Exonerate Edward Snowden Unconditionally!

by Stephen Lendman

It's long past time to stop Obama's war on whistleblowers. It's time to hold him accountable for waging it.

Whistleblowing is a national imperative. Exposing government wrongdoing is essential. Responsible parties must be punished.

Whistleblowers deserve praise, not prosecution. Snowden is a world hero. He connected important dots for millions. 

Lots more vital information awaits revealing. Everyone needs to know. The NSA operates lawlessly. It's a power unto itself. It's an out-of-control agency.

Global spying is espionage. It's stealing other countries' secrets. It's doing so for political and economic advantage. It's not about keeping us safe. 

Domestic spying has nothing to do with national security. It's for control. It's transformed America more than ever into a police state.

NSA works jointly with CIA, FBI and other rogue US spy agencies. They're waging war on freedom. They want it entirely eliminated. 

They're complicit with corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and corporate bosses. They want what no one should tolerate. 

They want America more dystopian than ever. It's already unfit to live in. They want worse conditions for millions.

Hundreds of Snowdens are needed. Sunshine is the best disinfectant. Whistleblowers need to be heard, not silenced.

The Government Accountability Project (GAP) calls them anyone "who discloses information that (he or she) reasonably believes is evidence of illegality, gross waste or fraud, mismanagement, abuse of power, general wrongdoing, or a substantial and specific danger to public health and safety." 

"Typically, whistleblowers speak out to parties that can influence and rectify the situation." 

"These parties include the media, organizational managers, hotlines, or Congressional members/staff, to name a few."

Sibel Edmonds founded the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC). She did so to aid "national security whistleblowers through a variety of methods."

Today is the most perilous time in world history. America is waging war on humanity. Bipartisan complicity created a homeland police state apparatus. Obama heads it.

Fundamental freedoms are targeted for elimination. Government wrongdoing is worse than ever. Exposing it is essential. It's a national imperative.

Whistleblowers with vital information need to reveal it. The 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act protects federal employees who report misconduct. Federal agencies are prohibited from retaliating against those who do so.

Whistleblowers are obligated to report law or regulatory violations, gross mismanagement, waste, fraud and/or abuse, or acts endangering public health or safety.

The Office of Special Council is empowered to investigate whistleblower complaints. The Merit Systems Protection Board adjudicates them.

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is the only judicial body authorized to hear whistleblower case appeals. 

Since the Whistleblower Protection Act's 1994 revision, it ruled on over 200 cases. Only three times did whistleblowers prevail. It's high time they got full legal protection.

At least 18 federal statutes protect private sector whistleblowers. They fall woefully short. Whatever corporations want they get.

On November 27, 2012, the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA) was enacted. It protects government employees from reprisal for:

• disclosing misconduct;

• revealing it to co-workers or supervisors;

• disclosing policy decision consequences; or

• doing any or all of the above in relation to their position or duties.

It doesn't matter. Obama targeted more whistleblowers than all his predecessors combined. He does so on fake national security grounds. 

He does it to harden police state ruthlessness. It's long past time to challenge him. It's vital to hold him accountable. It's essential to stop what can't be tolerated.

Snowden committed no crimes. He acted responsibly. He's wrongfully charged with espionage. He's accused of violating 1917 Espionage Act provisions. 

It's a long ago outdated WW I relic. It has no relevancy today. It belongs in history's dustbin. It belonged there decades ago. It should be declared null and void. 

Snowden is wrongfully charged with:

• "Theft of Government Property

• Unauthorized Communication of National Defense Information (and)

• Willful Communication of Classified Intelligence Information to an Unauthorized Person."

These and similar charges reflect police state injustice. Challenging it is vital. Exonerating Snowden is a good beginning. 

London Guardian editors agree. On January 1, they headlined "Showden affair: the case for a pardon," saying:

"(T)hrough journalists, in the absence of meaningful, reliable democratic oversight, (he gave) people enough knowledge about the nature of modern intelligence-gathering to allow an informed debate."

It's "actively happening." Federal District Court of the District of Columbia Judge Richard Leon called NSA spying unconstitutional. It's "almost Orwellian, he said.

"I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary' invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval," he explained

"Surely, such a program infringes on 'that degree of privacy' that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment." 

It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. Mass NSA surveillance does it writ large.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) defends vital digital rights. It called 2013 "a principled fight against global mass surveillance."

Spying on ordinary people is lawless, it said. "Secret laws are wrong." Digital and telecommunication spying are "as much 'surveillance' as a person peeping through a window."

No one's privacy should be compromised. On December 18, the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted the first resolution on the privacy rights. 

It's called "The right to privacy in the digital age." It's a step in the right direction. It ordered a human rights analysis of digital surveillance law.

In 2014, EFF promised to keep working "for a new era of private and secure digital communications."

Congress is obstructing justice. State courts and legislatures are acting on their own. They're doing so to protect electronic privacy.

Last summer, the Massachusetts Judicial Court ruled that vehicle passengers have a right to be free from persistent GPS monitoring.

Montana and Maine passed laws requiring police to have warrants before using electronic tracking devices.

Texas enacted similar legislation. Perhaps other states will follow. Wisconsin is considering privacy protection. 

A pending measure prohibits police from tracking cell phone communications without warrant permission.

Montana lawmakers plan amending the state constitution. Doing so would protect digital privacy. When Congress refuses to act responsibly, it's up to states to do so instead. 

It's the best chance for transformative change. If enough states act, it's hard stopping a national trend. Congress may be forced to go along. Anything is possible with enough commitment.

Guardian editors said:

"Parliamentarians, presidents, digital engineers, academics, lawyers and civil rights activists around the world have begun a wide-ranging and intense discussion."

At issue is challenging unjustifiable spying. Snowden can't come home. He's forced to remain abroad. Unjustifiable prosecution awaits him if he returns. Conviction is rubber-stamp certain.

"It is difficult to imagine Mr. Obama giving Mr. Snowden the pardon he deserves," said Guardian editors. Talk circulated about possible amnesty in return for all documents he has.

Why would he return what he feels vital to expose? Why should lawbreaking be concealed? 

Why should rogue NSA officials be allowed to continue operating lawlessly? Why should Snowden face prosecution for exposing wrongdoing?

Why should it be for doing the right thing? Former CIA director James Woolsey wants his head. He called for "hang(ing) by his neck until he is dead."

Woolsey is one of many unindicted US war criminals. He's responsible for too many high crimes to ignore. He's not alone. Washington is infested with criminals. Gangster states operate this way.

Snowden's case seems headed for Supreme Court debate. It's stacked with right-wing extremists. It's hard imagining them ruling fairly.

Guardian editors remain hopeful, saying:

If they say Snowden "did, indeed, raise serious matters of public  importance which were previously hidden (or worse, dishonestly concealed), is it then conceivable that he could be treated as a traitor or common felon?"

Wrongdoing is essential to expose. Whistleblowing is a noble tradition. Free speech is too important to compromise.

Snowden deserves praise, not prosecution. So do others acting responsibly the same way. Courageous acts need to be encouraged.

Ending whistleblower prosecutions is a good place to start. 

Exonerating Snowden would set a precedent. Perhaps Bradley Manning might follow.

Doing the right thing is more important then ever. So is enforcing rule of law principles.

Jamel Jaffer is ACLU deputy legal director. On December 19, he headlined "End His Prosecution," saying:

"Edward Snowden has made our democracy stronger. He should be praised, not prosecuted."

He revealed information everyone needs to know. Without it, "we wouldn't be having (an) extraordinary debate about the proper scope of the government's surveillance powers."

We have state legislatures addressing privacy rights. We have the General Assembly doing it. 

We got Judge Leon's ruling. Give credit where it's deserved. Snowden shook the system. It needs transformative change.

"Would it be better if all (he revealed) remained secret," asked Jaffer? Would it be better if ordinary people knew nothing?

Snowden strengthened America. He performed "an immense public service." Charging him "under the Espionage Act is a travesty," said Jaffer.

Efforts should encourage other Snowdens to go public. They should  do so to alert Americans that "an agency meant to protect them has become a threat...instead."

Exposing government wrongdoing is essential. Imagine it becoming a national trend.

Imagine it forcing elected and appointed public officials to obey rule of law principles. Imagine America changing for the better. 

Imagine what so far never happened. Now is more important than ever to change things. There's not a moment to waste.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. 

His new book is titled "Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity."

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs Fridays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

http://www.dailycensored.com/exonerate-edward-showden-unconditionally/

Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 12, Section 2, 1947-1948

The movement to democratize Egypt: Except for their religious beliefs, Jews shared lifestyles with those of Muslim background.

Jewish home in Egypt. Image from BBC Watch.

By Bob Feldman | The Rag Blog | January 6, 2014

[With all the dramatic activity in Egypt, Bob Feldman's Rag Blog "people's history" series, "The Movement to Democratize Egypt," could not be more timely. Also see Feldman's "Hidden History of Texas" series on The Rag Blog.]

Prior to the Zionist movement’s establishment of the State of Israel on Palestinian land in 1948 and subsequent eviction of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs from Palestine during the late 1940s, between 65,000 and 80,000 Egyptians of Jewish religious background lived in Egypt. Around 64 percent of Egyptians of Jewish background lived in Cairo and around 32 percent lived in Alexandria, according to the Egyptian census of 1947.

Before the establishment of Israel, Egyptian Jews “attained an inordinately high number of respectable positions in finance, commerce, industry and the professions” in post-World War II Egyptian society, according to Selma Botman’s The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970. As the Encyclopedia Judaica recalled:

In 1947 most Egyptian Jews (59%) were merchants, and the rest were employed in industry (18%), administration, and public services (11%). The economic situation of Egyptian Jewry was relatively good; there were several multi-millionaires, a phenomenon unusual in other Jewish communities of the Middle East…There were no restrictions on accepting Jews in government or foreign schools.

And in addition to the relatively prosperous Egyptians of Jewish religious background who lived in Cairo prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in Palestine, there were also “many poor Jews living in the Haret al-Ya Hud section of Cairo who were completely indistinguishable from their Muslim counterparts” in Egypt.

And, “with the exception of their adherence to religious belief, they ate, spoke, dressed, and lived in virtually identical ways” as the Egyptians of Islamic religious background, according to The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970.

Zionism was considered an alien ideology to most Egyptian Jews.

So, not surprisingly, although only about 20 percent of the people of Jewish religious background who lived in Egypt were officially considered Egyptian citizens in 1947, “Zionism was generally an alien ideology to most Egyptian Jews,” prior to 1947, according to The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970; and the Jewish League to Combat Zionism (al-Rabita al-Tsrailiyya li Muk afahat al-Sahyuniyya), founded in the mid-1940s by an Egyptian named Marcel Israel, included Egyptian “leftists and communists alike,” according to the same book.

Egypt’s mid-1940s Jewish League to Combat Zionism had the following four objectives, according to The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970: 1. “working against Zionism;” 2. “strengthening ties between Egyptian Jews and the Egyptian people in the struggle for independence;” 3. “lessen[ing] the gap between Jews and Arabs in Palestine;” and 4. “solving the problem of the Wandering Jew.”

But since the Egyptian monarchical regime’s prime minister in 1947, al-Nuqrashi, was being backed by some Egyptian Jews who were sympathetic to the Zionist movement (and who also wished to discourage Egyptians of Islamic and Jewish religious backgrounds from uniting in opposition to UK special influence in Egypt), al-Nuqrashi suppressed the Jewish League to Combat Zionism in 1947.

Yet when the United Nations voted to partition Palestine -- despite the objections of most people then living in Palestine and other Arab counties and many rank-and-file members of Egypt’s Democratic Movement for National Liberation [DMNL] -- the leftist DMNL group’s leadership -- like the Soviet Union -- endorsed the partition plan.

But in its al-Jamahir party newspaper, the DMNL also clarified its late 1947 unpopular political stance on the issue of Palestine’s partition in the following way:

We do not want to take Palestine away from the Arabs and give it to the Jews but we want to take it away from imperialism and give it to the Arabs and Jews…Then will begin the long struggle for rapprochement between Arab and Jewish states…

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 12, Section 1, 1947-1948

Police crack down on strikers in Mahalla, 1947, killing three workers. Image from Hossam el-Hamalawy / Flickr.

A people's history:
The movement to democratize Egypt

Part 12: 1947-1948 period/Section 1 -- Anti-imperialist left grows; Muslim Brotherhood collaborates with Egyptian regime.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / December 10, 2013

[With all the dramatic activity in Egypt, Bob Feldman's Rag Blog "people's history" series, "The Movement to Democratize Egypt," could not be more timely. Also see Feldman's "Hidden History of Texas" series on The Rag Blog.]

Despite the post-July 1946 political repression of Egyptian dissidents by the UK imperialist-backed monarchical regime, by the end of May 1947, a new Egyptian left anti-imperialist organization, the Democratic Movement for National Liberation [DMNL], also known as Hadeto, was formed after EMNL and Iskra leaders united and merged their approximately 1,200 Egyptian communist supporters into one group.

Solely funded in 1947 “from subscriptions and contributions imposed upon party members,” the DMNL “had some success” recruiting more Egyptian supporters in "the textile workers’ union, the transportation union, among...communication workers, hotel workers, tobacco workers, and military men” who often met fellow Egyptian left activists downtown at the Café Issayi-vitch in Cairo, according to Selma Botman’s The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970.

After the owners of the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company factory in Mahalla-al-Kubra -- Egypt’s largest and most modern textile factory -- announced plans to replace over 12,000 Egyptian textile factory workers with new machinery, the textile workers went on strike in early September 1947. And after four of the striking workers were killed and 70 strikers were arrested by the Egyptian forces of “law and order,” 17,000 more Egyptian textile “workers in Shubra went on strike for one day in sympathy,” according to the same book.

The early September 1947 strike in Mahalla-al-Kubra was lost by the textile workers following its repression by the Egyptian monarchical regime. But during the last three months of 1947, additional strikes by textile factory workers in Alexandria, by oil workers in Suez, and by Egyptian teachers and telegraph workers broke out; and between 1948 and 1950 Egyptian nurses, police officers, gas workers, and textile workers in some other Egyptian cities also held strikes.

The DMNL was still an underground group that had to organize clandestinely during the late 1940s because of the repressive nature of the Egyptian regime. Besides recruiting Egyptian workers who apparently acted as catalysts for the late 1940s wave of labor strikes in Egypt, the DMNL also was able to recruit into its ranks during the 1940s some non-commissioned officers in the Egyptian military and some Egyptian peasants or fallahin.

And by the early 1950s, “the DMNL had contacts in tens of villages” in Egypt, according to The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970. In addition, by the early 1950s, there were almost 500 unions in Egypt, according to an article by Atef Said, titled “Egypt’s Long Labor History.” that appeared in Against The Current in 2009.

During the late 1940s, around 13 million Egyptians lived in Egypt’s countryside in the Nile River valley and 6 million Egyptians lived in Egyptian cities. So although the number of Egyptian factory workers had increased from 247,000 to 756,000 between 1937 and 1947, around 66 percent of Egypt’s labor force was still engaged in agricultural work in the late 1940s. And despite Egypt’s formal political independence, foreign business investors still owned 61 percent of all Egyptian companies in 1947.

Yet the various anti-imperialist left secular Egyptian political groups together still had much less mass support by the 1940s than did the religiously fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood group. As Selma Botman’s Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952 observed:

[Hasan] al-Banna...established the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928... Al-Banna promoted a simple and absolute message to his followers: struggle to rid Egypt of foreign occupation; defend and obey Islam... By the outbreak of World War II, the Brotherhood...movement’s strength was...estimated at somewhere from many hundreds of thousands to beyond a million activists…

But according to Robert Dreyfuss’ Devil’s Game: How The United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam,

Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood was established with a grant from England’s Suez Canal Company, and over the next quarter century British diplomats, the intelligence service, MI6, and Cairo’s Anglophilic King Farouk would use the Muslim Brotherhood as a cudgel against Egypt’s communists and nationalists...

After World War II, Al-Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood temporarily began to collaborate with the Egyptian  regime to block an increase of mass support for Egypt’s secular left. As the same book recalled, “between 1945 and 1948...the organization...acted on the instructions of various ruling governments, as a counterweight to the Communists” in Egypt; and the “[Muslim] Brotherhood would sabotage meetings, precipitate clashes at public gatherings and even damage property” of the left opposition groups with which the Muslim Brotherhood competed politically for recruits and which the Egyptian government had forced underground.

Egyptian prime minister al-Nuqrashi began to see the Muslim Brotherhood as a political threat to the regime and “used his martial law authority to dissolve” the organization “in November 1948.” Al-Nuqrashi was assassinated a month later by a student attached to the Brotherhood;” and, utilizing King Farouk’s bodyguards, the Egyptian government “responded by murdering Hasan al-Banna,” the Muslim Brotherhood’s founder and leader, in 1949, according to Jason Thompson’s A History of Egypt.

 [Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Michael James : Back to Uptown, 1965-1966

Two men, Uptown Chicago, 1966. Photos by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
Back to Uptown: Bye-bye California, 
Chicago here I come, 1965-1966

I was glad to be back in Uptown, progressing along my path with another left turn and a big step into America.

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / December 9, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

The West Oakland organizing project over, I planned to leave Berkeley. But in the late fall of 1965 I was still there. I had classes. I was thinking about conflict, and how you could bring conflicting groups together. I met others who were already doing community organizing, including Mike Miller who is still at it in 2013, and Mike Sharon with whom I’ve lost contact. I was going to be a community organizer, either in Newark or Chicago.

That fall I lived with friends, for a time with John Williams, who taught me a lot about cooking and politics, and then at Julie Miller’s. Julie was a politically active student friend from Los Angeles. I studied and took in doses of politics and culture. In addition to sociology classes with Nathan Glazer and Hebert Blumer (a renowned academic who had played football at the University of Chicago and then professionally with the old Chicago Cardinals), I went to talks, rallies, demonstrations, films, and musical events.

The playwright and poet LeRoi Jones had become Amiri Baraka. He came to campus and his anti-white rap shook me up. My more knowledgeable pals Davy Wellman and Joe Blum helped me to understand Black Nationalism. A few years later Black Panther leader Bobby Seale would distinguish between revolutionary and reactionary nationalism. “You don’t fight fire with fire, you fight fire with water, and you don’t fight racism with more racism, you fight racism with solidarity.”

Simply put: dig yourself and others.

There were large marches into Oakland, against the Vietnam War and against the racist Oakland Tribune and its rightwing Republican owner, former Senator Bill Knowland. I saw the great guitarist John Fahey along with Country Joe and the Fish at the Finnish Hall. On Telegraph Avenue I bought and listened (over and over) to Joe’s EP Section 43. And I began going to concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco.

Also in San Francisco I took in a movie I’d read about, Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour, a flick about gay men in prison and their fantasies. The article in Studies on the Left reported on the SF Police Department’s harassment of a theater showing the film. This was all new to me; I didn’t have much consciousness about gays at the time.

I liked the film; it featured a black prisoner and a white one, breathing and whispering through a straw between their neighboring cells. I found it pleasant and sensual; it sure bumped up my learning curve on such matters.

I visited what I now considered my second home, the Williams compound in the Carmel Highlands. From there I explored down the coast. I climbed foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains and went to a rodeo in the old mission town San Juan Bautista. The rodeo was different than my early rodeo experience in Madison Square Garden -- this one was small, outdoors, and heavily influenced by Mexican culture.

Charlie Mingus, Monterrey, California, 1965.

And I went to the Monterey Jazz Festival. A jazz fan since my mid-teens, I’d been to shows and concerts in Greenwich Village and NYC’s Town Hall. I was at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1961, and went to many sets in Chicago. The Monterey Jazz Festival was my first jazz event on the West Coast. I took some pictures of Charlie Mingus hanging out in the concession area before his short set.

At Christmas time I went home to Connecticut. My brother and I, in a tradition started accidentally by our Dad years earlier, went to get a tree late on Christmas Eve; as usual the tree seller had long gone. My Dad returned to the lot to pay the next day, but no one was there. In subsequent years Beau and I didn’t even make that much effort, so later in my life when I sold trees at the Heartland Café, I never got too upset if some went missing and unaccounted for. Karma.

I’ll always remember that particular Christmas, especially for the warm vibes I felt while listening to the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, over and over. I suddenly appreciated them, and saw both them and the Remains at the Chicago Amphitheater the following year.

After Christmas I went to Newark, New Jersey, to visit Tom Hayden and others who worked in the Newark Community Union Project, in a black community. Then I went to Chicago and visited the National Office of Students for a Democratic Society, which was located at 63rd and Cottage Grove.

While in Chicago I visited a snow-covered, gray, and very cold Uptown, where I met with two JOIN Community Union organizers, Peter and Stevie Friedman, working in what was then a predominantly Southern white community. Next I headed down to the University of Illinois in Champaign Urbana, where SDS was holding one of its conventions. My only recollection of that meeting is of when I leapt off a table to break up an altercation between a black community person from the Newark Project and Bob Speck, a Navy vet from the Austin SDS chapter.

At the end of winter break I rode with fellow SDS members from Chicago to Los Angeles, and made my way back to Berkeley. Early in the New Year of ‘66 I was at a SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) benefit at the Fillmore, featuring Grateful Dead, Quick Silver Messenger Service, Moby Grape, and comedian Richard Pryor.

In the back of the hall I met and talked with Stokeley Carmichael (Kwame Ture) who was then head of SNCC. I shared with him my intention to leave Cal and go into a community, either Newark or Chicago. He told me in no uncertain terms to “Work with whites, we’ve got plenty going on in the Black community. We need more support from within the white community."

California girls. Carmel, California, 1965.

That was it. Bye-bye California. Chicago here I come.

But it took a while longer.

I had a graduate paper to write on organizing the poor. I was comparing three efforts: the Saul Alinsky model from his Industrial Areas Foundation, the conflicting and self-constricting efforts of the Government’s War on Poverty, and the “be one with the people” and “let the people decide” projects of SDS and ERAP. My research findings of course declared the SDS efforts best, and I spent the winter of 1966 in the Highlands writing about poverty and organizing.

While there I battled a raccoon that raided the bird feeder every night. Laying in wait, I was inside writing with a baseball bat nearby. I attached bells to the feeder and when they jingled I leapt into action. I went for the animal with a mighty swing, missing as the raccoon jumped free ahead of the bat.

Back up in the Bay Area I ran into someone at a Paul Butterfield concert who said, “I thought you left for Chicago.” I replied: “Soon -- I’m finishing a paper.” I was. I was also having a real fine time in my final weeks as a California resident.

But bye-bye California and hello Chicago did come to be. One Sunday in early April, JOIN organizer Burt Steck and I began heading east in my 1957 Ford convertible, to the heart of the nation.

On Monday night we stopped on the Navajo Reservation in northeastern Arizona and slept on the ground beside the Ford ragtop. In the morning we found that we had actually slept very close to the edge of Canyon de Chelly. Driving on a dirt road we stopped to pick up a hitchhiking Navajo kid. His mom came running out from the bushes and they both got into the car.

The small woman had a blanket she was bringing to a trading post. I just happened to have with me a box of broken abalone shells I had literally thought about “trading to the Indians.” They made great buttons. When we reached the trading post I gave them to the mom. She smiled. Inside I arranged for the trader to send me a buckskin, which I later traded to Austin SDS friend Bob Pardun for a very nice cowboy shirt.

Over a thousand miles and 20 hours later, Wednesday morning found us parked and asleep in front of the U.S. Farmers Association (USFA) office in Des Moines, Iowa. Two policemen tapped on the window and woke us up. We engaged in friendly and humorous conversation about Berkeley, the FSM, and heading to Chicago to organize the poor. They did ask about marijuana; I shared that I had tried it, but assured them we didn’t have any.

We were in Des Moines because a new SDS friend from the University of Nebraska, Carl Davidson, had told me about a radical farmer named Fred Stover. Stover had been a Department of Agriculture official in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, had supported the progressive, Henry Wallace, in the 1948 presidential campaign, and opposed the Korean War. He had been accused of being a member of the Communist Party in his youth and had been forced out of the leadership of the National Farmers Union (NFU). That led to his founding of the USFA, a progressive offshoot of the NFU.

When Fred arrived he took us out to eat, treating us ravenous boys to a big Iowa breakfast. We had a good talk. I really liked Stover. I myself had been a member of the 4H Club (“Head, Heart, Hands, and Health”), and have always liked agriculture and farmers, particularly those on the progressive side of the political equation.

By mid-afternoon Burt and I were in Chicago in Uptown. I immediately became involved in a small demonstration at the Price-Rite TV Repair Shop on Argyle. Mrs. Hinton, an East Indian on welfare and a JOIN member, had tried to return a broken used TV set she had purchased from Price’s. They refused. JOIN organizers and community folks were picketing out front. One of the Price brothers and I got into some macho posturing and arguing. Eventually Mrs. Hinton got her just due. The Price brothers were from Appalachia; eventually they would become JOIN supporters themselves.

It was a good day. I was glad to be back in Uptown, progressing along my path with another left turn and a big step into America.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Alice Embree : Chile and the Politics of Memory

19 November 2013

Alice Embree : Chile and the Politics of Memory

Me gustan los estudiantes. This painting by Austin's Carlos Lowry is the cover art on the Fall 2013 NACLA Report on the Americas.

The contradictions of Chile
and the politics of memory

The elections in Chile take place as the country marks the fortieth anniversary of the bloody military coup that happened with covert U.S. assistance.

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / November 20, 2013

“[T]he battle over memory is a struggle over meaning…” -- Steven S. Volk, "The Politics of Memory and the Memory of Politics," Fall 2013 NACLA Report on the Americas.

On Sunday, November 17, Socialist Michelle Bachelet received 47% of the vote in a field of nine Chilean presidential candidates. She will go into a December 15 run-off with a candidate from the hard right, Evelyn Matthei, who received 25% of the vote. Bachelet will likely serve a second term as president of Chile.

Both run-off candidates are daughters of Chilean Air Force officers. Bachelet’s father was an Air Force Brigadier General at the time of the 1973 military coup. Known for his loyalty to the democratic government, he was arrested for treason, tortured, and died in prison. Both Michelle Bachelet and her mother were arrested, tortured, and forced into exile. In stark contrast, Matthei’s father was a key member of the military junta. The memory of military rule for these two women could hardly be more disparate.

The elections in Chile take place as the country marks the fortieth anniversary of the bloody military coup that happened with covert U.S. assistance. The September 11, 1973 coup overthrew the elected Socialist president Salvador Allende. The Fall 2013 NACLA Report on the Americas, published by the nonprofit North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), explores the implications of that coup.

The cover art on the NACLA issue is by Austin artist Carlos Lowry. The painting hangs above our couch. It features Camila Vallejo against a background of jubilant students. The painting's name, Me gustan los estudiantes, is taken from a song by the legendary Chilean folksinger Violeta Parra.

Camila Vallejo, featured on NACLA’s cover, was president of Chile’s largest student federation. She became the well-known face of the 2011 student movement demanding change in an educational system that has left Chilean students among the most indebted in the world. On Sunday, Vallejo was elected to the Chilean Congress. Three other student leaders were also elected.

NACLA’s compilation of articles describes Chile 40 years after the coup. To some, Chile became a neoliberal economic success story. "Shock Doctrine" is what Naomi Klein calls it in a book by that name. Democracy was dismantled and social movements demobilized by military force. Opponents were imprisoned, tortured, “disappeared,” and exiled -- displacing and scattering Chileans across the globe. The public sector was weakened, free market tactics were celebrated, and public services were privatized.

But NACLA deals with another aspect of Chile’s coup -- the success of an international solidarity movement, the exposure of U.S. complicity in the coup through congressional hearings, the mobilization of many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to address human rights abuses, the creation of human rights archives (including one at the University of Texas at Austin), and the genesis of Central American solidarity committees.

NACLA also examines the Chilean student uprising, and contrasts it with Wall Street occupiers and Spain’s indignados. The student movement of Camila Vallejo claimed new space for social movements, and defied the status quo of Chile’s neoliberal economy. Student leaders rejected “politics as usual” as practiced by the dominant coalitions since 1990. The student demand for tax reform sufficient to support free education will become a major challenge from the left for Michelle Bachelet when she takes office again.

The bold student demonstrations, complete with theater, took politics into the streets in ways not seen for decades. Students staged an 1,800-second long "kiss-in" for education and an 1,800-hour-long relay around the presidential palace. The "1,800" symbolized the investment (2.2% percent of Chile’s gross domestic product) required to fully fund public education.

Chile is a territory of contradictions. They are as vast as its geographic extremes -- Andes to ocean, desert to rainforest. It is a country in which neoliberal policies deformed public education, weakened national health care, and caused students to incur burdensome loans. Its new prosperity rests upon severe income disparity.

It is a country that U.S. Republicans have sought to emulate in plans to “privatize” Social Security. Yet, it is a country whose recent student mobilizations have inspired students around the globe. It is a country that just elected Camila Vallejo, a Communist, to office, and is poised to elect Michelle Bachelet, a Socialist, to a second term as president.

[Alice Embree, a contributing editor to The Rag Blog, is a long-time Austin activist, organizer, and member of the Texas State Employees Union. A veteran of SDS and the women's liberation movement, Alice is a former staff member of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) and of underground newspapers The Rag in Austin and RAT in New York. She now co-chairs the Friends of New Journalism. Read more articles by Alice Embree on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 12, Section 1, 1947-1948

10 December 2013

HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 12, Section 1, 1947-1948

Police crack down on strikers in Mahalla, 1947, killing three workers. Image from Hossam el-Hamalawy / Flickr.

A people's history:
The movement to democratize Egypt

Part 12: 1947-1948 period/Section 1 -- Anti-imperialist left grows; Muslim Brotherhood collaborates with Egyptian regime.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / December 10, 2013

[With all the dramatic activity in Egypt, Bob Feldman's Rag Blog "people's history" series, "The Movement to Democratize Egypt," could not be more timely. Also see Feldman's "Hidden History of Texas" series on The Rag Blog.]

Despite the post-July 1946 political repression of Egyptian dissidents by the UK imperialist-backed monarchical regime, by the end of May 1947, a new Egyptian left anti-imperialist organization, the Democratic Movement for National Liberation [DMNL], also known as Hadeto, was formed after EMNL and Iskra leaders united and merged their approximately 1,200 Egyptian communist supporters into one group.

Solely funded in 1947 “from subscriptions and contributions imposed upon party members,” the DMNL “had some success” recruiting more Egyptian supporters in "the textile workers’ union, the transportation union, among...communication workers, hotel workers, tobacco workers, and military men” who often met fellow Egyptian left activists downtown at the Café Issayi-vitch in Cairo, according to Selma Botman’s The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970.

After the owners of the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company factory in Mahalla-al-Kubra -- Egypt’s largest and most modern textile factory -- announced plans to replace over 12,000 Egyptian textile factory workers with new machinery, the textile workers went on strike in early September 1947. And after four of the striking workers were killed and 70 strikers were arrested by the Egyptian forces of “law and order,” 17,000 more Egyptian textile “workers in Shubra went on strike for one day in sympathy,” according to the same book.

The early September 1947 strike in Mahalla-al-Kubra was lost by the textile workers following its repression by the Egyptian monarchical regime. But during the last three months of 1947, additional strikes by textile factory workers in Alexandria, by oil workers in Suez, and by Egyptian teachers and telegraph workers broke out; and between 1948 and 1950 Egyptian nurses, police officers, gas workers, and textile workers in some other Egyptian cities also held strikes.

The DMNL was still an underground group that had to organize clandestinely during the late 1940s because of the repressive nature of the Egyptian regime. Besides recruiting Egyptian workers who apparently acted as catalysts for the late 1940s wave of labor strikes in Egypt, the DMNL also was able to recruit into its ranks during the 1940s some non-commissioned officers in the Egyptian military and some Egyptian peasants or fallahin.

And by the early 1950s, “the DMNL had contacts in tens of villages” in Egypt, according to The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970. In addition, by the early 1950s, there were almost 500 unions in Egypt, according to an article by Atef Said, titled “Egypt’s Long Labor History.” that appeared in Against The Current in 2009.

During the late 1940s, around 13 million Egyptians lived in Egypt’s countryside in the Nile River valley and 6 million Egyptians lived in Egyptian cities. So although the number of Egyptian factory workers had increased from 247,000 to 756,000 between 1937 and 1947, around 66 percent of Egypt’s labor force was still engaged in agricultural work in the late 1940s. And despite Egypt’s formal political independence, foreign business investors still owned 61 percent of all Egyptian companies in 1947.

Yet the various anti-imperialist left secular Egyptian political groups together still had much less mass support by the 1940s than did the religiously fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood group. As Selma Botman’s Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952 observed:

[Hasan] al-Banna...established the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928... Al-Banna promoted a simple and absolute message to his followers: struggle to rid Egypt of foreign occupation; defend and obey Islam... By the outbreak of World War II, the Brotherhood...movement’s strength was...estimated at somewhere from many hundreds of thousands to beyond a million activists…

But according to Robert Dreyfuss’ Devil’s Game: How The United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam,

Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood was established with a grant from England’s Suez Canal Company, and over the next quarter century British diplomats, the intelligence service, MI6, and Cairo’s Anglophilic King Farouk would use the Muslim Brotherhood as a cudgel against Egypt’s communists and nationalists...

After World War II, Al-Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood temporarily began to collaborate with the Egyptian  regime to block an increase of mass support for Egypt’s secular left. As the same book recalled, “between 1945 and 1948...the organization...acted on the instructions of various ruling governments, as a counterweight to the Communists” in Egypt; and the “[Muslim] Brotherhood would sabotage meetings, precipitate clashes at public gatherings and even damage property” of the left opposition groups with which the Muslim Brotherhood competed politically for recruits and which the Egyptian government had forced underground.

Egyptian prime minister al-Nuqrashi began to see the Muslim Brotherhood as a political threat to the regime and “used his martial law authority to dissolve” the organization “in November 1948.” Al-Nuqrashi was assassinated a month later by a student attached to the Brotherhood;” and, utilizing King Farouk’s bodyguards, the Egyptian government “responded by murdering Hasan al-Banna,” the Muslim Brotherhood’s founder and leader, in 1949, according to Jason Thompson’s A History of Egypt.

 [Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Michael James : Like a Bruegel Painting, 1966

The JOIN Community Union was our effort in Uptown, Chicago, to build solidarity and create an organized force for change, especially among poor people of Southern origin.

SNCC’s Curtis Hayes (Muhammad) and SDS’s Susan Lum in Uptown, Chicago, 1966. Photos by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

By Michael James | The Rag Blog | January 6, 2014

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

UPTOWN, Chicago in 1966. I called it “Hillbilly Harlem.” Uptown was the regional capital of poor Southern white migrants moving to the North. The migration of Southern whites began when they came north in the 1940’s for war industry work, and accelerated after WWII when factories flourished in and around Chicago.People arrived from rural and urban areas throughout the South, with the majority coming from Appalachia.

I had lived in Uptown in the summer of 1964 when I worked as a participant observer for a Notre Dame study of Southern white migrants. Daytime had found me hanging out with older guys, often drinking, rolling cigarettes, and playing the guitar under the El tracks next to Graceland Cemetery. Now I was working with others in JOIN Community Union, a community organizing project initiated by SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and its Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP).

When it first started, as a project to organize the unemployed, JOIN stood for Jobs or Income Now. But when organizing the unemployed didn’t pan out, JOIN evolved into a “community union,” uniting folks to fight around issues that affected their lives, like housing, welfare, and police brutality.

Young radicals like myself went into cities around the country trying to organize “to build an interracial movement of the poor.” JOIN was our effort to build solidarity and create an organized force for change among poor people of Southern origin and others who lived in this community on Chicago’s North Side. We intended to help our nation live up to its stated vision of equal opportunity for all.

Virginia Bowers and Little Dovie.

In Uptown, we met a lot of folks while leafleting in front of the Unemployment Compensation Office on Lawrence Avenue. The backbone of JOIN was welfare women. The leadership included Dovie Coleman and Dovie Thurman, aka Big Dovie and Little Dovie -- confident and forceful black women.

Southern white women on welfare were aware of the goings-on in the civil rights movement and looked to these black women for leadership. One was Virginia Bowers from Arkansas, who became the JOIN office manager. Key organizers included Harriet Stulman, Alice Keller, and Vivien and Richie Rothstein.

Vivien and I had worked together what had been the West Oakland Community Union Project. In future years she became an organizer in Los Angeles of Vietnamese immigrants. Richie forged links to unions and set up a JOIN School to help community people learn about the power structure, welfare, police, and housing matters.

Post-JOIN he wrote about education for The New York Times and worked on education policy at the Economic Policy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. In his Uptown work he was serious, smart, dedicated and, as I now realize, inspirational. He didn’t always appreciate my rebellious youthful behavior.

The government’s new War on Poverty was active in Uptown, headquartered on Montrose (now a gym in the increasingly gentrified neighborhood). We believed the War on Poverty didn’t encourage community people to take action or make decisions on the big issues of jobs, housing, education, and welfare. It too often focused on superficial, harmless programs like where to plant trees.

JOIN held weekly meetings that featured speakers, theatrical skits, and singing. The group-sing was enthusiastic, if sometimes off key, and included mountain tunes, spirituals, and traditional union songs. Sometimes we altered the lyrics to reflect current conditions.

We showed films we got from UE’s (United Electrical Workers') treasure-trove of labor documentary and training films. We rented films from a distribution house, including the previously banned Salt of the Earth about striking mine workers in Silver City, New Mexico — though The Hank Williams Story turned out a larger crowd.

Regular attendees were a unique, interesting, somewhat motley crew of Uptown residents.

Regular attendees were a unique, interesting, somewhat motley crew of Uptown residents. We had our share of wino attendees, including a Greek fellow named John. Once I carried a drunk John into Cook County Hospital, when his frostbitten feet prevented him from walking.

Each week there was an increasing number of young guys from the neighborhood, hanging in the back of the room. One Southern kid named James Osborne had a job with the War on Poverty and also hung around JOIN. At a meeting in Washington, D.C., he spoke up and asked Sargent Shriver, the War on Poverty’s head man, a question that was apparently too challenging. James lost his job -- and distanced himself from JOIN.

A short time later he married a nun who worked in the neighborhood and they opened the Book Box on Lawrence (now Shake Rattle and Read) by the Green Mill. Later, in 1968, we held training sessions in its basement for a short-lived outfit called the National Organizing Committee (NOC), which recruited college students to be community organizers.

Goodfellows and girl in a car.

While I liked to joke that the meetings reminded me of a Bruegel painting, a mass of tortured and rough-edged peasants, there were of course plenty of sharp and effective people among the ranks, including Sarah, a Russian who had participated in the Russian Revolution and by 1966 was selling papers on Argyle.

Carl, a physically challenged welfare activist, came, as did Eugene Feldman, a retired teacher and former Communist. Feldman had organized sharecroppers in the South during the 1930s and shared pamphlets from those times. We knew we were part of an ongoing, long tradition of organizing and fighting for peoples’ rights.

A highlight of many meetings was a JOIN Theater agitprop skit that focused on the likes of Mayor Daley, urban renewal (poor people removal), landlords, and welfare and police brutality. My younger sister Melody James founded this project. Melody studied drama at Carnegie Institute and San Francisco State, so I asked her to come to Uptown to organize a peoples’ theater. After her JOIN work she returned to San Francisco and became a member of the legendary San Francisco Mime Troupe.

For JOIN Melody put together a lively mix of community people and student organizer types. JOIN Theater performed on various stages around town and in an empty lot on Clifton Street. Following the City’s massive urban removal of people in that part of the neighborhood, they performed before a large crowd, calling on the city to build a Hank Williams Memorial Playground in the space where Truman College stands today.

Over the spring and summer of ‘66 young guys began coming around JOIN. Near the old Wilson Avenue pool hall where Al Capone was said to have played, Reverend Maury ran a program for young guys. As we were less concerned with life after death than a better life in this lifetime, the Reverend’s hall became fertile ground for recruiting and we quickly made inroads.

We got to know these young guys, many of whom readily shared their accounts of police harassment and brutality. By the fall of 1966 Rev. Maury closed his operation. In its stead Bob Lawson, a JOIN organizer who had played football at Berkeley, gathered a group of young Southern guys that included Ralph Thurman, Hi Thurman, Bobby Joe McGinnis, and Jack (Junebug) Boykin.

They started a new group, which was friendly to but officially independent of JOIN. They called themselves The Uptown Goodfellows and opened a hangout-clubhouse space on Wilson at Kenmore.

When the police killed a young man named Ronnie Williams, who had moved to Uptown from Kentucky, it set off activity protesting police harassment and brutality.

When the police killed a young man named Ronnie Williams, who had moved to Uptown from Kentucky, it set off activity protesting police harassment and brutality. The Goodfellows and JOIN together organized a march on the infamous Summerdale 20th District Police Station. Over 300 people marched, mostly but not only, white Southerners.

Summerdale had been implicated earlier in a stolen-goods ring. The “Summerdale Scandal” led to the hiring (and brief tenure) of a forward-thinking criminology professor from Berkeley named O. W. Wilson as Police Superintendent. Our march called for an end to all police brutality but singled out a particularly hard-ass cop named Sam Joseph.

My own interaction with Joseph was limited to a short exchange of wise-ass remarks after he shined a flashlight into my car. I was parked down at Montrose Beach with Susan Ring, who was from a progressive home in the Swedish neighborhood of Andersonville. Her mom worked for the AFSC (American Friends Service Committee) and her dad was a butcher I jokingly referred to as the “Marxist butcher.”

Susan and I were making out when Joseph and his sidekick shined the light into the car and knocked on the window. Later Susan ended up marrying Junebug Boykin, who was my main street mentor.

The Summerdale march gave people a sense of unity, direction, and power. What followed from JOIN and the community was the founding of a program called Citizens’ Alert. This was an earlier version of the Oakland Black Panther Party’s practice of following the police and observing their activities. Citizens’ Alert is still active in Chicago, calling attention to police misbehavior. Activist Mary Powers has long been its leader.

The police response to the march was more hard-hitting on young guys in the neighborhood and an attack on JOIN. My college roommate Patrix Sturgis and my sister Melody were at the JOIN office when the 20th District Chicago Police burst in, ransacked the office and arrested them, claiming to have found a small amount of pot. Though it received less media coverage, they were later acquitted, after the police were found to have lied and planted the marijuana.

Housing was another major concern of folks in the hood. Buildings had mice, rats, and roaches, repairs weren’t made, and people were locked out when rent was late. We held rent strikes and demonstrations around housing issues. A group of lawyers who helped JOIN included Irv Birnbaum and Ted Stein. They worked with organizers and tenants, often going to housing court with them.

We tried to stop evictions. I made my way into a number of basements, turning on gas or electricity after landlords or their managers had turned the utilities off, and was once arrested when I informed an officer of the tenant’s rights and the law. Tenants at a large building on Broadway near Irving Park went up against a slumlord named Gutman. On a Sunday morning Rennie Davis and I went to his apartment building on the northwest side and hung a leaflet inside his vestibule: “Your Neighbor is a Slumlord!” We also put one on every car on the street.

In short order Gutman settled with the tenants, and that particular building became part of an improved housing initative by the Kate Maremont Foundation. A prolonged rent strike with marches at the “Sampson Building” on the 4100 N. Kenmore block led to an agreement and the formation of a tenant’s council.

JOIN did welfare advocacy, demonstrated at the welfare office, and called for fair treatment by the Illinois Department of Welfare.

JOIN did welfare advocacy, demonstrated at the welfare office, and called for fair treatment by the Illinois Department of Welfare. We worked closely with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO) and the Latin American Defense Organization. These demonstrations and marches exemplified the potential for building an interracial movement of the poor. Actions involving primarily black, brown, and white organizations helped lay the early groundwork for rainbow coalitions to come.

Mechanic and Steelworker Eric Gil.

 One spring afternoon the photographer Danny Lyon gave me a ride on his Triumph motorcycle to Molly Hagen’s apartment on Hyde Park Blvd. on the South Side. Molly’s crib became a regular destination. I would head there to hang out, smoke weed, and eat. I met Curtis Hayes (now Muhammad), who had worked with Molly in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and Eric Gill, from Belize, who worked on cars and had a job in the steel mill, and an assortment other characters, including a salesman for Duncan Yo Yo.

That summer I bought a 1963 Triumph 650 TR6 motorcycle from Clay Highland, who I knew from Lake Forest College. On the bike, sometimes with Molly on board, I explored Chicago and its far-flung neighborhoods, communities, and off-the-beaten-path treasures. I loved late night cruising up and down Lake Shore Drive, the green tunnel of Lower Wacker Drive, the smell of chocolate production on Kinzie, and the blast furnace at Finkl & Sons Steel on Armitage.

In addition to country music joints in Uptown, I went to hear Paul Butterfield, first in Old Town at Big John’s (where I had first seen Steve Miller), and then at the Blue Flame on Drexel Blvd at 39th Street, where he played with Howlin’ Wolf’s old band. At a meeting of activists from various projects around town I met a law student named Bernardine Dohrn.

Days later Bob Lawson and I took an exhilarating ride on my Triumph to the SDS Convention held in Clear Lake, Iowa, the place where Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper had gone down in an airplane. While there we got word that both the JOIN office and the new Movement for A Democratic Society office in Rogers Park had been busted. People were out of sorts.

Wearing a cowboy hat, I stood up and quoted Joe Hill: “Don’t mourn, organize.” This moment was my introduction to the assembled SDSers, and I left Clear Lake as part of SDS’s leadership, a member of the National Interim Committee. Before heading back to Chicago I reintroduced myself to Bernardine by sending her a post card: “Nice meeting you; how about we take a ride together on my motorcycle?”

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Alan Wieder : Bill Ayers' 'Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident'

In his ongoing journey, and with his new memoir, 'Public Enemy,' Bill Ayers continues to bring the radical 'spark' forward.

Image from Uprising Radio.

By Alan Wieder | The Rag Blog | January 7, 2014

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn will speak at "Underground Goes Overboard," a launch party for TheRagBlog.com, at 7 p.m., Friday, January 17, at the 5604 Manor Community Center in Austin. They will also be Thorne Dreyer's guests on Rag Radio earlier that same day, from 2-3 p.m. on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed live. Go here for other stations and times, and for podcast information.

[Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident by Bill Ayers (2013: Beacon Press); Hardcover; 240 pp; $24.95.]

“They just don’t get it.” Yes, the phrase is overused, yet, all too appropriate when addressing the continuing critiques, from both the left and the right, of Bill Ayers.

The recent publication of the second phase of his memoir, Public Enemy: Confessions of An American Dissident (Beacon, 2013), was followed on the “SDS and ‘60s Leftists” page of Facebook by an unthoughtful conversation on Ayers, his comrade and wife Bernardine Dohrn, and the Weather Underground (WO).

Facilitated by George Fish and responding to a negative book review by Jon Wiener, 43 comments followed Fish’s post. Mostly sour, bitter, and ahistorical in tone, the comments provide the antithesis of Ayers’ book and life, that of learning from the past and continuing, in a human and life-affirming way, the ongoing struggle that began for Ayers in the civil rights movement, antiwar movement, Students for a Democratic Society, and then the Weather Underground.

When confronted by a radio interviewer who referred to the subtitle as snide, Ayers softly replied that the entire title was chosen for its irony. Missing both the breadth and depth of Public Enemy, the interviewer, as well as Wiener and other critics, fail to acknowledge the thoughtfulness and energy that Ayers brings to struggle, both past and present.

In this particular book, we alternate between the author’s recollections of first, his experience in the 2008 attempt to demonize Barack Obama because he “palled around with terrorists,” and, second, the years after he surfaced from underground beginning in 1980 from where Ayers left off in his previous book, Fugitive Days.

There are both multiple and complex events, issues, and ideas presented in Public Enemy. A sampling will be discussed in this review.

Recently, South African anti-apartheid struggle leader and Constitutional Court Justice (comparable to the U.S. Supreme Court) Albie Sachs spoke at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. Talking about his country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Sachs emphasized the importance of acknowledgement for both personal and political healing.

Acknowledgement causes me to return to the radio interviewer’s portrayal of Confessions of An American Dissident as snide. In fact, irony aside, Ayers responded by talking about acknowledging one particular flaw during his time in WO. He asserted that neither he nor his comrades ever doubted their positions and that by not being skeptical they were arrogant and without reflection.

Doubt is discussed in Public Enemy and Ayers also talks about apologetics within a conceptual framework of an American Truth Commission.

Doubt is discussed in Public Enemy and Ayers also talks about apologetics within a conceptual framework of an American Truth Commission. In both the book and current media interviews, Ayers has continually repeated that neither he nor the WO ever killed anyone in the bombings of buildings.

Not only did I never kill or injure anyone, but in the six years of its existence, the Weather Underground never killed or injured anyone either. We crossed lines of legality to be sure, of propriety, and perhaps even of common sense, but it was restrained, and those are the simple, straightforward facts.

The correct term for Weather Underground bombings, in correspondence to the armed struggle in South Africa, is “armed propaganda.” And like Umkhonto We Sizwe underground soldiers in South Africa, Ayers would welcome the opportunity to answer queries about his WO activities at an American TRC.

In Public Enemy Ayers writes:

America, it seemed to me, was in urgent need of some kind of truth and reconciliation process… We needed a process to understand the truth of the past in order to create the possibility of a more balanced future… Everyone together would have the opportunity to tell their stories of suffering, and the victimizers would be asked why and how they created that misery. Society would have the opportunity to witness all of it in order to understand the extent and depth of the disaster as a step toward putting it behind us and moving forward. In that setting and standing with Kissinger and McCain, McNamara and Kerry, Bush and Cheney, I’d be happy to say exactly what I did, take full responsibility, and bow deeply. But without any chain of culpability whatsoever, I’ll stand on the record, or just stand aside.

While five chapters in Public Enemy present the threats and blacklisting Bill Ayers experienced during and after the 2008 presidential campaign, I will address the topic with brevity as it has already been explored in other reviews. An in-depth description and analysis is portrayed in Maya Schwenwar’s Truthout review, “Bill Ayers Weighs in on Democracy, Selfhood, and His ‘Unrepentant Terrorist’ Alter-Ego.”

Besides endless email threats and having someone actually come to his office at the University of Illinois-Chicago, Ayers was banned from talking on college campuses throughout the country. At the time my colleague at the University of South Carolina, Craig Kridel, the Curator of the Museum of Education, posted a page titled “The Bill Ayers Problem” on the Museum webpage. The page title, like Public Enemy, is ironic and at the time I wrote:

The inequality, unfairness, violence, and global greed are what Bill Ayers has fought against for many years. The fight is every bit as important today as it was during the Civil Rights Movement and the Viet Nam War. And while some people might call me insensitive because I refuse to enter a debate on Bill Ayers as a terrorist, I choose not to speak back to the cries of O’Reilly, Hannity, and Colmes and their nameless comrades because the work Bill Ayers is doing does not need defenders but, rather, supporters and allies that fight for a more just world. Finally, as an academic who works with teachers who fought against apartheid in South Africa, I can’t help but think that the same people who define Bill Ayers as a terrorist would have given that label to Nelson Mandela and his less known comrades during the struggle against the apartheid regime. We know now what history says about that – we can only hope that Bill Ayers and many other people continue their work as progressive educators and activists.

But Bill Ayers does not rail against his detractors in his writing. Rather, while he is critical in a political/personal way of their harassment and silencing and analyzes their actions, his emphasis is a celebration of people who continue the struggle. While the story of the cancellation of his talk at the University of Wyoming is politically important, from Ayers we learn more about the woman who fought for his right to speak. More accurately, she fought for her own free speech.

"I’m going to sue the university in federal court," she told me during our first conversation. "And I’m claiming that it’s my free speech that’s been violated – I have the right to speak to anyone I want to, and right now I want to speak to you." She was young and unafraid, smart and sassy, her dreams being rapidly made and used – no fear, no regret. I liked her immediately. Meg’s approach struck me as quite brilliant – students (and not I) were indeed the injured party.

The University of Wyoming student won the case and Bill Ayers spoke on democracy and education with over 1,000 people at the University. In discussing the event, he also honors his sister’s father-in-law, a retired United Church of Christ minister who drove a couple of hours to Laramie for the talk and told Bill: “‘The Lord moves in mysterious ways,’ he said with a wink and a smile gesturing with his Bible. ‘If any of the crazy Christians get out of hand, he wants me to set them straight.’”

Ayers writes of other cancellations at places throughout the country. The University of Nebraska stands out but only because he was in Tapai at the time and was woken with the news from a dean at three in the morning.

In contrast to Nebraska, there are brave academics at Millersville University and Georgia Southern University where Ayers was welcomed. At Millersville administrators explained that it was their “duty and honor” to have him speak. “It’s not about you personally, it’s about the mission and the meaning of the university.”

Honoring people throughout Bill Ayers’ journey is the stuff of Public Enemy.

Honoring people throughout Bill Ayers’ journey is the stuff of Public Enemy. One of the funniest yet potent tales is the reaction of Ayers’ comrade and friend, Michael Klonsky, when he was invited to give an education conference keynote address. The organization told Klonsky that they had intended to invite Bill Ayers but that he was “too controversial and too radical.” Klonsky scolded the inviter saying: “How dare you ask me to scab on Bill Ayers?” When Ayers thanked him, he replied: “Defending you? I wasn’t defending you, I was defending myself – I was deeply and personally offended when they said that your were too radical, and by implication that I wasn’t too radical. I’m as radical as you are, motherfucker.”

Bill Ayers’ book is about issues, ideas, actions, and people – it is not solely about Bill Ayers. Epsie Reyes was a colleague at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She supported Hillary, not Barack, in the 2008 democratic primaries, and she was one of many people who consoled Bill Ayers after Hillary Clinton first demonized him in a primary presidential debate.

Reyes sent strong emails to both Clinton and the Democratic National Committee “detailing how much money she’d donated and how many weekends she’d devoted to organizing on her behalf, explaining who I really was in her ‘humble opinion,’ and encouraging, then demanding that the campaign apologize to me personally and denounce the smears – or else she would have to rethink her commitments.”

Close friends and colleagues, of course, also came through in both 2001 and 2008. Mona and Rashid Khalidi were both supportive and insightful as were dozens of others. In 2008 there was a surprise call from Edward Said: “Of course it’s painful for you personally, but cringing and going quiet is the worst thing you could do at this moment. Your kids are watching you and your students too and a lot of others. Don’t let them down.”

Said’s message corresponds to the entirety of Public Enemy. Ayers celebrates political struggle and the people who try to sustain the fight. Two quotes come to mind, the first from a speech by Paul Potter referred to in the book. “Don’t let your life make a mockery of your values.” Margaret Meade’s words correspond to Potter’s connecting the personal to the collective. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

In addition to the 2001, 2008, and more recent stories, Public Enemy includes portraits from the time Bernardine and Bill came up from underground in 1980. Ayers writes admiringly about his childrens’ pre-school teacher at the time, BJ, whom he refers to as “an inspired early childhood educator.” “She was one of a kind, and everyone knew it.” Ayers’ portrait of BJ brought a response in Ron Jacobs’ Dissident Voice article, “Get Bill Ayers”: “Indeed, the truest hero in the book is the family’s New York child care provider, BJ.”

On Bill’s journey we meet Bernardine’s lawyers Eleanora Kennedy and Michael Kennedy and various other people including Ellie and Robby Meeropol who were Bill’s friends at the University of Michigan. Robby was the son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and he was three years old when his parents were executed.

Bernardine and Bill had just adopted Chesa Boudin whose parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, had been sentenced for murder in the Brinks Robbery in Nyack, New York. Robby explained that there was no road map and that times would be rough for Chesa – honest responses are very much a part of the many vignettes that Ayers presents throughout Public Enemy.

The real heart of the book, however, within the context of continuing struggle, is the authentic portrayal of the Dohrn/Ayers family...

The real heart of the book, however, within the context of continuing struggle, is the authentic portrayal of the Dohrn/Ayers family – Bernardine Dohrn and their sons Chesa, Malik, and Zayd. The book depicts seriousness and humor and mostly respect and admiration. There is a story from the early above ground days that I must include in this review.

Leaving swim class one day, we were swept up into a raucous women-led march heading from Broadway and Fifty-ninth Street toward Times Square. "No more porn! No more porn! No more porn!" we chanted ecstatically, fists pumping and voices rising as we entered the pornography district. It was a feisty and colorful crowd, our attendance just a happy accident, but with Zayd cheerfully perched on my shoulders we were in high spirits and quite pleased to be in cahoots. Soon we spotted a pizza stand along the route, and Zayd was famished from swimming and ready for a slice, so we settled into a booth. Zayd reflected on the parade we’d just left: "That was fun," he said. "Why don’t we want more corn?"

Ayers tells the story of all three sons advising him during 2008 and the respect appears to go both ways. Pages 129 to 131 serve as an illustration as Malik, Zayd, and Chesa join Bernardine in coaxing Bill not to speak with the media – a disposition alien to his being. Malik warns him of ambush and it recalls Mailer’s self-admonitions of never talk to the press – they control the story.

The consensus from them, in line with Bernardine’s steady and consistent basic instinct, was that whatever happened on the web or in the press, we should simply turn away. No comment, no elaboration, no clarification, no response. "Be completely quiet," they said, "and stay calm." "It’s harder then it sounds," Zayd added, looking right at me, "especially for you." True, too true: I tend to have a lot on my mind – who doesn’t? – and I’m genetically wired to speak up and speak out, and not always with considered judgment. My default position, no matter what, is to say something… "You’ll get flattened," they now said in unison.

Bill Ayers remained silent through 2008, but of course, “palling around with terrorists” quietly lives on. There is an ethos throughout Public Enemy, consistently present in the ideas, issues, actions, and people portrayed in the book, amidst everything else – this book is homage to Bernardine Dohrn.

Her strength, thoughtfulness, commitment, and humanity is the spirit of Public Enemy: Confessions of An American Dissident. Whether it is gently chiding Bill with their children or being warmly welcomed back by the judge in Chicago when she surfaced from underground – her humanity is ever present. Political commitment is obvious in Dohrn’s first above ground statement: “This is no surrender. The fight against racism and war continues, and I will spend my energy organizing to defeat the American empire.”

Ayers writes of her actions and dispositions when she was imprisoned at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York for refusing to give Grand Jury testimony on the Brinks Robbery. The emotion of being away from her kids but at the same time focused political commitment. There is also a great story of her mother passing on contraband when she visited the prison – a chocolate chip cookie!

There is much more to Public Enemy than the samples that I present. Bill Ayers critiques the Weather Underground and provides much more breadth to the ideas, issues, actions, people, and events he portrays. He also pushes his story to the present and therein lies the further message. Ayers, Dohrn, and many of their WO (and beyond) comrades continue to work for the same issues they have pursued beginning in the sixties.

For Ayers it is education and more and the latter includes working with young activists who continue the fight for the end of racism, class disparity, and imperialism. First in the civil rights movement, then SDS and WO, Ayers was part of the “spark” for a just world. His book is a partial story of continuing to keep that “spark” alive today.

This article was first published at Dissident Voice and was cross-posted to The Rag Blog by the author.

[Alan Wieder is an oral historian who lives in Portland, Oregon. His latest book, Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid was published in the United States by Monthly Review Press and in South Africa by Jacana Media. Read more articles by Alan Wieder on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

***Out In The 1950s C-Film Noir Night- Radar Secret Service

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

DVD Review

Radar Secret Service (not Radar Patrol vs. Sky King), 1951  

In the beginning was …radar. At least by the number of times the word was used and its glories acclaimed in the film under review, uh, Radar Secret Service, that appears to be the case. Call me jaded by the vast increase in technology and wizardry in my lifetime but I could not get a head of steam worked up about the subject of radar and all of its practical uses from fishing to police detection. The latter of course the theme driving this effort. I mentioned in recently reviewing some B-film noir efforts that there were subtle gradations in that B category. This film is a notch below that.  Here is why.

This standard police procedural starts with the good guys touting the virtues of radar and how the of use of it could help fight crime. Fight crime in the red scare, Cold War early 1950s so the criminal activity has a sinister national security edge to it. That edge concerns the uses of the then fairly recently discovered uses for atomic material. Naturally anybody who had quantities of that available would find a ready market, legal or illegal. Here the illegal comes into play. A gang of ne’er-do-wells hijacks a van carrying atomic material. (By the way no effort was made to encase the material or have the handlers protected by suits they just transported the stuff in an old time van like it was boxes of books or something.) The hijacked material was hidden away in a barn until it can be exported on a yacht owned by the ringleader of the operation.

Of course once the officers of the radar patrol get on the case that gang’s days are numbered. First they foil a clean getaway and netted one of the robbers by the use of, well, radar to track the miscreants. Then they foiled a small test transport by the gang using, oh well, yes, radar. Then they blew the case wide open using a helicopter equipped with, let’s see, radar and they thus had saved the sacred material from the bad guys, done a good day’s work, and enhanced national security. And for their efforts the government has upped their budget in order to buy more, yes again, radar. See C what I mean.