Advocates to Demand Lawmakers Address Environmental Justice as Poor People’s Campaign Heads to Springfield

Advocates to Demand Lawmakers Address Environmental Justice

as Poor People’s Campaign Heads to Springfield

Springfield, MA — For the fourth consecutive week, poor people, clergy and advocates will rally in Massachusetts as their historic reignition of the Poor People’s Campaign this week demands lawmakers ensure everyone in Massachusetts has the right to healthcare and a healthy environment.

At least 42% of Springfield residents have incomes under $25,000. April was the 400^th month in a row with warmer than normal temperatures. Springfield is the #1 most challenging city in the U.S. to live with asthma, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.

In Massachusetts, 379,100 people have no health insurance, 11 percent of census tracts are at-risk for being unable to afford water, and 10,452 tons of NOx, a leading cause of respiratory problems, are emitted yearly in Massachusetts.

Participants in Monday’s nonviolent direct action are expected to carry signs that read, “Health care is a moral issue”, “13.8 million U.S. households cannot afford water”, “Systemic change NOT climate change”, and “Why can we buy unleaded gas, but not unleaded water?”

The action in Massachusetts is one of three dozen nationwide. 

  

WHO:               Participants in Massachusetts Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral

                                    Revival, Arise for Social Justice, and Springfield Climate Justice Coalition

WHAT:              Protest at Springfield City Hall demanding immediate action to address environmental

                                    justice

WHERE:           Court Square, Springfield

WHEN:             Monday, June 4, 2018, 1-3pm

BACKGROUND:

The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is co-organized by Repairers of the Breach, a social justice organization founded by the Rev. Barber; the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary; and hundreds of local and national grassroots groups across the country.

On May 14, campaign co-chairs the Revs. William J. Barber II and Liz Theoharis were among hundreds arrested nationwide in the most expansive wave of nonviolent civil disobedience in U.S. history, kicking off a six-week season of direct action demanding new programs to fight systemic poverty and racism, immediate attention to ecological devastation and measures to curb militarism and the war economy. Last week, they were arrested again, alongside the Rev. Jesse Jackson after staging a pray-in in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. Hundreds more were arrested at capitols nationwide, including in Massachusetts.

The protests from coast to coast are reigniting the Poor People’s Campaign, the 1968 movement started by Dr. King and so many others to challenge racism, poverty and militarism. The Campaign is expected to be a multi-year effort, but over the first 40 days, poor and disenfranchised people, moral leaders and advocates are engaging in nonviolent direct action, including by mobilizing voters, knocking on tens of thousands of doors, and holding teach-ins, among other activities, as a moral fusion movement comprised of people of all races and religions takes off.

For the past two years, leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival have carried out a listening tour in dozens of states across this nation, meeting with tens of thousands of people from El Paso, Texas to Marks, Mississippi to South Charleston, West Virginia. Led by the Revs. Barber and Theoharis, the campaign has gathered testimonies from hundreds of poor people and listened to their demands for a better society.

A Poor People’s Campaign Moral Agenda, announced last month, was drawn from this listening tour, while an audit of America conducted with allied organizations, including the Institute for Policy Studies and the Urban Institute, showed that, in many ways, we are worse off than we were in 1968.

The Moral Agenda, which is guiding the 40 days of actions, calls for major changes to address systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy and our distorted moral narrative, including repeal of the 2017 federal tax law, implementation of federal and state living wage laws, universal single-payer health care, and clean water for all.

###

-- 

Savina Martin

Massachusetts Statewide Coordinating Chair (Eastern Region)

Cell: (339) 216.7181 

Email: massachusetts@poorpeoplescampagin.org

https://poorpeoplescampaign.org/

Michaelann Bewsee

Massachusetts Statewide Coordinating Chair (Western Region)

Arise for Social Justice, Springfield, MA

Khalil Saddiq, Legal Liaison

Massachusetts Statewide Coordinating Chair (Eastern Region)

"Forward Together NOT one step back!"

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"Not one step back"

Cole Harrison

Executive Director

Massachusetts Peace Action - the Commonwealth's largest grassroots peace organization

11 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138

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www.masspeaceaction.org

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On The Occasion Of The 170th Anniversary Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels’ “The Communist Manifesto”(1848)

On The Occasion Of The 170^th Anniversary Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels’ “The Communist Manifesto”(1848)

A link to the Karl Marwx Achives for an on-line copy of the Communist Manifesto  

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/

By Political Commentator Frank Jackman

If anybody had asked me back when I was a kid, a kid growing up in the desperately poor, working poor but desperate nevertheless, Acre section of North Adamsville a town south of Boston in Massachusetts that I would be commemorating, no, honoring an anniversary of the publication in 1847 of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s seminal political document The Communist Manifesto in the year 2018 I would have said they were crazy. (I will not get into the issue of commemorating odd-ball year anniversaries of events, like a 170^th anniversary, which in general I abhor since I have beaten that dead horse elsewhere and in any case such a whole historic event as here would draw a worthy exemption). Not because the document was, is, not worthy of talking about but back in the day, back in my teenage days I was adamantly an anti-communist in the tradition of almost all red scare Cold War post-war baby boomers who came of age, political under the threat of the nuclear bomb (some things seem to never change given the recent saber-rattling over the developments in North Korea by the American government).

Some, at least from that baby-boomer generation who have at least heard about the document which I cannot say is true for Generation X or the Millennials since they were not born under the sign of the red scare in a post-Soviet world, may be surprised that a backward working class kid in 1950s America would even had snuck a peek at that besotted document for fear of being tainted by the red scare coppers as pinko-red commie turn him in and be done with it.  Except I was very interested in politics even then and had heard about The Communist Manifesto by some from their photographs nefarious heavily bearded German guys who wanted back in the 1800s to upset the whole applecart and henceforth the root of all evil, the root of the international Communist conspiracy that would kill us in or beds if we were not vigilant against “Uncle Joe,” his successors or their hangers-on throughout the world and especially those “traitors” in America.

I had first heard about The Communist Manifesto in a political way although I was naïve as hell about the whole situation and about who I was working with in 1960. In the fall of that year, the fall of the famous Kennedy-Nixon fight for the American presidency where I was a serious partisan for Kennedy, our local, Massachusetts local, Irishman who made good I was also very, very interested in nuclear disarmament (a subject I still am interested in as the world have not gotten qualitively safer from that threat) and had gone to the Boston Common and participated in an anti-nuclear bomb rally (as the youngest participant by far) along with others from SANE (Doctor Spock’s organization) who had called the demonstration, the Quakers, and others. (Those others would include I later found out, many years later, members of the American Communist Party but not under that name but that of some “front” group. Of course by that time several years later I would have gone through three stages about American Communist Party members-from ho-hum so what if they are Commies we need all the forces we can muster to oppose the Vietnam War to being glad they were organizing like crazy against that war to disdain as they attempted to corral the youth movement into building bigger and better demonstrations against the war when that idea had worn out.) What got me going was when a bunch of people, guys, were harassing us, calling us “reds” and why didn’t we get the hell out of America and go to the Soviet Union. Along the way somebody, some guy mentioned The Communist Manifesto by that “Jew” Karl Marx. I had never hear of it although I was familiar with the name Karl Marx.               

Here’s the funny thing, funny in retrospect anyhow, I could not when I was interested in checking the Manifesto out for myself, find a copy in the school library or the public library. I never did find out the reason why and I was too timid once I saw it was not in the card catalogues to ask a librarian. Thus the way I got the document was looking through publications put out by the Government Printing Office, the U.S. government’s official printing operation. The reason they had printed it at the time, and it said right on the front page was that it had been a document used by the House Un-American Activities Committee and thus was part of the record of that nefarious entity (which in 1960 I think I found out later was almost run out of San Francisco by the demonstrations against it-one of the first breaks in the red scare Cold War phalanx).     

I made no pretense at the time nor do I now that I understood all that Marx was trying to get at. Certainly was clueless about the various polemics in Section Four against various other mostly pro-socialist opponents. (That part made greater sense later when I swear I went through almost every one of those oppositional ideas before coming to Marxism except maybe that exotic “feudal socialism” Marx vented against). What drew me in, although only haltingly at the time, was the idea that working people, my people, my family and friends, would get a better shake out of a socialist society, out of a classless society than we were getting at the time. But in those days I was hung up on some kind of career as a political operative, remember that Kennedy point earlier (not a candidate but the guy behind the candidate). So while I was never hostile to the ideas in that document and maybe have even been a “closet” social democrat masquerading as a liberal there was nothing operative for me then, certainly I was not in favor of revolution as the way forward for myself or my people.                

What changed things? I have written elsewhere about my induction into the American Army during the height of the Vietnam War and what that meant to me-and how I reacted to it by becoming a serious anti-war person (before I had been anti-war but in a wishy-washy way). Even then after I gave up the idea of a “normal” political career (that operative behind the scenes business) I was no Marxist but was in a search for some kind of way to change society short of revolution. (That is the period when I was engaging in those activities similar to the ones proposed by the groups Marx was polemicizing against in the Manifesto.)         

By 1971 it was clear that the American government under Nixon (that same Nixon was beaten to a gong by Kennedy) was not going to end the war in Vietnam. Didn’t give a damn about the whole thing. At that time I was hanging around a radical commune in Cambridge where we were trying to work out ideas (in isolation) about ending the fucking thing. That was the year on May Day when under the banner “if the government does not shut down the war, we will shut down the government” we attempted to do just that. Heady stuff and a dramatic move to the left on my part. All we got for that effort was tear gas, the police baton, and some days in Robert Kennedy Stadium (ironic, huh) for many thousands of good radicals and no end to the war.      

After that I, having picked up a copy of Marx’s The Communist Manifesto at the Red Bookstore in Cambridge,  began to sense that our isolated efforts were self-defeating if we didn’t have a larger force to bring down the damn system. Didn’t have in Marxian terms a class with the objective self-interest to lead the overturn. At the time, given the hostile attitude of the real American working class to us and to any ideas of socialism for the most part, I was unsure that such a strategy made sense.  What I knew was that was where the work had to be done. It has not been a fruitful struggle but nevertheless a necessary one even today when such ideas seem even more utopian than in my young adulthood. Some of what Marx talked about needs serious updating but the general premise of class struggle and the revolution as way forward as still solid. Just look around. Are the capitalists (the right now winning capitalists in the one-sided class war) going to give anything of value up? No way- we will have to take it away from them if we want to get that equalitarian society we dreamed about in our youth. As for the Manifesto a lot of it still reads like it was written yesterday.               

A View From The British Left - Britain: Propaganda Offensive Targets Russia Cloak, Dagger and Poison Pen

Workers Vanguard No. 1133	4 May 2018

Britain: Propaganda Offensive Targets Russia

Cloak, Dagger and Poison Pen

The following article is reprinted from Workers Hammer No. 241 (Spring 2018), published by our comrades of the Spartacist League/Britain.

6 APRIL—Theresa May’s discredited Tory government seized on the alleged poisoning of ex-MI6 spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury on 4 March to launch a new anti-Russia propaganda offensive. While providing zero evidence of Russian involvement, Westminster has been demanding that its NATO and EU [European Union] cronies take action against Moscow, insisting that Russia is responsible for “an assault on British sovereignty” and an “unlawful use of force.” In fact, on 3 April the head of Britain’s chemical weapons research unit at Porton Down admitted that its technical analysis could not establish that the substance originated in Russia.

The British imperialists certainly know a thing or two about assaults on sovereignty and use of force, “lawful” or not! As the Chartist Ernest Jones noted of the British empire in 1851, “On its colonies the sun never sets, but the blood never dries.” And the loss of most of its colonies hasn’t stopped the imperialist slaughter. Britain maintains hundreds of troops in Afghanistan, and since 2014 British aircraft and drones have carried out over 1,600 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. London has also been fully backing the horrific Saudi war in Yemen, in which over 10,000 people have been killed. This past 6 March marked the 30th anniversary of the cold-blooded assassination by the SAS [Britain’s special forces] of Mairéad Farrell, Daniel McCann and Seán Savage, unarmed IRA militants, in Gibraltar.

The government has so far evinced more bark than bite towards Russia: the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats, increased inspections of Russian imports and flights and threats to freeze Russian state assets. (The announcement that no member of Britain’s Saxe-Coburg dynasty will be attending the World Cup [in Russia] means there will be at least one place on earth to escape the spectacle of inbred class privilege that is the royal wedding.)

In co-ordination with Britain, the U.S. expelled 60 Russian diplomats and closed the Russian consulate in Seattle. The EU has stated that it “takes extremely seriously the UK Government’s assessment that it is highly likely that the Russian Federation is responsible” for the Salisbury poisonings. This statement was less forceful than the May government wanted, reflecting differences within and between the European ruling classes over how forcefully to pursue the anti-Russia agenda. Nonetheless, the EU voted to extend economic sanctions against Russia until September of this year, and most EU countries expelled Russian diplomats.

The British imperialists, under the wing of their senior U.S. partners, have been stepping up provocations against Russia since February 2014, when a fascist-spearheaded coup in Ukraine was engineered by Washington with the assistance of the EU. While screaming bloody murder over Russian “aggression,” the imperialist NATO alliance has been expanding into Eastern Europe. NATO has established four “Enhanced Forward Presence” battle groups on Russia’s border, including the largest deployment of U.S. tanks since the fall of the Soviet Union. Britain is in command of the operation in Estonia, which comprises some 800 British and 300 French troops.

This belligerence towards Putin’s regime is rooted in the imperialist powers’ determination to keep Russia out of their club. Arising out of the capitalist counterrevolution which destroyed the Soviet Union in 1991-92, capitalist Russia inherited a large nuclear arsenal and significant (though less advanced) industrial base in a country with vast natural resources. Where imperialist countries are characterised by the export of capital, Russia mainly exports oil and other natural resources, as well as weapons. Russia is today essentially a regional capitalist power, albeit with imperialist ambitions.

The imperialists intervene throughout the world in their drive to control markets, raw materials and cheap labour. Russia does not play a role in the carve-up of the world on a global scale. Its main military campaigns, with the recent exception of Syria, have been within the borders of the former Soviet Union. These included two brutal wars to prevent the oppressed nation of Chechnya from exercising its right to self-determination by seceding.

In contrast, Russia’s reclaiming of Crimea, following the 2014 coup in Ukraine, was overwhelmingly welcomed by Crimea’s majority Russian population. The imperialists nonetheless branded Russia’s move an act of totalitarian military aggression. (See “Crimea Is Russian,” Workers Hammer No. 226, Spring 2014.) Likewise the vote in the ethnically mixed but predominantly Russian-speaking provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk to separate from Ukraine was an elementary expression of national self-determination that the international working class should defend.

Jeremy Corbyn got a lot of flak for the 14 March statement by his spokesman Seumas Milne that the government’s confidential briefings did not in fact contain convincing evidence of Russian involvement in poisoning the Skripals. Corbyn and Milne aptly compared the claims about Russian chemical weapons to the bogus “evidence” of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that the [Tony] Blair government used as a pretext for joining the U.S. in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Not that the lack of any evidence prevented “her majesty’s loyal opposition” supporting the Tories’ anti-Russia measures. In fact, Corbyn went even further, demanding that “Russian money be excluded from our political system.”

This was echoed by the Socialist Party, who grotesquely lined up behind the government’s anti-Russia offensive by calling for the working class to impose sanctions not just against “the Russian super-rich but also against the Chinese, Asian and other oligarchs who control great chunks of London and other European capitals” (socialistparty.org.uk, 16 March). The Socialist Party have really outdone themselves! While alibiing the British bourgeoisie, who control London and (along with remnants of the British aristocracy) are the main beneficiaries of rent-gouging and property speculation, the Socialist Party endorses not only the campaign against Russia but also the drive for capitalist counterrevolution in the Chinese deformed workers state.

The British government insists it is acting in the interests of humanity in denouncing Russia’s alleged use of a chemical weapon. The reality is that the imperialists are fully prepared to use any means, including poison gas and other weapons of mass destruction, in pursuit of their interests. When imperialist forces intervened in Soviet Russia in 1919 in a failed attempt to crush the October Revolution, British warplanes bombarded Red Army troops with a chemical agent. That same year, when Kurds in Mesopotamia rose in revolt against British occupation, Winston Churchill declared: “I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas.... I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.”

Porton Down, less than ten miles from Salisbury, was the site of 30,000 chemical weapons experiments on British soldiers between 1945 and 1989. It is possible the Skripals were poisoned by a chemical weapon produced in Russia or at a former Soviet chemical weapons lab in Uzbekistan or at Porton Down. But the fact remains that the imperialist powers are the most deadly danger facing humanity. Having cut social services like the National Health Service (NHS) to the bone, slashed wages and unleashed massive spying on the population, the British ruling class is now banging the war drums against Moscow. It is in the interests of the working people of Britain and the world to oppose this imperialist war-mongering, as part of the struggle to oust the imperialist butchers and to bring the working class to power across the globe.

A View From The American Left- Texas Black Woman Jailed...for Voting

Workers Vanguard No. 1133	4 May 2018

Texas

Black Woman Jailed...for Voting

The right to vote is said to be sacred in the “land of the free,” a cure-all for every injustice visited upon working people and the downtrodden. Every time a rotten contract is crammed down the throats of a unionized workforce by the bosses; every time a black youth is shot dead in the streets by racist police; every time an immigrant child is torn from his mother’s arms by Homeland Security, working people are peddled the lie that they can change things at the ballot box. But the entire history of this country proves that, for the bourgeoisie, the franchise was never meant for everyone, and that goes double for black people. Nowhere is this more evident than in the “Great State of Texas.” To this day, the political fabric of Texas is shaped by the 19th-century conspiracy whose purpose was to expand black chattel slavery into the Southwest by robbing Mexico of millions of acres of its territory.

On March 28, a vindictive Texas state judge sentenced 43-year-old Crystal Mason, a black woman, to five years behind bars for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 presidential elections. That November, after her mother insisted that she drive in the rain to the polls, Mason voted in southern Tarrant County near Fort Worth. Mason had already been on federal supervised release for a year following the completion of a five-year prison term for a minor tax fraud conviction. According to Texas law, convicted felons are barred from voting until they have completed their sentences, including probation or parole. But Mason had never been told by anyone that she could not vote. She is out on bail and has filed a motion for a new trial. Drop all charges against Crystal Mason!

Mason’s provisional ballot was rejected and her vote never counted in the first place. In her appeal, her lawyer asserts that the state election statute is ambiguous with regard to federal supervised release, which differs substantially from parole. Mason says she may never vote again. Indeed, that is the point and the intended effect of her outrageous sentence, meant as a message to all black people and everyone else the rulers want to exclude from the “political process.”

In February 2017, another Texas woman, 37-year-old Rosa Maria Ortega, was sentenced to eight years in prison for voting in the 2012 and 2014 elections. Ortega is a permanent U.S. resident of Mexican descent who grew up in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. A working-class mother of four teenagers, all U.S. citizens, Ortega did not realize that green card holders are not allowed to vote. “I thought I was doing something right for my country,” Ortega told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (13 February 2017). Having voted Republican, she is now the poster child for Trumpian claims of rampant ballot fraud. She is currently out on bond pending an appeal of her sentence. After Ortega’s conviction, the vicious Texas attorney general Ken Paxton gloated: “This case shows how serious Texas is about keeping its elections secure, and the outcome sends a message that violators of the state’s election law will be prosecuted to the fullest.”

It is a bitter irony that Ortega faces prison and deportation from Texas, a state formed on land that the U.S. stole from Mexico. Between 1848 and 1928, at least 232 people of Mexican descent were lynched in Texas. Under a system known as “Juan Crow,” Mexican Americans were banned from restaurants and deprived of basic democratic rights. In addition to targeting black voters, the attacks on voting rights in Texas today are also aimed at disenfranchising Mexican Americans and other Latinos, who make up 40 percent of the state’s population.

Everyone who lives in this country should have full and equal democratic rights. We oppose any restrictions on the rights of prisoners and released felons to vote. As part of our fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants, we call for full voting rights for all immigrants, whether legal or “illegal.” These non-citizens who live under the class dictatorship of America’s rulers and their laws make up 7 percent of the total population—i.e., millions of people are denied full political rights.

The U.S. was built on the notion that “the people who own the country ought to govern it,” as the first Chief Justice, John Jay, put it. Originally, the franchise was restricted to property-owning white men. The bloody system of chattel slavery was enshrined in the Constitution. The deal that specified that slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person when it came to determining representation gave the Southern slaveowners control of Washington. It took decades of struggle to expand the vote to poor white men, the Civil War to smash slavery and extend the franchise to black men, and it wasn’t until 1920 that women got the vote.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed under the pressure of the mass civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. Black youth and working people, along with white activists, displayed enormous courage and succeeded in getting the racist rulers to grant some formal democratic rights, such as the right to vote and an end to official legal segregation in the South. The Act was expanded in 1975 to address racist discrimination against Mexican Americans, not least in Texas.

In 2013, the Supreme Court took a knife to the Voting Rights Act, using the absurd rationale that racism in the U.S. had been largely overcome. In an article at that time, we called this decision “nothing but a punch in the face to black people” (“Supreme Court Spits on Black Rights,” WV No. 1027, 12 July 2013). The Fifteenth Amendment granting voting rights regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” was ratified in 1870. But following the defeat of Reconstruction, it became a dead letter in the states of the old Confederacy, which employed poll taxes, literacy tests and other dirty tricks—backed up by the lynch rope terror of the Ku Klux Klan and local police (often intertwined)—to keep black people from casting ballots. The assaults on black voting rights today are the latest incarnation of this old song.

Since the 2013 Supreme Court ruling, Texas, along with other former Confederate states, has been spearheading a campaign to restrict voting rights. The state’s early attempts at crafting a voter photo ID law were so blatantly discriminatory against black people and Latinos that a 2016 federal appellate court ruling required the state to soften it. A similar law in North Carolina was struck down in 2016 because it targeted black voters with “almost surgical precision,” in the words of the judge’s decision. In 2017, the Supreme Court refused to reinstate the North Carolina law. Texas, however, kept on tweaking its restrictions and was finally rewarded on April 27, when a Fifth Circuit panel upheld the newest version.

In this era of mass incarceration, the disenfranchisement of convicted felons is a transparent device for blocking large numbers of black people and Latinos from exercising basic democratic rights. Some 6 million Americans have lost the right to vote due to felony convictions. A 2015 study reported that 2.2 million black adult U.S. citizens were prohibited from voting; nationally, more than one in eight voting-aged black men were ineligible to cast a ballot in the 2014 elections.

The assault on the right to vote has mainly been carried out by Republican governors and legislators in the name of preventing “voter fraud” and safeguarding election “integrity.” For their part, Democratic politicians went along with laws restricting voting rights for felons, though in recent months a few Democrats have called for easing them—in mainly Republican states. As for voter ID laws, the Democratic Party’s opposition to these measures is centered on swing states, whose importance is highlighted by the upcoming midterm elections. The in-your-face racist bigotry of the Republicans allows the Democrats to take support from black people for granted, without having to actually do anything for them.

There is, of course, real voter fraud. On April 23, Tarrant County justice of the peace Russ Casey, a Texas Republican, pleaded guilty to rigging his own election by turning in fake signatures to secure a place on a March 6 primary ballot. While Mason is looking at five years behind bars and Ortega has been sentenced to eight, Casey’s penalty was five years of probation. And it’s not just Republicans—Texas Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson was just as good at rounding up dead people to cast ballots and stealing elections as the notorious Chicago machine of former mayor Richard J. Daley.

The ballot is a fundamental democratic right that we tenaciously defend, but fundamental change will not come through voting. It was not by the ballot that slavery met its demise. Union rights did not come from Congress. All the gains working and black people have made came through their seizing them from the racist rulers by mass struggles on the battlefields, in the factories and on the streets.

When black people are declared to have no rights that others are bound to respect, it paints a target on the back of every black man, woman and child in this country. A serious defense of those rights demands resolute struggle against the capitalist system and opposition to the political parties that uphold its rule. The fight for the rights of the oppressed contributes to the struggle of the working class for its own liberation from capitalist exploitation through socialist revolution.

***Sagas Of The Irish-American Diaspora- Albany-Style- William Kennedy's "Very Old Bones"

***Sagas Of The Irish-American  Diaspora- Albany-Style- William Kennedy's "Very Old Bones"

Book Review

Very Old Bones, William Kennedy, Viking Press, New York, 1992

Recently, in reviewing an early William Kennedy Albany-cycle novel, “Ironweed” I mentioned that he was my kind of writer. I will let what I stated there stand on that score here. Here is what I said:

“William Kennedy is, at least in his Albany stories, my kind of writer. He writes about the trials and tribulations of the Irish diaspora as it penetrated the rough and tumble of American urban WASP-run society, for good or evil. I know these people, my people, their follies and foibles like the back of my hand. Check. Kennedy writes, as here with the main characters Fran Phelan and Helen Archer two down at the heels sorts, about that pervasive hold that Catholicism has even on its most debased sons and daughters, saint and sinner alike. I know those characteristics all too well. Check. He writes about that place in class society where the working class meets the lumpen-proletariat-the thieves, grifters, drifters and con men- the human dust. I know that place well, much better than I would ever let on. Check. He writes about the sorrows and dangers of the effects alcohol on working class families. I know that place too. Check. And so on. Oh, by the way, did I mention that he also, at some point, was an editor of some sort associated with the late Hunter S. Thompson down in Puerto Rico. I know that mad man’s work well. He remains something of a muse for me. Check.”

Although “Very Old Bones” is structurally part of Kennedy’s Albany-cycle of novels it is far more ambitious than the other novels in the cycle that I have read. Those previous efforts, led by the premier example, “Ironweed” set themselves the task of telling stories about particular characters in the Phelan clan and their neighbors in particular periods of the cycle that runs from approximately the 1880s to, as in the present novel, the late 1950s. Here we get a vast view of the clan, its trials and tribulations and its cursedness as a result of the insularity of the Irish diaspora, Albany style.

I am, frankly, ambitious about the success of this endeavor. While it is very good to have a summing up of the history of the Phelan clan, it struggle for "lace curtain" respectablity, and its remarkable stretch of characters from the cursed Malachi generation through to Fran (of “Ironweed”), and here his brother Peter as well, and on to Orton, the narrator’s generation (and Billy Phelan’s) there is almost too much of this and it gets in the way of the plot line here, basically the current survivors trying to cope with the traumas brought on by those previous generations. Conversely, I ran through the book at breakneck speed. Why? Change the names and a few of the incidentals, and a few f the specific pathologies, and this could have been the story of my Irish-derived family in that other diaspora enclave, Boston. Hence the ambiguity. Moreover, there is just a little too much of that “magical realism” in the plot that was all the rage in the 1990s in telling the sub-stories here and then expecting us the sober, no nonsense reader to suspend our disbelieve. Is this effort as good as "Ironweed"? No, that is the standard by which to judge a Kennedy work and still the number one contender from this reviewer's vantage point.

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love (1967)-In The Time Of Hunter Thompson’s Time –Hey, Rube- A Short Book Clip

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love (1967)-In The Time Of Hunter Thompson’s Time –Hey, Rube- A Short Book Clip 

Short Book Clip

Hey, Rube, Hunter Thompson, 2004

Make no mistake the late, lamented Hunter Thompson was always something of a muse for me going way back to the early 1970’s when I first read his seminal work on the outlaw bikers The Hell’s Angels. Since then I have devoured, and re-devoured virtually everything that he has written. However the present book leaves me cold. This is a case where ‘greed’ (on whose part I do not know although the proliferating pile of remembrances of Thompson may give a hint) got the better of literary wisdom. This compilation of articles started life as commentary on the ESPN.com, part of the cable sports network. And perhaps that is where the project should have ended. Hey, this stuff has a half-life in cyberspace so nothing would have been lost.

So what is the basis for my objection? Part of Hunter’s attraction always has been a fine sense of the hypocrisy of American politics. Although we marched to different drummers politically I have always appreciated his ability to skewer the latest political heavyweight- in- chief, friend or foe. That is missing here although he does get a few whacks in on the then current child-president Bush. But this is not enough. What this screed is really about is the whys and wherefores of his lifelong addiction to sports betting and particularly professional football, the NFL. A run through the ups and downs of previous seasons’(2000-2003) gambling wins and losses, however, does not date well. Hell, I can barely remember last week’s bets.

But the real problem is that like in politics we listen to different drummers. I am a long-time fan of‘pristine and pure’ big time college football and would not sully my hands to bet on the NFL so his whining about the San Francisco 49’ers or the Denver Broncos is so much hot air. However, I will take Notre Dame and 3 points against Alabama in the2012 major college national championship game. That’s the ticket. I miss Hunter and his wild and wooly writing that made me laugh many a time when I was down and needed a boost but not here. Enough said.

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love-Ivan Koop Kuper : Ken Kesey's Houston Acid Test

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love-Ivan Koop Kuper : Ken Kesey's Houston Acid Test

01 December 2010

Ivan Koop Kuper : Ken Kesey's Houston Acid Test 
The original "Furthur," the magic bus of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, on the road. Photo from NoFurthur.

Paying Larry McMurtry a visit:
The Merry Pranksters' last acid test

By Ivan Koop Kuper / The Rag Blog / December 1, 2010

HOUSTON -- In the heat of a July Houston morning in 1964, residents of the quiet Southampton neighborhood woke up to find a strangely painted school bus parked in front of an unassuming two-story brick house in the middle of the block.

The vintage 1939 International Harvester with its passengers of “Merry Pranksters” drove half way across the United States and was now parked in front of the house of novelist and Rice University professor, Larry McMurtry. The Southampton neighbors would learn that the brightly painted bus whose destination plate read “FURTHUR,” with two u's, was filled with strangely acting and even stranger looking people from California.

The leader of the Merry Pranksters was author Ken Kesey, whose novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, had just been published that summer. Their cross-country road trip to New York City was in part a celebration to commemorate the publication of his second novel, as well as the fulfillment of a request by his publisher for a personal appearance and an excuse to visit the World’s Fair taking place in the borough of Queens.

Fueled by the then-legal hallucinogenic drug LSD, Kesey and the Pranksters stopped in Houston along the way to visit McMurtry, who Kesey knew from their days at Stanford.

McMurtry lived with his 2-year-old son, James, on the oak-lined street near Rice University, where he taught undergraduate English.


Larry McMurtry and son, James, 1964. Photo from The Magic Bus.

McMurtry was also experiencing success in his life during this time. His inaugural novel, Horseman, Pass By, had been adapted into a screenplay and released as the feature-length movie, Hud, staring Paul Newman and Melvyn Douglas, the previous year.

“I remember walking down Quenby Street one afternoon and seeing the school bus parked in front of the McMurtry’s house,” said Kentucky-based artist Joan Wilhoit. “It was very atypical and pretty damn psychedelic with lots of colors. The Pranksters were very accommodating and invited us on the bus. They were very different, sort of proto-hippies, and I remember they painted their sneakers with Day-Glo paint. My parents befriended them and brought old clothes and hand-me-downs to those who needed it. My parents weren’t rude like some of the other neighbors were.”

Wilhoit, who was nine at the time. remembers that not all the neighbors were as welcoming as her parents and that some made sarcastic remarks about the Pranksters.

“’Do you have a bathroom on that bus?’ I remember one our neighbors asking the Pranksters through the school bus window,” the former Houstonian recounted. “I also remember hearing about the ‘naked girl’ and I thought it was the strangest thing how the police were called and how she had to be admitted to a psych ward of some Houston hospital.”

“Stark Naked,” as she was referred to in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the novel that chronicled the exploits of Kesey and the Pranksters in the 1960s, was a bus passenger apparently “tripping” throughout her bus ride to Houston, who discarded her clothing in favor of a blanket that she wore for the duration of the journey. Upon her arrival in Houston, she experienced an episode of “lysergically-induced” psychosis, and confused McMurtry’s toddler son with her own estranged child, “Frankie.”


"Stark Naked" (aka "The Beauty Witch") wore nothing but a blanket. Photo from The Magic Bus.

Three years later, the brightly painted bus was parked once again in front of McMurtry’s house on the oak-lined street near Rice Village. Kesey and the Pranksters returned to Houston in March 1967 to visit their old friend and to conduct what is purported to have been the last “acid test.” The social experiment was staged in the dining room of Brown College, a residential facility on the campus of Rice University, with McMurtry acting as faculty sponsor.

“I would have been 14 years old when they returned,” said Pricilla Boston (nee Ebersole), an employee of the department of state health services in Austin and the mother of two teen-aged sons.
I remember getting off the school bus from junior high one afternoon and seeing that the painted bus was parked in front of Mr. McMurtry’s house again. It was immensely colorful and there was no missing it, that’s for sure. All the kids in the neighborhood used to play street games at night a lot and it was almost like there was another set of kids in the neighborhood.

They had a youthful, fun vibe about them. I remember this one skinny guy in particular who would interact with us; he was younger than the others and he showed us the inside of the bus. He once asked us to go home and look in our parents’ medicine cabinet to see if they had any bottles of pills and bring them to him. I was asking myself "Why would he want those?"
Boston recounted following the skinny Prankster’s instructions and looking in her parent’s cabinet. “I don’t remember whether I brought him anything or not,” she said, “I just remember having a sense of what I was doing as being a little bit naughty.”

Although Kesey’s arrival and the ensuing acid test were promoted as a “concert” in the March 9 issue of the Rice Thresher, the campus student newspaper, this non-event turned out to be an acid test in name only. The promise of a reenactment of the “tests” conducted in California between 1965 and 1966 never materialized. Absent was the liquid light show, the live, amplified rock music, the pulsating strobe lights and movie projector images on the walls.

Also conspicuously absent was the mass dispensation and ingestion of psychotropic drugs by the Rice student body and other “assorted weirdos” in attendance. Instead, the Pranksters indulged the more than 200 attendees with a “madcap improvisation” of toy dart-gun fights, human dog piles, deep breathing demonstrations by Kesey himself, and rides on the “magic bus” around the Rice campus.

“The great Kesey affair was an absolute dud,” reported the Houston Post on March 21. “Some of the kids hissed while he [Kesey] read some kind of incantation, and others just left talking about what a drag it was.”

[Ivan Koop Kuper is a graduate student at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas, and maintains a healthy diet of music, media, and popular culture. He can be reached at kuperi@stthom.edu.]



Merry Pranksters in the news, 1964. Top, in Houston, and below, in Springfield, Ohio.


Prankster Hermit and the original bus. Photo from Lysergic Pranksters in Texas.


Top, Ken Kesey with restored bus, by then renamed "Further" with an "e". Below, the 1939 International Harvester, before restoration, at the Kesey family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, after being stored in the swamp for 15 years. Photo by Jeff Barnard / AP

The Rag Blog

Posted by thorne dreyer at 10:50 AM
Labels: American History, Drug Culture, Houston, Ivan Koop Kooper, Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, LSD, Merry Prankstes, Psychedelics, Rag Bloggers, Rice University, Sixties, Tom Wolfe

June Is Class-War Prisoners Month-Free The Jericho Movement Prisoners-Free All The Class-War Prisoners!

June Is Class-War Prisoners Month-Free The Jericho Movement Prisoners-Free All The Class-War Prisoners!  

Chelsea Manning, Albert Woodfox and Oscar Lopez Rivera are out let's get the rest out as well  

From Veterans For Peace

You Are Inspiring!

Veterans For Peace

5/31/2018 6:33 PM

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	Thursday, May 31st This week, across the country, members of Veterans For Peace were out in full force.  Many of you held moving ceremonies for Memorial Day and brought attention to the overwhelming costs of war.  The very next day, chapters in many states participated in Week 3 of the 40 Days of Action of the Poor People's Campaign.  It was an inspriational week to see so many Veterans For Peace members stand up to challenge Militarism and the Culture of Violence in multiple states and willingness to put your bodies on the line.  For this week's ENews, we made two short compilation videos to highlight the overwhelming amount of activism that happened this week.  Together, with this spirit, we can End War. Click on Image for Poor People's Campaign Video and to see how many VFP Chapters Particiapted! Click on Image for Memorial Day Video ICYMI (In Case You Missed It) make sure to check out these amazing videos that Chris Smiley put together of the Swords to Plowshares and Letters to the Wall!

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Ancient dreams, dreamed-The Risen People? May Day 1971- Magical Realism 101-Build The Resistance 2018

Ancient dreams, dreamed-The Risen People? May Day 1971- Magical Realism 101-Build The Resistance 2017

Endless, dusty, truck heavy, asphalt steaming hitchhike roads travelled, Route 6, 66, maybe 666 and perdition for all I know, every back road, every Connecticut highway avoiding back road from Massachusetts south to the capital for one last winner-take-all, no prisoners taken show-down to end all show-downs. And maybe, just maybe, finally some peace and a new world a-borning, a world we had been talking about for at least a decade (clueless, as all youth nations are clueless, that that road was well-travelled, very well- travelled, before us). No Jack Kerouac dharma bum easy road (although there were dharma bums, or at least faux dharma bums, aplenty on those 1971 roads south, and west too) let her rip cosmic brakeman Neal Cassady at the wheel flying through some wheat field night fantasy this trip.

No this trip was not about securing some cultural enclave in post-war (World War II so as not to confuse the reader) in break-out factory town Lowell or cold water tenement Greenwich Village/Soho New Jack City or Shangri-La West out in the Bay area, east or west, but about mucking up the works, the whole freaking governmental/societal/economic/cultural/personal/godhead world (that last one, the godhead one, not thrown in just for show, no way) and maybe, just maybe sneaking away with the prize. But a total absolute, absolutist, big karma sky fight out, no question. And we, I, am ready. On that dusty road ready.

More. See all roads head south as we, my girlfriend of the day, maybe more, maybe more than a day, Joyell, but along this time more for ease of travelling for those blessed truck driver eye rides, than lust or dream wish and my sainted wise-guy amigo (and shades of Gregory Corso, sainted, okay), Matty, who had more than a passing love or dream wish in her and if you had seen her you would not have wondered why. Not have wondered why if your “type” was Botticelli painted and thoughts of butterfly swirls just then or were all-type sleepy-eyed benny-addled teamster half-visioned out of some forlorn rear view mirror.

Ya, head south, in ones, twos, and threes (no more, too menacing even for hefty ex-crack back truckers to stop for) travelling down to D.C. for what many of us figure will be the last, finally, push back against the war, the Vietnam War, for those who have forgotten, or stopped watching television and the news, but THEY, and you knew (know) who they were, had their antennae out too, they KNEW we were coming, even high-ball fixed (or whiskey neat she had the face for them) looking out from lonely balconies Martha Mitchell knew that much. They were, especially in mad max robot-cop Connecticut, out to pick off the stray or seven who got into their mitts as a contribution to law and order, law and order one Richard Milhous Nixon-style (and in front of him, leading some off-key, off-human key chorus some banshee guy from Maryland, another watch out hitchhike trail spot, although not as bad as Ct, nothing except Arizona is). And thus those dusty, steamy, truck heavy (remind me to tell you about hitchhiking stuff, and the good guy truckers you wanted, desperately wanted, to ride with in those days, if I ever get a chance sometime).

The idea behind this hitchhiked road, or maybe, better, the why. Simple, too simple when you, I, thought about it later in lonely celled night but those were hard trying times, desperate times really, and just free, free from another set of steel-barred rooms this jailbird was ready to bring down heaven, hell, hell if it came down to it to stop that furious war (Vietnam, for the later reader) and start creating something recognizable for humans to live in. So youth nation, then somewhat long in the tooth, and long on bad karma-driven bloody defeats too, decided to risk all with the throw of the dice and bring a massive presence to D.C. on May Day 1971.

And not just any massed presence like the then familiar seasonal peace crawl that nobody paid attention too anymore except the organizers, although the May Day action was wrapped around that year’s spring peace crawl, (wrapped up, cozily wrapped up, in their utopian reformist dream that more and more passive masses, more and more suburban housewives from New Jersey, okay, okay not just Jersey, more and more high school freshman, more and more barbers, more and more truck driver stop waitresses, for that matter, would bring the b-o-u-r-g-e-o-i-s-i-e (just in case there are sensitive souls in the room) to their knees. No, we were going to stop the government, flat. Big scheme, big scheme no question and if anybody, any “real” youth nation refugee, excepting, of course, always infernal always, those cozy peace crawl organizers, tried to interject that perhaps there were wiser courses nobody mentioned them out loud in my presence and I was at every meeting, high or low. Moreover I had my ears closed, flapped shut closed, to any lesser argument. I, rightly or wrongly, silly me thought “cop.”

So onward anti-war soldiers from late night too little sleep Sunday night before Monday May Day dawn in some vagrant student apartment around DuPont Circle (I think, but it may have been further up off 14th Street, Christ after eight million marches for seven million causes who can remember that much. No question though on the student ghetto apartment locale; bed helter-skelter on the floor, telephone wire spool for a table, orange crates for book shelves, unmistakably, and the clincher, seventeen posters, mainly Che, Mao, Ho, Malcolm etc., the first name only necessary for identification pantheon just then, a smattering of Lenin and Trotsky but they were old guys from old revolutions and so, well, discounted) to early rise (or early stay up cigarette chain-smoking and coffee slurping to keep the juices flowing). Out into the streets, out into the small collectives coming out of other vagrant apartments streets (filled with other posters of Huey Newton , George Jackson, Frantz Fanon, etc. from the two names needed pantheon) joining up to make a cohorted mass (nice way to put it, right?). And then dawn darkness surrounded, coffee spilled out, cigarette bogarted, AND out of nowhere, or everywhere, bang, bang, bang of governmental steel, of baton, of chemical dust, of whatever latest technology they had come up with they came at us (pre-tested in Vietnam, naturally, as I found out later). Jesus, bedlam, mad house, insane asylum, beat, beat like gongs, defeated.

Through bloodless bloodied streets (this, after all, was not Chicago, hog butcher to the world), may day tear down the government days, tears, tear-gas exploding, people running this way and that coming out of a half-induced daze, a crazed half-induced daze that mere good- will, mere righteousness would right the wrongs of this wicked old world. One arrested, two, three, many, endless thousands as if there was an endless capacity to arrest, and be arrested, arrest the world, and put it all in one great big Robert F. Kennedy stadium home to autumn gladiators on Sunday and sacrificial lambs this spring maypole may day basket druid day.

And, as I was being led away by one of D.C.s finest, I turned around and saw that some early Sunday morning voice, some “cop” voice who advised caution and went on and on about getting some workers out to join us before we perished in an isolated blast of arrests and bad hubris also being led away all trussed up, metal hand-cuffs seemingly entwined around her whole slight body. She said she would stick with us even though she disagreed with the strategy that day and I had scoffed, less than twenty-four hours before, that she made it sound like she had to protect her erring children from themselves. And she, maybe, the only hero of the day. Righteous anonymous sister, forgive me. (Not so anonymous actually since I saw her many times later in Boston, almost would have traded in lust for her but I was still painted Botticelli-bewitched and so I, we, let the moment passed, and worked on about six million marches for about five millions causes with her but that was later. I saw no more of her in D.C. that week.)

Stop. Brain start. Out of the bloodless fury, out of the miscalculated night a strange bird, no peace dove, these were not such times even with all our unforced errors, and no flame-flecked phoenix raising but a bird, maybe the owl of Minerva came a better sense that this new world a-bornin’ would take some doing, some serious doing. More serious that some wispy-bearded, pony-tailed beat, beat down, beat around, beat up young stalwart road tramp acting in god’s place could even dream of. But that was later. Just then, just that screwed-up martyr moment, I was longing for the hot, dusty, truck driver stop meat loaf special, dishwater coffee on the side, road back home even ready to chance Connecticut highway dragnets to get there.