Friday, October 21, 2016

**** A MODEST PROPOSAL-RECRUIT, RUN INDEPENDENT LABOR MILITANTS FOR THE 2016....2018....2020....2022.... ELECTIONS (Updated)

**** A MODEST PROPOSAL-RECRUIT, RUN INDEPENDENT LABOR MILITANTS FOR THE 2016....2018....2020....2022.... ELECTIONS (Updated)

****From The American Left History Blog Archives (2008) - On American Political Discourse
 
Markin comment:


In 2007-2008 I, in vain, attempted to put some energy into analyzing the then blossoming American presidential campaign, a changing of the guard election on the Democratic side, since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious, “in my face” obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those few "talking heads, professional conmen and ersatz political crazies that your mother warned you against, repeatedly warned you against," who really believed, who had talked themselves into, had a vested interest in touting that it would be a watershed election. That grim reality despite the hoopla, heavy cash and organizing of the thing, was that once again that election would essentially be a technician’s election, you know for armchair strategists and those who like to, for example, figure out how the Congressional race in the 26th District in Texas will impact the balance of power in the U.S. House. (I confess that early on in my life that kind of thing intrigued me too until I got “religion” and worried more about real live issues and political programs which might actually help push the rock of human progress uphill a little further than wonk-ish concerns.)    
The subsequent “sleep-walk” four years of the Obama presidency, the non-watershed by anybody’s measurement 2012 American presidential election campaign, the banal mid-term elections of 2014 recently passed and the unending maelstrom of world politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well- paid bourgeois commentators (those "talking heads, professional conmen, and conwomen, and political mentioned above) go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have) better things to do like fighting against the seemingly endless wars that have plagued my old age and that of my progeny, the permanent war economies, the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers’ party that fights for a workers government. More than enough to do, right?  

Part of my “alternative” offering back then in 2008 to the same old, same of the electoral cycle was a proposition that the labor movement and its supporters rather than spent another dime on what even a child could now see was a waste of good dues money on supporting this or that bourgeois candidate instead run our own independent labor candidates for appropriate offices in what for now would be exemplary campaigns. To that end I motivated my pitch with a few reasons and the outline of a program. Today as the non-watershed 2016 elections looms in our faces even before we have devoured the fact of the horrendous 2014 elections and subsequent plethora of Demo-Repub presidential candidates who can barely keep a straight face in public I offer an updated version of that program and the urgency to get out independent labor candidates.  
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1. FIGHT FOR THE IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL OF U.S. TROOPS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST NOW (OR BETTER YET, YESTERDAY)! U.S. HANDS OFF THE WORLD! VOTE NO ON THE WAR BUDGET!
The never-ending and apparently soon to be resurrected, with or without “boots on the ground” quagmire in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East (Palestine, Iran, Syria you name it) is the fault line of American politics today. Every bourgeois politician has to have his or her feet put to the fire on this one. Not on some flimsy ‘sense of the Congress’ softball motion for withdrawal next, year, in two years, or (my favorite) when the situation is “stable.” Moreover, on the parliamentary level the only real vote that matters is the vote on the war budget. All the rest is fluff. Militant labor candidates should make a point of trying to enter Congressional contests where there are so-called known anti-war Democrats or Republicans (an oxymoron, I believe) running to make that programmatic contrast vivid.

But, one of those "talking heads, etc." might argue, that would split the ‘progressive’ forces. Grow up, please! That argument has grown stale since it was first put forth in the “popular front” days of the 1930’s. If you want to end the wars fight for this "no funding" position on the war budget. Otherwise the same people (yah, those progressive Democrats) who unanimously voted for the last war budget and are reliably foaming at the bit to vote for the next one (or in the same vein authorized millions for Israel’s 2014 massacre in Gaza bought and paid for with U.S. aid) get a free ride on the cheap. By rights this is our issue. Let us take it back.

2. FIGHT FOR A LIVING WAGE AND WORKING CONDITIONS-UNIVERSAL FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL.

It is a ‘no-brainer’ that no individual, much less families, can live on the minimum wage of $7/hr. (or proposed $10/hr). What planet do these politicians live on? We need an immediate fight for a living wage, full employment and decent working conditions. A step in the right direction and a fight that should be supported and funded is the recent “Fight for $15” campaign spearheaded by organized labor and some leftist groups. We need universal free health care for all. End of story. (Although Obamacare is inadequate and filled with pitfalls it must be defended against those who wish, including fully-insured at public expense Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, Congress and the Senate to dismantle the whole thing and leave millions without insurance again.) The organized labor movement must get off its knees and fight to organize Wal-Mart and the South. A boycott of Wal-Mart is not enough. A successful organizing drive will, like in the 1930s, go a long way to turning the conditions of labor and unionization around from its abysmal current status.


3. FIGHT THE ATTACKS ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT.
Down with the Death Penalty! Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants who make it here! Stop the Deportations! For the Separation of Church and State! Defend abortion rights! Full public funding of education! Stop the ‘war on drugs’, basically a war on blacks and minority youth-decriminalize drugs! Defend and free political prisoners like Chelsea Manning, Mumia and Albert Woodfolk! This list of demands hardly exhausts the “culture war” issues we defend. It is hard to believe that over 200 years after the American Revolution and the French Revolution we are fighting desperately to preserve many of the same principles that militants fought for in those revolutions. But, so be it.


4. FIGHT FOR A WORKERS PARTY.
The Donkeys, Elephants and Greens have had their chance. Now is the time to fight for our own party and for the interests of our own class, the working class. Any campaigns by independent labor militants must highlight this point. And any campaigns can also become the nucleus of a workers’ party network until we get strong enough to form at least a small party. None of these other parties, and I mean none, are working in the interests of working people and their allies. The following great lesson of politics today must be hammered home. Break with the Democrats, Republicans and Greens!


5. FIGHT FOR A WORKERS AND XYZ GOVERNMENT.

We need our own form of government. In the old days the bourgeois republic was a progressive form of government. Not so any more. That form of government ran out of steam about one hundred years ago and has been choking human process since then. We need a Workers Republic. We need a government based on workers councils with a ministry (I do not dare say commissariat in case any stray anarchists or red scare-born anti-communists are reading this) responsible to it. Let us face it if we really want to get any of the good and necessary things listed above accomplished we are not going to get it with the current form of government.


Why the XYZ part? What does that mean? No, it is not part of an algebra lesson. What it reflects is that while society is made up mainly of workers (of one sort or another) there are other classes (and parts of classes) in society that we seek as allies and who could benefit from a workers government. Examples- small independent contractors, intellectuals, the dwindling number of small farmers, and some professionals like dentists. Yah, I like the idea of a workers and dentists government after many years in the dentist chair. The point is you have got to fight for it.

Obviously any campaign based on this program will be an exemplary propaganda campaign for the foreseeable future. But we have to start now. Continuing to support or not challenging the bourgeois parties does us no good now. That is for sure. While bourgeois electoral laws do not favor independent candidacies and make things difficult write-in campaigns are possible.
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points


*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force, although it is admittedly down from the Great Recession highs. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work.
The basic scheme, as was the case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions, is that the work would be divided up through local representative workers’ councils that would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work.

Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as to implement “30 for 40” –with the no reduction in pay proviso, although many low –end employers are even now under the “cover” of the flawed Obamacare reducing hours WITH loss of pay-so that to establish this work system as a norm it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.


Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy. Support the recent militant efforts, including the old tactic of civil disobedience, by service unions and groups of fast-food workers to increase the minimum socially acceptable wage in their Fight For 15.


Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Hey, nobody said it was going to be easy.


Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of company-owned trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. The key here is to organize the truckers and distribution workers the place where the whole thing comes together. We have seen mostly unsuccessful organizing of retail stores. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.


Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more defeats like in Wisconsin in 2011, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, courts or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.


* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 and 2012  ( I don't know the 2014 number) labor, organized labor, spent over 450 million dollars respectively trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The “no show, no go” results speak for themselves as the gap between the rich and poor has risen even more in this period. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea in those elections was that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the-back like with the recent UAW contract give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.


The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example that I can recall- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks in the summer of 2011 when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.


This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go. And not on recall elections against individual reactionaries, like in Wisconsin against the reactionary fool Governor Walker , as substitutes for class struggle (and which was overwhelmingly unsuccessful to boot-while the number of unionized public workers there has dwindled to a precious few).  


*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reached its final stages back in 2011, the draw- down of non-mercenary forces anyway, I argued that we must recognize that we anti-warriors had failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006).As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and other proxy wars) continue now with a new stage against ISIS (Islamic State) in Iraq and Syria we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the U.S. troop escalation we know is coming before these fights are over. Not Another War In Iraq!  Stop The Arms Shipments To The Middle East! Stop The Bombing Campaign! Defend The Palestinian People-End The Blockade of Gaza. And as always since 2001 Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan!  


U.S. Hands Off Iran! Stop Bombing Syria!- American (and world) imperialists have periodically ratcheted up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner on this issue, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in Iran in our own way in our own time.


U.S. Hands Off The World! And Keep Them Off!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.


Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that in 1915 in the heat of war and paid the price by going to prison unlike other party leaders who were pledged to stop the war budgets but who capitulated to the bloody Kaiser. The only play for an honest representative of the working class under those conditions was to face imprisonment rather than vote for the war budgets. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now no new funding in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.


*Fight for a social agenda for working people! Free Quality Healthcare For All!

This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs. Be clear Obamacare is not our program and has been shown to be totally inadequate and wasteful however we will defend that program against those who wish to dismantle it and leave millions once again uninsured and denied basic health benefits.  


Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle-class as well.


Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students from broken homes and minority homes in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money if you want to find the money quickly to do the job right), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.


Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while low-cost aid has not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!


Stop housing foreclosures and aid underwater mortgages now!

Although the worst of the crunch has abated there are still plenty of problems and so this demand is still timely if not desperately timely like in the recent past. Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.


*We created the wealth, let’s take it back.

Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to beat down, beat down hard in all kinds of ways the mass of society for the benefit of the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.


Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.


Build a workers’ party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.


As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):


“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.” 


Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

ROLL UP YOUR SHEEVES! GET THOSE ELECTION BALLOT PETITIONS SIGNED! PRINT OUT THE LEAFLETS! PAINT THOSE BANNERS! GET READY TO SHAKE HANDS AND KISS BABIES
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News Flash: A. F. Markin Will Not Run For President In 2016    


From The American Left History Blog-June 2015

“Apparently Mister Markin is the only politician in America, or at least in the Democratic or Republican Party, who has not thrown his or her hat, or tried to throw his or her hat,  into the ring this election cycle for a chance at the brass ring, or Hillary Rodham Clinton’s big target. He must be a rare bird.”-John Stewart, WDJA News
When asked about endorsing Hilary Rodham Clinton for President A.F. Markin, at his press conference in New York City announcing his decision where he had just announced that he would not run for the office this cycle, quoted one of his favorite old time bluesman, a man who had many problems with, wine, women and song-“I’d rather be with the devil than to be that woman’s man.” Enough said.       

Media Flash: A. F. Markin, long time anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, pro-socialist activist and the evil genius behind the blog American Left History, has announced today that under no conditions will he be a candidate for President of the United States in 2016. In prior election cycles he has run for the office as an Independent Social-Democrat (2004) and after nomination on the Green Wave Party ticket in 2008 (although he waged an opportunistic low-level campaign because according to one campaign worker he did not want to ruin then Senator Barack Obama’s chances at the White House expecting some kind of job offer for doing so. To once again prove that opportunism does not pay, especially for so-called principled socialists like him and Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont, he was never offered any position in that administration). In 2012 he got “religion” and sat out the campaign not because of any thought of ruining the chances of that “miserable sell-out bastard Obama” (Markin’s words) but because he had read an obscure document based on the tenets of the Communist International (Vladimir Lenin’s old-time operation to create world revolution established in 1919 and which went out of business in 1943 on Stalin's orders) in a left-wing socialist newspaper which stated that socialists should not seek, not even run for, the executive offices (President, Governor, sheriff) of what they called the “bourgeois capitalist state.” Chastised, thoroughly chastised by that obscure odd-ball reference he is again sitting the 2016 election cycle out.     

At the press conference held in New York City’s Best Eastern Hotel making the announcement Markin, paraphrasing the great 19th century Northern Civil War general, William Tecumseh Sherman (hero of “Billy’s bummers' traipsing through Georgia and its environs and scourge of the rebels) stated that “if drafted I will not run and if elected I will not serve” in that post. He, however, did not rule out the possibility of running for some legislative office like the United States Senate or U.S. House of Representatives. –Josh Breslin, Portland Free Press
A.F. Markin commentary on the American Politics Today website expanding on his decision not to run (originally posted on the American Left History blog on June 6, 2015):      

“I know that the long suffering readers of this blog have been waiting breathlessly for me to announce my intentions for the presidential campaign of 2016. Wait a minute! What kind of madness is this on my part to impose on readers who I am sure are still recovering from the shell-shock of that seemingly endless and mendacious 2012 presidential campaign. Well… Okay, as usual I want to, for good or ill, make a little point about running for the executive offices of the bourgeois state now that I have gotten ‘religion’ about the necessary of radicals and revolutionaries, even garden variety socialists like me, NOT to do so. I think this point can really be driven home today now that we have a ‘progressive’ Democratic president, one Barack Obama, as a foil.

I have detailed elsewhere the controversy and checkered history in the international workers movement, and especially in the Communist International in its heroic days in the early 1920's, surrounding the question of whether radicals and revolutionaries, on principle, should run for these executive offices of the bourgeois state. I need not repeat that argument here. (See June 2008 Archives, "If Drafted I Will Not Run, If Elected I Will Not Serve-Revolutionaries and Running For Executive Offices," American Left History blog, dated June 15, 2008). I have also noted there the trajectory of my own conversion to the position of opposition to such runs.
Previously I had seen such electoral efforts as good propaganda tools and/or basically harmless attempts to intersect political reality at times when the electorate is tuned in. Always under the assumption made clear during the campaign that, of course, if elected one would not assume the office.

In any case, I admit to a previously rather cavalier attitude toward the whole question, even as I began to see the wisdom of opposition. But having gone through the recent presidential campaign and, more importantly, the inauguration and installation of a ‘progressive’ black man to the highest office attainable under the imperium I have begun to wipe that smirk off my face.

Why? I have hardly been unaware throughout my leftist political career that Social Democratic and Communist (Stalinist/Maoist varieties especially) Party politicians have, individually or in popular front alliances with capitalist parties, wreaked havoc on working people while administrating the bourgeois state. I have, in particular, spent a good part of my political career fighting against the notion of popular front strategies as they have been forged in the past, disastrously in places like Spain during the Civil War in the 1930s and Chile in 1973 or less disastrously in France in the 1980s. However this question of the realities of running the imperial state in America really hit home with the coming into office of Barack Obama.

Certainly, Obama did not have, and in the course of such things could not have any qualms about administering the bourgeois state, even if such toilsome work contradicted his most basic principles. Assuming, for the sake of argument here, that Obama is not the worst bourgeois politician, progressive or not, that has come down the pike. Already, in a few short weeks in office, he has escalated the troop levels in Afghanistan. He is most earnestly committed to bailing out the financial heart of the imperial system, at the long term expense of working people. Where is the room for that vaunted ‘progressive’ designation in all of this? Oh yes he has is against torture and illegal torture centers. That, dear readers might have passed for progressive action- in the 17th century. Jesus, is there no end to this madness in taking grandstanding kudos for stuff that Voltaire would have dismissed out of hand. So the next time someone asks you to run for President of the United States (or governor of a state or mayor of a city) take the Markin pledge - Just say NO!

 
 

Honor An Historic Leader Of The American Abolitionist Movement-John Brown Late Of Harper's Ferry

Honor An Historic Leader Of The American Abolitionist Movement-John Brown Late Of Harper's Ferry  


 




Chapter Six
The Eastern Connection


Unless otherwise noted, all images are from the Boyd B. Stutler Collection


John Brown
John Brown, 1857
Free State Kansas Fund certificate
Free State Kansas Fund certificate
Early in January 1857, John Brown arrived in Boston seeking support for his anti-slavery efforts. New England, in particular Massachusetts, was home to some of the most prominent abolitionists of the era—Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Lydia Maria Child, Henry David Thoreau, Abby Kelley and Stephen S. Foster, and Amos A. Lawrence, to name a few—and several hundred abolition organizations. The Massachusetts State Kansas Aid Committee, organized in 1856, was one of several committees formed during the Kansas Territorial period to raise funds for the free-state cause. The committee immediately authorized Brown to take possession of 200 Sharps rifles and ammunition that were stored in Iowa. Later in the month in Albany, New York, the National Kansas Committee also authorized funds for Brown.
Kansas Aid Committee flier
Kansas Aid Committee flier
It was during this trip that John Brown met the New Englanders whose names would be connected with his efforts as the “Secret Six.” Brown had already met New Yorker Gerrit Smith a decade earlier when he purchased land at North Elba. Of the other five, Brown met Frank Sanborn, secretary of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee, early in January 1857. Sanborn quickly became an ardent supporter of Brown, introducing him to other committee members and prominent Bostonians and arranging for his appearance before the Massachusetts legislature. George Luther Stearns was chairman of the committee, and Samuel Gridley Howe (husband of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” lyricist Julia Ward Howe) was a member. Sanborn also arranged for Brown to meet abolitionists Theodore Parker and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The last two had openly opposed the arrest of fugitive slave Anthony Burns in 1854, and Higginson helped lead a failed rescue attempt that resulted in the death of a deputy.
Gerrit Smith
Gerrit Smith
Frank B. Sanborn
Frank B. Sanborn
George Luther Stearns
George Luther Stearns
Samuel Gridley Howe
Samuel Gridley Howe
Theodore Parker
Theodore Parker
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Thomas Wentworth
Higginson
Despite meeting such prominent abolitionists, John Brown’s trip to New England failed to produce the financial backing he sought. On February 18, 1857, he appeared before a committee of the Massachusetts Legislature in hopes of obtaining an appropriation, but the effort failed. Throughout the early months of the year, Brown appealed for support during speaking appearances in towns throughout New England. He also appealed for support via the press, writing “To the Friends of Freedom” to the New York Tribune in March. Yet, while he received numerous pledges of support, very little actual cash was placed in his hands. Then, in April the National Kansas Committee, faced with declining income, withdrew its financial pledge to Brown. Ironically, it was during Brown's New England fund-raising trip that the Supreme Court issued its decision in the Dred Scott case, alarming opponents of slavery's expansion that the country was moving toward nationalization of slavery.
John Brown was so disappointed in the results of his fund-raising efforts that shortly before leaving Massachusetts in late April he penned “Old Browns Farewell to the Plymouth Rocks; Bunker Hill, Monuments; Charter Oaks; and Uncle Toms Cabbins.” He also was disappointed by news from his wife that his sons did not want to continue fighting. In addition, the "U. S. Hounds" had been looking for him, and he went into hiding for a short period before travelling to North Elba. After two weeks with his family, he headed west with his son Owen, arriving in early August at Tabor, Iowa. “I have only to say as regards the resolution of the boys to "learn & practice war no more"; that it was not at my solicitation that they engaged in it at the first: & that while I may perhaps feel no more love of the business than they do; still I think there may be possibly in their day that which is more to be dreaded: if such things do not now exist.” – Letter, John Brown to Mary Ann Brown, March 31, 1857, Boyd B. Stutler Collection


Primary Documents:


Secondary Sources:



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

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME
5820891383_1000bee6c1_bWhat does it say about our country that it takes a racist, misogynist sociopath to articulate what most people know – that our political (and economic) system is rigged?  Of course it’s not rigged in the way Donald Trump asserts, against him, but against the majority of our people.  The money primary and elite dominance insure an electoral contest that pits a billionaire against a multi-millionaire and guarantee that the issues important to most Americans are invisible or misidentified.  What Trump represents is certainly more threatening and disastrous for our country in most ways, but neither does Clinton promise real solutions to the challenges facing ordinary people.  Is it any wonder then that -- in the absence of any other plausible explanation and in the face of Democratic Party “pay-to-play” politics -- many confused and insecure (white) people are led by the siren song of racism to explain their insecurities?  What I wrote a few years back is still relevant:  “Malefactors of Great Wealth”  On the issue of wars, it also took Donald Trump, not Hillary Clinton, to point out the futility and waste of the $trillions spent on US wars in the Middle East – under both Democrats and Republicans. The “rabble” are treated with contempt and condescension in various ways by elites in both parties.
 
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‘Do Not Resist’ Confronts the Frightening Militarization of American Police
In the days following last year’s Charleston church shooting, in which nine African-Americans were murdered by a white supremacist, an armored vehicle rolled up to a modest home in nearby Richland County, S.C. Fifteen SWAT team cops in body armor jumped out and smashed the windows of the house… According to Eastern Kentucky University criminologist Peter Kraska, there are 50,000 to 80,000 raidslike this per year, up from 3,000 per year in the 1980s. The turning point came in the 1990s with the 1208 program, which authorized the Department of Defense (DOD) to transfer to federal and state police any weaponry and supplies “suitable for use by such agencies in counter-drug activities.” The 1208 was expanded into the 1033 Programin 1997, and the new policy gave police the right to asset forfeiture… Overly aggressive tactics were stoked by the DOD’s 2013 decision to give MRAPs (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles) to local law enforcement agencies. Within a year, more than 600 MRAPs were distributed, along with 11,595 bayonets, 205 grenade launchers, 79,288 assault rifles and 479 bomb-detonator robots that have been distributed since 2006.   More
 
TAKE AWAY MILITARY WEAPONS FROM POLICE!
http://www.truthdig.com/images/eartothegrounduploads/Filkins-Do-Not-Resist_590.jpgThroughout the Black Lives Matter movement, nonviolent protesters have been bombarded with armed tanks, rubber bullets, and grenade launchers containing toxic tear gas. As we witnessed in Ferguson, Baltimore, Charlotte and elsewhere, peaceful demonstrations for racial justice and police accountability have been routinely met with large trucks of law enforcement officers dressed and armed for war-like combat. Police do not typically address white protesters in the same manner. The utilization of military equipment and tactics in local police departments fuels the widespread mentality that law enforcement officers, meant to protect and serve, are mere combatants in black and brown communities.
RIGGED
The 2016 Republican presidential primary was rigged. It wasn’t rigged by the Republicans, the Democrats, Russians, space aliens, or voters. It was rigged by the owners of television networks who believed that giving one candidate far more coverage than others was good for their ratings….  The 2016 Democratic presidential primary was rigged. It wasn’t rigged by bankers, misogynists, Russians, Republicans, or computer hackers. It was rigged by the Democratic National Committee and its co-conspirators in the media, many of whom have helpfully confessed (in case it wasn’t obvious) in emails leaked from the DNC and from John Podesta. The DNC chose Hillary Clinton and worked hard to make sure that she “won.” Nobody has produced a hint of evidence as to who leaked the emails that added unnecessary confirmation of this rigging, but they should be thanked for informing us, whoever they are.   More
Extremist militias recruiting in fear of Clinton winning election, activists say
When Trump started talking about rigged elections and how a Clinton win would show that democracy was broken, “it was just amazing seeing how that resonated with people – a sense of democracy being broken, feeling like the candidates don’t represent them or anything they want to see happen in this country,” she added… In some Oregon counties, as in other rural areas, libraries are shutting, and sheriff’s departments can’t provide 911 dispatch after dark. Dwindling services lead to a sense of abandonment. The right can easily step in and provide both a clear political narrative to explain this, and a set of simple-seeming solutions. “The Patriot movement is attracting people who feel disenfranchised. It’s real out here, where people feel like they have not been listened to at the state level, and particularly by Democrats,” Campbell says.  More
 
Image result for The $5 trillion warsTHE $5 TRILLION WARS
This October marks 15 years since American troops entered Afghanistan. It was a precursor to the occupation of Iraq and is the longest military conflict in US history. Yet the trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended in these wars have rated barely a mention in the presidential campaign.  The most recent estimates suggest that war costs will run to nearly $5 trillion — a staggering sum that exceeds even the $3 trillion that Joseph Stiglitz and I predicted back in 2008.  Yet the cost seems invisible to politicians and the public alike… In earlier wars, the government routinely raised taxes, slashed nonmilitary spending, and sold war bonds. Taxes were raised to pay for the Spanish-American War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and World War I and World War II. Top rates of federal income taxes climbed to 70 percent during Vietnam and to over 90 percent during the Korean War. These policies were all part of an explicit strategy of engaging the American public in the war efforts. In sharp contrast, the George W. Bush administration cut taxes after the invasion of Afghanistan, in 2001 and again, in 2003, when we invaded Iraq. Most Americans pay lower taxes now than they did 15 years ago.  More
 
The Democrats’ Joe McCarthy Moment
When Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has one of his few lucid moments and suggests that the U.S. should cooperate with Russia rather than provoke more confrontations, he is denounced from many political quarters. But these attacks against Trump are most feverish from Democrats looking to give Hillary Clinton a boost politically and a diversionary excuse for her Wall Street speeches that she tried so hard to keep hidden until they were released by WikiLeaks from hacked emails of her longtime adviser John Podesta… Rather than seeking to explain Clinton’s paid speeches to Wall Street bigwigs and other special interests, Podesta and other Democrats have simply piled on the Russia-bashing with suggestions that Trump is consorting with America’s enemies. In Wednesday night’s debate, Clinton referred to Trump as Vladimir Putin’s “puppet.”   More
 
The Hawk on Russia Policy? Hillary Clinton, Not Donald Trump
Hillary Clinton made it abundantly clear Wednesday night that if she defeats Donald J. Trump next month she will enter the White House with the most contentious relationship with Russia of any president in more than three decades, and with a visceral, personal animus toward Vladimir V. Putin, its leader… Privately, some of her longtime advisers are already thinking about what mix of sanctions, diplomatic isolation and international condemnation they might put together if they take office to deal with Mr. Putin and the fragile economic state he runs, an update of the “containment” strategy that George F. Kennan formulated for President Harry S. Truman in 1947.  Equally surprising is the Republican reversal of tone… Most of the Republican Party remains firmly distrustful of Russia. But not Mr. Trump, its standard-bearer.  More
 
Berniecrats & Clintonites Clash Over Rent Control
In Richmond [California], the scene of an epic electoral battle between local progressives and Chevron-backed candidates in 2014, two would-be city councilors are getting OR [Our Revolution] fund-raising and publicity help… Melvin Willis and Ben Choi are leaders of the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA), a force for change in their majority minority city of 110,000 for the last 13 years… Like political insurgents elsewhere who identify more with Sanders personally than the Democratic Party, Willis and Choi are clashing with local Clintonites. In Richmond, leading Democrats, including Mayor Tom Butt and his longtime council rival, Nate Bates, are against rent control. As an organizer for the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), 25-year old Willis helped spearhead the effort to get a city council majority to approve rent regulation in 2015, before a California Apartment Association (CAA) petition drive triggered suspension of that local ordinance. Rent control and the requirement of just cause for eviction are now on the Richmond ballot Nov. 8, in revised form.   More
 
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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
I’ve posted the accompanying cartoon here many times.  Events of the past few weeks continue to underline that a coherent US policy in Iraq and Syria is impossible – even with the best will (which there is not) – given the conflicting http://masspeaceaction.org/home/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/MiddleEastWarRoom2.jpgcommitments and alliances in the region.  In Iraq, the US is working side-by-side against ISIS with a government supported by neighboring Iran;  in Syria the US and its allies combine to arm and finance armed Islamic extremists seeking to overthrow a government supported by Iran (and Russia); US planes bombed Syrian troops which were defending Syrian Deir ez-Zor against ISIS attackers;  US NATO ally Turkey bombed and killed 200 fighters of the Kurdish-Syrian forces confronting ISIS, who are armed and financed by the US; Turkish armed forces have also occupied parts of northern Iraq and claim to participate in the anti-ISIS fight, against the wishes of the Iraqi government.  There is no US solution to these wars except to stop fueling them and stop trying to bomb away “terrorism.”
 
THE ALEPPO / MOSUL RIDDLE
The Pentagon plan is deceptively simple; erase any signs of Damascus and the SAA east of Palmyra. And this is where the Battle of Mosul converges with the recent Pentagon attack on Deir Ezzor. Even if we have an offensive in the next few months against Raqqa – by the YPG Kurds or even by Turkish forces - we still have a “Salafist principality” from eastern Syria to western Iraq all mapped up, exactly as the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was planning (dreaming?) in 2012.  London-based Syrian historian Nizar Nayouf, as well as unnamed diplomatic sources, have confirmed that Washington and Riyadh closed a deal to let thousands of phony Caliphate jihadis escape Mosul from the west, as long as they head straight to Syria. A look at the battle map tells us that Mosul is encircled from all directions, except west.   More
 
Turkey kills 'up to 200' US-backed Kurdish rebels in Syria
Turkish warplanes have struck Kurdish militia targets in northern Syria and killed up to 200 fighters, state media quoted the military as saying on Thursday.  The jets hit 18 targets in Maarrat Umm Hawsh, a region north of the city of Aleppo, the official news agency Anadolu said.
The army claimed 160 to 200 members of the YPG (People's Protection Units) militia were killed in the strikes on Wednesday night… Ankara sees the YPG and the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) as terror groups linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
The PKK, proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the United States and the European Union, has waged a bloody insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984.  Tensions between Turkey and the US have increased over the YPG whom Washington views as an effective force against the Islamic State group in Syria.   More
 
US Allies are Funding ISIS (and Hillary Knew All Along)
The memo says: “We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to Isis and other radical groups in the region.” This was evidently received wisdom in the upper ranks of the US government, but never openly admitted because to it was held that to antagonise Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, Turkey and Pakistan would fatally undermine US power in the Middle East and South Asia.  For an extraordinarily long period after 9/11, the US refused to confront these traditional Sunni allies and thereby ensured that the “War on Terror” would fail decisively; 15 years later, al-Qaeda in its different guises is much stronger than it used to be because shadowy state sponsors, without whom it could not have survived, were given a free pass.  More
 
Why Is the Truth on Syria Difficult To Decipher?
“the truth on Syria”, has been segmented into many self-tailored “truths,” each promoted by one of the warring party to be the one and only, absolute and uncontested reality. But since there are many parties to the conflict, the versions of the “truth” communicated to us via copious media, are numerous and, most often, unverifiable.  The only truth that all parties seem to agree upon is that hundreds of thousands are dead and Syria is shattered. But, of course, each points to the other side for culpability of the ongoing genocide.  An oddly refreshing, although disturbing “truth” was articulated by Alon Ben-David in the Israeli Jerusalem Post last year.  The title of his article speaks volumes: “May it never end: The uncomfortable truth about the war in Syria.”  “If Israel’s interest in the war in Syria can be summarized in brief, it would be: That it should never end,” Ben-David wrote.   More
 
http://217.218.67.233/photo/20151129/1b72bfdb-f3b6-4b7f-b76e-70bee27a2169.jpgState Dept. warned that U.S. might be complicit in Saudi war crimes in Yemen
Government lawyers warned officials that the United States might be implicated in Saudi war crimes in Yemen, according to internal records obtained by Reuters. Yet the Obama administration continued to sell billions of dollars worth of arms to Saudi Arabia anyway.  For 19 months, a Saudi-led coalition of Middle Eastern countries, armed and supported by the U.S. and the United Kingdom, has been bombing Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East… Since the U.S.-backed bombing campaign was launched in March 2015, the Obama administration has authorized more than $22.2 billion in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia — including a $1.3 billion sale of precision munitions to be used in Yemen. Since 2009, the U.S. has offered Saudi Arabia more than $115 billion in weapons and support.    More
 
Do Western Nations Care about Yemeni Lives or Saudi Blood Money?
How much is the life of a Yemeni worth? Not much, according to the Saudi regime that has been bombing and starving the people of Yemen for since March 2015, or to the Saudi’s western backers, particularly the US and UK, which have been supplying the Saudi regime with weapons, military training, logistical support and diplomatic cover for its dirty interventionist war.  The latest outrage is the October 8 bombing of a packed funeral hall in Yemen’s capital city of Sanaa. This horrendous attack killed more than 140 people and injured about 600 more… What has been the US and UK governments’ response to the funeral bombing? The British government announced UK arms sales to the Saudis is “under careful and continual review”, while the Obama administration issued a statement that US support for Saudis is not a “blank check” and that the US was “prepared to adjust our support so as to better align with US principles, values and interests.”  The “principles, values and interests” of the Western powers, however, have been to buy cheap Saudi oil and make record profits by selling massive quantities of weapons to one of the most repressive countries in the world.   More
 
America’s Outdated Alliance with Saudi Arabia
Like other longstanding American relationships in the Middle East, the ties between Washington and Riyadh have nothing to do with human rights or democracy. The alliance rests mostly on two key factors: natural resources and regional stability.  First, in addition to being the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, the House of Saud is the custodian of a singular holy resource: oil. Saudi Arabia’s role as the largest exporter of the crucial fossil fuel, as well as its cultural and political influence over other six other Arab OPEC members, makes friendship with the kingdom a valuable, and seemingly indispensable, asset for a fuel-thirsty superpower.  Second, in the Cold-War era, maintaining a balance of power between Western allies such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and Soviet allies such as Iran and Syria, was central to US policy in the region.  More
 
Tonkin Gulf Revisited?
Was a U.S. Ship Attacked by a Missile off the Coast of Yemen... or Not?
U.S. officials recently invoked self-defense to justify ratcheting up participation in the war. Last week, the U.S. military launched multiple bombings targeting Houthi-held territory within Yemen, allegedly in retaliation for “attempted missile attacks in recent days against the USS Mason and other vessels in the Red Sea and the Bab-el-Mandeb,” as Pentagon spokesperson John Cook put it October 13. Cook called the bombings “self-defense strikes.” Notably, no U.S. vessels were struck.  Houthi rebels denied firing at the USS Mason, issuing a statement which declares, “Those claims are baseless.”  Speaking with reporters in Baltimore Saturday, Navy Admiral John Richardson claimed, without presenting evidence, that the USS Mason “once again appears to have come under attack in the Red Sea, again from coastal defense cruise missiles fired from the coast of Yemen.” Now it seems that even those claims are wearing thin.  More
 
HOW WAR DEHUMANISES EVERYONE IT TOUCHES
Dehumanisation—the process of debasing one's perceived enemy—is not the preserve of evil people: humiliation, alienation, non-recognition, exclusion, the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, and even campaigns of genocide, all fall well within the realm of possibility for the majority of human beings. There are many examples since WW2 of dehumanization at the extreme: Vietnam, Indonesia, Rwanda, Sudan, Iraq, Palestine, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan and Syria, where populations have also been described as less than human, and where civilians have been killed as a result of so-called 'precision bombing' or drowned in their attempts to flee from war and persecution. The treatment of other people as lesser beings has been the subject of research within the field of social psychology for over half a century, but whilst this work helps to explain the proclivities of our darker side, the solution to dehumanization, and ultimately annihilation, lies within the broader context of history, politics, philosophy and social activism—in struggles for emancipation from oppression or dehumanization in all its forms.   More
 
 
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ISRAEL, PALESTINE . . . and the U.S.
 
SANDY TOLAN: The Death of the Two-State Solution
Washington has finally thrown in the towel on its long, tortured efforts to establish peace between Israel and the Palestinians. You won’t find any acknowledgement of this in the official record. Formally, the U.S. still supports a two-state solution to the conflict. But the Obama cid:184CE5BB-1E66-463E-A88E-7D4CFF6EA125@hsd1.ma.comcast.net.administration’s recent 10-year, $38-billion pledge to renew Israel’s arsenal of weaponry, while still ostensibly pursuing “peace,” makes clear just how bankrupt that policy is. For two decades, Israeli leaders and their neoconservative backers in this country, hell-bent on building and expanding settlements on Palestinian land, have worked to undermine America’s stated efforts -- and paid no price. Now, with that record weapons package, the U.S. has made it all too clear that they won’t have to. Ever… Not long after the funeral, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brazenly approved a new settlement deep in the West Bank, prompting the State Department to “strongly condemn” the action as “deeply troubling.”  Such scolding words, however, shrivel into nothingness in the face of a single number: 38 billion.   More
 
In email, Clinton calls for a ‘Potemkin’ peace process
Last week we picked up the emails showing the Clinton team’s knee-jerk responsiveness to prodding by megadonor Haim Saban: Clinton must not “rebuke” Netanyahu over his opposition to Obama over the deal, but send positive signals re Israel, including opposition to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement– statements that could then be sent out to “thousands” of donors to help them understand where Hillary is on Israel.  The emails keep coming, and in the last day or so, Israeli publications have picked up a Clinton comment approving the idea of a “Potemkin” peace process...   A Potemkin process is of course just what the United States has had for twenty years or so. It is our contribution to the managed conflict undertaken by the Israelis; we never put any real pressure on the Israelis, and yet, affirming the Potemkin process gives the U.S. cover to claim that it is working hard to bring about a two-state solution. Even as apartheid solidifies across the West Bank and East Jerusalem.   More
 
Palestinian teen shot dead for throwing stones; wounded Palestinian woman executed
The Israeli military claimed that Bahr was killed after he threw stones at an army patrol jeep. “After being hit with the stones, the soldiers exited the jeep and were again pelted with rocks, injuring one lightly,” the Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz reported.  “According to the [Israeli military], the soldiers initiated the army’s arrest protocol, at which point the Palestinian was killed,” Haaretz added.  The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has previously stated that the military’s “open-fire regulations permit shooting at the legs of a suspect in order to facilitate his arrest.”
Referring to a February 2015 incident in which a Palestinian was killed after being shot in chest and head, the group added, “They do not permit killing him by firing three shots at his upper body.”  Palestinian health officials claimed that Israeli forces prevented Palestine Red Crescent emergency medics from gaining immediate access to Bahr, who was already dead by the time they were able to reach him.    More  
 
Why refugees in this West Bank camp are rebelling against the Palestinian Authority
Palestinian authorities consider the camp on the edge of Nablus city a den of lawless gangs and illicit guns that is sowing instability throughout the area, and are trying to tame it. Many Balata residents, meanwhile, vow they won’t submit to authorities they accuse of corruption, brutality, collaboration with Israel, and the economic neglect of a neighborhood that is home to about 27,000 people living in an area less than one square mile. The tension has been deadly in some cases: Since June, four police officers have been killed by gunmen and four Nablus residents have died at the hands of police, according to the Independent Commission for Human Rights, a Palestinian human rights watchdog based in the West Bank, and the Nablus governorate…  The impoverished camp illustrates a festering problem for Abbas, who has led the Palestinian Authority for more than a decade. Critics say Abbas has failed on many fronts, including not achieving statehood for Palestinians or peace with Israel.   More
 
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OTHER EVENTS
 
Friday-Sat, October 21-22: MEDEA BENJAMIN – “Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the US-Saudi Connection”,  
MEDEA BENJAMIN is the author of a new book on Saudi Arabia and Co-Founder of the Organization Code Pink.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21 First Church in Cambridge, Jewett Hall 7:00 p.m. • 11 Garden Street, Cambridge. Admission: Free (donations for Code Pink accepted) ; SATURDAY, OCTOBER 22. Community Church of Boston. 6:30 p.m. Reception • 7:30 p.m. Event • 565 Boylston Street, Boston. Admission: $20 www.brownpapertickets.com • www.communitychurchofboston.org  Contact: CHRIJ 617.552.8491 | humanrights@bc.edu | www.bc.edu/humanrights  
 
Friday-Sat, October 21-22: “WHITE LIKE ME: A Honky Dory Puppet Show", Mass. College of Art  (details can be found specifically at www.puppetshowplace.org/zaloom).  The (in)famous puppeteer Paul Zaloom, of Bread & Puppet and Beakman's World fame, will be presenting his latest outrageous political comedy " which basically blasts white privilege into the stratosphere. The NY Times has dubbed Zaloom as “one of the most original and talented political satirists working in the theater.”  Zaloom's "White Like Me," produced by Puppet Showplace Theater, will take place October 21-22 at. Further details can be found specifically at www.puppetshowplace.org/zaloom with an advance tix discount code available (good thru Oct. 11th) by entering the code ZALOOM when ordering tix. Sen. John McCain has called Zaloom's "White Like Me" a "questionable puppet show,” so what's not to like?
 
Wednesday, October 26: Dorchester Food Co-op Celebration & Member Challenge, 6pm to 8pm
Cesaria Resturante, Bowdoin St, Dorchester. We are now 500 members-owners strong and growing.  Thanks to your belief, passion and investment, this project is moving closer to the reality of opening a community-owned grocery store. Let's celebrate this important milestone together with delicious food, great music and wonderful people! Free appetizers, DJ, Cash Bar. RSVP today so we know how many people we are feeding!
 
Friday-Sat, October 28: Standing Rock Teach-In,  12:30pm Friday, 10am Saturday, Tufts University, Medford. Please join us for a two day teach-in on the protective actions at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline. More info, details: http://masspeaceaction.org/event/standing-rock-teach-in/
 
Saturday, October 29: The Right to Boycott: DEFENDING BDS TO PRESSURE ISRAEL, 10:00 am - 1:00 pm, Central Sq Branch Public Library, 45 Pearl St. Cambridge.  A Forum to Educate, Discuss and Strategize: Today, across the country, state and federal lawmakers are attempting to suppress the Palestinian-led campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. The forum will strategize ways to protect our right to free speech. More info:  http://masspeaceaction.org/event/right-to-boycott/
 
Tuesday, November 1:  IYAD BURNAT­: Bil’in and The Nonviolent Resistance, 7pm  at Encuentro 5
9A Hamilton Place, Boston (near Park St. T Station).  Iyad Burnat is the coordinator for the Popular Committee in Bil'in, Palestine. For 10 years, Iyad and the Popular Committee of this small village have held weekly non-violent demonstrations against the confiscation of their land. They have repeatedly been met with violence by the Israeli military. Iyad is coming to the Boston area to describe what life is like under Israeli occupation, his village's ongoing struggle for justice and freedom, and what inspires him to continue non-violent resistance.
Iyad is the winner of the 2015 James Lawson Award for Achievement bestowed by the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict during its summer institute at Tufts University.
 
SAVE THE DATE!
 
Saturday, December 3: The Next Four Years: Building Our Movements in Dangerous Times, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm ~ Simmons College, Boston.  Regardless of the outcome of the November, 2016 elections, the peoples’ movements and the political revolution will face enormous challenges in the next four years. We therefore call for a post-election conference on Saturday December 3 to identify and capitalize on all opportunities for organizing open to us in an increasingly undemocratic, hawkish and xenophobic environment. “The Next Four Years: Building Our Movements in Dangerous Times” will help us to frame our issues and public messaging, to forge a common vision, to increase greater integration of our movements, and to build an action plan that will inspire and motivate more and more people to get involved.
 
 
 
 
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CONTACTING DPP and Joining Our Work:
 
To make it easier to get involved with DPP, we've decided to publish contact info for our coordinators in every issue of this update. We will also regularly publish upcoming meetings of work committees, create a brochure or flyer about DPP, and greet new people at monthly meetings with an explanation of how we work. Here's how to reach them.
 
Facilitation Team:
Sydney Miller       sydsail@gmail.com
Alison Gottlieb:    asgottlieb1@gmail.com
Rosemary Keane  rosemarykean@yahoo.com