UFPJ Action Alert: Ready to Resist! Send a Letter to Your Senators.
UFPJ Action Alert: Ready to Resist! Send a Letter to Your Senators.
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coordinator, spoke on Friday at the Occupy Inauguration rally. We also marched with Disrupt J20 as many of the different contingents and blockades met at McPhearson Square Park for the Festival of Resistance. 
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Saturday, January 28, 2017
UFPJ Action Alert: Ready to Resist! Send a Letter to Your Senators.-Built The Resistance!
In Boston- 1/30 Reflection of a Chicago Union Activist
1/30 Reflection of a Chicago Union Activist
Erec Slater is Chicago public transit bus driver,elected shop steward
and executive board member, ATU Local 241
He has been involved in a range of union activities over the past few
years.
He was fired a year ago and recently won his job back after an
international defense campaign.
He will reflect on his experience and the union movement in Chicago.
This YouTube page has several videos produced by labor beat from the
past year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU6oenzMa98
<https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZKpUjEQ7Qs-Mc95Tr0OL7A>
Local TV station
http://wgntv.com/2016/12/21/cta-workers-demand-fair-contract-during-day-of-action/
Monday 7 PM Jan. 30
Encentro5
9A Hamilton Place (near Park Street and the Orpheum Theater)
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and executive board member, ATU Local 241
He has been involved in a range of union activities over the past few
years.
He was fired a year ago and recently won his job back after an
international defense campaign.
He will reflect on his experience and the union movement in Chicago.
This YouTube page has several videos produced by labor beat from the
past year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU6oenzMa98
<https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZKpUjEQ7Qs-Mc95Tr0OL7A>
Local TV station
http://wgntv.com/2016/12/21/cta-workers-demand-fair-contract-during-day-of-action/
Monday 7 PM Jan. 30
Encentro5
9A Hamilton Place (near Park Street and the Orpheum Theater)
______________________________
Act-MA mailing list
Act-MA@act-ma.org
http://act-ma.org/mailman/listinfo/act-ma_act-ma.org
To set options or unsubscribe
http://act-ma.org/mailman/options/act-ma_act-ma.org
*****I Hear Mother Africa Calling-With Odetta In Mind
*****I Hear Mother Africa Calling-With Odetta In Mind
Sam Eaton, nothing but the son of a son of a son of an old swamp Yankee, that’s a Yankee fisherman, a small tradesman, a farm hand and those who had, or their forebears had, come across the ocean not under some city on the hill dream but to escape the poor house, the debtors prison or the hangman and wound up doing some indentured servitude before getting under some high Brahmin's fist who did things like yeoman’s military service under General Washington against the bloody British when the call came for brave men to come and help in freedom’s fight and who later forged his way, family in tow, to struggle with the rough stony New England land which fought him and his every inch of the way almost as hard but for sure longer than those bloody Brits, tumble rock fought him down in Carver in the southeastern corner of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts where he tried to eke out an existence against the grim fresh breast of earth and marsh as a “bogger,” a man who worked the dreaded cranberry bogs for which that town was once famous, worked in harness raking the damn berries for some benighted Thanksgiving dinner, so yes, a swamp Yankee as against the Beacon Hill Brahmins who reaped the benefits of the bloodstained freedom fight without the risks and settled into a quiet life of coin counting and merchandise buying, had been puzzled at the age of fourteen at a time when he first heard a blues song, Howlin’ Wolf’s How Many More Years on a fugitive radio station down in Carver one night in the late 1950s (a song that later, much later, seemingly a technological millennia later, he would see done by Wolf on YouTube taken from a performance at the Newport Folk Festival in the early 1960s where the Wolf sweat rolling from his ebony cheeks and forehead flowing down his face like some ancient Nile River snaking its way to the sea, deep bass voice beyond deep seeming to get deeper with each drop of water would practically eat the harmonica he had in the cusp of his hand talking, no preaching to himself, taking himself to task, about some woman, some mean mistreating mama if the truth be known who had him in a sailor’s knot, has him all twisted up, had him so depressed and blue his wanted to go under the grasses but who in the end took the walk of the beaten down, beaten around and left old Minnie high and dry which Sam had sensed was happening way back when on that fugitive radio.).
That “fugitive” part just mentioned not being some pirate station off the coast which he had heard that some people who couldn’t get their music on the regular dial were doing somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean (he would find out later that this pirate station was out in the North Sea someplace and was there because of the uproar in England, like in the states over the demon effect rock and roll was having on the Queen’s subjects, her gaggle of children who somehow heard the fresh new breeze from America was heading their way and which he found out more about still later when he saw a film starring the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman about the subject) the result of some mystical still not understood airwave heading out into the atmosphere all the way from Chicago where occasionally around eleven o’clock (ten Chi town time) he would pick up Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour over WALM, a station that billed itself as the “Blues is the dues” station.
He was not sure but he thought then that Be-Bop Benny was a black guy, a Negro (the “polite” word of common usage then to signify blacks, now far out of style and thus the need to explain to generations born after who accept the racial designation black or Afro-American or some other local derivative), although he heard his father, Prescott, who was the last of a long line of downtrodden independent Eaton boggers who would soon thereafter go belly up and sell out to the mega-growers, call them “n----rs” without a trance of rancor or self-consciousness and put “damn” in front of that term with rancor when he had been drinking rye whiskey and bemoaning his fate and said the “n” word were being treated better than he and his were).
Although Sam had never seen a black man in person then since they did not follow the bogging trade and none lived in town or went through it as far as he knew he thought that if Be-Bop wasn’t then he was at least from the south because his voice sounded strange, had a drawl, had kind of a mumble-rumble quality to it and he was saying all kinds of be-bop, cool daddy, hot mama, from jump street kind of stuff. And for a time, a fair amount of time he did not like to hear that scratchy raspy voice, or that blues is dues stuff either. That was the source of his puzzlement.
Although Sam had never seen a black man in person then since they did not follow the bogging trade and none lived in town or went through it as far as he knew he thought that if Be-Bop wasn’t then he was at least from the south because his voice sounded strange, had a drawl, had kind of a mumble-rumble quality to it and he was saying all kinds of be-bop, cool daddy, hot mama, from jump street kind of stuff. And for a time, a fair amount of time he did not like to hear that scratchy raspy voice, or that blues is dues stuff either. That was the source of his puzzlement.
See Sam had not really been happy when he heard that station come over the fugitive airwaves on late Sunday nights (although the song was okay, no, more than okay, cool even if he didn’t quite understand why the Wolf was letting some mean mistreating mama get him down, get him so crazy that he wanted to go six feet under which even naïve Sam knew meant old Wolf was losing it but that kind of hard-bitten lyric was not to his taste then since he was just getting that bug, just wanted to hear about roses and playthings, stuff like that, happily ever after stuff). As a dedicated fourteen old white boy from a town with no Negro families, not even people who were connected with those workers in the town like his father and a couple of older adult brothers and uncles who worked the cranberry bogs, he was not interested, or maybe consciously interested is better, the blues.
Sam was totally into rock and roll, totally into listening to WMEX the local radio station out of Boston which was being interfered with by that blues is dues station out of Chi town at eleven o’clock (remember ten Chi town time). Interfered with his listening to Bill Haley blast away on Shake, Rattle and Roll, Elvis doing Tomorrow Night and Good Rockin’ Tonight, Johnny Grey doing a great version of Rocket 88, Sam Jackson doing This Is Rock, Bobby Sams doing One Night Of Sin good rocking stuff that DJ Arnie Ginsberg would play on his At The Hop show where he played songs that had dropped off the charts but were diamonds of rock and roll. So at fourteen he could not figure out, nor could they when he asked his friend Jack Caldwell who knew everything about roll and rock, what the appeal was of that Wolf tune. But that beat, that chord progression, that going down to the messy forlorn earth and then coming back up again would follow him for a long, long time. He never really found an answer, a satisfactory answer until he looked beyond the fugitive sound, looked back to why the blues was even the blues. Looked more to the way it made him feel when times were tough, when he would get into his depressive shell, and a blues is dues song would break the bad ass spell.
Not until later did Sam figure some stuff out after he had kind of given up on rock and roll for a while, maybe around sixteen, seventeen, when the music seemed, well, square, seemed to be about blond-haired, blue-eyed guys searching for (and getting) blond-haired blue eyed girls with a “boss” car and dough as a lure, maybe a surfer guy cruising the beaches out west, out California way, none of which he and his had much of, the dough and car part, and Carver being kind of landlocked no surfer profile, and so kind of distant from the life of a son of a son of a son of a swamp Yankee.
Sam started figuring stuff out too when he got into his folk music thing for a minute, music which mainly made him go up a wall but which he put up with because Sara Leonard, his girlfriend or the girl he wanted to be his girlfriend got all excited about it when she saw Joan Baez in Cambridge at some club (the original Club 47 as it turned out where Joan and lots of other folkies hung out) and insisted that he like the songs or hit the road, you know how that is (this Sara by the way all dark hair and the whitest of white skin got hung up on the iron-your-hair-like Joan Baez craze and he would have to sit in the Leonard parlor cooling his heels while Sara did her ritual). Jesus. Part of that folk thing although he was not sure how and why was about the blues, about down south music from the plantations and sharecropper cabins, and how they made music to keep themselves from going crazy when the hammer came down and they needed some way to express their rage at their plight without getting hung up on a tree somewhere or shot in the back down some dirty road.
The critics, and don’t ever ask Sam who these guys are since all he cares about is the music, about the blues, who performs it and whether it will take the bite out of his depression or not and not some discursive history stuff although if you talked about the Civil War, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, some guys called the Diggers (not boggers, not as far as he knew), or about the Renaissance he will listen all day, as long as you realize that you will be listening all night, say that the blues, you know, the quintessential black musical contribution to the American songbook along with first cousin jazz that breaks you out of your depression about whatever ails you or the world, was formed down in the Mississippi muds, down in some sweat-drenched bayou, down in some woody hollow all near Mister’s plantation, mill, or store. Well they might be right in a way about how it all started in America as a coded response to Mister’s, Master’s, Captain’s wicked perverse ways back in slavery times, later back in Mister James Crow times (now too but in a different code, but the same old Mister do this and not that, do that but not this just like when old James ran the code).
Sam believed however they were off by several maybe more generations and off by a few thousand miles from its origins in hell-bent Africa, hell-bent when Mister’s forbears took what he thought was the measure of some poor grimy “natives” and shipped them in death slave boats and brought them to the Mississippi muds, bayous and hollows (those who survived the horrendous middle passage without being swallowed up by the unfriendly seas). Took peoples, proud Nubians who had created very sharp and productive civilizations when Mister’s forbears were running around raggedly wondering what the hell a spoon was for when placed in their dirty clenched fingers, wondered still later how the heck to use the damn thing, and why and uprooted them whole.
Sam believed however they were off by several maybe more generations and off by a few thousand miles from its origins in hell-bent Africa, hell-bent when Mister’s forbears took what he thought was the measure of some poor grimy “natives” and shipped them in death slave boats and brought them to the Mississippi muds, bayous and hollows (those who survived the horrendous middle passage without being swallowed up by the unfriendly seas). Took peoples, proud Nubians who had created very sharp and productive civilizations when Mister’s forbears were running around raggedly wondering what the hell a spoon was for when placed in their dirty clenched fingers, wondered still later how the heck to use the damn thing, and why and uprooted them whole.
Uprooted you hear but somehow that beat, that tah, tat, tah, tah, tat, tah played on some stretched nailed string tightened against some cabin post by young black boys kept Africa home alive. Kept it alive while women, mothers, grandmothers and once in a while despite the hard conditions some great-grandmother who nursed and taught the little ones the old home beat, made them keep the thing alive. Kept alive too Mister’s forced on them religion strange as it was, kept the low branch spirituals that mixed with blues alive in plain wooden churches but kept it alive. So a few generations back black men took all that sweat, anger, angst, humiliation, and among themselves “spoke” home truth low down mean mistreating mama, two-timing man, cut you if you run, weary tune blues on juke joint no electricity Saturday nights out in the back woods accompanied by Willie’s fresh made brew and then sang high white collar penance blues come Sunday morning plain wood church time.
Son House, Charley Patton, Skip James, Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt and a lot of guys who went to their graves undiscovered in the salt sweat sultry Delta night carried on, and some sisters too, some younger sisters who heard the beat and heard the high collar Sunday spirituals.
Son House, Charley Patton, Skip James, Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt and a lot of guys who went to their graves undiscovered in the salt sweat sultry Delta night carried on, and some sisters too, some younger sisters who heard the beat and heard the high collar Sunday spirituals.
Some sisters like Odetta, big-voiced, big-voiced in a naked world, speaking of freedom trains with her brothers and sisters jam packed on the road, speaking of sweated field hand labor for damn Mister, man, women and child, speaking of that dirty bastard Mister James Crow and his do this and do that and don’t do this and don’t that like his charges were mere children to be ordered about, or hung from stange fruit trees or lying down in some shallow bottomland grave chains tied around the neck, speaking of the haunted northern star which turned Mister’s plantation indoors as it headed north, speaking of finding some cool shaded place where Mister would not disturb, couldn’t disturb and making lots of funny duck, odd-ball, searching for roots white college students whose campus halls she filled, marvel, mainly marvel, that they had heard some ancient Nubian Queen, some deep-voiced Mother Africa calling them back to the cradle of civilization, calling them back to where all, everything began.
And then Sam knew, or began to know, what that long ago fugitive beat that stayed in his head meant.
*Sacco and Vanzetti - The Case That Will Not Go Away-Nor Should It
Click on the title to link to "Wikipedia"'s entry for the Sacco and Vanzetti case, provided ere as background. As always with this source and its collective editorial policy, especially with controversial political issues like the Sacco and Vanzetti case, be careful checking the accuracy of the information provided at any given time.
Markin comment:
I have added a link to the Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society. Readers of this space should need no introduction to this case but if you do there are several commentaries that I have made on this historic working class legal defense case in this space. Go to the Society's website for additional information and current projects. Honor the memory of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Markin comment:
I have added a link to the Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society. Readers of this space should need no introduction to this case but if you do there are several commentaries that I have made on this historic working class legal defense case in this space. Go to the Society's website for additional information and current projects. Honor the memory of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Friday, January 27, 2017
Tell the U.S. Senate: Oppose and resist anti-worker Puzder nomination.-Build The Resistance
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2017 CREDO. All rights reserved.
In Boston-March and Speakout to Resist Deportations-Built The Resistance
[bmdc-wg] Fwd: March and Speakout to Resist Deportations-Built The Resistance
-------- Forwarded Message --------
| Subject: | March and Speakout to Resist Deportations |
|---|---|
| Date: | Fri, 27 Jan 2017 22:06:19 +0000 |
| From: | Green-Rainbow Party <office@green-rainbow.org> |
| To: | Matthew Andrews <peopleunite@verizon.net> |
NationBuilder
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A View From The Left - Ireland -For Free Abortion on Demand!
Workers Vanguard No. 1103
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13 January 2017
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Ireland
For Free Abortion on Demand!
The following article is reprinted from Workers Hammer No. 237, Winter 2016-2017, newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain.
On 25 November 2016, supporters of the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment protested in Dublin and solidarity demonstrations were held in cities around the world. Passed in 1983, the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution guarantees the “right to life of the unborn” and grotesquely equates the life of a pregnant woman with an embryo or foetus. While abortion had already been illegal under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, the Eighth Amendment has ensured that it remains illegal in all cases bar when the very life of the woman is under threat. Three years ago, following tremendous popular outrage over the death of Savita Halappanavar, who had been denied what could have been a life-saving abortion, the government passed legislation establishing a torturous process which a woman must go through to obtain a termination of her life-threatening pregnancy. That law, the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act, repealed the offence of “procuring a miscarriage” as stipulated in the 1861 law, but replaced it with a more far-reaching offence, “to intentionally destroy unborn human life,” for which the penalty was set at up to 14 years imprisonment.
To get abortions, Irish women are forced to travel to Britain (as did more than 3,400 in 2015) or illegally import abortion pills (Misoprostol and Mifepristone) ordered online. The numbers who use such pills are unknown, but the demand for them is shown by the number of customs seizures: over 1,000 pills in 2014. Abortion is a simple and safe medical procedure which should be available to all as part of the health service. Bans on it heap more expense and stress onto women and are particularly onerous for poor, young and immigrant women who cannot afford to travel or are not allowed to do so. They may also endanger women by deterring them from seeking medical assistance in the event of complications from taking abortion pills.
Repeal of the Eighth Amendment is necessary, but by itself repeal will not bring any actual abortion rights in Ireland. Comrades from the Spartacist League/Britain participated in a November 26 solidarity protest in London, and raised demands reflecting what Irish women actually need, not only in the South but also in Northern Ireland where abortion is outlawed: For free abortion on demand, North and South!
Abortion is politically explosive because it provides women with some control over whether or not to have children. This raises the spectre of equality for women and threatens to undermine the family, the main source of women’s oppression. The liberation of women requires the overthrow of the capitalist system and the establishment of a workers state. The working class in power will lay the ground for the disappearance of religious obscurantism and the replacement of the institution of the family by collective means of caring for and socialising children and by the fullest freedom of sexual relations.
In Ireland, the Catholic church has long been one of the central pillars of capitalist rule. The bishops were among the driving forces behind the passage of the Eighth Amendment and have been the staunchest opponents of even the slightest loosening of the ban on abortion. Ireland today is a vastly different society to what it was in 1983, as shown by the resounding yes vote in the 2015 referendum allowing gay marriage. Of course the church called for a no vote in that referendum and the Vatican’s secretary of state called its passage “a defeat for humanity.” Today the church is rightly despised by wide swathes of the population and its “moral” teachings about sexuality are widely disregarded. Recent opinion polls have consistently shown a clear majority in favour of repealing the Eighth Amendment and decreasing the restrictions on abortion.
Yet the church continues to wield tremendous power in Irish society. It still runs the vast majority of schools, and many hospitals operate under a Catholic “ethos.” Shadowy Catholic lay organisations like Opus Dei and the Iona Institute work to ensure they exert great influence in health, education and the media. And a great number of politicians, not least Taoiseach [Prime Minister] Enda Kenny, persist in showing obeisance to the Vatican.
The November 25 protests were held on the day before the first full meeting of a “Citizens’ Assembly” established by the Irish government that is to put forward proposals on the question of the Eighth Amendment. As Irish governments have done for the last 33 years, the real purpose of the Citizens’ Assembly is to kick the issue of abortion down the road. Its eight days of meetings are being spread over four months; its proposals are expected around June 2017 and they will then be examined by a parliamentary committee which will make recommendations to the government. Any changes to the Constitution would then need to be approved by the Irish parliament and then be put to the public in a referendum, which the government has said will not be held until 2018 at the earliest.
Enda Kenny recently travelled to Rome in preparation for Pope Francis’ visit to Ireland in August 2018 for the Vatican’s World Meeting of the Family which will come with a security price tag of €20 million [$21 million]. While there, Kenny ran his plans for the Citizens’ Assembly by the pontiff, who presumably gave it his blessing. The government was quick to make it clear that Francis’ visit would not coincide with any abortion referendum, but the visit will surely be used to whip up clericalist fervour.
On October 27, the government used the prospect of the Citizens’ Assembly to block a bill proposed by TDs [Members of Parliament] from the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party (under their current parliamentary guise, the Anti-Austerity Alliance-People Before Profit [AAA-PBP]) to hold a referendum on repealing the Eighth Amendment. Independent TDs on whom the government relies also voted to block the bill, including those like Katherine Zappone who are on record as being in favour of repealing the Eighth. The Labour Party voted to hold the referendum, but when it was part of the last government it opposed holding such a referendum.
Labour’s social-democratic tails in the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party have long counselled an incremental approach to the fight for abortion rights. First they called to “legislate for the X case,” for which in 1992 the Supreme Court ruled that abortion was permitted to save the life of the pregnant woman including if she was threatening suicide. That two-decade campaign resulted in the 2013 Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act, which in fact copperfastened the ban on abortion. Now their energies are devoted to the campaign to repeal the Eighth. Both the SP and SWP (as well as several of their front groups) are members of the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment, a class-collaborationist lash-up which includes a range of bourgeois feminist and gay rights groups, several trade unions and Amnesty International. The latter recently displayed its anti-communist credentials by joining Catholic reactionaries in condemning Irish president Michael D. Higgins for praising the deceased Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
The only way to win any meaningful abortion rights (as well as decent health and childcare) is through mass struggle against the capitalist state and the reactionary anti-woman forces behind it, not least the Catholic church. It is only the working class which has both the social power to successfully wage such a struggle and the interest in achieving free access to this safe medical procedure for all women in Ireland. To lead this struggle it is necessary to forge a workers party committed to the destruction of the capitalist system through workers revolution—the only way to open the road to emancipation for women.
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