. But such is the love battles. As for Jewish writers I would say I don’t remember reading any then, then in high school. Especially after Scribe would fill, try to fill, our lonely Friday nights reading some fag homo named Allen Ginsberg, a friend of Jack Kerouac, who had written a poem Howl  which he insisted that we let him read once he “discovered” the Beats. Jesus, a couple of guys, Timmy Riley for one who later on became one of the great drag queens in San Francisco after he came out of the closet and maybe Jack Callahan who holds the distinction of being the sole corner boy who stayed married to one woman for life almost tore Scribe apart one night to stop his madness. Later in the Summer of Love we would be so stoned on drugs that when Scribe started to recite Howl we were all ears.

To cut to the chase about Philip Roth once Scribe gave the word that this guy had something to say even to us gentile anti-Semites about the new mores in book world where unlike in Hemingway and Fitzgerald say they merely alluded to various sexual practices and had their swears sanitized he let it all hang out we were all ears. Except here is the funny part we were talking that talk, except maybe going on and on about masturbation so much, out in the streets so I remember Frankie Riley who respected Scribe more than the rest of us wondering what the big deal was. So, yeah, Philip Roth wrote some good stuff, told a tale well, expanded the literary universe, or what was left of it back then and got a bunch of guys who probably would have not given a damn reason to read him. RIP, Philip Roth, RIP             

Tom Wolfe-Fashionista Of His Own Kind-And A Hell Of A Writer When The Deal Went Down Has Cashed His Check - The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967- When Doctor Gonzo Was “Riding With The King”- Hunter S. Thompson’s The Gonzo Letters. Volume Two, 1968-1976

Tom Wolfe-Fashionista Of His Own Kind-And A Hell Of A Writer When The Deal Went Down Has Cashed His Check

By Bart Webber

I had been, strangely enough, in La Jolla out in California attending yet another writers’ conference which seems to be the makings of my days these days, attending writers’ conferences that is instead of taking pen to paper or rather fingers to word processor keyboard, when I heard Tom Wolfe had cashed his check. “Cashed his check” a term (along with synonymous “cashed his ticket”) grabbed from memory bank as a term used when I was “on the bum” hanging out in hobo jungle camps and the whole trail of flop houses and Salvation Army digs to signify that a kindred had passed to the great beyond. Was now resting in some better place that a stinking stew-bitten, flea –bitten, foul-aired and foul-person place. No more worries about the next flop, the next jug of cheapjack wine, the next run-in with vicious coppers and railroad bulls, and the next guy who was ready to rip whatever you had off to feed his own sullen addiction.

By the way this is not Thomas Wolfe of You Can’t Go Home Again, Look Homeward, Angels, etc. but the writer, maybe journalist is a better way to put the matter of tons of interesting stuff from acid trips in the 1960s hanging with Ken Kesey and his various tribes of merry pranksters, the Hell’s Angels, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters, to marveled space flights in the 1970s to Wall Street in the reckless 1980 and back who had cashed his check. The strange part of the “strangely enough” mentioned above was that on Monday May 14^th 2018, the day he died, I was walking along La Jolla Cove and commenting to my companion without knowing his fate that Tom Wolfe had made the La Jolla surfing scene in the early 1960s come alive with his tale of the Pump House Gang and related stories about the restless California tribes, you know those Hell’s Angels, Valley hot-rod freaks and the like who parents had migrated west from dustbowl Okies and Arkies to start a new life out in Eden. These next generation though lost in a thousand angsts and alienation not having to fight for every breath of fresh air (with the exception of the Angels who might as well have stayed in the Okies and McAllister Prison which would have been their fate.   

I don’t know how Tom Wolfe did at the end as a writer, or toward the end, when things seemed to glaze over and became very homogenized, lacked the verve of hard ass 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s times. Although I do note that he did a very although I note he did an interesting take on the cultural life at the Army base at Fort Bragg down in North Carolina in a book of essays around the theme of hooking up. That hooking up angle a sign that social cohesiveness in the age of the Internet was creating some strange rituals. Know this those pound for pound in his prime he along with Hunter Thompson could write the sociology of the land with simple flair and kept this guy, me, flipping the pages in the wee hours of the morning. RIP, Tom Wolfe, RIP.  

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the late gonzo journalist Hunter S, Thompson

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967- When Doctor Gonzo Was “Riding With The King”- Hunter S. Thompson’s The Gonzo Letters. Volume Two, 1968-1976  

Book Review

By Joshua Lawrence Breslin

Fear And Loathing In America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, The Gonzo Letters, Volume Two, 1968-1976, Hunter S. Thompson, Simon &Schuster, New York, 2006



I have written a number of reviews about the book s of the late outlaw gonzo journalist “Doctor Gonzo” Hunter S. Thompson. Those reviews have centered on the impact of his journalistic work in the pantheon of American political and social criticism and the jail break way that he presented his material that was like a breath of fresh air coming from out in the jet stream somewhere after all the lame gibberish of most reportage in the 1960s and 1970s (extending unfortunately to this day). His seemingly one man revolt (okay, okay Tom Wolfe and others too but he was the king hell king, alright) against paid by the word minute stuff of hack journalism told us the “skinny,” and told that straight, warts and all. The book under review however is more for aficionados like this writer who are interested in the minutiae about how this man created what he created, and the trials and tribulations, sometime bizarre, he went through to get the damn stuff published. And while one can rightly pass on the pre-Gonzo first volume of Thompson’s letters this one is worth reading for it provides the back drop to Doctor Gonzo’s most creative period, that period from about the publication of Hell’s Angels until his “discovery” of one Jimmy Carter. The period when Hunter S. Thompson was “riding with the king.”

In those earlier reviews (especially Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing On Campaign 1972, and Songs of The Doomed) I began with some generic comments applicable to all his work and they apply here as well so I will recycle them and intersperse additional comments about this book as well.

“Generally the most the trenchant social criticism, commentary and analysis complete with a prescriptive social program ripe for implementation has been done by thinkers and writers who work outside the realm of bourgeois society, notably socialists and other progressive thinkers. Bourgeois society rarely allows itself, in self-defense or hidebound fear, to be skewered by trenchant criticism from within. This is particularly true when it comes from a known dope fiend, gun freak and all-around lifestyle addict like the late, lamented Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Nevertheless, although he was far from any thought of a socialist solution to what ails society, particularly American society, and would reject such a political designation we of the extra-parliamentary could travel part of the way with him. We saw him as a kindred spirit. He was not one of us- but he was one of us. All honor to him for pushing the envelope of journalism in new directions and for his pinpricks at the hypocrisy of bourgeois society. Such men are dangerous.

I am not sure whether at the end of the day Hunter Thompson saw himself or wanted to been seen as a voice, or the voice, of his generation but he would not be an unworthy candidate. In any case, his was not the voice of the generation of 1968 being just enough older than us to have been formed by an earlier, less forgiving milieu. The hellhole, red scare, cold war night in all its infamy that even singed my generation. His earliest writings show that shadow night blanket, the National Observer stuff, well-written but mainly “objective” stuff that a thousand other guys were writing (and were getting better paid for). Nevertheless, only a few, and with time it seems fewer in each generation, allow themselves to search for some kind of truth even if they cannot go the whole distance. This compilation under review is a hodgepodge of letters over the best part of Thompson’s career, 1968-76.

As with all journalists, as indeed with all writers especially those who are writing under the gun and for mass circulation media, these letters reveal the tremendous time pressures put on writers under contractual publishing deadlines, the ridiculous amount of time spent trying to “hustle” one’s work around the industry even by a fairly well-known writer , the creative processes behind specific works (particularly the Fear and Loathing books) as outlined in several letters, including some amusing “cut and paste” efforts to use one article to serve about six purposes , and horror of horrors, damn writer’s block (or ennui). Some of these letters are minor works of art; others seem to have been thrown in as filler. However the total effect is to show the back story of a guy who blasted old bourgeois society almost to its foundations. Others will have to push on further.

“Gonzo” journalism as it emerges in the crucible of these letters, by the way, is quite compatible, with historical materialism. That is, the writer is not precluded from interpreting the events described within himself/herself as an actor in the story. The worst swindle in journalism, fostered by the formal journalism schools, as well as in other disciplines like history and political science is that somehow one must be ‘objective.’ Reality is better served if the writer puts his/her analysis correctly and then gets out of the way. In his best work that was Hunter’s way. And that premise shines through some of these letters.

As a member of the generation of 1968 I note that this was a period of particular importance in which won Hunter his spurs as a journalist. Hunter, like many of us, cut his political teeth on raging deep into the night against one Richard Milhous Nixon, at one time President of the United States, common criminal (unindicted, of course), and all- around political chameleon. Thompson went way out of his way, and with pleasure, skewering that man when Nixon was riding high. He was moreover just as happy to kick Nixon when he was down, just for good measure. Nixon represented the “dark side” of the American spirit- the side that appeared then, and today, as the bully boy of the world and as craven brute. If for nothing else Brother Thompson deserves a place in the pantheon of journalistic heroes for this exercise in elementary hygiene. Anyone who wants to rehabilitate THAT man before history please consult Thompson’s work first. Hunter, I hope you find the Brown Buffalo wherever you are. Read this book. Read all his books to know what it was like when men and women plied the journalist trade for keeps.