Working Towards A Better World Veterans For Peace

Working Towards A Better World

Veterans For Peace<vfp@veteransforpeace.org>

12/27/2018 2:10 PM

Via  vfp=veteransforpeace.org <vfp=veteransforpeace.org@mail.salsalabs.net>

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(Click on Image for Video) "My favorite thing about being a Veteran For Peace is that I actually get to serve my country.  A Veteran For Peace is someone who understands that real service comes from the heart and it comes from an intelligent mind set that embraces these challenges through organizing, through collectivism and through a shared interest in creating a more just world." -Kourtney Andar, Veterans For Peace Board member P.S. Please consider sharing on Facebook!

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Starting 2019 with our demands The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival

Starting 2019 with our demands

The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival<info@poorpeoplescampaign.org>

12/27/2018 5:08 PM

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Dear Alfred, On January 7th, we will return to the U.S. Capitol and deliver our campaign demands to the new Congress, focusing on voter suppression. In 2018, we saw attacks on the voting rights of poor people of color sweep our nation; from Georgia to Kansas, from North Carolina to North Dakota. We know that voting rights are central to every demand we have, and we will continue to call on Congress to take action to protect and expand voting rights, end racial gerrymandering, restore the right to vote to all formerly and currently incarcerated people, and more. But like many of you, we’re taking time first to reflect on all that we accomplished in 2018. We launched a movement committed to breaking the silence and telling the truth about the interlocking evils of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy/militarism and our nation’s distorted moral narrative. Together, we engaged in the largest wave of nonviolent civil disobedience in recent history and took action in over 40 states. Tens of thousands of people rallied on the National Mall to demand that we fight poverty, not the poor. Hundreds of poor and dispossessed people testified before the nation and made their demands heard. Leaders emerged in states around the country and we engaged in moral fusion organizing to build a broad and deep movement to sustain the fight for the long term. Over the next year, we will bring our moral movement to every corner of this country. We will continue to organize, mobilize, and take direct action if necessary, and we will hold our political representatives accountable until our demands are met. Donate now to sustain this crucial work as we head into 2019. GIVE TODAY States that participated in the 40 Days of Moral Action in 2018 From California to the Carolinas, from Alabama to Alaska, from Michigan to Mississippi, from Southern Florida to Northern Maine, from the Mexican border to the Bronx, and many places in between, we have raised a moral cry about the 140 million poor and low income people fighting to survive. We are now in the second phase of the campaign and are organizing for the times ahead. In the last few months, Poor People's Campaign leaders have won significant legal battles in places like Tennessee, where moral witnesses who engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience saw their cases dismissed, and Kentucky, where their legislature’s attempt to shut them out of the State Capitol was found unconstitutional; they have organized Poor People's Hearings from Gresham, OR to Little Rock, AR to Harrisburg, PA; and they have engaged in moral fusion organizing across lines of difference and historic division. We are proud of what we’ve done together, but as we witness the recent attacks on SNAP recipients and families at the border, veterans being deported, people made homeless by the worst forest fires in this country's recent history, our communities struggling from lack of access to clean water, and 37 million people still without healthcare, we know our work is just getting started. We learned this in 2018: There is a hunger for change and action in our nation. And there is nothing more powerful than when we stand united in common suffering and hope. Over one million of you tuned in by livestream, followed us online and joined us in the streets. If just 5% of you donated $10, it would help keep this movement moving. Before the year closes, donate whatever you can to our movement so we can keep pushing forward and make 2019 the year in which the voices of 140 million poor folk in America were undeniably heard. Thank you for your commitment to the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and for continuing to build a moral movement to save the soul of America. Forward together, not one step back, Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II & Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival Sent via ActionNetwork.org. To update your email address, change your name or address, or to stop receiving emails from The Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, please click here.

A View From The Local Left (Boston)- WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

How will it survive on $750 billion?

OUR POOR, STRUGGLING MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

The prospect of a cut to the military elicited a storm of condemnation across the media landscape. The National Review wrote that “cutting the resources available to the Pentagon is a bad idea,” noting that, “for decades, America has short-changed defense” meaning “America’s ability to defend its allies, its partners, and its own vital interests is increasingly in doubt.” In a Wall Street Journal article headlined “Don’t Cut Military Spending Mr. President,” Senate and House Armed Services committee chairs James Inhofe and Mac Thornberry claimed the military is in “crisis” after “inadequate budgets for nearly a decade,” and that “any cut in the Defense budget would be a senseless step backward.” More centrist outlets concurred. Forbes Magazine began its article with the words, “The security and well-being of the United States are at greater risk than at any time in decades,” recommending a “sensible and consistent increase” to the budget. Bloombergrecommended a consistent increase in military spending of 3 percent above inflation for five to 10 years, while Reuters noted the increased “risk” of a lower military budget.   More

STOP WASTING MONEY ON THE PENTAGON

Nearly 30 years ago, Congress asked the Pentagon to complete an audit that could show military leaders knew where our money was going. This year, the Pentagon finally delivered a result: After waiting nearly 30 years, the Pentagon failed its first-ever audit. Even more disturbing is that Pentagon leaders aren’t the least bit disturbed about this. Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, the number two official at the Pentagon, told reporters, “We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it.”  There’s every reason for Pentagon leaders from Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis on down to be ashamed of this result.  Every other major government agency has completed and passed an audit during that time, often many times. If the Pentagon doesn’t know where its money is going, how can they assure us it’s being put to good use? With a Pentagon budget of $647 billion this year — not even counting war costs — the potential for waste and fraud is sky-high…  If we keep going this way, we’re going to waste precious resources that could be used any number of other ways: creating jobs, fighting the opioid epidemic, building a health care system that works for all of us, fixing our crumbling roads and bridges, etc.

Until they can show they know what they’re doing, the Pentagon should be cut off from further increases so we can focus resources elsewhere.     More

The Man from Boeing Now Running the Pentagon

CNN noted in a headline reviewing the president’s decision that: “Trump’s acting secretary of defense will step into the role with no foreign policy, military experience.”  So what experience does Shanahan have? He is, literally and figuratively, the embodiment of the military-industrial complex about which former President Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans at the close of his presidency in 1961....  [Under Mattis] Shanahan was tapped to oversee defense policy, the budget and, um, acquisition teams at the Pentagon. “Shanahan, 54, has no military or political experience,” noted the Seattle Times when the selection was announced in March (of 2017). “He is, however, familiar with defense procurement from the business side.”  …Shanahan worked for many years as the vice president and general manager of Boeing Missile Defense Systems, and before that he was general manager for Rotorcraft Systems and U.S. Army Aviation programs. In other words, if there was a living, breathing embodiment of the military-industrial complex, it was Patrick Shanahan, a 31-year Boeing employee, member of the Boeing Executive Council and now the guy who will be helping the Pentagon with procurement issues.   More

Trump Voters Would Be Hit Hardest by GOP’s Food Stamp Work Rules

A House Republican plan to set stricter work rules for food stamp recipients would disproportionately affect low-income residents in states that supported Donald Trump for president and may imperil passage of farm legislation.  House Agriculture Committee Chairman Michael Conaway, a Texas Republican, said after a White House meeting with Trump on Thursday that the president "is keen on work requirements being a part" of the bill and offered to help pass a plan.  "The president wants to deliver a farm bill this year," White House legislative affairs director Marc Short said Thursday. "He also has a strong belief in the work requirements."   The plan so far doesn’t have enough Republican votes to pass the House, according to Mark Meadows, a North Carolina Republican who is chairman of the conservative Freedom Caucus, which wants even stricter work requirements. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said the chamber plans to consider the legislation next week.   More

Where Government Is a Dirty Word, but Its Checks Pay the Bills

Harlan County is the nation’s fifth most dependent on federal programs, according to the government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. In 2016 some 54 percent of the income of the county’s roughly 26,000 residents came from programs like Social Security and Medicaid, food stamps — formally known as SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — and the earned-income tax credit. That is up from 28 percent in 1990.  Surrounding counties are similarly dependent. Part of a coal-mining region in long, inexorable decline, this pocket of the nation exemplifies a political paradox: Why are so many American voters hostile to the government hand that feeds them?  “The SNAP card works every month; the kids eat two meals a day, but people don’t think about where the food comes from and go vote for Republicans,” said Larry King, a Kentucky farmer who is chairman of the Democratic Party in McCreary County, whose residents get 55 percent of their income from federal transfers.   More

SOME ARTICLES LOOKING AT CLASS AND RACE:

How Come So Many Bernie Bros Are Women and People of Color?

White Identity Politics Aren’t Going Anywhere

The Yellow Vests and the Left

*   *   *   *

NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong

A YEAR OF FOREVER WAR IN REVIEW: The World According to the "Adults in the Room"

As Donald Trump wraps up his second year in the Oval Office, despite sudden moves in Syria and Afghanistan, the United States remains entrenched in a set of military interventions across significant parts of the world. Worse yet, what those adults guided the president toward was yet more bombing, the establishment of yet more bases, and the funding of yet more oversized Pentagon budgets. And here was the truly odd thing: every time The Donald tweeted negatively about any of those wars or uttered an offhand remark in opposition to the warfare state or the Pentagon budget, that triumvirate of generals and good old Rex went to work steering him back onto the well-worn track of Bush-Obama-style forever wars… Why those nearly two years of bowing to the long-stale foreign policy thinking that had infused the Bush-Obama years, the very thing he had been theoretically running against?  Well, pin it on those adults in the room, especially the three generals.    More

BRING THE TROOPS HOME, BUT ALSO STOP THE BOMBING

As our nation debates the merits of President Trump’s call for withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan, absent from the debate is the more pernicious aspect of U.S. military involvement overseas: its air wars. Trump’s announcement and General Mattis’ resignation should unleash a national discussion about U.S. involvement in overseas conflicts, but no evaluation can be meaningful without a clear understanding of the violence that U.S. air wars have unleashed on the rest of the world for the past 17 years. By our calculations, in this “war on terror,” the U.S. and its allies have dropped a staggering 291,880 bombs and missiles on other countries—and that is just a minimum number of confirmed strikes.   More

Of course, it should be “Left” and “Right”. . .

Trump Unites Left and Right Against Troop Withdrawal Plans, but Puts Off Debate on War Aims

President Trump managed to do something remarkable with his abrupt order last week to withdraw all American troops from Syria and half from Afghanistan: unite the left and right against a plan to extract the United States from two long, costly and increasingly futile conflicts.

So chaotic was Mr. Trump’s decision-making process; so transparent his appeal to his political base; and so lacking in a cogent explanation to allies or the public that the president’s move short-circuited what many say is a much-needed national debate about the future of America’s wars… “It’s been getting increasingly harder to explain to European publics why we need to stay there,” said Tomas Valasek, a former NATO ambassador from Slovakia who is the director of Carnegie Europe.   More

Trump Critics of Syria Withdrawal Fueled Rise of ISIS

How ISIS overran large swaths of territory in northeastern Syria and established its de facto capital Raqqa is scarcely understood, let alone discussed by Western media. That is partly because the real story is so inconvenient to the established narrative of the Syrian conflict, which blames Assad for every atrocity that has ever occurred in his country, and for some horrors that may not have ever taken place. Echoing the Bush administration’s discredited attempts to link Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda, some neoconservative pundits hatched a conspiracy theorythat accused Assad of covertly orchestrating the rise of ISIS in order to curry support from the West. But the documented evidence firmly established the success of ISIS as a byproduct of the semi-covert American program to arm Assad’s supposedly moderate opposition.  More

Of course, the Israel Lobby is also a key component of the Washington War Party. . .

Pro-Israel groups turn their backs on Trump for the first time over Syria withdrawal

U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw all the American forces from Syria has, for the first time since he entered the White House, led him to face strong criticism from leading pro-Israel groups in Washington. The shift comes after two years in which these same groups mostly endorsed his administration’s Middle East policies, with some even claiming that his support for Israel was important enough to justify ignoring aspects of his presidency deemed less than palatable by many in the American Jewish community…  AIPAC took to Twitter to retweet a number of senators – both Democrats and Republicans – who severely criticized Trump’s decision on Syria. One tweet, by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, described the withdrawal as a “huge mistake.” Another by Democratic Senator Jeane Shaheen called the decision “ill-informed and hasty,” and warned that it will “breathe new life into ISIS and other terrorist groups.”   It was the first time that AIPAC even tacitly endorsed such strong-worded criticism against Trump since he became president in January 2017.   More

Two Fantastic Events at the CME | Sunday, December 30 Center for Marxist Education

Two Fantastic Events at the CME | Sunday, December 30

Center for Marxist Education<centermarxisteducation@gmail.com>

12/28/2018 2:56 PM

To  cme-emaillist@googlegroups.com,    act-ma@act-ma.org  

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*Sunday, December 30 | 2:00 - 4:00 PM*
*A Discussion with Yu Weihai*
Yu Weihai leads a center in China studying the political movement of the
working class worldwide. Join us for a discussion of how the center arose,
what it has learned, and its current work.
------------------------------
*Sunday, December 30 | 6:00 - 8:00 PM*
*Film Screening: The Black Panthers, Vanguard of the Revolution *
In the turbulent 1960s, change was coming to America and the fault lines
could no longer be ignored — cities were burning, Vietnam was exploding,
and disputes raged over equality and civil rights. A new revolutionary
culture was emerging and it sought to drastically transform the system. The
Black Panther Party for Self-Defense would, for a short time, put itself at
the vanguard of that change. *The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the
Revolution* is the first feature-length documentary to explore the Black
Panther Party, its significance to the broader American culture, its
cultural and political awakening for black people, and the painful lessons
wrought when a movement derails.
Master documentarian Stanley Nelson goes straight to the source, weaving a
treasure trove of rare archival footage with the diverse group of voices of
the people who were there: police, FBI informants, journalists, white
supporters and detractors, and Black Panthers who remained loyal to the
party and those who left it.

Featuring Kathleen Cleaver, Jamal Joseph, Ericka Huggins, and dozens of
others, as well as archival footage of the late Huey P. Newton and Eldridge
Cleaver, *The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution* tells the story
of a pivotal movement that gave rise to a new revolutionary culture in
America.
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Not Ready For Prime Time But Ready For Some Freaking Kind Of Review Film Reviews To Keep The Writers Busy And Not Plotting Cabals Against The Site Manager-Introduction To The New Short Film Review Series

Not Ready For Prime Time But Ready For Some Freaking Kind Of Review Film Reviews To Keep The Writers Busy And Not Plotting Cabals Against The Site Manager-Introduction To The New Short Film Review Series

Recently I wrote a short, well maybe not short when the thing got finished, summary of my “take” on this American Left History publication that I have been the site manager of since the fall of 2017. Took over full time after the variously called “purge,” “exile”, “retirement,” forced or otherwise of the previous site manager Allan Jackson who had actually hired me to run the day to day operations before the “internal rebellion” of the younger writers against his regime knocked him out of the box. I stood on the side-lines then since taking sides would have hurt my chances of taking full command and also I didn’t have an opinion one way or the other although I cringed when Seth Garth who I respect started talking about Stalinist purges, Siberia and written out of history photographs like this was the second coming of the Leon Trotsky-Joe Stalin fight back in ancient history early Soviet Union days.

I also cringed when the younger writers who obviously had never known privation or hard times started taking Allan to task for glorifying his hometown high school junkie corner boy, a guy called the Scribe, who got himself killed for some stupid reason down in Mexico over a busted drug deal. Hated   Allan’s incessant nostalgia for the 1960s, especially the Summer of Love, 1967 which they knew nothing about, didn’t want to write about and could have given a fuck about except to placate him (and move up the food chain which some did even in opposition). I now, now that the dust has settled, and I have taken firm control of the operations do have an opinion that indeed Allan was unceremoniously purged and found himself in exile although not to Ata Alma or deep Siberia but sunny California, via a short stop in Utah. Needless to say the same fate will not await me as long as I can keep young and old writers too busy to waste time plotting around the office water cooler.

(Needless to say I have in the back of my mind thought many times that I should just get rid of the damn water cooler and let the employees find their own water sources just like in most offices. Maybe I am making a mistake putting this in print will be seen by somebody who will then get all protective and defend keeping the thing as some democratic right or something grandfathered in since it was here before I was but so be it. My real problem is that this illustrious water cooler is the place where many a plot against recently exiled Allan Jackson were hatched and where, according to Sam Lowell’s own words, he “got religion” about the need to “pass the torch” and along the way put the knife deeply into the misbegotten body of his oldest friend by casting the decisive vote for Allan’s ouster. So you can see where things stand with these wild cowboys and the cohort of women writers I have brought in, or in the case of Leslie Dumont brought back spend even more time there so who knows what they are talking about).

Yeah, Allan took it on the chin, didn’t see it coming when the younger writers led by Will Bradley who when not conniving with others who harbor some kind of grievous hurts from those in charge, whoever is in charge, is an up and coming writer who now has courtesy of my good offices a by-line, if he can keep it, took a vote of no confidence and Allan took the sack, hit the skids. Some of his detractors wanted him escorted from the office under guard like they do in the high tech and finance fields throwing his boxes of stuff out the window or something like that but cooler heads prevails. Meaning this silly Editorial Board which needs to rubber stamp my decisions-nixed the idea since maybe he still had some friends from the old days who might take umbrage at the idea-and come in and do bodily harm to whoever proposed the crazy idea. Worse of all his longtime old-time high school corner boy Sam Lowell under the guise of passing the torch gave him the coup de grace giving the kids the deciding “no” vote. With friends like that I said at the time although not to Sam who now heads the Ed Board and is technically my “boss” who needs enemies. Sam I am sure in true hard-ass Acre neighborhood form will say all is fair in love and war and that Allan had done much worse to him over the years including sleeping with his, Sam’s, third wife.

Adding insult to injury the conspirators, Sam in good corner boy form included at first before he got elevated to the Ed Board and so had to be “neutral” or nice I forget which he claimed he was doing to back out of the battle, to slander and libel Allan when he was down, kicked him in the metaphorical groin. Maybe not court-worthy, not money damages worthy but it made it extremely hard for him to find work on the East Coast, in New York City particularly.  Put the hex on him like he had been some kind of monomaniacal tyrant when they put the kiss of death “hard to work with,” tag which gets your resume to the shedder faster than you can walk there. Publishers who a few years ago would have paid big money to Allan just to sit in the office when important advertisers came by now wouldn’t offer him a cup of coffee, would make him wait all day in the foyer and then  tell the front office that the big boys had gone home for the day and could you come back tomorrow like he was just out of journalism school. 

Those young writers as if to bury the dead deeply or perform some exotic exorcism to insure that Allan would not come back zombie-like from the dead like you see in the current wave of dystopic films or if you are old enough or have access to a Netflix account some films from the heyday of zombie films-the 1950s spread the rumors far and wide. As far as I can tell they made the stuff up. Or they had so-called “third parties” do their dirty work a trick I too learned long ago when you wanted to rake somebody over the coals but wanted to pretend you were just reporting some facts you had picked up along the way. Either way they had a field day once Allan left the office, left without giving a forwarding address (although Seth Garth his main old-time hometown neighborhood supporter knew where he was part of the time, knew at least that when he tapped out in New York that he headed West, not just any West but purely West Coast California west, to get clean, to get washed over by some fresh Pacific breeze in along the Pacific Coast Highway near Todo el  Mundo scene of many early fresh breathes when he and that crowd were young and filled to the brim with Summer of Love, 1967 dreams and visions).       

Some of the stuff really was unbelievable although as long as it didn’t impinge on the operations here or diminish my authority starting out trying to fill some pretty big shoes in the industry after Allan’s demise, I tucked my head in. A couple of things I tried to check out, stuff like he was selling encyclopedias door to door out in Westchester County when Readers Digest turned him down for an office boy’s job. (Does anybody still use a hard copy set of encyclopedias in the age of Internet anyway which is what made the story seem fishy to me.) Was working in a fish factory for wages down in North Carolina. Nothing to it. Had gotten a job as a bellhop at the Ritz. (Maybe but I could never get anybody to follow up on the story). Had been washing dishes when the Ritz had banquets and needed extra day labor help. Nothing.    

The three that did keep coming up and which had an aura of possibility since he had been seen in the West (which is how we were able to discount the North Carolina fish factory story since he was in either Utah or California by then confirmed by Seth) are worth noting. Let me put it this way I hope the next generation that rebels, assumed to be against me, will just shoot me and get it over with rather than run my reputation into the ground.

According to the most prevalent rumors Allan had variously been “seen” running a high-end West Coast whorehouse with his old flame Madame LaRue, acting as stage manager for the  famous Miss Judy Garland “drag queen” Queen of  the notorious KitKat Club in San Francisco or more improbably “selling out “ to the Mormons via attempting to get a press agent’s job during Mitt’s now successful U.S. Senate campaign out in the wilds of Utah. The first one was totally wrong although Allan did stay at Madame’s place, not the whorehouse, on Luna Bay for a while and who knows what they did or did not do together but it was not running the whorehouse since Madame according to Seth was very touchy about anybody running her place since she dealt almost exclusively with rich Asian businessmen with a taste for the wild side. Still even spreading such a rumor was just another nail in Allan’s coffin in a profession where things at least had to look aboveboard.

The KitKat Club rumor was really a vicious one and I was kind shocked when young Sarah Lemoyne, who was hired by me after the Allan dust-up so had no reason to seek some silly revenge, told me in all good faith and naivete that Allan had come out of some “closet” and was MC-ing the nightly shows at that establishment in full drag regalia. When I asked Seth about it, actually ordered him to find out what was happening, he laughed and said that yes Allan was out in Frisco town, all these older writers love to call it Frisco town like they were just slumming wherever else they landed in life. What the younger writers didn’t know, maybe couldn’t know, or didn’t give a damn about just so they could throw some mud was that Miss Judy Garland, the owner of the club and the Queen of the “drag” set out there was none other than their old-time corner boy Timmy Riley who after years in the closet, after years of being abused, mentally and physically by everybody in their old home town from immediate family to some Acre young toughs had drifted West to a friendlier environment. The real deal was that Allan had staked Timmy to the money to buy the club and so was only staying in one of the apartments above the club (which Timmy also owned) while in town to see if he could catch on in the publishing industry out there far from the East where he really had tapped out. End of story.       

I would not ordinarily in a publication dedicated to the left side of society, politically and every other way although some of the writers, especially the younger ones, are either pretty wide-world politically indifferent or just slightly to the left of say the Democratic Party, give two words to the Romney slur. But maybe, just maybe although none of this ever surfaced in any piece submitted to me except maybe a vague reference in a film review about Utah, whoever surfaced this one will learn a small political lesson, or at least get the facts right before running to the water cooler all heated up. What that rumor did not recognize was that Allan had skewered Mitt Romney for years when he was governor of Massachusetts all the way to his failed Republican Party presidential bid in 2012. Had particularly honed in on counting his inadequacies as a executive against his Mormon pioneer great-grandfather who had five wives in the days when that religion went in for polygamy. The guys here from what I have been told had great admiration for the old man. Nevertheless no way was Allan going to get any job with the long-memory Mormons hovering around Romney, or even anything in the whole state of Utah for that matter. End of story although I hope not end of lesson.   

I noted above that I had been looking over the on-line archives since this publication went to a totally on-line format in 2006 and offered some observations about what way the winds were blowing and which way they should blow in the future. (See From The Archives Of “American Left History”-An Analysis And A Summing Up After His First Year By Site Manager Greg Green, date November 18, 2018) One key observation, especially since I was brought over from American Film Gazette by Allan Jackson (who by the way now writes an occasional contributing editor piece here belying all those rumors mentioned above except as I have also mentioned that he did wind in Frisco will old friend Miss Judy Garland when he was broke and needed a place to stay before heading back East) where I had spent many years editing some 40,000 film reviews of varying lengths and by everybody with any pretentions to film reviewing expertise from long time film editor Sam Lowell of this publication to the legendary Janie Dove and Jack Cummings was the yearly decline in the number of film, book and music reviews.

I wondered why given the sparse political environment, the general decline of street politics which animated a lot of the early work and decline in end-around cultural and social material to report on, to spent money sending people to cover. I have since his return talked to Allan, we have exchanged e-mails since he is now up in Maine, about the matter and gotten some other feedback. Allan had insisted that each review had to be full-blown “think piece” style contribution or else forget it apparently. (He denied this originally when he resurfaced to edit a rock and roll anthology which I thought needed his touch, but most senior older writers have testified under oath and a couple before God for balance that anything less than three thousand words and worthy of print in some academic cinematic journal went into the ashcan and I accept their takes on this.) Frankly, many of the films that I have seen come to my desk or have reviewed personally are not worth more than about three or five hundred words, maybe less, maybe just a thumb up or down is plenty.

To bring more balance, to get better into the film review business which is what many people who don’t have time to read endless reviews expect of a publication like ours I have started this new series of short movie reviews which has the dual purposes of giving today’s busy world a quick but incisive opinion. And keep these monstrous writers who are hanging around the “water cooler” plotting against the “boss,” me, occupied. Greg Green]